"Let's go back in history to the 1950s. Standard Oil (split up into Amooco, Exxon, and many others long ago) owned the gas station market in the US. If you were foolish enough to open a gas station near a Standard Oil station they would reduce their prices to below cost until you went out of business, then raise them again and rip the customers off. They could afford to do that, and ended up with little competition."
Much the same thing happens today here in Australia, only it is more a duopoly, and it occurs in the liquor store market (You can't buy beer & wine in the local convenience store over here in Australia).
The alcohol retail market here is dominated by two large players, Woolworths and Coles Myer. Basically, one or the other of these two companies will open a new store in an area that's currently being serviced by one of the dwindling numbers of "Mom & Pop" operated stores, and proceed to price their goods at far lower levels than they do in their other stores where they are not attempting to destroy the local competition. Once the independant store is gone, they go back to price parity with the rest of their own stores and they are one step closer to having 50% each share of total market dominance. They can't be done for being a monopoly, because there are two of them doing it. They don't go up against each other like that, just the independants.
Obviously someone who's never had to use a 1200 baud modem to transfer a one meg file.
Au contraire, I have been using modems since the CP/M days. I cannot remember even having a 1Mb file back then, let alone having to download it with a modem. Even if such a scenario were encountered, the worst thing that can result is you have to wait a while. Big Deal. This is hardly a crisis of epic proportions and does not prove that "having broadband is the most important thing in the world"
"not all bands sounded bad unplugged, and of course it went to the better musicians that really showed their stuff unplugged. Eric Clapton leaps to mind as well as Page/Plant."
Indeed. The old school bands in general fare better when unplugged. The most suprising ones to me were KISS when they did Unplugged in the mid nineties. They sounded pretty good and tight, even when they got "the whole family" back together for the first time in 10 or so years. Most of the more modern wannabes are shown up as the talentless whine-babies that they truly are.
That's what I hate the most about mainstream modern music, the incessant, self absorbed whining that most of their "songs" are based around. Whatever happened to good old fashioned rock and roll?
"Spyware isn't as secretive as they seem to think it was. Much of it is installed with full knowledge of it's existance, but many people ignore the functions of what they download."
You are forgetting the "Auto Yes Click" phenomenon that afflicts most Windows users. BillG has spent years and years assaulting Windows users with "Are you sure you want to do this [YES] [NO]" dialogues that people are now habitualised into clicking on [YES] whenever they see it without reading the context. Lots of spyware gets installed that way.
I swear, a spyware app could flash up a window that says "Do you want to install an annoying browser hijacker than can't be removed [YES] [NO] and many people (read clueless n00bs) would still click [YES]
Just a note Karn, but those were my exact machine specs up until about 6 weeks ago. Then I popped in an XP2400 and another 512Mb RAM and you would not believe the noticeable performance improvement, and it only cost me a coupla hundred Aussie bucks!
But you better hurry, because the t'bird Athlons are getting harder to come by these days.
" Easy to disprove. Just give the dated source, with CVS log. NoCatAuth existed far before the claimed date."
The problem is that you still need to engage lawyers and the courts and the patent holder will do their damnedest to hold out and rack up the costs as long as possible (See SCO vs World for more info)
The end result is that the small company may decide that it is cheaper to simply cough up than to get embroiled in a drawn out legal stoush.
Repost from another post follows;
Perhaps a solution to this problem is to award damages against the claimant to an amount that is double what was being claimed (plus costs) if a bodgy patent doesn't hold water in court.
It would make the companies who decide to sue all and sundry for patent violations think long and hard about the validity of their patent and it would give the company being sued an incentive to actually fight it in court instead of just rolling over because it is the cheapest option.
"Its hard to blame a company for trying to cash in on their patent, even if its not a real invention."
Perhaps a solution to this problem is to award damages against the claiment to an amount that is double what was being claimed (plus costs) if a bodgy patent doesn't hold water in court.
It would make the companies who decide to sue all and sundry for patent violations think long and hard about the validity of their patent and it would give the company being sued an incentive to actually fight it in court instead of just rolling over because it is the cheapest option.
"If this continues and starts to ramp up, it's really going to make software development and deployment completely infeasible. It will inevitably piss off enough corporations that something will happen."
Actually, the really big corporations like this sort of patent fiasco. In fact they were the ones who lobbied for it in the first place.
Big companies can afford to lodge thousands and thousands of patents every year, small ones can't. From the perspective of the three or four major incumbants in the IT industry (Microsoft, Cisco, IBM) this becomes the corporate equivalent of the nuclear arms race. They all hold thousands of patents which they can use to smackdown any small startups that come along and they all have an unwritten agreement that they won't use their patents against each other, because they know that their opponent will countersue them using their own patent portfolio.
