This idea of Red Hat being the Microsoft of Linux is a really, really dumb meme. Here's why:
MS got (and extended) its monopoly by always controlling the connections between things. This lets them play each end of the connection against the other.
The obvious example of this is their OS monopoly.
The OS is, in addition to being a big mass of software, the interface between computer and application. The thing that gives MS their power is that Windows is the only way to run Windows apps[1]. This lets them dictate terms to both PC makers (they need Windows or their customers won't be able to run most commercial PC software) and application developers (they need access to documentation and development tools or they're excluded from the world's largest customer base.)
And because they have access to the OS source code and developers, MS's applications division can use OS features that nobody else can. OS changes can be specifically formulated to not break MS software while breaking the competitors. (It's rumoured that they did this to Lotus with a DOS version some years back.)
Compare this to Red Hat. The don't own most of the software in their Linux distribution. They don't (and can't) prevent you from producing a binary compatible OS using Linux source code. Mandrake did it. Heck, you can make BSD run Red Hat binaries.
And, with all of the source code available, they certainly can't restrict your ability to develop Linux applications, even assuming they wanted to.
They don't have a monopoly and they can't get one.
--Chris
[1] Yes, I know about emulators. Sure, you can run some Windows apps under Wine or Win4Lin, but you still can't just go to the store, buy a Windows app and know that it'll work.
This didn't work in 1986 either
on
CD Copy Stopper
·
· Score: 1
So basically, all they're doing is putting state on the CD itself so that you can't, say, install a piece of software again without first uninstalling it. Since the key is accessible to software, the scheme will be cracked quickly enough. Meanwhile, the legitimate users won't be able to re-install after a disk crash, won't be able to just carry around one installation CD to install the software on a bunch of computers and won't be able to make backup copies.
Those of us who used computers in the 80's are all feeling deja vu right about now.
And if you recall, the software companies that used copy protection back then are all gone now. The inconvenience of having to cope with copy protection was enough to drive away a lot of users. The companies you still hear about now mostly didn't copy-protect their software.
So here's hoping that Microsoft adopts this protection scheme for all of their products;-).
The University of Waterloo actually has two computer studies programs. Computer engineering is part of the engineering faculty while computer science is part of the math faculty.
The engineering programs tend to focus on the parts of computers that can be kicked. They're what you take if you want to work with embedded systems or processor design. They don't focus on things like software algorithms so much so if you're into programming, you take comp. sci. in the math faculty.
That program uses Macs for the first year and after that, a sprawling network of Unix servers and X-terminals (i.e. thin clients) running a goodly amount of free software. There isn't too much of a MS presence there, although they did install a Citrix server a while back so that students could run Word. (It's been a while since I've been a student, though, so I don't know whether that's still there.)
I suspect (the original site being down) that the C# course is probably the "this is what programmers do" course required of engineering students. So this might be the thin edge of the wedge, but it's certainly not MS-University.
It just occurred to my why the RIAA has been coming down so hard on Internet piracy lately. Remember that the RIAA mostly represents the management of the music industry--not the artists and not the shareholders. It is the job of these people (or the people they supervise) to pick out the artists they think will sell well and to promote their albums.
Now, record sales have been way down recently. There are two possible explanations for this:
Internet piracy is cutting into record sales.
The music industry is mostly managed by incompetents.
Guess which one the managers are loudly pushing for. Guess what they're blaming when the shareholders ask why the company isn't making any money.
That's right--this is all due to a bunch of pointy-haired bosses trying to save their jobs. Here's hoping that the next music industry will have more clue.
>Except for me and my testing, IT WAS NEVER PUSHED. >I had pushed it several times over the course of that year to check if it was working as I was getting ZERO results.
You should have put an official-looking sign underneath reading DO NOT PUSH.
This scheme will only work if there's a big enough body of software out there that 1) plays along with the Fritz chip and 2) everybody absolutely needs.
I've managed to get along for years without a Windows partition on my PC and if necessary, I can punt the three or four apps I don't have source for. It's been years since I've seen a popular Windows app that didn't have an open-source equivalent. I suspect most people will find that there's very little software out there that's indespensible enough to warrant letting Hollywood take over their computers.
