"Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence." -- US Senator Orrin Hatch
The "tends of thousands" phrase sounds more like a declaration of war against the citizens of America by the increasingly corporate owned government of ours. At a minimum, it sounds like a crackdown on "dissidents". When 1.5 million people are downloading today in America, most of which are law-abiding citizens that don't traffic in drugs, commit violent crimes, and pay for their groceries.
Could this have happened if the RIAA and MPAA were not busy purchasing our congressional representatives?
How do we stop this? I don't just mean the bill; I mean how do we stop the trend. How do we get politicians to represent the people again?
One question I have is how are we a representative democracy if we are no longer represented?
After years of this news growing, I still have not seen a coordinated large-scale effort to restore balance in our government so that it truly represents the people, and respects our principals.
While I consider myself a free market capitalist, and personally choose not to download music that the creators do not offer for free, I completely disagree with treating the American people as dissidents, as this bill and other are increasingly doing.
Is China becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
"Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence." -- US Senator Orrin Hatch
The "tends of thousands" phrase sounds more like a declaration of war against the citizens of America by the increasingly corporate owned government of ours. When 1.5 million people are downloading today in America, most of which are law abiding citizens that don't traffic in drugs, commit violent crimes, and pay for their groceries.
Could this have happened if the RIAA and MPAA were not busy purchasing our congressional representatives?
How do we stop this? I don't just mean the bill, I mean how do we stop the trend. How do we get politicians to represent the people again?
One question I have is how are we a representative democracy if we are no longer represented?
After years of this news growing, I still have not seen a coordinated large-scale effort to restore balance in our government so that it truly represents the people, and respects our principals.
While I consider myself a free market capitalist, and personally choose not to download music that the creators do not offer for free, I completely disagree with treating the American people as dissidents, as this bill and other are increasingly doing.
Is China becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
Are the games on the PC superior? To-date, I believe so. However, the long hours of play that MMORPGs demand also demand the ability to lay back and relax, particularly if you are forced to endure insane "grinds" (4-16 hours) in order to level.
It's worth nothing though that FF XI is now available for both the PC and PS2, and the two clients play on the same server together. This asks a new question. Do MMOG companies really have to choose between PC and console? Could the future be of MMOGs be integrated multiplatforms?
"Open source" came about because when the Internet just included educational, scientific and government people, and sharing documents became popular (e.g., Gophers and then Lynx), that excitement transfered over to the idea of "what would happen if we shared source code?"
We shared visions of how quickly we could solve problems together, developing and advancing technology at an astounding rate that would be good for everyone. We then began to wonder how we could declare software to belong to the "public domain" while simultaneously protecting it from being stolen by a bogus claim that someone has it, since copyright and the public domain were viewed as oppositional. This lead to the creation of the open source license
In all this discussion, no one ever thought about Microsoft or doing it because they were anti anything. There really were no technology enemies to us back then. Microsoft was simply irrelevant in these discussions, particularly since the Internet was almost exclusively Unix based. Even IBM hadn't yet become an issue to the technology to the Internet community. There were no corporate Interestes on the Internet, at least none that I was aware of. Most companies didn't even know what the Internet was, and any non-techie I talked to never heard of it.
Open source was born out of the ideal that a globe of people working together could accomplish so much more than isolated pockets.
While there are many advocates that would like to see Java open sourced under the GPL or other "generally accepted" open source licenses, most concede that it has to be protected from Microsoft and the potential for fracturing that undermines it's primary goals. I remember in 1995 when it was launched and read the whitepaper before it existed. The goals of Java were highly discussed and have helped build it to what it is today. Protecting those goals are important enough to consider a "less than completely open source" solution if that's what it takes. I couldn't easily dispute Sun's reason for deciding to not submit Java to the ECMA as promised. The primary reason was they had to protect Java from the threats of Microsoft, who is a member of the ECMA.
The JPC isn't an open standards body by many definitions, yet it has adopted enough of the goals and conventions of open standards to be regarded as such by many. I often call Java "the closest thing to being an open standard without being an open standard."
For many that really care about Java, the most important thing they want is the ability to openly contribute to the development of the source code the way they currently contribute to the JCP. This is not everything everyone wants, but it is clearly a huge leap in the right direction. My only point is that right now Sun refuses to do anything, because people are only looking at this using traditional open source licenses.
