Standard Oil was a monopoly because it was not better than its competition but rather relied on the government to fuel its practices
Petroleum derivatives had a well-earned reputation for being both unpredictable and lethal.
Rockefeller delivered a retail product based on standard formulations and sold in honest weights and measures. "Standard Oil" was trusted.
"Standard Oil" was cheap.
The kerosene that cost 58 cents in 1865 cost 26 cents in 1870. Standard Oil
None too surprisingly, perhaps, the Standard's customers tended to remain loyal to the Standard's operating companies after the break-up. They pospered as would Rockefeller himself.
There would be opportunities for others, but only for the big boys, vertically integrated like the Standard itself.
Considering that they may still be selling it at a loss and hoping to make up for it in game sales may actually net them more money as there were at least a few people who were using them to make clusters.
A single USAF HPC was built from 2,0000 PS3s. Blunderingly, Sony Nukes PS3 Supercomputing Purchases on that scale take product off retail shelves and return nothing to Sony but unbankable good will.
Sony took a brief swing at commercializing PS3 tech for post-production video. Zego When the OtherOS cannabilizes sales of your own HPC product, it is the OtherOS which disappears.
I used to have a pocket calculator that was powered by a small solar panel. The power requirements of something like a central heating control are similar.
The central heating control can be powered by the heat of the furnace, if it comes to that. The requirements are trivial. What matters is whether you have enough power to keep the necessary pumps, blowers and relays on-line.
In my next door neighbour's garden, there are a number of self-contained garden lights.
The lights are staked and portable.
You eliminate the expense and danger of high voltage wiring. The nuisance of low voltage wiring. It doesn't matter how inefficient the lights are. It doesn't matter if they are next to useless for anything but purely decorative lighting.
The exact same thing was said when the railroad industry began to eliminate brakemen.
The railroad industry fought tooth and claw any requirement for the use of telegraph, air brakes and automatic couplers. The brakeman was cheap and the brakeman was expendable.
Now if he had said that they were considering putting in remote control systems so that a backup pilot on the ground could take over electronically in the event that the pilot became incapacitated, that might be palatable.
That assumes perfect communication can be maintained with a plane whose pilot is ill, dead or injured. I would argue that this is presumptive evidence of a wounded plane as well as a wounded pilot.
This happened in history already almost 100 years ago. Wireless... free... the only difference, it was electrical power instead of internet. They tore down the Wardenclyffe tower because they couldn't meter the power usage. Meaning free wireless Power/Internet/ doesn't work... how did Radio get past that?? Oh ads...right.
Wardenclyffe can be described as a power plant only if you consider the demands of a crystal radio set to be a practical demonstration of broadcast power.
The Shoreham, L.I., tower was dynamited in 1917 - on the grounds that was altogether too useful a marker for U-Boats operating off-shore. Wardenclyffe Tower
In 1905 your basic electric appliance is the light bulb.
There is nothing else you can buy - or at least nothing else that you can afford to buy - and your residential power demands are negligible.
Which means that residential power sales are negligible and broadcast power becomes something very close to a product without a market.
The farmer has his windmill and lead-acid batteries. The small town or factory a coal-fired plant of its own or hydroelectric power from Niagara.
These prices are from the 1922 Sears Catalog of Electrical Goods, shown adjusted for inflation:
Electric fan $10 ($127) Sewing machine $40 ($507) Vacuum cleaner $35 ($444) Wringer washing machine $99 ($1268)
There is no electric stove in the catalog. No refrigerator.
The electric era really begins with the 1930s. Not the twenties. Not thee tens.
J. P. Morgan put about $150,000 ($3,000,000) of his own money into the 250 KW Wardenclyffe project - with nothing more to show for it than an unfinished building.
No transmitter - and perhaps more importantly - no receivers.
Yet another country that realizes you can make more money if the music is free. Didn't the Grateful Dead already figure this out?
The Grateful Dead in its most recognizable form was active from 1967 to 1995.
The "tapers" were just that - fans recording live performances to reel-to-reel or cassette tapes.
Fans who had paid for their tickets exchanging copies 1 for 1 with fans who had also paid for their concert tickets.
The Deadhead played by Deadhead rules.
Garcia performed in over 2000 concerts - around 70 a year. The price you pay for that is seeing major talents dying young. That Garcia survived into his fifties is something like a miracle.
Those that get picked, in many cases, were not smart enough to get themselves dismissed during jury selection.
