Personally, I find it interesting that this problem exists at all. I think the largest factor is the trend towards the web browser as the "swiss army knife" of the Internet. Internet newbies only want 2 things; email and web access. Services like Deja or Google serve as bridges to introduce all of these people to the world of Usenet. This is fine, but it never teaches them to think of Usenet as a service they can directly connect to with their choice of software packages. (I think you'd see the exact same thing happen with email, except Microsoft includes Outlook Express as a seperate program with every copy of Windows, and the setup wizard offers to create you a "mail account". Notice that it never offers to set up your "news account" automatically, though.)
ISP's could go a long way towards bringing their customers back to using their Usenet news servers if they offered a web-based front-end to them. (Anyone know if Linux has such a package available?)
That argument makes no sense, when you realize that Ford made their site public. That's the whole point of running most advertising-type web sites. You want a public presence on the Internet.
Claiming that linking to them from a site they don't approve of is equal to unauthorized use of their bandwidth makes as little sense as trying to control who can and can't view billboards on the side of the highway.
In my opinion, if Ford can't handle the heat from people slandering their web site, they should reconsider running one at all. There's no legal battle to be fought here, though.
It sounds to me like they're basically saying "We'd like to offer you two choices. Either take these last 2 payments we owe you and call it a done deal, or fight with us in court about it." They're betting you don't want to bother with the court battle.
It's completely up to you. You'd have a good case, except you can't get money from someone who has none. Go talk to an attorney who can investigate this place and find out if a suit is worthwhile. I don't think any Slashdot readers can give you better information than that, unless maybe they work for the place themselves.
As long as the govt. doesn't legally prevent you from writing your own code on a PC, there's no way to really claim a company such as Microsoft has a monopoly on a market.
There may be plenty of questionable business practices employed by MS, and maybe some "truth in advertising" laws they've bent or broken. Those are worthy of pursuit in the courts.
The reason MS doesn't look like it's going to really be punished by the Justice Dept. suit is because they've gone after the wrong issues!
Public utilities have regulated monopolies primarily because govt. said "Connecting up all of the homes for this product requires a significant infrastructure. It's not practical, or in the best interest of the public, to let each company duplicate this whole maze of wires or pipes, in attempts to compete with each other."
In the world of software, none of this applies. The bottom line is, Microsoft was there with a product that the vast majority of people were willing to use on their PC, so they bought into it. Most commerical competitors did only a half-assed job of marketing/advertising anything they released to compete with Windows - and in the case of IBM and OS/2, still sold their hardware with Microsoft's product loaded on it!
Linux and other Unix OS's are fine, but until recently, didn't attempt to meet the needs of the average *workstation* user. They were server OS's first and foremost, and have been molded and hammered into home/small business workstation OS's over the years.
I firmly believe in the power of the marketplace. When alternatives develop which truly meet people's needs better, Microsoft will lose dominance. This won't happen overnight though. Even if you succeeded in convincing every PC user in the world that BSD or Linux is their best choice, it would take years to get most of them to switch. People are generally lazy, and/or afraid of change. Until they buy a new PC or their hard drive crashes, they'll put up with what they've already got loaded.
Let's innovate more and litgate less - and let the market forces do as they will. I don't need more of my tax dollars paying lawyers to try to find reasons to punish Microsoft, expecially over a half-baked "monopoly" complaint.
Absolutely.... I consider myself very much a political conservative, but I'm all for ending the "war on drugs". Any true conservative should realize that things which let government get larger and increase taxes, like this pointless "war" should not be acceptable.
Comparing drugs to copying software is pretty ludicrous to begin with, though. I don't know anyone who can honestly say copying some CDs caused their health condition to deteriorate, for starters....
Lotus 1-2-3 might have had a lot to do with it, but I also remember one of the big things were the promise of memory managers letting you break through that nasty 640K conventional RAM barrier. I bet QEMM (with the nifty Desqview 386 DOS multitasker) sold a *lot* of people on the 386 architecture. I remember having a fast 286 as my first PC clone, and I thought it was great until my buddy got an early 386 class PC. He quickly started doing cool things with the RAM above the first megabyte that my 286 couldn't pull off....
Why anyone would expect auction sites to control content that's sold on them is beyond me.
If you want to keep this mess of worms in the proverbial can, quit trying to impose restrictions on services that don't provide any original content, but simply facilitate the transmission of information amongst parties.
