Umm, got news for you - just about no one nowadays ever listens to New Kids on the Block (pre-cursors to the BackStreet Boys) and no one will care about the BBs in about another 3 years either. Just like Debbie Gibson (remember her?) or Tiffany (even hear of her?) vanished. Will the be played in the future? I'm guessing someone somewhere in 10-20 years will stroll down memory lane, go wow, haven't heard this in years, then go "crap, now I rememeber why" and won't ever do it again.
Piles of today's music should never have seen the light of day, being more akin to a bad idol episode than anything else. What kills me is that lots of good music that was also critically acclaimed never sees the light of day anymore, unless you get a paid satellite feed, which curiously appears to lack the majority of songs plaguing the airwaves (ie, RIAA sponsored crap)
Problem 1) Clear Channel now owns 99% of stations that would deliver anything I would find remotely interesting, and is rapidly screwing them up, to the point I no longer listen to radio. I'm not alone in that. For example, in my city, there were 6 stations that played some form of rock music, everything from cutting edge to classic rock. Now, there's in reality only 3, and two of those are essentially broken down into a kinda sorta alt rock Top 40, the other is 70s classic rock. The remaining independent is 70s on up but needs to re-align itself given the sudden vacuum caused by the other 5 stations' shifts in the last month or two.
Personally, I've begun to wonder whether Clear Channel owns shares of XM or Sirius satellite radio, because they certainly are a driving reason to sign up.
We can thank DEC for this almost ubiquotous feature on almost any network card. I believe it had to do with MAC addresses needing to be specifiable for the hardware, thus you had to be able to set the MAC address when swapping out a card, otherwise much pain ensued. (Or something like that, the memory recesses this came from are a bit rusty after all that time;)
Check again, that's with the full suite of additions, including an X-server. The price for the TCPIP stack alone was much lower, and yes, I still have the disks (something like 20 floppies!) at home. It does come with some utilities, but X-Server was not one of them.
I recall seeing a show on Discovery about a year or two ago about how the Grateful Dead have been recording their own live shows and selling the CDs right after said show for several years as a way to side-step the commercial distribution channels. In the show, they reported that their net income increased many-fold over what they were paid from their RIAA member distributor (Imagine that, directly selling their CDs and taking all the profit vs getting $0.01 out of every $!)
Also, as others have mentioned, this most definitely is both obvious and a natural evolution of recording equipment capabilities. This "patent" should have been denied, since they're attempting to generically patent an existing process by merely putting a few time sensitive words in.
Steve Jobs made a really good point about Microsoft, he said that after Apple forced him out in the 80's they person in charge was a salesman. Apple made obscene profits but in the long run damaged the company and almost killed it...he said that Steve Ballmer is one of the biggest salesmen he has seen.
Every company I've ever seen that is run by a "salesman" and does more than just sales has always failed. They may make an initial splash, but a salesman's job is to appear to please everone while screwing them out of as much cash as possible. Sooner or later, everyone notices that they're getting screwed. Salesmen generally can't see past the next sale, and are extremely shortsighted.
People with real business acumen know that while their role is to attempt to please everyone and make money, they cannot screw people over regularly, because in the long term, that is not sustainable, and they'll have destroyed their company. They also know they cannot please everyone all the time, and sometimes not gouging a customer and only making a modest amount of cash, or even none, will result in more money over the long haul in repeat business.
IBM's TCPIP for OS/2 for versions 2.0 and 2.1 was around $120, IIRC. I know my boss at the time would not have OK'd > $500 for an OS for a 386! $300, yes, >$500, no.
But it was shit with games. You had to hope for ports or use tricks to make them run.
I ran Command & Conquer in a window on OS/2 with sound, while working on email and having a telnet session up monitoring a process at work. I do recall this was with Warp 3 or 4, and with the specialized settings to enable that.
The PPP support was excellent, and the TCPIP stack was a hell of a lot more robust than the kludgy win3.1
Actually, the TCPIP stack is better than any MS stack. Try running Multicast sockets in any MS product.
In the early 90s, a lot of people were moving away from mainframes and to Unix and TCP/IP. This eliminated a lot of the need/desire to run OS/2.
