This, by far is one of the most frustrating things. When a piece of hardware dies they will not accept your diagnosis because it's not windows. I've had idiots even blame the hardware dying on Linux and say they won't replace it. Asus would not give me an RMA once because a motherboard wouldn't save changes I made to the bios. Their reason? Because I didn't have the latest Windows motherboard drivers. They said it can make a difference *rolls eyes*.
I have never understood this attitude. Out of the hundreds of distros out there, most of them can be traced back to four bloodlines. Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, and Slackware. The first two of those making up at least 80% of distributions out there. Most distributions are specialized for a specific task. i.e. embedded, scientific, education, data recovery, gaming, firewall, etc. etc. They are _really_ good at one task. However, for most people, they can ignore 99% of them because what they want is a general purpose distro. For an average consumer, that choice can be narrowed down to 3 or 4 of the best. Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. It's not unreasonable to say to the consumer "here are your choices". All four are very high quality distributions and are really only going to differ in eye candy (all of which have very good eye candy anyway). Your choice for Linux as an average consumer isn't as scary as people make it out to be.
This is a very insightful interview. This company trudges past the fud and explains solid business models based on open source. They basically are saying that open source isn't an end all in itself. If you have a failing product, simply making it open source isn't going to make you a successful company. Seems obvious, but a lot of people don't understand it. They also go on to say a lot of people open source things because it's hip or cool.
She goes on to state that you must have a solid revenue stream based off the open source product somehow (then goes on to list various ways such as support, open sourcing parts of the program and closed source for the innovative part).
It sounds like this company has a good head on its shoulders and will be around awhile. Sure, there are those of us who open source for the freedom part (and this will always continue in universities, government, private individuals), but this company has figured out how to add value to a solid core business model using open source.
It's a fluff piece, but there was nothing mentioned in there to make me believe Intel is really doing anything new. All I saw was mention of 4 cores. Are cores the new mhz race? 2 cores is all 99% of people will see benefit from right now. The 4 core race is moot because it's like a race for automakers to produce the first production 16 cylinder family sedan. It's not going to really benefit anyone. Really only a marketing gimmick. I'd rather see Intel clean up their current 2 core chips.
Here's what most consumers need in a computer...
A low latency desktop that can handle about 2-3 running applications with no slowdown that runs cool and doesn't use a lot of power.
Here's what we are getting...
A high latency desktop with fat pipes that run hot, optimized for running 7-8 cpu intensive applications at once, and idles at 200 watts. Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.
I like your idea of the gmail accounts. Maybe I'll make that suggestion here...
Anyway, a lot of people only understand how to do three things on a computer. Office, simple web browsing, and Email. They don't know how to send files with the first two, but they sure know how to with the third. If you were to implement some sort of ftp server they can exchange large files on (and promote it), that would most likely take care of the biggest files. Also, a lot of people don't even realize how big a file is. They don't know that sending 10 raw pictures is 100 megs easily, they just think (oh, I'm just sending a few pics from over the weekend). If you were to set some reasonable limits on attachment sizes (say 10mb) you'd get some whiners at first, but in the long run it'd go away. The problem isn't so much how many emails people get, it's the damn attachments!
"Red Hat didn't make Linux: IBM made Linux, Intel made Linux, Oracle made Linux," according to Ellison.
"We have many more developers on Linux than Red Hat," he added, pointing out that the Redwood Shores, California-based company Oracle Cluster File System to enable Linux to scale across enterprise clusters
Man, those are some ignorant ass comments. Oracle is a much bigger company than red hat. It's more interesting to see the percentage of their developers focused on open source. I can pretty much guarantee it's red hat. Red hat needs open source to survive. It's the basis of their whole business model.