If items are sold on eBay, Amazon, or wherever, and said items are illegal in a nation, let that nation deal with the individual who ends up buying them in their nation. Perhaps, even go after the seller directly - but don't shoot the messenger.
This "punish the messenger" mentality causes most of these disputes in the first place. ISPs have to fight over whether or not they're held accountable for content posted to Usenet, webmasters have to worry about what their users upload to their servers, etc. etc. Enough already!
I live in St. Louis, Missouri - but our company even has a plant located in Kansas City. I definitely could have gotten permission to attend this one. I'd welcome it, in fact. Finally, a show I don't need to buy plane tickets to see!
But no - I heard not a word about it until now. This really was mis-managed to the max!
Absolutely! Any artist who tries to restrict distribution of unreleased bootleg material is shooting him or herself in the foot.
Almost anyone I know who listens to bootlegs is either A.) already a big fan, who has already purchased most or all of the musicians' released works and wants additional material, or B.) a new listener who is just learning whether or not they like the musician, by hearing the bootleg recording.
Why in the world would you want to attempt to restrict this type of material from being distributed? If it's of enough value to a musician/band, they should be marketing it themselves.
I beg to differ. I own a Mavica FD-81 and I absolutely love this camera. The only "image quality" related complaint I've had is the tendency for the camera to use too much flash and create an overexposed image. It's easily correctable in Photoshop (just drag the "brightness" adjustment a little to the left, and voila) - but to avoid the hassle, it seems to be best to select the option on the camera to disable the flash, whenever it's possible.
Sure, this camera doesn't create super hi-res 6MB images, but so what? I really don't understand the need for that. One of the things I actually liked about the Mavica was the ability to create a decent looking 640x480 image, perfect for cropping and posting to web sites. I don't want to generate huge images that take forever to d/l from a web page.
In all the hype and rush to offer consumers "film-like resolution" digital cameras, they seem to be forgetting the large number of us out there who use these cameras as supplements to real 35mm cameras. If I want high quality photos, I use my trusty Minolta. If I want to post to the web, or upload photos to a friend, I use the Mavica. I never bought this camera to serve as a total replacement for a film camera!
I don't have the actual CD-ROM and case in front of me right now, but I recall seeing a particularly restrictive EULA printed up in the manual for DeLorme's Street Atlas USA software.
It said something to the effect of it being a violation of the agreement to connect GPS hardware other than DeLorme's own TripMate unit to your PC and run their software with it.
This seems expecially silly when you consider that their software package not only supports the TripMate's proprietary communications protocol but is also compatible with the industry standard NMEA GPS protocol. (We designed our software so it will work with almost anyone's GPS, but don't try it or it'll violate your EULA!!)
Actually, I hadn't heard about this before looking at this link. It is an interesting situation, but I still tend to disagree with the writer's conclusions.
In fact, I think ASCAP is poorly conceived, in and of iteself. As far as I'm concerned (and I spent a few years as a local musician myself, writing and playing original compositions) - artists should cease trying to collect royalties on public performances of their works.
If a piece of music is performed by someone other than the original composer, it is *not* the same experience for the listener. It might be a good imitation, but it's still different. Anyone publically re-creating someone else's musical work had to go to considerable effort to do so. (Had to learn how to play the music, or at least set up the entire performance -- bringing the needed equipment to perform it, advertise it, etc.)
If anything, ASCAP should limit themselves to only collecting royalties from commercial entities that replay artists' recordings for commercial gain (such as radio stations). Live performances should be left completely out of the picture. Otherwise, you run into this ludicrous situations like the Girl Scouts.
I've used several Toshiba and Dell notebooks which started out with a flawless display, but a pixel suddenly went bad (usually showed up as blue or red all the time) after either several power-cycles, or after the first month of use.
You can't necessarily tell a display will be perfect for you based on firing it up once in the store to test it. That's for sure.
Re:We're only in it for the money
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Umm... except of course, the guy is a hypocrite himself, considering he's being sued by Lucasarts over using the THX sounder in one of his songs without permission.
In all honesty though, has anyone really had better results with a handheld device when doing graphical web browsing??
As much as I love my PalmPilot (on my 3rd. one now) - I still can't get it to web-surf reliably. I've tried several browsers for it such as PalmScape and they always hang the machine eventually.
In fact, they often crash badly enough that I have to do a hard reset and lose all my data to recover.
The earlier poster who commented on the fear of govt. control over what you can and can't code into an application is a very real concern. The Microsoft case allows a "foot in the door" towards this type of regulation - like it or not.
