Don't forget that most people looking for older newspaper articles are doing research, not reading the news, and paying a small fee to get the one or two documents they really want doesn't bother them at all.
I did research... I also didn't do any research using articles that cost money to use. They are limiting their revenue stream, not increasing it.
And it's not like they have any valid justification for claiming that back issues cost much money for them to host...
Yeah, you have to have the hardware and the storage space but it does NOT cost $2.95/issue.
If you want people to use the service and get the information then make it priced reasonably. I know that I have posted about this before but I will repeat it: If you want to keep your users and don't want them to go to a competitor don't do this...
P2P, bah. There are plenty of USENET front-ends that make finding files much easier and faster to get.
25 million reasons why... Comcast HSD subscribers. Also millions more: People who don't want to deal w/USEnet (I'm one of them).
I have never had a positive experience getting anything from USEnet other than alt.sex.stories and from what limited reading I did of it in the past month it sucks worse than ever.
USEnet for files is awful even with programs to do it for you. P2P is fast, getting faster, and has TONS more material.
Yes, because excluding gays and atheists from their organization is both honorable and good, right?
Excluding homosexuals is the new and "acceptable" racism but them excluding atheists isn't surprising...
The BSA is traditionally quite religion oriented ("do my duty to God..." and all that) and many faiths offer religion awards (which are difficult to obtain I might add). Hell, most BSA troops are sponsored by Churchs!
In the Troop that I belonged to we had a kid that was an atheist. They kept their mouths shut about it and the son eventually earned Eagle shortly after I did. Big deal.
In an organization that is based on relgion, hosted in relgious buildings, and says you should believe in some sort of God (doesn't matter which) you can be happy just playing along. If you want to stir the pot they have every right to shun you.
Don't like it? Don't join up and start your own organization.
Guy got drunk, drove drunk, stopped on the highway to pee on the side of a road at 2:00am.
The root of the issue is what they define exposing yourself. If you are just taking a leak in public that's "public urination". If you are blatantly fondling yourself (i.e. individuals taped at a particular I-94 rest stops in Minnesota) in public it's a little different.
I also want to know what child is up at 2:00AM that might be in direct sight of this individual relieving himself.
And what I said (in my post talking about WMP) was that the blog linked to from the main page was light on details, showed nothing more than a blurry screenshot of the demo movie, and wasn't worth reporting on.
Sorry, but so many people have been able to dupe the public with demos (nevermind movies of demos) that we shouldn't even bother to put this stuff on the main page.
Anyone remember the tiny helicopter robot or the guy that claimed blazing speeds over analog modems?
Well, in this picture I see a movie file being played (on what seems to be WMP) showing the cells on the screen.
Now, I wasn't there, nor was the article really in depth by any means, but it would seem to me that this was nothing more than a movie demonstration and nothing live.
I'm not quite so impressed. Maybe we should start linking to real content from the front page (i.e. in-depth accounts and not some blogger's one page summary with a blurry photo of a movie file being played on a projection screen).
If you know someone who is using Netflix right now ask them about the service? Do they like it?
I don't know a single person that uses Netflix so that's rather difficult. I also haven't heard it *anywhere* other than on Slashdot. I wouldn't even know it existed otherwise.
Now go into your local Blockbuster Video store and ask the clerk there how he feels about his employer.
I have a feeling that they will have no comment... We all know what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you.
Netflix's customers are huge evangelists for the service and they view the service as fun, innovative and exciting -- not bad for a growing company with very little debt.
This guy is probably a customer for this young and new company w/o many subscribers (compared to Blockbuster). I really can't speak either way about it though as I have never used them myself.
Blockbuster on the other hand is a bloated company, with tons of debt, who is laying off it's employees, cutting back their hours, fending off a shareholder proxy fight with Carl Icahn, who has had their CEO recently announce that if he was not re-elected he would resign from the company.
Ok, yeah, it's bloated - along with plenty of other companies out there. I am not fan of Blockbuster and their tactics which include blatant lying to their customers and potential customers about their "no late fees" crap.
Cutting back hours? I don't know about that. I know of a couple Blockbusters around here and they are open the same hours they have been for years. At least you know that the movie rental places are open on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In the long run, all three companies, Netflix, Movie Gallery and Blockbuster will face a tremendous battle to stay alive when Video on Demand becomes widely available, but in the short run, if you agree with Pachter, then you should short Netflix and use the proceeds to buy Blockbuster and Movie Gallery.
I'm not holding my breath for VoD, really, I'm not. Even if/when it does become "viable" I have a feeling it will continue to be expensive and a little bit behind the DVD release dates. I really don't see any advantage to VoD but then again I have ~6 different movie rental places within 5 miles of me. YMMV.
