>When you sign the piece of paper to buy
>something you say
"I agree to pay above total amount according to card issuer agreement."
That "card issuer agreement" is an ironclad contract that I doubt anyone could squirm out
of paying, at least not on simple questions of semantics.
Now, this is NOT something that just came about
in the last 2 decades! Even the debit card is
not new, just far more common today. The merchant
agreement and banking procedures have not changed
in any substantial way since the 1950's. Certain
trappings around the way we use card-based payments have changed; notably the incredibly high
interest rates on consumer loans, and of course the instantaneous accounting of the transaction
by modem. The ATM is new (since the late '70s, then common in the 80's, now *everywhere*), but
the business model is not.
Until a recent purge of old crap, I could have produced credit card receipts from the '60s to
compare the language of the fine print. It would
be interesting to compare the language on credit
applications also, but I assure you they haven't changed much, except in superficial ways.
>What if your boss emails a word or access
> docuement to you on Saturday and demands to have
> it finished by monday?
I'd have one hell of a good laugh on monday when I open the email... Followed by a rundown of my
very high weekend consulting rates and the procedure to follow if I need to be contacted...
> They currently have 50,000 customers, most of >which are at high-speed.
>
> Are they losing money every month? If so, WHY? >If not, why couldn't a company come in, buy their >assets
> from auction, and start making money?
They are nearly a billion dollars in debt. You can't look at their assets without looking at their liabilities. The service is US$75-80 per
month, and at just 50,000 customers, how will they
ever get out of debt?
>Under the protection of Chapter 11, the Company
> will seek to restructure its operations and debt
> obligations while maintaining the operation of
> its wireless network
Their "debt obligations" add up to nearly a billion dollars. They have about 50,000 subscribers. Even if they got every subscriber to prepay for ten years of service they probably couldn't meet their debt.
Maybe I just don't understand business, but,
the numbers just don't add up for me. If they add up for some banker, more power to him I guess.
Au contraire. I do work for a living and I pay so that welfare office can exist.
Are you such a socialist that you can't understand why I won't subscribe to directTV or
whatever until they fix their business model?
It is as if you are accusing me of pirating. I am NOT pirating, nor am I supporting the directTV system that seems to encourage it.
The dish folks benefit from their idiom being saturated into the marketplace. How popular would they seem if only paying subscribers had the service? I think their marketability will suffer greatly if they ever truly stop the piracy. Hard crypto with true accountability between the subscriber and the service provider would do the trick, but do the broadcasters have the balls to really black out that many boxes? I think they allow the piracy to continue because it supports the advertising metrics, and the half-measures they take against it do nothing except focus attention on the broadcasters' victim status.
Because I don't like the business model the broadcasters use AT ALL, I don't support it.
You summarize my opinion as "pathetic" but you seem to have missed the point -- I do without TV.
That seems to be unamerican or something.
I repeat my pathetic observation: In my experience, FAR more than one out of ten satellite TV users are getting their service for free. If you went around telling people you're thinking of paying for it, you'd receive a lot of blank stares, as if it's such a foreign concept as to be beyond reason!
Unless THAT changes, I can't even support the system, not as a subscriber nor as an investor.
Almost everybody I know who watches TV has
some kind of cracked system for it. My problem
with this is that *I* can't make myself pay
for something that I know is widely available for free, so I basically do without TV.
If the situation were that everybody really and
truly paid, instead of the "H-Card/PC" situation
I see everywhere, I might be able to justify
subscribing.
This is one case where widespread "piracy" has caused me to evaluate a service as not being worth paying for! (If all my neighbors get the
service for free and take it for granted, I do
not wish to be a chump and pay for it.)
If I paid for satellite tv, I would definitely become the only person I know, and I know plenty,
who pays.
Indeed he did! Every time he made a purchase he signed a contract, parties to which include the merchant, the bank, and the purchaser. You agree to pay when you make the purchase. If the merchant doesn't get this agreement, it's his fault and he should take the loss.