I don't think comparing the temporary shutdown of restaurants over health violations to the Microsoft "monopoly breakup" is fair.
In the case of the restaurants, people's lives and health are directly at stake. It's very clear that one of the primary purposes of a restaurant is to serve food that is safe to eat.
Same thing with a city yanking a business license after numerous complaints of being ripped off.
MS may make products you personally feel are rip-offs, but the entire reason they're so successful is that the vast majority of computer users *don't* feel that way. Otherwise, why would they buy the software licenses at all?
If you truly let Capitalism work, you leave businesses alone. You don't try to "level the playing field" artificially by punishing the most successful. That sounds a lot more like a Socialist system of govt. to me.
IBM was so good at what they do (look at how many patents per year they churn out!) that they were successful *despite* damaging govt. intervention. It didn't make things better for anyone I know, though. Can you really say "Gee, my life improved since they punished IBM's success!"??
Honestly, I think more Linux users should welcome Microsoft's huge influence. The reality is, the GUI built by them is a large motivating factor pushing Linux apps to improve. I know some would disagree, but man - I thought the average X desktop looked pretty ugly before people felt the pressure to develop interfaces like KDE and Gnome/E to counteract Windows. If MS wasn't such a big player, would we have these same kinds of things? I'm not so sure....
You know something else that doesn't seem to have been touched on yet? I don't understand the "holier than thou" attitude of college sysadmins who try to dictate what should be done with the available bandwidth.
The fact is, the bandwidth and Inet connection itself is provided for the use of the students. If they see fit to run Napster (or anything else) using it, who are you to complain? It seems to me, your job is to maintain the network that the students paid for with their tuition money. That means, ensure that things are functional and allow them to run *any* software they wish to run.
If 58% of your bandwidth is taken up by people running Napster - so what? That means the people who pay your salary, ultimately, wish it be used in that manner.
Even if you *believe* they are all using Napster to pirate commercial music, you certainly can't prove that just by noting that the software is using up X percentage of your bandwidth! It's not your place to try to prove it either. You weren't hired to police the students. You were hired to care for the computers and network.
Ok, so maybe you really should get more than a 10% discount on your Gateway PC since you worked there for 1+ years. Still, there are plenty of good reasons companies don't sell their items to employees at cost (or real close to cost).
For starters, those types of programs inevitably get abused. Employees buy items at the discounted price and turn around and resell them at big profits. Each time this happens, it effectively robs the company of a potential sale.
Also, don't forget - there's a much lower profit margin on computers than on automobiles. When I worked at a couple smaller PC shops in town, they commonly made no more than maybe an 8% markup on each sale. Just because computers are fairly expensive doesn't mean the system builder is reaping a big profit.
No, I just can't believe you'd actually condemm an electronics manufacturer for something so petty!
So what if they sell a telephone eavesdropping device? The only illegal part about it is the manner in which it might be used. If someone buys one and sets it up on their home phone upstairs, so they can play around with taping their conversations from a recorder in the basement, what's so horrible about that? (And what makes this any different than answering machines that you can hit "record" on and tape an entire phone conversation with?)
The device itself doesn't cause any harm at all, and can certainly be used for legitimate purposes.
This doesn't even take into consideration the fact that Ramsey sells *hundreds* of other devices that you'd have to go pretty far out of your way to do anything remotely illegal with at all. It's not like the company specializes in phone taps and bugs....
Those of you who believe you've suffered from unjust searches and seizures of property should check out the web site http://www.fear.org.
This is a very good resource for fighting to get your property back, and is frequented by a number of lawyers who volunteer their time to the cause.
I can personally relate to this issue, because several years ago, my parents' home was raided by the FBI and my multi-line bulletin board system was seized. To this date, I have still never been charged with a crime but none of my equipment was ever returned.
(By now, of course, all of the PC hardware is close to worthless, even if I was to get it back.)
One of the things I found most appalling about the incident was the lack of detail on the search warrant. It was basically a "cookie cutter" form, probably mass generated from a template document on a word processor, where they filled in a few blanks. In the "specific" list of items they were to seize, it listed just about anything remotely resembling magnetic or computer media, and it appeared they never even knew what my name was. They just had the house address on the warrant. It struck me that they can crank out copies of these babies pretty much at will, get any willing judge to sign off on them - and voila, instant legal rights to search anybody/anything.
Our "rights" have become little more than illusions created by paperwork.
Ok - but where do you draw the line? For example, with my own personal web site, I made great efforts to retain compatibility with the majority of browsers/platforms out there.