The only possible killer app is the ability to download commercial movies or music, but all that saves me is a drive out to the local HMV. Big furry deal. It's not like the commercial download services are actually worth using.
This whole scheme will only work if the Wintel platform is the be-all and end-all of computing. It isn't anymore. They might still get this through, sure. But they might also just alienate their customer base enough to make it worthwhile for everybody to switch to, say, a Linux/AMD or Linux/PowerPC base.
And that certainly couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
> He sent some of his work to Harlan, and Harlan returned it > with a note that basically called my friend an idiot and provided > nothing at all constructive... all this knowing that at the time my > friend was a young kid in high school...
Ellison may well be a jerk--he certainly has a reputation for, uh, bluntness, but look at it from his viewpoint: every week, a half-dozen or so total strangers ask him to work as an editor for them for free. It's a huge and completely unreasonable imposition.
Let me put it another way. Suppose, every week, you got an average of twenty phone calls from total strangers asking you to help them with their computer problems. Not people who pay you for a service, just random people who got your phone number from the phone book and call you at any time, regardless of what you're doing, because you're a "famous computer guy", and who will very upset and offended if you refuse. How many phone calls will it take before you just hang up on them?
Now, I don't know what Ellison said to your friend, but the fact that he bothered to write back at all--spending his own time, which he could have spent writing, in answering the letter rather than just round-filing it--implies that he was at least trying to be polite.
Might your friend have been somewhat thin-skinned at the time?
(BTW, Ellison wrote an essay called Xenogenesis in which he talks about how authors (not just him) have been mistreated by some of the crazier fans, which covers this a lot better than I do.)
>And I think it says something about the state of open source >development when people actually believe that making an application >more difficult to configure properly is somehow advantageous.
Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said that GUI-based interfaces were easier to use. I said they were easier to learn to use. Big difference.
I maintain that any reasonably sane configuration file format, once you've learned it, is less work to maintain than the equivalent proprietary binary format with a GUI configuration tool.
Why? Because there are thousands of tools out there for manipulating text files. You can use the text editor of your choice on a config file, or run it through a macro preprocessor, store it in a version control system, write scripts to automate the customization or even write a GUI configuration program for it. The sky's the limit.
Whereas all you can do with a GUI is what the configuration tool lets you do. There are cases where that's actually a worthwhile trade-off but a web server isn't one of them.
I think it says something about the state of IT when they consider it a downside that Apache doesn't have a point-and-click web-based configuration tool.
The only advantage of such interfaces is that they're friendly to novices, which is all well and good when you're dealing with a word processor or e-mail client, but this is a web server. Anyone who uses one for anything other than a toy needs to be (or to hire) a skilled professional just to keep the thing running and up to date. Anyone who finds editing a text file intimidating has no business administrating any kind of server.
Heck--I wouldn't hire a web administrator who couldn't write their own point-and-click configuration tool.
Many, many years ago, I read a library book on Unexplained Phenomena, and in it, there was the tale of some large, dead animal that had washed ashore on some beach somewhere. The thing looked sort of like a giant octopus, but it was too decayed to really make a comparison.
Most people thought it was a just giant squid, too long decayed, but some scientists took tissue samples and preserved them in alcohol.
Many years later, once microscope technology had improved, the sample was re-examined, and they discovered that it was HUMAN FLESH!!!!!
Oops. I mean, they discovered that it was octopus tissue.
So it turns out that sometimes, these wierd unexplained tales aren't quite so implausible after all.
Now excuse me. I need to sign up for anal probe insurance.
My old school (the University of Waterloo) did this as a matter of course. The Math faculty (which housed the CS department) was mostly Unix-based (with some Macs for the first-year students) and when the old VT-200 clones got too moldy, they replaced them with X-terminals--er, I mean, "thin clients". They started out as NCDs but other vendors also provided their batches of them.
IIRC, they had about ten admin people for the whole thing, which was considered really impressive, given that there were three different computer architectures in use running mostly transparently as "CPU servers". When you logged on, you got XTerms on one or more of them. It was typically the same one but they could change without notice on you. This usually worked because all the GNU tools were compiled on all of the machines. If you really needed to use a particular machine, you could still rlogin to it--all machines NFS-mounted the users' home directories.
