Careful with their compatibility list. It's not bad, but I found it rather innacurate. Unfortunately, it seemed to err on the optomistic side, too.
EG. My PS2 can't play DVD-R discs of movies properly. Their compatibility list said it could. (I think this is due to people putting in a DVD-R and playing it for a few minutes, so they assume it works fine.) In reality, it usually plays ok until it nears the end of a disc - where it start skipping badly and aborts before the movie ends. They also claimed my Samsung DVD-812 could play MP3 and VCD formats. This seems to have come from its instruction manual, which does state this. Unfortunately, it also clearly states that the DVD-812 won't read any CD-R media. (So tell me, where do you get commercially pressed CD-ROMs full of MP3 music?) I think when most people check a compatibility list on DVD players for MP3 capabilities, they're assuming it'll play them from CD-R type discs.....
If you're hung-up on the whole idea that the mailman is acting on behalf of a govt. agency and not a truly "private business" -- how about this scenario?
I receive a phone call from a guy who asks me to assist him with robbing a bank. I agree, as long as I get 60% of the money.
Afterwards, we're both caught. Can we name the local telco as an accessory to the crime? After all, it was their service that made it possible for us to communicate about the crime.
I think not.
Same with an ISP. I really feel that legally, there's no good reason they should be responsible for their users. Any legal cases ruled in this manner were wrong and subject to question.
Sure, people will come to the ISP first if someone hacks a system using their service. The police may well come to the telco requesting a trace, or a list of numbers a customer called too.
In the case of the telco, it happens that govt. already passed specific legislation forcing them to give police/FBI access to call traces/monitoring. Otherwise, the telco could simply say "Sorry. We just don't keep track of that type of information." and there'd be nothing they could really do about it.
Being a govt. regulated monopoly, the telco doesn't get that option.
Some of the Internet's most basic functions assume a lack of monitoring, in fact. Usenet newsgroups are probably the best example. If it was designed so the identity/location of original posters were always logged someplace - you wouldn't see much of the traffic it gets each day.
Yes, absolutely! The problem does lie with government and not with the true *providers* of broadband.
The small "competitors" selling DSL were not really DSL providers at all. That's the crux of the issue. They just wanted government to force the regional Bells to hand over their DSL services at (or below) cost so they could resell it.
Then they bellyache when the regional Bells "play games" with them, and give them only second rate service on those circuits. Gee, I wonder why *that* happens?
Open the whole thing up.... take govt. regulation out of the picture completely, and see what happens then. In the short term, sure - there will be some chaos and some folks will see their access cut off as their company goes under.
Good... that's "survival of the fittest" in action. In the long-term, you'll have a variety of different technologies that all promise to bring you inexpensive high-speed Internet - and DSL will simply be the regional Bell's method of choice.
You, the consumer, will finally have *real* alternatives, instead of the exact same service sold to you by your choice of "shell companies" that are simply printing up the bills and forwarding your service requests to the real provider, the Bells.
Bleah. I've said it many times before, but I'll say it once more.
DSL, by its very nature, is really the property of the telcos. The technology is great, but the only people really responsible for keeping it "alive" are the Bells. It runs over their existing copper, and requires repeaters and switches owned and maintained by them.
As long as federal government hangs onto the idea that the regional Bells need to remain "government protected monopolies" - we'll have this bickering over how many of their services should be freely handed out to their competitors.
IMHO, the whole thing is insane. It has almost nothing to do with "only government regulation can cause monopolies". It has everything to do with "government regulation can protect a company's monopoly status long after it's useful to do so".
At this point, who cares about the past? Just let the regional Bells go. End the govt. controls and restrictions on them, but end the monopoly protections too. Whatever is theirs is theirs, and let them sink or swim with it from here on out!
DSL is *not* the "end all, be all" of high-speed Internet. It's simply one of only a couple reasonably priced options available at the moment. Assuming freedom from govt. interference, anyone can come along and offer alternatives to DSL that work as well or better.
The long-term answer is not to force Bell to let everyone and their brother resell DSL service. That just creates "shell companies" that do nothing but add an extra layer of "red tape" when you're trying to fix billing or service problems. People with Covad or Northpointe DSL still had to wait for those companies to go crying back to the regional Bell when problems came up. It's inefficient and pointless.
Sure, "better graphics" provide the motivation -- but the difficulty in coding for the more advanced processors tends to work against them.
By the time developers really master the art of coding for the new platform, it's already "outdated" anyway, and they're just struggling to make it appear as good as whatever the new "latest and greatest" technology is.
When I look at my collection of PS2 games, I see that the vast majority of the titles released in the first year or so have decidedly poor graphics. (Fantasy of Flight, for example, or Real Pool) These things look like 4+ year old computer games. They certainly don't look any better than most "respectable" PS1 titles.
The graphics details they're trying to address in new platforms are miniscule problems compared to many issues they've *never* really fixed. (EG. Graphics glitches that draw black space instead of the side of an object when your character walks to just the right place and angle.)
I don't even play SSX Tricky that often, but I've managed to "fall into" graphics screw-ups twice now. One time, my snowboarder kept getting redrawn over and over on top of a glitching, flickery backdrop that looked like it was stuck between updating two different frames. Finally, I pressed enough buttons that he "fell out" of the "trap" somehow and back onto the snow.
Even in Grand Theft Auto III, I've had at least one instance where I managed to walk "through" the side of a building partially.
To me, these experiences completely ruin the game's atmosphere - and are far more serious issues than the fact that some object doesn't cast the right shade of colored lighting onto a surrounding item.
Whatever.... It's also been argued that your best bet is not to log anything or make any attempts at restricting access based on content.
If you're truly just providing the connection and not taking any steps that show you're able (and willing) to monitor what actually travels over the connection - you have much better legal ground to stand on if they come after you for a user's misbehavior online.
(EG. Your mailman can't be arrested just because he delivered you envelopes containing child porn photos. He had no way of knowing what was in them.)
Bandwidth doesn't "cost more than we consumers are paying". Not by a longshot!
The problem is, telcos are over-estimating how much profit they should be able to generate, per consumer, for a given amount of bandwidth.