This language has been part of the credit card receipt since at least the 1960's; it's not a recent development.
Now, do you have a cite where we can research the
"banks many years ago" who took losses from unsolicited credit cards?
I had a college class with this as the textbook, and an instructor who was programming industrial robotics (day job) while teaching our class. Outstanding book!
I still go here first, if presented with questions about operator precedence or multidimensional pointer arithmetic, it's always on the shelf right next to K&R, and makes a good complement to it.
I also heartily recommend Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++.
In the C++ textbook department, a local University teaches an intro programming course with Gary Bronson, _A First Book of C++: From Here to There_ 0-314-04236-9; If I were teaching
such a class, I'd enjoy using this text, although
it does speak from a procedural design standpoint in the early chapters.
Actually... well... no, but I had to
pause to think about it... I still refer, not infrequently, to the Programmer's Guide to the IBM
PC, by Peter Norton.
Every time I'm tempted to move it from my bookshelf to storage, I end up referring to it,
so it stays.
I keep an old 2-volume Solaris book around, knowing that Sparc's DON'T COME WITH MANUALS,
and the manuals you do get aren't particularly useful.
I'd love to have a copy of David Ahl's 101 Basic Computer Games, but even I tossed things that old.
Strategy guides to some of the old games? Sure,
(not to mention the abandonware issue!)
I suppose the list goes on. Let's see, I can donate my extra copy of Stevens Unix Network Programming I, a whole shelf of Java 1.x books,
"The Teachings of Buddha" which was in a hotel room instead of Gideon's Bible(!), the novelisation of Girl, Interrupted, an english-spanish dictionary with no cover, and *maybe* my extra Programming Perl-2nd-ed.
That's about all I can part with, and I just might
hoof them down to my local library.
I'm finding that in my community, in these economic good times, the used bookstore has taken the role traditionally filled by the library.
I realize that doesn't really bring literacy to the poor, but it is a phenomenon that I've observed. Books change hands from peer to peer and through such a vehicle as a used book seller, and these are the very people who would, in other circumstances, be a frequent library patron.
I don't mean to diminish the other services that are provided by libraries of course. I just tallied up the CS books I still want to buy this year, and I'm over $1000. Not counting what adding a shelf will cost!! A library might let
me try-before-I-buy or even read-instead-of-buy.
The costs of these books doesn't bother me at all
though, and I wish this could somehow be a datapoint in the whole copyright/artist-gets-paid misunderstanding.
Why, in my day, the public library had three books on computers: A spanish language introduction to programming on System 370 assembly language, a book devoted to prettyprinting PL/I programs, and a Fortran book
(from which I gained much knowledge.) That was
1977. A few years later, they had a shelf of similarly obsolete texts, but never anything really enlightening. I'm referring to the central
library in Dallas, Texas, a library designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that probably housed several million books.
Today, I would still not expect to find the whole Addison-Wesely catalog or even a single O'Reilly
book in any library east of California. (IN California, I expect to see these books at the convenience store, or rather, have seen, in Mountain View at least!)
I wonder how many W. Richard Stevens texts are available at your average public library? How about the Sun Java series, or even the Solaris System Administrators Guides? Knuth? Booch?
Jacobsen? Rumbaugh?
Hard computer science books, starting with Cormen Leiserson and Rivest: Introduction to Algorithms,
and Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming.
O'Reilly books seem to find themselves neither on library shelves nor as primary texts for university classes. I wonder if it is because of the marketing niche that ORA has carved out as more of an independent publisher. At least, recent years have seen the availability of these types of books at chain bookstores.
If I could have put my hands on Introduction to Algorithms and on various Automata texts when I was at my peak of mathematical aptitude, I would be much further along academically than I am now.
If you compare and contrast elements of
Star Wars and Dune, you may find similarities
that will turn your stomach. Parts of the Star Wars universe and some key plot elements are quite obviously inspired by Dune.
