ISPs like it because it keeps the traffic on the network. NTL (a cable ISP in the UK, now part of Virgin Media) used to run usenet servers and you could download stuff from them at line speed. The traffic was going directly from their server to the client, and was often mirrored nearer the edge. They stopped, and everyone switched to Bittorrent and their off-network bandwidth spiked to such a degree that they brought it back again a few weeks later. They turned it off again after a few years, but for a long time it was keeping the traffic on their network, and therefore cheap. It also worked quite nicely as a liability shield: an NNTP server is effectively a cache, so they were protected as a common carrier as long as they didn't censor anything, and their customers were only downloading, so weren't liable for distributing copyrighted works.
I don't get your first argument. What works over a slow line works over a fast line even better. I see no problem.
The problem is latency. It often takes a day or more for a message to be propagated around the usenet network. By the time you reply to a thread, a dozen other people may have posted the same thing, but you won't see their replies until tomorrow because they were all posting to different servers.
Back before things like bittorrent and even gnutella, it was common to spilt movies up into 1MB files and store them in various free hosting places, then place a load of links to the component parts somewhere. One common trick was to register for a load of hotmail accounts and send the file as an attachment to a fake email address. It would then sit in your sent folder. You could then share the login details and anyone would be able to download it. The same thing would be possible with gmail, only this time you wouldn't have to split the files. Upload the attachments as drafts.
You only get them in groups of 5. If you don't use them, you may get another 5 before they expire (potentially the same day). I had 20 at one point (you can't moderate and post in the same story, and I very rarely read the comments without posting, so I make a terrible moderator), but 5 is the number that is assigned at once. The algorithm is based on a number of things, karma is one and so is posting frequency (if I stop posting for 2 days, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have mod points when I return). They are definitely not unlimited, as the original poster implied.
The problem is, offering a nightmarish experience costs money. If it's not a completely automated process (and it can't be, or it's easy for their customers), then they need to provide a human that will waste your time, and that costs money. Even on minimum wage, it quickly eats up the per-device profit. It also only works once. Your support is so bad that it's easier to buy a replacement and so people will: they'll buy one from your competitor.
So do they. If there's a good chance you'll need the warranty repair, they wouldn't offer it - a warranty repair would completely eat their profit on the drive.
Congress can't make a law that binds Congress's lawmaking ability
Is that actually true? In the UK, Parliament can't pass laws that bind a future Parliament[1], but in this case he's only proposing a 2-year limit (i.e. for the duration of this Congress), so that wouldn't apply: they'd be voting to limit themselves, not future holders of their office. That said, wouldn't it be simpler to get 50% of the members of one of the houses to sign a pledge to vote against any such legislation?
[1] This raised some interesting constitutional issues when we signed the Treaty of European Union.
So what? I've not tried recently, but if you searched for the title of my first book about six months after it was published, the top hit was for an illegal download. Some people downloaded it. Possibly a lot of people downloaded it. I don't care about those people (except the ones that downloaded it and then either bought it or told their friends to buy it), I care about the people who went to somewhere like InformIT and bought the PDF or the ones that went to somewhere like Amazon and bought the hard copy. And I care about ensuring that those people had the best experience possible.
It's very easy to eliminate piracy: just ensure that your product is so bad that no one wants it.
Some people will pirate anything. Some will download as many games as possible, and not even play most of them. The important thing about GOG is that even though their games are trivial to get illegally for free, a lot of people (myself included) are still willing to pay for them. The service that they offer is of greater value to me than the small amounts of money that they charge.
Their DOSBox config is optimised for compatibility, not for performance. For example, they always set linear 2x scaling for adventure games. I usually tweak this to hq3x and end up with it looking much nicer. They do, however, provide the config file that automatically mounts the CD image (including recompressed audio tracks) in the correct place and launches the game, which is very helpful. A lot of their Windows games also work in WINE with a little bit of prodding. This is especially useful when the originals often won't because they include some CD-based copy protection that breaks on anything that isn't Windows 95.
Why? I much prefer working on a milestone basis. When I'm consulting, the people I'm working for generally only have a very vague idea of how long it takes me to do something. They only care about how much the work is worth to them, and whether that amount is more than the cost of having me do it. By telling an employee that they'll be paid more for working unproductively for 10 hours than for working productively for one, you're setting up exactly the wrong kind of incentives.