Second of all, those three companies did NOT make Linux. IBM has been a very good general purpose contributor, and to a lesser extent Intel. However, Oracle is NOT in that bunch. Oracle's contributions are minor compared to the other two and can be mostly traced back to enhancements that directly benefit their commercial products. Not saying their contributions aren't appreciated, but they are by no means the same league as Intel and IBM. And really, he just spouted out a couple of his butt buddies. There are a lot of small companies that make a particular product based on linux (such as backup solutions) that make extremely important contributions. The only surviving iSCSI implementation on Linux came from a small company making a linux based backup solution. Intel in fact contributed iSCSI code that is now largely depreciated. Open source does need a commercial counterpart, however it's not the 500 pound gorillas that make open source unique. It's the small companies that need it to survive. I can't say the same or Oracle.
Everyone, please understand how extremely easy it is to contact your senator to voice your opinion regarding this. http://www.senate.gov/
In the upper right hand corner is a "Senator search". Click the state you live in and your two senators websites will be listed. Most (if not all) of the senators are available via email. Voice your opinion in a calm professional manner.
Too many people sit back and watch democracy happen around them. If every single person who read this story voiced their opinion about it to their senator (whether they agree or disagree), there would be tens of thousands of emails (as oppossed to maybe a couple hundred).
It's just to easy to voice your opinion to your senator these days. You would be throwing away a huge opportunity if you didn't.
Although the article reads like one big advertisment, I've always liked the thinkpads. I bought mine while the line was still under IBM. Does anyone have experience with Levano??
I don't know if they have a turn-key solution for you, but Axis Communications has some of the best cameras I've seen. They are linux based and very easy to write glue code for between systems (very open API's and development models). In general they are high quality cameras I would stake my job against.
I'm glad to see some real progress in the processor world. We are so guided by the enterprise market that we've had to support x86 WAY longer than we should have. The cell looks like it has a real chance of becoming the next big advancement. For one, IBM is working heavily with the open source community. This is possibly one of the best things they could have done to help the cell. By doing this, you make open source developers happy and more inclined to port over their applications. One of the hardest things to do in getting a new arch out is getting application support, and they've pretty much guaranteed a modest amount of applications by going open source. The nokia 770 is a pefect example of this. They've supported open source and made available more than enough tools for quick porting of applications, and look at the huge amount available already in the first few months. The nokia 770 probably sets records in how many applications were ported in such a short period of time.
Make the developers happy, and they will port their apps. With large amounts of available applications, the consumers will buy. When the consumers buy, you have a successful new arch.
you really hit the nail on the head. Most general purpose distributions these days are way to bloated to run on old hardware well. They will run, just not snappy. DSL is a pretty good choice. Simple things like not having 324235 services running in the background and compiling your own kernel will help a lot too (not using initrd and not 2 megabytes in size). Those lesser known distros that so many trolls complain are "useless" and add to consumer confusion actually serve a purpose:-P Come to find out, a one size fits all solution realy isn't best?! You don't say! The latest KDE with all effects enabled probably isn't going to serve you to well. But I've gotten good results on sub 50mhz cpu's with modern versions of stripped down distros. Even with a gui using micro X with uclibc buildroot.
But in general, to use old hardware well, you have to know somewhat what you are doing. My grandma isn't going to get a box at a grage sale and slap linux from scratch on it.
City officials turned down Nees, saying the teen could come in and hand-copy the list. Officials said giving out copies of address lists would leave the newsletter subscribers open to spam and computer viruses.
What it sounds like to me is he wanted an electronic version. They said "no, you can come in and hand copy the list yourself, but that's all you get". Which is completely reasonable. I work in local government and it's well known that almost anything we do is public record (very few exceptions). However! We don't just haphazardly give information away. It costs time and money to make information available, so it's generally asked that citizens put forth some effort to narrow down the information they want and go to some effort to get it. Usually there is some sort of processing fee and you have to know specifically what you want. It seems totally reasonable to say "we'll give you the list, but if you are going to use it for some malicious purpose we're going to make it harder for you to spam than cut-paste".
Do we really need "cell phones" anymore these days? It's hard to believe we are still doing things like this. Here's what we should have in 2006...
