If you met any business leaders you'd be shocked at how stipid they are. You don't need to be smart to be a business leader you just have to be able to put aside your morals to make money.
Okay, well, just to be clear I was adopting a point of view for the sake of argumentation. I realize my hyperbole doesn't quite reflect reality, having been a part of and worked with several executive teams at software companies and other businesses. So no, I'm not at all shocked that some executives are morons (in my experiences, the ones at big organizations were actually worse).
Nonetheless, it does usually take a little bit of saavy and business acumen if not outright intelligence to run a business, and those usually dictate being able to spot something as basic as people pushing their own agenda. If you can't spot that from a mile away, you WILL get pushed out of your position as a "business leader" eventually.
How is my explanation disingenuous? Do you deny that my description of the origins of Slashdot is true? I assumed we all knew that Slashdot is owned by VA Linux and the editors paid a salary by them now, and that ads appear on their pages, and a whole bunch of other relevant background facts that I'm not going to enumerate in this post. That still doesn't make them journalists.
As for VA Linux's involvement owning other sites, I fail to see the relevance. Slashdot editors weren't pro-Linux until they were bought by VA Linux? The mind boggles at your suggestion.
The fact that I have my own opinions hardly makes me unable to exercise my intellect and assess whether a piece of writing reflects good journalistic practices or a biased opinion, whether I agree with it or not. If it did, then we would all have to throw up our hands and refuse to judge anything written by anybody because we all hold opinions which would presumably make us unable to judge bias.
As to your point of fact, I did say in another post in this thread that "people hate SCO", which is a statement of fact that can be rapidly deduced by reading posts on Slashdot, not that I hate SCO. I don't deny that I've said something like that at some point in the past, since it's not an entirely inaccurate reflection of my feelings. Of course, I don't "hate" a corporation in any personal sense, since that would be meaningless, but I do loathe the actions of their management, specifically their anti-competitive attempts to extort money from many other businesses, instead of creating useful goods and services themselves.
As for the tone of the article, that may be the case, but fails to explain the blatant ad hominem attack. And when placed in context of some of her other articles that I've just been looking at, your point fails to hold up.
No, I find many of the Slashdot postings to be quite biased as well, some in way I agree with, and some not. But the Slashdot editors aren't journalists, and nobody could mistake them for such after spending any time on this site. Nobody hired them for the quality of their writing, they just put up a big community forum/mega-blog site and starting sticking stuff up that interests them. I don't think they are journalists any more than Drudge is a journalist, though he may have interesting things to say or break relevant news sometimes.
Did you not bother reading my post? I already answered this question - it's a troll because of the ad hominem attack on the intelligence of Groklaw readers, regardless of the possible validity of any other points she made. Trolls can sometimes make valid points too.
Yes, but they are all in context of the IBM/SCO trial, and they are all relatively recent articles. Even the first article, nominally about Compuware, goes on to talk about how this must warm SCO's heart.
I went back on her author page to her early articles from back in 2002, and found several that mention IBM. They don't seem to exhibit this vehement hatred at all. You sure there's not something else going on here?
I don't understand. How on earth do these people get jobs as reporters with so little integrity, not to mention such poor writing and cognition skills? Who is going to read this article and not see right through the bias? I clicked and started reading, had no idea who the writer was, and by the end of the first paragraph it was obvious they were either writing a troll article to get page impressions or that they must be on SCO's payroll. How little subtlety can you possibly have?
I guess this is what you get from a magazine that as I've since discovered from their Contact page is aimed at "IT managers". They claim "business leaders" are part of their audience too, but if a business leader is dumb enough to read this and not see it as a paid advertisement, they won't be leading their business for long.
They have published at least two or three blatantly pro-SCO pieces. I'm not sure if they were all by this same Maureen O'Gara lady or not.
What I wonder about is do they do this stuff as pure internet trolling? In other words, putting something out there that they know will inflame people so that it gets posted to Slashdot et. al. and therefore gets lots of page views and thus advertising dollars for their web site?