(After all, why work long and hard to build a site that a good part of your audience can't view properly afterwards?)
Unfortunately, I reached a point where I wanted to do more than just text, static images, and some tables. I decided against the proprietary plug-ins, and went with Java. After all, Java was made to be cross-platform compatible. Well, guess what? Now I have more complaints than ever from people who can't view my site because my menus are in Java and they don't have Java support working on their browser!
I think at some point, you have to make the decision to upgrade technology at the expense of those who refuse to keep up. Otherwise, there can be no progress. This is as true for web site design as it is for PC hardware. "Sorry pal, we just don't offer this program on 5.25" floppy disks anymore...."
This isn't necessarily a "war on people's minds" or an example of "Brave New World" mentality. This is just people trying to make use of the new tools that are provided for them.
No! When I run NT and get the blue screen of death, that's the *operating system* that crashed. I can't kill the problem application and continue. The entire OS is dead and it requires a reboot.
Microsoft loves to blame it all on the application developers - but no matter how poorly they write their app, the OS should not allow the app to clobber the entire system. In Java, everything runs in a "sandbox" so it can't run away and kill the whole system. Why can't NT seem to get this right?
Furthermore, I don't think most of us are trying to claim that Linux would be just as stable as it is today if people ran the same number of apps on it that are out there for NT. The real issue, though, is the frequency of crashes when you run the *same* apps on both platforms. Oracle database ran great on our old OpenVMS VAX, yet on a DEC Alpha running NT, it bombs regularly.
If I put up an ftp server in Linux, it just sits there and runs.... Same for an Apache web server. You do the same tasks on an NT box (say, with IIS for web and their built-in ftp server), and good luck keeping it going more than a month or two, tops.
Actually, it's interesting you mention this - because I work for a metal heat-treater/finisher who was in a similar situation, some years back.
We had workstations on DOS with DEC Pathworks and VAX's on the back end. It may not have been very pretty, but it worked reliably.
Then, in the name of "innovation" and "improvement" - we shelled out big $'s to migrate everything to NT 3.51 server and workstation. The custom application that tracks our customers, sales, and order info was rewritten as a GUI under NT that passes the data back to an Oracle database.
Ever since then, well - we've had pretty-looking screens and made everyone learn how to use a mouse, but it's never been as reliable or fast as it used to be. We finally had things reasonably stable by service pack 5 for NT 3.51 - but when NT 4 came along and we did that upgrade, things went downhill again.
All of the Pentium 100Mhz workstations with 32 megs. of RAM suddenly became obsolete, because while they worked reasonably well as NT 3.51 workstations, NT 4.0 proved too much for them.
From all of this, you'd think that they'd learn, but no.... When it came time to upgrade the Oracle database (last really "stable" thing we had around here), they moved it to a DEC Alpha running (gasp) NT. Funny how the database needs to be rebooted about once every couple weeks now. I don't remember that happening before.... hmm.
It strikes me as interesting that people always forget the basic law of physics: "Matter is neither created or destroyed."
That's ultimately why we'll never destroy the planet with trash. There's only a fixed amount of material here, no matter how we decide to use it or convert it from one form to another.
We spend our entire lives trying to make order from chaos, and a lot of that involves expending energy converting things around from one form to another.
Why do a lot of conversions needlessly? (AKA. Why create a bunch of electronic parts which normally function just fine for years and years, assemble them on a circuit board, package and market it, and then have the end user throw it out after only 60 mins. of use? Just seems like a waste of effort.)
I'm no eco-freak either, because I think most of it proves to be silly, pointless endeavours. (AKA. The "environmentally friendly gasoline" that turned out to be more likely to seep into the water supply than regular gas. Non-oxygenated gas ran better in cars to begin with -- shoulda left it alone.)
The true issue is all about efficiency, though. As people already said here - filling up landfills with items we'd be better off using longer or reusing makes no sense, efficiency-wise.
The *only* reason I've held off on buying one of these keyboards for my Palm IIIX is the fact that it ties up the port you need for your modem.
It would be really cool if I didn't have to lug around a notebook computer whenever I travel and need to get online, but using a Palm with only a stylus to write multiple emails (or post to newsgroups) is a major suck.
Why can't someone build one of these keyboards (like a GoType 2) with a built-in modem or another Palm type port on the back of it, so you can use both items simultaneously? I could even get to enjoy Palm ICQ and PalmIRC if I had a keyboard and modem together on the thing!