I realize that I am a bit different than most people when it comes to renting DVDs. I'd prefer to buy them. Target has great deals on movies (i.e. Pulp Fiction with extended crap for $10 and many random titles for $7.50). I spend a lot of time looking through the $5 bins at Walmart for movies. I also buy previously rented DVDs which are usually 3 or 4 for $20. I don't frequent Blockbuster as I always feel uncomfortable in their store. I prefer Hollywood Video because of their random titles that are $1 back if you return the movie within 24 hours.
So I really don't care if Blockbuster or Netflix do well or not but I certainly don't believe for a second that the sudden downfall of the rental business will come from VoD. Then again I'm not a market "analyst" blogging away about stock prices... I'm just a movie watcher that doesn't like to pay a whole hell of a lot to watch a movie once.
Then why call it Kazaa Skype? They are associating themselves with exactly what I don't want on my computer.
Once a spyware co always a spyware co...
on
John Dvorak Hypes Skype
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Nobody wants to admit it (yet), but now Skype is the standard. The only problem is that the protocol is proprietary and only Skype knows how it works. This seems to offend a lot of people.
My problem comes with who developed Skype (KaZaa). Sorry, but I have zero respect for companies that promote/promoted spyware.
"The goal was to make the site look like it could be a real site from a company like Wal-Mart, but have text that was so ridiculous that anyone who read it would realize that it was absurd," Papasian said in a statement on his revamped Web site. "If anyone believed it to be a real Wal-Mart site, that is only a testament to the degree of absurdity that exists within corporate America today."
Due to all the retarded behavior that our fellow citizens exhibit on a daily basis I am never surprised when I see people falling for direct parody.
I am also not surprised that corporations are allowed to shutdown *what was likely fair use*. Sadly, someday, we will all look back on this and say, "look how free we once were. It survived 400 hits before it was taken down. They didn't even have to approve the webpage before it was posted."
It seems to me that 3 years in prison for downloading/uploading a show that is shown for free is cruel and unusual.
Are we going to start leaving the advertisements in the shows when we distribute them via BT? Because that's how the TV shows are shown for "free". The advertising space is paid for (and at a premium depending on slot/show popularity).
I agree that a three year sentence (regardless of media type) is excessive but that doesn't mean that it was freely distributed in the first place.
The real silver lining here emerges when you consider where the entertainment industry started back in 2003, and where they've ended up in 2005. After two years of heavy investments in lobbying Congress for a host of outrageous changes to copyright laws (like the Induce Act), the entertainment moguls managed to enact only a tiny sliver of their agenda, and only by granting concessions to ClearPlay.
And yet after 229 years of lobbying Congress the flesh and blood people of this fine country and losing their rights sliver by sliver to those "people" created out of paper and ink.
Or you can know that NetSol (as of 11/2004) likes to hold domains during transfers until they go over the expiration date to make it EXTREMELY difficult for you to move away from them.
They are also difficult to deal with over the phone, over the Internet, etc.
I was completely disappointed in their service and while attempting to move elsewhere ran into the problems above. Luckily I won't have to deal w/them again in the near future and I hope no one else does either.
To those of you that don't want to download 3MB of animated GIFs for a 2 second view of a whirlwind on Mars let me sum it up for you. Dust, a small hill, and what appears to be a UFO dancing around on the screen.
For those of you that are conspiracy theorists... This could be a UFO sighting! It also could have been made in any one of the deserts in the USA (or abroad!);-)
Staying one step ahead of Big Brother is a poor substitute for privacy rights.
You have no privacy rights so protecting yourself to the best of your ability is all you have to do. If the company policy is against that then that's a whole different story.
I don't have any expectation of privacy while at work except that which I create for myself. However, don't you think it is a bit unnecessary to actually read people's conversations and emails? Preventing abuse of company resources is one thing but actually reading the content of my emails is another. I could very well be talking about something that is work related but that I do not want certain people to read. Is that really so wrong? There are things you might have to say to another coworker that wouldn't get you fired but might cause trouble amongst other coworkers if they were read by the wrong person. I just think such total monitoring is excessive.
I already stated that it's unethical but perfectly legal. I don't see what exactly what you are trying to say past that.
If you don't like the policy that companies are permitted to put into place then don't work there, don't use their network for personal use, or start your own company where you have a liberal usage policy that allows people to freely use your network however they see fit.
Monitoring might be excessive and it's not done in some shrinking percentage of companies but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen.
Protect yourself, don't use it, or find another place to work.
