I was thinking that replacement parts in the auto industry would be analogous to product support for software. Say that software vendors were required to make support available (not for free, just available) for n years, and after that they were free to discontinue support. This would ensure that vendors would continue to support a release for n years without requiring customers to upgrade, and give vendors a fairer playing field on which to compete.
If one vendor is cutting their support costs by only supporting the current version, that keeps their price low. Another vendor, wanting to do the right thing and provide more support for previous versions of a competing product has higher support costs, and thereby their price must be higher.
I hear that Novell was pushing really hard for IPX/SPX to be the protocol for the internet, which was silly and impossible because it's a broadcast protocol. Then they put off implementing TCP/IP for a million years, while the internet (and networks connected to it) were taking off on TCP/IP.
I also hear that Novell put a lot of work into Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for network management databases. DAP grew and grew and was too bulky to be popularly used. Somebody made up Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is now used by Microsoft for Active Directory.
Now I'm hearing that Novell is going toward Linux. Based on past history, that does not bode well for Linux.
On the other hand, how long should a vendor have to provide support for a piece of software? Should Broderbund still have to provide phone support for The Print Shop v2.0 (1994)?
If software companies can't end-of-life products, and have to support them indefinitely, the cost of vendor support becomes insanely high.
In the US auto industry, car manufacturers are required to produce replacement parts for a model for seven years.* Perhaps a regulation of that kind would be good for software/hardware vendors, too.
*Except Yugo, what with the giant war and everything.
To play a proper game of football or baseball, you need upwards of 15 people and an appropriately-sized venue. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't get that many people two spend two hours in the same place unless there's a wedding or a funeral.
Basketball, on the other hand, can be successfully played two-on-two or three-on-three. Much easier to get that many people together. And I don't know where you can find a pickup baseball or football game, either.
But what do I know? I'm fat and lazy and don't like to go outside or be around other people.
This is the first I've heard about a leather iPod case at all. Probably because I don't care about iPods, and so don't get worked up into a lather anytime someone says "iPod" in any venue.
That is definitely a weird looking walk. It's fairly easy to imagine that it's just a couple of tiny people with very skinny legs and tight pants, like some bizarro two-person horse costume.
After watching the video, though, I have some questions:
1. Can it jump? If so, how far? 2. Can it right itself if it does fall over? 3. Can it stand still without constant leg motion? (I know, some people can't do that, so it might be a lot to ask.) 4. How long before someone straps a latex phallus to it and makes pr0n out of it? Or, of this has already occurred, where's the video of that?
But when your mule dies in the bitter cold of the ice planet Hoth, you can slice it open with your lightsaber and shove your semi-conscious friend inside to keep warm while you build a proper shelter.
So far as I know, there's not a product on the market that does what Blackberry does the way that Blackberry does it. Blackberry integrates with corporate mail servers directly, making the device a real extension of your PIM/mail client (like MS Outlook). And it's an always-on receiver.
All the other products I've seen cannot be integrated with corporate mail servers seamlessly. I also haven't seen anything else that has the always-on receiver reliability that Blackberry has.
Of course, it's been about a year since I looked. Do educate me if need be. But if I'm still pretty much right, and I think I am, RIM will do fine because there's no competitors in their arena that do what they do anywhere near as well as they do it.
So on one hand I hear that there's global warming, and that makes the ice sheets melt. Then I hear that when the ice sheets melt, it reduces the salt level in the north Atlantic. And I hear that when that happens, the big heat conveyor stream that comes up the Atlantic kind of peters out, which makes it colder.
Apparently, global warming makes it colder. Make up my mind already.
Actually, it seems that scientists are not in agreement about whether the cooling effects caused by the melting, etc., are greater, equal, or lesser than the warming effects in play now.
Lastly: there was a "little ice age" (History Channel) that ended about 1850 - curiously about the same time as the industrial revolution. I have to wonder how much of the warming we've seen since then is caused by humanity, and how much is just "the Earth is warming up for reasons we don't understand."
All that said, I still think it's better, holistically speaking, not to pump a bunch of pollution into the air, water and soil. I'm not saying that any of that pollution is or is not causing global climate change; I'm just saying.
I have. Their stores pretty much suck. The only reason they still exist is momentum and because WalMart beat down all the competition. I think their own in-house internet presence may just be the end of them.
The intention of the original tax credit program was to encourage industry to create synthetic oil and synthetic natural gas by processing coal. Industry found the loophole allowing them to "chemically alter" the coal in a way that gets them the tax break without having to do any work towards making real synthetic fuels. Damn those lefties for thinking that industry might actually do the right thing!