EG. A single 128K ISDN circuit in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) currently costs a home user roughly $130 per month. My July phone bill just mentioned a rate INCREASE on ISDN circuits, starting next month. Why? ISDN is quickly losing popularity since most residential ISDN customers switched to DSL or a cable modem already, as soon as one or the other became available in their geographic area. I suppose they'll start complaining about the "lack of demand for our high speed services" soon, too.
They recently RAISED prices on their DSL service too, as soon as a couple competitors died off. It's not like they were losing money on the service at the previous prices - and if anything, costs should be dropping on this stuff so they can take away customers they currently lose to cable modems.
Speaking of their previous DSL competitors (EG. Northpoint and Covad), even their own employees were seen on old Slashdot discussions saying they were way overpaid for the work they performed.
Mismanagement seems to be the primary reason we don't have cheaper bandwidth already. The "light at the end of the tunnel" will hopefully be a new generation of businesses buying out the dead and dying and making better use of the resources.
I think you make an excellent point about the "next boom" being related to bandwidth.
I've been predicting for years that lots of high-speed connectivity between people will be the "key" to any future innovation related to computers and communications devices.
I think the "pioneers" of high speed Internet suffered because they were trying to lay down the infrastructure before the "killer apps" were out there that made the general public interested in buying.
I'm not saying this killed Worldcom. Obviously, they died due to fraudulent accounting practices and poor planning.
In general though, the demand for high speed Internet for the consumer is primarily fueled by things they can't really promote. (Porn video streams, software piracy, and music/video piracy.) People using the net mainly to read/write email and do some research or shopping on the web don't feel compelled to spend $50 a month for DSL or a cable modem, as a rule. These activities were created around the 56K (and slower) modem connection - and "high bandwidth versions" of these services generally mean "pointless additional graphics and sounds that make it harder to get to what you need".
The next generation of people picking up the pieces from the dead/dying pioneer companies have a real shot at getting the bandwidth out there to the masses. If/when they start doing this at prices equivalent or cheaper to using analog phone lines w/modems - people will switch "just because you get more for the same money". Only then will creative uses for all the bandwidth really start popping up.
Your statement is often repeated, but I'm still not sure I agree with it.
I understand, of course, that the objective of capitalism is amassing capital - but competitors can be rendered irrelevant in many ways. It's not like merging with them through expensive corporate buy-outs is the only (or even most-efficient) way of dealing with them.
As I said before, I think mergers are attractive in the current economy, largely because government's taxes and interference tilts the balance in favor of it.
On a truly level playing field, I think you'd see some buyouts/mergers - but you'd also see spin-offs of new, smaller competitors. (To some extent, you see this now. Intel's CPU making competitor, AMD, seems to have been born from disgruntled Intel employees.)
A given company C.E.O. might always strive to become a monopoly - but it doesn't mean the market will naturally end up this way. Almost all successful monopolies we have today are preserved by government regulation. The ones that aren't don't seem to remain "on the top of the heap" for very long.
The old addage about "the bigger you are, the harder you fall" seems to hold true. At some point, you grow to a size where you can no longer effectively manage everything your corporation is doing. Sure, you try to spread things out - appointing more and more management to oversee small parts of the whole. But the initial vision of the founder gets lost in the murk - and sooner or later, someone comes along who can topple the "empire" with superior customer service/products/value.
I don't think I'm "deluded" in the slightest when I see all of the efforts made by the FBI over the years to obtain more flexibility in performing surveilance.
Technically, no, maybe they'll always want a warrant first - but they're also constantly trying to make sure getting that warrant is a "no-brainer". Ideally, they'd like a search warrant to be handed out like a piece of candy. It's simply a piece of paper that makes their activity look more legitimate on the surface.
It's not that the FBI loves collecting "evidence they could never hope to use". The problem is, technology makes it feasible to process much more raw information than ever before. If they can side-step traditional limitations on what they can and can't collect as evidence, they can start mass collection efforts, fed into computer systems, and have the machines do the work for them. Flag all the "interesting" stuff that pops up, get your warrant, and go check it out.
How hard is it for them to claim they "acted in good faith" when their expensive software "data mining" package said someone needed to be checked out? Nevermind they kicked in some gun dealer's door at 2AM and gave his wife a heart-attack, all because the software couldn't tell those large gun purchases were just inventory for his store - as opposed to "suspected terrorist activity".
I'm not disagreeing with you that the "free market" doesn't exist in the United States (or anyplace else on earth at this time).
I do, however, think your conclusions are incorrect. The idea that "the market naturally trends towards consolidation" is really only an untested theory, and I suspect it's not true.
We have no way of knowing if the market will really trend towards consolidation if you take away all the governmnet interference that's currently worked into the system.
I believe much consolidation we see today is motivated primarily by the corrupt political system we've got in place. (EG. A corporate giant can finally achieve "critical mass" to escape high taxes. Look at Microsoft or Cisco, both of whom didn't pay a dime in federal taxes a year or two ago. They were able to generate enough tax breaks and write-offs to pull it off. This just doesn't happen with smaller businesses.)
In a truly "free market economy", I don't think companies would generally see an advantage to large mergers. It causes far too many complications. (You take on a whole slew of employees that largely duplicate the tasks performed by your original staff. You suddenly obtain a product line that you may or may not really know what to do with. You gain all of the property and inherent costs of it, yet it's likely more square footage than you need after you eliminate duplicate jobs and products.)
Thanks, I'll check out "No Logo". Sounds like a good read.
Just for the sake of clarification though, I wasn't try to make a claim that "pop culture" is the only (or even the most powerful) thing that keeps us together as a society.
It isn't the "definitive tie" for us humans. Not at all....
In the modern world, however, we've created a number of pastimes that encourage our solitude. We spend hours watching a television, or sitting in front of a video game console or computer screen. We go out to movies where hundreds of people sit together, never saying a word to each other, while they collectively experience a solitary form of entertainment.
Unlike some people, I *don't* believe this is a bad thing. People really don't need to be social all the time. It's ok. But what it does do is creates a situation where many of our common experiences have to do with what we observed through the mass media programming.
Without any "pop culture" at all, sure - we'd have plenty of other things to talk about. Why do you think "gossip" is so popular? When all else fails (and people grow tired of talking about themselves), they often start talking about their neighbors. When you want to made conversation, though, and you don't want to risk offending the other person - references to pop culture are a pretty safe bet. (EG. 2 women can talk about how outrageous some soap-opera star acted on the show the other day, instead of gossiping about a co-worker.) It offers one more tool in our arsenal of topics to discuss, and people find a lot of comfort in that.
