they are trying desperately to make Google, Amazon, etc. pay more for "using their pipes". They have run out of real ways to make money and are trying anything they can to get new revenue.
They can only cut employees so far to show saving/revenue quarter over quarter. This is kind of like the wheel wrights that used to make wheels for wagons. That was a booming business back when wagons and horses were the main mode of transportation. As the automobile and the train displaced wagons the entire industry of making wagon wheels died. The idea of a wired telephone is in the process of dying. And it will take cause the existing telephone companies to go out of business or if they are lucky adapt to the new technology. And that is what we are seeing. The SBC/AT&T/BellSouth mergers now put the entire Cingular wireless network under one company again. If they are smart they will build on that as the new base of the combined company shedding all the other parts. And that will work until the next major change in communications happens. Same thing happened to the pony express and telegrams. (Western Union just recently stopped providing telegram service too.) For now the new mainstream communications method is celluar. And with the added data services and smart phones coming out as well as increased battery life it will continue to the growth market for awhile. So what will the next big communications technology change be? Quantum phones?
Since they broke up AT&T free market forces have been in play. AT&T was burdened by additional restrictions compared to the RBOCs which put AT&T at a disadvantage in most cases. Since the original government mandated break up each regional company has either survived or died based on how well they performed. It has been very interesting to see how the original baby bells have floundered around for the most part with the introduction of VOIP and wireless services. They started out based on a shrinking revenue base and if they did not reinvent themselves using some of the new technologies they have been acquired or continue to lose out to newer companies.
So other than the original break up it has all been free market pressures that have forced the various mergers and acqusitions.
Why all the fuss about the telecom mergers/aqusitions? It is the nature of a free market that some companies will win and others lose. The losers generally get bought out and absorbed by the winners. The break up created a number of artificial players in the industry which have since sucumbed to market pressures/bad management/changing industry resulting in the consolidation of the industry. The big problem is that technology is changing so quickly that the old mega corporations can not change quickly enough. This was evident with AT&T which stumbled around on inertia for many many years, sheding parts of the company to prop up the old paradigm for doing business until there was nothing else to shed. That was when SBC saw its chance to acquire the parent company at a price the accounts thought was a good deal. It will be interesting to see what parts of the old AT&T are canabalized for use and which parts will be discarded. Based on past experience neither organization really knows what it is doing. All they seem to do anymore is try to make the numbers for the next quarter so the stock holders and pundits are pleased so the stock price goes up. Which is the real problem with the entire industry, they are not able to look much further than 3 months down the road to the next analyst meeting. With most projects taking more than 3 months to implement and reap any rewards very few get a chance to be completed. They get cut, or the people get cut, before some of the more inovative ideas have a chance to make money.
But without the "eye candy" is there any reason to pay for the more expensive version of vista? If this actually happens then most programmers won't write anything that uses any of the "eye candy" because most users won't have it and won't see it. Why spend time fiddling with stuff that no one uses?
It also begs the question of why would anybody let alone a company pay for "eye candy" when that is not needed to get the job done?
Expect people and companies to continue using XP for the next couple of decades instead of spending money to upgrade to vista. From the sounds of it there is nothing in vista that are "must have" type features. And the programers will follow the market and continue to turn out their applications to work on the largest common denominator of systems/users out there.
Would be interesting to see what the "major pieces of software" companies would do when selling to government or even large corporate customers which do not allow connectivity to the Internet for specific LAN segments running specific services. I am sure they would make an exception and disable this feature or be forced to provide a "licensing server in a box" setup. Not everything can or should be connected to the Internet or allowed to communicate to systems outside of your LAN. And in some cases it is a hard requirement due to security or regulatory mandates.
But I guess that won't keep idiot government procurement offices from paying full price for the next version of windows when many installations of it won't be able to "authenticate" itself since they won't have Internet access.
Which raises the question: how are they going to handle this on laptops? If you have an Internet connection, hardwired or wireless, you get all the features, but if you are in a dead zone, airplane, unable to connect you don't get the features you are used to seeing when connected? I would think that would provide a very poor user experience. In that case why bother with the fancy new features, particularly if you can work in a "degraded" mode just fine?
Not only that but in order for companies to get the most from their programing dollars they will write their programs for the largest group of users. From the sounds of things that will be those running the stripped down consumer version of windows.
Microsoft probably won't realize this until after they release the full blown version (sometime in 2015) but by splitting their users in this way most companies will not bother to use the enhanced capabilities of the more expensive OS since only a small percentage of users will have it. Expect to see people continue to use XP for many many years to come since upgrading won't provide any need to have features.