Fast forward. Today, the Council for Energy Independence, with the synfuel industry, is lobbying to extend the tax credits beyond the $50/bbl cutoff by calculating based on oil prices from two years ago.
Truly, IRC is the citizens' band radio of the internet age. I only wonder why text messaging hasn't made IRC completely obsolete the way cell phones killed CB radio.
Speaking of text messaging - if you can text message someone on their cell phone, why don't you just call them?
Would it benefit the average user with one or two machines?
Taking computers out of the equation, what if I had AC run to my house, where there was an AC>DC converter for the whole house, then all the electrical things inside were DC? I'm talking refrigerator, washer and dryer, clock radio, TV, everything. Would there be a point to this, apart from encouraging people to buy all new electrical stuff?
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.
The bill is meant to ease growing fears that open Internet access may be blocked or compromised by the Bell phone carriers and cable operators, which may create tiers of service for delivering content to consumers, much the way the post office charges more for overnight mail delivery than for regular delivery.
Consumer groups and Internet companies like Google and Amazon contend that any move by the network operators to levy fees for premium delivery service would harm Web sites that are unwilling to pay for faster delivery.
The Wyden legislation, called the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, aims to prohibit network operators from assessing charges that give some content providers better access than others or blocking its subscribers from accessing content.
"You best compete by letting every company play on a level field, but these proposals would tilt the field," Senator Wyden said of the plans discussed by some network operators. "The Net has been about access and equal treatment and giving everyone a fair shake, and people who own these fat pipes, these cable and telecommunications people who say that they can't keep doing this, want to undermine that."
He added that his bill would prevent network operators from giving preferential treatment to affiliated companies. Time Warner Cable, he said, should not be able to give other Time Warner companies better access to the network than their rivals.
The bill more squarely confronts the concerns of consumer groups than a broader bill proposed last summer by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, which would prevent Internet service providers from blocking access, but would largely leave network operators to manage their own networks, including potentially charging content providers for a premium service.
That bill has won support from 16 Republican senators.
The Federal Communications Commission has largely stood on the sidelines as this debate as evolved. Though the commission has said it supports the principle of open, undifferentiated access to the networks, it has not taken any regulatory action.
"One reason I'm hesitant to have the commission jump in is because we don't want to impede companies' ability to invest," said Kevin Martin, the commission chairman.
Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content. They argue that since traffic over their networks is rising, companies may want to pay to ensure that their Web sites can be accessed quickly by consumers.
Executives at Verizon, for instance, want to give companies a chance to buy a dedicated link to Verizon's customers so that their data would be set apart from general traffic on the network.
But consumer groups say that creating a "fast lane" for those who can pay would ultimately result in a series of "walled" networks run by the phone and cable companies, which is very different from the open Internet model that exists now.
"We're concerned that even if you have a robust basic Internet and higher-speed lane, they will only make it available to their favorite partners, and that's discrimination," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that focuses on telecommunications and intellectual property issues.
I believe their lines end just across the road from us ~500 feet away...
That does suck, but I know that "across the road" can mean a huge expense for the carrier, if they want to extend the line across - or rather under - said road. Could be that a small number of customers on the other side of the road doesn't make it financially feasible to trench a new line under a road. Could be that they're having trouble working with the municipality to get rights to do any trenching or digging. And cable companies are still monopolies where they are, so it might be that Comcast just can't go on the turf of the crappy little cable company you're stuck with.
When they started offering digital phone, I signed up for it. So I get digital cable, digital phone and internet. The phone service is just what you would expect phone service to be like, no complaints about anything.
When we got ready to move again recently, our homebuilder told us that Comcast is always eager to get service set up for new developments - they come out requesting before the builder gets a chance to ask. SBC/AT&T and Nicor (gas), not so much. And when I called Comcast, expecting to cancel service and restart in six weeks (while we live at the inlaws'), they told me they'd simply transfer service instead to the new address.
When I moved into a new house six years ago, we had AT&T cable. We got a flyer on the door about broadband internet. I called them up. "Sorry, it's not available in your area yet." I asked when it would be available. "Twelve to twenty-four months."
Twelve months later, I called back. "Not available in your area." When? "Twelve to twenty-four months." But that's what you said last time. "Sorry, my hands are superglued to the laminated 'lame answer' card."
Another twelve months, another call, same lame answer.
Then Comcast took over, all over Chicagoland. They started upgrading infrastructure immediately to support internet. They improved cable TV service. They started offering video on demand, with many shows for free (I don't know how I could get through a day without free kids' shows whenever I want). They started offering digital phone service. Now I find out they're going to offer VoIP.
