Um, before anyone gets too excited, take note that the nuclear power plants would apparently only be used to power machinery used for drilling for oil.
Sorta like using solar power to charge a battery that is in turn used to start a conventional engine.
Believe it or not, there is one easy and swift way to get a teacher fired. And fired in such a way that they'll never have another teaching job again.
A very good friend of mine spent on the order of 5 years getting a degree in education because he wanted to be a high school teacher. When we were in high school together, he had a crappy and unstable home life but always looked up to the few good teachers in our school. They were really the only decent role models he had and he decided he wanted to travel the same path because he knew, better than most, what a positive influence a really good teacher can have on a kid's life. Not long after he after had all the necessary certifications and whatnot, he landed a really good job in an upscale public school district on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. He made quick friends with the faculty including the principal, his students loved him, he was active in the sports programs, and so on.
One Monday, during the school's lunch hour, he was keeping an eye on a group of students in a classroom for whatever reason. As is common with teens, their conversation turned--shall we say--a bit on the sexual side. Now if you knew my friend, you'd know that he's a pretty jovial, easy-going guy. He made some harmless off-hand joke relating to the existing conversation before trying to steer the banter back towards something more school-appropriate. Worst mistake in his life.
One of the girls in the room at the time had a history of disciplinary problems. Her parents were of the "my precious snowflake can do no wrong" persuasion and already had a grudge against the school. Apparently she relayed some blatantly false information about the discussion to her parents and they, in turn, threatened the school with a sexual harassment lawsuit. By Wednesday my friend was fired. The school board couldn't be bothered to hear his side of the story. They didn't confirm the story with any of the other students in the room. The teacher's union wouldn't lend a hand because they won't touch a sexual harassment claim with a ten-fool pole, legitimate or not. Just the threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit set the whole system against him. His career as a teacher was finished for good. No school would hire him after that.
All he has now is a worthless education degree and is trying to support his family on whatever random work he can find because he can't afford to go back to college now, especially with huge student loans that he never got the chance to pay off.
The U.S. public school system doesn't fail only the students it ensnares, it fails the teachers as well.
Expiring on an author's death has several problems. One, it creates at least a small bit of incentive to kill off authors.
I hadn't thought of that. But a relatively short delay would almost completely defuse that. Among the small percentage of the population that are would-be murders, extremely few would be willing to take the risk of being discovered to have killed someone, only so they might stand the remote possibility of profiting off the death 7 years later.
More realistically, it means that if an author writes a successful book and has kids at the same time, if he lives, he can use the money to raise his kids, if he dies, the kids are screwed.
It's not that I disagree exactly, but I'd like to know, why do authors' kids get preferential treatment over all others? If a father works in a factory and consistently gets the best employment reviews in history before suffering an untimely but accidental death, his kids don't get years of steady income as a result of their father's excellent work. Same goes for salespeople, hair stylists, lawyers, or I.T. engineers.
And the argument doesn't hold up in the face of the length of the copyright term: 70 years after an author's death. Does this mean that the children of successful authors should never be bothered to lift a finger to support themselves throughout their entire expected life?
No, still I believe that the law should support an author's or artist's right to control their own work, but only so long as they have the opportunity to personally benefit from it (plus a few years).
Display only the full-size image. This hotlinking, and is considered worse than framing.
Err, no. Hotlinking means including content on a web page that's loaded from another site without permission. I think that the word and concept of "hotlinking" is completely retarded ("oh noes, someone's stealing my dataz on the intarweb!") but there it is.
If Google simply linked directly to the image instead of making you click through a link on a useless frame, I fail to see what harm would occur, except that website operators wouldn't get their precious pageview when someone found an image they were interested in via Google. The CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension has an option to automatically enable this behavior. The search results still have a link to the page where Google found the image, so no functionality is lost.
Example: a malicious addon is released, and it takes some time before the malicious behaviour is discovered, and people delete the addon. But has it injected malicious code into other addons on the system? Now you have to remove all addons to be sure.
Is this outlandish or possible? Has Mozilla implemented any security against such an attack?