I agree with your first statement, however, OS/2 had much more going for it than being an SNA gateway. It was robust from 91 onward, hardly ever crashing, unlike the ubiquitous BSOD for windows users of all stripes (except for NT 3.1, which was relatively rock-stable, but had no apps). I had uptimes on the order of 9 months, the longest I remember, because I had an update to the kernel to address a specific issue with X-windows client software I was running. This machine ran a variety of services, and for all intents and purposes was much like any unix system of its time, perhaps better than most, certainly for the money.
The last thing I should mention is that after about 3 years of running the os as a mail server, ftp server, and running many large scale models on it (it had 2GB of hard drive space, incredibly large in those days, not even sufficient to load XP these days): a defrag utility came out for OS/2. I remember running it on the data drive, sure the 1GB partition would be fragged to hell and back. After all, my NT 3.5x and NT 4 running colleagues defragged weekly at least on the same hardware! Imagine my surprise when the report came back < 4% fragmentation. HPFS was a great file system. Ahhh, the memories.
OS/2 actually IS pretty dead now, but it's not because it was technically inferior. Up to 1999, it still was better than anything MS could put out.
Having run OS/2 for years, I can atest to this little factiod, running Command & Conquer in a window on OS/2 with sound, while working on email and having a telnet session up monitoring a process at work. Can you yet do this in Windows? (I haven't tried, the BSOD frightens me too much to leave anything running during a game!)
And, IIRC, the thing that killed OS/2 wasn't anything less insidious than MS's anti-competitive practices, something about Office 97 not being backwards compatible by design (recall that little forced update fiasco?) and Office 97 apps asking for a memory address at the 2GB limit. (OS/2's VMs were limited to 512MB, so Office apps bombed when they didn't get what they asked for, not that they used anything above 512MB. I suppose someone enterprising should have hacked the memory request code, but that didn't happen.)
Well at least you never had to deal with that problem with OS/2, so advanced, you don't even need a new version
2.0, 2.1, 2.11, 2.3, and 2.4, I believe, with 2.0 being a royal pain in the arse to install, and each succeeding version getting easier and better. BTW, I believe I still own copies of 2.1, 2.3, and 2.4, including a copy of OS/2 Warp Server. I also have copies of Slackware, Red Hat, and Solaris right alongside those:)
for the judge to make this ruling? Wasn't this the crux of Lindows defense something like 6-8 months ago? (time passes funny for me lately, so it just seems like years have passed already...)
Well, there's a spectacularly bad "Ice Pirates" with Gregory Hines and Robert Urich. I should rephrase that, may be bad, or may be hilariously funny. It's definitely not your run of the mill cheap sci-fi flick. I especially liked the time-warped robot fighting scene, and Hines' fro!
Get real, the easiest way to halt spam is to make sure the the connection's originating from a real SMTP server (ie, somewhere, its IP is cross-referenced as an MX record) This one step will remove 99% of zombies, of course, it also disables most email servers run by enterprising/.r's, unless they've ponied up the cash for their own domains and can manage the records in it.
It's not a fool-proof approach in eliminating spam, but it surely will make it orders of magnitude more difficult to spam anonymously. And identifying spammers and spam sources and blocking them will be much easier.
Just to get rid of the fans/flamers, I disliked the ewoks of 6, and 1 just finished off any interest I had in this series.
As for episode 4, at the time it was the biggest thing around, its special effects were ground breaking, perhaps even on the scale of the first Matrix (which, btw, I must say had a better 3rd episode than SW #6) and its scale and quality of story was something not seen in a long time, if ever, even if it seems quaint now. #5 left all of us wanting more, and we got ewoks in #6, which left most of the original fans going wtf, but we still watched it.
Episode 1 with JarJar should have been canned. Or, put another way, Episode 1 could have been cut down to about a 20 min intro for #2 without losing anything of the "story". GL should have consulted with someone with a clue, Alan Dean Foster perhaps, or any 1st grader. (ok, ok, maybe a 2nd grader....)
In my view, the only way to "save" Star Wars, would have been for Lucas to have hired some serious folks back in 82 or 83 to write the other portions of the trilogy, and actually have them made by other directors and merely kept executive producer status. IOW, it's far too late, as the time for "Star Wars", at least as GL envisioned it, is long gone. Maybe someone will remake it in another 10-20 years, with a better overall story line and appropriate new effects.
