Maildir storage format is resistant to bit-rot because it stores each message in a separate file, and uses filesystem directories for mail folders. It's widely supported by user agents (mail readers) and IMAP/POP3/SMTP servers, so you'll never be stranded by the actions of a single software vendor. Finally, it's easily searched using everyday unix tools - find, grep, sed, awk, etc., and you can use the full-text search engine of your choice for speedy searches.
That's crazy talk. There are many threats to the health and vibrancy of an open source project, and being backed by a commercial company is not a reliable indicator of danger.
Consider the behavior of the project maintainers and planners. Do they engage the community on key issues? Do they accept outside contributions? How are conflicts resolved?
The issue isn't who funds the developers, but the attitudes and behaviors of project leadership.
Most contributors grant a "perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and transferable license" to your contribution that allows dual licensing. Unless you specifically disclaimed your copyright, you still have it.
What's Open Source got to do with the story? Good point. Fonality is no more open than Cisco or other big telecom vendors that integrate -- but don't participate in -- open source. Fonality incorporates Asterisk, which is truly open source, but Fonality has never contributed anything back to the community. In fact, Fonality does all it can to minimize the role that Asterisk plays in its solution. The truth is that there would be no Fonality without Asterisk, and that Fonality (and Tom Keating) just say "open source" to get attention.
To prove the point, Keating even linked to his previous interview quoting Lyman as saying, "Trixbox is a free open source community - largely international. Fonality is a commercial paid product, largely domestic. We couldn't be farther apart in communities, interest, or financial objectives. I guess our only real common ground is a usage and love of Asterisk."
First, the stated privacy concerns are no justification for changing the underlying infrastructure. If you're genuinely concerned about privacy, then start encrypting everything you put on the wire. Use anonymizing services.
Secondly, network geeks in general do not grok the economics of the internet on a national or global scale. Without statistical multiplexing and large economies of scale created by the "backbone providers" vilified in the original post, your internet access fees would not be as affordable as they are today. Without large service providers, your connectivity would not be as robust and reliable as it is today.
Finally, large-network interconnection is as much an art of negotiation as it is a science of traffic exchange. Each commercial network relies on access fees to remain solvent, but universal access to the internet requires at least a few large players to exchange traffic. It works best network-wise if this exchange is settlement-free and frictionless: routing protocols get to do the jobs they were designed to do, and bits fly directly to their destination networks. However, networks often want to be paid for such peering, on the basis of unequal exchange, network size, stability, POP count, etc. Adding this "friction" to the creation of network peers balkanizes the net somewhat, and arguably increases stability, but it prevents a rich, dense routing mesh that would be ideal for network efficiency.
Just imagine how wonderfully the internet would work if every AS peered with every other AS in a 50 mile radius. Sure, smaller players would still need to buy transit bandwidth, but two businesses in the same town wouldn't need to send traffic to a coast just to communicate. The optimal way to reduce the need for "huge backbone pipes" (a brutal oversimplification, btw) is more dense interconnection and more direct routing that would result. The drag on such progress is economic and political, not technical.
Enjoying your job has its benefits, but there are other valid reasons to work. None of the following apply to everyone equally and they aren't direct substitutions for each other. Being a little heavy in one can compensate for being light in another:
Direct Compensation
High salary/wage
Excellent retirement benefits
Excellent health coverage
Discounts on products/services
Deferred Compensation
Ownership equity
Stock grants, warrants, or options
Profit-sharing
Bonus or performance incentives
Educational Benefits
Experience, On-the-job training
Internship
Tuition reimbursement
Cross-training from co-workers
Intangible Enrichment
Pure enjoyment
Spiritual purpose (Read 1 Cor 10:31)
Patriotism/Service to public
Fame, prestige, reputation
Philanthropic (joy of helping others)
Friendship, camraderie
To say that job satisfaction is above all others is self-serving and short-sighted. It may be true for a season, but there are many, many other motives for work. Think as a long-term investor: be aware of your motivations for accepting a position, and be continually aware of whether the original motives are no longer being served. Be also aware of the opportunities you forgo as you maintain your position. Be willing to change, and be ready to defend (to your own self) your decision.
OKAY, OKAY!!! So a word processor was a horrible example for an effective hosted app. Now you see why it's unlikely that Google launch a hosted-application service in the near future. Still, micropayments or not, a payment system would be an excellent building block for Google's empire.
