I read an interesting analysis not too long ago that made an interesting point. If you're conservative, and you go on about the "liberal media," and if you also call a moderate like Kerry a "liberal," then you thereby push liberals further to the center, push the media further to the right, and you've won before an election's ever held.
I mention this only to support your point: there's no liberal media to be found this side of Pacifica Radio/Democracy Now. You'd be hard pressed, as well, to find more than a handful of liberals (i.e., less than 6) in both houses of Congress combined.
With all due respect, it's you that missed the point. The piece is actually arguing that hacking should be incorporated into product lifecycle process. It's not arguing that products need to be so pliant that the "painted footprints on the floor" crowd can't use them, but rather that companies embrace the fact that some of their consumers will hack their products and that some of those hacks will be better than the original.
With all due respect, I think the point of the ruling is to ensure that M$ doesn't leverage its dominance in the OS market to dominate/monopolize other markets as well.
Bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP (and having it installed as the default media app.) removes any need the typical consumer might have to investigate other options. This is why the EU is protesting M$'s solution. Unless Real is installed along with WMP, the average consumer won't use Real or WinAmp, thereby stiffling competition.
Sounds like a prescription for keeping potential investors salivating:
start rumors of an IPO
deny the rumors while alluding to the fact that your company's position is so cash-rich that you don't need to go public (thereby keeping investors very, very interested)
go public later in the year with an inflated P/E ratio, just like the good ol' days back in the '90s.
I live in a small town in Eastern Washington (population 600) that's unlikely to be seeing fiber for several years. Just over a year ago I got fed up with the slowwww connection speeds (never better than 28k) and got two-way satellite service from DirecWay.
At that time, the only option was having a Windows box hooked up to the dish, so I have an XP workstation sitting on the front end of my home network.
Overall, I'd have to say that I'm fairly satisfied. I've been able to sit in my living room and terminal service into servers at work (over wireless, no less) without too much of a latency issue (it's typically about 3 seconds); at first the delay was disconcerting, but after a while you adjust.
The pipe is actually pretty fat. I'm averaging a decent transfer rate (~300kb/sec), allowing me to download (or upload) from home most of what I used to piggyback onto my work laptop.
Weather is occasionally an issue. Snow or ice stuck on the dish, for example, will wipe out the signal entirely. A couple weeks ago, for example, I had to go out when it was -5 degrees and very gingerly remove a coating of ice off the dish in order to meet a deadline. Yet that's been more the exception than the rule. Caveat emptor.
My only complaint is that the basic satellite home service I signed up for has bandwidth throttling after ~180 mb of traffic in a 24 hour period. (The satellite networking is shared rather than switched, so bandwidth hogs would need to be dealt with). Nonetheless, downloading distro ISOs are still out of the question from home, and that's a real pain.
It sounds like the service you're considering is an improvement over mine. I'd really like to get rid of the Windows box as the front end of since I'm basically putting the most vulnerable part of the network right up front in script-kiddy land, though DirecWay does seem to have a pretty solid firewall.
I'll be checking out the DirecWay site for more details about your system.
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I read an interesting analysis not too long ago that made an interesting point. If you're conservative, and you go on about the "liberal media," and if you also call a moderate like Kerry a "liberal," then you thereby push liberals further to the center, push the media further to the right, and you've won before an election's ever held. I mention this only to support your point: there's no liberal media to be found this side of Pacifica Radio/Democracy Now. You'd be hard pressed, as well, to find more than a handful of liberals (i.e., less than 6) in both houses of Congress combined.
With all due respect, it's you that missed the point. The piece is actually arguing that hacking should be incorporated into product lifecycle process. It's not arguing that products need to be so pliant that the "painted footprints on the floor" crowd can't use them, but rather that companies embrace the fact that some of their consumers will hack their products and that some of those hacks will be better than the original.
Bundling Windows Media Player with Windows XP (and having it installed as the default media app.) removes any need the typical consumer might have to investigate other options. This is why the EU is protesting M$'s solution. Unless Real is installed along with WMP, the average consumer won't use Real or WinAmp, thereby stiffling competition.
At that time, the only option was having a Windows box hooked up to the dish, so I have an XP workstation sitting on the front end of my home network.
Overall, I'd have to say that I'm fairly satisfied. I've been able to sit in my living room and terminal service into servers at work (over wireless, no less) without too much of a latency issue (it's typically about 3 seconds); at first the delay was disconcerting, but after a while you adjust.
The pipe is actually pretty fat. I'm averaging a decent transfer rate (~300kb/sec), allowing me to download (or upload) from home most of what I used to piggyback onto my work laptop.
Weather is occasionally an issue. Snow or ice stuck on the dish, for example, will wipe out the signal entirely. A couple weeks ago, for example, I had to go out when it was -5 degrees and very gingerly remove a coating of ice off the dish in order to meet a deadline. Yet that's been more the exception than the rule. Caveat emptor.
My only complaint is that the basic satellite home service I signed up for has bandwidth throttling after ~180 mb of traffic in a 24 hour period. (The satellite networking is shared rather than switched, so bandwidth hogs would need to be dealt with). Nonetheless, downloading distro ISOs are still out of the question from home, and that's a real pain.
It sounds like the service you're considering is an improvement over mine. I'd really like to get rid of the Windows box as the front end of since I'm basically putting the most vulnerable part of the network right up front in script-kiddy land, though DirecWay does seem to have a pretty solid firewall.
I'll be checking out the DirecWay site for more details about your system.