Sun needs to understand how important the need to open up the development of the code so McNealy knows it's a problem that isn't being solved today, as evidenced by the technical issues of running Java on the BSDs and many distributions of Linux. They also need to understand that it can be solved in a way that addresses Sun's primary concerns.
The public debate is clouding these two truths because the open source community, many of which have no real interest in the Java language, have been using this momentum to try to get as much as they possibly can from Sun, dreaming that Sun would even consider a GPL license given its concerns.
I simply would rather see progress in solving real problems than achieve nothing through an all or nothing proposition, with McNealy sadly announcing that nothing wins. He justified it with remarks that make it very clear he does not understand the problems today.
I've developed in relational databases since inception (dBase II), including all major commercial databases today. I can tell you, I am SO glad DB2 is not open source or attempting to be the Universal "run anywhere" database of the world. It is very behind the times due to it's extensive legacy customer base. The only benefit it has is performance on IBM hardware.
I'm not sure that open sourcing cannot forbid forking. Sure, it would be a bit untraditional to open source a product and at the same time forbid forking, but certainly not impossible.
While such an open source license wouldn't make everyone happy, particularly GPL advocates, it would permit people to start to addressing some of the issues Java has today.
Those issues require opening up the development of the Java code, even if Sun maintains ownership, prevents forking, and manages the development process similar to the way it manages the JCP today.
Performance, reliability and compatibility are the primary issues with Java on any operating system that Sun or IBM doesn't provide a JVM for today. Open sourcing Java would help to ensure that the source code Sun maintains receives patches and is further developed to further enable Java to better run on diverse platforms.
That's the fundamental issue here. Do you believe Java should be "write once, run anywhere" or just "write once, run anywhere Sun and IBM can financially justify creating a native JVM, and perhaps, if you are lucky, run elsewhere"?
That is just part of the case. Open source advocates that have been working on the BSDs and various distributions of Linux (e.g., Debian) can, I'm sure, give you a better case than what I described.
The bottom line is the open source advocates believe it will permit Java to develop more quickly and with higher quality, increasing its competitiveness. They believe this will help everyone except Microsoft and those committing their infrastructure to.NET.
The business case is that inviting more people to participate as an open source project will expedite its development permitting it to be more competitive. The open source advocates argue development will be faster, higher quality, and reach more platforms.
I personally wasn't aware of the degree to which this was an issue until I installed FreeBSD. Sun doesn't supply a native JVM for it, and it's current license puts a lot of restrictions complicating the optimization of a free JVM for FreeBSD.
You can get it running, but you have to jump through hoops, agreeing to Sun's source license, and then downloading it from Sun's site before you can compile a version for your PC. After you apply patches created by someone that worked very hard to get the thing to run on your OS, the compile process takes a long time.
The worst part, though, is that it is slow on FreeBSD compared to other operating systems running on the same hardware. Very little can be done until Sun truly open sources Java.
The primary solution people have taken to is creating patches to solve the problems Sun's code has running on different platforms. This has several drawbacks. One is that the patches take time to develop, creating a lag in versions. The second is that the patched versions rarely get true testing, so you can only hope it works with your application, and that something unexpected doesn't surprise you down the road. Most people creating these patches don't have access to Sun's highly priced compatibility test suite.
The irony is that the compatibility Sun want's to maintain is eroded already by Sun's reluctance to both open source Java and make the test suite more accessible. This decision also decreases the platforms that Java can run on, the opposite of one of Sun's stated goals.
A lot of people take it for granted when they install a pre-compiled JVM downloaded from Sun's website on one of the operating systems Sun happens to support. Let me know, please, when Sun releases a FreeBSD JVM, and solves problems the OpenBSD people have had getting it to run correctly.
"Despite urging from competitors and open source advocates, Sun Microsystems Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., will not [permit anyone other than Jack the Construction Guy to build Sun's new 100-story office building,]" said Sun CEO Scott McNealy during a news conference at the 2004 FOSE conference. 'We're trying to understand what problem does it solve that is not already solved,' McNealy said."
What problem could possibly be solved by letting people contribute their time to help build Java?!?