Or have they been bought off by somebody else? I mean, how does SCO, a broke, shitty company if ever I've seen one, get this small but vocal cadre of middling tech journalists to push their agenda loudly? Even now, when the market, mainstream journalists and anybody else with half a brain have pretty much written SCO off. That's why I wonder if maybe this is just trolling for ad impressions.
I don't know, but your article loses all credibility when it includes this statement in the first paragraph. Most of the Groklaw readers aren't pro-IBM, they are anti-SCO. This is the second or third journalist to repeat this pseudo-meme, and that doesn't make it any more true. In fact, I think this has become so-called "LinuxWorld"'s party line.
People hate SCO because of what SCO has done, period. There is nothing more to say about it.
This article is a troll, plain and simple. I don't know anything about the disposition of AIX source code re: IBM and SCO's contractual relationships in the past, but I certainly won't take any source seriously that is so broken in their understanding of the basic underlying facts.
Who is behind LinuxWorld? Why the ridiculous pro-SCO equivocation and anti-IBM attacks? Regardless of how you feel about IBM, how can anybody else associated with the software industry support a company that has made IP-lawsuits its first and only business priority?
For anything that actually uses and needs to manipulate complex GUI applications then wxWidgets sucks.
Okay, but it's better and much faster to develop in than the alternatives, with the exception of Qt. wxWidgets apps come out excellently in Windows, they just generally require some tweaking to make them work well in Linux as well because it's a native widget wrapping library. But it's _because_ it uses native widgets that wxWidgets has become so popular - compare to using something like Swing (ugh).
OK, this dispite the fact that wxWidgets feels a lot like MFC. Hmmm.
People keep saying this, but wxWidgets is FAR simpler to learn and use than MFC and doesn't suffer from many of the severely annoying things in MFC. I find MFC event maps to be heinous - wxWidgets feels much more usable to me (I admit that I still prefer the Qt signal/slot model).
I picked up and wrote my first fairly complex wxWidgets application in a few weeks. No way I could have done that in MFC.
As for your "superheavyweight" accusation, I don't see it. wxWidgets apps feel qualitatively just as fast as native apps to me, and the performance gap from hand-coded native apps is not terribly noticeable to me, and apparently not to the many other people using wxWidgets either, since they frequently cite this as a reason they use it. Yes, you inherit platform-specific bugs and issues that you have to work around at times, but this is far easier than maintaining separate GUIs for each platform, and do you really think anybody in their right mind would write Gtk apps with a mostly Windows target market?
Qt just isn't an option for cross-platform Open Source projects, shareware or other low cost software, or hobbyists that can't afford the entry cost. Thus wxWidgets is "good enough" for many people. For large commercial projects, sure I'd recommend Qt, which I agree deals better with complicated composite widgets and complex GUI applications in general.
This is just not true. TV/CRT whine is almost painful to my ears if a room is otherwise silent. My roommate always does this - turns off the cable box, leaves on the TV in his room, and I have to go down the hall, into his room to shut the damned thing off because it's so distracting. Now admittedly, all of my friends are in their mid-twenties, and have never been loud concert going types (well, I've been to a few, but not a regular occurrence), so maybe we just don't have the damaged hearing of many older folks. But any audio product built specifically for a half-deaf 50 year old audience isn't going to do too well.
I'm assuming you are talking from experience re: XM radio? For me, it's just a matter of listening to XM radio and listening to a normal MP3 or AAC encoded file. You can hear the "hard cutoff" in frequency response which you can visibly see in a spectral analyzer. Even if your hearing in the high frequency range isn't too great (and admittedly, nobody hears very _well_ at those high frequencies), the cutoff sounds hard and unnatural and should be quite noticeable. It's not a bitrate artifact, since low bitrate artifacts sound very distinct (and can be heard on many of the talk channels, especially the news/weather channels, ouch). Apparently, some of the XM issues are also from the "neural analyzers" they use as part of the encoding process, according to some of the people who should know in the XM radio forums. But almost everybody seems to admit now that the hard frequency cutoff is an issue.