Anyway, it worked pretty well most of the time. The only major problem was that on occasion, the NFS server would get confused and render some or all of the network unusable. This got really, really annoying at 3 AM when you were trying to do an assignment and the admins had gone home. They eventually got a Network Appliance dedicated NFS server for the student accounts, which helped things a lot.
The X-terminals were pretty long-lived, too. I bought one of them recently from the University some 6 years or so after I'd last used one of those.
with Valenti's implicit assumption, that being able to sell or rent movies over the Internet is a worthwhile goal. The ARPA project and the IETF and the W3C didn't spend thirty years and billions of dollars so that suburban families don't can save a fifteen-minute drive to the corner Blockbuster.
Bandwidth is too valuable to be wasted on Hollywood movies. It is my fondest wish that the Internet never again be used to transport one, legally or illegally.
The whole dot-com boom was based on the flawed premise that the Internet as a whole and the Web in particular could be use to deliver "content" to "consumers". In other words, it would be a one-to-many medium just like TV, radio and newspapers. But the whole point of the Internet is that it's not like that--it's a many-to-many medium.
The 'net is a poor broadcast medium. You can do it, but it's expensive and troublesome. The web was designed to share information. Its advantage is that anyone can publish to a world-wide audience. People don't go to the net to consume content. They go there to create it.
The dot-com boom failed because most of the companies (and their investors) didn't get that. They tried to use the web as a broadcast medium and the only reason that the whole thing didn't sink into the swamp right away was that investors sent them truckloads of money, enough to keep beating the dead horse for several years. Now that the money's running out, most of these sites will go away. Charging for access is just their last gasp and I don't expect most of them to survive for long.
(Hopefully, some of the better ones will. There are some worthwhile websites out there, Slashdot among them, that benefit from being on the web rather than, say, a magazine.)
My prediction is that the current dieback will continue until bandwidth becomes cheap enough to make banner-ads a viable source of revenue, provided you run the operation cheaply enough.
Hmmm. I didn't see anything on the web page about what the service
is, so this is all conjecture, but...
If each installation also expands coverage, that means that each
base-station relays packets for your neighbours. Which means that if
you decide at some point to cancel your service, you could also be
cutting off other folks. Besides, you have to share your bandwidth
with them.
So, the only fair way to compensate folks for this is to pay them for
every downstream customer they have to route. This way, they remain
motivated to let Vista keep a tranceiver in their house, even if they
don't want the Internet connection. So, the more neighbours you
recruit, the more money you make.
> Any network programmer worth half a grain of salt would know about the
> problems inherent in using UDP, and for general MP3 file sharing, etc,
> they would integrate a TCP based transport
I think their fears are legitimate. Consider that a decent network
programmer will demand a much higher salary than a crack monkey with a
copy of Network Programming for Dummies. Right now, there's probably
a startup out there that does UDB-based IM with a really
pretty client written by that crack monkey. All it takes is for
one of the big boys to buy them and incorporate it into their service,
and you know the suits aren't going to care what the service does to
the competitor's part of the Internet.
This is exactly the same sort of thinking that brought us pollution and spam.
>As a Canadian, and a Slashdot lurker, I must say that I feel rather
>strange about this whole issue.
Me too.
>Anyone out there feel the same? What can I do as a non-American? Yes,
>I can give to the EFF, and yes, I can write to my own government, but
>let's be honest: The next time Chretien is in town, Dubya ain't gonna
>be asking him his country's stand on Copyright Law...
If everyone in the country starts writing him about how important
copyright law is to them, he certainly will.
Canada is still its own country and still has its own laws.
Yes, the US has far too much influence on us, but there's always the
option of just staying out of the US. I think that as Canadians, it
is our duty to make sure our country stays free.
In other words, "Think Globally, Act Locally."
Consider: if Canada keeps its laws relatively sane while the US does
not, it will become a haven for geeks. Brain drains get noticed
because they bite countries in the economy, and if
nothing else, that will restore freedom.
Oh, and giving money to the EFF sounds like a good idea.