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Personally, I find it interesting that this problem exists at all. I think the largest factor is the trend towards the web browser as the "swiss army knife" of the Internet. Internet newbies only want 2 things; email and web access. Services like Deja or Google serve as bridges to introduce all of these people to the world of Usenet. This is fine, but it never teaches them to think of Usenet as a service they can directly connect to with their choice of software packages. (I think you'd see the exact same thing happen with email, except Microsoft includes Outlook Express as a seperate program with every copy of Windows, and the setup wizard offers to create you a "mail account". Notice that it never offers to set up your "news account" automatically, though.)
ISP's could go a long way towards bringing their customers back to using their Usenet news servers if they offered a web-based front-end to them. (Anyone know if Linux has such a package available?)
That argument makes no sense, when you realize that Ford made their site public. That's the whole point of running most advertising-type web sites. You want a public presence on the Internet.
Claiming that linking to them from a site they don't approve of is equal to unauthorized use of their bandwidth makes as little sense as trying to control who can and can't view billboards on the side of the highway.
In my opinion, if Ford can't handle the heat from people slandering their web site, they should reconsider running one at all. There's no legal battle to be fought here, though.
It sounds to me like they're basically saying "We'd like to offer you two choices. Either take these last 2 payments we owe you and call it a done deal, or fight with us in court about it." They're betting you don't want to bother with the court battle.
It's completely up to you. You'd have a good case, except you can't get money from someone who has none. Go talk to an attorney who can investigate this place and find out if a suit is worthwhile. I don't think any Slashdot readers can give you better information than that, unless maybe they work for the place themselves.
Folks, here's the thing:
As long as the govt. doesn't legally prevent you from writing your own code on a PC, there's no way to really claim a company such as Microsoft has a monopoly on a market.
There may be plenty of questionable business practices employed by MS, and maybe some "truth in advertising" laws they've bent or broken. Those are worthy of pursuit in the courts.
The reason MS doesn't look like it's going to really be punished by the Justice Dept. suit is because they've gone after the wrong issues!
Public utilities have regulated monopolies primarily because govt. said "Connecting up all of the homes for this product requires a significant infrastructure. It's not practical, or in the best interest of the public, to let each company duplicate this whole maze of wires or pipes, in attempts to compete with each other."
In the world of software, none of this applies. The bottom line is, Microsoft was there with a product that the vast majority of people were willing to use on their PC, so they bought into it. Most commerical competitors did only a half-assed job of marketing/advertising anything they released to compete with Windows - and in the case of IBM and OS/2, still sold their hardware with Microsoft's product loaded on it!
Linux and other Unix OS's are fine, but until recently, didn't attempt to meet the needs of the average *workstation* user. They were server OS's first and foremost, and have been molded and hammered into home/small business workstation OS's over the years.
I firmly believe in the power of the marketplace. When alternatives develop which truly meet people's needs better, Microsoft will lose dominance. This won't happen overnight though. Even if you succeeded in convincing every PC user in the world that BSD or Linux is their best choice, it would take years to get most of them to switch. People are generally lazy, and/or afraid of change. Until they buy a new PC or their hard drive crashes, they'll put up with what they've already got loaded.
Let's innovate more and litgate less - and let the market forces do as they will. I don't need more of my tax dollars paying lawyers to try to find reasons to punish Microsoft, expecially over a half-baked "monopoly" complaint.
Absolutely.... I consider myself very much a political conservative, but I'm all for ending the "war on drugs". Any true conservative should realize that things which let government get larger and increase taxes, like this pointless "war" should not be acceptable.
Comparing drugs to copying software is pretty ludicrous to begin with, though. I don't know anyone who can honestly say copying some CDs caused their health condition to deteriorate, for starters....
Lotus 1-2-3 might have had a lot to do with it, but I also remember one of the big things were the promise of memory managers letting you break through that nasty 640K conventional RAM barrier.
I bet QEMM (with the nifty Desqview 386 DOS multitasker) sold a *lot* of people on the 386 architecture. I remember having a fast 286 as my first PC clone, and I thought it was great until my buddy got an early 386 class PC. He quickly started doing cool things with the RAM above the first megabyte that my 286 couldn't pull off....
Why anyone would expect auction sites to control content that's sold on them is beyond me.
If you want to keep this mess of worms in the proverbial can, quit trying to impose restrictions on services that don't provide any original content, but simply facilitate the transmission of information amongst parties.