I don't disagree... their per-unit charges are pretty insane still. There is a family plan now, so you only have to pay 7 bucks a month per additional unit instead of 10, but still I think it's too much money on the margin for all but the hardcore market. The usual response on the forums is "if they charged less than 7 bucks a month per unit above the first, there would be rampant account sharing". Hmm, I dunno about that, it's like saying that there should be rampant cable subscription sharing between adjacent apartments because it costs 1/10th the amount for an additional cable box as it does for the cable service. Sure, it happens occasionally, but it's pretty rare.
I have an XMDirect in my car and an XMPCR at home (because as you say, I'm not lugging around a single unit between my car and my apartment, it's just not reasonable effort-wise to do so). I haven't switched to the family plan yet, so I'm still paying 20 bucks a month. I would have no problem with paying an additional 3 dollars or so per month per receiver, and I'd probably buy another two or three XM receivers at that price so I didn't have to lug around my PCR, and so I could have XM in my living room without going through incredible hassles, etc.
Unfortunately, I just don't think XM has built their business in a way that makes this profitable for them. I don't think they make any money on receiver sales, just on subscriptions, and they really want people to get multiple subs for multiple units.
It varies by channel too. The problem is, what good does it do to have 100+ channels if half of them are unlistenable? For a long time anybody who bitched about XM sound quality was hounded off the message boards as a 'whiny audiophile' who was just imagining things, but I sure as hell am no audiophile. I listen to 196kbps VBR CD-rip MP3s and enjoy them a lot, though I admit even 128kbps MP3s are 'listenable' but not fabulous to my ears. Now, I have several friends with XM radio who have decent ears but definitely aren't audiophiles and they complain about the sound pitch too - if you don't know that the highs are getting clipped, it's hard to describe, but I've heard them use words like 'hollow', 'missing something', etc. until I explained to them what was happening (the human ear hears to ~20kHz, and they are clipping frequencies above 15kHz or even lower before they even encode the music).
I love listening to the classical channels on XM where I don't find the sound quality too bad and the variety of talk is nice. The pop stations (top 20, etc.) have a decent amount of bandwidth allocation and better-sounding pre-processing than some of the others, but the content gets boring after half an hour. This has left me reconsidering my XM subscription - I love my XMPCR at my desk, and my XMDirect/blitzsafe setup in my car, but I no longer have much desire to record songs for posterity off of XM. I do sometimes record talk shows though, and it's nice to not have to listen to a long program when it's on, but to have it waiting for me on my computer at my convenience.
Well, in my living room A) there is no space to mount a projector properly without it looking ghetto. Even if there were, the construction work to wire and set it up would have cost about as much as my LCD RP set. B) FP works great with low light conditions, but not great in average light. I have lots of windows in a Manhattan apartment, so an FP setup would only be usable late at night - even with all the blinds drawn, the light level is still too high, it would look insanely washed out.
I guess if you live somewhere where usable space is not an issue (here in Manhattan, the cost per square foot of living room space is much more than the cost of any of these sets), or you are building a windowless home theater room from scratch in a house in the burbs where you can have everything mounted properly in a housing that looks good, the 1500 bucks you save might be worth it. For me, a 60" Grand Wega LCD RP was a good deal at 2200 bucks (big sale price, I got a great deal), was far less mounting/install effort, and made sense, and apparently most people feel the same way.
No, that should read "irrational communism". Communism denies human nature, which includes the desire to accumulate wealth, desire for power (alpha male status), etc. It doesn't work because humans are still biological animals with the instincts and desires of animals, despite having brains with intellects that can moderate (not completely deny) these instincts and desires.