Hey I actually like joe (Joe's Own Editor), which is a direct descendant interface-wise, of Wordstar. I usually point unix-newbs to joe and let them choose later whether to side with vi or emacs.
One thing Paypal does not do well is micropayments, or payments under $1, but it's something Google does very well. Consider the millions of virtual pennies they daily count for AdSense. (or is it AdCents?!)
The virtual wallet metaphor has been tried many times with no success, but Google has the clout and expertise to do it. There are thousands of web publishers that want to charge 2c to read a page (NYTimes?) but have no effective means to do so. A micropayment system might even be a necessary prerequisite to a hosted applications model -- some prognosticators are convinced Google will begin selling PCs with a Linux-based OS, hosting applications on a subscription or pay-per-use model. Would you pay 1c every time you opened Google's continuall-improved word processor?
Also, Google enjoys loads more user trust than Paypal. I've moved over $10,000 through Paypal, but they wouldn't lift a finger to help me when I was the victim of a $500 fraud. There are many stories of unduly locked/suspended accounts and a severe lack of investigatory dur diligence on Paypal's part. If Google brings a "Do No Evil" alternative payment system, you better believe I'll switch.
Finally, eBay might not like Google developing a competitor to Paypal (assuming it actually will be... RTFA), but eBay's bread and butter is listing and final value fees, not Paypal transaction charges. I'd bet eBay is much more concerned about Google Base than about a payment system. Of course, the combined threat (of Google Base and a Google Payments) is massive.
Exactly -- pentium conjures "fifth generation," or at best a years-old product, which isn't the image they want for the newest dual core processors. CPU technology has come a long way since the pentium, and the name should reflect that. But it's much deeper than that -- Intel's fighting the brand battle 3-6 years in the future. They're positioning the Intel brand to be much stronger in the coming years.
When you know how to spot it, it become blatantly obvious: product identifiers become non-words or just short strings of digits so the manufacturer's name will again become part of product mentions. Auto manufacturers have known this for decades. Remember when the "Legend" and "Vigor" brands disappeared in favor of the "Acura TL" and "Acura RL?" Acura learned form what BMW, Mercedes, and others knew for years. You don't drive a 323i or a C350, you drive a BMW 323i or a Mercedes C350. Only when in-context do the models become shortened to their simple model names or series/class name. Now Intel's following this path.
Keeping the company brand in balance with the products is essential; if one product overshadows the company, the company loses identity. Apple's quietly fighting to keep "Apple" in front of "iPod" and pushing "Mac" back into the name of its flagship notebook. If the company overshadows its products, the products become less competitive and buying habits focus on company loyalty -- think household appliances, in which the brand name is so strong vs individual products that often the same manufacturer supplies many brands with nearly-identical but rebadged versions.
Intel is wise to make the change now. AMD fans brag about "Athlons" and "Opterons," not "AMDs." Intel forces its products to raise the awareness of their company by reducing product names to non-words. Now, their CPUs will be marketed as "Intel D 840" etc and only hardware-aware geeks will shorten it to '840. It's a subtle reminder that Intel (not pentium) is the brand to trust.
Their longstanding "Intel inside" campaign makes this transition possible, even easy. On the other hand, when AMD retires the Athlon name, for instance, they will lose substantial brand awareness because "Athlon" has much more brand strength than "AMD." I've found numerous non-technical people that figure Athlon is made by Intel, simply because that's the only CPU manufacturer they recognize.
Yes, there are privacy and security concerns that stem from Bellster -- what happens when a bomb threat is called in using a Bellster route? -- but these are questions that must be answered as voice and data truly converge. Bellster is a disruptive technology, and Jeff Pulver is all about that.
However, you set the barrier to entry way too high: Asterisk doesn't require a shiny new "PBX-ready" PC. You can choose any of the following bootable CDs to turn any old PC into an Asterisk box with just a Control-Alt-Delete. Not a PC fan? Asterisk now runs on Mac OSX, too. Now the only real barrier is the hardware, an FXO interface to connect to your POTS line. Just such an interface is reasonably priced at Digium.com, the makers of Asterisk.
Don't want to spend all that just to join the free love revolution that Bellster hopes to be? Well, Asterisk has tons of other uses, like being a PBX for your home or office, too. Set up mailboxes for each member of the office or household. Email an incoming voice message automatically. Zap the telemarketers that don't pay attention to the do-not-call list. The list goes on as far as your imagination: Asterisk makes computer telephony accessible to everyone with a computer. Even if Bellster isn't the future of telephony, Asterisk is.