Gone is the idea of the "phone". You make phone calls via a softphone on your iPaq or Zaurus type mobile device. You have a handheld computer with a softphone. Instead of the idea of connecting to a cellular phone network, you pay a monthly flat fee and get a 1 megabit EVDO pipe to your phone and home computer. You pay your VoIP provider for minutes and your cellular network provider for internet access.
The ONLY reason we don't do things like that is because cell companies have so much control. They make a crapload of money scamming us and aren't going to give it up anytime soon. Cell phone networks are of the few networks left you actually pay on a per byte basis. There's no technical reason for them to do it. They just know there are few players in that market and can get away with it.
All it would really take is an internet service provider to get the balls and team up with a cable TV and VoIP provider. Provide fiber to the home for TV, phone, and internet. Set up a 3G cell network with EVDO for mobile internet access. Sell iPaq's with a softphone. They could make a KILLING. I'm willing to bet most of middle class America would pay 200-300 dollars a month FLAT FEE to get all their voice, tv, and internet from one provider that they can use anywhere (when in reality, it's just providing internet with other services on top of it).
Sadly though, if someone's going to invest in a cellular network, they probably want to be in the raquet too and aren't going to provide all that.
And it will probably use their own protocol and probably have to connect to the PSTN constantly to have any usefulness. And because they connect to the PSTN they will have to pay pound-me-in-the-ass wholesale rates for calls, completely defeating the purpose of VoIP. I used to work in the VoIP industry and made a striking observation. The calls that get completely routed SIP/SDP/RTP are dirt cheap! This is what a majority of what the small guys do and they make an absolute killing. One guy with a 2,500 dollar VoIP gateway can make thousands a month.
So using your own protocol makes you least accessable in the VoIP arena, and you end up having to connect to the PSTN for the majority of your calls and paying Bellsouth pound-me-in-the-ass rates. IAX has it right and will probably be the future for the small guys.
It's mind boggling that any of these new guys would want to force themselves to connect to the PSTN. Traditional telecoms are a technological dinosaur and we really don't need them anymore. They are still around because they have so much power. If all the VoIP guys just used a standard, they could superceed traditional telecom and eventually force it to adapt.
But they are dumb. The small guys will continue to make a killing working together. The big guys will continue to write their own protocols. And the big telecoms will continue to charge outrageous rates for their 1980's technology.
If they do win and google is forced to give over searches, I think the best action would be a campaign to put so much noise in those searches it would be pointless for them to even try. i.e. searching for things like killing the president and how jews invented tornados.
I work in local government. I am around cops all day. 2 of my friends actually became cops. Over the period of 2 years while training and first year of service, you can definatly see a change in their attitude. They become very detached from reality. I think very few cops these days actually become officers to uphold the law and make the world a better place. Some do it for the rush and excitment. A lot do it for the power. Some do it simply because it's a steady government job that doesn't require anything more than a high school diploma.
A great deal of police think that if you were clocked at 45, you were going 45 and you are just lying. There's this attitude that if you were pulled over or arrested, you are guilty (even before trial). If not, that would mean the police are wrong (oh my, god forbid that!).
What happened to you is actually a common police tactic. Not ticketing you for the primary accused charge, but some made up lesser charge (seat belt, tail light, reduced speeding ticket). Most people won't fight it because they are scared if they get in court the officer might bring up the original charge and have a huge ticket. Guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it. Which is sad, because a lot of people pay for tickets they should fight because they are scared. The police are very aware of this and use it as a common tactic to make a ticket stick.
And that's the sad state of many police departments in the united states. Making the world safe and fair for us by upholding the law is only about 10% of their motivation anymore. Revenue and power through selective accusations seems to really trump that these days.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen the police flick on their lights just to run a red light. Or let off their friends when they pull them over. The clincher? I'm at a crowded restaurant one night (30 minute wait time). Cop walks in with two chicks, looks at the line. Walks right past everyone and finds a recently vacant table. Asks them to clean it and sits right down. And no one said anything because he was a cop. That really sums up their attitude right there.