The American jury is typically middle-aged, middle-class, small-C conservative.
They are civic-minded and responsible people. They believe in the law - and they do not weasel out of commitments and obligations they think are important.
If you go into court thinking you are smarter than the jury you are going to get your sorry ass pounded into the marble flooring.
This illustrates why many judges need to be taken out and shot.
The plaintiff made his court date.
The defendant did not.
There really isn't much the judge can do - there really isn't much that he has the legal right to do - but render a judgment for the plaintiff by default.
This is basically covered under martial law anyway, which would presumably be imposed in the event of an attack. The government already has the power to do anything it wants in such an event, so specifically enumerating an "internet kill switch" is basically moot.
In December 1917 US railroads were nationalized for the duration - an entire sector of the economy reconstructed over-night by government fiat.
Change happened swiftly. The railroads were divided into three Divisions; East, West and South. Duplicate passenger services were killed off, costly and employee-heavy sleeping car services were cut back and extra fares applied to discourage their use. Uniform passenger ticketing was instituted, and competing services on different former railroads were cut back. Terminals, facilities and shops were shared.
Over 100,000 railroad cars and 1,930 steam locomotives were ordered at a cost of $380 million, all of new USRA standard designs, which were up-to-date and standardized types, designed to be the best that could be produced to replace much outdated equipment.United States Railroad Administration
Why is it that Sony first allowed Linux on PS3 (and earlier PS's too)
1 The PS3 was a premium-priced console built around some very new and expensive tech.
The OtherOS was supposed to help drive sales to the enthusiast and early adopter - but it never ammounted to all that much.
2 That was long before every home video component known to man became web-enabled. When Pandora, Netflix, Skype and all the rest are directly accessible from your HDTV, you don't need to muck around installing Ubuntu and Firefox on an aging PS3 Phatt.
3. --- and long before console-excluive online services like XBox Live began coining money for Sony's compeitors.
As evidenced by the scores of military and business users making compute clusters out of these, the cell platform is great for many HPC applications
The PS3 was a great celll platform because it was cheap - and it was cheap because it was being sold at a loss.
The use of a video game console in a "mission critical" application would almost certainly violate any real or implied warranty of fitness that would stand up in court.
They don't represent the whole market percentages. Microsoft, only a month or so ago, tried to pass that off as their success story--by only presenting paid licenses when Linux is free
When you rake in $5 billion every quarter against a product that sells for free you have something to brag about. The SMB that buys a Windows server product is almost certainly buying a host of other Windows products.
The SMB that chooses Linux is almost certain to choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux - which would be counted here.
"Hello, good sir. I would like to purchase a computer."
After which he points you to towards the Sony Vaio, the HP Pavilion, the Lenovo ThinkPad. Perhaps a Dell Inspiron if you a looking for a budget desktop.
He does not send you to the racks with the XBox 360, the Wii, and PS3.
This was at a time when Microsoft was a quasi-dominant force in the server market, when their IIS server platform actually had a reasonable install base in production environments, and Windows was totally unchallenged by Linux and pals.
Microsoft is doing quite well in the server market:
x86 server revenues were up 31.7% to $7 billion on shipments up 25.8% to 1.8 million servers, positively impacting Windows server demand. IDC put Windows server revenue at $5 billion, representing 46.5% of overall quarterly factory revenue. Linux server revenues were up 30.1% to $1.8 billion, representing 16.8% of all server revenue, up 2.5 points over last year.Server Sales Were Healthy in Q2: IDC [August 29]
With the second quarter server market figures tabulated and analyzed, it looks like SMBs rule the roost. Basically, there's been dramatic market growth among x86 servers--i.e, the PC-derived kind that SMBs buy. The high end of the market, meanwhile, continues to dry up. IDC, the market research firm behind the figures, says that there was a 28.2 percent 2Q year-over-year increase in Windows Server shipments, as users not only bought new x86 machines, but found broader uses for x86 machines. Linux servers (which also often involve x86 machines) showed even better growth, with vendor revenue up 30.1 percent. Linux servers now account for 16.8 percent of the server market, an increase of 2.5 points over the last year. Server Field Becoming An SMB Market
Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.
There are 27 H.264 licensors.
No more than four are American.
A dozen are Asian giants in manufacturing - companies like Mitsubishi and Samsung. Seizing assets in peacetime from your major trading partners invites retaliation.
In a recession, this is lunacy.