What do you define as malicious behavior? A Firefox extension can modify the browser in almost regard. There's not much you can do to sandbox the extensions without removing the flexibility of the extensions feature altogether.
Bottom line: You, the user, take responsibility for any software you install on your computer, even Firefox addons.
Shakespeare's work is hundreds of years old, Tolkien's is not. I believe that copyright on a particular work should expire upon an author's death (or very shortly thereafter... 7 rather than 70 years) but my beliefs are completely irrelevant. Tolkien's work is still copyrighted under current law.
Under your logic, it could be argued that pretty much any work with a household name would fall into the public domain (The Simpsons, Harry Potter, Windows XP...)
Replacing a $14,400/year Corporal with a $120,000 civilian. One who doesn't have to take an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
On one Air Force base that I was stationed, it was very common for a company (usually Lockheed Martin) to "convince" the military that a certain position would be better served by a civilian contractor. It was just mere coincidence that the military person currently occupying that job just happened to be within early retirement age and that, even more coincidentally, he would be the one hired by the contractor to fill the civilian position after the military position was closed.
Eventually, entire portions of the base were run by civilians (civil engineering, the supply chain, avionics shops, test equipment maintenance, and vehicle management and maintenance are only a few that I recall off the top of my head) and the only military members that were left were those that legally couldn't be replaced by a contractor because they would be needed if the unit were to deploy anywhere.
I don't think most Slashdotters realize how big/powerful/corrupt the entire defense contracting industry really is.
G.E. expects that when they are introduced, perhaps in 2011 or 2012, holographic discs using its technology will be less than 10 cents a gigabyte -- and fall in the future.
Hmm. Okay, so 2-3 years from now, the cost per GB for this new technology will be about the same as today's cost (10-15 cents per GB).
I'm sorry, but I hate hate HATE it when companies do this. Go and read some R&D press releases. Without fail, they always say that although they're years away from the market, the consumer price of the end product will be about the same or slightly less than what we pay for current similar (but inferior) technology. Usually not significantly cheaper (unless it'll let them use some phrase like "pennies per square foot") and never will it cost more, regardless of the advantages.
I wonder, do they hire psychics who can can foresee all of the engineering and manufacturing hurdles that they're going to face whilst bringing it to market? Have they bought a time machine and know not only what their raw materials will cost in 5 years, but how consumers will be using technology by then? Do they have spies planted in R&D labs around the world so that they know exactly what they'll need to do in order to compete?
If they knew all of this, it wouldn't take them years to introduce the product in the first place!
When I read the summary, I imagined the "power users" you sometimes see on web forums.
You know the type I'm talking about: 500K posts racked up in 2-3 years, a long annnoying signature, moderator privileges, and more often than not, a complete douchebag who stopped caring about helping people long ago and now only stays on to start arguments and whip out his moderator e-peen whenever someone dares publicly disagrees with him.
This is why I prefer mailing lists and IRC when it comes to community support. Egos tend not to get in the way quite as easily because the playing field is a bit more level. You still have a few individuals of the douche persuasion but even if they become moderators/operators, the "avatar" effect is lessened and they don't have the ability to rewrite or delete content once it's been posted.
1996. Slackware 3.0. Kernel 1.2.13. A whole stack of effin' floppies. Installed on a Pentium 100MHz with 12MB of RAM.
I was just getting the hang of this Internet thing when I ran across Slashdot and other sites talking about this Linux software. Windows was both frustrating and a bit boring, so I decide to check it out. I spend a good month just researching and reading docs before finally attempting the install. And then it took about another few weeks to get a working install. It was an odd feeling, booting an OS on my computer for the first time that wasn't MS-DOS or Windows.
I clearly remember logging in as root, getting a shell prompt, and then saying to myself, "Okay, now what?"
The biggest challenges were getting X and dialup PPP working. Back then, there was nothing in the way of hand-holding when it came to configuring something. You basically had to open up a text editor, write your config file, pray that it worked, debug when it didn't, etc. There were a few HOWTOs and docs online, but most of them were written by Unix/Linux experts who assumed you were as experienced as them. There was no googling for an error message and getting your solution on the first hit. If you didn't understand how something worked, you had little chance of getting it to work the way you wanted. Nowadays you just pop in an Ubuntu CD and a few clicks later, you have a fully-functional system and answers to most any question right at your fingertips.
