It's nothing like a store selling name brand product's it doesn't make and selling a generic brand it does or doesn't make along side it. It's like going to a Eddie Bauer Outlet and selling Faded Glory jeans in front of the door. With the exception of retail outlets, A brick&mortar store makes it's money on selling products regardless of brand. Regardless of actual product, but of course most stores try to specialize (not since the days of the General Store that cowboy boots and eggs are sold in the same store). It's in the store's best interest to sell name brands because some people buy by brand, and name brands get people into the store. And it's equally in the store's best interest to sell a generic brand because they make higher margins on those sales. But BestBuy obviously isn't going to let CompUSA put products on BestBuy shelves and sell them right inside the store.
You want to improve the grammer and spelling of slashdot posts? White a spell/grammer checker and submit it for use in the slashcode.
It annoys me when people point out grammer and spelling mistakes because they are just that, MISTAKES. If I accidently use their insted of they're, your instead of you're, teh, or any of the other more common typing mistakes, if that's the worst mistake I make that day, I consider that to be a pretty damn good day.
I have some trouble with spelling, I admit that. It's genetic. I'm a poor speller, my mother is worse at spelling, and my grandfather's spelling is extremely bad.
But as bad as my typing may be, it's more intelligible than my speech. I have several speech impediments, including a lisp and a stutter. On top of that, when I take a breath while speaking, it comes out hard and jagged and is more or less universally noticed.
The point of all this is, for reasons both within and outside of a person's control, there will always be "transmission errrors" in communication.
Get yourself an old Motorola StarTAC 7868. Mine is something like a decade old and still going strong. No voice dialing, but I consider that an unneccessay feature.
Rebates are not the problem. Many small shops depend on them since front-end margins are so low any more. There is nothing wrong with them. They are mutually beneficial to the manufacturer and the VAR/SP/SB/OEM's. If ASUS offers a rebate for buying their motherboard, and I buy that board, ASUS gets money on their sale, and I get money on the purchase. That rebate doesn't keep me from buying an MSI motherboard though. What AMD is alleging that Intel does, is in certain instances, refuse to sell specific items if the competitor's product is offered. That's anticompetitive, but rebates aren't. Now the part of with-holding HP's rebate check because they offer AMD proccessors, also, is anti-competitive also, not because of the rebate itself, but because of withholding it. Offering a product at a lower product isn't wrong. Withholding a product is.
ok, ok, you don't have to get offensive on me. I'm a liberal libertarian. And yes it did have a basis on the decision. The justice who was on CSPAN2 a couple months ago with Scalia (I believe it was Stevens) said as much.
Well, not everyone lives in your city. I don't, although I do have DSL access (and that's what I use) along with cable access. However, a friend of mine doesn't have DSL access, and certainly not wireless. To get broadband internet, he had to get cable (which he didn't have previiously, and he still only rarely watches anything but network TV), and cable internet. He's been waiting for 4 years for DSL to get to his street, but it it isn't likely to happen any time soon. But when it does, he's dumping both his cable tv and cable internet in favor of DSL from Verizon, where he already has telephone service (and Verizon offers "naked" DSL in his area, so he could then even drop the telephone service if he so desired).
Actually, I use Limewire to download movie trailers (because I can't be bothered searching torrent trackers for them) and porn. Some of of the porn might be "pirated" but most of what I find is what is already freely available on freesites, and previews of pay sites.
First, let me say that I don't agree with this ruling. That said:
The reason being is because the justices of the Supreme Court (well some of them) don't judge on the basis of the constitutional text alone. The Constitution says nothing about Fair Use, filesharing, computers, the internet, or p2p. What they decide on is part constitution and part existing culture and similar law in otehr countries. When the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for minors, one of the points made was that no other developed country allowed the death penalty for minors.
Direct contradiction of previous rulings are the norm. In it's history, the Supreme Court first upheld segregation (Seperate but Equal) and then struck it down (Brown vs. Board of Ed). The lawyers for the Brown side of the case didn't argue on the basis of the constitution or whether or not the Equal side of Seperate but Equal was being fulfilled (which it wasn't), but on the basis of the inethicality of segregation.
And finally, this case doesn't direct contradict a previous ruling (unless your referening someting other than the Betamax decision). In Betamax, the Court ruled that a device (or it's creators) isn't liable for copyright infringement if it has substantial noningringing use under the doctrine of Fair Use. It set a litmus test under which, if something is found to be primarily working within Fair Use, it is not liable for a non-Fair Use infringement, but if it is found to be primarily used to infringe copyright, it is liable. Using this litmus test, the Supreme Court found Grokster to fail.