How do your force Sony to design and export the WebM-enabled camcorder, video game console or HDTV? You can't.
Not without legislation - and more political repercussions.
More importantly, how do you build a global market for WebM?
Lenovo is designing a video game console for the Chinese market. For Lenovo H.264 licensing amounts to less than your own pocket change.
How the geek expects Google to stop this sort of thing from happening is beyond me.
Google and On2 are not a licensor of any of the patents in MPEG LA's patent pools.
The licensors are the global giants in R&D and manufacturing - companies like Mitsubishi, Philips, Sony and Samsung - and they have had the better part of ten years to commercialize H.264.
WebM in its current state is a low-bandwidth distribution codec for YouTube, not a production codec. Not even for the Flip pocket camcorder.
That is not going to change anytime soon - if ever.
In other words, a prosecutor should know that in court, if you need to cite the DSM-IV, you need to cite the DSM-IV, not a Wikipedia article citing the DSM-IV
You need to do this at trial.
It is unfair to attempt to impeach a witness who is not present to respond to your challenge.
You must be prepared to introduce your own expert witnesses who can explain what the proper role of DSM-IV is in clinical practice and how that is relevant to your case - and again, you need to be prepared to do this before the trial court.
It is unfair to allow new evidence to be introduced on appeal.
That introduces an element of surprise that modern judicial procedure has worked very hard to exclude.
Slashdot Mirror
Standard Oil was a monopoly because it was not better than its competition but rather relied on the government to fuel its practices
Petroleum derivatives had a well-earned reputation for being both unpredictable and lethal.
Rockefeller delivered a retail product based on standard formulations and sold in honest weights and measures. "Standard Oil" was trusted.
"Standard Oil" was cheap.
The kerosene that cost 58 cents in 1865 cost 26 cents in 1870. Standard Oil
None too surprisingly, perhaps, the Standard's customers tended to remain loyal to the Standard's operating companies after the break-up. They pospered as would Rockefeller himself.
There would be opportunities for others, but only for the big boys, vertically integrated like the Standard itself.
What's the point of a 250GB drive it all I have on it are dinky PSN games?
How many games using Blu-Ray media can you load on a 250 GB drive?
The simplest and most effective form of DRM is the file you can't afford to store or copy or download.
Considering that they may still be selling it at a loss and hoping to make up for it in game sales may actually net them more money as there were at least a few people who were using them to make clusters.
A single USAF HPC was built from 2,0000 PS3s. Blunderingly, Sony Nukes PS3 Supercomputing Purchases on that scale take product off retail shelves and return nothing to Sony but unbankable good will.
Sony took a brief swing at commercializing PS3 tech for post-production video. Zego When the OtherOS cannabilizes sales of your own HPC product, it is the OtherOS which disappears.
Sorry. Sony already ruined their own expensive console by removing marketed features after the fact.
Searching Google News returns about 7,700 hits for "PS3."
The "OtherOS" was never more than a very small part of the PS3 story - and it is the Move controller that is making headlines now.
Accusations of bribery are rampant on Slashdot whenever a public figure, judge or politician makes a decision the geek does not like.
My apologies for the truncated post.
The blind faith many people seem to put in Assange confuses the hell out of me.
The problem is bigger than Assange.
Accusations of bribery are rampant on Slashdot whenever a public figure, judge or politician makes a
I used to have a pocket calculator that was powered by a small solar panel. The power requirements of something like a central heating control are similar.
The central heating control can be powered by the heat of the furnace, if it comes to that. The requirements are trivial. What matters is whether you have enough power to keep the necessary pumps, blowers and relays on-line.
In my next door neighbour's garden, there are a number of self-contained garden lights.
The lights are staked and portable.
You eliminate the expense and danger of high voltage wiring. The nuisance of low voltage wiring. It doesn't matter how inefficient the lights are. It doesn't matter if they are next to useless for anything but purely decorative lighting.
The exact same thing was said when the railroad industry began to eliminate brakemen.
The railroad industry fought tooth and claw any requirement for the use of telegraph, air brakes and automatic couplers. The brakeman was cheap and the brakeman was expendable.
Reform was driven by those outside the industry.
The Great Rail Wreak At Revere
Lorenzo Coffin
'St George' Westinghouse
Flying is much safer than driving even if our monkey brains can't handle the concept of rare medium scale catastrophes vs common small scale ones.
How do you define "medium scale?"
There is a reason why the pilot of Flight 1549 chose to ditch in the Hudson River.