I'll end this for now with one final thought. Diversity requires creativity. Advertisers strive to hire the most creative people possible. Why? Because they know that in general, people aren't all that creative. Most of us would rather be "spoon-fed" someone else's creative idea than make the effort to roll our own.
The example of it making little difference whether a Spanish ship traveled at 2 knots or 20 isn't a good analogy.
When you scale the distance traveled up as high as is required when you're talking about colonizing a new planet - you run into the issue of the travel taking longer than a human's lifespan.
Theoretically, yes, you could construct a traveling "world" of sorts - where generations of people live and die, but the man-made "planet" continues on a slow course towards a new plant to colonize. In reality, it seems like this would raise quite a few issues and stumbling blocks.
For starters, by the time the ship makes it to the new world - will the people on board know what to do? Will they care? After all, you're talking about many generations of humans that made this ship their home. Will there really be incentive to disembark and risk death trying to colonize some other planet?
By contrast, if the people *do* long for colonization of a new world - I'd argue that it would only happen if they were lacking a number of things on their ship that couldn't be simulated/recreated. If that's so, it's questionable whether man would even survive for the thousands of years required for the ship to reach its destination in the first place. (EG. Issues of malnutrition because of the limited types of food and drink available on board.)
After the initial amusement wore off, I started thinking more about it. Look, I think *all* of us grow tired of all the advertising out there. It might make the author feel self-important to act as though he's the lone dissenter to advertising - but it's just not so. Still, it's not wise to equate advertising with modern culture.
"Pop culture" is a sort of glue that holds us together and helps us make bonds/relationships with others. When you want to strike up a conversation with someone new, you start looking for "common ground". It really does you no good to break into a big discussion on an obscure topic the other party has no previous knowledge of. They'll get bored and walk away. Communications is a 2-way street. You listen and respond, listen and respond.
You can go on attacking popular music ("Fratboy Slim" as you prefer calling him, or "Everqueer"), or lambast the latest Hollywood movie productions and TV series. Whatever floats your boat. Still, it doesn't change the fact that all of these little blips on life's "radar" provide common experiences that people can relate to and talk about in daily life.
Useless junk? Well, sure it is. All entertainment could be classified that way. Sports too, and drinking for pleasure. Humans need breaks. We can't *always* be doing "productive" things. We need some down-time, and some plain old "fun time" to recharge our bodies and minds.
Fast food exists primarily because it's inexpensive + convenient. If McDonalds never ran a television ad again - do you think they'd go away? Doubtful - although they might not like having less opportunity to remind you that they're a breakfast/lunch/dinner option. People would still go there and eat their processed foods. People's tendencies to eat this sort of unhealthy fare are much more complex than mindless brainwashing by commercials. If you think otherwise, I'm afraid you sell all of us short.
Ok, I'd have to argue that your wishes are unrealistic. In reality, maintaining a help-desk is much more central to your profitability than dealing with users running open-relay mail servers.
Even so, many customers of large ISPs *do* complain about poor quality of service when calling the help desk.
In any case, I'm not intending to pick on Earthlink in particular. Perhaps they do a pretty good job of killing spammers off of their systems. I don't have statistics to prove or disprove that. I just use them as an example of a very large ISP compared to the old days of the "mom and pop" local ISP.
Keeping your network secure is *primarily* about making sure hackers don't get in and do damage to your own servers or steal customer records/information. It's secondarily about eliminating issues such as users abusing your "terms of service agreement" with spamming, etc.
I can almost guarantee that the vast majority of spam problems come from large nation-wide (or world-wide) ISPs, or from regional ISPs owned and operated by telcos/cable companies - as opposed to local mom-and-pop operations. This is no accident, IMHO. When you're the "little guy", you have to more carefully manage the resources you have and concentrate on keeping an "above average" level of service. Otherwise, you'll be crushed by the "big ISPs".
Honestly, the lack of certain kinds of software for Linux has kept me from setting it up on my parents' PC.
1. My mom, like most mothers I know, is very interested in creating greeting cards and thank-you notes on a color inkjet printer. I have yet to see a single greeting-card maker program for Linux. (Did anyone ever write one of these yet? Maybe sort of a Broderbund "Print Shop" clone, even?) Even if a free open-source card-maker is available, what kind of card artwork comes with it? For under $25, you can buy one of several Windows-based greeting card programs that come with a CD full of commercially-designed cards from respected companies like Hallmark or American Greetings. I'm not sure some Linux guru is going to be able to match that artistic quality in his/her spare time as a freeware project....
2. My folks also do a lot of family research. So far, I haven't seen a single package better than Broderbund's "Family Tree Maker" for their needs. Again, this puppy isn't available in a Linux version. I'm sure Linux has a number of geneology packages for it - but honestly, I don't think any are as user-friendly or comprehensive as "Family Tree Maker".
3. There's a real lack of children's educational software for Linux. I have yet to see any commercial Linux offerings from any of the people who own the rights to the characters children like and relate to. (Disney learning titles, Dr. Seuss, the Bernstein Bears, Sesame Street, etc.) My parents want their youngest child to be able to play learning games on their PC sometimes, and expect it to handle whatever discount title they pick up at the local Best Buy store.
StarOffice and KDE/Gnome + internet apps are a teriffic "core" -- but until some of these other software gaps get filled, Linux isn't ready for many "family PCs".
I think the "peer pressure" idea is becoming a bit of a "dinosaur" from the days of the mom-and-pop ISP. In the past, except for AOL, you didn't really have many large ISPs that kept on large numbers of spamming users.
The small ISPs would be pretty responsive to complaints, or if they weren't - they'd feel the pain of getting blacklisted, and would usually give in and kick off their problem users.
Nowdays, with most customers on one of a handfull of giant ISPs, it's no longer effective or realistic to ban the whole ISP. (EG. With the number of customers Earthlink has, can you really expect them to always keep *every* user with an open-relay off of their network? Even if they hired whole teams of people just to perform that one task, new people with open-relays would subscribe faster than they could discover them. Hence, Earthlink would almost always be on a blacklist.)