Which why you need to go after the source of the money. Send out a phish and/or spam email to everyone, those that respond or click on the links are traced and have their computers confiscated and are banned from the Internet. Remove the source of the money and the problem will fix itself.
If ISPs were really interested in fighting spam then they would take the following measures:
Block port 25 in and out to end users (provide a registration process for the few power users that want to run their own MTA)
Implement greylisting on the ISPs MTAs (will block the vast majority of spam bots)
run spamassassin or similar tools on the ISPs MTA
Monitor outgoing message counts and investigate those above a critical threshold (can't be that many legitimate users sending more than a few hundred messages a day, all the rest are probably spammers)
If ISP's were really serious about reducing or eliminating spam there are relatively simple ways to do it. But they make money off of the spammers by hosting their web sites and providing bandwidth. And if you are spending millions on apparently ineffective solutions to fight spam you have obviously selected the wrong solution.
Wow. You don't actually think people *buy* real stuff from spammers? And that the spammers are really selling the stuff they're advertising? Ok, maybe the pharma spammers, but the rest of them? Not so much. These people are theves. They steal for a living.
These people are paying money for something, if no one was responding and giving money to these people why would the keep spamming like they do? True, the idiots may not get anything for the money, but if they respond then they should be stopped from ever doing it again, banning them from the Internet and use of computers would fix that problem.
Someone somewhere is making money at spamming, if you interrupt the flow of money the spammers will move on to other schemes to defraud people of money.
Actually none of the ISPs have any interest in reducing spam. They make to much money off of the spam operators and the sites that host the products provided by the spammers. Taking actual measures to reduce spam would cost the ISPs to much money.
Instead, they want to make money from legimate companies that want to get their messages to end users. This is a win win for the ISPs, but does nothing for end users.
As discussed many times here the only way to defeat spam is to choke off the money flow to the people that use spam to advertise. There are two ways to stop the flow of money. First is to go after the spammers and advertisers. So far this has proven ineffective. Second way is to go after the idiots that actually buy stuff from spammers. This should be relatively easy. Send out spam and when the idiots bite you get their IP addresses and their names and probably their credit card info. Then send the police around to their homes to confiscate their computers, cancel their ISP connections, and ban them from using computers or the Internet forever. It will take about a year or two to track all the idiots down, but once the flow of money has been stopped the spam will stop.
I read the same section you quoted. And I ask again, doesn't the fast forward option allow you to skip most commercials? The section you quoted says commecials can not be avoided. So which is it?
I built a mythtv system over a year ago and have rarely watched live tv since. The commercial skip feature on mythtv works pretty well.:)
As to the article, if they allow you to "fast forward" doesn't that let you avoid most of the commercials? Or have they figured out how to block the fast forward when a commercial is playing?
Damn metric/standard conversion! Was the lenght of the runway measured in meters or feet? Get the guy that worked on the Mars orbiter, I know he knows how to convert this stuff correctly.
Apparently it has become common for certain people to go around to small towns all over the country that have civil war era cannons and convince the towns to turn them over, sometimes for nothing, and other times for small amounts of money. The cannons then end up in some private collection. The problem as you pointed out is that those cannons apparently legally belong to the federal government and were orginally presented to the towns for display. Some towns have spent many thousands of dollars to get their cannons back from these collectors.
The Earth's climate has changed in the past and it will change in the future. All we can do is adapt to it. The change is not happening over night. There is plenty of time to adapt. Coastal cities will either build flood control walls or will be slowly abandonded as the coast lines change. In another few hundred years the decendants of the current Chicken Little's will be screaming about global cooling and how they no longer have beach front property.
If you want a static climate then establish self sustaining colonies off this planet. Only in completly sealed environments are you going to be able to have a non-changing environment. Just don't make the same errors that the Spaceship Earth people did in there experiment many years ago. Oh wait, they also had a carbon dioxide issue. Seems they could not control even a small enclosed environment. And people think we can control the Earths environment.
His last Q&A? I think you missed the point, he was absolutely serious about what he said. He has to become a saint first so he can then be declared a god.
The article kind of shows RMS is going over board a little on the "free software" idea. The main thing that jumps out is that RMS wants more credit for the GNU idea. Sounds like he would have prefered the BSD license in this case.
And at the rate RMS is going he is forcing everyone to choose up sides, take your pick, RMS and his do it his way or the highway approach or Linus, Linux, Sun, and other useful software tools. A few more rants like this one and I think most people will choose a side. But not the one RMS wants.
