Before everyone flies off the handle here, remember that this is happening in Singapore, who has much more draconian law enforcement than the US or Europe.
I'm not saying this to dump on Singapore, but rather, to hopefully mitigate even a tiny bit of the OMG BUSH PWNS CIVIL LIBERTIES knee-jerk reactions that are sure to follow.
SD: Because the purpose of this study is trying to describe objectively hackers' everyday life, providing the people that have a poor knowledge of the hacking scene and the digital underground with a clear vision, uninfluenced by mass media or personal prejudices, putting an end to all the stereotypes surrounding this world. "
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *wipes tears from eyes*
"58% of iPod owners are at least somewhat likely to choose a Zune over another brand."
Wrong. 58% of iPod owners who are looking to buy a new mp3 player in the next year are at least somewhat likely to choose a Zune over another brand. If you don't understand why that distinction is important maybe you should pick up some statistics when you get to high school.
"The study removes *all* people who don't plan to buy an mp3 player in the next year, not just iPod owners. That affects both the iPod owners group and the "other" group the same way."
The problem is that there's no evidence in the study to show that the sample size is large enough to draw sound conclusions from. How many of their 1725 subjects said they weren't looking to buy and were just thrown out? We don't know.
Look, if you survey 1000 ipod owners, and determine that 10% are planning to purchase another mp3 player in a year, and then figure out that within that 10%, half of them would consider a zune, then you can say something like 5% of ipod users are considering jumping ship.
If you survey 1000 random people, and then throw away an unknown number of those people because they're not looking to buy a mp3 player, and then run all of your numbers on this tiny subset, you're not going to get good numbers, period.
I don't really see why you felt the need to flame me over my post. It would certainly be easier to respond to you if I didn't have to sift through all of the verbal abuse, but I'll try anyways.
People who are planning to buy a new mp3 player in the next year are not a representative sample of mac users or even the market in general. The expected lifetime of an ipod is a lot longer than a year, so you're removing a lot of customers who exhibit brand loyalty just because they don't see a need to replace their ipod over the next 12 months. The typical consumer does not have a functional 300-500$ mp3 player AND the desire to replace it within the next year.
Consider this hypothetical situation. Out of the 1725 users:
1000 do not own a mp3 player, nor do they have any plans to ever own one. 700 are ipod owners who are not buying new mp3 players BECAUSE THEY LOVE THEIR IPODS AND ARE LOYAL TO APPLE. 5 own other mp3 players and are happy with them. 8 are in the market for a mp3 player and are probably going to buy an ipod. 12 are in the market for a mp3 player and are probably going to buy a zune.
From this the study would conclude that 60% of users are "disloyal" to the ipod brand, which is clearly not representative.
Bottom line, if you're going to talk brand loyalty with respect to ipods, you need to consider not only the people who say "My ipod is so good I'm going to buy another" but ALSO the people who say "My ipod is so good that I don't need another mp3 player until this one breaks 4 years down the road." The study is conducted on a subset of their sample based on rules that do not produce a group of people that is representative of anything, and they don't even give us the numbers involved.
As I said before, the methodology is shoddy.
Here's a TOTALLY WILD IDEA for a study. Why don't you survey people who own mp3 players and ask them if they'd buy another mp3 player from the same manufacturer?
"A survey indicates that iPod owners may not be as loyal to their devices as Mac owners are to their computers, thus opening the possibility for Microsoft's Zune to enter the market. Surveyed people also indicated a high likelyness of buying the much maligned brown device. But that doesn't mean that the market is now at Microsoft's mercy."
There is absolutely no information in the article about mac owner's loyalty to their computers. It essentially shows that:
* among people who are looking to buy new mp3 players 58% own ipods. * among people who own mp3 players that are not ipods, 59% are "somewhat likely" to buy a zune.
A new survey conducted by ABI Research has shown that many prospective MP3 player buyers--even owners of iPods--would be likely to choose Microsoft's Zune player. 1725 teenage and adult US residents were asked whether they planned to buy an MP3 player in the next 12 months. Of those responding that they were likely to do so, 58% of those identifying themselves as existing iPod owners and 59% of those who owned other brands said they would be "somewhat likely" or "extremely likely" to choose a Microsoft Zune player over an iPod or another brand of MP3 player.