The problem is that the OS's job is merely to run programs. (Actually, that's the kernel's job) Whatever the user loads on top of that needs to be able to do whatever it is that it's supposed to do. So, the OS technically has no job other than running whatever it is asked to run.
It is the job of the user to configure those applications to do what they want. However, MS loads lots of things by default, some of those are bad, and some cannot be removed without killing the system. In this case, MS probably should be responsible. However, considering the scope and impact of this problem, I would consider such a move by ISPs a smart one to reduce the bandwidth garbage on their own network, and also subtly enforce by default various portions of their TOS's. Do note that those knowledgable would still be easily able to configure their connections to do things that might allow worms in, but hopefully they know what they're doing. (Again - assuming that the ISP provided firewall appliance is much like the Cable/DSL routers we all know and love...)
I think that's an awesome strategic move! AMD had the insight to see that hey, here's a group of highly technical people that have some great ideas, and gee, we can hire them all.
Would rather have had AMD go "hmm, naaah, we don't need to hire guys with really creative and proven ideas, let's go reinvent the wheel"?
Thanks to their insight, hypertransport did not go the way of the dung heap, and superior processors design resulting in better performance, especially in multi-processor machines have resulted that are actually being accepted in the market place. They are also causing the former obvious monopoly to take notice. Note that the P4 will be no more, and the PIII core is coming back. Now that's eating some crow. If not for AMD, how likely would the retirement of the P4 have been in this time frame? I doubt it would have happened, because Intel would not have had to push their processors much and could probably have coasted for another 2 or 3 years with this chip.
This was to complete the analogy of MS's general tactics and why they're wrong. It's what they're attempting to do. I didn't say it would work in the case of MSN.
The only reasons it's worked so well so far (they do have almost 30% of the market according to this article) is that most people aren't technically savvy, so when they see MSN first, they get used to it, and by the time they figure out there's more, they're used to MSN and you know how much those folks like change.... Take a look at AOL, it's one of the main reasons it's still as big as it is.
I think he's talking about the fragmentation caused by multiple non-interoperative desktop APIs. After all, we already have Gnome and KDE, neither of which support the other's apps. Perhaps a common API to which they all design to would be good for 3rd party application developers, so they could have their apps run on all desktops?
Please note that firewall appliances can be configured. (At least that's my assumption!) For dial-up, however, those ports probably shouldn't be an option because of the completely random IPs used, etc, that I can think of no good reason to use MS's built-in virus capability to do something that can be done via other software faster, better, and without opening yourself to the worm du jour.
To complete your analogy, you'd need the "club owners" to also own 98% of all TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, and any other avenue of advertising. They disallow all advertizing for anything other than their own clubs.
Thus, even though the clubs "should" lose money, they don't, because the competition's capability to compete has been squashed because of their inability to be known by the customer, and all customers are funneled into the clubs, and hey, the clubs only serve the club owners whiskey, beer, wine, all substandard, and only plays music "owned" by the club owners, again not doing well in the market until the clubs opened. Now that only the owners clubs exist, well, they're not making as much money as they'd like, since there's still some money flowing into someone else's coffers, hey, restaurants! Well, the owners now open restaurants inside their clubs and the entire scenario starts again....
Hopefully you get the point why such a thing is bad? It has nothing to do with a business decision, it has to do with utilizing one monopolized market to control another. Losing money is irrelevant in this scenario, as soon your competition will shrivel up, not having their own monopoly to support them.
For a large group of folks, the blame can be laid at the feet of broadband providers for not providing a firewall appliance along with the cable modem. (Many of us run this as a secondary appliance behind the modem, and get 4 or more ports for the price of 1 connection in the process;) However, hooking up a windows machine behind a nice functional hardware firewall, however simple it may be, really works for the active worms. (Doesn't help the dial-up guys though, although dial-up providers maybe should block certain ports.... after all, who uses 135-139 on dialup connections anyways?)
Please go ahead and read this for my view of why this is complete vapor.
Unless the new PCI Express cards have additional default functionality built into the bus that allows some kind of buffering and access to card hardware that PCI/AGP have never allowed, this is pure BS. I have not heard that ATI and NVidia are working on products that have open APIs to hardware which allow their products to interoperate. Heck, I haven't heard that either one of them even have anything like true dual paralleled cards in the works for their own lines! (Note: this would be like the dualism of Voodoo, 2 cards simultaneously rendering on 1 monitor, not two cards in 1 system.)