I have been a satisfied Comcast subscriber since they took over from AT&T. I know cable companies get a bad rap, and I know many deserve it. But Comcast's past history, at least around Chicago, has been great.
There is booming technology in India, but it has been suggested there is little thought for security, which creates a market to exploit that.
I wonder if the "little thought for security" also applies to the call centers there, who have access to at least some customer information, certainly including email addresses, and likely including home addresses.
Note that I am not bashing the quality of phone support sourced from the subcontinent. I have had good and bad support experiences with people from all over the place. But they better not be settin' up no call center in Dubai, or I'm gonna make a big stink about it.
AltaVista used to be *the* search engine a long time ago.
This is true, but the only people who knew about it at the time were the early adopters of the internet. AltaVista was not getting the media coverage then that Google (and others) get now. Today, I'm sure that people who don't even have computers know about Google. That was not the case for AltaVista in its day.
In any event, there's still legitimate work to be done, which is only mocked by implemeting what I shall now call "Whack-A-Spam" or "Spam Spam Revolution."
So all you'd need to do to royally screw an airline flight would be to modify a cell phone to pump out signal at a much higher power, then? Considering that, how long before electronic devices are banned from carry-on?
Either they will drop this e-mail tax crap or they will lose those idiots who are still subscribed to their "internet" service
You're probably wrong there. As a service becomes "regular," especially when it's charged to a credit card automatically, as many internet services are, most people are just going to let it go.
Here's an example. I like to think I'm not an idiot, but it took six years for me to figure out that my homeowners insurance had been ratcheting up until it was costing twice as much as it should have. Why? Bill comes, write the check, move on. I was too busy to notice what was going on, let alone look into it. It took our getting ready to sell the house for me to take a serious look.
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I was thinking that replacement parts in the auto industry would be analogous to product support for software. Say that software vendors were required to make support available (not for free, just available) for n years, and after that they were free to discontinue support. This would ensure that vendors would continue to support a release for n years without requiring customers to upgrade, and give vendors a fairer playing field on which to compete.
If one vendor is cutting their support costs by only supporting the current version, that keeps their price low. Another vendor, wanting to do the right thing and provide more support for previous versions of a competing product has higher support costs, and thereby their price must be higher.
I hear that Novell was pushing really hard for IPX/SPX to be the protocol for the internet, which was silly and impossible because it's a broadcast protocol. Then they put off implementing TCP/IP for a million years, while the internet (and networks connected to it) were taking off on TCP/IP.
I also hear that Novell put a lot of work into Directory Access Protocol (DAP) for network management databases. DAP grew and grew and was too bulky to be popularly used. Somebody made up Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which is now used by Microsoft for Active Directory.
Now I'm hearing that Novell is going toward Linux. Based on past history, that does not bode well for Linux.
On the other hand, how long should a vendor have to provide support for a piece of software? Should Broderbund still have to provide phone support for The Print Shop v2.0 (1994)?
If software companies can't end-of-life products, and have to support them indefinitely, the cost of vendor support becomes insanely high.
In the US auto industry, car manufacturers are required to produce replacement parts for a model for seven years.* Perhaps a regulation of that kind would be good for software/hardware vendors, too.
*Except Yugo, what with the giant war and everything.
Ehm, baseballs and footballs are hard to find?
To play a proper game of football or baseball, you need upwards of 15 people and an appropriately-sized venue. I don't know about anyone else, but I can't get that many people two spend two hours in the same place unless there's a wedding or a funeral.
Basketball, on the other hand, can be successfully played two-on-two or three-on-three. Much easier to get that many people together. And I don't know where you can find a pickup baseball or football game, either.
But what do I know? I'm fat and lazy and don't like to go outside or be around other people.
A brief Googling seems to indicate that they're using Secure Computing SmartFilter as the content filtering service.
The Secure Computing site lists "A United States Defense Agency" as one of its clients. Said agency also uses the Sidewinder product as a firewall.
Of course, this is all conjecture.
This is the first I've heard about a leather iPod case at all. Probably because I don't care about iPods, and so don't get worked up into a lather anytime someone says "iPod" in any venue.
That is definitely a weird looking walk. It's fairly easy to imagine that it's just a couple of tiny people with very skinny legs and tight pants, like some bizarro two-person horse costume.
After watching the video, though, I have some questions:
1. Can it jump? If so, how far?
2. Can it right itself if it does fall over?
3. Can it stand still without constant leg motion? (I know, some people can't do that, so it might be a lot to ask.)
4. How long before someone straps a latex phallus to it and makes pr0n out of it? Or, of this has already occurred, where's the video of that?