It's really nice to see the prophecies of our economists of the past two decades coming to pass today! Now that we have the global economy that America rushed to create, look at all the things they promised that we now have:
- America will be the leader in knowledge based work. Isn't it wonderful to lead the world? OK, so leading means sacrificing your job. That's just a minor technicality.
- The American dollars that left our country as we opened our economy have to eventually return. Heck, our trade deficit is only half a trillion dollars a year now! Apparently, what the economics prophets really meant to say is that we'd be giving away twice as much without their great advice. Half a trillion dollars in annual donations of our capital to the rest of the world is not as bad as a trillion. Right? The prophets of the economy sure are wise.
- As long as you have a college education, you'll profit from the global economy. Wow, are they right. You can major in anything and succeed today, if you define success as having at least one job before you are on long-term unemployement. At least with a college education you are educated enough to calculate how much your living expenses are than your unemployment check, and how quickly you'll be homeless.
But, hey, the good news is that you can watch all these prophecies unfold on your nice imported TV. It sure was cheap, wasn't it? So what if you can't pay your light bill. Just plug that TV secretly into any outlet you can find on the streets or on the outside of any garage you'll be trying to live in.
I've been wondering, and would love to hear what/.'ers have to say, what advice do we give to children to on how to financially secure their future? What college major do you recommend for our next generation?
For those of us who view the Internet as a community prospering together, this appears to be very anti-social behavior, disregarding the basic vision of the community.
This vision of linking together the world's documents to create the "world wide web" built the Internet community long before browsers had graphics, home users could dial-up with a TCP/IP connection, or commercial enterprises such as CMP hosted their servers online.
From 1993-1996, the impact of corporations building a presense on the Internet was widely debated. I, for one, sided with their right to join us, believing that capitalism and the ideals of the Internet community could complement each other, or at least not oppose one another.
If the CMP referrer refusal is an "error", then it is their obligation if they wish to remain participants in the Internet community to clarify, which they do not appear to have done; or if they have, they have done a poor job of getting the word out.
I don't believe anyone is questioning their legal "right", or their "right" as owner of the servers. I presume you are referring to their "right" in these contexts.
What we are questioning is their right to continue to benefit from the patronage of a community dedicated to principals they currently appear to be opposing. It is our right to determine who shall benefit from our time online, or if such a right should be revoked. Our collaborative discussion on/. or elsewhere of whether or not what they did is "right" according to the principles that we subscribe to is a fundamental requirement to determining the degree to which CMP will be able to benefit from our patronage in the future.
If they wish to continue to benefit from our determination of what is right (e.g., letting documents link to other documents to permit users to "travel" the www), then it is their duty to respond to the questions concerning their referral policy, and to promptly correct any unintented technical or management errors. On the other hand, if they do not care if they lose visitors to their site, or incorrectly believe that people interested in their content (IT professionals primarily) are intelligent and informed enough to be aware of their action or able to make a decision adhering to basic Internet community values, then it is their "right" to do. We shall not deny them the "right" to isolate themselves and disappear due to loss of interest.
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There are three reason sites go down: (a) a business decision that the benefit of keeping the site up is not worth the cost of keeping it up, (b) external causes that reasonable catastrophic countermeasures on the part of the site owner could not prevent, such as discruption in the Internet root DNS servers, or (c) incompetence.
A lot of site downtime goes in category a. You see this when they officially announce the downtime and even schedule it during hours when the impact is minimal. This is ok. Not all systems are critical, or have to be available at 4am. Sometimes the company is just willing to accept any associated loss. That's a business decision.
In this case category b was not the cause. The rest of the Internet functioned properly.
This leaves categories a or c. The issue is that most users of the affected services don't feel that category a is acceptable, and many feel that a is unlikely since it wasn't announced in advance. Few believe that it was an intentional business decision to take the Passport services down without warning.
This leaves category c, incompetence, as the only likely reason for these services going down. Such imcompetence is not acceptable for a company that offers its products ensuring competence to customers that require e-businesses to run 24/7 with 99.9% uptime, and makes billions of dollars each year dominating software markets that businesses depend on daily.
I agree. Yet, in creating a virtual office you're talking about being nearly 100% results oriented. And we're not talking about a few virtual employees, we're talking about virtually all your employees and contractors.