I'll call you on this. Yes, the graphics cards could do that, but how does third party hardware access this buffer on the graphics cards? The claim here is that 2 dissimilar graphics cards can be run together in a system and work togther. That is a pretty major claim, not at all like Voodoo, which had specialized hardware and connections to enable that functionality.
So, exactly how is an ATI 9800 going to render 50% of a screen and send that info to my NVidia GFX that rendered the other 50% to pass onto the monitor connected to the NVidia? Or vice-versa? Seriously, that's why my bullshit meter pegged on this.
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Umm, got news for you - just about no one nowadays ever listens to New Kids on the Block (pre-cursors to the BackStreet Boys) and no one will care about the BBs in about another 3 years either. Just like Debbie Gibson (remember her?) or Tiffany (even hear of her?) vanished. Will the be played in the future? I'm guessing someone somewhere in 10-20 years will stroll down memory lane, go wow, haven't heard this in years, then go "crap, now I rememeber why" and won't ever do it again.
Piles of today's music should never have seen the light of day, being more akin to a bad idol episode than anything else. What kills me is that lots of good music that was also critically acclaimed never sees the light of day anymore, unless you get a paid satellite feed, which curiously appears to lack the majority of songs plaguing the airwaves (ie, RIAA sponsored crap)
Problem 1) Clear Channel now owns 99% of stations that would deliver anything I would find remotely interesting, and is rapidly screwing them up, to the point I no longer listen to radio. I'm not alone in that. For example, in my city, there were 6 stations that played some form of rock music, everything from cutting edge to classic rock. Now, there's in reality only 3, and two of those are essentially broken down into a kinda sorta alt rock Top 40, the other is 70s classic rock. The remaining independent is 70s on up but needs to re-align itself given the sudden vacuum caused by the other 5 stations' shifts in the last month or two.
Personally, I've begun to wonder whether Clear Channel owns shares of XM or Sirius satellite radio, because they certainly are a driving reason to sign up.
We can thank DEC for this almost ubiquotous feature on almost any network card. I believe it had to do with MAC addresses needing to be specifiable for the hardware, thus you had to be able to set the MAC address when swapping out a card, otherwise much pain ensued. (Or something like that, the memory recesses this came from are a bit rusty after all that time ;)
Check again, that's with the full suite of additions, including an X-server. The price for the TCPIP stack alone was much lower, and yes, I still have the disks (something like 20 floppies!) at home. It does come with some utilities, but X-Server was not one of them.
I recall seeing a show on Discovery about a year or two ago about how the Grateful Dead have been recording their own live shows and selling the CDs right after said show for several years as a way to side-step the commercial distribution channels. In the show, they reported that their net income increased many-fold over what they were paid from their RIAA member distributor (Imagine that, directly selling their CDs and taking all the profit vs getting $0.01 out of every $!)
Also, as others have mentioned, this most definitely is both obvious and a natural evolution of recording equipment capabilities. This "patent" should have been denied, since they're attempting to generically patent an existing process by merely putting a few time sensitive words in.
Every company I've ever seen that is run by a "salesman" and does more than just sales has always failed. They may make an initial splash, but a salesman's job is to appear to please everone while screwing them out of as much cash as possible. Sooner or later, everyone notices that they're getting screwed. Salesmen generally can't see past the next sale, and are extremely shortsighted.
People with real business acumen know that while their role is to attempt to please everyone and make money, they cannot screw people over regularly, because in the long term, that is not sustainable, and they'll have destroyed their company. They also know they cannot please everyone all the time, and sometimes not gouging a customer and only making a modest amount of cash, or even none, will result in more money over the long haul in repeat business.
IBM's TCPIP for OS/2 for versions 2.0 and 2.1 was around $120, IIRC. I know my boss at the time would not have OK'd > $500 for an OS for a 386! $300, yes, >$500, no.
I ran Command & Conquer in a window on OS/2 with sound, while working on email and having a telnet session up monitoring a process at work. I do recall this was with Warp 3 or 4, and with the specialized settings to enable that.
Actually, the TCPIP stack is better than any MS stack. Try running Multicast sockets in any MS product.