"Our conclusion," says principal analyst Steve Wilson, "is that iPod users don't display the same passionate loyalty to iPods that Macintosh users have historically shown for their Apple products." Only 15% of iPod owners said they were "not very likely" or "not at all likely" to choose Zune.
I believe this article is deliberately misleading. The methodology they used HORRIBLY flawed. Let's take it apart piece by piece, shall we?
They interviewed 1725 teenagers and adults.
Of that group of people, they threw out all of them who said they were not likely to buy an MP3 player in the next 12 months. If I were a loyal, satisfied ipod owner, I would be completely discounted from this survey. Furthermore, they give no indication of how many people actually made it to this point. It's entirely possible that out of the initial 1725, only 200 were looking to buy a new mp3 player. Out of the remaining 1525, 1000 could have no interest in MP3 players at all, and the remaining 500 could be raving lunatic apple fanatics, for all we know.
Now, for the next step, they say 58% of the users they surveyed WHO ARE GOING TO BUY A NEW MP3 PLAYER IN THE NEXT YEAR currently own ipods. You see how sneaky this is? In the first step, they eliminated people who are happy with their current mp3 players, so this step generates this rather meaningless statistic.
The next step is even more of a non-sequitur. They state that 59% of the people who own other brand mp3 players say they are at least "somewhat likely" to buy a zune.
So what's the REAL conclusion here? Let's rephrase the results of their study more accurately:
1) 58% of the people in the market for a new mp3 player own an ipod. This statistic is useless as a measure of brand loyalty because we get no information about how many people who own ipods are satisfied. 58% of ipod owners are looking for a new mp3 player would be an interesting statistic. 58% of people looking for new mp3 players are ipod owners isn't because of the issues of sample size and the lack of any data about satisfied customers.
2) 59% of the people in the market for a new mp3 player who bought something other than an ipod are at least "somewhat likely" to buy a zune. To simplify, if you bought an mp3 player and didn't pick the ipod last time and are buying a new one you're looking at offerings that aren't the ipod (i.e. the zune). No shit?
Anyways, I'm not at all impressed by this survey, the methodology seems weak and I don't think there's really any useful information here.
Your response implies the rather absurd viewpoint that no president has ever dealt with a crisis effectively, therefore it's unfair to criticize GWB for his lack of effectiveness versus iraq, afghanistan, 9/11, the insurgency (and, hell, katrina).
If you really believe that you are either ignorant of US history or very close-minded.
If you really just didn't know any better, I suggest you start with a good biography of Roosevelt. He effectively dealt with the great depression and world war 2. The problems in Bush's presidency are kiddie stuff compared to either one of those.
Nah, dude, I wasn't trolling. Besides, you quoted me out of context....the sentence following the one you quoted qualified the statement pretty heavily:
Just to be clear that means Firefox on Linux seems to render huge amounts of text slower than IE wine'd on linux and Opera native on linux...just my experience
I'm running a bottom-of-the-barrel geforce 5 with the accelerated nvidia drivers. It's not killing me, and I'm glad it works great for you, but I still think there's room for improvement in the performance department, and I don't think there's anything unreasonable about that opinion. Besides, the main point was that I didn't think there was enough exciting stuff to merit a 2.0 release, and this is really getting on a tangent...
Honestly, I've been using Firefox 2.0 since RC1, and I don't find anything really compelling about it over Firefox 1.5. I mean...I use FF about 80% of the time at home, and use it almost exclusively at work, but there just wasn't anything that made me go "wow" about it.
Also, it seems to me that Firefox has developed a rather hefty memory / CPU footprint, and its text rendering performance is noticably slower than Opera and IE, especially on Linux. (Just to be clear that means Firefox on Linux seems to render huge amounts of text slower than IE wine'd on linux and Opera native on linux...just my experience).
Anyways, it's a solid release, and still my primary browser....good for the Firefox team...but I can't help but think it would have served FF better to release something more compelling in their 2.0 release.
Facts are merely statements that can be proven or disproven conclusively. Of course, one can numerically compare deaths under Saddam's occupation versus death under America's occupation.
Of course, without any kind of evidence, we can't really decide whether the stories were really pulled, but you can't say something isn't a fact just because it turns out to be false (or, worse, because it flies in the face of what you choose to believe (which sounds like the case here)).
"The press has been after Bush since 2000, especially compared against Clinton."