Why bother with the overhead and security risks of organizing unpredictable, unreliable public donations of CPU cycles when ResPower puts a sweet, automated rendering farm at the disposal of anyone with a credit card?
According to their website, ResPower supports all the following 3D software systems:
A global context preserves the power of the word "censorship." Yes, an entire country that systematically eradicates specific literature is engaged in censorship. But no, an ISP that nullroutes a website is not effectively preventing that site's information from being published, since one can use a free proxy, web archive site, or simply a different ISP.
You can claim any definition you wish for 'censorship,' but using the word so casually (toward Google, in this case) will only dilute the power of the concept of censorship.
Are Google's actions and Germany's actions the same to you?
Such liability is an empty threat. You might study a little law before making such statements. One of the prerequisites for such a liability is a specific duty that google owes you, or some consideration you paid for their specific performance. Since neither exists, then your claim of potential liability is, well, without merit.
Google, a private business, offers you a free service. Use it or don't. But do not claim that they owe you specific results (suppressed or not).
If my ISP nullrouted a site containing this kind of material? No, I would not consider that to be censorship, since their nullrouting it does not inhibit the publishing of the site's information.
If, however, the ISP hosting the page removed it, then I would consider that to be censorship. (Unless is was mirrored many other places to make it commonly available. See DeCSS for examples.)
You can qualify and limit the word 'censorship,' by saying that "Google censored the site from their index," or "My ISP censored that IP address from their customers' view." But using such a strong word in a drastically-less-than-global context is abuse of its meaning, which was my earlier point. It's purposefully inflammatory.
Censorship, if any, typically happens close to the publisher, not close to the consumer.
Censorship is the supression of publication, not the supression of endorsement. Google has not removed this filth from the internet, just removed it from their search results. Simply saying "It absolutely is the same thing," does not, in fact, make it the same thing. It's not the same thing.
If you continue to misuse the word 'censor,' you will dilute its value.
Censorship is not the same as filtering. filtering is censoring a sample, not a population
Censorship is not the same as ranking. ranking says only that A is more relevant or applicable than B
Censorship is not the same as preference. does preference of A really mean censorship of B?
Censorship is not the same as choice. choosing A does not mean censoring B
Censorship is not the same as ambivalence. right to free press does not equal a right to be heard in a specific forum, including google's index
Censorship has a specific meaning. Use it carefully and it will continue have meaning. Use it whenever you dislike another's speech (or lack thereof) and you're just crying wolf.
Google did not and cannot censor the page, because Google does not control the publishing of the repugnant page.
Like a library's card catalog, Google is a guide to find information you want. Google has not removed the information you sought, but removed their pointer to that information. That's not the same as burning books or suppressing publication.
Freedom of press does not grant a favorable Google PageRank.
Subtlety is the bane of the scriptkiddie. Forcing your enemies' WebTV boxen to dial 911 is a tactic that lacks creativity, involves an innocent public service as a third party to the conflict, and is downright foolish.
A more elegant, subtle hack that would surely yield more juicy results is to change the dialup number to one that you control. Go ahead and answer the call, accept their authentication, then record all the traffic (email, web, etc.) as it passes through your transparent proxies. If knowledge is power, then raw data from your enemies must be some sort of ammunition.
Sure, the attacker would still be liable to MSN for modifying their licensed hardware, interfering with users, yadda yadda, but it wouldn't have involved the emergency services, which is obviously a hotpoint for the antiterrorism efforts.
The 'Starving Artist' game should better mirror reality. Instead, have students come up with an idea for a record album, cover art, and lyrics... only to be told by teachers that their efforts are considered 'work for hire' and that the sole payment they'll ever see came yesterday, in an advance of peanuts. For better impact, the day before this game, the teachers should inexplicably distribute peanuts to the class, muttering complex legal terms for effect.
While working to repay the generous helping of advance peanuts, the students can be comforted that their art is being shared on the net by those that actually appreciate it.
According to the Terms of Service for your Sitefinder service at [URL], my sole remedy is "to discontinue use of the Verisign services or our site."
I am strongly dissatisfied with the Sitefinder service but cannot discontinue use thereof. Further, with the profit-driven Sitefinder, Verisign has strayed from the spirit of Jon Postel's charter to "preserve the central coordinating functions of the global Internet for the public good."
