IMO the "WiFi Cloud" is the next revolution in information technologies. There have been only a few, and each time they have shaken the establishment to its roots.
First there was the invention of writing. It made it possible to, for the first time, record information permanently and in a verifiable manner. Count your sheep and have the auditor sign off on it. Fraud reduction and inventory control in the same document.
This was all well and good for the longest time. But the Powers-That-Be locked-up information by effectively encrypting it: keeping the church liturgy in Latin. It was not accessible to the common man.
Then came the invention of the printing press. What an uproar! Suddenly information "wanted to be free" -- tracts and booklets and books and magazines all exploded onto the scene, utterly destroying the lockhold the P-T-B had on it.
Again, things stayed like that for a good long time. The P-T-B again locked up information by copyright, by purchasing controls, by obscurity, and by costs. It became difficult, or at least legally hazardous, to access some information, and expensive to distribute it.
The Internet revolution leveled the field, and once again brought the P-T-Bs to their knees. Information broke free of their bonds once again.
Undoubtedly we will see the P-T-Bs cripple this freedom. It's simply not in their best economic nor power interests to let us commoners share information cheaply or easily. Knowledge is power and money.
I think we'll see wireless networks become the next revolution in information-sharing. When these devices become ubiquitous and fast, the cost of passing-along information from point-to-point will be so cheap as to be free. I've a WiFi router in my house -- what would I care if someone else were to send their data through it? No skin off my ass.
My hope is that some form of "WiFi clouds" becomes the form of information sharing that the Powers-That-Be can not, at last, control and limit to their sole benefit.
The various injuries suffered by walking into doorframes, being doubled-up in the back seat of small cars, tripping over smaller people -- they're all expensive.
I say we should be paying tall people even more. They're suffering, way up there in the sky!
Hell with putting $50 toward a lawsuit. I'll put $50 toward a lottery -- the winner being whoever puts the SCO executive staff out of our misery, by whatever lethal means they choose!
Hmmm. Would a class-action lawsuit do the trick? Does the GPL make it impossible to personally claim infringement of your ownership/copyright of contributed code?
Telemarketers have just as much right to call you as everyone else does.
No they do not.
They are engaging in commercial speech. Commercial speech is subject to any number of restrictions. One of the common and reasonable restrictions -- already applicable to postal mail and faxes, becoming increasingly applicable to email, and highly likely to very quickly become applicable to cell-phone calls -- is that the costs must be born by the commercial entity: ie. they can't send you postage-owing mail, use your fax paper, eat up your monthly data allocation, spend your telephone dollar for you.
Commercial speech restrictions are reasonable and necessary, and telemarketers will very quickly find that out with the very first lawsuit. Precedence has been set in other marketing media, and will be set in this one.
Martin, we're talking evolutionary, over-the-millenia sort of timelines here. Men are evolved to a particular role. That role certainly has nothing to do with education and earnings.
Not to excuse the men aren't worthy meme, but it is the women who bear the children. From that POV, once men have managed to squirt out a few of the little cadgers, their role in this life is pretty much done.
...you could call up Information and harass them f or the 1-800 number for the Direct Marketing Association, or whatever they call themselves up here, and then get your name put on a do-not-call list.
I did this going on eight years ago, and I've received fewer than a dozen telemarketing calls since. My postal junkmail also was reduced.
There is a registry, it can just be a bitch to find out how to get on it. Shouldn't stop you from succeeding, though!
The wholesale cost, the retail price, the price difference between Wal*Mart and the competition, and the percentage profit were all explicitly and clearly listed.
There were very few items with less than 40% markup. Those that were under were so because of competitor price pressure.
- I believe the CRTC would readily consider this to be equivalent to unrequested commercial faxes, in which case you have a *VERY* big club to fight with.
- I believe the telco will readily reduce your bill by $X per month if you can provide a suitable $X for the cost of these spam messages.
- There is a national opt-out service which is highly effective. I don't know the number off-hand. I recall having to hassle the telco to get the number, and it did take a bit of phone tag to find the person who did know it. But in the past eight years, I've had NO telemarketing calls and VERY LITTLE junk snail mail.
- If you can identify the company that left the mail, I suggest you can take them to small claims court for the cost of retrieving their mail, the cost of filing the claim, and the cost of attending court. And I expect you will win (for starters, they won't show up to defend themselves!)
All in all, I think you can readily resolve the problem, quite possibly to your profit!
I've recently been seeing inventory sheets lying around the local Wal*Mart. By appearances, Wal*Mart manages to score a good 50% markup on almost everything. I was rather surprised it was that high.
Kill off Quark? It'll never happen. Quark users have two distinguishing characteristics:
- they are absolute masochists.
- they refuse to learn.
In support of the former point, I present the Quark UI. It is simply fucking awful. It makes it difficult to work quickly and efficiently, and holds itself to no known UI standard. Ugh.
In support of the latter, I present FrameMaker, Ventura, and InDesign.
In every domain, Quark is solidly trounced and thrashed by its competition: FrameMaker and Ventura for long, structured documents (Quark has fuck-all support for the things that are absolutely required to do long document work efficiently); InDesign for short, "artsy" documents (Quark's traditional domain, though it needs a shitload of plugins to accomplish anything useful).