Maybe because he's had at least for major crises (9/11,afghanistan invasion, iraq invasion, iraqi insurgency) during his presidency and largely failed to deal with every one of them with any kind of effectiveness?
Right on, dude. I played the game for almost a year, and I seem to be one of the few people around here with no regrets whatsoever. Sure, I spent a lot of time in the game, but the insights I got into the way people handle things like power, money, and so forth are things that I'll keep with me for the rest of my life. Even better, I learned a lot about how I deal with those same things myself...there's no substitute for being able to play such an engrossing game, flip the switch off, and analyze your own behavior objectively. That shit comes in handy every single day at my job...projects are raids, salaries are loot...people are people, and there's no better place to learn about them than an anonymous fantasy realm, when all of the pretensions are gone.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't have the willpower to say "hey, it's time to turn the game off and go out with my friends", then you should steer clear. Also, if you're the kind of person who has any kind traces of obsessive-compulsive behavior, there's a damn good chance you'll get sucked in. As for myself, every day after I finished playing I just said to myself "Self, you didn't get an epic today. Did you still have fun playing?". For a year, the answer was yes 80% of the time. When the answer turned to "No" consistently, I canceled my account. Even when I was playing a lot, I still always was willing to turn the game off and go play with my friends...but I digress.
I feel for the people like the poster, but really, if you don't have self-control, you're going to get burned at SOMETHING. The one guy I know who really got his life devoured now compulsively works out like six days a week. Sure that's more healthy than sitting in front of a keyboard, but it's really just the same behavior channeled into a healthier pursuit. The point of the matter is that WOW is just a microcosm of the real world and everyone takes their own bullshit there. My friend can get kind of compulsive about stuff. The OP sounds like he was looking for an escape. Lots of people are are in unsatisfying relationships, or starved for feelings of success.
I guess my point is that I'm a bit disgusted that even within the "gamer" community we do what we accuse a lot of politicians of doing...we oversimplify issues until we have someone to blame. The middle east is a clusterfuck because of "terrorists," the internet is insecure because of "hackers," and I'm a lard-ass because of video games. If people can learn to look at problems and say "How much of this problem is the fault of me or people acting just as I would?" then people learn and grow. If people say "Whose fault is this?" then you stay asleep at the wheel, and it's just a matter of time until you bounce from WOW to coke or working out or an unsatisfying career.
As I remember, Yellow Dog Linux was one of the better linux distros for macs back when they were still on the PowerPC platform. Now that the PowerPC platform is pretty much defunct, I can't help but think that them moving to a:
- Unreleased gaming console - which has been much-maligned for its excessively high price - and huge production delays - on a new processor architecture - using a WM that's not even out of CVS
seems like biting off more than they can chew, and smacks a bit of desperation.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible, and once I get a PS3 (once the prices get down to sane levels) I think it'll be a neat product to play with...but I'm just glad I don't own any stock in terrasoft:)
Your analogy is inaccurate. The article is about ensuring QOS, something which is done on pretty much every competently-run network in existence, and well-accepted as reasonable on any networks where it isn't. QOS is not a violation of network neutrality.
Here's an example. Let's say the coffee shop sat down and figured out that college kids account for 80% of their bandwith usage but only 20% of their revenue, whereas working-age people accounted for 15% of their bandwith and 60% of their revenue. They then decide to have their network deliver the New York Times and WSJ sites at full speed, and everything else at 5k.
Of course, even if this were the case, it wouldn't be that odious because users could just go to another coffee shop. Really, no matter how you slice it, it's very hard to make this situation look anything like the network neutrality debate.
In short, there's nothing contradictory about holding the two following opinions:
1) Network providers should take reasonable steps to avoid abuse, such as capping max download speeds. 2) Network providers should not be able to jack their rates up because you're making a lot of money with it, or throttle your connection down to nothing because you're accessing information they don't like.
The bottom line is that the free flow of information is a Greater Good which should not be "for sale."
I am a professional programmer at a small company, and all of our desktop machines and development servers run Gentoo. Although I would never use Gentoo on our production servers (they're managed RHEL boxes), Gentoo is the best choice for what we do around here. Pretty much every employee here can recompile his own kernel, write out a fstab by hand, and understand compilation errors.