When you are doling out 600k/year for 10 or so virtual employees, and this number is growing, you still need to have a feel for the daily operations of your business. It's not the same as micromanaging. You need to know where there are issues and bottlenecks and how they are being handled on a day to day basis. Virtual companies don't eliminate the need to manage daily operations, and daily operations are not micromanaging. Operations management is a fundamental part of running a business.
It isn't easy to be purely results oriented. What do you do whan results are under par after 6 months of work? How do you account for and change things?
It goes both ways, too. I spent over half my career working at home for clients, and I learned to physically appear and demonstrate what I produced on a weekly basis, to offer assurance. Yet, even with this, the virtual employee/contractor still lacks the same means to obtain recognition and promotion. "Out of site, out of mind" was what one client said when he accidentally gave away my cubicle to another contractor.
Let's say in results oriented management you conclude that the team was successful for the past 6 months. Sure, that's reason to be happy. But you'll have to wonder to what extent the individuals contributed, both to reward your best workers, and possibly to weed out slackers. Yes, slackers do exist. There are bound to be at least one or two out of every ten. Perhaps they have learned ways to appear productive when indeed they are not, simply because you don't have any real solid metrics to assess personal productivity, and don't have the traditional model where everyone is aware of what their teammates are truly doing.
Virtual enterprises can succeed. It is simply a great challenge to build a company solely on a large pool of virtual employees.
This challenge tends to be more related to people than technology.
I don't think technology is the challenge. It's the people resources that are difficult to manage.
How do you pay people you not only can't see daily, but possibly may have never even met in person? How can you check up on the current state of your operation?
What sites do you go to? I've been using Mozilla on all my computers (Windows and Linux) for over a year now without problems except for a few sites I had to use for clients (time reporting and Outlook web mail). I complained to the time reporting company, which explicitly says it only supports IE, that one cannot report time from a Linux box.
Other than that, every other site I use works great in Mozilla, including banking sites and other sites that you'd think would be tempted to make the IE-only mistake.
What I don't miss is the pop-up I used to have to endure in IE when I disabled ActiveX, not to mention it's countless lack of features (tabbed browsing, popup blocking, etc,...).
I have found that the DoNotUseIE.patch file has upgraded it to 100% open standards compliance, and this cannot be overridden by any future version of IE or other Microsoft extensions.
I don't care what they say or do now because clearly this puts Nintendo on a boycott list. What Nintendo produces is something I will henceforth care less about since I will never purchase another product from them until they apologize for their behavior.
Companies who side with the DMCA and the current unbalanced use of patent and copyright law in aspects that clearly are opposed by the public, from which the pool of their customers comes from, do not deserve one dime. The people are still greater than the entities created to benefit them.
Quests in EQOA are completely server side. This has nothing to do with the memory cards.
This is why the quests in the game suck so bad. I love questing, but hate EQOA quests. There are many complaints about the quests, such as having to run many zones or search endlessly in zones, but a vast number of those complains stem from the fundamental problem that few are dungeon quests. AC's quests in contrast are usually dungeon quests, which means that the quest begins when you enter the dungeon, and you usually do the entire quest inside the dungeon, killing the boss at the end of one of tunnels to obtain the item. Thus, when I say that AC often adds quests in their monthly patch, I also mean they add new dungeons... ie, new maps, new graphics, new mobs, new challenges and traps, new environments, etc,...!
EQOA is very subpar at many things. But the only thing you have touched on is the inability to add new, low level content.
The only thing?!? The ability to add new content isn't significant in itself? Lack of content is the fundamental problem of MMOGs today! And, in EQOA, this problem is amplified by great magnitute. Read the EQOA forums! We all agree that lack of content is a major issue. Even though AC is better because it adds a lot of new content with its monthly patches, I believe they all lack because there aren't enough devs to create enough content, thus time sink is a curse in these games, something that is not a fundamentally required for RPGs, but an unfortunate consequence of this business model where devs create the content and they want us to play them for months and years (subscription based.) I believe that user created content is the only solution, but that is another topic.
And what do you mean by "low level content". It boils down to having something to do other than time sink... period! When you can compare one MMOG to another, you realize that this does vary from game to game, yet persists among them all as an enourmous fundamental problem because they are all subscription based yet depend on a limitted pool of developers to create content.
