The article neglects to mention a little known competing Congressional bill sponsored by the Telcos...the Communications Opportunity for Protecting Revenue Of Providers Harping About Government Intervention Act or COPROPHAGIA.
Basically it says that the Telcos can write their own rules and the rest of us can eat shit.
1. The "working code" is several kB of sparsely documented assembly for a completely different (and old) CPU.
Then it's not really "working", at least not in the environment you need it to.
2. The people who wrote it have long since left the company.
Unless it's written in such an obscure language that you can't find anyone to maintain it, you're probably still better off hiring someone to try to get a handle on your existing code than to make someone reimplement from scratch. Plus if the only people who know anything about your code are long gone, then the code must not have needed much maintenance anyway.
3. The "working code" was obviously designed, written and debugged over period of several years by several people, while you have six months to come up with a new working solution on your own ?
Then you have already ignored the "Never rewrite working code" advice in the first place. Good luck.
The user experience is better when the software vendor only needs to target a non-moving target for hardware. Also, it gives an opportunity to focus on an integrated UI, and look-and-feel. People really do want their computers to "just work" and be easy to use.
This is the reason why I think virtualization solutions like VMWare are going to take off in the next few years for many enterprise solutions. Target your application at a virtual "hardware platform" that can run atop any OS/hardware platform, and let the customer worry about what hardware to choose. Certainly not the best solution for every application (e.g., apps where you need a lot of integration with other desktop applications), but for large scale data entry systems I can see a lot of benefit from that approach.
Maybe it's different where you are, but like I said, the rental people told me all the supplemental insurance covers is for your deductable. $20/day to insure against a $500 deductable make no sense from any risk management perspective.
Your story about the Lambo sounds like a bit of urban legend to me. They won't let you rent the car if your own insurance won't cover it, but they didn't check the guy's insurance to ensure it covered the value of an expensive car, which would be the case for...oh, just about everybody except those who already own a Lambo or similarly expensive car. Sounds fishy to me.
I've never seen a Walmart with a front window, but the last time I rented a car I asked what the supplemental insurance covered (since my regular car insurance covered me while using the rental car) and the reply was that it insured me against having to pay my $500 deductable. I thought about for ten seconds, and concluded that if it made sense to pay $20/day to avoid a $500 deductable in case of an accident, then it should make equally as much sense to pay one's regular insurer over $7000 extra per year to simply have a $0 deductable. I don't know about you, but that spells "rip-off" to me.
Your story reminds of the time I had to rent a car while my truck was in the shop.
The rental guy tries to get me to purchase the $13/day supplemental insurance, which I instintively decline without a second thought. After they bring up the rental car, the guy tries again with the hard sell, telling me how it's really in my best interest to get the supplemental insurance.
Me: "Why? My insurance company tells me the insure me for the use of the rental car."
Rental Guy: "Yes, but this covers your deductable."
Me: "Well, let's do the math. I have a $500 deductable, which you will insure against for $13/day. Now if this were worthwhile for me, I should be just as willing to pay $13/day every day to avoid my deductable with my regular vehicle. Since $13/day times 365 days comes to a bit shy of $5,000, you're saying I should consider it worthwhile to pay $5,000 per year extra to avoid a $500 deductable in the case I have an accident. Wow, you must either believe that a) I'm such a bad driver that I get in an average of 10 accidents per year, or b) that I'm incredibly stupid."
Rental Guy:...sighs as he scribbles on the invoice... "OK, no supplemental insurance."
Inbound access is best controlled by a hardware firewall, no doubt. But the whole point of controlling outbound access is to alert when a rogue client program is trying to call out...in other words to ask your same question...what is this program and why is it calling out?
For me, outbound alert is the only function I want in a software firewall. My Sygate firewall was the only thing that protected me when I suffered a silent IE hijacking that spawned several processes that tried to phone home. Having a software firewall block inbound access, OTOH, only seems to cause numerous headaches for anyone trying to set up simple home networking which the vast majority do through hardware firewall/routers anyway.
Currently, my company has a few trial units in Walmart. We bend over backwards to give them anything they want. If we get the account, our revenue will quadruple and make us a national player in a billion dollar industry with about 60 employees. As much of a pain that is, it is worth it to the company.
I heard similar claims to this before, but here's what I don't get. If your company is producing a product that has 4 times the potential market that you are currently realizing, why should hitching your star to Wal-Mart be the *only* way to achieve this? After all, no consumer shops solely at Wal-Mart. Sure, it's probably easier to target the ONE biggest retailer, but at the cost of putting your business at their mercy. And if you can't achieve that potential (or at least the vast majority of it) without Wal-Mart, that suggests to me that the only reason for wooing Wal-Mart is to have them give preference to your product over your competitors where you have no competitive advantage otherwise. And thus you are even *more* at Wal-Mart's mercy.