Now if he had said that they were considering putting in remote control systems so that a backup pilot on the ground could take over electronically in the event that the pilot became incapacitated, that might be palatable.
That assumes perfect communication can be maintained with a plane whose pilot is ill, dead or injured. I would argue that this is presumptive evidence of a wounded plane as well as a wounded pilot.
This happened in history already almost 100 years ago. Wireless... free... the only difference, it was electrical power instead of internet. They tore down the Wardenclyffe tower because they couldn't meter the power usage. Meaning free wireless Power/Internet/ doesn't work... how did Radio get past that?? Oh ads...right.
Wardenclyffe can be described as a power plant only if you consider the demands of a crystal radio set to be a practical demonstration of broadcast power.
The Shoreham, L.I., tower was dynamited in 1917 - on the grounds that was altogether too useful a marker for U-Boats operating off-shore. Wardenclyffe Tower
In 1905 your basic electric appliance is the light bulb.
There is nothing else you can buy - or at least nothing else that you can afford to buy - and your residential power demands are negligible.
Which means that residential power sales are negligible and broadcast power becomes something very close to a product without a market.
The farmer has his windmill and lead-acid batteries. The small town or factory a coal-fired plant of its own or hydroelectric power from Niagara.
These prices are from the 1922 Sears Catalog of Electrical Goods, shown adjusted for inflation:
Electric fan $10 ($127)
Sewing machine $40 ($507)
Vacuum cleaner $35 ($444)
Wringer washing machine $99 ($1268)
There is no electric stove in the catalog. No refrigerator.
The electric era really begins with the 1930s. Not the twenties. Not thee tens.
J. P. Morgan put about $150,000 ($3,000,000) of his own money into the 250 KW Wardenclyffe project - with nothing more to show for it than an unfinished building.
No transmitter - and perhaps more importantly - no receivers.
Yet another country that realizes you can make more money if the music is free. Didn't the Grateful Dead already figure this out?
The Grateful Dead in its most recognizable form was active from 1967 to 1995.
The "tapers" were just that - fans recording live performances to reel-to-reel or cassette tapes.
Fans who had paid for their tickets exchanging copies 1 for 1 with fans who had also paid for their concert tickets.
The Deadhead played by Deadhead rules.
Garcia performed in over 2000 concerts - around 70 a year. The price you pay for that is seeing major talents dying young. That Garcia survived into his fifties is something like a miracle.
Those that get picked, in many cases, were not smart enough to get themselves dismissed during jury selection.
The American jury is typically middle-aged, middle-class, small-C conservative.
They are civic-minded and responsible people. They believe in the law - and they do not weasel out of commitments and obligations they think are important.
If you go into court thinking you are smarter than the jury you are going to get your sorry ass pounded into the marble flooring.
This illustrates why many judges need to be taken out and shot.
The plaintiff made his court date.
The defendant did not.
There really isn't much the judge can do - there really isn't much that he has the legal right to do - but render a judgment for the plaintiff by default.
This is basically covered under martial law anyway, which would presumably be imposed in the event of an attack. The government already has the power to do anything it wants in such an event, so specifically enumerating an "internet kill switch" is basically moot.
In December 1917 US railroads were nationalized for the duration - an entire sector of the economy reconstructed over-night by government fiat.
Change happened swiftly. The railroads were divided into three Divisions; East, West and South. Duplicate passenger services were killed off, costly and employee-heavy sleeping car services were cut back and extra fares applied to discourage their use. Uniform passenger ticketing was instituted, and competing services on different former railroads were cut back. Terminals, facilities and shops were shared.
Over 100,000 railroad cars and 1,930 steam locomotives were ordered at a cost of $380 million, all of new USRA standard designs, which were up-to-date and standardized types, designed to be the best that could be produced to replace much outdated equipment. United States Railroad Administration
Why is it that Sony first allowed Linux on PS3 (and earlier PS's too)
1 The PS3 was a premium-priced console built around some very new and expensive tech.
The OtherOS was supposed to help drive sales to the enthusiast and early adopter - but it never ammounted to all that much.
2 That was long before every home video component known to man became web-enabled. When Pandora, Netflix, Skype and all the rest are directly accessible from your HDTV, you don't need to muck around installing Ubuntu and Firefox on an aging PS3 Phatt.
3. --- and long before console-excluive online services like XBox Live began coining money for Sony's compeitors.