>I have the paperwork in front of me to take Universal Records to small
>claims court to recover the purchase price of the CD. Since Universal
>is not based in my area, it will be very expensive for them to send
>their high-priced lawyers to my county to deal with the charges. And,
>worst case, I will lose the cost of the CD (and best case, I will get
>a refund on the CD and make a political statement at the
>same time).
If you're going to do that, be sure to sue the CEO and/or board of
directors, not the company itself. If you sue the
company, they'll send some low-paid flack down to represent them. If
you name the individuals though, they'll have to come down
themselves.
Much more annoying.
(ObAttribution: Harlan Ellison in An Edge In My Voice. Hey,
Ellison is a master at this sort of thing.)
1) The next couple of books in the Continuing Time series are
written and have been for years. He's having trouble getting the
rights back from his publisher, who won't publish them for some
reason.
2) A few years back, he got into computer animation. He and a
partner are working on a CGI TV series based on the early adventures
of Trent, which seems to have put his writing on hold.
On the plus side, Quiet Vision (quietvision.com) is reprinting his
older stuff and I still hear rumors about how he'll be getting the
rights to the new novels back.
You can also get all of these books (and others) directly from
Plan 9. They give the authors more royalties for those sales.
Also, if you're going to start reading Sluggy Freelance, I highly recommend you start from the first strip. Everything makes so much more sense that way.
What he said. Also, (in my blatant opinion) the service
really, really sucks.
My parents, who are extremely frugal, wanted to get on the Internet.
I told them about a local ISP that charged $10-20 a month (CDN) but
then my dad saw the 3Web ads. Well, free is better than a monthly
fee. I was curious about this so I agreed to try to set them up.
Remember, the 'rents are really cheap^H^H^H^H^Hfrugal. Their computer
is a recycled 486 running Windows 3.1. 3Web needed Windows 95 or
better. Fortunately, I'd gotten sick of Diablo so I gave them my
copy. Their PC has enough RAM to actually run Windows well, so no
problems there.
I then spent a full weekend wrestling with the thing. Windows 95 was
its usual charming self and much profanity was issued. Only after I'd
gotten it working did I notice the requirements on the 3Web CD:
"Requires multimedia Pentium or better". I installed the software
anyway. More profanity ensued but I eventually got most of it
working.
Actually signing up was like kicking dead whales down the beach. The
entire user interface was based on Flash or something similar and I
could actually watch the drop-down menus being drawn. Eventually
though, I got the thing usable. I even read slashdot with Internet
Explorer.
But it still sucked, even then. There was a giant animated
advertising bar. Since the 'rents only had a 14" monitor (cheap,
remember?) the bar would occupy the top quarter of the screen and
cover the title bars of every window. The ad bar stayed on top of
everything, of course, so there was no way to get at the controls of
IE. When I finally managed to move and resize it to usability, I had
maybe three vertical inches of visible web browser.
Real useful, folks.
And, of course, the ad-bar showed full motion video, which ran at top
priority and slowed the system down to a crawl. I got far enough to
know that it worked and turned it off. Since then, my parents haven't
used it once. They keep talking about it but I suspect that the sheer
repulsiveness of the whole experience will keep them off the Internet
for the forseeable future.
What were 3Web thinking? Yes, I used an old, underpowered computer
with their service and so arguably I deserve what I get, but do you
really expect people who are willing to pay serious money for a
computer not to fork over another $10 a month for a real ISP? That
makes for an utterly ludicrous marketting demographics--people who are
willing to spend quite a lot of money on a relatively new computer and
display but willing to accept a vastly inferior Internet experience
solely to save a bit of pocket change.
The bottom line is that (in my opinion) 3Web was just another badly
thought out dot-com idea that somehow got Canada Post involved in
their scheme and subsequently ran out of venture capital. They
deserve what they get.
Slashdot Mirror
This idea of Red Hat being the Microsoft of Linux is a really, really dumb meme. Here's why:
MS got (and extended) its monopoly by always controlling the connections between things. This lets them play each end of the connection against the other.
The obvious example of this is their OS monopoly.
The OS is, in addition to being a big mass of software, the interface between computer and application. The thing that gives MS their power is that Windows is the only way to run Windows apps[1]. This lets them dictate terms to both PC makers (they need Windows or their customers won't be able to run most commercial PC software) and application developers (they need access to documentation and development tools or they're excluded from the world's largest customer base.)