Newegg is good, and they're probably still one of the best hardware retailers on the net but the overall experience (including price) is drastically reduced from what it once was. Newegg is still one of my primary sources for product research, but at least half the time I can get a better deal (with decent support and all) somewhere else.
I've *never* heard a good thing about Tiger Direct, though. Few would cry if they just happen to blip out of existence one day.
The personal computing industry owes a lot to YouTube, Hulu, iPlayer and the like: outside gaming, these are the only mainstream killer apps that actually require 21st century hardware.
They could have existed 10 years ago if there were some sort of standard for streaming video in a browser without the collosal overhead of Flash. Or the need to install RealPlayer. Or the prerequisite of running Quicktime. Or Windows Media Player.
My XBMC box is a 750MHz PIII and it streams high-def fullscreen video over the local network just fine. No technical reason it shouldn't have been able to do it in a browser as well, back when it was fit to be a desktop machine.
Aside from the vastly outdated Atari 2600 in my basement as a child I was first exposed to gaming in the form of Super Mario Bros., Duck Hunt, and Metroid. I look at some of the games today and while I find them visually appealing, they just don't seem to have the same drawing power.:/
Although games have changed dramatically since those days, I think its not the games that have lost their drawing power. We mature. When I was a kid, I was a hardcore gamer. Platformers, racing games, RPGs, if it was 16-bit and not a sports game, I've beaten it.
Then, when I was 20 or 21, I went from playing 4-8 hours a day to almost zero quite literally overnight. I got home from work one day, looked at my Playstation, and said, "nah, not today." That was almost a decade ago. Since then the only thing I've played is the occasional emulated game or annual round of Wipeout XL. I guess I just realized that spending so much time on video games was an incredible waste when I could be learning about Linux or some programming language. (In fact, one of my first non-trivial projects at the time was writing a Tetris clone in Tcl/Tk.)
Anyway, digressed a bit there. What I was trying to say is that video games provide an outlet for young minds. Many kids have literally nothing to do at home when school gets out. Or on the weekend or over summer vacation. They crave something interesting, interactive, and challenging. Video games provide that. Adults generally have no end of daily challenges thus a lesser need to use video games as an intellectual outlet. There are plenty of adults that are gamers these days, but they all got into gaming when they were kids. Practically no adults start playing video games as an adult.
My favorite part about Geocities, in 1996, was the themed Neighborhoods.
I had SiliconVally/8043 over a decade ago. Even back then it bothered me that they didn't really do much with the Neighborhood concept other than to categorize sites. I always thought it could have been something that allowed people to network and find others with similar tastes and ideas. Basically a poor-man's version of social networking sites that are all the rage today.
I've got to be getting old, there were so many really good ideas back then that got about 90% of the way towards the major Internet trends that we see today only to completely fall over into obscurity well before their time.
The internet seemed so much smaller back then, like the number of pages could have fit into the multiple neighborhoods of Geocities.
I used to have a copy of the Internet Yellow Pages. A physical book. The same size and shape as a telephone yellow-pages. At the time it was printed, it listed most of the relevant sites devoted to a particular subject and it was actually pretty darn thorough. Most of the URLs back then were.edu,.gov, or.net. Only a few.com and almost no.org. There were a few entries for FTP and Gopher sites scattered here and there as well. Good times. I wonder if I still have that book stashed away somewhere, the Internet was such an incredibly different place back then.
Dude. If only I had mod points. I would hack Slashdot to give your comment like 18 of them.
What you said is exactly what's been resonating in my head for years. Corporations have become lazy to the point that they squander their (sometimes ill-gotten) riches on the lifestyles of their top-tier execs instead of competing in the market or enriching the community that built them. Their business models have switched from "become a market leader through superior performance" to "intimidate the fuck out of everyone until they just hand us money."