>I don't watch TV, so I don't know how the first >mini-series went.
I don't watch TV either, much, and certainly not
enough to be able to catch an entire miniseries.
I bought the Dune release on DVD, and hope that
all these things are released on DVD, as it's
the only way I'll see the whole series.
I love the Dune production because it undoes
some of the damage done by the Lynch debacle.
At least the sci-fi channel screenwriters
seem to have actually read the book first.
It appears they may have a different understanding of certain subtleties (and not-so
subtleties) of the story and the setting, but
it isn't really annoying. A few details of the
miniseries show an outstanding respect for the
novel.
Herbert himself did this, by writing
Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune
concurrently. Dune Messiah and Dune have
so many story elements in common that it
must be a challenge to keep a screenplay
interesting. The books keep your attention
on other levels besides plot and local color,
but a movie adaptation has different issues.
Now, if someone wants to produce God Emperor,
I'd just LOVE to see a good, cruel yet benign, Leto II.
There has been call since the early '70s to require
certification for programmers -- a way to make them
financially responsible for the quality of their work
would be on the lines of a construction company's bond.
As long as we allow a software industry to permit
mediocrity, we will be blessed with substandard systems
even to a national disgrace.
The story is quoted from a lot of people whose core
competency is politics, and not from network engineers.
I wonder what the rest of the story is.
I have industrial strength security built on consumer
gear for my network, why can't they?
There are lots of people who would have
bought one of these things (like me) who
won't now (like me) because of this.
I hope it's way more than just a class-action
suit. I hope they broke some international law
by screwing up the Canadians, and have to pay
billions in fines or their CEO has to do hard time, or something like that. If the extortion
claim is brought up, I think they can be prosecuted under RICO.
Wish I could just make my regular linux box
be a PVR.
Tivo is too new on the scene to be arrogant enough to create this kind of PR. And the
messages from the Tivo spokesman only confirm
that they do mean to be assholes about the whole
thing.
> my $40 in gambling money is purchasing me a
>few hours of fun at the blackjack table
My goodness, you must be a good player, and lucky! Last time I was in a casino, $40 would
have played TWO HANDS of blackjack.
I couldn't believe the $20 and $50 minimums at tables, and that there were no $5 tables!
This was at a riverboat in Mississippi, but
I've seen a similar in Shreveport. I realize
if you live in Vegas you can still find $2.00
blackjack. I live in AZ but haven't checked out
the Indian casinos.
I don't care much for gambling places. I like the games themselves, but I don't like the depressingly mundane (yet garish) surroundings.
The "entertainment" in those places is always
meant to appeal to one or two previous generations.
I want to use a PC in a recording studio.
Basically, the only way to do it is to long
audio and midi cables to a PC outside the recording room, since PC's are entirely too
noisy for a studio. If notebooks had good
audio hardware available there would be some
options there. Maybe the G4 cubes are really
quiet, but again, not too many options in the
area of professional audio hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
>When you sign the piece of paper to buy
>something you say
"I agree to pay above total amount according to card issuer agreement."
That "card issuer agreement" is an ironclad contract that I doubt anyone could squirm out
of paying, at least not on simple questions of semantics.
Now, this is NOT something that just came about
in the last 2 decades! Even the debit card is
not new, just far more common today. The merchant
agreement and banking procedures have not changed
in any substantial way since the 1950's. Certain
trappings around the way we use card-based payments have changed; notably the incredibly high
interest rates on consumer loans, and of course the instantaneous accounting of the transaction
by modem. The ATM is new (since the late '70s, then common in the 80's, now *everywhere*), but
the business model is not.
Until a recent purge of old crap, I could have produced credit card receipts from the '60s to
compare the language of the fine print. It would
be interesting to compare the language on credit
applications also, but I assure you they haven't changed much, except in superficial ways.