In addition to the technical objections to the Sitefinder (chiefly the misleading or incorrect error messages generated by wildcards in the.com and.net zones), I bring to your attention the following business objection:
Verisign is abusing its monopoly in the.com,.net, and Global Registry domains via the Sitefinder service. Any domain holder that wishes to avoid Sitefinder's misdirection must register common misspellings, which directly benefits Verisign's Global Registry regardless of the registrar used. No other organization is in a position to so blatantly exploit the domain name system for their own profit.
In addition to the technical objections to the Sitefinder (chiefly the misleading or incorrect error messages generated by wildcards in the.com and.net zones), I bring to your attention the following complaint:
Verisign is abusing its monopoly in the.com,.net, and Global Registry domains via the Sitefinder service. Any domain holder that wishes to avoid Sitefinder's misdirection must register common misspellings of their domain(s), which directly benefits Verisign's Global Registry regardless of the registrar used. No other organization is in a position to so blatantly exploit the domain name system for their own profit.
I disagree to the Term of Service of Verisign's Sitefinder. The Sole Remedy offered in the Terms is impractical, to wit: I, along with millions of of other internet users, cannot discontinue use of Verisign's services without discontinuing use of the DNS, a key component of everyday internet usage. Therefore, I respectfully ask that Verisign discontinue the Sitefinder service immediately.
Sure, you can have a CD-quality telephone call, but you need to agree with your called party on the codec. Radio stations and audio production houses have been sending high-quality audio over ISDN for years.
More specifically, I don't expect high-quality calls to become widespread, because there's always a profit-driven compromise between call capacity and quality. The telephone company will never offer higher quality audio on a widespread basis if it cuts their overall capacity and thus, profit.
I've dreamed of such an arragement, too, but the FCC will not force the Bells to limit their business to infrastructure only. It would be a boon for competition that companies layer themselves much like a protocol stack, but vertical integration brings economies of scale that are lucrative and irresistible.
Asking the Bells to simply sell access to their infrastructure and refrain from competing in the retail market is akin to asking Microsoft to concentrate only on operating systems. Yes, it would prevent an unfair advantage and encourage competition, but this quickly becomes a political discussion on the relative merits of regulation, which is a slippery slope indeed.
Let's run through the typical "last mile" options:
Copper pairs - aging, installed almost everywhere, with metropolitan runs below fifteen thousand feet or so supporting some form of DSL. Great for switched voice (POTS), not bad for midrange bandwidth data (DSL), not a lot of lang-term future possibility, but cheap and already installed.
Coax cable - Almost exclusively controlled by cable television companies, more expensive than a simple copper pair but cheap enough to deliver to all but the most rural areas. Much greater bandwidth than POTS or DSL, also with low latency well-suited to voice or video calls.
Satellite - Reaches nearly everyone in North American than can see the southern sky, nearly all fixed cost structure, and low marginal cost to add a user/subscriber. High latency, but huge bandwidth well-suited to broadcasting the same material to all users.
This article brings to light the fact that fiber to the curb just isn't practical now. My wife works for a company that attempted a speculative fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) build for a neighborhood in Colorado, and the project (among other factors) sent her employer into Chapter 11. FTTC is sexy, yes, but it's just not within economic reach yet.
I've said for a couple years now that cable companies truly have the broadband advantage, but they waste their bandwidth to the curb by competing for television subscriptions. The massive installed base of coax has a much greater bandwidth than your POTS copper pair, but rarely is it used to its full potential.
Owners of huge cable plants will eventually let television delivery fall to satellite deliver (high latency, high broadcast bandwidth) while your everyday coax cable will be more used for low-latency, highly interactive bandwidth like voice and data. Satellite for broadcast, cable for interactive voice/video/data services, and let the POTS pairs finish off their remaining useful life.
If more folks would get reasonable about the realistic uses for fiber (long haul, high bandwidth aggregation circuits) by reading salient articles like this one, we'd more quickly be able to enjoy true broadband in many forms of delivery. It's just going to take more people in decision-making positions that realize the appropriate use of the technologies we have at hand.