It backfires on them occasionally when a small startup patents an idea and it gets under the radar but usually all they have to do then is buy out the startup and they are back to square one.
The primary use of software patents is the suppression of new players in the market place, and you will note that the three big players in the patent arena do not directly compete with one another, they may have some small product overlaps at best.
err, just how exactly are we to identify you from all the other AC's?
Re:Does it work properly/completely with Opera yet
on
Gmail Adds Features
·
· Score: 1
"I just keep getting the blank page, and refreshing doesn't achieve anything"
I actually had that same problem with firefox (blank page) a few times. I restart firefox and it seems to fix it. I had another problem where the gmail page would load, but the user/pass dialogue would be missing. I fixed that by removing java and reinstalling it.
XBox 2 is starting to look like my next console purchase
If they don't retain backwards compatibility for the original XBox I won't be buying it, and the way things appear to be shaping up it doesn't look like it will.
Why would I want to do that? You want me to move to another goddamn country just so I can get cheaper broadband? Perhaps if you had a life outside of the internet you would realise that having broadband is nice, but it's certainly not the most important thing you can have in the world.
What I don't like about Firefox is its installer. When new a new version comes out you have to uninstall the old one before you install the new one, or else you end up with two entries in your "Add/Remove programs". If you then remove the old one, the new one breaks and must be installed again. This was last noticed when upgrading from b0.93 to PR1.0
This behaviour makes it more difficult to support clueless noobs than it should be, as when a new vuln is discovered it is not as simple as it should be for them to upgrade their systems (after be prompted to by yours truly) by themselves. It becomes necessary to provide them with step by step instructions which often look rather daunting to clueless users. "I never had to do stuff like that before" is a common response.
"The only reason I'm not getting decent drivers from them is because their aren't enough of us gaming on Linux, not because we didn't purchase their expensive video cards."
Agreed. I have two (primary use) PC's at home. Number one is an XP2400+1Gb+GF4-4200/128 and it runs Windows. Number two is a Dual PIII/933+512Mb+GF4MX400/64 and it runs Linux.
The first one is obviously the better system for gaming, and in fact that is what I primarily use it for. It is good enough to run Far Cry with most settings on "very high" detail, believe it or not. The second one I use for all internet related stuff, as well as a central file server.
I'm hoping that one day I won't need to have a Windows machine at all for games, but for this to happen developers will need to start developing for Linux, and for devs to do that people must start buying Linux games.
My small contribution to the cause is to always buy the linux version of a game if at all possible, even if I intend to run it on Windows initially. I have found so far that the activation keys for most games are interchangable between the linux and windows version. So, once I have purchased my Linux game I can then obtain through more dubious channels the Windows version, and proceed to use my legally obtained key with the Wwindows binaries. I suppose that this is technically illegal, but I don't feel it is in the least bit morally wrong.
My aim is to gradually build up a collection of Linux games, and as my systems are upgraded over time more and more of those games will become playable natively on any future linux PC I might have. In the meantime I hope I am encouraging developers to release their games natively under linux.
" The problem with this is that the actors are way too old to play Luke and Wedge and Han and Leia and Lando."
That is not necessarily a problem. Many movies have gone onto TV series using entirely different casts than the original. The most obvious one that springs to mind is M*A*S*H. Ask just about anyone today "who played Hawkeye in MASH" and I doubt a single person would answer you with "Donald Sutherland"
Granted, the bigscreen version M*A*S*H is not quite on par with Star Wars pop-culture-wise (although when it was first released it was highly successful and the main stars were very identifiable at the time). Also, M*A*S*H fans were probably never quite as obsessive as their Star Wars counterparts.
"I personally think XP looks like garbage and it is the one of the main reason I refuse to upgrade my Win2k system at home to XP"
Mebbe you already know this, but you do know that you can turn off the brain-rotting "eye candy" and make XP look pretty much just like Win2000 don't you?
Having said that, there is still not a whole lot of reason as far as I can tell to make the upgrade anyway. XP doesn't do anything better than 2000 (unless you want to run the latest and greatest Adobe bloatware, which demands XP for no good reason at all.
Slashdot Mirror
"Let's go back in history to the 1950s. Standard Oil (split up into Amooco, Exxon, and many others long ago) owned the gas station market in the US. If you were foolish enough to open a gas station near a Standard Oil station they would reduce their prices to below cost until you went out of business, then raise them again and rip the customers off. They could afford to do that, and ended up with little competition."