Amazon was an online retailer when there were almost no other online retailers. They managed to grow into a new market and own pretty much all of it. They then moved into a completely new market: cloud hosting. And they own most of that market too. Their high P/E is based on the fact that they've shown twice that they can identify new markets and become dominant players in them by the time they become large markets. That's exactly the kind of company that makes a good long-term investment. Apple has done something similar with the iPod, iPhone and iPad (and, before that, with the transition to high-end laptops), but in each market they were gradually pushed into a niche by commoditisation, so their success depends on being able to identify new markets, whereas Amazon already has two or three cash cows.
Uh, I think you're confusing Slashdot with Reddit. Moderators still only get 5 mod points at a time and they are applied to comments as soon as the selection is made. The only change is that the UI now makes it easy to accidentally moderate, by having a pop-up list box to select the moderation type and no confirm button.
I've also not worked in Silicon Valley, but I did spend a couple of weeks there earlier this month visiting various companies. The vast majority of people I met were under 40, but there were still a significant number of people over the age of 50, including a number of very competent people.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some attrition for two reasons. The first is that older people are more experienced and so should either be more competent (i.e. more expensive), or leave you wondering why they've failed to learn anything useful in the last 20 years. If they're more expensive, that means fewer jobs (although still quite a lot in the bay area). If they've failed to expand their skills, then it might be better to bet on someone younger who has a similar level of ability now but a lot more potential. If they don't live up to that potential, you've not lost anything.
The other reason is the kind of lifestyle in the valley. As a stodgy 30-year-old, I view it as the sort of place that's nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Given the sort of salary levels that you find in the valley, it's easy to imagine people working there in their 20s, saving a hundred or two thousand, and then moving somewhere else where they can buy a decent sized house and have a much lower cost of living.
It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
The real problem is that this mischaracterisation is so ingrained that you can be modded up for saying it even on Slashdot where people should know better.
Users not paying for your product is not the problem. Or, rather, the fact that they are using it is not the problem. The goal is to maximise profit, which means making sure as many people who might pay for your product actually do. A person who pirates it but would never have bought it is not a problem. A person who might have bought it but doesn't is, whether they pirate it or not. A person who doesn't buy your game because you've priced it too high or because they don't like the distribution system is a problem, but one that's relatively easy to fix.
The problem is an industry that is devoting its attention to eliminating piracy, not to maximising sales. They'd rather have 100 sales and 100 pirates than 10,000 sales and 100,000 pirates. Yes, pirates suck, but it's a stupid business model to chase them at the expense of your customers.
It's a problem for Microsoft though. They'd give a better impression of Windows without all of this crap, but they'd also make Windows machines cost more. Dell's problem with shipping Linux machines was that they actually got more from the crapware than the cost of the Windows license, so installing Linux instead of Windows actually cost them more. If Microsoft banned this kind of thing in the OEM license agreement, then suddenly Linux would be $50 or so cheaper than Windows, which makes a big difference on a $300 laptop. But if they keep allowing it, then people say that their Windows machine is slow and full of unstable crap that has nothing at all to do with Windows. I guess their best strategy would be to identify the worst of the crap and pay the companies responsible to port it to Linux...
Not really. The lucrative kind of support for an open source project is not 'I am an idiot user who can't work out how to do a simple task, please hold my hand' it's 'I am a user who has a problem that your software almost solves, please add the functionality that I require to solve it completely.'
How do they get the support number? Presumably there is something written next to it that says 'this is only for use for paid support contracts' and if so, why is it even published? When the person trying to call the number finds it, they should also find the thing telling them to make sure that they have their support contract number to hand when they call, or if they don't have one redirecting them to your sales number.
And if they're not the person who installed it and hasn't checked the license, then I wonder how they do with other companies. Do they call up Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle for support for products that they don't have licenses for, let alone support contracts?
While O'Reilly does make their work available DRM-free, I take exception to the 'the one company' part of your post. Pearson[1] makes all of their books available in DRM-free PDF and ePub versions from here. O'Reilly may be the underdog in this market, but they're not the only one doing the right thing. They've been providing DRM-free books since at least 2007 (I only started paying attention when they published my first book).
[1] Owner of the Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall brands, among others.