Monarchy died because citizens eventually realized that their kings were, without exception, acting in their own best interests instead of the interest of their civilizations. Corporations are in the same boat, the only question is if, when, and how they too will be replaced.
MySQL's originator's wanted to have it both ways: Lots-O-corporate money AND GPL poster child. Well they got their money alright, but to get it they had to pray for a really wealthy, poorly managed corporation to come along and vet their convoluted business plan. That would be Sun.
Uh, no. MySQL, the company, was doing just fine all by themselves. They were making a tidy profit on value-added services, support contracts, and custom development. They were one of the shining examples of how to build a successful (read: profitable) business on top of an open source product. That's what made them an attractive purchase in the first place.
Now, with a billion dollars spent to "buy" MySQL but a bunch of forks still out there, no company in their right mind is going to invest anything in MySQL because they'll be worried Widenius will just steal the improvements and fork it again.
That just makes no sense. In the open source world, you're supposed to "steal" improvements. That's what open source is all about. And in any event, there have always been plenty of support/consulting options in the database world besides the original vendor. That has always been true no matter who owns the commercial version of MySQL or whether an open source fork becomes the de facto edition.
MySQL is pariah, it's poisoned.
Thanks for the FUD, but you can have it back. Because MySQL is open source, it is by design immune to such trivial things as corporate takeovers. MySQL is the most popular database engine on the planet and this is one of the big reasons why. Although the future of MySQL may be uncertain, anyone currently using MySQL can be secure in the knowledge that their copy won't magically shut itself off and that there isn't just one vendor capable of adequately supporting the current code base.
If you're running any kind of data volume worth talking about you're better off with PostgreSQL. Not only is it faster with *real* queries and more robust, but now it's safer going forward.
PostgreSQL is a fine database engine, but it has fuck all to do with this discussion.
I saw that you posted the same comment in the gearlog article, but I don't have an account there. I have an account here, however, so I'd like to clarify the point upon which all your shouting seems to rest:
Despite how you'd like to paint them, iSuppli is just a market research firm. They take things apart, document what's inside, and estimate the raw cost of the components. In particular, they made NO judgements about how much it cost Amazon's employees to engineer it, write the software, or market it. It's possible that they didn't even include many manufacturing costs (tooling the machinery, making the plastic moulds, etc). Even BusinessWeek's article was careful to point out that some costs, like royalty fees, were not figured into the research.
YOU were the one that manufactured the idea of, "hey, these Kindle things are really only worth $185! Somebody's getting ripped off!" Only so you could (try) to tear it down in a fit of anti-socialist rage.
Also, I'm still trying to figure out what a dilapidated chemical plant has to do with an internet story about an ebook reader.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't be anything new...
Um, before anyone gets too excited, take note that the nuclear power plants would apparently only be used to power machinery used for drilling for oil.
Sorta like using solar power to charge a battery that is in turn used to start a conventional engine.
Believe it or not, there is one easy and swift way to get a teacher fired. And fired in such a way that they'll never have another teaching job again.
A very good friend of mine spent on the order of 5 years getting a degree in education because he wanted to be a high school teacher. When we were in high school together, he had a crappy and unstable home life but always looked up to the few good teachers in our school. They were really the only decent role models he had and he decided he wanted to travel the same path because he knew, better than most, what a positive influence a really good teacher can have on a kid's life. Not long after he after had all the necessary certifications and whatnot, he landed a really good job in an upscale public school district on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area. He made quick friends with the faculty including the principal, his students loved him, he was active in the sports programs, and so on.
One Monday, during the school's lunch hour, he was keeping an eye on a group of students in a classroom for whatever reason. As is common with teens, their conversation turned--shall we say--a bit on the sexual side. Now if you knew my friend, you'd know that he's a pretty jovial, easy-going guy. He made some harmless off-hand joke relating to the existing conversation before trying to steer the banter back towards something more school-appropriate. Worst mistake in his life.