If items are sold on eBay, Amazon, or wherever, and said items are illegal in a nation, let that nation deal with the individual who ends up buying them in their nation. Perhaps, even go after the seller directly - but don't shoot the messenger.
This "punish the messenger" mentality causes most of these disputes in the first place. ISPs have to fight over whether or not they're held accountable for content posted to Usenet, webmasters have to worry about what their users upload to their servers, etc. etc. Enough already!
I live in St. Louis, Missouri - but our company even has a plant located in Kansas City. I definitely could have gotten permission to attend this one. I'd welcome it, in fact. Finally, a show I don't need to buy plane tickets to see!
But no - I heard not a word about it until now.
This really was mis-managed to the max!
Absolutely! Any artist who tries to restrict distribution of unreleased bootleg material is shooting him or herself in the foot.
Almost anyone I know who listens to bootlegs is either A.) already a big fan, who has already purchased most or all of the musicians' released works and wants additional material, or B.) a new listener who is just learning whether or not they like the musician, by hearing the bootleg recording.
Why in the world would you want to attempt to restrict this type of material from being distributed? If it's of enough value to a musician/band, they should be marketing it themselves.
I beg to differ. I own a Mavica FD-81 and I absolutely love this camera. The only "image quality" related complaint I've had is the tendency for the camera to use too much flash and create an overexposed image. It's easily correctable in Photoshop (just drag the "brightness" adjustment a little to the left, and voila) - but to avoid the hassle, it seems to be best to select the option on the camera to disable the flash, whenever it's possible.
Sure, this camera doesn't create super hi-res 6MB images, but so what? I really don't understand the need for that. One of the things I actually liked about the Mavica was the ability to create a decent looking 640x480 image, perfect for cropping and posting to web sites. I don't want to generate huge images that take forever to d/l from a web page.
In all the hype and rush to offer consumers "film-like resolution" digital cameras, they seem to be forgetting the large number of us out there who use these cameras as supplements to real 35mm cameras. If I want high quality photos, I use my trusty Minolta. If I want to post to the web, or upload photos to a friend, I use the Mavica. I never bought this camera to serve as a total replacement for a film camera!
I don't have the actual CD-ROM and case in front of me right now, but I recall seeing a particularly restrictive EULA printed up in the manual for DeLorme's Street Atlas USA software.
It said something to the effect of it being a violation of the agreement to connect GPS hardware other than DeLorme's own TripMate unit to your PC and run their software with it.
This seems expecially silly when you consider that their software package not only supports the TripMate's proprietary communications protocol but is also compatible with the industry standard NMEA GPS protocol. (We designed our software so it will work with almost anyone's GPS, but don't try it or it'll violate your EULA!!)
Actually, I hadn't heard about this before looking at this link. It is an interesting situation, but I still tend to disagree with the writer's conclusions.
In fact, I think ASCAP is poorly conceived, in and of iteself. As far as I'm concerned (and I spent a few years as a local musician myself, writing and playing original compositions) - artists should cease trying to collect royalties on public performances of their works.
If a piece of music is performed by someone other than the original composer, it is *not* the same experience for the listener. It might be a good imitation, but it's still different. Anyone publically re-creating someone else's musical work had to go to considerable effort to do so. (Had to learn how to play the music, or at least set up the entire performance -- bringing the needed equipment to perform it, advertise it, etc.)
If anything, ASCAP should limit themselves to only collecting royalties from commercial entities that replay artists' recordings for commercial gain (such as radio stations).
Live performances should be left completely out of the picture. Otherwise, you run into this ludicrous situations like the Girl Scouts.
I've used several Toshiba and Dell notebooks which started out with a flawless display, but a pixel suddenly went bad (usually showed up as blue or red all the time) after either several power-cycles, or after the first month of use.
You can't necessarily tell a display will be perfect for you based on firing it up once in the store to test it. That's for sure.
Umm... except of course, the guy is a hypocrite himself, considering he's being sued by Lucasarts over using the THX sounder in one of his songs without permission.
In all honesty though, has anyone really had better results with a handheld device when doing graphical web browsing??
As much as I love my PalmPilot (on my 3rd. one now) - I still can't get it to web-surf reliably.
I've tried several browsers for it such as PalmScape and they always hang the machine eventually.
In fact, they often crash badly enough that I have to do a hard reset and lose all my data to recover.
The earlier poster who commented on the fear of govt. control over what you can and can't code into an application is a very real concern. The Microsoft case allows a "foot in the door" towards this type of regulation - like it or not.
