But sometimes all they need is a huge opening weekend...after all, that's what their marketing campaigns are designed to produce. Take Independence Day, for example. Enormous hype, mega opening weekend, and a fizzle after that, but the opening weekend was so big that it's total box office take puts above the Empire Strikes Bakc, and just below Return of the Jedi.
Word of mouth generally takes time, even when spread via SMS. The stinkier the movie, the faster word spreads, even before the advent of cell phones much less texting.
Downloading MAY be legal; perhaps you can convince the judge that you thought that because the files were available, that the copyright holder had approved it.
It's the act of making files (esp. music) available for OTHERS to download that is totally illegal. Without question. This is publishing something you are not the owner of. Thus the RIAA goes after people who are publishing files copyrighted by RIAA members.
Thus, in the analogy, the SELLER of the fake watch is culpable, the BUYER was deceived. Whether or not the buyer SHOULD have known better isn't relevant. Whether or not a downloader should know better probably depends on who you ask. To the RIAA, you're a leaching criminal if you merely copy a CD you own to an mp3 player.
A DSL line is, by definition, also a plain old telephone line. Is it's maintenance fundamentally different than if it where just your average, everyday phone line? If not, then as long as someone has an SBC landline (ie. 95% of the population in SBC territory), then they already ARE paying for line maintenace.
And the idea that SBC is selling DSL lines at a loss is dubious at best. The R&D to develop DSL was paid for in the late eighties / early nineties via special permission from congress to raise telephone service rates in order to develop interactive television, and in fact, they had promised to deliver it to some large percentage of the population, so you could also argue that a certain amount of field equipment and upgrades has already been paid for, too. The installation of lines was paid for a hell of a long time ago. And the upgrades to digital switches has been mostly in order to save them money as demand increases; the benefit for DSL is ancillary, and thus those switches are also already paid for by telephone subscribers.
The DSL reseller is presumably providing the DSLAM, so where exactly is SBC's loss? Is it like one those studies IBM did way back when that determined that it would cost them $40 to develop and ship an empty box?
A company with a monopoly can only think in monopoly terms. The idea of competition is alien, and unwanted, and the longer a company was had a monopoly, the more ingrained those ideas are.
There is plenty of good US national debt related information available at the Dept. of Treasury's web site. In particular the Bureau of Public Debt is a great starting point, with things like debt history from 1950-2000, which does indeed show that the national debt was never reduced during Clinton's presidency.
These numbers are an aggregate of public debt, and intragovernmental holdings. Apparently, the public debt was actually reduced during Clinton's presidency as shown in the recent statistics page here , but the intragovernmental holdings increased enough to still put the country in the red. So then you ask, what are intragovernmental holdings? Hey! They'll tell you that, too!
The issues isn't loans; it's the outrageous cost of higher education. Tuition has risen MUCH faster than average incomes, often in the double digit per year range. So what it costs to go to college versus what you can save before toward tuition, and what you'll earn for the first ten years after graduation (typical payoff timeline) is really different now. Also, interest rates are much higher; my first undergrad loan was at 5%. My grad school loans were at 8.5%.
Never knew that cashier, laborer, temp, waitress, or bum demanded such respect.
It isn't the length, but rather the "power" words you refer to that turn titles on their ear. Take that above list and "repurpose" it to be: Customer Service Representative, Multi-tasking Specialist, Food Service Technician, and Homeless. Only that last one doesn't ratchet the ridiculous meter to the danger zone.
* Americans are proud of being a democracy, but few bother to either participate in that democracy by actually voting, or to take responsibility for their non-participation as a root cause of the problems which they so loudly decry.
* Culturally, Americans have a hard time with empathy, particularly for other cultures. This may be related to the utter ignorance of other cultures, but even within the US, people have a a hard time relating to those outside their immediate peer group.
* And perhaps most appalling, is the obsession with so-called reality TV, which not only doesn't resemble any normal reality, but intentionally foments the worst in people, both the active participants, and viewers. This seems to be humanity at its most base, not unlike the Romans pitting slaves against each other and various deadly creatures for entertainment. Sound familiar?
The Zaurus has a DSP specifically for audio decoding. So mp3/ogg playback ought to have negligible impact on the ARM cpu. A meaningful datum of processor usage would have to either measure this DSP, or use a device that lacks any additional processing power.