This is a major invasion of privacy if you ask me. Of course, while at work you are using company resources so they really do get to say how and when they are used but I feel there is an important difference between monitoring your employee's resource usage and actually reading their emails and instant messages. You don't have to totally invade everyone's privacy to enforce your company policy of internet usage.
There is to be *NO* expectation of privacy while using computers at work. Don't think for a minute that your company won't pull out those records if necessary.
In the mean time protect yourself. Run everything over encrypted tunnels, don't use your company's DNS servers, use a browser that allows you to save your cache to a safe location (USB hard drive,/dev/null, whatever), don't use work e-mail for anything other than work, don't use unencrypted webmail, don't assume that they aren't using keylogging, the list goes on...
Unethical? Yeah. Legal? Definitely. Get over it and protect yourself as best you can. That means don't use your Internet connection at work for anything that would get you fired or could be used against you later.
very little of the old "I told you so"... very mature and honest.
Honest, yes, mature, no. Saying "I told you so" certainly isn't mature and what RMS is saying is so utterly lame that I can't even understand how most people can deal with it.
Software can be distributed w/o charge but does not have to be 100% free. Why he insists that this is the case is only understandable by him and people that are just as warped as he can be.
McVoy's great triumph was the adoption of this program for Linux development. No free software project is more visible than Linux. It is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, an essential component, and users often mistake it for the entire system. As McVoy surely planned, the use of his program in Linux development was powerful publicity for it.
Yeah, RMS is all about Free/Free but I see it as an important step for all software. Free stuff that isn't "totally free" is *not* wrong.
I would like to make my personal feelings known that non-totally free stuff that is later taken away because someone didn't learn "no give backs" is lame.
Yeah, RMS is right about a lot of stuff and really does have vision but I just have to disagree w/him here. Not everything has to be free.
Perhaps if your statement made any sense then it would be the "end of argument".
What you said makes absolutely no sense at all as the DMCA just allows corporations to hoard their Intellectual Property and sue anyone that even thinks about using it.
What it doesn't stop is companies from making the correct descision to open their formats so that people/companies can easily interoperate w/o using ridiculous proprietary/closed utilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that most people looking for older newspaper articles are doing research, not reading the news, and paying a small fee to get the one or two documents they really want doesn't bother them at all.
I did research... I also didn't do any research using articles that cost money to use. They are limiting their revenue stream, not increasing it.
And it's not like they have any valid justification for claiming that back issues cost much money for them to host...
Yeah, you have to have the hardware and the storage space but it does NOT cost $2.95/issue.
If you want people to use the service and get the information then make it priced reasonably. I know that I have posted about this before but I will repeat it: If you want to keep your users and don't want them to go to a competitor don't do this...
P2P, bah. There are plenty of USENET front-ends that make finding files much easier and faster to get.
25 million reasons why... Comcast HSD subscribers. Also millions more: People who don't want to deal w/USEnet (I'm one of them).
I have never had a positive experience getting anything from USEnet other than alt.sex.stories and from what limited reading I did of it in the past month it sucks worse than ever.
USEnet for files is awful even with programs to do it for you. P2P is fast, getting faster, and has TONS more material.
Don't like it? Make sure your government isn't donating money or resources to this religious anti-gay organization.
I'd start with the Federal Government before I'd bother w/the BSA.
Yes, because excluding gays and atheists from their organization is both honorable and good, right?
Excluding homosexuals is the new and "acceptable" racism but them excluding atheists isn't surprising...
The BSA is traditionally quite religion oriented ("do my duty to God..." and all that) and many faiths offer religion awards (which are difficult to obtain I might add). Hell, most BSA troops are sponsored by Churchs!
In the Troop that I belonged to we had a kid that was an atheist. They kept their mouths shut about it and the son eventually earned Eagle shortly after I did. Big deal.
In an organization that is based on relgion, hosted in relgious buildings, and says you should believe in some sort of God (doesn't matter which) you can be happy just playing along. If you want to stir the pot they have every right to shun you.
Don't like it? Don't join up and start your own organization.
Guy got drunk, drove drunk, stopped on the highway to pee on the side of a road at 2:00am.
The root of the issue is what they define exposing yourself. If you are just taking a leak in public that's "public urination". If you are blatantly fondling yourself (i.e. individuals taped at a particular I-94 rest stops in Minnesota) in public it's a little different.
I also want to know what child is up at 2:00AM that might be in direct sight of this individual relieving himself.
And what I said (in my post talking about WMP) was that the blog linked to from the main page was light on details, showed nothing more than a blurry screenshot of the demo movie, and wasn't worth reporting on.
Sorry, but so many people have been able to dupe the public with demos (nevermind movies of demos) that we shouldn't even bother to put this stuff on the main page.