This has essentially nothing to do with your propostion, which seems to be that the only basis for a compassionate or reasonable society is religion. And that capitalism is somehow tied to religious practices. You think if you take America, get rid of religion, then you end up with the Soviet Union? You think the only basis for morality and ethics is religion? There are so many mistakes in your post I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Re:Is it an open protocol?
on
Replacing TCP?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They apparently already have some problems with GPL compliance. They are distributing binaries of a tool called Rateless Copy which they state uses the GPLed libAsync library under their own license while promising to deliver source code under the GPL "soon".
Don't get me wrong, I think they mean well, but they are trying to prohibit commercial use of GPL-linked works. Nobody said the GPL was always friendly to your business plan, but you can either take it or leave it, not have it both ways. I know one of the founders of this company, Chris Coyne - he used to regularly come to my parties in college. Nice guys, and I am sure they mean well. They could use some serious guidance though on licensing and IP issues, not to mention trying to make a viable business out of network software, which is a tough proposition in itself.
This has been around for ages. Many people just aren't aware of Reed-Solomon codes (and more recently, Tornado codes). Implement on top of UDP. You can do this today in the application layer, and it's been done in many applications. Okay, so moving it into the network layer is an interesting proposal, but I'm sure these guys aren't the first to think of it either.
This fellow was class of '01 Harvard, where error and erasure codes are a common subject in CS classes. I'm quite sure Mr. Maymounkov took a class or classes with Professor Mitzenmacher or Rabin, who have been teaching this subject in their respective algorithms classes for some time.
Others have been working to commercialize erasure codes for some time. When it comes down to it, it's hard to sell network algorithms. It's even harder to sell something new in the network layer than it is to sell it as a UDP application library. So I guess I don't really understand their business value proposal here either, how they plan to compete with Digital Fountain, et. al. But best of luck to them anyway.
There's a reason that Open Source software is gaining in popularity in corporations. And I think you've stated it nicely. Companies from the small like Digium (makers of Asterisk) to the big, like Big Blue realize that selling software is not as profitable as it once was, largely due to competition in the market from overseas and the ease of cloning product features. Services is still profitable, if at a modest margin, and if you make use of overseas labor. Hardware is profitable, but your margins are again limited.
That's why the best approach from a business perspective seems to be bundling or packaging fancy software with hardware, services or both. The software may be the hook to get people in, and you might even give it away (and while you're at it, make it Open Source, it makes your customers happy). But tie it to your expensive hardware. Or just convince companies that it works best with your expensive hardware. Or that your expensive services personnel are best equipped to customize or build value-added functions on top of it.
This is the whole reason that quite a few tech businesses have embraced Open Source. It's not a function of their love of the community.
I agree completely. Anecdotal evidence suggests that when people used to pay $2500 for a desktop PC, spending $200 on an OS and $400 on some application software for it seemed like less of an issue. Sure, there was piracy, but by virtue of the class and wealth restrictions of PC ownership created by the hardware price itself, the PC owners were more likely to at least be able to make an economic decision about software ownership.
Now that an entry-level PC costs 400 dollars, and if you are willing to go a generation or two back in hardware, you can get a PC and CRT monitor for perhaps 250-300 dollars, probably even less in many countries. So decent hardware is much more accessible to the working class in second world nations, and even the upper middle class in third world nations. But tack on 1000 dollars worth of OS, office software, and a few other apps they need, and you are talking about perhaps several months salary. Given the economic decision between being left in the last century technology-wise, or using illegally copied software, it's hardly surprising what most people choose to do (wasn't there a posting on software 'piracy' in Russia just last night?).
I think Americans and Europeans use the same justifications too - if their whole PC setup cost 500 bucks, the cost of a retail copy of Windows, Office, etc. seem exhorbitant in comparison. Microsoft is just bitchy because hardware prices have come down so far due to competition and economies of scale, while they've kept prices artificially high (thanks to an effective monopoly, even if not an absolute one), and the market searches for ways to route around that, hence rampant illegal copying.
I was beginning to think that nobody remembers OOG, Signal 11, Jon Katz or the rest of the early generation of characters we used to have around here (okay, just kidding about Katz, I hated him too).