>What if your boss emails a word or access
> docuement to you on Saturday and demands to have
> it finished by monday?
I'd have one hell of a good laugh on monday when I open the email... Followed by a rundown of my
very high weekend consulting rates and the procedure to follow if I need to be contacted...
> They currently have 50,000 customers, most of >which are at high-speed.
>
> Are they losing money every month? If so, WHY? >If not, why couldn't a company come in, buy their >assets
> from auction, and start making money?
They are nearly a billion dollars in debt. You can't look at their assets without looking at their liabilities. The service is US$75-80 per
month, and at just 50,000 customers, how will they
ever get out of debt?
>Under the protection of Chapter 11, the Company
> will seek to restructure its operations and debt
> obligations while maintaining the operation of
> its wireless network
Their "debt obligations" add up to nearly a billion dollars. They have about 50,000 subscribers. Even if they got every subscriber to prepay for ten years of service they probably couldn't meet their debt.
Maybe I just don't understand business, but,
the numbers just don't add up for me. If they add up for some banker, more power to him I guess.
>I find it very insulting that they are using the
>Linux mascot.
Is there no coypright issue here?
>One can just imagine the hollywood lobbyist
> chatting up the Senator over a drink
Am I the only one who has a problem with
legislation being conceived under the influence
of dangerous mind altering drugs such as alcohol?
Au contraire. I do work for a living and I pay so that welfare office can exist.
Are you such a socialist that you can't understand why I won't subscribe to directTV or
whatever until they fix their business model?
It is as if you are accusing me of pirating. I am NOT pirating, nor am I supporting the directTV system that seems to encourage it.
The dish folks benefit from their idiom being saturated into the marketplace. How popular would they seem if only paying subscribers had the service? I think their marketability will suffer greatly if they ever truly stop the piracy. Hard crypto with true accountability between the subscriber and the service provider would do the trick, but do the broadcasters have the balls to really black out that many boxes? I think they allow the piracy to continue because it supports the advertising metrics, and the half-measures they take against it do nothing except focus attention on the broadcasters' victim status.
Because I don't like the business model the broadcasters use AT ALL, I don't support it.
You summarize my opinion as "pathetic" but you seem to have missed the point -- I do without TV.
That seems to be unamerican or something.
I repeat my pathetic observation: In my experience, FAR more than one out of ten satellite TV users are getting their service for free. If you went around telling people you're thinking of paying for it, you'd receive a lot of blank stares, as if it's such a foreign concept as to be beyond reason!
Unless THAT changes, I can't even support the system, not as a subscriber nor as an investor.
>Ah yes, the good old "if it's in plain sight you >should expect it to be stolen" defense.
More like, "if you dump it in my yard, it's mine."
Almost everybody I know who watches TV has
some kind of cracked system for it. My problem
with this is that *I* can't make myself pay
for something that I know is widely available for free, so I basically do without TV.
If the situation were that everybody really and
truly paid, instead of the "H-Card/PC" situation
I see everywhere, I might be able to justify
subscribing.
This is one case where widespread "piracy" has caused me to evaluate a service as not being worth paying for! (If all my neighbors get the
service for free and take it for granted, I do
not wish to be a chump and pay for it.)
If I paid for satellite tv, I would definitely become the only person I know, and I know plenty,
who pays.
1) the consumer never signed any contracts
Indeed he did! Every time he made a purchase he signed a contract, parties to which include the merchant, the bank, and the purchaser. You agree to pay when you make the purchase. If the merchant doesn't get this agreement, it's his fault and he should take the loss.
This language has been part of the credit card receipt since at least the 1960's; it's not a recent development.
Now, do you have a cite where we can research the
"banks many years ago" who took losses from unsolicited credit cards?
>Advanced C: Tips and Techniques
I had a college class with this as the textbook, and an instructor who was programming industrial robotics (day job) while teaching our class. Outstanding book!