One of the girls in the room at the time had a history of disciplinary problems. Her parents were of the "my precious snowflake can do no wrong" persuasion and already had a grudge against the school. Apparently she relayed some blatantly false information about the discussion to her parents and they, in turn, threatened the school with a sexual harassment lawsuit. By Wednesday my friend was fired. The school board couldn't be bothered to hear his side of the story. They didn't confirm the story with any of the other students in the room. The teacher's union wouldn't lend a hand because they won't touch a sexual harassment claim with a ten-fool pole, legitimate or not. Just the threat of a sexual harassment lawsuit set the whole system against him. His career as a teacher was finished for good. No school would hire him after that.
All he has now is a worthless education degree and is trying to support his family on whatever random work he can find because he can't afford to go back to college now, especially with huge student loans that he never got the chance to pay off.
The U.S. public school system doesn't fail only the students it ensnares, it fails the teachers as well.
I hadn't thought of that. But a relatively short delay would almost completely defuse that. Among the small percentage of the population that are would-be murders, extremely few would be willing to take the risk of being discovered to have killed someone, only so they might stand the remote possibility of profiting off the death 7 years later.
It's not that I disagree exactly, but I'd like to know, why do authors' kids get preferential treatment over all others? If a father works in a factory and consistently gets the best employment reviews in history before suffering an untimely but accidental death, his kids don't get years of steady income as a result of their father's excellent work. Same goes for salespeople, hair stylists, lawyers, or I.T. engineers.
And the argument doesn't hold up in the face of the length of the copyright term: 70 years after an author's death. Does this mean that the children of successful authors should never be bothered to lift a finger to support themselves throughout their entire expected life?
No, still I believe that the law should support an author's or artist's right to control their own work, but only so long as they have the opportunity to personally benefit from it (plus a few years).
Err, no. Hotlinking means including content on a web page that's loaded from another site without permission. I think that the word and concept of "hotlinking" is completely retarded ("oh noes, someone's stealing my dataz on the intarweb!") but there it is.
If Google simply linked directly to the image instead of making you click through a link on a useless frame, I fail to see what harm would occur, except that website operators wouldn't get their precious pageview when someone found an image they were interested in via Google. The CustomizeGoogle Firefox extension has an option to automatically enable this behavior. The search results still have a link to the page where Google found the image, so no functionality is lost.
What do you define as malicious behavior? A Firefox extension can modify the browser in almost regard. There's not much you can do to sandbox the extensions without removing the flexibility of the extensions feature altogether.
Bottom line: You, the user, take responsibility for any software you install on your computer, even Firefox addons.
No, not really. It takes a lot more than computers and good cameras to make even a mediocre film.
Conversely, there have always been good films that never had a Hollywood or MPAA logo on them.
Shakespeare's work is hundreds of years old, Tolkien's is not. I believe that copyright on a particular work should expire upon an author's death (or very shortly thereafter... 7 rather than 70 years) but my beliefs are completely irrelevant. Tolkien's work is still copyrighted under current law.
Under your logic, it could be argued that pretty much any work with a household name would fall into the public domain (The Simpsons, Harry Potter, Windows XP...)
Because Quake Live only runs on Windows.
(And actually, there are a lot of free FPS games that run on Linux which are arguably as good or better than Q3A anyway.)
But if you steal it, they're bound to notice when it's gone...
On one Air Force base that I was stationed, it was very common for a company (usually Lockheed Martin) to "convince" the military that a certain position would be better served by a civilian contractor. It was just mere coincidence that the military person currently occupying that job just happened to be within early retirement age and that, even more coincidentally, he would be the one hired by the contractor to fill the civilian position after the military position was closed.
Eventually, entire portions of the base were run by civilians (civil engineering, the supply chain, avionics shops, test equipment maintenance, and vehicle management and maintenance are only a few that I recall off the top of my head) and the only military members that were left were those that legally couldn't be replaced by a contractor because they would be needed if the unit were to deploy anywhere.
I don't think most Slashdotters realize how big/powerful/corrupt the entire defense contracting industry really is.
TFA:
Hmm. Okay, so 2-3 years from now, the cost per GB for this new technology will be about the same as today's cost (10-15 cents per GB).