Is it just me, or does Slashdot feel like it's lost some of its character as it's grown?
Okay, but MEPIS already gives you this. It was much easier to install (at least on my hardware) than Windows XP, since it actually had up-to-date drivers for everything. On a desktop system, it takes about 20-30 minutes to install. Even on my laptop, it took me maybe an hour and a half to get it installed and set up properly (with about half that time spent Googling to figure out how to get my widescreen display working). As the other replies said, the installation problem is already solved. Though I will admit, Mandrake, which used to be the easy-to-install distro of choice has declined in build quality over time and the last time I tried it (a couple releases back) it didn't work with my NVidia graphics card out of the box, which is a major tick against it for me.
Give MEPIS a try if you have half an hour to spare. It's a bootable CD distro, so you can try it with no effort at all, and then just click on the Install To Hardrive icon if you want to keep it around (but unlike Knoppix, it's actually been designed as a daily use distribution). Also, you don't have to figure out apt-get, since it comes with KPackage conveniently located in an obvious spot in the default menu configuration - a couple clicks and you have a list you can search for that weird application or library you need. I have pretty much not come across anything except the really obscure stuff that I needed that wasn't two clicks away.
If you are a company and need support, I'd go with Xandros right now. But for personal use, MEPIS is great (there IS commercial support forthcoming for MEPIS, but it doesn't really seem to be "quite there" yet on that front).
There are now marketing firms that specialize in grass roots marketing efforts, by putting out semi-phony blogs and probably pimping things on supposedly "community-driven" sites like Slashdot. As soon as the market gets big enough, the marketers will be there. And Slashdot is numerically significant and a good spot to push technogizmos on the geek thought leaders.
I would be surprised if people didn't try to use Slashdot in this way. Just look at how Roland Piquepaille has made a business out of getting Timothy (I think it's usually him) to publish his inane Slashdot submissions, which ALWAYS have link-backs to his "summaries" of various news stories in his blog. He's Slashvertizing for his blog, so he can get more advertising hits.
What does it all mean? Well, you just have to be a little more cynical around here I guess. In any case, it's nothing really new - used to be we'd see vaporware announcements and the like float by, but the submission writer and the sketchy company weren't usually one and the same. Now sometimes they are.
Agreed 100%. There are things that annoy me about Java, but the IO classes are a godsend. I rather miss their flexibility and power when I'm working in C, C++, or even Python et. al. Not saying you can't find libraries that have many or most of the capabilities, but in Java, it's all built in and you know it will work on any Java platform.
Right, and the only reason Diebold has been adding features like this is the extensive public uproar over their past snafus.
So what, you are telling us to stop bitching? I'll stop bitching when they finish implementing an open, auditable, verifiable voting system. And when they have executives that realize that outspoken politics has no place in their role as executives at the largest provider of electronic voting systems in our country.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, well, just to be clear I was adopting a point of view for the sake of argumentation. I realize my hyperbole doesn't quite reflect reality, having been a part of and worked with several executive teams at software companies and other businesses. So no, I'm not at all shocked that some executives are morons (in my experiences, the ones at big organizations were actually worse).
Nonetheless, it does usually take a little bit of saavy and business acumen if not outright intelligence to run a business, and those usually dictate being able to spot something as basic as people pushing their own agenda. If you can't spot that from a mile away, you WILL get pushed out of your position as a "business leader" eventually.
If anything would create an expectation of journalistic integrity around here it would be the "News for Nerds" tagline. But just read the FAQ>/a>, this is explicitly addressed, and the editors definitely don't create the impression that this is anything like a serious news magazine, trade journal or other publication that would be expected to uphold journalistic standards.
As for VA Linux's involvement owning other sites, I fail to see the relevance. Slashdot editors weren't pro-Linux until they were bought by VA Linux? The mind boggles at your suggestion.