And because they have access to the OS source code and developers, MS's applications division can use OS features that nobody else can. OS changes can be specifically formulated to not break MS software while breaking the competitors. (It's rumoured that they did this to Lotus with a DOS version some years back.)
Compare this to Red Hat. The don't own most of the software in their Linux distribution. They don't (and can't) prevent you from producing a binary compatible OS using Linux source code. Mandrake did it. Heck, you can make BSD run Red Hat binaries.
And, with all of the source code available, they certainly can't restrict your ability to develop Linux applications, even assuming they wanted to.
They don't have a monopoly and they can't get one.
--Chris
[1] Yes, I know about emulators. Sure, you can run some Windows apps under Wine or Win4Lin, but you still can't just go to the store, buy a Windows app and know that it'll work.
So basically, all they're doing is putting state on the CD itself so that you can't, say, install a piece of software again without first uninstalling it. Since the key is accessible to software, the scheme will be cracked quickly enough. Meanwhile, the legitimate users won't be able to re-install after a disk crash, won't be able to just carry around one installation CD to install the software on a bunch of computers and won't be able to make backup copies.
;-).
Those of us who used computers in the 80's are all feeling deja vu right about now.
And if you recall, the software companies that used copy protection back then are all gone now. The inconvenience of having to cope with copy protection was enough to drive away a lot of users. The companies you still hear about now mostly didn't copy-protect their software.
So here's hoping that Microsoft adopts this protection scheme for all of their products
The University of Waterloo actually has two computer studies programs. Computer engineering is part of the engineering faculty while computer science is part of the math faculty.
The engineering programs tend to focus on the parts of computers that can be kicked. They're what you take if you want to work with embedded systems or processor design. They don't focus on things like software algorithms so much so if you're into programming, you take comp. sci. in the math faculty.
That program uses Macs for the first year and after that, a sprawling network of Unix servers and X-terminals (i.e. thin clients) running a goodly amount of free software. There isn't too much of a MS presence there, although they did install a Citrix server a while back so that students could run Word. (It's been a while since I've been a student, though, so I don't know whether that's still there.)
I suspect (the original site being down) that the C# course is probably the "this is what programmers do" course required of engineering students. So this might be the thin edge of the wedge, but it's certainly not MS-University.
Yet.
It just occurred to my why the RIAA has been coming down so hard on
Internet piracy lately. Remember that the RIAA mostly represents the
management of the music industry--not the artists and not the
shareholders. It is the job of these people (or the people they
supervise) to pick out the artists they think will sell well and to
promote their albums.
Now, record sales have been way down recently. There are two possible
explanations for this:
- Internet piracy is cutting into record sales.
- The music industry is mostly managed by incompetents.
Guess which one the managers are loudly pushing for. Guess whatthey're blaming when the shareholders ask why the company isn't making
any money.
That's right--this is all due to a bunch of pointy-haired bosses
trying to save their jobs. Here's hoping that the next music industry
will have more clue.
>Except for me and my testing, IT WAS NEVER PUSHED.
>I had pushed it several times over the course of that year to check if it was working as I was getting ZERO results.
You should have put an official-looking sign underneath reading DO NOT PUSH.
That would have done it.
--Chris
This scheme will only work if there's a big enough body of software
out there that 1) plays along with the Fritz chip and 2) everybody
absolutely needs.
I've managed to get along for years without a Windows partition on my
PC and if necessary, I can punt the three or four apps I don't have
source for. It's been years since I've seen a popular Windows app
that didn't have an open-source equivalent. I suspect most people
will find that there's very little software out there that's
indespensible enough to warrant letting Hollywood take over their
computers.
The only possible killer app is the ability to download commercial
movies or music, but all that saves me is a drive out to the local
HMV. Big furry deal. It's not like the commercial download services
are actually worth using.
This whole scheme will only work if the Wintel platform is the be-all
and end-all of computing. It isn't anymore. They might
still get this through, sure. But they might also just alienate their
customer base enough to make it worthwhile for everybody to switch to,
say, a Linux/AMD or Linux/PowerPC base.
And that certainly couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of people.
[Karma? What's karma?]