But when your mule dies in the bitter cold of the ice planet Hoth, you can slice it open with your lightsaber and shove your semi-conscious friend inside to keep warm while you build a proper shelter.
So far as I know, there's not a product on the market that does what Blackberry does the way that Blackberry does it. Blackberry integrates with corporate mail servers directly, making the device a real extension of your PIM/mail client (like MS Outlook). And it's an always-on receiver.
All the other products I've seen cannot be integrated with corporate mail servers seamlessly. I also haven't seen anything else that has the always-on receiver reliability that Blackberry has.
Of course, it's been about a year since I looked. Do educate me if need be. But if I'm still pretty much right, and I think I am, RIM will do fine because there's no competitors in their arena that do what they do anywhere near as well as they do it.
So on one hand I hear that there's global warming, and that makes the ice sheets melt. Then I hear that when the ice sheets melt, it reduces the salt level in the north Atlantic. And I hear that when that happens, the big heat conveyor stream that comes up the Atlantic kind of peters out, which makes it colder.
Apparently, global warming makes it colder. Make up my mind already.
Actually, it seems that scientists are not in agreement about whether the cooling effects caused by the melting, etc., are greater, equal, or lesser than the warming effects in play now.
Lastly: there was a "little ice age" (History Channel) that ended about 1850 - curiously about the same time as the industrial revolution. I have to wonder how much of the warming we've seen since then is caused by humanity, and how much is just "the Earth is warming up for reasons we don't understand."
All that said, I still think it's better, holistically speaking, not to pump a bunch of pollution into the air, water and soil. I'm not saying that any of that pollution is or is not causing global climate change; I'm just saying.
You can wipe those "stem cells" out of your hands with a towel and get back to work.
Here's another article from Jan 2004.
http://www.thehill.com/business/012104_fuel.aspx
I have. Their stores pretty much suck. The only reason they still exist is momentum and because WalMart beat down all the competition. I think their own in-house internet presence may just be the end of them.
The intention of the original tax credit program was to encourage industry to create synthetic oil and synthetic natural gas by processing coal. Industry found the loophole allowing them to "chemically alter" the coal in a way that gets them the tax break without having to do any work towards making real synthetic fuels. Damn those lefties for thinking that industry might actually do the right thing!
Fast forward. Today, the Council for Energy Independence, with the synfuel industry, is lobbying to extend the tax credits beyond the $50/bbl cutoff by calculating based on oil prices from two years ago.
http://www.thehill.com/business/012104_fuel.aspx
I am here to tell you that the people doing the lobbying today are Republicans.
Truly, IRC is the citizens' band radio of the internet age. I only wonder why text messaging hasn't made IRC completely obsolete the way cell phones killed CB radio.
Speaking of text messaging - if you can text message someone on their cell phone, why don't you just call them?
Would it benefit the average user with one or two machines?
Taking computers out of the equation, what if I had AC run to my house, where there was an AC>DC converter for the whole house, then all the electrical things inside were DC? I'm talking refrigerator, washer and dryer, clock radio, TV, everything. Would there be a point to this, apart from encouraging people to buy all new electrical stuff?
Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, will introduce new legislation today that would prohibit Internet network operators from charging companies for faster delivery of their content to consumers or favoring some content providers over others.
The bill is meant to ease growing fears that open Internet access may be blocked or compromised by the Bell phone carriers and cable operators, which may create tiers of service for delivering content to consumers, much the way the post office charges more for overnight mail delivery than for regular delivery.
Consumer groups and Internet companies like Google and Amazon contend that any move by the network operators to levy fees for premium delivery service would harm Web sites that are unwilling to pay for faster delivery.
The Wyden legislation, called the Internet Non-Discrimination Act of 2006, aims to prohibit network operators from assessing charges that give some content providers better access than others or blocking its subscribers from accessing content.
"You best compete by letting every company play on a level field, but these proposals would tilt the field," Senator Wyden said of the plans discussed by some network operators. "The Net has been about access and equal treatment and giving everyone a fair shake, and people who own these fat pipes, these cable and telecommunications people who say that they can't keep doing this, want to undermine that."
He added that his bill would prevent network operators from giving preferential treatment to affiliated companies. Time Warner Cable, he said, should not be able to give other Time Warner companies better access to the network than their rivals.
The bill more squarely confronts the concerns of consumer groups than a broader bill proposed last summer by Senator John Ensign, Republican of Nevada, which would prevent Internet service providers from blocking access, but would largely leave network operators to manage their own networks, including potentially charging content providers for a premium service.
That bill has won support from 16 Republican senators.