Anyone remember the tiny helicopter robot or the guy that claimed blazing speeds over analog modems?
Well, in this picture I see a movie file being played (on what seems to be WMP) showing the cells on the screen.
Now, I wasn't there, nor was the article really in depth by any means, but it would seem to me that this was nothing more than a movie demonstration and nothing live.
I'm not quite so impressed. Maybe we should start linking to real content from the front page (i.e. in-depth accounts and not some blogger's one page summary with a blurry photo of a movie file being played on a projection screen).
If you know someone who is using Netflix right now ask them about the service? Do they like it?
I don't know a single person that uses Netflix so that's rather difficult. I also haven't heard it *anywhere* other than on Slashdot. I wouldn't even know it existed otherwise.
Now go into your local Blockbuster Video store and ask the clerk there how he feels about his employer.
I have a feeling that they will have no comment... We all know what happens when you bite the hand that feeds you.
Netflix's customers are huge evangelists for the service and they view the service as fun, innovative and exciting -- not bad for a growing company with very little debt.
This guy is probably a customer for this young and new company w/o many subscribers (compared to Blockbuster). I really can't speak either way about it though as I have never used them myself.
Blockbuster on the other hand is a bloated company, with tons of debt, who is laying off it's employees, cutting back their hours, fending off a shareholder proxy fight with Carl Icahn, who has had their CEO recently announce that if he was not re-elected he would resign from the company.
Ok, yeah, it's bloated - along with plenty of other companies out there. I am not fan of Blockbuster and their tactics which include blatant lying to their customers and potential customers about their "no late fees" crap.
Cutting back hours? I don't know about that. I know of a couple Blockbusters around here and they are open the same hours they have been for years. At least you know that the movie rental places are open on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
In the long run, all three companies, Netflix, Movie Gallery and Blockbuster will face a tremendous battle to stay alive when Video on Demand becomes widely available, but in the short run, if you agree with Pachter, then you should short Netflix and use the proceeds to buy Blockbuster and Movie Gallery.
I'm not holding my breath for VoD, really, I'm not. Even if/when it does become "viable" I have a feeling it will continue to be expensive and a little bit behind the DVD release dates. I really don't see any advantage to VoD but then again I have ~6 different movie rental places within 5 miles of me. YMMV.
I realize that I am a bit different than most people when it comes to renting DVDs. I'd prefer to buy them. Target has great deals on movies (i.e. Pulp Fiction with extended crap for $10 and many random titles for $7.50). I spend a lot of time looking through the $5 bins at Walmart for movies. I also buy previously rented DVDs which are usually 3 or 4 for $20. I don't frequent Blockbuster as I always feel uncomfortable in their store. I prefer Hollywood Video because of their random titles that are $1 back if you return the movie within 24 hours.
So I really don't care if Blockbuster or Netflix do well or not but I certainly don't believe for a second that the sudden downfall of the rental business will come from VoD. Then again I'm not a market "analyst" blogging away about stock prices... I'm just a movie watcher that doesn't like to pay a whole hell of a lot to watch a movie once.
Why because the person knew that he would just be needlessly burning karma for a post that would not see the light of day on Slashdot?
People here are too likeminded to put up with a post like that even though it is 100% true.
Then why call it Kazaa Skype? They are associating themselves with exactly what I don't want on my computer.
Nobody wants to admit it (yet), but now Skype is the standard. The only problem is that the protocol is proprietary and only Skype knows how it works. This seems to offend a lot of people.
My problem comes with who developed Skype (KaZaa). Sorry, but I have zero respect for companies that promote/promoted spyware.
"The goal was to make the site look like it could be a real site from a company like Wal-Mart, but have text that was so ridiculous that anyone who read it would realize that it was absurd," Papasian said in a statement on his revamped Web site. "If anyone believed it to be a real Wal-Mart site, that is only a testament to the degree of absurdity that exists within corporate America today."
Due to all the retarded behavior that our fellow citizens exhibit on a daily basis I am never surprised when I see people falling for direct parody.
I am also not surprised that corporations are allowed to shutdown *what was likely fair use*. Sadly, someday, we will all look back on this and say, "look how free we once were. It survived 400 hits before it was taken down. They didn't even have to approve the webpage before it was posted."
It seems to me that 3 years in prison for downloading/uploading a show that is shown for free is cruel and unusual.
Are we going to start leaving the advertisements in the shows when we distribute them via BT? Because that's how the TV shows are shown for "free". The advertising space is paid for (and at a premium depending on slot/show popularity).
I agree that a three year sentence (regardless of media type) is excessive but that doesn't mean that it was freely distributed in the first place.