The game that solves this problem will possess the holy grail of MMOGs. I believe the only solution is to allow users to create content, even if that creates obstacles to overcome. It will be worth it, because the devs will never be able to create enough unique interesting content to prevent us from moving to a game that has more and better conent.
This will become more clear as competition heats up to the point where PS2 and XBox become primary conduits for MMOG playing.
My primary point is that in EQOA the content problem is exacerbated by their inability to routinely update the clients true create truly new experience from month to month.
I understand what you are saying. The auction system was a very nice patch. However, after playing AC for years before I played EQOA for about a year, I have to say the monthly patches in EQOA are very disappointing.
Don't forget also that Frontiers required a new CD. Part of this is marketing, of course; and AC even required a new CD for their Majesty update. But vast improvements that you get in AC without a new CD don't seem feasible with a 3M client patch space.
In AC a monthly patch can include new dungeons, quests, new islands, new creatures, new combat options, and loads of other new things. EQOA's monthly patches are very subpar in contrast, and I suspect heavily this is due to the memory card limit.
Also keep in mind that FF XI requires a hard drive to play on the PS2! This means that Sony itself appears to believe that the benefit of having that option on the client is great enough to justify requiring customers to buy one.
Slashdot Mirror
But even though it's redundant, it's also clearly an improvement in readability! That has to count for something!
Grass houses?
The "tends of thousands" phrase sounds more like a declaration of war against the citizens of America by the increasingly corporate owned government of ours. At a minimum, it sounds like a crackdown on "dissidents". When 1.5 million people are downloading today in America, most of which are law-abiding citizens that don't traffic in drugs, commit violent crimes, and pay for their groceries.
Could this have happened if the RIAA and MPAA were not busy purchasing our congressional representatives?
How do we stop this? I don't just mean the bill; I mean how do we stop the trend. How do we get politicians to represent the people again?
One question I have is how are we a representative democracy if we are no longer represented?
After years of this news growing, I still have not seen a coordinated large-scale effort to restore balance in our government so that it truly represents the people, and respects our principals.
While I consider myself a free market capitalist, and personally choose not to download music that the creators do not offer for free, I completely disagree with treating the American people as dissidents, as this bill and other are increasingly doing.
Is China becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
"Tens of thousands of continuing civil enforcement actions might be needed to generate the necessary deterrence." -- US Senator Orrin Hatch The "tends of thousands" phrase sounds more like a declaration of war against the citizens of America by the increasingly corporate owned government of ours. When 1.5 million people are downloading today in America, most of which are law abiding citizens that don't traffic in drugs, commit violent crimes, and pay for their groceries. Could this have happened if the RIAA and MPAA were not busy purchasing our congressional representatives? How do we stop this? I don't just mean the bill, I mean how do we stop the trend. How do we get politicians to represent the people again? One question I have is how are we a representative democracy if we are no longer represented? After years of this news growing, I still have not seen a coordinated large-scale effort to restore balance in our government so that it truly represents the people, and respects our principals. While I consider myself a free market capitalist, and personally choose not to download music that the creators do not offer for free, I completely disagree with treating the American people as dissidents, as this bill and other are increasingly doing. Is China becoming more like us, or are we becoming more like them?
It's worth nothing though that FF XI is now available for both the PC and PS2, and the two clients play on the same server together. This asks a new question. Do MMOG companies really have to choose between PC and console? Could the future be of MMOGs be integrated multiplatforms?
We shared visions of how quickly we could solve problems together, developing and advancing technology at an astounding rate that would be good for everyone. We then began to wonder how we could declare software to belong to the "public domain" while simultaneously protecting it from being stolen by a bogus claim that someone has it, since copyright and the public domain were viewed as oppositional. This lead to the creation of the open source license
In all this discussion, no one ever thought about Microsoft or doing it because they were anti anything. There really were no technology enemies to us back then. Microsoft was simply irrelevant in these discussions, particularly since the Internet was almost exclusively Unix based. Even IBM hadn't yet become an issue to the technology to the Internet community. There were no corporate Interestes on the Internet, at least none that I was aware of. Most companies didn't even know what the Internet was, and any non-techie I talked to never heard of it.
Open source was born out of the ideal that a globe of people working together could accomplish so much more than isolated pockets.