Much the same thing happens today here in Australia, only it is more a duopoly, and it occurs in the liquor store market (You can't buy beer & wine in the local convenience store over here in Australia).
The alcohol retail market here is dominated by two large players, Woolworths and Coles Myer. Basically, one or the other of these two companies will open a new store in an area that's currently being serviced by one of the dwindling numbers of "Mom & Pop" operated stores, and proceed to price their goods at far lower levels than they do in their other stores where they are not attempting to destroy the local competition. Once the independant store is gone, they go back to price parity with the rest of their own stores and they are one step closer to having 50% each share of total market dominance. They can't be done for being a monopoly, because there are two of them doing it. They don't go up against each other like that, just the independants.
Back then we had 300 Baud modems by the way, none of your fancy smancy 1200 baud jobs thank you very much. ;-)
Obviously someone who's never had to use a 1200 baud modem to transfer a one meg file.
Au contraire, I have been using modems since the CP/M days. I cannot remember even having a 1Mb file back then, let alone having to download it with a modem. Even if such a scenario were encountered, the worst thing that can result is you have to wait a while. Big Deal. This is hardly a crisis of epic proportions and does not prove that "having broadband is the most important thing in the world""not all bands sounded bad unplugged, and of course it went to the better musicians that really showed their stuff unplugged. Eric Clapton leaps to mind as well as Page/Plant."
Indeed. The old school bands in general fare better when unplugged. The most suprising ones to me were KISS when they did Unplugged in the mid nineties. They sounded pretty good and tight, even when they got "the whole family" back together for the first time in 10 or so years. Most of the more modern wannabes are shown up as the talentless whine-babies that they truly are.
That's what I hate the most about mainstream modern music, the incessant, self absorbed whining that most of their "songs" are based around. Whatever happened to good old fashioned rock and roll?
"Spyware isn't as secretive as they seem to think it was. Much of it is installed with full knowledge of it's existance, but many people ignore the functions of what they download."
You are forgetting the "Auto Yes Click" phenomenon that afflicts most Windows users. BillG has spent years and years assaulting Windows users with "Are you sure you want to do this [YES] [NO]" dialogues that people are now habitualised into clicking on [YES] whenever they see it without reading the context. Lots of spyware gets installed that way.
I swear, a spyware app could flash up a window that says "Do you want to install an annoying browser hijacker than can't be removed [YES] [NO] and many people (read clueless n00bs) would still click [YES]
"XP2000+, 512MB DDR, Geforce 4 Ti 4200
Just a note Karn, but those were my exact machine specs up until about 6 weeks ago. Then I popped in an XP2400 and another 512Mb RAM and you would not believe the noticeable performance improvement, and it only cost me a coupla hundred Aussie bucks!
But you better hurry, because the t'bird Athlons are getting harder to come by these days.
" Easy to disprove. Just give the dated source, with CVS log. NoCatAuth existed far before the claimed date."
The problem is that you still need to engage lawyers and the courts and the patent holder will do their damnedest to hold out and rack up the costs as long as possible (See SCO vs World for more info)
The end result is that the small company may decide that it is cheaper to simply cough up than to get embroiled in a drawn out legal stoush.
Repost from another post follows;
Perhaps a solution to this problem is to award damages against the claimant to an amount that is double what was being claimed (plus costs) if a bodgy patent doesn't hold water in court.
It would make the companies who decide to sue all and sundry for patent violations think long and hard about the validity of their patent and it would give the company being sued an incentive to actually fight it in court instead of just rolling over because it is the cheapest option.
"Its hard to blame a company for trying to cash in on their patent, even if its not a real invention."
Perhaps a solution to this problem is to award damages against the claiment to an amount that is double what was being claimed (plus costs) if a bodgy patent doesn't hold water in court.
It would make the companies who decide to sue all and sundry for patent violations think long and hard about the validity of their patent and it would give the company being sued an incentive to actually fight it in court instead of just rolling over because it is the cheapest option.
" they'll copyright, what comes out of your butt soon!"
Oops! Too late!
"If this continues and starts to ramp up, it's really going to make software development and deployment completely infeasible. It will inevitably piss off enough corporations that something will happen."
Actually, the really big corporations like this sort of patent fiasco. In fact they were the ones who lobbied for it in the first place.
Big companies can afford to lodge thousands and thousands of patents every year, small ones can't. From the perspective of the three or four major incumbants in the IT industry (Microsoft, Cisco, IBM) this becomes the corporate equivalent of the nuclear arms race. They all hold thousands of patents which they can use to smackdown any small startups that come along and they all have an unwritten agreement that they won't use their patents against each other, because they know that their opponent will countersue them using their own patent portfolio.