That sounds logical. It's definately the freenet client, because if I kill the Java VM, freenet throws up an error message about getting disconnected. That and I really only run one java client. I'll have to look through the config file to see if this can be remedied. As I said before, I'm not a programmer by any stretch of the word (I can write simple to midlevel macros in VBA, but that's it), and don't really understand how exactly a java client interfaces with a Java VM. I had figured if it was the fault of the freenet client, than that would be hogging the resources instead of java.
Of course any discussion of Java isn't complete without someone bringing up that it's slow and bloated. I don't mind the speed, because I don't use any java applications that need to be all that fast. IANA programmer, but java seems to have a horrible leak in it. I have to shut down my freenet node and restart it about once per day because javaw.exe slowly nibbles away at the available memory and will routinely eat up 99% of the CPU usage. The highest the memory usage has gotten before I restarted is ~ 181MB. Over 10% of my total memory!
I think the point MS is trying to make is this: I subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed. However, I may only want to read the YRO and AskSlashdot stories. That I know of, there is no way to selectively download stories from a feed. If there was some sort of header of section info, I could pick and choose which stories to view and wich to discard before it reaches the viewer. The closest thing to this is what Reuters and Yahoo do: have seperate feeds for each topic: Science, Technology, Top News, Politics, etc. But I'm sure it would be easier for a site to offer one RSS feed which the end-user could selectively filter instead of seperate feeds for different topics.
Doubleclick is complaining that Adblock will "ruin" the internet by making advertising unprofitable for web page creators. People on both sides of the argument cite TiVo's and some newer VCR's 30 second skip feature. But even that isn't the beginning of work done to make ads less obtrusive. Magnavox has a feature called SmartSound. This tech has been in their TV's over a decade. What it does is normalize audio levels, because cable networks tend increase the volume for commecials to make them more noticable. Now most good TV's have a similar feature. And the cable companies noticed. I have a cheap TV that doesn't have this feature, and I rarely get loud commecials anymore.
I see the same as the future of the internet. People will block the annoying, intrusive, and CPU-sucking ads, and advertisers will notice this and eventually stop making such ads. To any advertisers out there, here's a hint, I block out of hand anything that moves, whether it blinks, is animated, or floats on the screen, including the floating toolbars at the top of the screen. I block intellitxt. I block huge ads stuck in the middle of content (think just about every news website, and slashdot). I do not block static ads at the top or bottom of the screen or ads in a side bar that doesn't interfere with reading the content.
Actually, this is right along the lines of what I was going to suggest. For me, I'm horrible at remembering appointments and other such tasks. Sure, I can set up reminders and what not to remind me at 5:00 that I'm meeting a friend after work, but what about stopping at the bank on my way to the groccery store. Can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to make that stop. So a *PS-enabled system to remind me to turn left at the light and go to the bank instead of right to the groccery store would be very helpful
between running gaim and thunderbird in the background, I get automatic notifications for most of the accounts. I like to partition things. One gmail account is used only for mailing lists, anotehr is used for things that will likely put me on spam lists. I have seperate emails for my full-time job, for sales in my side-business, and for administrative purposes in my side-business. The netscape email was what I used before I got my own domain, and forward email from that account to my antrotech email. I have a yahoo account for accessing yahoo groups about science & technology, and another one for accessing adult material on yahoo groups. I use two aim accounts to partition people I know in r/l and people I only know on the internet. As far as the hotmail accounts, four are hold-over's from before gmail and when msn groups didn't suck so bad. And the fifth is my main email address for people who actually know me to contact me
I think this is a good thing. Why? Because I collect email addresses. I already have two aim accounts (gaim is my best friend!) so there's two new email accounts right there. Add them to the two gmail accounts, two yahoo accounts, a netscape mail account, 5 hotmail addresses, and 3 corporate emails. Now I'm up to 15 email addresses!
If I lived in a time before computers and electronics, I would have probably persued a career in my other love, porn, err, my OTHER other love, meteorology. Before Luke Howard gave us the nomenclature and the basic hydrology of clouds, meteorology was mostly cataloguing the weather and making (somewhat) educated guesses based on patterns. An ancient greek weather forcast: A high chance of either sun or rain!