If your product is some sort of made-in-China plastic doo-dad, I guess I can see the reasoning, but for anyone marketing anything that's beyond the total impulse purchase, I don't see where putting your business solely at Wal-Mart's mercy in your interest.
And don't say that the problem is that we're going to make ourselves extinct. Species make themselves extinct all the time. Nothing more natural than that.
Yeah, that's the ticket. We may be blindly barreling towards extinction, but at least we're enjoying the ride.
I realize you're probably trolling, but I thought it appropriate that you interpreted the parent's idea of banning ID to "banning religion." I thought the ID people were desperately trying to promote the idea that ID was NOT religion but "real science". Not that I think that ID should be banned (rather it should be openly debunked as the BS it is), but I glad to see a proponent admit that ID is "religion."
...I just want to let people know that the assumption that Google is paying a ton for their net is off base. I think the true numbers would shock people.
And I think if this was anything more than an assumption on your part, you'd actually provide those "true numbers".
Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth?
They already do, don't they? It seems to me that if I have a website, my hosting provider charges based on upon how much bandwidth it uses. I assume Google pays for all the upstream bandwidth that users pay for downstream.
What they seem to want is to be able to charge content providers based upon how valuable that bandwidth is to them. That is predatory, IMO.
I agree with you on all counts and would mod you up if I had points. But one point of clarification...
Your current customers pay you to get to Google, Google doesnt do anything other than serve people's requests (granted it uses bandwidth provided by the telcos to perform its searches but that is just a cost of doing business in my opinion).
It seems to me content hosts like Google pay for the bandwidth their servers use, too. That makes the claims of "Google gets a free ride" all the more galling to me. It is akin to the Department of Transportation wanting to charge extra road taxes based on the value of what's in your vehicle. Parasites.
Yes! Thank you for being the first one in this thread to make this distinction.
IANAL, but my understanding is if this woman was charged with a criminal code violation and the RIAA were attempting to negotiate in exhange for not pressing charges, that WOULD be extortion.
Exactly my thoughts...if Amazon didn't invent cookies nor the mouse click, and we can presume the obviousness of the fact that 1 click to purchase is more desirable than multiple clicks, why should everyone else be forced to make their purchase process more complicated just because Amazon was able to get to the USPTO first? If someone borrows something from Amazon's particular implementation of the 1 click purchase, it is fair for a patent to protect them, but to patent 1 click is akin to patenting the idea of of a doorknob that only requires one hand and forcing all other doorknob makers to make knobs which require both hands to operate.
Slashdot Mirror
Good sleuth work! That would explain it.
You can day-trade yourself into the poorhouse on Schwab, but online poker is a felony? WTF?!?!
Precisely the point I was going to make...
Basically it says that the Telcos can write their own rules and the rest of us can eat shit.
I was waiting to see a link to that stinking pile of bullcrap. I call it the "Swift Boat Veterans for a Tiered Internet" campaign.
Then it's not really "working", at least not in the environment you need it to.
Unless it's written in such an obscure language that you can't find anyone to maintain it, you're probably still better off hiring someone to try to get a handle on your existing code than to make someone reimplement from scratch. Plus if the only people who know anything about your code are long gone, then the code must not have needed much maintenance anyway.
Then you have already ignored the "Never rewrite working code" advice in the first place. Good luck.
This is the reason why I think virtualization solutions like VMWare are going to take off in the next few years for many enterprise solutions. Target your application at a virtual "hardware platform" that can run atop any OS/hardware platform, and let the customer worry about what hardware to choose. Certainly not the best solution for every application (e.g., apps where you need a lot of integration with other desktop applications), but for large scale data entry systems I can see a lot of benefit from that approach.
Why would I have? As I noted, my regular auto insurance covered me for the rental car.
Maybe it's different where you are, but like I said, the rental people told me all the supplemental insurance covers is for your deductable. $20/day to insure against a $500 deductable make no sense from any risk management perspective.
Your story about the Lambo sounds like a bit of urban legend to me. They won't let you rent the car if your own insurance won't cover it, but they didn't check the guy's insurance to ensure it covered the value of an expensive car, which would be the case for...oh, just about everybody except those who already own a Lambo or similarly expensive car. Sounds fishy to me.
I've never seen a Walmart with a front window, but the last time I rented a car I asked what the supplemental insurance covered (since my regular car insurance covered me while using the rental car) and the reply was that it insured me against having to pay my $500 deductable. I thought about for ten seconds, and concluded that if it made sense to pay $20/day to avoid a $500 deductable in case of an accident, then it should make equally as much sense to pay one's regular insurer over $7000 extra per year to simply have a $0 deductable. I don't know about you, but that spells "rip-off" to me.
...who's going to to try to press you to pay an extra $20/day for the rip-off supplemental insurance on this plan?