I think it's a real problem that Gentoo gets compared to regular linux distro's....I prefer to call it a "meta-distro". It's a series of tools for creating a LFS system without having to deal with doing package management manually. If you're not comfortable working on that level, use a premade distro.
I keep seeing all of these dumb arguments like "With gentoo you can optimize your packages for your architecture and get speed gains!" or "With gentoo you won't have to worry about dependency hell ever again!". Of course, those two statements are partially true, but it frames the entire argument wrong by presenting Gentoo as if it were another distro, only different.
In other words, Gentoo is not the hardest way to install a linux distro, it's just the easiest way to make your own LFS system. I'd never want to discourage someone from trying it out, but non-gentoo users should regard us saying it's "easy" and a "time-saver" much the same way you'd regard a commercial airline pilot talking about flying a little cessna.
I don't mean to sound all holier-than-thou, but if you aren't either an expert linux user or willing to become one, you are not among Gentoo's target users.
First of all, as much as I hate pedants who always correct "linux" to "gnu/linux", their thinking is valid here. Let's remember that linux is a kernel and a philosophy, not a whole operating system, and as far as kernels go, it's among the best out there.
People who don't understand what linux is or what is about always go for this angle "ZOMG SUPPORT IPODS OR MICROSOFT WILL WIN", and it's a bit sad to see them get coverage. Linux is just the expression and manifestation of the belief that making things that are free and open and elegant is rewarding in and of itself, but furthermore, incidentally the way to make the best products.
Let microsoft spend its energy worrying about competition and survival. The author's and microsoft's concerns aren't sensical in a open-source mindset.
I browsed through an old story, found the first post, and cloned it.
Re:Gotta speak my mind...
on
iPods at War
·
· Score: 1
Although I'm a fairly liberal, anti-war twentysomething, I mostly agree with your post. Even though I don't support the war, I feel that if someone's putting their life on the line for their country, they ought to be cut a little slack when it comes to things like music piracy, age restrictions, hell even black markets and so forth so long as they keep it on the proverbial DL.
However, your statement "if you are not putting your life on the line don't criticize others that do" makes me very nervous. There's a line between laws that are there to keep society orderly (i.e. drinking age, IP laws, etc) and laws that define what we stand for (prohibitions of killing defenseless people, torture, etc).
I make my living writing software, but I'd never condone cracking down on game piracy among the troops. Regardless of whether or not I support the war, I know a lot of guys aren't there because they want to be, and even if they're rabidly pro-war, I think they deserve some leeway due to the extraordinary danger they face. On the other hand, when they start breaking the laws that (at least in theory...) differentiate us from what we are fighting against, well then...that's when it becomes the DUTY of those who "aren't putting their life on the line" to criticize.
Slashdot Mirror
Before everyone flies off the handle here, remember that this is happening in Singapore, who has much more draconian law enforcement than the US or Europe.
I'm not saying this to dump on Singapore, but rather, to hopefully mitigate even a tiny bit of the OMG BUSH PWNS CIVIL LIBERTIES knee-jerk reactions that are sure to follow.
You know what else was "reliably predicted for weeks"^H^H^H^H^H^Hmonths"? The debacle in Iraq.
" NF: Why should hackers collaborate with you?
SD: Because the purpose of this study is trying to describe objectively hackers' everyday life, providing the people that have a poor knowledge of the hacking scene and the digital underground with a clear vision, uninfluenced by mass media or personal prejudices, putting an end to all the stereotypes surrounding this world. "
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! *wipes tears from eyes*
"58% of iPod owners are at least somewhat likely to choose a Zune over another brand."
Wrong. 58% of iPod owners who are looking to buy a new mp3 player in the next year are at least somewhat likely to choose a Zune over another brand. If you don't understand why that distinction is important maybe you should pick up some statistics when you get to high school.
"The study removes *all* people who don't plan to buy an mp3 player in the next year, not just iPod owners. That affects both the iPod owners group and the "other" group the same way."
The problem is that there's no evidence in the study to show that the sample size is large enough to draw sound conclusions from. How many of their 1725 subjects said they weren't looking to buy and were just thrown out? We don't know.
Look, if you survey 1000 ipod owners, and determine that 10% are planning to purchase another mp3 player in a year, and then figure out that within that 10%, half of them would consider a zune, then you can say something like 5% of ipod users are considering jumping ship.