As evidenced by the scores of military and business users making compute clusters out of these, the cell platform is great for many HPC applications
The PS3 was a great celll platform because it was cheap - and it was cheap because it was being sold at a loss.
The use of a video game console in a "mission critical" application would almost certainly violate any real or implied warranty of fitness that would stand up in court.
This lawsuit was ridiculous in that the guy was bound to lose since Sony did nothing wrong legally.
Not to mention that he was trying to recover the $800 he supposedly laid out for the rental of a replacement laptop.
They don't represent the whole market percentages. Microsoft, only a month or so ago, tried to pass that off as their success story--by only presenting paid licenses when Linux is free
When you rake in $5 billion every quarter against a product that sells for free you have something to brag about. The SMB that buys a Windows server product is almost certainly buying a host of other Windows products.
The SMB that chooses Linux is almost certain to choose Red Hat Enterprise Linux - which would be counted here.
A man walks into a shop:
"Hello, good sir. I would like to purchase a computer."
After which he points you to towards the Sony Vaio, the HP Pavilion, the Lenovo ThinkPad. Perhaps a Dell Inspiron if you a looking for a budget desktop.
He does not send you to the racks with the XBox 360, the Wii, and PS3.
This was at a time when Microsoft was a quasi-dominant force in the server market, when their IIS server platform actually had a reasonable install base in production environments, and Windows was totally unchallenged by Linux and pals.
Microsoft is doing quite well in the server market:
x86 server revenues were up 31.7% to $7 billion on shipments up 25.8% to 1.8 million servers, positively impacting Windows server demand. IDC put Windows server revenue at $5 billion, representing 46.5% of overall quarterly factory revenue. Linux server revenues were up 30.1% to $1.8 billion, representing 16.8% of all server revenue, up 2.5 points over last year. Server Sales Were Healthy in Q2: IDC [August 29]
With the second quarter server market figures tabulated and analyzed, it looks like SMBs rule the roost. Basically, there's been dramatic market growth among x86 servers--i.e, the PC-derived kind that SMBs buy. The high end of the market, meanwhile, continues to dry up.
IDC, the market research firm behind the figures, says that there was a 28.2 percent 2Q year-over-year increase in Windows Server shipments, as users not only bought new x86 machines, but found broader uses for x86 machines.
Linux servers (which also often involve x86 machines) showed even better growth, with vendor revenue up 30.1 percent. Linux servers now account for 16.8 percent of the server market, an increase of 2.5 points over the last year. Server Field Becoming An SMB Market
Cases like this are ones where the US government (assuming these are US patents) should step up and use their powers of eminent domain to acquire these patents, declare H.264 a government standard (like AES and DES before it) and release the patents (or a perpetual license thereto) into the public domain.
There are 27 H.264 licensors.
No more than four are American.
A dozen are Asian giants in manufacturing - companies like Mitsubishi and Samsung. Seizing assets in peacetime from your major trading partners invites retaliation.
In a recession, this is lunacy.
How do your force Sony to design and export the WebM-enabled camcorder, video game console or HDTV? You can't.
Not without legislation - and more political repercussions.
More importantly, how do you build a global market for WebM?
Lenovo is designing a video game console for the Chinese market. For Lenovo H.264 licensing amounts to less than your own pocket change.
I'm still rooting for Google's format.
H.264 evolved outside the web.
How the geek expects Google to stop this sort of thing from happening is beyond me.
Google and On2 are not a licensor of any of the patents in MPEG LA's patent pools.
The licensors are the global giants in R&D and manufacturing - companies like Mitsubishi, Philips, Sony and Samsung - and they have had the better part of ten years to commercialize H.264.
WebM in its current state is a low-bandwidth distribution codec for YouTube, not a production codec. Not even for the Flip pocket camcorder.
That is not going to change anytime soon - if ever.
In other words, a prosecutor should know that in court, if you need to cite the DSM-IV, you need to cite the DSM-IV, not a Wikipedia article citing the DSM-IV
You need to do this at trial.
It is unfair to attempt to impeach a witness who is not present to respond to your challenge.
You must be prepared to introduce your own expert witnesses who can explain what the proper role of DSM-IV is in clinical practice and how that is relevant to your case - and again, you need to be prepared to do this before the trial court.
It is unfair to allow new evidence to be introduced on appeal.
That introduces an element of surprise that modern judicial procedure has worked very hard to exclude.
There is no larger government than one which can sustain a system of chattel slavery - except the one which has the power to destroy it.