Though supporting international, non-English characters in domain names is a Good Thing, Verisign makes some arrogant assumptions in their broken implementation:
a) DNS is only used for HTTP (web). By pointing failed lookups at idnnow.com (198.41.1.35) to see the plugin website, Verisign breaks all other services' proper "not found/unresolved/connection refused" response. "Not found" is a more helpful answer than an erroneous one.
b) The universal web platform is Internet Explorer on Windows. First, it's not just the browser that needs to be patched -- all internet hosts will need updated DNS resolvers to handle the binary, non-ASCII names. Even if (a) were true above, there are many other browsers and platforms than IE/Win. And they're using their monopoly power to leverage proprietary software into users browsers.
c) Everybody speaks English. It's time that we as Americans realize that we are not alone in this world. Pompous assumptions like these foster hatred of the U.S. Yes, Verisign offers eight other translations of idnnow.com, but combined with (a) and (b) above, it's just another broken way that an American Megacorp tells the world How It's Gonna Be.
d) Verisign runs the internet. Okay, so this one's almost true, because they have a stranglehold on some of the internet's most intimate infrastructure... but my big beef with Verisign is that they do not approach their responsibilities with an attitude of service. Nameless servants of the public all over the globe quietly keep the internet up and running, but Verisign's public decisions infer that theirs is the only policy that matters.
A net loss of $100 means that the price was $100 below the cost of goods sold. It's not the same thing as stealing $100 from Microsoft.
If, hypothetically, Microsoft sold an XBOX for $300 that cost $200 to manufacture, then they had a net loss of $100 on that XBOX. That's still $200 in sales and $200 that wasn't spent on a Sony, Sega, or Nintendo console. Or a PC, for that matter.
Besides, it's silly to think that it matters in the least to a company with over $43 BILLION IN CASH. If you think buying an XBOX hurts Microsoft in any way, you might as well try moving an ocean with a spoon. This is one of the few companies in history that actually could sell a product at a loss and "make it up" in volume, by simply driving lesser-funded competitors out of business.
I don't understand all the blind hatred against Microsoft -- if you don't like the company, a) try to change what you don't like about them (write better software so that they improve or lose), and/or b) don't buy their products. It's just that simple.
[posted using Apple's Safari browser on OSX 10.2.3]
Slashdot Mirror
Maildir storage format is resistant to bit-rot because it stores each message in a separate file, and uses filesystem directories for mail folders. It's widely supported by user agents (mail readers) and IMAP/POP3/SMTP servers, so you'll never be stranded by the actions of a single software vendor. Finally, it's easily searched using everyday unix tools - find, grep, sed, awk, etc., and you can use the full-text search engine of your choice for speedy searches.
That's crazy talk. There are many threats to the health and vibrancy of an open source project, and being backed by a commercial company is not a reliable indicator of danger.
Consider the behavior of the project maintainers and planners. Do they engage the community on key issues? Do they accept outside contributions? How are conflicts resolved?
The issue isn't who funds the developers, but the attitudes and behaviors of project leadership.
You maintain your copyright for Asterisk contributions if you used Digium's contributors' agreement.
Read carefully: https://issues.asterisk.org/view_license_agreement.php
Most contributors grant a "perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, irrevocable, non-exclusive, and transferable license" to your contribution that allows dual licensing. Unless you specifically disclaimed your copyright, you still have it.
To prove the point, Keating even linked to his previous interview quoting Lyman as saying, "Trixbox is a free open source community - largely international. Fonality is a commercial paid product, largely domestic. We couldn't be farther apart in communities, interest, or financial objectives. I guess our only real common ground is a usage and love of Asterisk."
First, the stated privacy concerns are no justification for changing the underlying infrastructure. If you're genuinely concerned about privacy, then start encrypting everything you put on the wire. Use anonymizing services.
Secondly, network geeks in general do not grok the economics of the internet on a national or global scale. Without statistical multiplexing and large economies of scale created by the "backbone providers" vilified in the original post, your internet access fees would not be as affordable as they are today. Without large service providers, your connectivity would not be as robust and reliable as it is today.
Finally, large-network interconnection is as much an art of negotiation as it is a science of traffic exchange. Each commercial network relies on access fees to remain solvent, but universal access to the internet requires at least a few large players to exchange traffic. It works best network-wise if this exchange is settlement-free and frictionless: routing protocols get to do the jobs they were designed to do, and bits fly directly to their destination networks. However, networks often want to be paid for such peering, on the basis of unequal exchange, network size, stability, POP count, etc. Adding this "friction" to the creation of network peers balkanizes the net somewhat, and arguably increases stability, but it prevents a rich, dense routing mesh that would be ideal for network efficiency.
Just imagine how wonderfully the internet would work if every AS peered with every other AS in a 50 mile radius. Sure, smaller players would still need to buy transit bandwidth, but two businesses in the same town wouldn't need to send traffic to a coast just to communicate. The optimal way to reduce the need for "huge backbone pipes" (a brutal oversimplification, btw) is more dense interconnection and more direct routing that would result. The drag on such progress is economic and political, not technical.