It's been my default for a bit longer and I find !devapple, !wiki and !walpha very useful. Most searches have the relevant result in the zero-click info. If you get to the end of the results and haven't found anything useful it has links to Google and Bing. I always click on the Google one and so far haven't found a case where Google has produced a helpful result when DDG has failed.
No, that's not the case. What the rest of the world wanted the ITU to do was create a framework for decentralised control of the infrastructure that the US nominally controls, and in particular stop ICANN from doing its current TLD-whoring. What ITU proposed instead was to create an international framework for censoring the Internet.
Several things. First, Babylon didn't come from nothing. We have lots of prehistoric evidence of gradually increasing levels of civilisation (stone age, bronze age, iron age, and so on). Second, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume that a writing system is either a product of, or a stimulator for, a large number of other social developments. To have writing, you need to have people who can dedicate enough of their lives to learning how to read and write, which means at least a degree of agriculture, so that people who don't hunt and gather still can eat. You need specialisation or roles within society, which means you also get various other trades appearing at the same time or earlier.
Finally, it really wouldn't make sense from an to travel to another planet to collect slaves. You'd want slaves who can live in the same environment as you, and that are easy to feed, and that means that using something that evolved on your own planet would make sense. Even if you only took back fertilised ova, the energy cost of transportation would be huge. And, if you could build an interstellar spacecraft, you'd already have enough automation and energy control that using a hacked-up evolved life form to do would would be woefully inefficient.
The whole black people are monkeys thing is purely a US idiom. In the rest of the English-speaking world, there isn't that connotation and it's fairly common to call people (of any phenotype) monkeys with no racist overtones. That's part of the reason why the celebrity apes thing seemed so weird to the rest of us. It's not even universal in the USA. A lot of people called GWB a chimp, but there's no indication that anyone thought that he was black...
That's true. They wouldn't bother trying to get the state police involved, they'd just send their private thugs to your house and take anything that they liked the look of. if you don't like it, then make sure you hire better-armed security than them. And pay them more than they'd get for just stepping aside...
Slashdot Mirror
ISPs like it because it keeps the traffic on the network. NTL (a cable ISP in the UK, now part of Virgin Media) used to run usenet servers and you could download stuff from them at line speed. The traffic was going directly from their server to the client, and was often mirrored nearer the edge. They stopped, and everyone switched to Bittorrent and their off-network bandwidth spiked to such a degree that they brought it back again a few weeks later. They turned it off again after a few years, but for a long time it was keeping the traffic on their network, and therefore cheap. It also worked quite nicely as a liability shield: an NNTP server is effectively a cache, so they were protected as a common carrier as long as they didn't censor anything, and their customers were only downloading, so weren't liable for distributing copyrighted works.
I don't get your first argument. What works over a slow line works over a fast line even better. I see no problem.
The problem is latency. It often takes a day or more for a message to be propagated around the usenet network. By the time you reply to a thread, a dozen other people may have posted the same thing, but you won't see their replies until tomorrow because they were all posting to different servers.
Back before things like bittorrent and even gnutella, it was common to spilt movies up into 1MB files and store them in various free hosting places, then place a load of links to the component parts somewhere. One common trick was to register for a load of hotmail accounts and send the file as an attachment to a fake email address. It would then sit in your sent folder. You could then share the login details and anyone would be able to download it. The same thing would be possible with gmail, only this time you wouldn't have to split the files. Upload the attachments as drafts.
You only get them in groups of 5. If you don't use them, you may get another 5 before they expire (potentially the same day). I had 20 at one point (you can't moderate and post in the same story, and I very rarely read the comments without posting, so I make a terrible moderator), but 5 is the number that is assigned at once. The algorithm is based on a number of things, karma is one and so is posting frequency (if I stop posting for 2 days, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have mod points when I return). They are definitely not unlimited, as the original poster implied.
The problem is, offering a nightmarish experience costs money. If it's not a completely automated process (and it can't be, or it's easy for their customers), then they need to provide a human that will waste your time, and that costs money. Even on minimum wage, it quickly eats up the per-device profit. It also only works once. Your support is so bad that it's easier to buy a replacement and so people will: they'll buy one from your competitor.
So do they. If there's a good chance you'll need the warranty repair, they wouldn't offer it - a warranty repair would completely eat their profit on the drive.