Err, the point I was trying to make is that I am a small shop white box builder, but I don't compete on price, I compete on quality. I buy motherboards from ASUS and ASRock only, and I then purchase boards with specific chipsets based on reviews and other research. I pick all my parts using this model. I can't compete with the $300 Dell's on price, but I can compete with them on quality. I just tell potential customers the saga of my ex-girlfriend's Dell laptop, which had EVERY SINGLE part replaced over a matter of 2 years.
Capacity for production is over two million mainboards per month, and ECS regularly make that many. ECS respectfully request that we don't name their customers, since those customers don't even know who else uses ECS for manufacture, but rest assured that it's a veritable who's who in the PC mainboard game, with a couple of vendors on the list that you might be shocked to learn don't produce all their own products.
Based on the horrible crap that comes out of ECS/Elite/PC Chips with their own name on it, I can't think of a better argument to sway people into buying from a small shop or building their own system. I just found a new sales tool, thank you slashdot and hexus!
ASUS makes rock solid boards. Of the dozen or so I've used the only one that has ever been anything but stable was the very first board I ever used in the very early days before I realized you had to use those stand-offs to keep from shorting out the board on the case. And even then, it still ran, just never quite right.
Now if your looking for a low-cost board, ASRock is bar-none. I've heard rumours that they are the value-brand for ASUS, and I certainly believe that. I've built a handfull of systems with ASRock boards, and have had no problems. They have on-board graphics, audio, LAN, and usually a modem riser.
The site costs a lot of money, but ads and intellitxt cost bandwidth and CPU time on the server. Blocking them from running saves the site resources so it can support more users for less money.
Interestingly enough, this Firefox extention is more or less the same premise that someone on K5 thinks would be the perfect base of a p2p file sharing program. But like others, I think the problem is friends don't share the same interests a lot of times, especcially to the same degree. My friends all have the same basic interests: computers, music, movies, and sports. However, for friend 1, the priority is music, movies, sports, computers. Friend 2 is music, sports, movies, computers. My priorities are computers, movies, music, sports.
I think a hybrid approach between a social network and Amazon recommendations would be ideal. Based on bookmarks and preferences that you post to the server, an algorithm could reccomend other uses with similar tastes. I could then agree or disagree (on a 10 point scale) with the recommendation. That user would then enter my network, and I could browse other users in their network. You would be able to see their rating by other users. Additional ratings would refine the algorithm's ability to find new "friends" You would be notified when someone made you their "friend" so you could check them out and decide whether or not to reciprocate.
If your using Windows or OS X, I would recommend Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. You can download a 30 day trial here. Also available in trial form is Studio MX which has Dreamweaver, Flash, and a suite of other Macromedia products.
Another route if you are running Windows 2000 or XP Professional is to download Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express 2005 beta 2, available for free download. MS VWDE2005 is bundled with Microsoft SQL Server Express, which is a free, stripped down version of MS SQLServer. This route may be a better idea if you are going to be building a website built on asp and SQL Server hosted on a Windows Server. Visual Web Developer Express will run on XP Home, but SQL Server Express will not. It has built in support for an Oracle DB, but not for MySQL.
Before choosing a host, decide what language you are going to script in. If you are going to use asp and/or.net you will need a Windows host. Most hosts will only offer php on linux servers.
Did you even read the summary, let alone TFA? It says that WalMart sells linux PC's online only and without any support, and this place is the first to offer face-to-face sales with knowledgable sales people and support. That's the news.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, but when are they going to build a robot out of an xbox? http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&date= 2005-07-06
It's nothing like a store selling name brand product's it doesn't make and selling a generic brand it does or doesn't make along side it. It's like going to a Eddie Bauer Outlet and selling Faded Glory jeans in front of the door. With the exception of retail outlets, A brick&mortar store makes it's money on selling products regardless of brand. Regardless of actual product, but of course most stores try to specialize (not since the days of the General Store that cowboy boots and eggs are sold in the same store). It's in the store's best interest to sell name brands because some people buy by brand, and name brands get people into the store. And it's equally in the store's best interest to sell a generic brand because they make higher margins on those sales. But BestBuy obviously isn't going to let CompUSA put products on BestBuy shelves and sell them right inside the store.
It annoys me when people point out grammer and spelling mistakes because they are just that, MISTAKES. If I accidently use their insted of they're, your instead of you're, teh, or any of the other more common typing mistakes, if that's the worst mistake I make that day, I consider that to be a pretty damn good day.
I have some trouble with spelling, I admit that. It's genetic. I'm a poor speller, my mother is worse at spelling, and my grandfather's spelling is extremely bad.