I don't think comparing the temporary shutdown of restaurants over health violations to the Microsoft "monopoly breakup" is fair.
In the case of the restaurants, people's lives and health are directly at stake. It's very clear that one of the primary purposes of a restaurant is to serve food that is safe to eat.
Same thing with a city yanking a business license after numerous complaints of being ripped off.
MS may make products you personally feel are rip-offs, but the entire reason they're so successful is that the vast majority of computer users *don't* feel that way. Otherwise, why would they buy the software licenses at all?
If you truly let Capitalism work, you leave businesses alone. You don't try to "level the playing field" artificially by punishing the most successful. That sounds a lot more like a Socialist system of govt. to me.
IBM was so good at what they do (look at how many patents per year they churn out!) that they were successful *despite* damaging govt. intervention. It didn't make things better for anyone I know, though. Can you really say "Gee, my life improved since they punished IBM's success!"??
Honestly, I think more Linux users should welcome Microsoft's huge influence. The reality is, the GUI built by them is a large motivating factor pushing Linux apps to improve. I know some would disagree, but man - I thought the average X desktop looked pretty ugly before people felt the pressure to develop interfaces like KDE and Gnome/E to counteract Windows. If MS wasn't such a big player, would we have these same kinds of things? I'm not so sure....
You know something else that doesn't seem to have been touched on yet? I don't understand the "holier than thou" attitude of college sysadmins who try to dictate what should be done with the available bandwidth.
The fact is, the bandwidth and Inet connection itself is provided for the use of the students. If they see fit to run Napster (or anything else) using it, who are you to complain? It seems to me, your job is to maintain the network that the students paid for with their tuition money. That means, ensure that things are functional and allow them to run *any* software they wish to run.
If 58% of your bandwidth is taken up by people running Napster - so what? That means the people who pay your salary, ultimately, wish it be used in that manner.
Even if you *believe* they are all using Napster to pirate commercial music, you certainly can't prove that just by noting that the software is using up X percentage of your bandwidth! It's not your place to try to prove it either. You weren't hired to police the students. You were hired to care for the computers and network.
Off my soapbox.....
Ok, so maybe you really should get more than a 10% discount on your Gateway PC since you worked there for 1+ years. Still, there are plenty of good reasons companies don't sell their items to employees at cost (or real close to cost).
For starters, those types of programs inevitably get abused. Employees buy items at the discounted price and turn around and resell them at big profits. Each time this happens, it effectively robs the company of a potential sale.
Also, don't forget - there's a much lower profit margin on computers than on automobiles. When I worked at a couple smaller PC shops in town, they commonly made no more than maybe an 8% markup on each sale. Just because computers are fairly expensive doesn't mean the system builder is reaping a big profit.
No, I just can't believe you'd actually condemm an electronics manufacturer for something so petty!
So what if they sell a telephone eavesdropping device? The only illegal part about it is the manner in which it might be used. If someone buys one and sets it up on their home phone upstairs, so they can play around with taping their conversations from a recorder in the basement, what's so horrible about that? (And what makes this any different than answering machines that you can hit "record" on and tape an entire phone conversation with?)
The device itself doesn't cause any harm at all, and can certainly be used for legitimate purposes.
This doesn't even take into consideration the fact that Ramsey sells *hundreds* of other devices that you'd have to go pretty far out of your way to do anything remotely illegal with at all. It's not like the company specializes in phone taps and bugs....
Those of you who believe you've suffered from unjust searches and seizures of property should check out the web site http://www.fear.org.
This is a very good resource for fighting to get your property back, and is frequented by a number of lawyers who volunteer their time to the cause.
I can personally relate to this issue, because several years ago, my parents' home was raided by the FBI and my multi-line bulletin board system was seized. To this date, I have still never been charged with a crime but none of my equipment was ever returned.
(By now, of course, all of the PC hardware is close to worthless, even if I was to get it back.)
One of the things I found most appalling about the incident was the lack of detail on the search warrant. It was basically a "cookie cutter" form, probably mass generated from a template document on a word processor, where they filled in a few blanks. In the "specific" list of items they were to seize, it listed just about anything remotely resembling magnetic or computer media, and it appeared they never even knew what my name was. They just had the house address on the warrant. It struck me that they can crank out copies of these babies pretty much at will, get any willing judge to sign off on them - and voila, instant legal rights to search anybody/anything.
Our "rights" have become little more than illusions created by paperwork.
Ok - but where do you draw the line?
For example, with my own personal web site, I made great efforts to retain compatibility with the majority of browsers/platforms out there.