My company's ISP, Continet, is on that list. Sad to say that they've locked the doors and, I hear, asked all employees to turn in their keys. Dial up access has been cut off by the phone company (Qwest), DSL and ISDN appear to be working for the time being. A sign on their door claims that "other arangements are being made". Fat chance.
So you can scratch them off the list. Pity. So ends the long, slow slide in customer service.
MS can do a whole lot more than force an OEM to pay full price for each copy of Windows: when Windows 95 was launched, IBM wasn't even allowed to sell it with their desktop machines. IBM had to bend to MS's terms before they could sell machines with Windows. If everyone really does want Windows on their shiny new computers, then if you sell shiny new computers but can't sell Windows, you're toast.
Imagine if, when Gateway's deal is set to expire, and they're negotiating the next two-year deal (or however long they do them for), and MS says, "Gee, you'd really be helping us out if you didn't see that other OS on any of your desktops. It only makes your support costs go up, having to support two OS's. And you know, the more $ we make, the better deal it is for you, because you'll look great being such a major part of our success. You do want us to succeed, right? Of course, we can always get someone else to sell more for us. I wonder if I have Michael Dell's phone number on me..."
This is a fallacy of poor logic: sample sets of three don't extrapolate to general conclusions. There are people out there who have three + GXP series drives that aren't having any problems. By your logic, they have nothing to worry about.
A poster above has had many UltraStars tank; the lesson being that all brands and types of hard drives can fail. Don't think you're immune. If you haven't been bit yet, chances are good that eventually you will be.
Deskstars also have a three year warranty. You could check before alluding a falsehood.
Smugness is not a substitute for insightful commentary, and is even less appreciated when a lack of logic and facts are present.
Quoth Zathrus: As to the original question - what else are they going to use? There's a great huge gaping whole when it comes to productivity software like Exchange/Outlook. Yes, there's Notes. Yes, there's Netscape/Solaris whatever-its-called-now. And maybe Novell still has a solution (I don't know personally). But none of them match the ease of use, "ease" of administration, and interoperability offered by Exchange/Outlook. They either don't work as well together across various pieces, they cost too much to maintain, or they don't integrate as well into the OS (gee, surprise... anyone? And no... I'm sure being a monopoly had NOTHING to do with that... riiight).
If you aren't familiar with the alternatives, how can you assess their attributes in any remotely meaningful way? I won't try to provide the answers, though I'm evaluating everything I can find to fill this gap at my company, but for the record, the main possibilities that I see, so far are:
* MS Exchange * Lotus Domino / Notes (can use Outlook as client if you wish) * Novell Groupwise * Samsung SDS Contact, the next version of HP's OpenMail, which no one appears to have seen yet. * Sun's iPlanet Calendar Server, maybe can use Outlook as client, but intends web client access * Steltor Corporate Time Server, can use Outlook as client * Bynari Insight, also can use Outlook as a client (can you tell that this a (unfortunate) requirement for me ? )
This is taking the definition of groupware rather loosely...providing email is no big deal, so providing calendar / resource scheduling services is the priority for me. Others may be just as interested in the various collaboration tools and archiving stuff found in Notes & Groupwise.
Help propagate it by writing a howto. Instead of one company with an automated way to convert existing and newly incoming documents to.rtf, make it easy for there to be hundreds.
This is only true where Wal-Mart has established, large scale competitors.
When Wal-Mart opens a new store, they usually sell many items at a huge loss, ostensibly to draw in new customers. But since many local, small-scale businesses cannot afford to match those below cost prices, they founder and die. Once gone, wal-Mart raises prices. This is called predatory pricing, and is illegal. In that kind of game, the deepest pockets win, which is why when they compete with larger companies (Target et. al.), their prices are similar; they each have enough resources to price match the other for an extended period of time.
Wal-Mart has been found guilty of predatory pricing and fined. But the practice continues. Hence the comment that Wal-Mart drives local, small retailers out of business. They do.
You're right, though, in that one of the real problems is that most people shop to save a buck. They'll drive all over town getting 18 mpg in their SUV because Coke is $0.49 cheaper at Schnucks this week.