I agree with your first statement, however, OS/2 had much more going for it than being an SNA gateway. It was robust from 91 onward, hardly ever crashing, unlike the ubiquitous BSOD for windows users of all stripes (except for NT 3.1, which was relatively rock-stable, but had no apps). I had uptimes on the order of 9 months, the longest I remember, because I had an update to the kernel to address a specific issue with X-windows client software I was running. This machine ran a variety of services, and for all intents and purposes was much like any unix system of its time, perhaps better than most, certainly for the money.
The last thing I should mention is that after about 3 years of running the os as a mail server, ftp server, and running many large scale models on it (it had 2GB of hard drive space, incredibly large in those days, not even sufficient to load XP these days): a defrag utility came out for OS/2. I remember running it on the data drive, sure the 1GB partition would be fragged to hell and back. After all, my NT 3.5x and NT 4 running colleagues defragged weekly at least on the same hardware! Imagine my surprise when the report came back < 4% fragmentation. HPFS was a great file system. Ahhh, the memories.
Having run OS/2 for years, I can atest to this little factiod, running Command & Conquer in a window on OS/2 with sound, while working on email and having a telnet session up monitoring a process at work. Can you yet do this in Windows? (I haven't tried, the BSOD frightens me too much to leave anything running during a game!)
And, IIRC, the thing that killed OS/2 wasn't anything less insidious than MS's anti-competitive practices, something about Office 97 not being backwards compatible by design (recall that little forced update fiasco?) and Office 97 apps asking for a memory address at the 2GB limit. (OS/2's VMs were limited to 512MB, so Office apps bombed when they didn't get what they asked for, not that they used anything above 512MB. I suppose someone enterprising should have hacked the memory request code, but that didn't happen.)
for the judge to make this ruling? Wasn't this the crux of Lindows defense something like 6-8 months ago? (time passes funny for me lately, so it just seems like years have passed already...)
Ah yes, how could I ever forget the slave making assembly line? Chop Chop... :-D
As for the DVD version, I haven't seen it, but you can get it on VHS.
Well, there's a spectacularly bad "Ice Pirates" with Gregory Hines and Robert Urich. I should rephrase that, may be bad, or may be hilariously funny. It's definitely not your run of the mill cheap sci-fi flick. I especially liked the time-warped robot fighting scene, and Hines' fro!
Get real, the easiest way to halt spam is to make sure the the connection's originating from a real SMTP server (ie, somewhere, its IP is cross-referenced as an MX record) This one step will remove 99% of zombies, of course, it also disables most email servers run by enterprising /.r's, unless they've ponied up the cash for their own domains and can manage the records in it.
It's not a fool-proof approach in eliminating spam, but it surely will make it orders of magnitude more difficult to spam anonymously. And identifying spammers and spam sources and blocking them will be much easier.
Just to get rid of the fans/flamers, I disliked the ewoks of 6, and 1 just finished off any interest I had in this series.
As for episode 4, at the time it was the biggest thing around, its special effects were ground breaking, perhaps even on the scale of the first Matrix (which, btw, I must say had a better 3rd episode than SW #6) and its scale and quality of story was something not seen in a long time, if ever, even if it seems quaint now. #5 left all of us wanting more, and we got ewoks in #6, which left most of the original fans going wtf, but we still watched it.
Episode 1 with JarJar should have been canned. Or, put another way, Episode 1 could have been cut down to about a 20 min intro for #2 without losing anything of the "story". GL should have consulted with someone with a clue, Alan Dean Foster perhaps, or any 1st grader. (ok, ok, maybe a 2nd grader....)
In my view, the only way to "save" Star Wars, would have been for Lucas to have hired some serious folks back in 82 or 83 to write the other portions of the trilogy, and actually have them made by other directors and merely kept executive producer status. IOW, it's far too late, as the time for "Star Wars", at least as GL envisioned it, is long gone. Maybe someone will remake it in another 10-20 years, with a better overall story line and appropriate new effects.
The problem is that the OS's job is merely to run programs. (Actually, that's the kernel's job) Whatever the user loads on top of that needs to be able to do whatever it is that it's supposed to do. So, the OS technically has no job other than running whatever it is asked to run.