As to your point of fact, I did say in another post in this thread that "people hate SCO", which is a statement of fact that can be rapidly deduced by reading posts on Slashdot, not that I hate SCO. I don't deny that I've said something like that at some point in the past, since it's not an entirely inaccurate reflection of my feelings. Of course, I don't "hate" a corporation in any personal sense, since that would be meaningless, but I do loathe the actions of their management, specifically their anti-competitive attempts to extort money from many other businesses, instead of creating useful goods and services themselves.
As for the tone of the article, that may be the case, but fails to explain the blatant ad hominem attack. And when placed in context of some of her other articles that I've just been looking at, your point fails to hold up.
No, I find many of the Slashdot postings to be quite biased as well, some in way I agree with, and some not. But the Slashdot editors aren't journalists, and nobody could mistake them for such after spending any time on this site. Nobody hired them for the quality of their writing, they just put up a big community forum/mega-blog site and starting sticking stuff up that interests them. I don't think they are journalists any more than Drudge is a journalist, though he may have interesting things to say or break relevant news sometimes.
Did you not bother reading my post? I already answered this question - it's a troll because of the ad hominem attack on the intelligence of Groklaw readers, regardless of the possible validity of any other points she made. Trolls can sometimes make valid points too.
I went back on her author page to her early articles from back in 2002, and found several that mention IBM. They don't seem to exhibit this vehement hatred at all. You sure there's not something else going on here?
I guess this is what you get from a magazine that as I've since discovered from their Contact page is aimed at "IT managers". They claim "business leaders" are part of their audience too, but if a business leader is dumb enough to read this and not see it as a paid advertisement, they won't be leading their business for long.
What I wonder about is do they do this stuff as pure internet trolling? In other words, putting something out there that they know will inflame people so that it gets posted to Slashdot et. al. and therefore gets lots of page views and thus advertising dollars for their web site?
Or have they been bought off by somebody else? I mean, how does SCO, a broke, shitty company if ever I've seen one, get this small but vocal cadre of middling tech journalists to push their agenda loudly? Even now, when the market, mainstream journalists and anybody else with half a brain have pretty much written SCO off. That's why I wonder if maybe this is just trolling for ad impressions.
Groklaw's IBM-dazzled observers
I don't know, but your article loses all credibility when it includes this statement in the first paragraph. Most of the Groklaw readers aren't pro-IBM, they are anti-SCO.
This is the second or third journalist to repeat this pseudo-meme, and that doesn't make it any more true. In fact, I think this has become so-called "LinuxWorld"'s party line.
People hate SCO because of what SCO has done, period. There is nothing more to say about it.
This article is a troll, plain and simple. I don't know anything about the disposition of AIX source code re: IBM and SCO's contractual relationships
in the past, but I certainly won't take any source seriously that is so broken in their understanding of the basic underlying facts.
Who is behind LinuxWorld? Why the ridiculous pro-SCO equivocation and anti-IBM attacks? Regardless of how you feel about IBM, how can anybody else associated with the software industry support a company that has made IP-lawsuits its first and only business priority?
For anything that actually uses and needs to manipulate complex GUI applications then wxWidgets sucks.
Okay, but it's better and much faster to develop in than the alternatives, with the exception of Qt. wxWidgets apps come out excellently in Windows, they just generally require some tweaking to make them work well in Linux as well because it's a native widget wrapping library. But it's _because_ it uses native widgets that wxWidgets has become so popular - compare to using something like Swing (ugh).
OK, this dispite the fact that wxWidgets feels a lot like MFC. Hmmm.
People keep saying this, but wxWidgets is FAR simpler to learn and use than MFC and doesn't suffer from many of the severely annoying things in MFC. I find MFC event maps to be heinous - wxWidgets feels much more usable to me (I admit that I still prefer the Qt signal/slot model).
I picked up and wrote my first fairly complex wxWidgets application in a few weeks. No way I could have done that in MFC.