But I wonder if it wouldn't be more direct for browsers to stop rendering links and instead show ascii URLs; instead of clicking a "hyper" link, one would merely need to copy and paste a given URL into the address bar. By removing the convenience of linking, the web would just be reduced to providing references that are no different from footnotes.
I totally agree. In fact, I've just been researching backup solutions. A summary my findings so far:
DDS-4 - 5 tape changer, 20 GB / tape = 100 GB for $2500. 9+ hours to write 100 GB. Tapes are $10 each.
DLT - 40 GB/tape, $1400, 3:45 to write. Tapes are $55 each.
Super DLT - 110 GB / tape, $4700, 2:46 to write. Tapes are $115.
LTO (Ultrium) - 100 GB / tape, $3500, 1:51 to write. Tapes are $100.
All sizes are native, uncompressed, and times given assume no compression, so if the data set is compressed 2:1, then capcity doubles, as does throughput, and write time doesn't change.
>>I've supported it for a government agency with 35,000 employees and 300 Exchange servers. It scales very well.
35000 / 300 = 116.67 users per server
Even if half of those servers are there for redundancy, 235 users is NOT scaling well. I wouldn't expect the tens of thousands of users per server that a unix email only solution can provide, but this kind of ratio is just pathetic.
I'd love to use Notes. It'll never happen, though.
Why? 35 installed seats with MS Outlook, that's why. Purchasing 35 Notes clients plus the server plus (albeit meager) user training, vs. just buying Exchange (since we already own the client) is a tough sell. Long term value vs. short term savings loses if it takes people away from what's familiar, and to them works tolerably well.
MS knew damn well what they were doing when they created Oulook, bundled it with MS Office without raising that suite's price, and made offers to all major system OEMs that couldn't be refused: using the power of it's desktop monopoly to muscle it's way into new markets.
What I really want is a decent, open source calendar server that uses iCal. It's enough to make this admin start learning something about programming...
Microsoft DOES force upgrades...in a particularly insidious manner. My office has an NT Server, which mostly runs great. If we grow, we need more client access licenses. MS doesn't sell these anymore. So we'll HAVE to upgrade to stay legal.
And MS is currently trying to bully offices into site licenses for Office, which, you guessed it, REQUIRE you to run the current version.
All that notwithstanding, I agree about the author's bias. He compares not just two operating systems, but two different architectures. While that may be appropriate to look at it in a big picture way, it sidesteps the apples-to-apples type comparison, whose costs would be closer.
This might be like trying to tell the Irish how much jolly old England has done for them, all that capital invested, jobs provided, etc.
All it does is ignore all of the lousy things done by the US all over the world. There are very good reasons to dislike the US government, and not knowing them doesn't mean they don't exist.
A- I can't preview it to assess it's worth to me before I make the purchase like I can in meatspace, ie. flip through a book or magazine, hear peices of a CD, etc.
B- If I lose my connection midway through downloading the page, do I have to pay again?
C- Do you pay to use a library? Even those who don't pay taxes get to use it...
D- What rights do I get with my purchase? Right of first sale (& right to resell)? Can I shift that content to other media? Can I quote it? Am I liable if I mis-quote it? Is this a read-once purchase? Will every site that sells "content" have a different license? How do you enforce provincial licenses through a globally accessible medium? Eventually we'll have to really decide if click-wrap licenses are enforceable at all...
Last fall on a quest for quiet, I bought two of these. They claim that they're more quiet than a hard drive, but damn if they had to be comparing them to the loudest hard drive on the planet. There wasn't one iota of difference in the noise level.
Big disappointment.
Hate to break it to you, but most of Raskin's work on the Mac was a direct response to the work already completed at Xerox PARC, including but not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
Not trying to say that the Mac was totally unoriginal, but the Mac didn't spring forth fully formed as a creation of Apple alone.
Slashdot Mirror
But sometimes all they need is a huge opening weekend...after all, that's what their marketing campaigns are designed to produce. Take Independence Day, for example. Enormous hype, mega opening weekend, and a fizzle after that, but the opening weekend was so big that it's total box office take puts above the Empire Strikes Bakc, and just below Return of the Jedi.
Word of mouth generally takes time, even when spread via SMS. The stinkier the movie, the faster word spreads, even before the advent of cell phones much less texting.
Downloading MAY be legal; perhaps you can convince the judge that you thought that because the files were available, that the copyright holder had approved it.