It backfires on them occasionally when a small startup patents an idea and it gets under the radar but usually all they have to do then is buy out the startup and they are back to square one.
The primary use of software patents is the suppression of new players in the market place, and you will note that the three big players in the patent arena do not directly compete with one another, they may have some small product overlaps at best.
OK, fair enuff then
err, just how exactly are we to identify you from all the other AC's?
"I just keep getting the blank page, and refreshing doesn't achieve anything"
I actually had that same problem with firefox (blank page) a few times. I restart firefox and it seems to fix it. I had another problem where the gmail page would load, but the user/pass dialogue would be missing. I fixed that by removing java and reinstalling it.
XBox 2 is starting to look like my next console purchase
If they don't retain backwards compatibility for the original XBox I won't be buying it, and the way things appear to be shaping up it doesn't look like it will.
So why don't you move?
Why would I want to do that? You want me to move to another goddamn country just so I can get cheaper broadband? Perhaps if you had a life outside of the internet you would realise that having broadband is nice, but it's certainly not the most important thing you can have in the world.
many people have to pay for their broadband bits, so it costs quite a lot to leech stuff off bittorrent
I use Firefox.
I like Firefox.
What I don't like about Firefox is its installer. When new a new version comes out you have to uninstall the old one before you install the new one, or else you end up with two entries in your "Add/Remove programs". If you then remove the old one, the new one breaks and must be installed again. This was last noticed when upgrading from b0.93 to PR1.0
This behaviour makes it more difficult to support clueless noobs than it should be, as when a new vuln is discovered it is not as simple as it should be for them to upgrade their systems (after be prompted to by yours truly) by themselves. It becomes necessary to provide them with step by step instructions which often look rather daunting to clueless users. "I never had to do stuff like that before" is a common response.
"(and what am I missing?)"
6) What percentage comes from digitised recordings taken from your old vinyl LP collection.
"The only reason I'm not getting decent drivers from them is because their aren't enough of us gaming on Linux, not because we didn't purchase their expensive video cards."
Agreed. I have two (primary use) PC's at home. Number one is an XP2400+1Gb+GF4-4200/128 and it runs Windows. Number two is a Dual PIII/933+512Mb+GF4MX400/64 and it runs Linux.
The first one is obviously the better system for gaming, and in fact that is what I primarily use it for. It is good enough to run Far Cry with most settings on "very high" detail, believe it or not. The second one I use for all internet related stuff, as well as a central file server.
I'm hoping that one day I won't need to have a Windows machine at all for games, but for this to happen developers will need to start developing for Linux, and for devs to do that people must start buying Linux games.
My small contribution to the cause is to always buy the linux version of a game if at all possible, even if I intend to run it on Windows initially. I have found so far that the activation keys for most games are interchangable between the linux and windows version. So, once I have purchased my Linux game I can then obtain through more dubious channels the Windows version, and proceed to use my legally obtained key with the Wwindows binaries. I suppose that this is technically illegal, but I don't feel it is in the least bit morally wrong.
My aim is to gradually build up a collection of Linux games, and as my systems are upgraded over time more and more of those games will become playable natively on any future linux PC I might have. In the meantime I hope I am encouraging developers to release their games natively under linux.
" ...we'll learn what that last song on the White Album means."
What has Paul McCartney signing goodnight to his kids got to do with the John Lennon files?
There are, of course, privacy considerations as well.
You would have to be a complete knob to keep anything important in a free webmail account.
" The problem with this is that the actors are way too old to play Luke and Wedge and Han and Leia and Lando."
That is not necessarily a problem. Many movies have gone onto TV series using entirely different casts than the original. The most obvious one that springs to mind is M*A*S*H. Ask just about anyone today "who played Hawkeye in MASH" and I doubt a single person would answer you with "Donald Sutherland"
Granted, the bigscreen version M*A*S*H is not quite on par with Star Wars pop-culture-wise (although when it was first released it was highly successful and the main stars were very identifiable at the time). Also, M*A*S*H fans were probably never quite as obsessive as their Star Wars counterparts.
"I personally think XP looks like garbage and it is the one of the main reason I refuse to upgrade my Win2k system at home to XP"
Mebbe you already know this, but you do know that you can turn off the brain-rotting "eye candy" and make XP look pretty much just like Win2000 don't you?
Having said that, there is still not a whole lot of reason as far as I can tell to make the upgrade anyway. XP doesn't do anything better than 2000 (unless you want to run the latest and greatest Adobe bloatware, which demands XP for no good reason at all.
Nevertheless, it costs money to defend yourself from the demands of the patent holder, irrespective of whether their patent is bogus or not.