As for your "superheavyweight" accusation, I don't see it. wxWidgets apps feel qualitatively just as fast as native apps to me, and the performance gap from hand-coded native apps is not terribly noticeable to me, and apparently not to the many other people using wxWidgets either, since they frequently cite this as a reason they use it. Yes, you inherit platform-specific bugs and issues that you have to work around at times, but this is far easier than maintaining separate GUIs for each platform, and do you really think anybody in their right mind would write Gtk apps with a mostly Windows target market?
Qt just isn't an option for cross-platform Open Source projects, shareware or other low cost software, or hobbyists that can't afford the entry cost. Thus wxWidgets is "good enough" for many people. For large commercial projects, sure I'd recommend Qt, which I agree deals better with complicated composite widgets and complex GUI applications in general.
I'm assuming you are talking from experience re: XM radio? For me, it's just a matter of listening to XM radio and listening to a normal MP3 or AAC encoded file. You can hear the "hard cutoff" in frequency response which you can visibly see in a spectral analyzer. Even if your hearing in the high frequency range isn't too great (and admittedly, nobody hears very _well_ at those high frequencies), the cutoff sounds hard and unnatural and should be quite noticeable. It's not a bitrate artifact, since low bitrate artifacts sound very distinct (and can be heard on many of the talk channels, especially the news/weather channels, ouch). Apparently, some of the XM issues are also from the "neural analyzers" they use as part of the encoding process, according to some of the people who should know in the XM radio forums. But almost everybody seems to admit now that the hard frequency cutoff is an issue.
I have an XMDirect in my car and an XMPCR at home (because as you say, I'm not lugging around a single unit between my car and my apartment, it's just not reasonable effort-wise to do so). I haven't switched to the family plan yet, so I'm still paying 20 bucks a month. I would have no problem with paying an additional 3 dollars or so per month per receiver, and I'd probably buy another two or three XM receivers at that price so I didn't have to lug around my PCR, and so I could have XM in my living room without going through incredible hassles, etc.
Unfortunately, I just don't think XM has built their business in a way that makes this profitable for them. I don't think they make any money on receiver sales, just on subscriptions, and they really want people to get multiple subs for multiple units.
I love listening to the classical channels on XM where I don't find the sound quality too bad and the variety of talk is nice. The pop stations (top 20, etc.) have a decent amount of bandwidth allocation and better-sounding pre-processing than some of the others, but the content gets boring after half an hour. This has left me reconsidering my XM subscription - I love my XMPCR at my desk, and my XMDirect/blitzsafe setup in my car, but I no longer have much desire to record songs for posterity off of XM. I do sometimes record talk shows though, and it's nice to not have to listen to a long program when it's on, but to have it waiting for me on my computer at my convenience.
I guess if you live somewhere where usable space is not an issue (here in Manhattan, the cost per square foot of living room space is much more than the cost of any of these sets), or you are building a windowless home theater room from scratch in a house in the burbs where you can have everything mounted properly in a housing that looks good, the 1500 bucks you save might be worth it. For me, a 60" Grand Wega LCD RP was a good deal at 2200 bucks (big sale price, I got a great deal), was far less mounting/install effort, and made sense, and apparently most people feel the same way.
I'm sure 10 subscribers emailed the "on call" editor, but if you haven't noticed, they rarely check their emails before letting the story go up.
This has essentially nothing to do with your propostion, which seems to be that the only basis for a compassionate or reasonable society is religion. And that capitalism is somehow tied to religious practices. You think if you take America, get rid of religion, then you end up with the Soviet Union? You think the only basis for morality and ethics is religion? There are so many mistakes in your post I wouldn't even know where to begin.
Don't get me wrong, I think they mean well, but they are trying to prohibit commercial use of GPL-linked works. Nobody said the GPL was always friendly to your business plan, but you can either take it or leave it, not have it both ways. I know one of the founders of this company, Chris Coyne - he used to regularly come to my parties in college. Nice guys, and I am sure they mean well. They could use some serious guidance though on licensing and IP issues, not to mention trying to make a viable business out of network software, which is a tough proposition in itself.