I think it's important to understand the history of this whole situtation to understand its current state. A few years ago, he came up with the idea for Gentoo. It was innovative at the time because there were few source based distributions out there. The idea of the source based distribution wasn't new, but portage definatly was/is the best source based package manager I've seen out there. He sunk a lot of his own personal money into gentoo that he never got back. When he left to work at MS, it pissed off a lot of purists and a lot of people shunned him. I think his move not to come back to the open source community (right now, anyway) has a lot to do with the fact he poured so much of himself into open source, and once he left to try and not live paycheck to paycheck, people immediatly forgot all of his contributions to gentoo.
There's no mention of the home owner getting pissed off. The problem is, they assumed they were getting 8 million dollars in property taxes they weren't. They planned their budget around this and now many departments are being told to give money back. Some departments are saying to accomidate giving money back, they might have to do some lay-offs.
They think that the mistake was made on a public terminal for public information lookups. A typo of a similarly named program that hadn't been in use for years came up and allowed this un-authorized person to make the change. They don't think it was intentionally malicious.
Forgive me for sounding like a slashbot, but I feel the drug companies are preventing these breakthroughs from seeing the light of day. The money is in the treatment, not in the cure. It has been known for quite awhile that certain people's bodies posses certain evolutionary characteristics that prevent them from getting aids. Basically nothing has come of this. It's scary to think the world will probably see very few cures in our lifetime. Like Chris Rock says, in our lifetime we will talk about our AIDS like its arthritis. "Man, my AIDS is actin up again. It gets like this when it rains."
omg Disney is the freaking worst offender. They will make a movie that does good at the box office, and completely ruin it. I can't believe they are dumb enough to keep doing it. For example, Mulan. It was a pretty good success at the box office. So what does Disney do? Come out with an awful sequel that rides on the mulan name that is probably one of the worst Disney movies ever. They've done this at least a good 20-30 times with their box office hits. I don't even think they try anymore. They probably have a formula that a sequel based on a hit will automatically profit x amount riding on the name alone.
Mkay. I see this type of troll everytime these stories come up. These laptops aren't for starving children with hanta on their death beds. These are for children who live in poor nations, but are otherwise living and doing ok. Countries that education is their next step to becoming a modernized country. Their governments are concerned with getting their own people education right now, not feeding starving children half way around the world. It wasn't long ago they were the starving ones. You act as if the money would go to one or the other. That's not the case. If the money weren't going towards these laptops, it'd probably go right into their education systems.
And money isn't what those starving countries need. It's social order usually. America pays farmers for their food and buries it to control food prices. We have PLENTY of food to give away. Getting it in the hands of starving people is the problem. More often than not they will end up in the hands of warlords or destroyed. Throwing money at the problem isn't going to help those countries. Until dictator X is overthrown their people will continue to starve. And the UN isn't about raiding countries to overthrow dictators.
Hmmm, yes. Because not handing over search information to the feds making their stock take a huge dive really makes me think they cater to shareholders. I think google is smart enough to pick their battles. China isn't one of them (right now anyway).
It's all about consolidation. Getting rid of the lavish products that don't generate much profit and focusing on your strong products. Amazon went through this awhile back. I remember at one point they were selling a broom that cost 3 times as much to ship than the broom itself cost. I imagine there weren't a whole lot of people buying it, but it still sat in inventory taking up space. Every once in awhile you just need to step back and say "do we really need to sell some of these things?".
If their recent refusal to give the gov't information regarding what people searched is any indication, they are already on the way. k thx slash sarcasm
Seriously though. That bold move made them take a huge stock hit. Giving away those records wouldn't have negatively affected their business, so the only conclusion I can really come to (given their history) is that they did that purely for moral reasons. They are smart guys and knew their stock would take a hit, but did it anyway. Does this sound like an evil company to you?