To say that job satisfaction is above all others is self-serving and short-sighted. It may be true for a season, but there are many, many other motives for work. Think as a long-term investor: be aware of your motivations for accepting a position, and be continually aware of whether the original motives are no longer being served. Be also aware of the opportunities you forgo as you maintain your position. Be willing to change, and be ready to defend (to your own self) your decision.
OKAY, OKAY!!! So a word processor was a horrible example for an effective hosted app. Now you see why it's unlikely that Google launch a hosted-application service in the near future. Still, micropayments or not, a payment system would be an excellent building block for Google's empire.
Hey I actually like joe (Joe's Own Editor), which is a direct descendant interface-wise, of Wordstar. I usually point unix-newbs to joe and let them choose later whether to side with vi or emacs.
One thing Paypal does not do well is micropayments, or payments under $1, but it's something Google does very well. Consider the millions of virtual pennies they daily count for AdSense. (or is it AdCents?!)
The virtual wallet metaphor has been tried many times with no success, but Google has the clout and expertise to do it. There are thousands of web publishers that want to charge 2c to read a page (NYTimes?) but have no effective means to do so. A micropayment system might even be a necessary prerequisite to a hosted applications model -- some prognosticators are convinced Google will begin selling PCs with a Linux-based OS, hosting applications on a subscription or pay-per-use model. Would you pay 1c every time you opened Google's continuall-improved word processor?
Also, Google enjoys loads more user trust than Paypal. I've moved over $10,000 through Paypal, but they wouldn't lift a finger to help me when I was the victim of a $500 fraud. There are many stories of unduly locked/suspended accounts and a severe lack of investigatory dur diligence on Paypal's part. If Google brings a "Do No Evil" alternative payment system, you better believe I'll switch.
Finally, eBay might not like Google developing a competitor to Paypal (assuming it actually will be... RTFA), but eBay's bread and butter is listing and final value fees, not Paypal transaction charges. I'd bet eBay is much more concerned about Google Base than about a payment system. Of course, the combined threat (of Google Base and a Google Payments) is massive.
roderickm
Exactly -- pentium conjures "fifth generation," or at best a years-old product, which isn't the image they want for the newest dual core processors. CPU technology has come a long way since the pentium, and the name should reflect that. But it's much deeper than that -- Intel's fighting the brand battle 3-6 years in the future. They're positioning the Intel brand to be much stronger in the coming years.
When you know how to spot it, it become blatantly obvious: product identifiers become non-words or just short strings of digits so the manufacturer's name will again become part of product mentions. Auto manufacturers have known this for decades. Remember when the "Legend" and "Vigor" brands disappeared in favor of the "Acura TL" and "Acura RL?" Acura learned form what BMW, Mercedes, and others knew for years. You don't drive a 323i or a C350, you drive a BMW 323i or a Mercedes C350. Only when in-context do the models become shortened to their simple model names or series/class name. Now Intel's following this path.
Keeping the company brand in balance with the products is essential; if one product overshadows the company, the company loses identity. Apple's quietly fighting to keep "Apple" in front of "iPod" and pushing "Mac" back into the name of its flagship notebook. If the company overshadows its products, the products become less competitive and buying habits focus on company loyalty -- think household appliances, in which the brand name is so strong vs individual products that often the same manufacturer supplies many brands with nearly-identical but rebadged versions.
Intel is wise to make the change now. AMD fans brag about "Athlons" and "Opterons," not "AMDs." Intel forces its products to raise the awareness of their company by reducing product names to non-words. Now, their CPUs will be marketed as "Intel D 840" etc and only hardware-aware geeks will shorten it to '840. It's a subtle reminder that Intel (not pentium) is the brand to trust.
Their longstanding "Intel inside" campaign makes this transition possible, even easy. On the other hand, when AMD retires the Athlon name, for instance, they will lose substantial brand awareness because "Athlon" has much more brand strength than "AMD." I've found numerous non-technical people that figure Athlon is made by Intel, simply because that's the only CPU manufacturer they recognize.