Feel free to contact me if you need help guys.
This fellow was class of '01 Harvard, where error and erasure codes are a common subject in CS classes. I'm quite sure Mr. Maymounkov took a class or classes with Professor Mitzenmacher or Rabin, who have been teaching this subject in their respective algorithms classes for some time.
Others have been working to commercialize erasure codes for some time. When it comes down to it, it's hard to sell network algorithms. It's even harder to sell something new in the network layer than it is to sell it as a UDP application library. So I guess I don't really understand their business value proposal here either, how they plan to compete with Digital Fountain, et. al. But best of luck to them anyway.
That's why the best approach from a business perspective seems to be bundling or packaging fancy software with hardware, services or both. The software may be the hook to get people in, and you might even give it away (and while you're at it, make it Open Source, it makes your customers happy). But tie it to your expensive hardware. Or just convince companies that it works best with your expensive hardware. Or that your expensive services personnel are best equipped to customize or build value-added functions on top of it.
This is the whole reason that quite a few tech businesses have embraced Open Source. It's not a function of their love of the community.
Now that an entry-level PC costs 400 dollars, and if you are willing to go a generation or two back in hardware, you can get a PC and CRT monitor for perhaps 250-300 dollars, probably even less in many countries. So decent hardware is much more accessible to the working class in second world nations, and even the upper middle class in third world nations. But tack on 1000 dollars worth of OS, office software, and a few other apps they need, and you are talking about perhaps several months salary. Given the economic decision between being left in the last century technology-wise, or using illegally copied software, it's hardly surprising what most people choose to do (wasn't there a posting on software 'piracy' in Russia just last night?).
I think Americans and Europeans use the same justifications too - if their whole PC setup cost 500 bucks, the cost of a retail copy of Windows, Office, etc. seem exhorbitant in comparison. Microsoft is just bitchy because hardware prices have come down so far due to competition and economies of scale, while they've kept prices artificially high (thanks to an effective monopoly, even if not an absolute one), and the market searches for ways to route around that, hence rampant illegal copying.
Is it just me, or does Slashdot feel like it's lost some of its character as it's grown?
Give MEPIS a try if you have half an hour to spare. It's a bootable CD distro, so you can try it with no effort at all, and then just click on the Install To Hardrive icon if you want to keep it around (but unlike Knoppix, it's actually been designed as a daily use distribution). Also, you don't have to figure out apt-get, since it comes with KPackage conveniently located in an obvious spot in the default menu configuration - a couple clicks and you have a list you can search for that weird application or library you need. I have pretty much not come across anything except the really obscure stuff that I needed that wasn't two clicks away.
If you are a company and need support, I'd go with Xandros right now. But for personal use, MEPIS is great (there IS commercial support forthcoming for MEPIS, but it doesn't really seem to be "quite there" yet on that front).
I would be surprised if people didn't try to use Slashdot in this way. Just look at how Roland Piquepaille has made a business out of getting Timothy (I think it's usually him) to publish his inane Slashdot submissions, which ALWAYS have link-backs to his "summaries" of various news stories in his blog. He's Slashvertizing for his blog, so he can get more advertising hits.
What does it all mean? Well, you just have to be a little more cynical around here I guess. In any case, it's nothing really new - used to be we'd see vaporware announcements and the like float by, but the submission writer and the sketchy company weren't usually one and the same. Now sometimes they are.
Agreed 100%. There are things that annoy me about Java, but the IO classes are a godsend. I rather miss their flexibility and power when I'm working in C, C++, or even Python et. al. Not saying you can't find libraries that have many or most of the capabilities, but in Java, it's all built in and you know it will work on any Java platform.
So what, you are telling us to stop bitching? I'll stop bitching when they finish implementing an open, auditable, verifiable voting system. And when they have executives that realize that outspoken politics has no place in their role as executives at the largest provider of electronic voting systems in our country.