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This, by far is one of the most frustrating things. When a piece of hardware dies they will not accept your diagnosis because it's not windows. I've had idiots even blame the hardware dying on Linux and say they won't replace it. Asus would not give me an RMA once because a motherboard wouldn't save changes I made to the bios. Their reason? Because I didn't have the latest Windows motherboard drivers. They said it can make a difference *rolls eyes*.
I have never understood this attitude. Out of the hundreds of distros out there, most of them can be traced back to four bloodlines. Debian, Red Hat, Gentoo, and Slackware. The first two of those making up at least 80% of distributions out there. Most distributions are specialized for a specific task. i.e. embedded, scientific, education, data recovery, gaming, firewall, etc. etc. They are _really_ good at one task. However, for most people, they can ignore 99% of them because what they want is a general purpose distro. For an average consumer, that choice can be narrowed down to 3 or 4 of the best. Suse, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mandriva. It's not unreasonable to say to the consumer "here are your choices". All four are very high quality distributions and are really only going to differ in eye candy (all of which have very good eye candy anyway). Your choice for Linux as an average consumer isn't as scary as people make it out to be.
This is a very insightful interview. This company trudges past the fud and explains solid business models based on open source. They basically are saying that open source isn't an end all in itself. If you have a failing product, simply making it open source isn't going to make you a successful company. Seems obvious, but a lot of people don't understand it. They also go on to say a lot of people open source things because it's hip or cool.
She goes on to state that you must have a solid revenue stream based off the open source product somehow (then goes on to list various ways such as support, open sourcing parts of the program and closed source for the innovative part).
It sounds like this company has a good head on its shoulders and will be around awhile. Sure, there are those of us who open source for the freedom part (and this will always continue in universities, government, private individuals), but this company has figured out how to add value to a solid core business model using open source.
Girth Brookes.
It's a fluff piece, but there was nothing mentioned in there to make me believe Intel is really doing anything new. All I saw was mention of 4 cores. Are cores the new mhz race? 2 cores is all 99% of people will see benefit from right now. The 4 core race is moot because it's like a race for automakers to produce the first production 16 cylinder family sedan. It's not going to really benefit anyone. Really only a marketing gimmick. I'd rather see Intel clean up their current 2 core chips.
Here's what most consumers need in a computer...
A low latency desktop that can handle about 2-3 running applications with no slowdown that runs cool and doesn't use a lot of power.
Here's what we are getting...
A high latency desktop with fat pipes that run hot, optimized for running 7-8 cpu intensive applications at once, and idles at 200 watts. Because it should take 10+ seconds to open a basic program on an out of box pc.
I like your idea of the gmail accounts. Maybe I'll make that suggestion here...
Anyway, a lot of people only understand how to do three things on a computer. Office, simple web browsing, and Email. They don't know how to send files with the first two, but they sure know how to with the third. If you were to implement some sort of ftp server they can exchange large files on (and promote it), that would most likely take care of the biggest files. Also, a lot of people don't even realize how big a file is. They don't know that sending 10 raw pictures is 100 megs easily, they just think (oh, I'm just sending a few pics from over the weekend). If you were to set some reasonable limits on attachment sizes (say 10mb) you'd get some whiners at first, but in the long run it'd go away. The problem isn't so much how many emails people get, it's the damn attachments!
"Red Hat didn't make Linux: IBM made Linux, Intel made Linux, Oracle made Linux," according to Ellison.
"We have many more developers on Linux than Red Hat," he added, pointing out that the Redwood Shores, California-based company Oracle Cluster File System to enable Linux to scale across enterprise clusters
Man, those are some ignorant ass comments. Oracle is a much bigger company than red hat. It's more interesting to see the percentage of their developers focused on open source. I can pretty much guarantee it's red hat. Red hat needs open source to survive. It's the basis of their whole business model.