Why do Quark users keep on using such a lousy program? I reiterate my points: undying masochism and steadfast ignorance.
Not a big problem. Simply tell those people who send you MSWord.doc files that you do not and will not accept them in that format, and request that they instead provide an RTF or PDF version.
If you're worried they may not be happy about doing so, explain that.doc supports virus propagation through VB, and that you simply can not afford the risk.
If enough of us do that, the.doc standard will fall.
I live in Canada, too. And I own a Toshiba 1110 laptop. I paid about $1500 for it, at the beginning of this year. It was the cheapest usable (for my purposes) computer I could find.
Pray tell, what kind of WinXP laptop boxen are you finding that are cheaper than the iBook?
For that matter, what Linux laptop boxen with the same processing power as the Powerbook are you able to purchase for less than $2300?
Me, I think you're blowing smoke. $2300 sounds about bog-average for a moderately powerful laptop.
The license is just a piece of paper. MS doesn't care about that piece of paper.
MS cares about damaging Linux. But it must do so in a way that will avoid another lengthy, expensive lawsuit.
By purchasing a "license" from SCO, they have effectively bankrolled Darl's kamikaze attack on Linux. FUD is being strafed all over the place.
Courts can't touch MS on this one. It's a beautiful bit of work, really.
(I believe Sun, OTOH, purchased their license as a protective gamble. If SCO loses, Sun is out of pocket a few million bucks, no big deal. If SCO prevails, Sun is going to make a fortune on Linux sales.)
Slashdot Mirror
THE BEST CANADIAN BANK
Is CitizensBank. It's a credit union, true, but they run a damn fine operation.
For starters, they have a no-cost VISA which donates 10c for *every* transaction to charity, those charities being elected by vote by the members.
Their mortgage rates are frequently the lowest available and are *always* lower than any bank rate.
Their ATM card is no-cost.
And their accounts pay a bit more interest than any of the banks. Not difficult, of course, and not very much.
If you can keep some money in the account -- I think it's a mere $1000 -- there are no banking fees.
IMO the "WiFi Cloud" is the next revolution in information technologies. There have been only a few, and each time they have shaken the establishment to its roots.
First there was the invention of writing. It made it possible to, for the first time, record information permanently and in a verifiable manner. Count your sheep and have the auditor sign off on it. Fraud reduction and inventory control in the same document.
This was all well and good for the longest time. But the Powers-That-Be locked-up information by effectively encrypting it: keeping the church liturgy in Latin. It was not accessible to the common man.
Then came the invention of the printing press. What an uproar! Suddenly information "wanted to be free" -- tracts and booklets and books and magazines all exploded onto the scene, utterly destroying the lockhold the P-T-B had on it.
Again, things stayed like that for a good long time. The P-T-B again locked up information by copyright, by purchasing controls, by obscurity, and by costs. It became difficult, or at least legally hazardous, to access some information, and expensive to distribute it.
The Internet revolution leveled the field, and once again brought the P-T-Bs to their knees. Information broke free of their bonds once again.
Undoubtedly we will see the P-T-Bs cripple this freedom. It's simply not in their best economic nor power interests to let us commoners share information cheaply or easily. Knowledge is power and money.
I think we'll see wireless networks become the next revolution in information-sharing. When these devices become ubiquitous and fast, the cost of passing-along information from point-to-point will be so cheap as to be free. I've a WiFi router in my house -- what would I care if someone else were to send their data through it? No skin off my ass.
My hope is that some form of "WiFi clouds" becomes the form of information sharing that the Powers-That-Be can not, at last, control and limit to their sole benefit.
The various injuries suffered by walking into doorframes, being doubled-up in the back seat of small cars, tripping over smaller people -- they're all expensive.
I say we should be paying tall people even more. They're suffering, way up there in the sky!
Hell with putting $50 toward a lawsuit. I'll put $50 toward a lottery -- the winner being whoever puts the SCO executive staff out of our misery, by whatever lethal means they choose!
Hmmm. Would a class-action lawsuit do the trick? Does the GPL make it impossible to personally claim infringement of your ownership/copyright of contributed code?
Well, the courts have once again disagreed with you. So sad, too bad.
Where do you come up with this loony idea that they have a right to call me?
Telemarketers have just as much right to call you as everyone else does.
No they do not.
They are engaging in commercial speech. Commercial speech is subject to any number of restrictions. One of the common and reasonable restrictions -- already applicable to postal mail and faxes, becoming increasingly applicable to email, and highly likely to very quickly become applicable to cell-phone calls -- is that the costs must be born by the commercial entity: ie. they can't send you postage-owing mail, use your fax paper, eat up your monthly data allocation, spend your telephone dollar for you.
Commercial speech restrictions are reasonable and necessary, and telemarketers will very quickly find that out with the very first lawsuit. Precedence has been set in other marketing media, and will be set in this one.
Martin, we're talking evolutionary, over-the-millenia sort of timelines here. Men are evolved to a particular role. That role certainly has nothing to do with education and earnings.