It's the act of making files (esp. music) available for OTHERS to download that is totally illegal. Without question. This is publishing something you are not the owner of. Thus the RIAA goes after people who are publishing files copyrighted by RIAA members.
Thus, in the analogy, the SELLER of the fake watch is culpable, the BUYER was deceived. Whether or not the buyer SHOULD have known better isn't relevant. Whether or not a downloader should know better probably depends on who you ask. To the RIAA, you're a leaching criminal if you merely copy a CD you own to an mp3 player.
A DSL line is, by definition, also a plain old telephone line. Is it's maintenance fundamentally different than if it where just your average, everyday phone line? If not, then as long as someone has an SBC landline (ie. 95% of the population in SBC territory), then they already ARE paying for line maintenace.
And the idea that SBC is selling DSL lines at a loss is dubious at best. The R&D to develop DSL was paid for in the late eighties / early nineties via special permission from congress to raise telephone service rates in order to develop interactive television, and in fact, they had promised to deliver it to some large percentage of the population, so you could also argue that a certain amount of field equipment and upgrades has already been paid for, too. The installation of lines was paid for a hell of a long time ago. And the upgrades to digital switches has been mostly in order to save them money as demand increases; the benefit for DSL is ancillary, and thus those switches are also already paid for by telephone subscribers.
The DSL reseller is presumably providing the DSLAM, so where exactly is SBC's loss? Is it like one those studies IBM did way back when that determined that it would cost them $40 to develop and ship an empty box?
A company with a monopoly can only think in monopoly terms. The idea of competition is alien, and unwanted, and the longer a company was had a monopoly, the more ingrained those ideas are.
There is plenty of good US national debt related information available at the Dept. of Treasury's web site. In particular the Bureau of Public Debt is a great starting point, with things like debt history from 1950-2000, which does indeed show that the national debt was never reduced during Clinton's presidency.
These numbers are an aggregate of public debt, and intragovernmental holdings. Apparently, the public debt was actually reduced during Clinton's presidency as shown in the recent statistics page here , but the intragovernmental holdings increased enough to still put the country in the red. So then you ask, what are intragovernmental holdings? Hey! They'll tell you that, too!
Intra Governmental Holdings
Debt Held By the Public
If that's hopeful paper pushing to make the Dems look good, or not, I don't know. Conclusions sure are easy to come by here, though.
We need to work on our visualization skills; on /. there will always be a pedant to "help". In this case it's me.
/
/
/
;)
If our axes are:
y
|
|
|
L________ x
z
Then rotating b2b around:
X --> 959, or q5q depending on if you're retaining relative position of the characters
Y --> d5d
Z --> 959, or q5q, once again depending on whether or not you're retaining relative position.
We'll skip the possible iterations of mirroring this time around
The issues isn't loans; it's the outrageous cost of higher education. Tuition has risen MUCH faster than average incomes, often in the double digit per year range. So what it costs to go to college versus what you can save before toward tuition, and what you'll earn for the first ten years after graduation (typical payoff timeline) is really different now. Also, interest rates are much higher; my first undergrad loan was at 5%. My grad school loans were at 8.5%.
o sts/199 8/07july/straight_talk.html
Interesting link:
http://www.acenet.edu/washington/college_c
> Just remember that 0 0 255 and 255 0 0 do not go together.
/. special interest area.
Unless you're designing a new
Hmmmm.....
Never knew that cashier, laborer, temp, waitress, or bum demanded such respect.
It isn't the length, but rather the "power" words you refer to that turn titles on their ear. Take that above list and "repurpose" it to be: Customer Service Representative, Multi-tasking Specialist, Food Service Technician, and Homeless. Only that last one doesn't ratchet the ridiculous meter to the danger zone.
I'd add a couple more symptoms:
* Americans are proud of being a democracy, but few bother to either participate in that democracy by actually voting, or to take responsibility for their non-participation as a root cause of the problems which they so loudly decry.
* Culturally, Americans have a hard time with empathy, particularly for other cultures. This may be related to the utter ignorance of other cultures, but even within the US, people have a a hard time relating to those outside their immediate peer group.