The JPC isn't an open standards body by many definitions, yet it has adopted enough of the goals and conventions of open standards to be regarded as such by many. I often call Java "the closest thing to being an open standard without being an open standard."
For many that really care about Java, the most important thing they want is the ability to openly contribute to the development of the source code the way they currently contribute to the JCP. This is not everything everyone wants, but it is clearly a huge leap in the right direction. My only point is that right now Sun refuses to do anything, because people are only looking at this using traditional open source licenses.
Sun needs to understand how important the need to open up the development of the code so McNealy knows it's a problem that isn't being solved today, as evidenced by the technical issues of running Java on the BSDs and many distributions of Linux. They also need to understand that it can be solved in a way that addresses Sun's primary concerns.
The public debate is clouding these two truths because the open source community, many of which have no real interest in the Java language, have been using this momentum to try to get as much as they possibly can from Sun, dreaming that Sun would even consider a GPL license given its concerns.
I simply would rather see progress in solving real problems than achieve nothing through an all or nothing proposition, with McNealy sadly announcing that nothing wins. He justified it with remarks that make it very clear he does not understand the problems today.
I've developed in relational databases since inception (dBase II), including all major commercial databases today. I can tell you, I am SO glad DB2 is not open source or attempting to be the Universal "run anywhere" database of the world. It is very behind the times due to it's extensive legacy customer base. The only benefit it has is performance on IBM hardware.
While such an open source license wouldn't make everyone happy, particularly GPL advocates, it would permit people to start to addressing some of the issues Java has today.
Those issues require opening up the development of the Java code, even if Sun maintains ownership, prevents forking, and manages the development process similar to the way it manages the JCP today.
Performance, reliability and compatibility are the primary issues with Java on any operating system that Sun or IBM doesn't provide a JVM for today. Open sourcing Java would help to ensure that the source code Sun maintains receives patches and is further developed to further enable Java to better run on diverse platforms.
That's the fundamental issue here. Do you believe Java should be "write once, run anywhere" or just "write once, run anywhere Sun and IBM can financially justify creating a native JVM, and perhaps, if you are lucky, run elsewhere"?
That is just part of the case. Open source advocates that have been working on the BSDs and various distributions of Linux (e.g., Debian) can, I'm sure, give you a better case than what I described.
The bottom line is the open source advocates believe it will permit Java to develop more quickly and with higher quality, increasing its competitiveness. They believe this will help everyone except Microsoft and those committing their infrastructure to .NET.
I personally wasn't aware of the degree to which this was an issue until I installed FreeBSD. Sun doesn't supply a native JVM for it, and it's current license puts a lot of restrictions complicating the optimization of a free JVM for FreeBSD.
You can get it running, but you have to jump through hoops, agreeing to Sun's source license, and then downloading it from Sun's site before you can compile a version for your PC. After you apply patches created by someone that worked very hard to get the thing to run on your OS, the compile process takes a long time.
The worst part, though, is that it is slow on FreeBSD compared to other operating systems running on the same hardware. Very little can be done until Sun truly open sources Java.
The primary solution people have taken to is creating patches to solve the problems Sun's code has running on different platforms. This has several drawbacks. One is that the patches take time to develop, creating a lag in versions. The second is that the patched versions rarely get true testing, so you can only hope it works with your application, and that something unexpected doesn't surprise you down the road. Most people creating these patches don't have access to Sun's highly priced compatibility test suite.
The irony is that the compatibility Sun want's to maintain is eroded already by Sun's reluctance to both open source Java and make the test suite more accessible. This decision also decreases the platforms that Java can run on, the opposite of one of Sun's stated goals.
A lot of people take it for granted when they install a pre-compiled JVM downloaded from Sun's website on one of the operating systems Sun happens to support. Let me know, please, when Sun releases a FreeBSD JVM, and solves problems the OpenBSD people have had getting it to run correctly.
What problem could possibly be solved by letting people contribute their time to help build Java?!?
- America will be the leader in knowledge based work. Isn't it wonderful to lead the world? OK, so leading means sacrificing your job. That's just a minor technicality.