> He sent some of his work to Harlan, and Harlan returned it
> with a note that basically called my friend an idiot and provided
> nothing at all constructive... all this knowing that at the time my
> friend was a young kid in high school...
Ellison may well be a jerk--he certainly has a reputation for, uh,
bluntness, but look at it from his viewpoint: every week, a
half-dozen or so total strangers ask him to work as an editor
for them for free. It's a huge and completely unreasonable
imposition.
Let me put it another way. Suppose, every week, you got an average of
twenty phone calls from total strangers asking you to help them with
their computer problems. Not people who pay you for a service, just
random people who got your phone number from the phone book and call
you at any time, regardless of what you're doing, because you're a
"famous computer guy", and who will very upset and offended if you
refuse. How many phone calls will it take before you just hang up on
them?
Now, I don't know what Ellison said to your friend, but the fact that
he bothered to write back at all--spending his own time, which he
could have spent writing, in answering the letter rather than just
round-filing it--implies that he was at least trying to be
polite.
Might your friend have been somewhat thin-skinned at the time?
(BTW, Ellison wrote an essay called Xenogenesis in which he
talks about how authors (not just him) have been mistreated by some of
the crazier fans, which covers this a lot better than I do.)
>And I think it says something about the state of open source
>development when people actually believe that making an application
>more difficult to configure properly is somehow advantageous.
Now you're putting words in my mouth. I never said that GUI-based
interfaces were easier to use. I said they were easier to
learn to use. Big difference.
I maintain that any reasonably sane configuration file format, once
you've learned it, is less work to maintain than the equivalent
proprietary binary format with a GUI configuration tool.
Why? Because there are thousands of tools out there for manipulating
text files. You can use the text editor of your choice on a config
file, or run it through a macro preprocessor, store it in a version
control system, write scripts to automate the customization or even
write a GUI configuration program for it. The sky's the limit.
Whereas all you can do with a GUI is what the configuration tool lets
you do. There are cases where that's actually a worthwhile trade-off
but a web server isn't one of them.
I think it says something about the state of IT when they consider it
a downside that Apache doesn't have a point-and-click web-based
configuration tool.
The only advantage of such interfaces is that they're friendly to
novices, which is all well and good when you're dealing with a word
processor or e-mail client, but this is a web server. Anyone
who uses one for anything other than a toy needs to be (or to hire) a
skilled professional just to keep the thing running and up to date.
Anyone who finds editing a text file intimidating has no business
administrating any kind of server.
Heck--I wouldn't hire a web administrator who couldn't write
their own point-and-click configuration tool.
Many, many years ago, I read a library book on Unexplained Phenomena, and in it, there was the tale of some large, dead animal that had washed ashore on some beach somewhere. The thing looked sort of like a giant octopus, but it was too decayed to really make a comparison.
Most people thought it was a just giant squid, too long decayed, but some scientists took tissue samples and preserved them in alcohol.
Many years later, once microscope technology had improved, the sample was re-examined, and they discovered that it was HUMAN FLESH!!!!!
Oops. I mean, they discovered that it was octopus tissue.
So it turns out that sometimes, these wierd unexplained tales aren't quite so implausible after all.
Now excuse me. I need to sign up for anal probe insurance.
Late last night, I finally finished my upgrade Mandrake 8.1.
It figures.
My old school (the University of Waterloo) did this as a matter of course. The Math faculty (which housed the CS department) was mostly Unix-based (with some Macs for the first-year students) and when the old VT-200 clones got too moldy, they replaced them with X-terminals--er, I mean, "thin clients". They started out as NCDs but other vendors also provided their batches of them.
IIRC, they had about ten admin people for the whole thing, which was considered really impressive, given that there were three different computer architectures in use running mostly transparently as "CPU servers". When you logged on, you got XTerms on one or more of them. It was typically the same one but they could change without notice on you. This usually worked because all the GNU tools were compiled on all of the machines. If you really needed to use a particular machine, you could still rlogin to it--all machines NFS-mounted the users' home directories.
Anyway, it worked pretty well most of the time. The only major problem was that on occasion, the NFS server would get confused and render some or all of the network unusable. This got really, really annoying at 3 AM when you were trying to do an assignment and the admins had gone home. They eventually got a Network Appliance dedicated NFS server for the student accounts, which helped things a lot.