Second of all, those three companies did NOT make Linux. IBM has been a very good general purpose contributor, and to a lesser extent Intel. However, Oracle is NOT in that bunch. Oracle's contributions are minor compared to the other two and can be mostly traced back to enhancements that directly benefit their commercial products. Not saying their contributions aren't appreciated, but they are by no means the same league as Intel and IBM. And really, he just spouted out a couple of his butt buddies. There are a lot of small companies that make a particular product based on linux (such as backup solutions) that make extremely important contributions. The only surviving iSCSI implementation on Linux came from a small company making a linux based backup solution. Intel in fact contributed iSCSI code that is now largely depreciated. Open source does need a commercial counterpart, however it's not the 500 pound gorillas that make open source unique. It's the small companies that need it to survive. I can't say the same or Oracle.
Everyone, please understand how extremely easy it is to contact your senator to voice your opinion regarding this. http://www.senate.gov/
In the upper right hand corner is a "Senator search". Click the state you live in and your two senators websites will be listed. Most (if not all) of the senators are available via email. Voice your opinion in a calm professional manner.
Too many people sit back and watch democracy happen around them. If every single person who read this story voiced their opinion about it to their senator (whether they agree or disagree), there would be tens of thousands of emails (as oppossed to maybe a couple hundred).
It's just to easy to voice your opinion to your senator these days. You would be throwing away a huge opportunity if you didn't.
Although the article reads like one big advertisment, I've always liked the thinkpads. I bought mine while the line was still under IBM. Does anyone have experience with Levano??
I don't know if they have a turn-key solution for you, but Axis Communications has some of the best cameras I've seen. They are linux based and very easy to write glue code for between systems (very open API's and development models). In general they are high quality cameras I would stake my job against.
I'm glad to see some real progress in the processor world. We are so guided by the enterprise market that we've had to support x86 WAY longer than we should have. The cell looks like it has a real chance of becoming the next big advancement. For one, IBM is working heavily with the open source community. This is possibly one of the best things they could have done to help the cell. By doing this, you make open source developers happy and more inclined to port over their applications. One of the hardest things to do in getting a new arch out is getting application support, and they've pretty much guaranteed a modest amount of applications by going open source. The nokia 770 is a pefect example of this. They've supported open source and made available more than enough tools for quick porting of applications, and look at the huge amount available already in the first few months. The nokia 770 probably sets records in how many applications were ported in such a short period of time.
Make the developers happy, and they will port their apps. With large amounts of available applications, the consumers will buy. When the consumers buy, you have a successful new arch.
you really hit the nail on the head. Most general purpose distributions these days are way to bloated to run on old hardware well. They will run, just not snappy. DSL is a pretty good choice. Simple things like not having 324235 services running in the background and compiling your own kernel will help a lot too (not using initrd and not 2 megabytes in size). Those lesser known distros that so many trolls complain are "useless" and add to consumer confusion actually serve a purpose :-P Come to find out, a one size fits all solution realy isn't best?! You don't say! The latest KDE with all effects enabled probably isn't going to serve you to well. But I've gotten good results on sub 50mhz cpu's with modern versions of stripped down distros. Even with a gui using micro X with uclibc buildroot.
But in general, to use old hardware well, you have to know somewhat what you are doing. My grandma isn't going to get a box at a grage sale and slap linux from scratch on it.
City officials turned down Nees, saying the teen could come in and hand-copy the list. Officials said giving out copies of address lists would leave the newsletter subscribers open to spam and computer viruses.
What it sounds like to me is he wanted an electronic version. They said "no, you can come in and hand copy the list yourself, but that's all you get". Which is completely reasonable. I work in local government and it's well known that almost anything we do is public record (very few exceptions). However! We don't just haphazardly give information away. It costs time and money to make information available, so it's generally asked that citizens put forth some effort to narrow down the information they want and go to some effort to get it. Usually there is some sort of processing fee and you have to know specifically what you want. It seems totally reasonable to say "we'll give you the list, but if you are going to use it for some malicious purpose we're going to make it harder for you to spam than cut-paste".
Do we really need "cell phones" anymore these days? It's hard to believe we are still doing things like this. Here's what we should have in 2006...