I agree with you to a point. People do need to make *some* effort to find resolution to their own problems before running for free help. That's why I say "You can't save the world." Some people trying to get Linux going just don't need to be using it. They tend to be the type that doesn't enjoy problem-solving, doesn't really "like computers", and expects free hand-holding for every little project they embark on.
Commercial packages are best suited to these individuals....
But by the same token, it's not fair to ignore questions because you personally feel the time can be "better spent" answering "more worthy" questions instead. The guy asking a simple "how do I set up ppp" could be doing some important stuff using Linux - and can't get there simply because he can't get his box on the net to download the files he needs to proceed.
Meanwhile, some esoteric and complex question that sounds like a "real, worthy question" is often asked by a guy who can figure it out on his own anyway. He may just be asking, hoping for a quick solution found by someone else like him. If he doesn't get one in a few minutes, he'll proceed to use his pretty-good problem solving skills to find it for himself.
Bleah.... after close to 10 years of doing PC support, consulting, and technician work - I'm convinced that there's really no "better way" of dealing with the new hardware purchases.
If you constantly chase down compatibility (EG. Our new systems must be able to boot using the same Norton Ghost drive image we built for the last ones!), you cheat yourself out of better deals for the money spent. Manufacturers don't just change around system specs because they enjoy frustrating the consumer. They do it because they can add new functionality, better performance, or simply because old components they used are no longer in production.
On the other hand, if you don't insist on "nearly identical" hardware - your productivity suffers as your techs have to learn to deal with all those different configurations.
So in effect, it's pretty much a wash. You either save $'s by always getting the best value for the money in new hardware and lose some of the savings in added support costs, or you blow it up front paying premium prices for outdated but compatible hardware, and make your support jobs less taxing.
Given those considerations - I'd typically opt for getting whatever hardware is latest and greatest for the money. Modern OS's generally behave pretty well on modern hardware, and by buying large number of systems at a time (instead of 10 here, and 5 or 10 there a month or two later), you minimize the headaches of multiple system types scattered all over....
I have no doubt you're having success burning discs with your IDE writer attached to the same ribbon cable as your CD-ROM drive. The point is, it works for you because you have a newer writer with the "burn-proof" type technology in it. That's really just a band-aid for the buffer-underrun problem. It works fine, yes - but my suggestions were aimed at IDE CD-burner users in general. Using your setup with an older IDE burner that lacks buffer-underrun protection will likely result in "coasters".
Yeah, I'm fully aware of "roaming" being a purely administrative issue. (If one company owned all the towers, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd care which tower your call happened to be carried on.)
My point, though, is that with a large enough country, you'll most likely have several competing providers - and thereby such hassles as roaming charges. Cell towers aren't exactly cheap to install and maintain. When you cover a large number of square miles, it starts to cost much more to send your installation and repair techs out to all of those remote locations.
Japan may have much more population density, but at least they don't have some company trying to maintain a group of cell towers over 1,500 miles away.
As far as Canada and Australia having better cellular coverage than the U.S. - it's entirely possible. I've never made a cellular call in either of those countries. The U.S. is behind the times in several ways when it comes to telecommunications. It's sort of the curse attached to our being first with the original phone technologies. I remember Canadian friends telling me about cheap T1 circuits into their homes and inexpensive ISDN lines before that. In the U.S. - ISDN has generally been a rip-off. $149 a month or so for 128K of bandwidth was the norm here in the Midwest. Our telcos didn't want to offer it until the federal trade commission ruled that they had to offer it everywhere by a certain date. It required a number of phone switch upgrades, so they wanted all the ISDN users to pay for those upgrade costs. In other parts of the world, the newer phone switches were all they had installed to begin with - so adding these services was pretty inexpensive and easy.
Less "immoral"? So who are you to claim absolute knowledge of what is moral and immoral for the rest of us?
You're arguing on pretty subjective grounds.
I have no problems with my own conscience when I download an artist's MP3 song, or burn a copy of one of their music CDs.
Truly, I believe it always has been and always will be the nature of the music (and video) distribution business that a certain percentage of people will buy a given work, while another percentage will just make themselves a copy of it.
Right now, it seems to be believed that it's more profitable to bellyache about the artificial "losses" incurred from the "illegal copies" floating around than to take responsibility for one's own actions and try to produce better music. The quality of "popular music" is at an all-time low right now, and the only answer they can give for poor sales is music piracy.
I've purchased literally hundreds of CDs and hundreds of cassette tapes. Know what? Quite a few of those tapes are already worn out. Do they offer any type of replacement deal? Nope! Whether my tape happens to last 20 years, or only 2 - I'm stuck paying full retail price for a replacement. In a fair world, the music industry would realize that I already paid for my rights to listen to this particular album the first time, and only charge me the actual cost of the replacement media if my tape wore out.
So instead of re-buying the same stuff twice, I'm trying to download a lot of it as MP3's. Immoral? I think not... but some of you would, of course, decry this as absolutely wrong.
Yeah - exactly! I mean, perhaps they figure nobody wants a flash on this type of device, because they know much of the attraction is the ability to take discreet photos of the unsuspecting.
Still, when you've got these low-quality (sometimes plastic, not even real glass) optics and cheap digital CCD's, you're simply not going to get a decent picture without bright background lighting.
Even with my $900 Sony digital 8 camcorder, taking still photos to the memory stick is troublesome indoors. Sometimes, you can load the photo into Photoshop and adjust the brightness/contrast and end up with something usable - but by default, it's too dark. I guess I need to buy the light attachment for it.
The other alternative would be attaching an infra-red light, and letting these devices take those photos with a greenish cast, similar to the "night-shot" mode on the camcorders. (The "Blair Witch Project" film effect, basically.)
Well, you also have to keep in mind, it's *far* easiesr providing seamless coverage to the relatively small geography of the Japanese islands than to the entire United States.
If Japan was the same size as the U.S., I suspect you'd see them dealing with issues like "roaming" too.
I agree, though, that they probably have an advantage by standardizing on one cellular technology. It always seemed odd to me that we have carriers (such as VoiceStream wireless) in the U.S. supporting GSM phone standards, while everyone else does CDMA.
Slashdot Mirror
Careful with their compatibility list. It's not bad, but I found it rather innacurate. Unfortunately, it seemed to err on the optomistic side, too.