If you survey 1000 random people, and then throw away an unknown number of those people because they're not looking to buy a mp3 player, and then run all of your numbers on this tiny subset, you're not going to get good numbers, period.
I don't really see why you felt the need to flame me over my post. It would certainly be easier to respond to you if I didn't have to sift through all of the verbal abuse, but I'll try anyways.
People who are planning to buy a new mp3 player in the next year are not a representative sample of mac users or even the market in general. The expected lifetime of an ipod is a lot longer than a year, so you're removing a lot of customers who exhibit brand loyalty just because they don't see a need to replace their ipod over the next 12 months. The typical consumer does not have a functional 300-500$ mp3 player AND the desire to replace it within the next year.
Consider this hypothetical situation. Out of the 1725 users:
1000 do not own a mp3 player, nor do they have any plans to ever own one.
700 are ipod owners who are not buying new mp3 players BECAUSE THEY LOVE THEIR IPODS AND ARE LOYAL TO APPLE.
5 own other mp3 players and are happy with them.
8 are in the market for a mp3 player and are probably going to buy an ipod.
12 are in the market for a mp3 player and are probably going to buy a zune.
From this the study would conclude that 60% of users are "disloyal" to the ipod brand, which is clearly not representative.
Bottom line, if you're going to talk brand loyalty with respect to ipods, you need to consider not only the people who say "My ipod is so good I'm going to buy another" but ALSO the people who say "My ipod is so good that I don't need another mp3 player until this one breaks 4 years down the road." The study is conducted on a subset of their sample based on rules that do not produce a group of people that is representative of anything, and they don't even give us the numbers involved.
As I said before, the methodology is shoddy.
Here's a TOTALLY WILD IDEA for a study. Why don't you survey people who own mp3 players and ask them if they'd buy another mp3 player from the same manufacturer?
"A survey indicates that iPod owners may not be as loyal to their devices as Mac owners are to their computers, thus opening the possibility for Microsoft's Zune to enter the market. Surveyed people also indicated a high likelyness of buying the much maligned brown device. But that doesn't mean that the market is now at Microsoft's mercy."
There is absolutely no information in the article about mac owner's loyalty to their computers. It essentially shows that:
* among people who are looking to buy new mp3 players 58% own ipods.
* among people who own mp3 players that are not ipods, 59% are "somewhat likely" to buy a zune.
I believe this article is deliberately misleading. The methodology they used HORRIBLY flawed. Let's take it apart piece by piece, shall we?
So what's the REAL conclusion here? Let's rephrase the results of their study more accurately:
1) 58% of the people in the market for a new mp3 player own an ipod. This statistic is useless as a measure of brand loyalty because we get no information about how many people who own ipods are satisfied. 58% of ipod owners are looking for a new mp3 player would be an interesting statistic. 58% of people looking for new mp3 players are ipod owners isn't because of the issues of sample size and the lack of any data about satisfied customers.
2) 59% of the people in the market for a new mp3 player who bought something other than an ipod are at least "somewhat likely" to buy a zune. To simplify, if you bought an mp3 player and didn't pick the ipod last time and are buying a new one you're looking at offerings that aren't the ipod (i.e. the zune). No shit?
Anyways, I'm not at all impressed by this survey, the methodology seems weak and I don't think there's really any useful information here.
I have mod points, and I was going to moderate this discussion but I have never been more confused as to what to mod a post than the parent post.
0_0
Your response implies the rather absurd viewpoint that no president has ever dealt with a crisis effectively, therefore it's unfair to criticize GWB for his lack of effectiveness versus iraq, afghanistan, 9/11, the insurgency (and, hell, katrina).
If you really believe that you are either ignorant of US history or very close-minded.
If you really just didn't know any better, I suggest you start with a good biography of Roosevelt. He effectively dealt with the great depression and world war 2. The problems in Bush's presidency are kiddie stuff compared to either one of those.
Nah, dude, I wasn't trolling. Besides, you quoted me out of context....the sentence following the one you quoted qualified the statement pretty heavily:
Just to be clear that means Firefox on Linux seems to render huge amounts of text slower than IE wine'd on linux and Opera native on linux...just my experience
I'm running a bottom-of-the-barrel geforce 5 with the accelerated nvidia drivers. It's not killing me, and I'm glad it works great for you, but I still think there's room for improvement in the performance department, and I don't think there's anything unreasonable about that opinion. Besides, the main point was that I didn't think there was enough exciting stuff to merit a 2.0 release, and this is really getting on a tangent...