Gone is the idea of the "phone". You make phone calls via a softphone on your iPaq or Zaurus type mobile device. You have a handheld computer with a softphone. Instead of the idea of connecting to a cellular phone network, you pay a monthly flat fee and get a 1 megabit EVDO pipe to your phone and home computer. You pay your VoIP provider for minutes and your cellular network provider for internet access.
The ONLY reason we don't do things like that is because cell companies have so much control. They make a crapload of money scamming us and aren't going to give it up anytime soon. Cell phone networks are of the few networks left you actually pay on a per byte basis. There's no technical reason for them to do it. They just know there are few players in that market and can get away with it.
All it would really take is an internet service provider to get the balls and team up with a cable TV and VoIP provider. Provide fiber to the home for TV, phone, and internet. Set up a 3G cell network with EVDO for mobile internet access. Sell iPaq's with a softphone. They could make a KILLING. I'm willing to bet most of middle class America would pay 200-300 dollars a month FLAT FEE to get all their voice, tv, and internet from one provider that they can use anywhere (when in reality, it's just providing internet with other services on top of it).
Sadly though, if someone's going to invest in a cellular network, they probably want to be in the raquet too and aren't going to provide all that.
And it will probably use their own protocol and probably have to connect to the PSTN constantly to have any usefulness. And because they connect to the PSTN they will have to pay pound-me-in-the-ass wholesale rates for calls, completely defeating the purpose of VoIP. I used to work in the VoIP industry and made a striking observation. The calls that get completely routed SIP/SDP/RTP are dirt cheap! This is what a majority of what the small guys do and they make an absolute killing. One guy with a 2,500 dollar VoIP gateway can make thousands a month.
So using your own protocol makes you least accessable in the VoIP arena, and you end up having to connect to the PSTN for the majority of your calls and paying Bellsouth pound-me-in-the-ass rates. IAX has it right and will probably be the future for the small guys.
It's mind boggling that any of these new guys would want to force themselves to connect to the PSTN. Traditional telecoms are a technological dinosaur and we really don't need them anymore. They are still around because they have so much power. If all the VoIP guys just used a standard, they could superceed traditional telecom and eventually force it to adapt.
But they are dumb. The small guys will continue to make a killing working together. The big guys will continue to write their own protocols. And the big telecoms will continue to charge outrageous rates for their 1980's technology.
If they do win and google is forced to give over searches, I think the best action would be a campaign to put so much noise in those searches it would be pointless for them to even try. i.e. searching for things like killing the president and how jews invented tornados.
I work in local government. I am around cops all day. 2 of my friends actually became cops. Over the period of 2 years while training and first year of service, you can definatly see a change in their attitude. They become very detached from reality. I think very few cops these days actually become officers to uphold the law and make the world a better place. Some do it for the rush and excitment. A lot do it for the power. Some do it simply because it's a steady government job that doesn't require anything more than a high school diploma.
A great deal of police think that if you were clocked at 45, you were going 45 and you are just lying. There's this attitude that if you were pulled over or arrested, you are guilty (even before trial). If not, that would mean the police are wrong (oh my, god forbid that!).
What happened to you is actually a common police tactic. Not ticketing you for the primary accused charge, but some made up lesser charge (seat belt, tail light, reduced speeding ticket). Most people won't fight it because they are scared if they get in court the officer might bring up the original charge and have a huge ticket. Guilt or innocence has nothing to do with it. Which is sad, because a lot of people pay for tickets they should fight because they are scared. The police are very aware of this and use it as a common tactic to make a ticket stick.
And that's the sad state of many police departments in the united states. Making the world safe and fair for us by upholding the law is only about 10% of their motivation anymore. Revenue and power through selective accusations seems to really trump that these days.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen the police flick on their lights just to run a red light. Or let off their friends when they pull them over. The clincher? I'm at a crowded restaurant one night (30 minute wait time). Cop walks in with two chicks, looks at the line. Walks right past everyone and finds a recently vacant table. Asks them to clean it and sits right down. And no one said anything because he was a cop. That really sums up their attitude right there.