I still go here first, if presented with questions about operator precedence or multidimensional pointer arithmetic, it's always on the shelf right next to K&R, and makes a good complement to it.
I also heartily recommend Bruce Eckel's Thinking in C++.
In the C++ textbook department, a local University teaches an intro programming course with Gary Bronson, _A First Book of C++: From Here to There_ 0-314-04236-9; If I were teaching
such a class, I'd enjoy using this text, although
it does speak from a procedural design standpoint in the early chapters.
>Want any MS Dos 3.0 programming books?
Actually... well... no, but I had to
pause to think about it... I still refer, not infrequently, to the Programmer's Guide to the IBM
PC, by Peter Norton.
Every time I'm tempted to move it from my bookshelf to storage, I end up referring to it,
so it stays.
I keep an old 2-volume Solaris book around, knowing that Sparc's DON'T COME WITH MANUALS,
and the manuals you do get aren't particularly useful.
I'd love to have a copy of David Ahl's 101 Basic Computer Games, but even I tossed things that old.
Strategy guides to some of the old games? Sure,
(not to mention the abandonware issue!)
I suppose the list goes on. Let's see, I can donate my extra copy of Stevens Unix Network Programming I, a whole shelf of Java 1.x books,
"The Teachings of Buddha" which was in a hotel room instead of Gideon's Bible(!), the novelisation of Girl, Interrupted, an english-spanish dictionary with no cover, and *maybe* my extra Programming Perl-2nd-ed.
That's about all I can part with, and I just might
hoof them down to my local library.
I'm finding that in my community, in these economic good times, the used bookstore has taken the role traditionally filled by the library.
I realize that doesn't really bring literacy to the poor, but it is a phenomenon that I've observed. Books change hands from peer to peer and through such a vehicle as a used book seller, and these are the very people who would, in other circumstances, be a frequent library patron.
I don't mean to diminish the other services that are provided by libraries of course. I just tallied up the CS books I still want to buy this year, and I'm over $1000. Not counting what adding a shelf will cost!! A library might let
me try-before-I-buy or even read-instead-of-buy.
The costs of these books doesn't bother me at all
though, and I wish this could somehow be a datapoint in the whole copyright/artist-gets-paid misunderstanding.
thank you for your pixels
Why, in my day, the public library had three books on computers: A spanish language introduction to programming on System 370 assembly language, a book devoted to prettyprinting PL/I programs, and a Fortran book
(from which I gained much knowledge.) That was
1977. A few years later, they had a shelf of similarly obsolete texts, but never anything really enlightening. I'm referring to the central
library in Dallas, Texas, a library designed by Frank Lloyd Wright that probably housed several million books.
Today, I would still not expect to find the whole Addison-Wesely catalog or even a single O'Reilly
book in any library east of California. (IN California, I expect to see these books at the convenience store, or rather, have seen, in Mountain View at least!)
I wonder how many W. Richard Stevens texts are available at your average public library? How about the Sun Java series, or even the Solaris System Administrators Guides? Knuth? Booch?
Jacobsen? Rumbaugh?
Hard computer science books, starting with Cormen Leiserson and Rivest: Introduction to Algorithms,
and Knuth: The Art of Computer Programming.
O'Reilly books seem to find themselves neither on library shelves nor as primary texts for university classes. I wonder if it is because of the marketing niche that ORA has carved out as more of an independent publisher. At least, recent years have seen the availability of these types of books at chain bookstores.
If I could have put my hands on Introduction to Algorithms and on various Automata texts when I was at my peak of mathematical aptitude, I would be much further along academically than I am now.
> the telecom company will now hurl a lawsuit at
>you.
What jurisdiction will entertain a lawsuit
in international waters?
It's a quote by Tom Duff of Bell Labs, who knew he
was using humor to illustrate a point not about Pi, but about the problem of converting time units.
http://users.erols.com/blilly/programming/Progr
>I personally think the ending to "Fight Club"
>would solve this problem once and for all.