Just get over it and adapt. Global warming is not something that can be changed. The Earth has gone through many many cycles of warming and cooling. We are going into another cycle of warming. So invest in boats and water pumps and build flood control walls around coastal cities. Things are going to change. Adapt or die.
Or if you want an unchanging environment move off the Earth and live in space.
If its 'open source', then it will be trivial for any qualified coder who wants to produce a modified version of the code to remove the restrictions instead of enforcing them.
Hush! Don't spill the beans on this yet. Let them get this accepted by the industry and keep the modified code a secret.
Re:Simulations are lacking, here's why
on
Students vs. Hackers
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Not only is the end user normally the weak point there is also the complacency factor that hits the security team itself. But that only happens over time, usually an extended period of time. The longer a collection of systems are in place the more likely that one of the administrators will short cut procedures and leave a system exposed.
In a similulation as described in the article everyone is hyper vigilant and actively looking at all aspects of security. In the normal world it is rare that the entire team would be operating at such a highened state of alert all the time.
And external threats while real are less likely than an internal user using knowledge or capabilities granted to those users to compromise systems or data. Users also allow viruses onto firewalled networks either knowingly or unknowingly. Internal threats are more common than external threats and much harder to protect against.
Actually I think they have implemented an improved version. These sites don't have the infrastructure costs associated with maintaining the monkeys. The parents of the monkeys provide the support infrastructure. There is still the problem of how to detect when the million monkeys have produced something useful. Again, these sites have a solution, they let another million monkeys watch the results and comment on any results that show promise.
So where do books that are neither technical nor fiction, such as Defensa Apasionada del Idioma Espanol , go?
Holy SHIT! Can't anyone think for themselves and extrapolate a solution without someone spoon feeding the solution to them? CREATE ANOTHER CATEGORY DUMBASS!
Seriously! What are they teaching in school these days?
Slashdot Mirror
they are trying desperately to make Google, Amazon, etc. pay more for "using their pipes". They have run out of real ways to make money and are trying anything they can to get new revenue.
They can only cut employees so far to show saving/revenue quarter over quarter. This is kind of like the wheel wrights that used to make wheels for wagons. That was a booming business back when wagons and horses were the main mode of transportation. As the automobile and the train displaced wagons the entire industry of making wagon wheels died. The idea of a wired telephone is in the process of dying. And it will take cause the existing telephone companies to go out of business or if they are lucky adapt to the new technology. And that is what we are seeing. The SBC/AT&T/BellSouth mergers now put the entire Cingular wireless network under one company again. If they are smart they will build on that as the new base of the combined company shedding all the other parts. And that will work until the next major change in communications happens. Same thing happened to the pony express and telegrams. (Western Union just recently stopped providing telegram service too.) For now the new mainstream communications method is celluar. And with the added data services and smart phones coming out as well as increased battery life it will continue to the growth market for awhile. So what will the next big communications technology change be? Quantum phones?
Since they broke up AT&T free market forces have been in play. AT&T was burdened by additional restrictions compared to the RBOCs which put AT&T at a disadvantage in most cases. Since the original government mandated break up each regional company has either survived or died based on how well they performed. It has been very interesting to see how the original baby bells have floundered around for the most part with the introduction of VOIP and wireless services. They started out based on a shrinking revenue base and if they did not reinvent themselves using some of the new technologies they have been acquired or continue to lose out to newer companies.
So other than the original break up it has all been free market pressures that have forced the various mergers and acqusitions.
Why all the fuss about the telecom mergers/aqusitions? It is the nature of a free market that some companies will win and others lose. The losers generally get bought out and absorbed by the winners. The break up created a number of artificial players in the industry which have since sucumbed to market pressures/bad management/changing industry resulting in the consolidation of the industry. The big problem is that technology is changing so quickly that the old mega corporations can not change quickly enough. This was evident with AT&T which stumbled around on inertia for many many years, sheding parts of the company to prop up the old paradigm for doing business until there was nothing else to shed. That was when SBC saw its chance to acquire the parent company at a price the accounts thought was a good deal. It will be interesting to see what parts of the old AT&T are canabalized for use and which parts will be discarded. Based on past experience neither organization really knows what it is doing. All they seem to do anymore is try to make the numbers for the next quarter so the stock holders and pundits are pleased so the stock price goes up. Which is the real problem with the entire industry, they are not able to look much further than 3 months down the road to the next analyst meeting. With most projects taking more than 3 months to implement and reap any rewards very few get a chance to be completed. They get cut, or the people get cut, before some of the more inovative ideas have a chance to make money.