However, this is the first time a system operator (be it a virtual one) has attempted to embrace their users in every facet of their lives.
if (TV == every_facet_of_our_lives) we_are_fucked();
"Remember, there's a big difference between kneeling down and bending over."
From a true Zappaphile...
Your story reminds of the time I had to rent a car while my truck was in the shop.
The rental guy tries to get me to purchase the $13/day supplemental insurance, which I instintively decline without a second thought. After they bring up the rental car, the guy tries again with the hard sell, telling me how it's really in my best interest to get the supplemental insurance.
Me: "Why? My insurance company tells me the insure me for the use of the rental car."
Rental Guy: "Yes, but this covers your deductable."
Me: "Well, let's do the math. I have a $500 deductable, which you will insure against for $13/day. Now if this were worthwhile for me, I should be just as willing to pay $13/day every day to avoid my deductable with my regular vehicle. Since $13/day times 365 days comes to a bit shy of $5,000, you're saying I should consider it worthwhile to pay $5,000 per year extra to avoid a $500 deductable in the case I have an accident. Wow, you must either believe that a) I'm such a bad driver that I get in an average of 10 accidents per year, or b) that I'm incredibly stupid."
Rental Guy: ...sighs as he scribbles on the invoice... "OK, no supplemental insurance."
Inbound access is best controlled by a hardware firewall, no doubt. But the whole point of controlling outbound access is to alert when a rogue client program is trying to call out...in other words to ask your same question...what is this program and why is it calling out?
For me, outbound alert is the only function I want in a software firewall. My Sygate firewall was the only thing that protected me when I suffered a silent IE hijacking that spawned several processes that tried to phone home. Having a software firewall block inbound access, OTOH, only seems to cause numerous headaches for anyone trying to set up simple home networking which the vast majority do through hardware firewall/routers anyway.
I heard similar claims to this before, but here's what I don't get. If your company is producing a product that has 4 times the potential market that you are currently realizing, why should hitching your star to Wal-Mart be the *only* way to achieve this? After all, no consumer shops solely at Wal-Mart. Sure, it's probably easier to target the ONE biggest retailer, but at the cost of putting your business at their mercy. And if you can't achieve that potential (or at least the vast majority of it) without Wal-Mart, that suggests to me that the only reason for wooing Wal-Mart is to have them give preference to your product over your competitors where you have no competitive advantage otherwise. And thus you are even *more* at Wal-Mart's mercy.
If your product is some sort of made-in-China plastic doo-dad, I guess I can see the reasoning, but for anyone marketing anything that's beyond the total impulse purchase, I don't see where putting your business solely at Wal-Mart's mercy in your interest.
Indeed, nothing could be a problem from the "natural" point of view, as you define it. Talk about adding nothing to the debate.
Yeah, that's the ticket. We may be blindly barreling towards extinction, but at least we're enjoying the ride.
I realize you're probably trolling, but I thought it appropriate that you interpreted the parent's idea of banning ID to "banning religion." I thought the ID people were desperately trying to promote the idea that ID was NOT religion but "real science". Not that I think that ID should be banned (rather it should be openly debunked as the BS it is), but I glad to see a proponent admit that ID is "religion."
And I think if this was anything more than an assumption on your part, you'd actually provide those "true numbers".
Does it seem redundant to make both the sender and the recipient pay for the same bandwidth?
They already do, don't they? It seems to me that if I have a website, my hosting provider charges based on upon how much bandwidth it uses. I assume Google pays for all the upstream bandwidth that users pay for downstream.
What they seem to want is to be able to charge content providers based upon how valuable that bandwidth is to them. That is predatory, IMO.
I agree with you on all counts and would mod you up if I had points. But one point of clarification...
It seems to me content hosts like Google pay for the bandwidth their servers use, too. That makes the claims of "Google gets a free ride" all the more galling to me. It is akin to the Department of Transportation wanting to charge extra road taxes based on the value of what's in your vehicle. Parasites.
IANAL, but my understanding is if this woman was charged with a criminal code violation and the RIAA were attempting to negotiate in exhange for not pressing charges, that WOULD be extortion.
...maybe Gates is a little bit miffed that someone could get out a $100 laptop in less time than it's taking Microsoft to squeeze out Vista.
Exactly my thoughts...if Amazon didn't invent cookies nor the mouse click, and we can presume the obviousness of the fact that 1 click to purchase is more desirable than multiple clicks, why should everyone else be forced to make their purchase process more complicated just because Amazon was able to get to the USPTO first? If someone borrows something from Amazon's particular implementation of the 1 click purchase, it is fair for a patent to protect them, but to patent 1 click is akin to patenting the idea of of a doorknob that only requires one hand and forcing all other doorknob makers to make knobs which require both hands to operate.