The X-terminals were pretty long-lived, too. I bought one of them recently from the University some 6 years or so after I'd last used one of those.
with Valenti's implicit assumption, that being able to sell or rent movies over the Internet is a worthwhile goal. The ARPA project and the IETF and the W3C didn't spend thirty years and billions of dollars so that suburban families don't can save a fifteen-minute drive to the corner Blockbuster.
Bandwidth is too valuable to be wasted on Hollywood movies. It is my fondest wish that the Internet never again be used to transport one, legally or illegally.
The whole dot-com boom was based on the flawed premise that the
Internet as a whole and the Web in particular could be use to deliver
"content" to "consumers". In other words, it would be a one-to-many
medium just like TV, radio and newspapers. But the whole point of the
Internet is that it's not like that--it's a many-to-many
medium.
The 'net is a poor broadcast medium. You can do it, but it's
expensive and troublesome. The web was designed to share information.
Its advantage is that anyone can publish to a world-wide
audience. People don't go to the net to consume content. They go
there to create it.
The dot-com boom failed because most of the companies (and their
investors) didn't get that. They tried to use the web as a broadcast
medium and the only reason that the whole thing didn't sink into the
swamp right away was that investors sent them truckloads of money,
enough to keep beating the dead horse for several years. Now that the
money's running out, most of these sites will go away. Charging for
access is just their last gasp and I don't expect most of them to
survive for long.
(Hopefully, some of the better ones will. There are some
worthwhile websites out there, Slashdot among them, that benefit from
being on the web rather than, say, a magazine.)
My prediction is that the current dieback will continue until
bandwidth becomes cheap enough to make banner-ads a viable source of
revenue, provided you run the operation cheaply enough.
tongue
Hmmm. I didn't see anything on the web page about what the service
is, so this is all conjecture, but...
If each installation also expands coverage, that means that each
base-station relays packets for your neighbours. Which means that if
you decide at some point to cancel your service, you could also be
cutting off other folks. Besides, you have to share your bandwidth
with them.
So, the only fair way to compensate folks for this is to pay them for
every downstream customer they have to route. This way, they remain
motivated to let Vista keep a tranceiver in their house, even if they
don't want the Internet connection. So, the more neighbours you
recruit, the more money you make.
In other words, it's a pyramid scheme.
So that's what Dave Rhodes' been doing lately.
at least one of them will lose.
> Any network programmer worth half a grain of salt would know about the
> problems inherent in using UDP, and for general MP3 file sharing, etc,
> they would integrate a TCP based transport
I think their fears are legitimate. Consider that a decent network
programmer will demand a much higher salary than a crack monkey with a
copy of Network Programming for Dummies. Right now, there's probably
a startup out there that does UDB-based IM with a really
pretty client written by that crack monkey. All it takes is for
one of the big boys to buy them and incorporate it into their service,
and you know the suits aren't going to care what the service does to
the competitor's part of the Internet.
This is exactly the same sort of thinking that brought us pollution and spam.
>As a Canadian, and a Slashdot lurker, I must say that I feel rather
>strange about this whole issue.
Me too.
>Anyone out there feel the same? What can I do as a non-American? Yes,
>I can give to the EFF, and yes, I can write to my own government, but
>let's be honest: The next time Chretien is in town, Dubya ain't gonna
>be asking him his country's stand on Copyright Law...
If everyone in the country starts writing him about how important
copyright law is to them, he certainly will.
Canada is still its own country and still has its own laws.
Yes, the US has far too much influence on us, but there's always the
option of just staying out of the US. I think that as Canadians, it
is our duty to make sure our country stays free.
In other words, "Think Globally, Act Locally."
Consider: if Canada keeps its laws relatively sane while the US does
not, it will become a haven for geeks. Brain drains get noticed
because they bite countries in the economy, and if
nothing else, that will restore freedom.
Oh, and giving money to the EFF sounds like a good idea.
>I have the paperwork in front of me to take Universal Records to small
>claims court to recover the purchase price of the CD. Since Universal
>is not based in my area, it will be very expensive for them to send
>their high-priced lawyers to my county to deal with the charges. And,
>worst case, I will lose the cost of the CD (and best case, I will get
>a refund on the CD and make a political statement at the
>same time).