EG. My PS2 can't play DVD-R discs of movies properly. Their compatibility list said it could. (I think this is due to people putting in a DVD-R and playing it for a few minutes, so they assume it works fine.) In reality, it usually plays ok until it nears the end of a disc - where it start skipping badly and aborts before the movie ends. They also claimed my Samsung DVD-812 could play MP3 and VCD formats. This seems to have come from its instruction manual, which does state this. Unfortunately, it also clearly states that the DVD-812 won't read any CD-R media. (So tell me, where do you get commercially pressed CD-ROMs full of MP3 music?) I think when most people check a compatibility list on DVD players for MP3 capabilities, they're assuming it'll play them from CD-R type discs.....
If you're hung-up on the whole idea that the mailman is acting on behalf of a govt. agency and not a truly "private business" -- how about this scenario?
I receive a phone call from a guy who asks me to assist him with robbing a bank. I agree, as long as I get 60% of the money.
Afterwards, we're both caught. Can we name the local telco as an accessory to the crime? After all, it was their service that made it possible for us to communicate about the crime.
I think not.
Same with an ISP. I really feel that legally, there's no good reason they should be responsible for their users. Any legal cases ruled in this manner were wrong and subject to question.
Sure, people will come to the ISP first if someone hacks a system using their service. The police may well come to the telco requesting a trace, or a list of numbers a customer called too.
In the case of the telco, it happens that govt. already passed specific legislation forcing them to give police/FBI access to call traces/monitoring. Otherwise, the telco could simply say "Sorry. We just don't keep track of that type of information." and there'd be nothing they could really do about it.
Being a govt. regulated monopoly, the telco doesn't get that option.
Some of the Internet's most basic functions assume a lack of monitoring, in fact. Usenet newsgroups are probably the best example. If it was designed so the identity/location of original posters were always logged someplace - you wouldn't see much of the traffic it gets each day.
Yes, absolutely! The problem does lie with government and not with the true *providers* of broadband.
The small "competitors" selling DSL were not really DSL providers at all. That's the crux of the issue. They just wanted government to force the regional Bells to hand over their DSL services at (or below) cost so they could resell it.
Then they bellyache when the regional Bells "play games" with them, and give them only second rate service on those circuits. Gee, I wonder why *that* happens?
Open the whole thing up.... take govt. regulation out of the picture completely, and see what happens then. In the short term, sure - there will be some chaos and some folks will see their access cut off as their company goes under.
Good... that's "survival of the fittest" in action. In the long-term, you'll have a variety of different technologies that all promise to bring you inexpensive high-speed Internet - and DSL will simply be the regional Bell's method of choice.
You, the consumer, will finally have *real* alternatives, instead of the exact same service sold to you by your choice of "shell companies" that are simply printing up the bills and forwarding your service requests to the real provider, the Bells.
Bleah. I've said it many times before, but I'll say it once more.
DSL, by its very nature, is really the property of the telcos. The technology is great, but the only people really responsible for keeping it "alive" are the Bells. It runs over their existing copper, and requires repeaters and switches owned and maintained by them.
As long as federal government hangs onto the idea that the regional Bells need to remain "government protected monopolies" - we'll have this bickering over how many of their services should be freely handed out to their competitors.
IMHO, the whole thing is insane. It has almost nothing to do with "only government regulation can cause monopolies". It has everything to do with "government regulation can protect a company's monopoly status long after it's useful to do so".
At this point, who cares about the past? Just let the regional Bells go. End the govt. controls and restrictions on them, but end the monopoly protections too. Whatever is theirs is theirs, and let them sink or swim with it from here on out!
DSL is *not* the "end all, be all" of high-speed Internet. It's simply one of only a couple reasonably priced options available at the moment. Assuming freedom from govt. interference, anyone can come along and offer alternatives to DSL that work as well or better.
The long-term answer is not to force Bell to let everyone and their brother resell DSL service. That just creates "shell companies" that do nothing but add an extra layer of "red tape" when you're trying to fix billing or service problems. People with Covad or Northpointe DSL still had to wait for those companies to go crying back to the regional Bell when problems came up. It's inefficient and pointless.
Sure, "better graphics" provide the motivation -- but the difficulty in coding for the more advanced processors tends to work against them.
By the time developers really master the art of coding for the new platform, it's already "outdated" anyway, and they're just struggling to make it appear as good as whatever the new "latest and greatest" technology is.
When I look at my collection of PS2 games, I see that the vast majority of the titles released in the first year or so have decidedly poor graphics. (Fantasy of Flight, for example, or Real Pool) These things look like 4+ year old computer games. They certainly don't look any better than most "respectable" PS1 titles.
The graphics details they're trying to address in new platforms are miniscule problems compared to many issues they've *never* really fixed. (EG. Graphics glitches that draw black space instead of the side of an object when your character walks to just the right place and angle.)
I don't even play SSX Tricky that often, but I've managed to "fall into" graphics screw-ups twice now. One time, my snowboarder kept getting redrawn over and over on top of a glitching, flickery backdrop that looked like it was stuck between updating two different frames. Finally, I pressed enough buttons that he "fell out" of the "trap" somehow and back onto the snow.
Even in Grand Theft Auto III, I've had at least one instance where I managed to walk "through" the side of a building partially.
To me, these experiences completely ruin the game's atmosphere - and are far more serious issues than the fact that some object doesn't cast the right shade of colored lighting onto a surrounding item.
Whatever.... It's also been argued that your best bet is not to log anything or make any attempts at restricting access based on content.
If you're truly just providing the connection and not taking any steps that show you're able (and willing) to monitor what actually travels over the connection - you have much better legal ground to stand on if they come after you for a user's misbehavior online.
(EG. Your mailman can't be arrested just because he delivered you envelopes containing child porn photos. He had no way of knowing what was in them.)
Bandwidth doesn't "cost more than we consumers are paying". Not by a longshot!
The problem is, telcos are over-estimating how much profit they should be able to generate, per consumer, for a given amount of bandwidth.
EG. A single 128K ISDN circuit in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) currently costs a home user roughly $130 per month. My July phone bill just mentioned a rate INCREASE on ISDN circuits, starting next month. Why? ISDN is quickly losing popularity since most residential ISDN customers switched to DSL or a cable modem already, as soon as one or the other became available in their geographic area. I suppose they'll start complaining about the "lack of demand for our high speed services" soon, too.