I'm sorry, but I hate hate HATE it when companies do this. Go and read some R&D press releases. Without fail, they always say that although they're years away from the market, the consumer price of the end product will be about the same or slightly less than what we pay for current similar (but inferior) technology. Usually not significantly cheaper (unless it'll let them use some phrase like "pennies per square foot") and never will it cost more, regardless of the advantages.
I wonder, do they hire psychics who can can foresee all of the engineering and manufacturing hurdles that they're going to face whilst bringing it to market? Have they bought a time machine and know not only what their raw materials will cost in 5 years, but how consumers will be using technology by then? Do they have spies planted in R&D labs around the world so that they know exactly what they'll need to do in order to compete?
If they knew all of this, it wouldn't take them years to introduce the product in the first place!
When I read the summary, I imagined the "power users" you sometimes see on web forums.
You know the type I'm talking about: 500K posts racked up in 2-3 years, a long annnoying signature, moderator privileges, and more often than not, a complete douchebag who stopped caring about helping people long ago and now only stays on to start arguments and whip out his moderator e-peen whenever someone dares publicly disagrees with him.
This is why I prefer mailing lists and IRC when it comes to community support. Egos tend not to get in the way quite as easily because the playing field is a bit more level. You still have a few individuals of the douche persuasion but even if they become moderators/operators, the "avatar" effect is lessened and they don't have the ability to rewrite or delete content once it's been posted.
1996. Slackware 3.0. Kernel 1.2.13. A whole stack of effin' floppies. Installed on a Pentium 100MHz with 12MB of RAM.
I was just getting the hang of this Internet thing when I ran across Slashdot and other sites talking about this Linux software. Windows was both frustrating and a bit boring, so I decide to check it out. I spend a good month just researching and reading docs before finally attempting the install. And then it took about another few weeks to get a working install. It was an odd feeling, booting an OS on my computer for the first time that wasn't MS-DOS or Windows.
I clearly remember logging in as root, getting a shell prompt, and then saying to myself, "Okay, now what?"
The biggest challenges were getting X and dialup PPP working. Back then, there was nothing in the way of hand-holding when it came to configuring something. You basically had to open up a text editor, write your config file, pray that it worked, debug when it didn't, etc. There were a few HOWTOs and docs online, but most of them were written by Unix/Linux experts who assumed you were as experienced as them. There was no googling for an error message and getting your solution on the first hit. If you didn't understand how something worked, you had little chance of getting it to work the way you wanted. Nowadays you just pop in an Ubuntu CD and a few clicks later, you have a fully-functional system and answers to most any question right at your fingertips.
It's been a fun ride, actually.
Newegg is good, and they're probably still one of the best hardware retailers on the net but the overall experience (including price) is drastically reduced from what it once was. Newegg is still one of my primary sources for product research, but at least half the time I can get a better deal (with decent support and all) somewhere else.
I've *never* heard a good thing about Tiger Direct, though. Few would cry if they just happen to blip out of existence one day.
Uh, sure. In voting.
Operating systems are a tad different, I think.
They could have existed 10 years ago if there were some sort of standard for streaming video in a browser without the collosal overhead of Flash. Or the need to install RealPlayer. Or the prerequisite of running Quicktime. Or Windows Media Player.
My XBMC box is a 750MHz PIII and it streams high-def fullscreen video over the local network just fine. No technical reason it shouldn't have been able to do it in a browser as well, back when it was fit to be a desktop machine.
Fixed that for ya.
I once used a 28.8K dialup modem to connect to an ISP. Over VoIP.
Although games have changed dramatically since those days, I think its not the games that have lost their drawing power. We mature. When I was a kid, I was a hardcore gamer. Platformers, racing games, RPGs, if it was 16-bit and not a sports game, I've beaten it.
Then, when I was 20 or 21, I went from playing 4-8 hours a day to almost zero quite literally overnight. I got home from work one day, looked at my Playstation, and said, "nah, not today." That was almost a decade ago. Since then the only thing I've played is the occasional emulated game or annual round of Wipeout XL. I guess I just realized that spending so much time on video games was an incredible waste when I could be learning about Linux or some programming language. (In fact, one of my first non-trivial projects at the time was writing a Tetris clone in Tcl/Tk.)