It is the job of the user to configure those applications to do what they want. However, MS loads lots of things by default, some of those are bad, and some cannot be removed without killing the system. In this case, MS probably should be responsible. However, considering the scope and impact of this problem, I would consider such a move by ISPs a smart one to reduce the bandwidth garbage on their own network, and also subtly enforce by default various portions of their TOS's. Do note that those knowledgable would still be easily able to configure their connections to do things that might allow worms in, but hopefully they know what they're doing. (Again - assuming that the ISP provided firewall appliance is much like the Cable/DSL routers we all know and love...)
I think that's an awesome strategic move! AMD had the insight to see that hey, here's a group of highly technical people that have some great ideas, and gee, we can hire them all.
Would rather have had AMD go "hmm, naaah, we don't need to hire guys with really creative and proven ideas, let's go reinvent the wheel"?
Thanks to their insight, hypertransport did not go the way of the dung heap, and superior processors design resulting in better performance, especially in multi-processor machines have resulted that are actually being accepted in the market place. They are also causing the former obvious monopoly to take notice. Note that the P4 will be no more, and the PIII core is coming back. Now that's eating some crow. If not for AMD, how likely would the retirement of the P4 have been in this time frame? I doubt it would have happened, because Intel would not have had to push their processors much and could probably have coasted for another 2 or 3 years with this chip.
This was to complete the analogy of MS's general tactics and why they're wrong. It's what they're attempting to do. I didn't say it would work in the case of MSN.
The only reasons it's worked so well so far (they do have almost 30% of the market according to this article) is that most people aren't technically savvy, so when they see MSN first, they get used to it, and by the time they figure out there's more, they're used to MSN and you know how much those folks like change.... Take a look at AOL, it's one of the main reasons it's still as big as it is.
I think he's talking about the fragmentation caused by multiple non-interoperative desktop APIs. After all, we already have Gnome and KDE, neither of which support the other's apps. Perhaps a common API to which they all design to would be good for 3rd party application developers, so they could have their apps run on all desktops?
Please note that firewall appliances can be configured. (At least that's my assumption!) For dial-up, however, those ports probably shouldn't be an option because of the completely random IPs used, etc, that I can think of no good reason to use MS's built-in virus capability to do something that can be done via other software faster, better, and without opening yourself to the worm du jour.
To complete your analogy, you'd need the "club owners" to also own 98% of all TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines, and any other avenue of advertising. They disallow all advertizing for anything other than their own clubs.
Thus, even though the clubs "should" lose money, they don't, because the competition's capability to compete has been squashed because of their inability to be known by the customer, and all customers are funneled into the clubs, and hey, the clubs only serve the club owners whiskey, beer, wine, all substandard, and only plays music "owned" by the club owners, again not doing well in the market until the clubs opened. Now that only the owners clubs exist, well, they're not making as much money as they'd like, since there's still some money flowing into someone else's coffers, hey, restaurants! Well, the owners now open restaurants inside their clubs and the entire scenario starts again....
Hopefully you get the point why such a thing is bad? It has nothing to do with a business decision, it has to do with utilizing one monopolized market to control another. Losing money is irrelevant in this scenario, as soon your competition will shrivel up, not having their own monopoly to support them.
Just some thoughts.
Please go ahead and read this for my view of why this is complete vapor.
Unless the new PCI Express cards have additional default functionality built into the bus that allows some kind of buffering and access to card hardware that PCI/AGP have never allowed, this is pure BS. I have not heard that ATI and NVidia are working on products that have open APIs to hardware which allow their products to interoperate. Heck, I haven't heard that either one of them even have anything like true dual paralleled cards in the works for their own lines! (Note: this would be like the dualism of Voodoo, 2 cards simultaneously rendering on 1 monitor, not two cards in 1 system.)
I'll call you on this. Yes, the graphics cards could do that, but how does third party hardware access this buffer on the graphics cards? The claim here is that 2 dissimilar graphics cards can be run together in a system and work togther. That is a pretty major claim, not at all like Voodoo, which had specialized hardware and connections to enable that functionality.
So, exactly how is an ATI 9800 going to render 50% of a screen and send that info to my NVidia GFX that rendered the other 50% to pass onto the monitor connected to the NVidia? Or vice-versa? Seriously, that's why my bullshit meter pegged on this.