- The American dollars that left our country as we opened our economy have to eventually return. Heck, our trade deficit is only half a trillion dollars a year now! Apparently, what the economics prophets really meant to say is that we'd be giving away twice as much without their great advice. Half a trillion dollars in annual donations of our capital to the rest of the world is not as bad as a trillion. Right? The prophets of the economy sure are wise.
- As long as you have a college education, you'll profit from the global economy. Wow, are they right. You can major in anything and succeed today, if you define success as having at least one job before you are on long-term unemployement. At least with a college education you are educated enough to calculate how much your living expenses are than your unemployment check, and how quickly you'll be homeless.
But, hey, the good news is that you can watch all these prophecies unfold on your nice imported TV. It sure was cheap, wasn't it? So what if you can't pay your light bill. Just plug that TV secretly into any outlet you can find on the streets or on the outside of any garage you'll be trying to live in.
I've been wondering, and would love to hear what /.'ers have to say, what advice do we give to children to on how to financially secure their future? What college major do you recommend for our next generation?
This vision of linking together the world's documents to create the "world wide web" built the Internet community long before browsers had graphics, home users could dial-up with a TCP/IP connection, or commercial enterprises such as CMP hosted their servers online.
From 1993-1996, the impact of corporations building a presense on the Internet was widely debated. I, for one, sided with their right to join us, believing that capitalism and the ideals of the Internet community could complement each other, or at least not oppose one another.
If the CMP referrer refusal is an "error", then it is their obligation if they wish to remain participants in the Internet community to clarify, which they do not appear to have done; or if they have, they have done a poor job of getting the word out.
I don't believe anyone is questioning their legal "right", or their "right" as owner of the servers. I presume you are referring to their "right" in these contexts.
What we are questioning is their right to continue to benefit from the patronage of a community dedicated to principals they currently appear to be opposing. It is our right to determine who shall benefit from our time online, or if such a right should be revoked. Our collaborative discussion on /. or elsewhere of whether or not what they did is "right" according to the principles that we subscribe to is a fundamental requirement to determining the degree to which CMP will be able to benefit from our patronage in the future.
If they wish to continue to benefit from our determination of what is right (e.g., letting documents link to other documents to permit users to "travel" the www), then it is their duty to respond to the questions concerning their referral policy, and to promptly correct any unintented technical or management errors. On the other hand, if they do not care if they lose visitors to their site, or incorrectly believe that people interested in their content (IT professionals primarily) are intelligent and informed enough to be aware of their action or able to make a decision adhering to basic Internet community values, then it is their "right" to do. We shall not deny them the "right" to isolate themselves and disappear due to loss of interest.
http://lists.anti-dmca.org/mailman/listinfo/dmca_d iscuss
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There are three reason sites go down: (a) a business decision that the benefit of keeping the site up is not worth the cost of keeping it up, (b) external causes that reasonable catastrophic countermeasures on the part of the site owner could not prevent, such as discruption in the Internet root DNS servers, or (c) incompetence.
A lot of site downtime goes in category a. You see this when they officially announce the downtime and even schedule it during hours when the impact is minimal. This is ok. Not all systems are critical, or have to be available at 4am. Sometimes the company is just willing to accept any associated loss. That's a business decision.
In this case category b was not the cause. The rest of the Internet functioned properly.
This leaves categories a or c. The issue is that most users of the affected services don't feel that category a is acceptable, and many feel that a is unlikely since it wasn't announced in advance. Few believe that it was an intentional business decision to take the Passport services down without warning.
This leaves category c, incompetence, as the only likely reason for these services going down. Such imcompetence is not acceptable for a company that offers its products ensuring competence to customers that require e-businesses to run 24/7 with 99.9% uptime, and makes billions of dollars each year dominating software markets that businesses depend on daily.
Do you see how this is a little different?
I hope they document and publish the process they used to install the .NET applications so others can get their sites back up and running this quickly.
When you are doling out 600k/year for 10 or so virtual employees, and this number is growing, you still need to have a feel for the daily operations of your business. It's not the same as micromanaging. You need to know where there are issues and bottlenecks and how they are being handled on a day to day basis. Virtual companies don't eliminate the need to manage daily operations, and daily operations are not micromanaging. Operations management is a fundamental part of running a business.
It isn't easy to be purely results oriented. What do you do whan results are under par after 6 months of work? How do you account for and change things?