I think it's important to understand the history of this whole situtation to understand its current state. A few years ago, he came up with the idea for Gentoo. It was innovative at the time because there were few source based distributions out there. The idea of the source based distribution wasn't new, but portage definatly was/is the best source based package manager I've seen out there. He sunk a lot of his own personal money into gentoo that he never got back. When he left to work at MS, it pissed off a lot of purists and a lot of people shunned him. I think his move not to come back to the open source community (right now, anyway) has a lot to do with the fact he poured so much of himself into open source, and once he left to try and not live paycheck to paycheck, people immediatly forgot all of his contributions to gentoo.
It's such a short article, please read it...
There's no mention of the home owner getting pissed off. The problem is, they assumed they were getting 8 million dollars in property taxes they weren't. They planned their budget around this and now many departments are being told to give money back. Some departments are saying to accomidate giving money back, they might have to do some lay-offs.
They think that the mistake was made on a public terminal for public information lookups. A typo of a similarly named program that hadn't been in use for years came up and allowed this un-authorized person to make the change. They don't think it was intentionally malicious.
Forgive me for sounding like a slashbot, but I feel the drug companies are preventing these breakthroughs from seeing the light of day. The money is in the treatment, not in the cure. It has been known for quite awhile that certain people's bodies posses certain evolutionary characteristics that prevent them from getting aids. Basically nothing has come of this. It's scary to think the world will probably see very few cures in our lifetime. Like Chris Rock says, in our lifetime we will talk about our AIDS like its arthritis. "Man, my AIDS is actin up again. It gets like this when it rains."
omg Disney is the freaking worst offender. They will make a movie that does good at the box office, and completely ruin it. I can't believe they are dumb enough to keep doing it. For example, Mulan. It was a pretty good success at the box office. So what does Disney do? Come out with an awful sequel that rides on the mulan name that is probably one of the worst Disney movies ever. They've done this at least a good 20-30 times with their box office hits. I don't even think they try anymore. They probably have a formula that a sequel based on a hit will automatically profit x amount riding on the name alone.
Mkay. I see this type of troll everytime these stories come up. These laptops aren't for starving children with hanta on their death beds. These are for children who live in poor nations, but are otherwise living and doing ok. Countries that education is their next step to becoming a modernized country. Their governments are concerned with getting their own people education right now, not feeding starving children half way around the world. It wasn't long ago they were the starving ones. You act as if the money would go to one or the other. That's not the case. If the money weren't going towards these laptops, it'd probably go right into their education systems.
And money isn't what those starving countries need. It's social order usually. America pays farmers for their food and buries it to control food prices. We have PLENTY of food to give away. Getting it in the hands of starving people is the problem. More often than not they will end up in the hands of warlords or destroyed. Throwing money at the problem isn't going to help those countries. Until dictator X is overthrown their people will continue to starve. And the UN isn't about raiding countries to overthrow dictators.
Hmmm, yes. Because not handing over search information to the feds making their stock take a huge dive really makes me think they cater to shareholders. I think google is smart enough to pick their battles. China isn't one of them (right now anyway).
It's all about consolidation. Getting rid of the lavish products that don't generate much profit and focusing on your strong products. Amazon went through this awhile back. I remember at one point they were selling a broom that cost 3 times as much to ship than the broom itself cost. I imagine there weren't a whole lot of people buying it, but it still sat in inventory taking up space. Every once in awhile you just need to step back and say "do we really need to sell some of these things?".
If their recent refusal to give the gov't information regarding what people searched is any indication, they are already on the way.
k thx slash sarcasm
Seriously though. That bold move made them take a huge stock hit. Giving away those records wouldn't have negatively affected their business, so the only conclusion I can really come to (given their history) is that they did that purely for moral reasons. They are smart guys and knew their stock would take a hit, but did it anyway. Does this sound like an evil company to you?