But without the "eye candy" is there any reason to pay for the more expensive version of vista? If this actually happens then most programmers won't write anything that uses any of the "eye candy" because most users won't have it and won't see it. Why spend time fiddling with stuff that no one uses?
It also begs the question of why would anybody let alone a company pay for "eye candy" when that is not needed to get the job done?
Expect people and companies to continue using XP for the next couple of decades instead of spending money to upgrade to vista. From the sounds of it there is nothing in vista that are "must have" type features. And the programers will follow the market and continue to turn out their applications to work on the largest common denominator of systems/users out there.
Would be interesting to see what the "major pieces of software" companies would do when selling to government or even large corporate customers which do not allow connectivity to the Internet for specific LAN segments running specific services. I am sure they would make an exception and disable this feature or be forced to provide a "licensing server in a box" setup. Not everything can or should be connected to the Internet or allowed to communicate to systems outside of your LAN. And in some cases it is a hard requirement due to security or regulatory mandates.
But I guess that won't keep idiot government procurement offices from paying full price for the next version of windows when many installations of it won't be able to "authenticate" itself since they won't have Internet access.
Which raises the question: how are they going to handle this on laptops? If you have an Internet connection, hardwired or wireless, you get all the features, but if you are in a dead zone, airplane, unable to connect you don't get the features you are used to seeing when connected? I would think that would provide a very poor user experience. In that case why bother with the fancy new features, particularly if you can work in a "degraded" mode just fine?
Not only that but in order for companies to get the most from their programing dollars they will write their programs for the largest group of users. From the sounds of things that will be those running the stripped down consumer version of windows.
Microsoft probably won't realize this until after they release the full blown version (sometime in 2015) but by splitting their users in this way most companies will not bother to use the enhanced capabilities of the more expensive OS since only a small percentage of users will have it. Expect to see people continue to use XP for many many years to come since upgrading won't provide any need to have features.
Reminds me of the Hammer's Slammers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hammer's_Slammers tanks which used 3cm power guns for artillery defense. Now all we need to do is setup a tank with the AI used in the DARPA challenge to navigate the battle field. In no time at all we could have a fully functional BOLO http://users.stargate.net/~whkeith/htm/bolo.htm. But then we need to be real careful not to create a BERSERKER http://www.berserker.com/about_berserkers.htm.
Which why you need to go after the source of the money. Send out a phish and/or spam email to everyone, those that respond or click on the links are traced and have their computers confiscated and are banned from the Internet. Remove the source of the money and the problem will fix itself.
If ISPs were really interested in fighting spam then they would take the following measures:
Block port 25 in and out to end users (provide a registration process for the few power users that want to run their own MTA)
Implement greylisting on the ISPs MTAs (will block the vast majority of spam bots)
run spamassassin or similar tools on the ISPs MTA
Monitor outgoing message counts and investigate those above a critical threshold (can't be that many legitimate users sending more than a few hundred messages a day, all the rest are probably spammers)
If ISP's were really serious about reducing or eliminating spam there are relatively simple ways to do it. But they make money off of the spammers by hosting their web sites and providing bandwidth. And if you are spending millions on apparently ineffective solutions to fight spam you have obviously selected the wrong solution.
Wow. You don't actually think people *buy* real stuff from spammers? And that the spammers are really selling the stuff they're advertising? Ok, maybe the pharma spammers, but the rest of them? Not so much. These people are theves. They steal for a living.
These people are paying money for something, if no one was responding and giving money to these people why would the keep spamming like they do? True, the idiots may not get anything for the money, but if they respond then they should be stopped from ever doing it again, banning them from the Internet and use of computers would fix that problem.
Someone somewhere is making money at spamming, if you interrupt the flow of money the spammers will move on to other schemes to defraud people of money.
Actually none of the ISPs have any interest in reducing spam. They make to much money off of the spam operators and the sites that host the products provided by the spammers. Taking actual measures to reduce spam would cost the ISPs to much money.
Instead, they want to make money from legimate companies that want to get their messages to end users. This is a win win for the ISPs, but does nothing for end users.
As discussed many times here the only way to defeat spam is to choke off the money flow to the people that use spam to advertise. There are two ways to stop the flow of money. First is to go after the spammers and advertisers. So far this has proven ineffective. Second way is to go after the idiots that actually buy stuff from spammers. This should be relatively easy. Send out spam and when the idiots bite you get their IP addresses and their names and probably their credit card info. Then send the police around to their homes to confiscate their computers, cancel their ISP connections, and ban them from using computers or the Internet forever. It will take about a year or two to track all the idiots down, but once the flow of money has been stopped the spam will stop.