Yes, there are privacy and security concerns that stem from Bellster -- what happens when a bomb threat is called in using a Bellster route? -- but these are questions that must be answered as voice and data truly converge. Bellster is a disruptive technology, and Jeff Pulver is all about that.
e d.it/asterisk/p ://www.osdisc.com/cgi-bin/view.cgi/products/li vecd/asterisklive
However, you set the barrier to entry way too high: Asterisk doesn't require a shiny new "PBX-ready" PC. You can choose any of the following bootable CDs to turn any old PC into an Asterisk box with just a Control-Alt-Delete. Not a PC fan? Asterisk now runs on Mac OSX, too. Now the only real barrier is the hardware, an FXO interface to connect to your POTS line. Just such an interface is reasonably priced at Digium.com, the makers of Asterisk.
Bootable Asterisk CDs:
http://knopsterisk.com/
http://www.automat
http://www.xorcom.com/rapid/
htt
Don't want to spend all that just to join the free love revolution that Bellster hopes to be? Well, Asterisk has tons of other uses, like being a PBX for your home or office, too. Set up mailboxes for each member of the office or household. Email an incoming voice message automatically. Zap the telemarketers that don't pay attention to the do-not-call list. The list goes on as far as your imagination: Asterisk makes computer telephony accessible to everyone with a computer. Even if Bellster isn't the future of telephony, Asterisk is.
According to their website, ResPower supports all the following 3D software systems:
A global context preserves the power of the word "censorship." Yes, an entire country that systematically eradicates specific literature is engaged in censorship. But no, an ISP that nullroutes a website is not effectively preventing that site's information from being published, since one can use a free proxy, web archive site, or simply a different ISP.
You can claim any definition you wish for 'censorship,' but using the word so casually (toward Google, in this case) will only dilute the power of the concept of censorship.
Are Google's actions and Germany's actions the same to you?
Such liability is an empty threat. You might study a little law before making such statements. One of the prerequisites for such a liability is a specific duty that google owes you, or some consideration you paid for their specific performance. Since neither exists, then your claim of potential liability is, well, without merit.
Google, a private business, offers you a free service. Use it or don't. But do not claim that they owe you specific results (suppressed or not).
If my ISP nullrouted a site containing this kind of material? No, I would not consider that to be censorship, since their nullrouting it does not inhibit the publishing of the site's information.
If, however, the ISP hosting the page removed it, then I would consider that to be censorship. (Unless is was mirrored many other places to make it commonly available. See DeCSS for examples.)
You can qualify and limit the word 'censorship,' by saying that "Google censored the site from their index," or "My ISP censored that IP address from their customers' view." But using such a strong word in a drastically-less-than-global context is abuse of its meaning, which was my earlier point. It's purposefully inflammatory.
Censorship, if any, typically happens close to the publisher, not close to the consumer.
If you continue to misuse the word 'censor,' you will dilute its value.
- Censorship is not the same as filtering.
- Censorship is not the same as ranking.
- Censorship is not the same as preference.
- Censorship is not the same as choice.
- Censorship is not the same as ambivalence.
Censorship has a specific meaning. Use it carefully and it will continue have meaning. Use it whenever you dislike another's speech (or lack thereof) and you're just crying wolf.filtering is censoring a sample, not a population
ranking says only that A is more relevant or applicable than B
does preference of A really mean censorship of B?
choosing A does not mean censoring B
right to free press does not equal a right to be heard in a specific forum, including google's index
Google did not and cannot censor the page, because Google does not control the publishing of the repugnant page.
Like a library's card catalog, Google is a guide to find information you want. Google has not removed the information you sought, but removed their pointer to that information. That's not the same as burning books or suppressing publication.
Freedom of press does not grant a favorable Google PageRank.
Subtlety is the bane of the scriptkiddie. Forcing your enemies' WebTV boxen to dial 911 is a tactic that lacks creativity, involves an innocent public service as a third party to the conflict, and is downright foolish.
A more elegant, subtle hack that would surely yield more juicy results is to change the dialup number to one that you control. Go ahead and answer the call, accept their authentication, then record all the traffic (email, web, etc.) as it passes through your transparent proxies. If knowledge is power, then raw data from your enemies must be some sort of ammunition.
Sure, the attacker would still be liable to MSN for modifying their licensed hardware, interfering with users, yadda yadda, but it wouldn't have involved the emergency services, which is obviously a hotpoint for the antiterrorism efforts.
The 'Starving Artist' game should better mirror reality. Instead, have students come up with an idea for a record album, cover art, and lyrics... only to be told by teachers that their efforts are considered 'work for hire' and that the sole payment they'll ever see came yesterday, in an advance of peanuts. For better impact, the day before this game, the teachers should inexplicably distribute peanuts to the class, muttering complex legal terms for effect.