They recently RAISED prices on their DSL service too, as soon as a couple competitors died off. It's not like they were losing money on the service at the previous prices - and if anything, costs should be dropping on this stuff so they can take away customers they currently lose to cable modems.
Speaking of their previous DSL competitors (EG. Northpoint and Covad), even their own employees were seen on old Slashdot discussions saying they were way overpaid for the work they performed.
Mismanagement seems to be the primary reason we don't have cheaper bandwidth already. The "light at the end of the tunnel" will hopefully be a new generation of businesses buying out the dead and dying and making better use of the resources.
I think you make an excellent point about the "next boom" being related to bandwidth.
I've been predicting for years that lots of high-speed connectivity between people will be the "key" to any future innovation related to computers and communications devices.
I think the "pioneers" of high speed Internet suffered because they were trying to lay down the infrastructure before the "killer apps" were out there that made the general public interested in buying.
I'm not saying this killed Worldcom. Obviously, they died due to fraudulent accounting practices and poor planning.
In general though, the demand for high speed Internet for the consumer is primarily fueled by things they can't really promote. (Porn video streams, software piracy, and music/video piracy.) People using the net mainly to read/write email and do some research or shopping on the web don't feel compelled to spend $50 a month for DSL or a cable modem, as a rule. These activities were created around the 56K (and slower) modem connection - and "high bandwidth versions" of these services generally mean "pointless additional graphics and sounds that make it harder to get to what you need".
The next generation of people picking up the pieces from the dead/dying pioneer companies have a real shot at getting the bandwidth out there to the masses. If/when they start doing this at prices equivalent or cheaper to using analog phone lines w/modems - people will switch "just because you get more for the same money". Only then will creative uses for all the bandwidth really start popping up.
Your statement is often repeated, but I'm still not sure I agree with it.
I understand, of course, that the objective of capitalism is amassing capital - but competitors can be rendered irrelevant in many ways. It's not like merging with them through expensive corporate buy-outs is the only (or even most-efficient) way of dealing with them.
As I said before, I think mergers are attractive in the current economy, largely because government's taxes and interference tilts the balance in favor of it.
On a truly level playing field, I think you'd see some buyouts/mergers - but you'd also see spin-offs of new, smaller competitors. (To some extent, you see this now. Intel's CPU making competitor, AMD, seems to have been born from disgruntled Intel employees.)
A given company C.E.O. might always strive to become a monopoly - but it doesn't mean the market will naturally end up this way. Almost all successful monopolies we have today are preserved by government regulation. The ones that aren't don't seem to remain "on the top of the heap" for very long.
The old addage about "the bigger you are, the harder you fall" seems to hold true. At some point, you grow to a size where you can no longer effectively manage everything your corporation is doing. Sure, you try to spread things out - appointing more and more management to oversee small parts of the whole. But the initial vision of the founder gets lost in the murk - and sooner or later, someone comes along who can topple the "empire" with superior customer service/products/value.
I don't think I'm "deluded" in the slightest when I see all of the efforts made by the FBI over the years to obtain more flexibility in performing surveilance.
Technically, no, maybe they'll always want a warrant first - but they're also constantly trying to make sure getting that warrant is a "no-brainer". Ideally, they'd like a search warrant to be handed out like a piece of candy. It's simply a piece of paper that makes their activity look more legitimate on the surface.
It's not that the FBI loves collecting "evidence they could never hope to use". The problem is, technology makes it feasible to process much more raw information than ever before. If they can side-step traditional limitations on what they can and can't collect as evidence, they can start mass collection efforts, fed into computer systems, and have the machines do the work for them. Flag all the "interesting" stuff that pops up, get your warrant, and go check it out.
How hard is it for them to claim they "acted in good faith" when their expensive software "data mining" package said someone needed to be checked out? Nevermind they kicked in some gun dealer's door at 2AM and gave his wife a heart-attack, all because the software couldn't tell those large gun purchases were just inventory for his store - as opposed to "suspected terrorist activity".
I'm not disagreeing with you that the "free market" doesn't exist in the United States (or anyplace else on earth at this time).
I do, however, think your conclusions are incorrect. The idea that "the market naturally trends towards consolidation" is really only an untested theory, and I suspect it's not true.
We have no way of knowing if the market will really trend towards consolidation if you take away all the governmnet interference that's currently worked into the system.
I believe much consolidation we see today is motivated primarily by the corrupt political system we've got in place. (EG. A corporate giant can finally achieve "critical mass" to escape high taxes. Look at Microsoft or Cisco, both of whom didn't pay a dime in federal taxes a year or two ago. They were able to generate enough tax breaks and write-offs to pull it off. This just doesn't happen with smaller businesses.)
In a truly "free market economy", I don't think companies would generally see an advantage to large mergers. It causes far too many complications. (You take on a whole slew of employees that largely duplicate the tasks performed by your original staff. You suddenly obtain a product line that you may or may not really know what to do with. You gain all of the property and inherent costs of it, yet it's likely more square footage than you need after you eliminate duplicate jobs and products.)
Thanks, I'll check out "No Logo". Sounds like a good read.
Just for the sake of clarification though, I wasn't try to make a claim that "pop culture" is the only (or even the most powerful) thing that keeps us together as a society.
It isn't the "definitive tie" for us humans. Not at all....
In the modern world, however, we've created a number of pastimes that encourage our solitude. We spend hours watching a television, or sitting in front of a video game console or computer screen. We go out to movies where hundreds of people sit together, never saying a word to each other, while they collectively experience a solitary form of entertainment.
Unlike some people, I *don't* believe this is a bad thing. People really don't need to be social all the time. It's ok. But what it does do is creates a situation where many of our common experiences have to do with what we observed through the mass media programming.
Without any "pop culture" at all, sure - we'd have plenty of other things to talk about. Why do you think "gossip" is so popular? When all else fails (and people grow tired of talking about themselves), they often start talking about their neighbors. When you want to made conversation, though, and you don't want to risk offending the other person - references to pop culture are a pretty safe bet. (EG. 2 women can talk about how outrageous some soap-opera star acted on the show the other day, instead of gossiping about a co-worker.) It offers one more tool in our arsenal of topics to discuss, and people find a lot of comfort in that.