Killing yourself during a grandiose delusion?
Wonder if a solar powered steam car would
beat these photovoltaics?
>I didn't even think it was worth the five
>minutes it would have taken to filch out the
>floppy drives
Floppy drives haven't improved at all in five years' time, and it's annoying to have to buy
them.
>The chassis are obsolete
I've looked high and low for decent AT cases
and power supplies.
>the memory's probably 30 pin (remember that!)
old 4meg 30 pin ram chips are pretty expensive
nowadays, when you can find them. More than
just pc's used these chips.
>scifi soaps such as Star Wars
If you compare and contrast elements of
Star Wars and Dune, you may find similarities
that will turn your stomach. Parts of the Star Wars universe and some key plot elements are quite obviously inspired by Dune.
>I don't watch TV, so I don't know how the first >mini-series went.
I don't watch TV either, much, and certainly not
enough to be able to catch an entire miniseries.
I bought the Dune release on DVD, and hope that
all these things are released on DVD, as it's
the only way I'll see the whole series.
I love the Dune production because it undoes
some of the damage done by the Lynch debacle.
At least the sci-fi channel screenwriters
seem to have actually read the book first.
It appears they may have a different understanding of certain subtleties (and not-so
subtleties) of the story and the setting, but
it isn't really annoying. A few details of the
miniseries show an outstanding respect for the
novel.
>why would you adapt TWO stories into one series
Herbert himself did this, by writing
Dune, Dune Messiah, and Children of Dune
concurrently. Dune Messiah and Dune have
so many story elements in common that it
must be a challenge to keep a screenplay
interesting. The books keep your attention
on other levels besides plot and local color,
but a movie adaptation has different issues.
Now, if someone wants to produce God Emperor,
I'd just LOVE to see a good, cruel yet benign, Leto II.
There has been call since the early '70s to require certification for programmers -- a way to make them financially responsible for the quality of their work would be on the lines of a construction company's bond. As long as we allow a software industry to permit mediocrity, we will be blessed with substandard systems even to a national disgrace.
The story is quoted from a lot of people whose core competency is politics, and not from network engineers. I wonder what the rest of the story is.
I have industrial strength security built on consumer gear for my network, why can't they?
Oh yeah, they can't afford my consulting rate.
There are lots of people who would have
bought one of these things (like me) who
won't now (like me) because of this.
I hope it's way more than just a class-action
suit. I hope they broke some international law
by screwing up the Canadians, and have to pay
billions in fines or their CEO has to do hard time, or something like that. If the extortion
claim is brought up, I think they can be prosecuted under RICO.
Wish I could just make my regular linux box
be a PVR.
Tivo is too new on the scene to be arrogant enough to create this kind of PR. And the
messages from the Tivo spokesman only confirm
that they do mean to be assholes about the whole
thing.
Peasants, please storm their castle.
> my $40 in gambling money is purchasing me a
>few hours of fun at the blackjack table
My goodness, you must be a good player, and lucky! Last time I was in a casino, $40 would
have played TWO HANDS of blackjack.
I couldn't believe the $20 and $50 minimums at tables, and that there were no $5 tables!
This was at a riverboat in Mississippi, but
I've seen a similar in Shreveport. I realize
if you live in Vegas you can still find $2.00
blackjack. I live in AZ but haven't checked out
the Indian casinos.
I don't care much for gambling places. I like the games themselves, but I don't like the depressingly mundane (yet garish) surroundings.
The "entertainment" in those places is always
meant to appeal to one or two previous generations.
I want to use a PC in a recording studio.
Basically, the only way to do it is to long
audio and midi cables to a PC outside the recording room, since PC's are entirely too
noisy for a studio. If notebooks had good
audio hardware available there would be some
options there. Maybe the G4 cubes are really
quiet, but again, not too many options in the
area of professional audio hardware.