I read the same section you quoted. And I ask again, doesn't the fast forward option allow you to skip most commercials? The section you quoted says commecials can not be avoided. So which is it?
I built a mythtv system over a year ago and have rarely watched live tv since. The commercial skip feature on mythtv works pretty well. :)
As to the article, if they allow you to "fast forward" doesn't that let you avoid most of the commercials? Or have they figured out how to block the fast forward when a commercial is playing?
Obviously the runway wasn't long enough.
Damn metric/standard conversion! Was the lenght of the runway measured in meters or feet? Get the guy that worked on the Mars orbiter, I know he knows how to convert this stuff correctly.
Embrace and "Extend".
Damn spam. Yet another Viagra ad.
I do find it funny that Microsoft is running a lab with 300 linux servers.
Apparently it has become common for certain people to go around to small towns all over the country that have civil war era cannons and convince the towns to turn them over, sometimes for nothing, and other times for small amounts of money. The cannons then end up in some private collection. The problem as you pointed out is that those cannons apparently legally belong to the federal government and were orginally presented to the towns for display. Some towns have spent many thousands of dollars to get their cannons back from these collectors.
Someone please mod the parent UP!
The Earth's climate has changed in the past and it will change in the future. All we can do is adapt to it. The change is not happening over night. There is plenty of time to adapt. Coastal cities will either build flood control walls or will be slowly abandonded as the coast lines change. In another few hundred years the decendants of the current Chicken Little's will be screaming about global cooling and how they no longer have beach front property.
If you want a static climate then establish self sustaining colonies off this planet. Only in completly sealed environments are you going to be able to have a non-changing environment. Just don't make the same errors that the Spaceship Earth people did in there experiment many years ago. Oh wait, they also had a carbon dioxide issue. Seems they could not control even a small enclosed environment. And people think we can control the Earths environment.
Did anyone else think breast implants when reading the headline? I figure they could be seeing in brail with such implants....
His last Q&A? I think you missed the point, he was absolutely serious about what he said. He has to become a saint first so he can then be declared a god.
The article kind of shows RMS is going over board a little on the "free software" idea. The main thing that jumps out is that RMS wants more credit for the GNU idea. Sounds like he would have prefered the BSD license in this case.
And at the rate RMS is going he is forcing everyone to choose up sides, take your pick, RMS and his do it his way or the highway approach or Linus, Linux, Sun, and other useful software tools. A few more rants like this one and I think most people will choose a side. But not the one RMS wants.
Just get over it and adapt. Global warming is not something that can be changed. The Earth has gone through many many cycles of warming and cooling. We are going into another cycle of warming. So invest in boats and water pumps and build flood control walls around coastal cities. Things are going to change. Adapt or die.
Or if you want an unchanging environment move off the Earth and live in space.
If its 'open source', then it will be trivial for any qualified coder who wants to produce a modified version of the code to remove the restrictions instead of enforcing them.
Hush! Don't spill the beans on this yet. Let them get this accepted by the industry and keep the modified code a secret.
Not only is the end user normally the weak point there is also the complacency factor that hits the security team itself. But that only happens over time, usually an extended period of time. The longer a collection of systems are in place the more likely that one of the administrators will short cut procedures and leave a system exposed.
In a similulation as described in the article everyone is hyper vigilant and actively looking at all aspects of security. In the normal world it is rare that the entire team would be operating at such a highened state of alert all the time.
And external threats while real are less likely than an internal user using knowledge or capabilities granted to those users to compromise systems or data. Users also allow viruses onto firewalled networks either knowingly or unknowingly. Internal threats are more common than external threats and much harder to protect against.
Actually I think they have implemented an improved version. These sites don't have the infrastructure costs associated with maintaining the monkeys. The parents of the monkeys provide the support infrastructure. There is still the problem of how to detect when the million monkeys have produced something useful. Again, these sites have a solution, they let another million monkeys watch the results and comment on any results that show promise.
Someone just figured out a way to harness a million monkeys to randomly type the works of Shakespear given enough time and bandwidth.
Are you one of the monkeys?
So where do books that are neither technical nor fiction, such as Defensa Apasionada del Idioma Espanol , go?
Holy SHIT! Can't anyone think for themselves and extrapolate a solution without someone spoon feeding the solution to them? CREATE ANOTHER CATEGORY DUMBASS!
Seriously! What are they teaching in school these days?