But as bad as my typing may be, it's more intelligible than my speech. I have several speech impediments, including a lisp and a stutter. On top of that, when I take a breath while speaking, it comes out hard and jagged and is more or less universally noticed.
The point of all this is, for reasons both within and outside of a person's control, there will always be "transmission errrors" in communication.
Get yourself an old Motorola StarTAC 7868. Mine is something like a decade old and still going strong. No voice dialing, but I consider that an unneccessay feature.
Rebates are not the problem. Many small shops depend on them since front-end margins are so low any more. There is nothing wrong with them. They are mutually beneficial to the manufacturer and the VAR/SP/SB/OEM's. If ASUS offers a rebate for buying their motherboard, and I buy that board, ASUS gets money on their sale, and I get money on the purchase. That rebate doesn't keep me from buying an MSI motherboard though. What AMD is alleging that Intel does, is in certain instances, refuse to sell specific items if the competitor's product is offered. That's anticompetitive, but rebates aren't. Now the part of with-holding HP's rebate check because they offer AMD proccessors, also, is anti-competitive also, not because of the rebate itself, but because of withholding it. Offering a product at a lower product isn't wrong. Withholding a product is.
ok, ok, you don't have to get offensive on me. I'm a liberal libertarian. And yes it did have a basis on the decision. The justice who was on CSPAN2 a couple months ago with Scalia (I believe it was Stevens) said as much.
Well, not everyone lives in your city. I don't, although I do have DSL access (and that's what I use) along with cable access. However, a friend of mine doesn't have DSL access, and certainly not wireless. To get broadband internet, he had to get cable (which he didn't have previiously, and he still only rarely watches anything but network TV), and cable internet. He's been waiting for 4 years for DSL to get to his street, but it it isn't likely to happen any time soon. But when it does, he's dumping both his cable tv and cable internet in favor of DSL from Verizon, where he already has telephone service (and Verizon offers "naked" DSL in his area, so he could then even drop the telephone service if he so desired).
Actually, I use Limewire to download movie trailers (because I can't be bothered searching torrent trackers for them) and porn. Some of of the porn might be "pirated" but most of what I find is what is already freely available on freesites, and previews of pay sites.
The reason being is because the justices of the Supreme Court (well some of them) don't judge on the basis of the constitutional text alone. The Constitution says nothing about Fair Use, filesharing, computers, the internet, or p2p. What they decide on is part constitution and part existing culture and similar law in otehr countries. When the Supreme Court struck down the death penalty for minors, one of the points made was that no other developed country allowed the death penalty for minors.
Direct contradiction of previous rulings are the norm. In it's history, the Supreme Court first upheld segregation (Seperate but Equal) and then struck it down (Brown vs. Board of Ed). The lawyers for the Brown side of the case didn't argue on the basis of the constitution or whether or not the Equal side of Seperate but Equal was being fulfilled (which it wasn't), but on the basis of the inethicality of segregation.
And finally, this case doesn't direct contradict a previous ruling (unless your referening someting other than the Betamax decision). In Betamax, the Court ruled that a device (or it's creators) isn't liable for copyright infringement if it has substantial noningringing use under the doctrine of Fair Use. It set a litmus test under which, if something is found to be primarily working within Fair Use, it is not liable for a non-Fair Use infringement, but if it is found to be primarily used to infringe copyright, it is liable. Using this litmus test, the Supreme Court found Grokster to fail.
So, in short: mod parent up!
Of course any discussion of Java isn't complete without someone bringing up that it's slow and bloated. I don't mind the speed, because I don't use any java applications that need to be all that fast. IANA programmer, but java seems to have a horrible leak in it. I have to shut down my freenet node and restart it about once per day because javaw.exe slowly nibbles away at the available memory and will routinely eat up 99% of the CPU usage. The highest the memory usage has gotten before I restarted is ~ 181MB. Over 10% of my total memory!
I think the point MS is trying to make is this: I subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed. However, I may only want to read the YRO and AskSlashdot stories. That I know of, there is no way to selectively download stories from a feed. If there was some sort of header of section info, I could pick and choose which stories to view and wich to discard before it reaches the viewer. The closest thing to this is what Reuters and Yahoo do: have seperate feeds for each topic: Science, Technology, Top News, Politics, etc. But I'm sure it would be easier for a site to offer one RSS feed which the end-user could selectively filter instead of seperate feeds for different topics.