I'll end this for now with one final thought. Diversity requires creativity. Advertisers strive to hire the most creative people possible. Why? Because they know that in general, people aren't all that creative. Most of us would rather be "spoon-fed" someone else's creative idea than make the effort to roll our own.
Did anyone else catch that the release date for the new OSX update is August 24th. - the same day Microsoft picked for the release of Windows '95?
Maybe it's just coincidence, but it just struck me as interesting. Can't help but wonder if there's any significance behind it.
(In any case, it's also my birthday. Unfortunately, I don't own a Mac - so I don't think I'll be looking for a copy of this OS as a gift this year.)
Umm, I still think it *is* relevant.
The example of it making little difference whether a Spanish ship traveled at 2 knots or 20 isn't a good analogy.
When you scale the distance traveled up as high as is required when you're talking about colonizing a new planet - you run into the issue of the travel taking longer than a human's lifespan.
Theoretically, yes, you could construct a traveling "world" of sorts - where generations of people live and die, but the man-made "planet" continues on a slow course towards a new plant to colonize. In reality, it seems like this would raise quite a few issues and stumbling blocks.
For starters, by the time the ship makes it to the new world - will the people on board know what to do? Will they care? After all, you're talking about many generations of humans that made this ship their home. Will there really be incentive to disembark and risk death trying to colonize some other planet?
By contrast, if the people *do* long for colonization of a new world - I'd argue that it would only happen if they were lacking a number of things on their ship that couldn't be simulated/recreated. If that's so, it's questionable whether man would even survive for the thousands of years required for the ship to reach its destination in the first place. (EG. Issues of malnutrition because of the limited types of food and drink available on board.)
After the initial amusement wore off, I started thinking more about it. Look, I think *all* of us grow tired of all the advertising out there. It might make the author feel self-important to act as though he's the lone dissenter to advertising - but it's just not so. Still, it's not wise to equate advertising with modern culture.
"Pop culture" is a sort of glue that holds us together and helps us make bonds/relationships with others. When you want to strike up a conversation with someone new, you start looking for "common ground". It really does you no good to break into a big discussion on an obscure topic the other party has no previous knowledge of. They'll get bored and walk away. Communications is a 2-way street. You listen and respond, listen and respond.
You can go on attacking popular music ("Fratboy Slim" as you prefer calling him, or "Everqueer"), or lambast the latest Hollywood movie productions and TV series. Whatever floats your boat. Still, it doesn't change the fact that all of these little blips on life's "radar" provide common experiences that people can relate to and talk about in daily life.
Useless junk? Well, sure it is. All entertainment could be classified that way. Sports too, and drinking for pleasure. Humans need breaks. We can't *always* be doing "productive" things. We need some down-time, and some plain old "fun time" to recharge our bodies and minds.
Fast food exists primarily because it's inexpensive + convenient. If McDonalds never ran a television ad again - do you think they'd go away? Doubtful - although they might not like having less opportunity to remind you that they're a breakfast/lunch/dinner option. People would still go there and eat their processed foods. People's tendencies to eat this sort of unhealthy fare are much more complex than mindless brainwashing by commercials. If you think otherwise, I'm afraid you sell all of us short.
Ok, I'd have to argue that your wishes are unrealistic. In reality, maintaining a help-desk is much more central to your profitability than dealing with users running open-relay mail servers.
Even so, many customers of large ISPs *do* complain about poor quality of service when calling the help desk.
In any case, I'm not intending to pick on Earthlink in particular. Perhaps they do a pretty good job of killing spammers off of their systems. I don't have statistics to prove or disprove that. I just use them as an example of a very large ISP compared to the old days of the "mom and pop" local ISP.
Keeping your network secure is *primarily* about making sure hackers don't get in and do damage to your own servers or steal customer records/information. It's secondarily about eliminating issues such as users abusing your "terms of service agreement" with spamming, etc.
I can almost guarantee that the vast majority of spam problems come from large nation-wide (or world-wide) ISPs, or from regional ISPs owned and operated by telcos/cable companies - as opposed to local mom-and-pop operations. This is no accident, IMHO. When you're the "little guy", you have to more carefully manage the resources you have and concentrate on keeping an "above average" level of service. Otherwise, you'll be crushed by the "big ISPs".
Honestly, the lack of certain kinds of software for Linux has kept me from setting it up on my parents' PC.
1. My mom, like most mothers I know, is very interested in creating greeting cards and thank-you notes on a color inkjet printer. I have yet to see a single greeting-card maker program for Linux. (Did anyone ever write one of these yet? Maybe sort of a Broderbund "Print Shop" clone, even?) Even if a free open-source card-maker is available, what kind of card artwork comes with it? For under $25, you can buy one of several Windows-based greeting card programs that come with a CD full of commercially-designed cards from respected companies like Hallmark or American Greetings. I'm not sure some Linux guru is going to be able to match that artistic quality in his/her spare time as a freeware project....
2. My folks also do a lot of family research. So far, I haven't seen a single package better than Broderbund's "Family Tree Maker" for their needs. Again, this puppy isn't available in a Linux version. I'm sure Linux has a number of geneology packages for it - but honestly, I don't think any are as user-friendly or comprehensive as "Family Tree Maker".
3. There's a real lack of children's educational software for Linux. I have yet to see any commercial Linux offerings from any of the people who own the rights to the characters children like and relate to. (Disney learning titles, Dr. Seuss, the Bernstein Bears, Sesame Street, etc.) My parents want their youngest child to be able to play learning games on their PC sometimes, and expect it to handle whatever discount title they pick up at the local Best Buy store.
StarOffice and KDE/Gnome + internet apps are a teriffic "core" -- but until some of these other software gaps get filled, Linux isn't ready for many "family PCs".
I think the "peer pressure" idea is becoming a bit of a "dinosaur" from the days of the mom-and-pop ISP. In the past, except for AOL, you didn't really have many large ISPs that kept on large numbers of spamming users.
The small ISPs would be pretty responsive to complaints, or if they weren't - they'd feel the pain of getting blacklisted, and would usually give in and kick off their problem users.
Nowdays, with most customers on one of a handfull of giant ISPs, it's no longer effective or realistic to ban the whole ISP. (EG. With the number of customers Earthlink has, can you really expect them to always keep *every* user with an open-relay off of their network? Even if they hired whole teams of people just to perform that one task, new people with open-relays would subscribe faster than they could discover them. Hence, Earthlink would almost always be on a blacklist.)