The real silver lining here emerges when you consider where the entertainment industry started back in 2003, and where they've ended up in 2005. After two years of heavy investments in lobbying Congress for a host of outrageous changes to copyright laws (like the Induce Act), the entertainment moguls managed to enact only a tiny sliver of their agenda, and only by granting concessions to ClearPlay.
And yet after 229 years of lobbying Congress the flesh and blood people of this fine country and losing their rights sliver by sliver to those "people" created out of paper and ink.
Actually it would have been last week because they would have skipped over this week to arrive at exactly this moment in time.
Or you can know that NetSol (as of 11/2004) likes to hold domains during transfers until they go over the expiration date to make it EXTREMELY difficult for you to move away from them.
They are also difficult to deal with over the phone, over the Internet, etc.
I was completely disappointed in their service and while attempting to move elsewhere ran into the problems above. Luckily I won't have to deal w/them again in the near future and I hope no one else does either.
Direct links to the animated GIFs are here:
;-)
PIA07861.gif and PIA07863.gif.
To those of you that don't want to download 3MB of animated GIFs for a 2 second view of a whirlwind on Mars let me sum it up for you. Dust, a small hill, and what appears to be a UFO dancing around on the screen.
For those of you that are conspiracy theorists... This could be a UFO sighting! It also could have been made in any one of the deserts in the USA (or abroad!)
Staying one step ahead of Big Brother is a poor substitute for privacy rights.
You have no privacy rights so protecting yourself to the best of your ability is all you have to do. If the company policy is against that then that's a whole different story.
I don't have any expectation of privacy while at work except that which I create for myself. However, don't you think it is a bit unnecessary to actually read people's conversations and emails? Preventing abuse of company resources is one thing but actually reading the content of my emails is another. I could very well be talking about something that is work related but that I do not want certain people to read. Is that really so wrong? There are things you might have to say to another coworker that wouldn't get you fired but might cause trouble amongst other coworkers if they were read by the wrong person. I just think such total monitoring is excessive.
I already stated that it's unethical but perfectly legal. I don't see what exactly what you are trying to say past that.
If you don't like the policy that companies are permitted to put into place then don't work there, don't use their network for personal use, or start your own company where you have a liberal usage policy that allows people to freely use your network however they see fit.
Monitoring might be excessive and it's not done in some shrinking percentage of companies but that doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen.
Protect yourself, don't use it, or find another place to work.
This is a major invasion of privacy if you ask me. Of course, while at work you are using company resources so they really do get to say how and when they are used but I feel there is an important difference between monitoring your employee's resource usage and actually reading their emails and instant messages. You don't have to totally invade everyone's privacy to enforce your company policy of internet usage.
/dev/null, whatever), don't use work e-mail for anything other than work, don't use unencrypted webmail, don't assume that they aren't using keylogging, the list goes on...
There is to be *NO* expectation of privacy while using computers at work. Don't think for a minute that your company won't pull out those records if necessary.
In the mean time protect yourself. Run everything over encrypted tunnels, don't use your company's DNS servers, use a browser that allows you to save your cache to a safe location (USB hard drive,
Unethical? Yeah. Legal? Definitely. Get over it and protect yourself as best you can. That means don't use your Internet connection at work for anything that would get you fired or could be used against you later.
very little of the old "I told you so"... very mature and honest.
Honest, yes, mature, no. Saying "I told you so" certainly isn't mature and what RMS is saying is so utterly lame that I can't even understand how most people can deal with it.
Software can be distributed w/o charge but does not have to be 100% free. Why he insists that this is the case is only understandable by him and people that are just as warped as he can be.
McVoy's great triumph was the adoption of this program for Linux development. No free software project is more visible than Linux. It is the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system, an essential component, and users often mistake it for the entire system. As McVoy surely planned, the use of his program in Linux development was powerful publicity for it.
Yeah, RMS is all about Free/Free but I see it as an important step for all software. Free stuff that isn't "totally free" is *not* wrong.
I would like to make my personal feelings known that non-totally free stuff that is later taken away because someone didn't learn "no give backs" is lame.
Yeah, RMS is right about a lot of stuff and really does have vision but I just have to disagree w/him here. Not everything has to be free.
Perhaps if your statement made any sense then it would be the "end of argument".
What you said makes absolutely no sense at all as the DMCA just allows corporations to hoard their Intellectual Property and sue anyone that even thinks about using it.
What it doesn't stop is companies from making the correct descision to open their formats so that people/companies can easily interoperate w/o using ridiculous proprietary/closed utilities.
Here's a serious answer to your semi-serious question: spend $50 on a justice of the peace.
Just so you know... They are $250 now.