Call me on a cellphone so that *I* have to pay to be hassled by them? Fuck that. I'd have them in small claims court the next day.
Not to excuse the men aren't worthy meme, but it is the women who bear the children. From that POV, once men have managed to squirt out a few of the little cadgers, their role in this life is pretty much done.
...I agree. I do all sorts of dumb risk-taking things. No doubt my days are numbered!
(On the other hand, it keeps life, um, "exciting". Yup.)
...you could call up Information and harass them f or the 1-800 number for the Direct Marketing Association, or whatever they call themselves up here, and then get your name put on a do-not-call list.
I did this going on eight years ago, and I've received fewer than a dozen telemarketing calls since. My postal junkmail also was reduced.
There is a registry, it can just be a bitch to find out how to get on it. Shouldn't stop you from succeeding, though!
The wholesale cost, the retail price, the price difference between Wal*Mart and the competition, and the percentage profit were all explicitly and clearly listed.
There were very few items with less than 40% markup. Those that were under were so because of competitor price pressure.
- I believe the CRTC would readily consider this to be equivalent to unrequested commercial faxes, in which case you have a *VERY* big club to fight with.
- I believe the telco will readily reduce your bill by $X per month if you can provide a suitable $X for the cost of these spam messages.
- There is a national opt-out service which is highly effective. I don't know the number off-hand. I recall having to hassle the telco to get the number, and it did take a bit of phone tag to find the person who did know it. But in the past eight years, I've had NO telemarketing calls and VERY LITTLE junk snail mail.
- If you can identify the company that left the mail, I suggest you can take them to small claims court for the cost of retrieving their mail, the cost of filing the claim, and the cost of attending court. And I expect you will win (for starters, they won't show up to defend themselves!)
All in all, I think you can readily resolve the problem, quite possibly to your profit!
I've recently been seeing inventory sheets lying around the local Wal*Mart. By appearances, Wal*Mart manages to score a good 50% markup on almost everything. I was rather surprised it was that high.
Kill off Quark? It'll never happen. Quark users have two distinguishing characteristics:
- they are absolute masochists.
- they refuse to learn.
In support of the former point, I present the Quark UI. It is simply fucking awful. It makes it difficult to work quickly and efficiently, and holds itself to no known UI standard. Ugh.
In support of the latter, I present FrameMaker, Ventura, and InDesign.
In every domain, Quark is solidly trounced and thrashed by its competition: FrameMaker and Ventura for long, structured documents (Quark has fuck-all support for the things that are absolutely required to do long document work efficiently); InDesign for short, "artsy" documents (Quark's traditional domain, though it needs a shitload of plugins to accomplish anything useful).
Why do Quark users keep on using such a lousy program? I reiterate my points: undying masochism and steadfast ignorance.
Corel has an available SVG viewer. No idea whether it works.
I, like all of you, have had great fun participating in the sport of Darl-bashing. Frankly, it was just too easy and too amusing to pass up.
But I've had a sudden realization, and I must confess that I'm now rather embarassed at my behaviour, for the truth is this:
Darl McBride must surely be a mental retard. I see no other viable explanation for his actions.
Which means that I've been picking on the handicapped, and that's just unacceptable. I'm terribly embarassed. I didn't realize at first, honest!
Darl, if you're reading this, I apologise. I'm not going to say nasty things about you any more. You have my compassion and pity.
Not a big problem. Simply tell those people who send you MSWord .doc files that you do not and will not accept them in that format, and request that they instead provide an RTF or PDF version.
.doc supports virus propagation through VB, and that you simply can not afford the risk.
.doc standard will fall.
If you're worried they may not be happy about doing so, explain that
If enough of us do that, the
I live in Canada, too. And I own a Toshiba 1110 laptop. I paid about $1500 for it, at the beginning of this year. It was the cheapest usable (for my purposes) computer I could find.
Pray tell, what kind of WinXP laptop boxen are you finding that are cheaper than the iBook?
For that matter, what Linux laptop boxen with the same processing power as the Powerbook are you able to purchase for less than $2300?
Me, I think you're blowing smoke. $2300 sounds about bog-average for a moderately powerful laptop.
Garbage In => Garbage Out.
MOD PARENT UP
What makes you think they're licensing anything?
The license is just a piece of paper. MS doesn't care about that piece of paper.
MS cares about damaging Linux. But it must do so in a way that will avoid another lengthy, expensive lawsuit.
By purchasing a "license" from SCO, they have effectively bankrolled Darl's kamikaze attack on Linux. FUD is being strafed all over the place.
Courts can't touch MS on this one. It's a beautiful bit of work, really.
(I believe Sun, OTOH, purchased their license as a protective gamble. If SCO loses, Sun is out of pocket a few million bucks, no big deal. If SCO prevails, Sun is going to make a fortune on Linux sales.)
Uh-huh. Right with ya there, bro'.
Of course, when the only other viable option is NO broadband at all, I'll quite happily take the monopoly provider, no matter how ugly.
In other words, consider yourself lucky: you at least have a choice to get broadband, whereas most of the US population doesn't even get that.