* And perhaps most appalling, is the obsession with so-called reality TV, which not only doesn't resemble any normal reality, but intentionally foments the worst in people, both the active participants, and viewers. This seems to be humanity at its most base, not unlike the Romans pitting slaves against each other and various deadly creatures for entertainment. Sound familiar?
The Zaurus has a DSP specifically for audio decoding. So mp3/ogg playback ought to have negligible impact on the ARM cpu. A meaningful datum of processor usage would have to either measure this DSP, or use a device that lacks any additional processing power.
My company's ISP, Continet, is on that list. Sad to say that they've locked the doors and, I hear, asked all employees to turn in their keys. Dial up access has been cut off by the phone company (Qwest), DSL and ISDN appear to be working for the time being. A sign on their door claims that "other arangements are being made". Fat chance.
So you can scratch them off the list. Pity. So ends the long, slow slide in customer service.
MS can do a whole lot more than force an OEM to pay full price for each copy of Windows: when Windows 95 was launched, IBM wasn't even allowed to sell it with their desktop machines. IBM had to bend to MS's terms before they could sell machines with Windows. If everyone really does want Windows on their shiny new computers, then if you sell shiny new computers but can't sell Windows, you're toast.
Imagine if, when Gateway's deal is set to expire, and they're negotiating the next two-year deal (or however long they do them for), and MS says, "Gee, you'd really be helping us out if you didn't see that other OS on any of your desktops. It only makes your support costs go up, having to support two OS's. And you know, the more $ we make, the better deal it is for you, because you'll look great being such a major part of our success. You do want us to succeed, right? Of course, we can always get someone else to sell more for us. I wonder if I have Michael Dell's phone number on me..."
This is a fallacy of poor logic: sample sets of three don't extrapolate to general conclusions. There are people out there who have three + GXP series drives that aren't having any problems. By your logic, they have nothing to worry about.
A poster above has had many UltraStars tank; the lesson being that all brands and types of hard drives can fail. Don't think you're immune. If you haven't been bit yet, chances are good that eventually you will be.
Deskstars also have a three year warranty. You could check before alluding a falsehood.
Smugness is not a substitute for insightful commentary, and is even less appreciated when a lack of logic and facts are present.
Quoth Zathrus:
As to the original question - what else are they going to use? There's a great huge gaping whole when it comes to productivity software like Exchange/Outlook. Yes, there's Notes. Yes, there's Netscape/Solaris whatever-its-called-now. And maybe Novell still has a solution (I don't know personally). But none of them match the ease of use, "ease" of administration, and interoperability offered by Exchange/Outlook. They either don't work as well together across various pieces, they cost too much to maintain, or they don't integrate as well into the OS (gee, surprise... anyone? And no... I'm sure being a monopoly had NOTHING to do with that... riiight).
If you aren't familiar with the alternatives, how can you assess their attributes in any remotely meaningful way? I won't try to provide the answers, though I'm evaluating everything I can find to fill this gap at my company, but for the record, the main possibilities that I see, so far are:
* MS Exchange
* Lotus Domino / Notes (can use Outlook as client if you wish)
* Novell Groupwise
* Samsung SDS Contact, the next version of HP's OpenMail, which no one appears to have seen yet.
* Sun's iPlanet Calendar Server, maybe can use Outlook as client, but intends web client access
* Steltor Corporate Time Server, can use Outlook as client
* Bynari Insight, also can use Outlook as a client (can you tell that this a (unfortunate) requirement for me ? )
This is taking the definition of groupware rather loosely...providing email is no big deal, so providing calendar / resource scheduling services is the priority for me. Others may be just as interested in the various collaboration tools and archiving stuff found in Notes & Groupwise.
This sounds like a good implementation.
.rtf, make it easy for there to be hundreds.
Help propagate it by writing a howto. Instead of one company with an automated way to convert existing and newly incoming documents to
This is only true where Wal-Mart has established, large scale competitors.
When Wal-Mart opens a new store, they usually sell many items at a huge loss, ostensibly to draw in new customers. But since many local, small-scale businesses cannot afford to match those below cost prices, they founder and die. Once gone, wal-Mart raises prices. This is called predatory pricing, and is illegal. In that kind of game, the deepest pockets win, which is why when they compete with larger companies (Target et. al.), their prices are similar; they each have enough resources to price match the other for an extended period of time.