I see the same as the future of the internet. People will block the annoying, intrusive, and CPU-sucking ads, and advertisers will notice this and eventually stop making such ads. To any advertisers out there, here's a hint, I block out of hand anything that moves, whether it blinks, is animated, or floats on the screen, including the floating toolbars at the top of the screen. I block intellitxt. I block huge ads stuck in the middle of content (think just about every news website, and slashdot). I do not block static ads at the top or bottom of the screen or ads in a side bar that doesn't interfere with reading the content.
Actually, this is right along the lines of what I was going to suggest. For me, I'm horrible at remembering appointments and other such tasks. Sure, I can set up reminders and what not to remind me at 5:00 that I'm meeting a friend after work, but what about stopping at the bank on my way to the groccery store. Can't tell you how many times I've forgotten to make that stop. So a *PS-enabled system to remind me to turn left at the light and go to the bank instead of right to the groccery store would be very helpful
between running gaim and thunderbird in the background, I get automatic notifications for most of the accounts. I like to partition things. One gmail account is used only for mailing lists, anotehr is used for things that will likely put me on spam lists. I have seperate emails for my full-time job, for sales in my side-business, and for administrative purposes in my side-business. The netscape email was what I used before I got my own domain, and forward email from that account to my antrotech email. I have a yahoo account for accessing yahoo groups about science & technology, and another one for accessing adult material on yahoo groups. I use two aim accounts to partition people I know in r/l and people I only know on the internet. As far as the hotmail accounts, four are hold-over's from before gmail and when msn groups didn't suck so bad. And the fifth is my main email address for people who actually know me to contact me
I think this is a good thing. Why? Because I collect email addresses. I already have two aim accounts (gaim is my best friend!) so there's two new email accounts right there. Add them to the two gmail accounts, two yahoo accounts, a netscape mail account, 5 hotmail addresses, and 3 corporate emails. Now I'm up to 15 email addresses!
If I lived in a time before computers and electronics, I would have probably persued a career in my other love, porn, err, my OTHER other love, meteorology. Before Luke Howard gave us the nomenclature and the basic hydrology of clouds, meteorology was mostly cataloguing the weather and making (somewhat) educated guesses based on patterns. An ancient greek weather forcast: A high chance of either sun or rain!
Err, the point I was trying to make is that I am a small shop white box builder, but I don't compete on price, I compete on quality. I buy motherboards from ASUS and ASRock only, and I then purchase boards with specific chipsets based on reviews and other research. I pick all my parts using this model. I can't compete with the $300 Dell's on price, but I can compete with them on quality. I just tell potential customers the saga of my ex-girlfriend's Dell laptop, which had EVERY SINGLE part replaced over a matter of 2 years.
Based on the horrible crap that comes out of ECS/Elite/PC Chips with their own name on it, I can't think of a better argument to sway people into buying from a small shop or building their own system. I just found a new sales tool, thank you slashdot and hexus!
Now if your looking for a low-cost board, ASRock is bar-none. I've heard rumours that they are the value-brand for ASUS, and I certainly believe that. I've built a handfull of systems with ASRock boards, and have had no problems. They have on-board graphics, audio, LAN, and usually a modem riser.
The site costs a lot of money, but ads and intellitxt cost bandwidth and CPU time on the server. Blocking them from running saves the site resources so it can support more users for less money.
I think a hybrid approach between a social network and Amazon recommendations would be ideal. Based on bookmarks and preferences that you post to the server, an algorithm could reccomend other uses with similar tastes. I could then agree or disagree (on a 10 point scale) with the recommendation. That user would then enter my network, and I could browse other users in their network. You would be able to see their rating by other users. Additional ratings would refine the algorithm's ability to find new "friends" You would be notified when someone made you their "friend" so you could check them out and decide whether or not to reciprocate.
Group x scored higher in a poll on security than group y. Ergo, more people trust group x (than group y)
Another route if you are running Windows 2000 or XP Professional is to download Microsoft Visual Web Developer Express 2005 beta 2, available for free download. MS VWDE2005 is bundled with Microsoft SQL Server Express, which is a free, stripped down version of MS SQLServer. This route may be a better idea if you are going to be building a website built on asp and SQL Server hosted on a Windows Server. Visual Web Developer Express will run on XP Home, but SQL Server Express will not. It has built in support for an Oracle DB, but not for MySQL.
Before choosing a host, decide what language you are going to script in. If you are going to use asp and/or .net you will need a Windows host. Most hosts will only offer php on linux servers.
Did you even read the summary, let alone TFA? It says that WalMart sells linux PC's online only and without any support, and this place is the first to offer face-to-face sales with knowledgable sales people and support. That's the news.