The Federal Communications Commission has largely stood on the sidelines as this debate as evolved. Though the commission has said it supports the principle of open, undifferentiated access to the networks, it has not taken any regulatory action.
"One reason I'm hesitant to have the commission jump in is because we don't want to impede companies' ability to invest," said Kevin Martin, the commission chairman.
Phone and cable companies largely agree that they should have the right to offer Internet companies the option of paying for faster delivery of their content. They argue that since traffic over their networks is rising, companies may want to pay to ensure that their Web sites can be accessed quickly by consumers.
Executives at Verizon, for instance, want to give companies a chance to buy a dedicated link to Verizon's customers so that their data would be set apart from general traffic on the network.
But consumer groups say that creating a "fast lane" for those who can pay would ultimately result in a series of "walled" networks run by the phone and cable companies, which is very different from the open Internet model that exists now.
"We're concerned that even if you have a robust basic Internet and higher-speed lane, they will only make it available to their favorite partners, and that's discrimination," said Gigi Sohn, the president of Public Knowledge, an advocacy group that focuses on telecommunications and intellectual property issues.
I believe their lines end just across the road from us ~500 feet away ...
That does suck, but I know that "across the road" can mean a huge expense for the carrier, if they want to extend the line across - or rather under - said road. Could be that a small number of customers on the other side of the road doesn't make it financially feasible to trench a new line under a road. Could be that they're having trouble working with the municipality to get rights to do any trenching or digging. And cable companies are still monopolies where they are, so it might be that Comcast just can't go on the turf of the crappy little cable company you're stuck with.
Just a little more of the Comcast love-fest --
When they started offering digital phone, I signed up for it. So I get digital cable, digital phone and internet. The phone service is just what you would expect phone service to be like, no complaints about anything.
When we got ready to move again recently, our homebuilder told us that Comcast is always eager to get service set up for new developments - they come out requesting before the builder gets a chance to ask. SBC/AT&T and Nicor (gas), not so much. And when I called Comcast, expecting to cancel service and restart in six weeks (while we live at the inlaws'), they told me they'd simply transfer service instead to the new address.
When I moved into a new house six years ago, we had AT&T cable. We got a flyer on the door about broadband internet. I called them up. "Sorry, it's not available in your area yet." I asked when it would be available. "Twelve to twenty-four months."
Twelve months later, I called back. "Not available in your area." When? "Twelve to twenty-four months." But that's what you said last time. "Sorry, my hands are superglued to the laminated 'lame answer' card."
Another twelve months, another call, same lame answer.
Then Comcast took over, all over Chicagoland. They started upgrading infrastructure immediately to support internet. They improved cable TV service. They started offering video on demand, with many shows for free (I don't know how I could get through a day without free kids' shows whenever I want). They started offering digital phone service. Now I find out they're going to offer VoIP.
I have been a satisfied Comcast subscriber since they took over from AT&T. I know cable companies get a bad rap, and I know many deserve it. But Comcast's past history, at least around Chicago, has been great.
Just so you know.
There is booming technology in India, but it has been suggested there is little thought for security, which creates a market to exploit that.
I wonder if the "little thought for security" also applies to the call centers there, who have access to at least some customer information, certainly including email addresses, and likely including home addresses.
Note that I am not bashing the quality of phone support sourced from the subcontinent. I have had good and bad support experiences with people from all over the place. But they better not be settin' up no call center in Dubai, or I'm gonna make a big stink about it.
AltaVista used to be *the* search engine a long time ago.
This is true, but the only people who knew about it at the time were the early adopters of the internet. AltaVista was not getting the media coverage then that Google (and others) get now. Today, I'm sure that people who don't even have computers know about Google. That was not the case for AltaVista in its day.
Fair enough, and I didn't know any of that.
In any event, there's still legitimate work to be done, which is only mocked by implemeting what I shall now call "Whack-A-Spam" or "Spam Spam Revolution."
So all you'd need to do to royally screw an airline flight would be to modify a cell phone to pump out signal at a much higher power, then? Considering that, how long before electronic devices are banned from carry-on?
Either they will drop this e-mail tax crap or they will lose those idiots who are still subscribed to their "internet" service
You're probably wrong there. As a service becomes "regular," especially when it's charged to a credit card automatically, as many internet services are, most people are just going to let it go.
Here's an example. I like to think I'm not an idiot, but it took six years for me to figure out that my homeowners insurance had been ratcheting up until it was costing twice as much as it should have. Why? Bill comes, write the check, move on. I was too busy to notice what was going on, let alone look into it. It took our getting ready to sell the house for me to take a serious look.