While working to repay the generous helping of advance peanuts, the students can be comforted that their art is being shared on the net by those that actually appreciate it.
Sure, you can have a CD-quality telephone call, but you need to agree with your called party on the codec. Radio stations and audio production houses have been sending high-quality audio over ISDN for years.
More specifically, I don't expect high-quality calls to become widespread, because there's always a profit-driven compromise between call capacity and quality. The telephone company will never offer higher quality audio on a widespread basis if it cuts their overall capacity and thus, profit.
I've dreamed of such an arragement, too, but the FCC will not force the Bells to limit their business to infrastructure only. It would be a boon for competition that companies layer themselves much like a protocol stack, but vertical integration brings economies of scale that are lucrative and irresistible.
Asking the Bells to simply sell access to their infrastructure and refrain from competing in the retail market is akin to asking Microsoft to concentrate only on operating systems. Yes, it would prevent an unfair advantage and encourage competition, but this quickly becomes a political discussion on the relative merits of regulation, which is a slippery slope indeed.
This article brings to light the fact that fiber to the curb just isn't practical now. My wife works for a company that attempted a speculative fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) build for a neighborhood in Colorado, and the project (among other factors) sent her employer into Chapter 11. FTTC is sexy, yes, but it's just not within economic reach yet.
I've said for a couple years now that cable companies truly have the broadband advantage, but they waste their bandwidth to the curb by competing for television subscriptions. The massive installed base of coax has a much greater bandwidth than your POTS copper pair, but rarely is it used to its full potential.
Owners of huge cable plants will eventually let television delivery fall to satellite deliver (high latency, high broadcast bandwidth) while your everyday coax cable will be more used for low-latency, highly interactive bandwidth like voice and data. Satellite for broadcast, cable for interactive voice/video/data services, and let the POTS pairs finish off their remaining useful life.
If more folks would get reasonable about the realistic uses for fiber (long haul, high bandwidth aggregation circuits) by reading salient articles like this one, we'd more quickly be able to enjoy true broadband in many forms of delivery. It's just going to take more people in decision-making positions that realize the appropriate use of the technologies we have at hand.
Though supporting international, non-English characters in domain names is a Good Thing, Verisign makes some arrogant assumptions in their broken implementation:
a) DNS is only used for HTTP (web). By pointing failed lookups at idnnow.com (198.41.1.35) to see the plugin website, Verisign breaks all other services' proper "not found/unresolved/connection refused" response. "Not found" is a more helpful answer than an erroneous one.
b) The universal web platform is Internet Explorer on Windows. First, it's not just the browser that needs to be patched -- all internet hosts will need updated DNS resolvers to handle the binary, non-ASCII names. Even if (a) were true above, there are many other browsers and platforms than IE/Win. And they're using their monopoly power to leverage proprietary software into users browsers.
c) Everybody speaks English. It's time that we as Americans realize that we are not alone in this world. Pompous assumptions like these foster hatred of the U.S. Yes, Verisign offers eight other translations of idnnow.com, but combined with (a) and (b) above, it's just another broken way that an American Megacorp tells the world How It's Gonna Be.
d) Verisign runs the internet. Okay, so this one's almost true, because they have a stranglehold on some of the internet's most intimate infrastructure... but my big beef with Verisign is that they do not approach their responsibilities with an attitude of service. Nameless servants of the public all over the globe quietly keep the internet up and running, but Verisign's public decisions infer that theirs is the only policy that matters.
So, can we just mod Verision as "arrogant?"
roderickm
A net loss of $100 means that the price was $100 below the cost of goods sold. It's not the same thing as stealing $100 from Microsoft.
If, hypothetically, Microsoft sold an XBOX for $300 that cost $200 to manufacture, then they had a net loss of $100 on that XBOX. That's still $200 in sales and $200 that wasn't spent on a Sony, Sega, or Nintendo console. Or a PC, for that matter.
Besides, it's silly to think that it matters in the least to a company with over $43 BILLION IN CASH. If you think buying an XBOX hurts Microsoft in any way, you might as well try moving an ocean with a spoon. This is one of the few companies in history that actually could sell a product at a loss and "make it up" in volume, by simply driving lesser-funded competitors out of business.
I don't understand all the blind hatred against Microsoft -- if you don't like the company, a) try to change what you don't like about them (write better software so that they improve or lose), and/or b) don't buy their products. It's just that simple.
[posted using Apple's Safari browser on OSX 10.2.3]