(After all, why work long and hard to build a site that a good part of your audience can't view properly afterwards?)
Unfortunately, I reached a point where I wanted to do more than just text, static images, and some tables. I decided against the proprietary plug-ins, and went with Java. After all, Java was made to be cross-platform compatible. Well, guess what? Now I have more complaints than ever from people who can't view my site because my menus are in Java and they don't have Java support working on their browser!
I think at some point, you have to make the decision to upgrade technology at the expense of those who refuse to keep up. Otherwise, there can be no progress. This is as true for web site design as it is for PC hardware. "Sorry pal, we just don't offer this program on 5.25" floppy disks anymore...."
This isn't necessarily a "war on people's minds" or an example of "Brave New World" mentality. This is just people trying to make use of the new tools that are provided for them.
No! When I run NT and get the blue screen of death, that's the *operating system* that crashed. I can't kill the problem application and continue. The entire OS is dead and it requires a reboot.
Microsoft loves to blame it all on the application developers - but no matter how poorly they write their app, the OS should not allow the app to clobber the entire system. In Java, everything runs in a "sandbox" so it can't run away and kill the whole system. Why can't NT seem to get this right?
Furthermore, I don't think most of us are trying to claim that Linux would be just as stable as it is today if people ran the same number of apps on it that are out there for NT. The real issue, though, is the frequency of crashes when you run the *same* apps on both platforms. Oracle database ran great on our old OpenVMS VAX, yet on a DEC Alpha running NT, it bombs regularly.
If I put up an ftp server in Linux, it just sits there and runs.... Same for an Apache web server. You do the same tasks on an NT box (say, with IIS for web and their built-in ftp server), and good luck keeping it going more than a month or two, tops.
Actually, it's interesting you mention this - because I work for a metal heat-treater/finisher who was in a similar situation, some years back.
We had workstations on DOS with DEC Pathworks and VAX's on the back end. It may not have been very pretty, but it worked reliably.
Then, in the name of "innovation" and "improvement" - we shelled out big $'s to migrate everything to NT 3.51 server and workstation. The custom application that tracks our customers, sales, and order info was rewritten as a GUI under NT that passes the data back to an Oracle database.
Ever since then, well - we've had pretty-looking screens and made everyone learn how to use a mouse, but it's never been as reliable or fast as it used to be. We finally had things reasonably stable by service pack 5 for NT 3.51 - but when NT 4 came along and we did that upgrade, things went downhill again.
All of the Pentium 100Mhz workstations with 32 megs. of RAM suddenly became obsolete, because while they worked reasonably well as NT 3.51 workstations, NT 4.0 proved too much for them.
From all of this, you'd think that they'd learn, but no.... When it came time to upgrade the Oracle database (last really "stable" thing we had around here), they moved it to a DEC Alpha running (gasp) NT. Funny how the database needs to be rebooted about once every couple weeks now. I don't remember that happening before.... hmm.
It strikes me as interesting that people always forget the basic law of physics:
"Matter is neither created or destroyed."
That's ultimately why we'll never destroy the planet with trash. There's only a fixed amount of material here, no matter how we decide to use it or convert it from one form to another.
We spend our entire lives trying to make order from chaos, and a lot of that involves expending energy converting things around from one form to another.
Why do a lot of conversions needlessly? (AKA. Why create a bunch of electronic parts which normally function just fine for years and years, assemble them on a circuit board, package and market it, and then have the end user throw it out after only 60 mins. of use? Just seems like a waste of effort.)
I'm no eco-freak either, because I think most of it proves to be silly, pointless endeavours.
(AKA. The "environmentally friendly gasoline" that turned out to be more likely to seep into the water supply than regular gas. Non-oxygenated gas ran better in cars to begin with -- shoulda left it alone.)
The true issue is all about efficiency, though. As people already said here - filling up landfills with items we'd be better off using longer or reusing makes no sense, efficiency-wise.
The *only* reason I've held off on buying one of these keyboards for my Palm IIIX is the fact that it ties up the port you need for your modem.
It would be really cool if I didn't have to lug around a notebook computer whenever I travel and need to get online, but using a Palm with only a stylus to write multiple emails (or post to newsgroups) is a major suck.
Why can't someone build one of these keyboards (like a GoType 2) with a built-in modem or another Palm type port on the back of it, so you can use both items simultaneously? I could even get to enjoy Palm ICQ and PalmIRC if I had a keyboard and modem together on the thing!