If you're going to do that, be sure to sue the CEO and/or board of
directors, not the company itself. If you sue the
company, they'll send some low-paid flack down to represent them. If
you name the individuals though, they'll have to come down
themselves.
Much more annoying.
(ObAttribution: Harlan Ellison in An Edge In My Voice. Hey,
Ellison is a master at this sort of thing.)
As I understand it, it's a combination of things:
1) The next couple of books in the Continuing Time series are
written and have been for years. He's having trouble getting the
rights back from his publisher, who won't publish them for some
reason.
2) A few years back, he got into computer animation. He and a
partner are working on a CGI TV series based on the early adventures
of Trent, which seems to have put his writing on hold.
On the plus side, Quiet Vision (quietvision.com) is reprinting his
older stuff and I still hear rumors about how he'll be getting the
rights to the new novels back.
Let's boycott msn.com!
--Chris
(at 3.7 million lines, OpenOffice is by far the largest open source project in the world)
I wasn't sure about this, so I took a look at the linux kernel source:
$ cd
$ find . -name \*.[ch] -exec cat \{\} \; | wc -l
3130679
So OpenOffice is bigger than the Linux kernel, but only by around 15%. I don't know if you can say it's by far the largest.
Yeah, I know I'm being pedantic.
dash dash Chris
M-x crush-vi-and-its-mutant-offspring-ha-ha-ha
You can also get all of these books (and others) directly from Plan 9. They give the authors more royalties for those sales.
Also, if you're going to start reading Sluggy Freelance, I highly recommend you start from the first strip. Everything makes so much more sense that way.
What he said. Also, (in my blatant opinion) the service
really, really sucks.
My parents, who are extremely frugal, wanted to get on the Internet.
I told them about a local ISP that charged $10-20 a month (CDN) but
then my dad saw the 3Web ads. Well, free is better than a monthly
fee. I was curious about this so I agreed to try to set them up.
Remember, the 'rents are really cheap^H^H^H^H^Hfrugal. Their computer
is a recycled 486 running Windows 3.1. 3Web needed Windows 95 or
better. Fortunately, I'd gotten sick of Diablo so I gave them my
copy. Their PC has enough RAM to actually run Windows well, so no
problems there.
I then spent a full weekend wrestling with the thing. Windows 95 was
its usual charming self and much profanity was issued. Only after I'd
gotten it working did I notice the requirements on the 3Web CD:
"Requires multimedia Pentium or better". I installed the software
anyway. More profanity ensued but I eventually got most of it
working.
Actually signing up was like kicking dead whales down the beach. The
entire user interface was based on Flash or something similar and I
could actually watch the drop-down menus being drawn. Eventually
though, I got the thing usable. I even read slashdot with Internet
Explorer.
But it still sucked, even then. There was a giant animated
advertising bar. Since the 'rents only had a 14" monitor (cheap,
remember?) the bar would occupy the top quarter of the screen and
cover the title bars of every window. The ad bar stayed on top of
everything, of course, so there was no way to get at the controls of
IE. When I finally managed to move and resize it to usability, I had
maybe three vertical inches of visible web browser.
Real useful, folks.
And, of course, the ad-bar showed full motion video, which ran at top
priority and slowed the system down to a crawl. I got far enough to
know that it worked and turned it off. Since then, my parents haven't
used it once. They keep talking about it but I suspect that the sheer
repulsiveness of the whole experience will keep them off the Internet
for the forseeable future.
What were 3Web thinking? Yes, I used an old, underpowered computer
with their service and so arguably I deserve what I get, but do you
really expect people who are willing to pay serious money for a
computer not to fork over another $10 a month for a real ISP? That
makes for an utterly ludicrous marketting demographics--people who are
willing to spend quite a lot of money on a relatively new computer and
display but willing to accept a vastly inferior Internet experience
solely to save a bit of pocket change.
The bottom line is that (in my opinion) 3Web was just another badly
thought out dot-com idea that somehow got Canada Post involved in
their scheme and subsequently ran out of venture capital. They
deserve what they get.