Congress can't make a law that binds Congress's lawmaking ability
Is that actually true? In the UK, Parliament can't pass laws that bind a future Parliament[1], but in this case he's only proposing a 2-year limit (i.e. for the duration of this Congress), so that wouldn't apply: they'd be voting to limit themselves, not future holders of their office. That said, wouldn't it be simpler to get 50% of the members of one of the houses to sign a pledge to vote against any such legislation?
[1] This raised some interesting constitutional issues when we signed the Treaty of European Union.
So what? I've not tried recently, but if you searched for the title of my first book about six months after it was published, the top hit was for an illegal download. Some people downloaded it. Possibly a lot of people downloaded it. I don't care about those people (except the ones that downloaded it and then either bought it or told their friends to buy it), I care about the people who went to somewhere like InformIT and bought the PDF or the ones that went to somewhere like Amazon and bought the hard copy. And I care about ensuring that those people had the best experience possible.
It's very easy to eliminate piracy: just ensure that your product is so bad that no one wants it.
Some people will pirate anything. Some will download as many games as possible, and not even play most of them. The important thing about GOG is that even though their games are trivial to get illegally for free, a lot of people (myself included) are still willing to pay for them. The service that they offer is of greater value to me than the small amounts of money that they charge.
Their DOSBox config is optimised for compatibility, not for performance. For example, they always set linear 2x scaling for adventure games. I usually tweak this to hq3x and end up with it looking much nicer. They do, however, provide the config file that automatically mounts the CD image (including recompressed audio tracks) in the correct place and launches the game, which is very helpful. A lot of their Windows games also work in WINE with a little bit of prodding. This is especially useful when the originals often won't because they include some CD-based copy protection that breaks on anything that isn't Windows 95.
Why? I much prefer working on a milestone basis. When I'm consulting, the people I'm working for generally only have a very vague idea of how long it takes me to do something. They only care about how much the work is worth to them, and whether that amount is more than the cost of having me do it. By telling an employee that they'll be paid more for working unproductively for 10 hours than for working productively for one, you're setting up exactly the wrong kind of incentives.
Amazon was an online retailer when there were almost no other online retailers. They managed to grow into a new market and own pretty much all of it. They then moved into a completely new market: cloud hosting. And they own most of that market too. Their high P/E is based on the fact that they've shown twice that they can identify new markets and become dominant players in them by the time they become large markets. That's exactly the kind of company that makes a good long-term investment. Apple has done something similar with the iPod, iPhone and iPad (and, before that, with the transition to high-end laptops), but in each market they were gradually pushed into a niche by commoditisation, so their success depends on being able to identify new markets, whereas Amazon already has two or three cash cows.
Uh, I think you're confusing Slashdot with Reddit. Moderators still only get 5 mod points at a time and they are applied to comments as soon as the selection is made. The only change is that the UI now makes it easy to accidentally moderate, by having a pop-up list box to select the moderation type and no confirm button.
I've also not worked in Silicon Valley, but I did spend a couple of weeks there earlier this month visiting various companies. The vast majority of people I met were under 40, but there were still a significant number of people over the age of 50, including a number of very competent people.
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some attrition for two reasons. The first is that older people are more experienced and so should either be more competent (i.e. more expensive), or leave you wondering why they've failed to learn anything useful in the last 20 years. If they're more expensive, that means fewer jobs (although still quite a lot in the bay area). If they've failed to expand their skills, then it might be better to bet on someone younger who has a similar level of ability now but a lot more potential. If they don't live up to that potential, you've not lost anything.
The other reason is the kind of lifestyle in the valley. As a stodgy 30-year-old, I view it as the sort of place that's nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there. Given the sort of salary levels that you find in the valley, it's easy to imagine people working there in their 20s, saving a hundred or two thousand, and then moving somewhere else where they can buy a decent sized house and have a much lower cost of living.
It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
The real problem is that this mischaracterisation is so ingrained that you can be modded up for saying it even on Slashdot where people should know better.
Users not paying for your product is not the problem. Or, rather, the fact that they are using it is not the problem. The goal is to maximise profit, which means making sure as many people who might pay for your product actually do. A person who pirates it but would never have bought it is not a problem. A person who might have bought it but doesn't is, whether they pirate it or not. A person who doesn't buy your game because you've priced it too high or because they don't like the distribution system is a problem, but one that's relatively easy to fix.