Wal-Mart has been found guilty of predatory pricing and fined. But the practice continues. Hence the comment that Wal-Mart drives local, small retailers out of business. They do.
You're right, though, in that one of the real problems is that most people shop to save a buck. They'll drive all over town getting 18 mpg in their SUV because Coke is $0.49 cheaper at Schnucks this week.
This is an interesting line of thought.
But I wonder if it wouldn't be more direct for browsers to stop rendering links and instead show ascii URLs; instead of clicking a "hyper" link, one would merely need to copy and paste a given URL into the address bar. By removing the convenience of linking, the web would just be reduced to providing references that are no different from footnotes.
Not that any of this will happen, of course.
I totally agree. In fact, I've just been researching backup solutions. A summary my findings so far:
/tape, $1400, 3:45 to write. Tapes are $55 each.
DDS-4 - 5 tape changer, 20 GB / tape = 100 GB for $2500. 9+ hours to write 100 GB. Tapes are $10 each.
DLT - 40 GB
Super DLT - 110 GB / tape, $4700, 2:46 to write. Tapes are $115.
LTO (Ultrium) - 100 GB / tape, $3500, 1:51 to write. Tapes are $100.
All sizes are native, uncompressed, and times given assume no compression, so if the data set is compressed 2:1, then capcity doubles, as does throughput, and write time doesn't change.
I can't let this pass:
>>I've supported it for a government agency with 35,000 employees and 300 Exchange servers. It scales very well.
35000 / 300 = 116.67 users per server
Even if half of those servers are there for redundancy, 235 users is NOT scaling well. I wouldn't expect the tens of thousands of users per server that a unix email only solution can provide, but this kind of ratio is just pathetic.
I'd love to use Notes. It'll never happen, though.
Why? 35 installed seats with MS Outlook, that's why. Purchasing 35 Notes clients plus the server plus (albeit meager) user training, vs. just buying Exchange (since we already own the client) is a tough sell. Long term value vs. short term savings loses if it takes people away from what's familiar, and to them works tolerably well.
MS knew damn well what they were doing when they created Oulook, bundled it with MS Office without raising that suite's price, and made offers to all major system OEMs that couldn't be refused: using the power of it's desktop monopoly to muscle it's way into new markets.
What I really want is a decent, open source calendar server that uses iCal. It's enough to make this admin start learning something about programming...
Microsoft DOES force upgrades...in a particularly insidious manner. My office has an NT Server, which mostly runs great. If we grow, we need more client access licenses. MS doesn't sell these anymore. So we'll HAVE to upgrade to stay legal.
And MS is currently trying to bully offices into site licenses for Office, which, you guessed it, REQUIRE you to run the current version.
All that notwithstanding, I agree about the author's bias. He compares not just two operating systems, but two different architectures. While that may be appropriate to look at it in a big picture way, it sidesteps the apples-to-apples type comparison, whose costs would be closer.
This might be like trying to tell the Irish how much jolly old England has done for them, all that capital invested, jobs provided, etc.
All it does is ignore all of the lousy things done by the US all over the world. There are very good reasons to dislike the US government, and not knowing them doesn't mean they don't exist.
A- I can't preview it to assess it's worth to me before I make the purchase like I can in meatspace, ie. flip through a book or magazine, hear peices of a CD, etc.
B- If I lose my connection midway through downloading the page, do I have to pay again?
C- Do you pay to use a library? Even those who don't pay taxes get to use it...
D- What rights do I get with my purchase? Right of first sale (& right to resell)? Can I shift that content to other media? Can I quote it? Am I liable if I mis-quote it? Is this a read-once purchase? Will every site that sells "content" have a different license? How do you enforce provincial licenses through a globally accessible medium? Eventually we'll have to really decide if click-wrap licenses are enforceable at all...
Last fall on a quest for quiet, I bought two of these. They claim that they're more quiet than a hard drive, but damn if they had to be comparing them to the loudest hard drive on the planet. There wasn't one iota of difference in the noise level.
Big disappointment.
Hate to break it to you, but most of Raskin's work on the Mac was a direct response to the work already completed at Xerox PARC, including but not limited to bitmapped displays, icon based program launching, wysiwig programs, etc.
Not trying to say that the Mac was totally unoriginal, but the Mac didn't spring forth fully formed as a creation of Apple alone.