Anyway, digressed a bit there. What I was trying to say is that video games provide an outlet for young minds. Many kids have literally nothing to do at home when school gets out. Or on the weekend or over summer vacation. They crave something interesting, interactive, and challenging. Video games provide that. Adults generally have no end of daily challenges thus a lesser need to use video games as an intellectual outlet. There are plenty of adults that are gamers these days, but they all got into gaming when they were kids. Practically no adults start playing video games as an adult.
</armchair psychologist>
I had SiliconVally/8043 over a decade ago. Even back then it bothered me that they didn't really do much with the Neighborhood concept other than to categorize sites. I always thought it could have been something that allowed people to network and find others with similar tastes and ideas. Basically a poor-man's version of social networking sites that are all the rage today.
I've got to be getting old, there were so many really good ideas back then that got about 90% of the way towards the major Internet trends that we see today only to completely fall over into obscurity well before their time.
I used to have a copy of the Internet Yellow Pages. A physical book. The same size and shape as a telephone yellow-pages. At the time it was printed, it listed most of the relevant sites devoted to a particular subject and it was actually pretty darn thorough. Most of the URLs back then were .edu, .gov, or .net. Only a few .com and almost no .org. There were a few entries for FTP and Gopher sites scattered here and there as well. Good times. I wonder if I still have that book stashed away somewhere, the Internet was such an incredibly different place back then.
Dude. If only I had mod points. I would hack Slashdot to give your comment like 18 of them.
What you said is exactly what's been resonating in my head for years. Corporations have become lazy to the point that they squander their (sometimes ill-gotten) riches on the lifestyles of their top-tier execs instead of competing in the market or enriching the community that built them. Their business models have switched from "become a market leader through superior performance" to "intimidate the fuck out of everyone until they just hand us money."
Monarchy died because citizens eventually realized that their kings were, without exception, acting in their own best interests instead of the interest of their civilizations. Corporations are in the same boat, the only question is if, when, and how they too will be replaced.
Uh, no. MySQL, the company, was doing just fine all by themselves. They were making a tidy profit on value-added services, support contracts, and custom development. They were one of the shining examples of how to build a successful (read: profitable) business on top of an open source product. That's what made them an attractive purchase in the first place.
That just makes no sense. In the open source world, you're supposed to "steal" improvements. That's what open source is all about. And in any event, there have always been plenty of support/consulting options in the database world besides the original vendor. That has always been true no matter who owns the commercial version of MySQL or whether an open source fork becomes the de facto edition.
Thanks for the FUD, but you can have it back. Because MySQL is open source, it is by design immune to such trivial things as corporate takeovers. MySQL is the most popular database engine on the planet and this is one of the big reasons why. Although the future of MySQL may be uncertain, anyone currently using MySQL can be secure in the knowledge that their copy won't magically shut itself off and that there isn't just one vendor capable of adequately supporting the current code base.
PostgreSQL is a fine database engine, but it has fuck all to do with this discussion.
Not really. You can try disabling bunches of stuff, but for the most part if you want to run a modern desktop environment, you need modern hardware.
You can also try Xubuntu. You will be amazed how much functionality is identical to standard Ubuntu.
Hi.
I saw that you posted the same comment in the gearlog article, but I don't have an account there. I have an account here, however, so I'd like to clarify the point upon which all your shouting seems to rest:
Despite how you'd like to paint them, iSuppli is just a market research firm. They take things apart, document what's inside, and estimate the raw cost of the components. In particular, they made NO judgements about how much it cost Amazon's employees to engineer it, write the software, or market it. It's possible that they didn't even include many manufacturing costs (tooling the machinery, making the plastic moulds, etc). Even BusinessWeek's article was careful to point out that some costs, like royalty fees, were not figured into the research.
YOU were the one that manufactured the idea of, "hey, these Kindle things are really only worth $185! Somebody's getting ripped off!" Only so you could (try) to tear it down in a fit of anti-socialist rage.
Also, I'm still trying to figure out what a dilapidated chemical plant has to do with an internet story about an ebook reader.