The problem is an industry that is devoting its attention to eliminating piracy, not to maximising sales. They'd rather have 100 sales and 100 pirates than 10,000 sales and 100,000 pirates. Yes, pirates suck, but it's a stupid business model to chase them at the expense of your customers.
It's a problem for Microsoft though. They'd give a better impression of Windows without all of this crap, but they'd also make Windows machines cost more. Dell's problem with shipping Linux machines was that they actually got more from the crapware than the cost of the Windows license, so installing Linux instead of Windows actually cost them more. If Microsoft banned this kind of thing in the OEM license agreement, then suddenly Linux would be $50 or so cheaper than Windows, which makes a big difference on a $300 laptop. But if they keep allowing it, then people say that their Windows machine is slow and full of unstable crap that has nothing at all to do with Windows. I guess their best strategy would be to identify the worst of the crap and pay the companies responsible to port it to Linux...
Not really. The lucrative kind of support for an open source project is not 'I am an idiot user who can't work out how to do a simple task, please hold my hand' it's 'I am a user who has a problem that your software almost solves, please add the functionality that I require to solve it completely.'
How do they get the support number? Presumably there is something written next to it that says 'this is only for use for paid support contracts' and if so, why is it even published? When the person trying to call the number finds it, they should also find the thing telling them to make sure that they have their support contract number to hand when they call, or if they don't have one redirecting them to your sales number.
And if they're not the person who installed it and hasn't checked the license, then I wonder how they do with other companies. Do they call up Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle for support for products that they don't have licenses for, let alone support contracts?
While O'Reilly does make their work available DRM-free, I take exception to the 'the one company' part of your post. Pearson[1] makes all of their books available in DRM-free PDF and ePub versions from here. O'Reilly may be the underdog in this market, but they're not the only one doing the right thing. They've been providing DRM-free books since at least 2007 (I only started paying attention when they published my first book).
[1] Owner of the Addison Wesley and Prentice Hall brands, among others.
It's been my default for a bit longer and I find !devapple, !wiki and !walpha very useful. Most searches have the relevant result in the zero-click info. If you get to the end of the results and haven't found anything useful it has links to Google and Bing. I always click on the Google one and so far haven't found a case where Google has produced a helpful result when DDG has failed.
No, that's not the case. What the rest of the world wanted the ITU to do was create a framework for decentralised control of the infrastructure that the US nominally controls, and in particular stop ICANN from doing its current TLD-whoring. What ITU proposed instead was to create an international framework for censoring the Internet.
Several things. First, Babylon didn't come from nothing. We have lots of prehistoric evidence of gradually increasing levels of civilisation (stone age, bronze age, iron age, and so on). Second, it doesn't seem too far fetched to assume that a writing system is either a product of, or a stimulator for, a large number of other social developments. To have writing, you need to have people who can dedicate enough of their lives to learning how to read and write, which means at least a degree of agriculture, so that people who don't hunt and gather still can eat. You need specialisation or roles within society, which means you also get various other trades appearing at the same time or earlier.
Finally, it really wouldn't make sense from an to travel to another planet to collect slaves. You'd want slaves who can live in the same environment as you, and that are easy to feed, and that means that using something that evolved on your own planet would make sense. Even if you only took back fertilised ova, the energy cost of transportation would be huge. And, if you could build an interstellar spacecraft, you'd already have enough automation and energy control that using a hacked-up evolved life form to do would would be woefully inefficient.
The whole black people are monkeys thing is purely a US idiom. In the rest of the English-speaking world, there isn't that connotation and it's fairly common to call people (of any phenotype) monkeys with no racist overtones. That's part of the reason why the celebrity apes thing seemed so weird to the rest of us. It's not even universal in the USA. A lot of people called GWB a chimp, but there's no indication that anyone thought that he was black...
That's true. They wouldn't bother trying to get the state police involved, they'd just send their private thugs to your house and take anything that they liked the look of. if you don't like it, then make sure you hire better-armed security than them. And pay them more than they'd get for just stepping aside...
What would you suggest if someone wants to run ASP.NET code on their website?
Therapy.