I agree with you to a point. People do need to make *some* effort to find resolution to their own problems before running for free help. That's why I say "You can't save the world." Some people trying to get Linux going just don't need to be using it. They tend to be the type that doesn't enjoy problem-solving, doesn't really "like computers", and expects free hand-holding for every little project they embark on.
Commercial packages are best suited to these individuals....
But by the same token, it's not fair to ignore questions because you personally feel the time can be "better spent" answering "more worthy" questions instead. The guy asking a simple "how do I set up ppp" could be doing some important stuff using Linux - and can't get there simply because he can't get his box on the net to download the files he needs to proceed.
Meanwhile, some esoteric and complex question that sounds like a "real, worthy question" is often asked by a guy who can figure it out on his own anyway. He may just be asking, hoping for a quick solution found by someone else like him. If he doesn't get one in a few minutes, he'll proceed to use his pretty-good problem solving skills to find it for himself.
Bleah.... after close to 10 years of doing PC support, consulting, and technician work - I'm convinced that there's really no "better way" of dealing with the new hardware purchases.
If you constantly chase down compatibility (EG. Our new systems must be able to boot using the same Norton Ghost drive image we built for the last ones!), you cheat yourself out of better deals for the money spent. Manufacturers don't just change around system specs because they enjoy frustrating the consumer. They do it because they can add new functionality, better performance, or simply because old components they used are no longer in production.
On the other hand, if you don't insist on "nearly identical" hardware - your productivity suffers as your techs have to learn to deal with all those different configurations.
So in effect, it's pretty much a wash. You either save $'s by always getting the best value for the money in new hardware and lose some of the savings in added support costs, or you blow it up front paying premium prices for outdated but compatible hardware, and make your support jobs less taxing.
Given those considerations - I'd typically opt for getting whatever hardware is latest and greatest for the money. Modern OS's generally behave pretty well on modern hardware, and by buying large number of systems at a time (instead of 10 here, and 5 or 10 there a month or two later), you minimize the headaches of multiple system types scattered all over....
What about my previous post was "wrong"?
I have no doubt you're having success burning discs with your IDE writer attached to the same ribbon cable as your CD-ROM drive. The point is, it works for you because you have a newer writer with the "burn-proof" type technology in it. That's really just a band-aid for the buffer-underrun problem. It works fine, yes - but my suggestions were aimed at IDE CD-burner users in general. Using your setup with an older IDE burner that lacks buffer-underrun protection will likely result in "coasters".
Yeah, I'm fully aware of "roaming" being a purely administrative issue. (If one company owned all the towers, it wouldn't make much sense that they'd care which tower your call happened to be carried on.)
My point, though, is that with a large enough country, you'll most likely have several competing providers - and thereby such hassles as roaming charges. Cell towers aren't exactly cheap to install and maintain. When you cover a large number of square miles, it starts to cost much more to send your installation and repair techs out to all of those remote locations.
Japan may have much more population density, but at least they don't have some company trying to maintain a group of cell towers over 1,500 miles away.
As far as Canada and Australia having better cellular coverage than the U.S. - it's entirely possible. I've never made a cellular call in either of those countries. The U.S. is behind the times in several ways when it comes to telecommunications. It's sort of the curse attached to our being first with the original phone technologies. I remember Canadian friends telling me about cheap T1 circuits into their homes and inexpensive ISDN lines before that. In the U.S. - ISDN has generally been a rip-off. $149 a month or so for 128K of bandwidth was the norm here in the Midwest. Our telcos didn't want to offer it until the federal trade commission ruled that they had to offer it everywhere by a certain date. It required a number of phone switch upgrades, so they wanted all the ISDN users to pay for those upgrade costs. In other parts of the world, the newer phone switches were all they had installed to begin with - so adding these services was pretty inexpensive and easy.
Less "immoral"? So who are you to claim absolute knowledge of what is moral and immoral for the rest of us?
You're arguing on pretty subjective grounds.
I have no problems with my own conscience when I download an artist's MP3 song, or burn a copy of one of their music CDs.
Truly, I believe it always has been and always will be the nature of the music (and video) distribution business that a certain percentage of people will buy a given work, while another percentage will just make themselves a copy of it.
Right now, it seems to be believed that it's more profitable to bellyache about the artificial "losses" incurred from the "illegal copies" floating around than to take responsibility for one's own actions and try to produce better music. The quality of "popular music" is at an all-time low right now, and the only answer they can give for poor sales is music piracy.
I've purchased literally hundreds of CDs and hundreds of cassette tapes. Know what? Quite a few of those tapes are already worn out. Do they offer any type of replacement deal? Nope! Whether my tape happens to last 20 years, or only 2 - I'm stuck paying full retail price for a replacement. In a fair world, the music industry would realize that I already paid for my rights to listen to this particular album the first time, and only charge me the actual cost of the replacement media if my tape wore out.
So instead of re-buying the same stuff twice, I'm trying to download a lot of it as MP3's. Immoral? I think not... but some of you would, of course, decry this as absolutely wrong.
Yeah - exactly! I mean, perhaps they figure nobody wants a flash on this type of device, because they know much of the attraction is the ability to take discreet photos of the unsuspecting.
Still, when you've got these low-quality (sometimes plastic, not even real glass) optics and cheap digital CCD's, you're simply not going to get a decent picture without bright background lighting.
Even with my $900 Sony digital 8 camcorder, taking still photos to the memory stick is troublesome indoors. Sometimes, you can load the photo into Photoshop and adjust the brightness/contrast and end up with something usable - but by default, it's too dark. I guess I need to buy the light attachment for it.
The other alternative would be attaching an infra-red light, and letting these devices take those photos with a greenish cast, similar to the "night-shot" mode on the camcorders. (The "Blair Witch Project" film effect, basically.)
Well, you also have to keep in mind, it's *far* easiesr providing seamless coverage to the relatively small geography of the Japanese islands than to the entire United States.
If Japan was the same size as the U.S., I suspect you'd see them dealing with issues like "roaming" too.
I agree, though, that they probably have an advantage by standardizing on one cellular technology. It always seemed odd to me that we have carriers (such as VoiceStream wireless) in the U.S. supporting GSM phone standards, while everyone else does CDMA.