It goes both ways, too. I spent over half my career working at home for clients, and I learned to physically appear and demonstrate what I produced on a weekly basis, to offer assurance. Yet, even with this, the virtual employee/contractor still lacks the same means to obtain recognition and promotion. "Out of site, out of mind" was what one client said when he accidentally gave away my cubicle to another contractor.
Let's say in results oriented management you conclude that the team was successful for the past 6 months. Sure, that's reason to be happy. But you'll have to wonder to what extent the individuals contributed, both to reward your best workers, and possibly to weed out slackers. Yes, slackers do exist. There are bound to be at least one or two out of every ten. Perhaps they have learned ways to appear productive when indeed they are not, simply because you don't have any real solid metrics to assess personal productivity, and don't have the traditional model where everyone is aware of what their teammates are truly doing.
Virtual enterprises can succeed. It is simply a great challenge to build a company solely on a large pool of virtual employees. This challenge tends to be more related to people than technology.
How do you pay people you not only can't see daily, but possibly may have never even met in person? How can you check up on the current state of your operation?
Other than that, every other site I use works great in Mozilla, including banking sites and other sites that you'd think would be tempted to make the IE-only mistake.
What I don't miss is the pop-up I used to have to endure in IE when I disabled ActiveX, not to mention it's countless lack of features (tabbed browsing, popup blocking, etc,...).
I have found that the DoNotUseIE.patch file has upgraded it to 100% open standards compliance, and this cannot be overridden by any future version of IE or other Microsoft extensions.
Companies who side with the DMCA and the current unbalanced use of patent and copyright law in aspects that clearly are opposed by the public, from which the pool of their customers comes from, do not deserve one dime. The people are still greater than the entities created to benefit them.
This is why the quests in the game suck so bad. I love questing, but hate EQOA quests. There are many complaints about the quests, such as having to run many zones or search endlessly in zones, but a vast number of those complains stem from the fundamental problem that few are dungeon quests. AC's quests in contrast are usually dungeon quests, which means that the quest begins when you enter the dungeon, and you usually do the entire quest inside the dungeon, killing the boss at the end of one of tunnels to obtain the item. Thus, when I say that AC often adds quests in their monthly patch, I also mean they add new dungeons... ie, new maps, new graphics, new mobs, new challenges and traps, new environments, etc,...!
EQOA is very subpar at many things. But the only thing you have touched on is the inability to add new, low level content.
The only thing?!? The ability to add new content isn't significant in itself? Lack of content is the fundamental problem of MMOGs today! And, in EQOA, this problem is amplified by great magnitute. Read the EQOA forums! We all agree that lack of content is a major issue. Even though AC is better because it adds a lot of new content with its monthly patches, I believe they all lack because there aren't enough devs to create enough content, thus time sink is a curse in these games, something that is not a fundamentally required for RPGs, but an unfortunate consequence of this business model where devs create the content and they want us to play them for months and years (subscription based.) I believe that user created content is the only solution, but that is another topic.
And what do you mean by "low level content". It boils down to having something to do other than time sink... period! When you can compare one MMOG to another, you realize that this does vary from game to game, yet persists among them all as an enourmous fundamental problem because they are all subscription based yet depend on a limitted pool of developers to create content.
The game that solves this problem will possess the holy grail of MMOGs. I believe the only solution is to allow users to create content, even if that creates obstacles to overcome. It will be worth it, because the devs will never be able to create enough unique interesting content to prevent us from moving to a game that has more and better conent.
This will become more clear as competition heats up to the point where PS2 and XBox become primary conduits for MMOG playing.
My primary point is that in EQOA the content problem is exacerbated by their inability to routinely update the clients true create truly new experience from month to month.
Don't forget also that Frontiers required a new CD. Part of this is marketing, of course; and AC even required a new CD for their Majesty update. But vast improvements that you get in AC without a new CD don't seem feasible with a 3M client patch space.
In AC a monthly patch can include new dungeons, quests, new islands, new creatures, new combat options, and loads of other new things. EQOA's monthly patches are very subpar in contrast, and I suspect heavily this is due to the memory card limit.
Also keep in mind that FF XI requires a hard drive to play on the PS2! This means that Sony itself appears to believe that the benefit of having that option on the client is great enough to justify requiring customers to buy one.