Honestly, I've been using Firefox 2.0 since RC1, and I don't find anything really compelling about it over Firefox 1.5. I mean...I use FF about 80% of the time at home, and use it almost exclusively at work, but there just wasn't anything that made me go "wow" about it.
Also, it seems to me that Firefox has developed a rather hefty memory / CPU footprint, and its text rendering performance is noticably slower than Opera and IE, especially on Linux. (Just to be clear that means Firefox on Linux seems to render huge amounts of text slower than IE wine'd on linux and Opera native on linux...just my experience).
Anyways, it's a solid release, and still my primary browser....good for the Firefox team...but I can't help but think it would have served FF better to release something more compelling in their 2.0 release.
*Sarcasm*
Now here comes the partisan bickering....
Facts are merely statements that can be proven or disproven conclusively. Of course, one can numerically compare deaths under Saddam's occupation versus death under America's occupation.
Of course, without any kind of evidence, we can't really decide whether the stories were really pulled, but you can't say something isn't a fact just because it turns out to be false (or, worse, because it flies in the face of what you choose to believe (which sounds like the case here)).
"The press has been after Bush since 2000, especially compared against Clinton."
Maybe because he's had at least for major crises (9/11,afghanistan invasion, iraq invasion, iraqi insurgency) during his presidency and largely failed to deal with every one of them with any kind of effectiveness?
Right on, dude. I played the game for almost a year, and I seem to be one of the few people around here with no regrets whatsoever. Sure, I spent a lot of time in the game, but the insights I got into the way people handle things like power, money, and so forth are things that I'll keep with me for the rest of my life. Even better, I learned a lot about how I deal with those same things myself...there's no substitute for being able to play such an engrossing game, flip the switch off, and analyze your own behavior objectively. That shit comes in handy every single day at my job...projects are raids, salaries are loot...people are people, and there's no better place to learn about them than an anonymous fantasy realm, when all of the pretensions are gone.
If you're the kind of person who doesn't have the willpower to say "hey, it's time to turn the game off and go out with my friends", then you should steer clear. Also, if you're the kind of person who has any kind traces of obsessive-compulsive behavior, there's a damn good chance you'll get sucked in. As for myself, every day after I finished playing I just said to myself "Self, you didn't get an epic today. Did you still have fun playing?". For a year, the answer was yes 80% of the time. When the answer turned to "No" consistently, I canceled my account. Even when I was playing a lot, I still always was willing to turn the game off and go play with my friends...but I digress.
I feel for the people like the poster, but really, if you don't have self-control, you're going to get burned at SOMETHING. The one guy I know who really got his life devoured now compulsively works out like six days a week. Sure that's more healthy than sitting in front of a keyboard, but it's really just the same behavior channeled into a healthier pursuit. The point of the matter is that WOW is just a microcosm of the real world and everyone takes their own bullshit there. My friend can get kind of compulsive about stuff. The OP sounds like he was looking for an escape. Lots of people are are in unsatisfying relationships, or starved for feelings of success.
I guess my point is that I'm a bit disgusted that even within the "gamer" community we do what we accuse a lot of politicians of doing...we oversimplify issues until we have someone to blame. The middle east is a clusterfuck because of "terrorists," the internet is insecure because of "hackers," and I'm a lard-ass because of video games. If people can learn to look at problems and say "How much of this problem is the fault of me or people acting just as I would?" then people learn and grow. If people say "Whose fault is this?" then you stay asleep at the wheel, and it's just a matter of time until you bounce from WOW to coke or working out or an unsatisfying career.
As I remember, Yellow Dog Linux was one of the better linux distros for macs back when they were still on the PowerPC platform. Now that the PowerPC platform is pretty much defunct, I can't help but think that them moving to a:
:)
- Unreleased gaming console
- which has been much-maligned for its excessively high price
- and huge production delays
- on a new processor architecture
- using a WM that's not even out of CVS
seems like biting off more than they can chew, and smacks a bit of desperation.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's possible, and once I get a PS3 (once the prices get down to sane levels) I think it'll be a neat product to play with...but I'm just glad I don't own any stock in terrasoft
Your analogy is inaccurate. The article is about ensuring QOS, something which is done on pretty much every competently-run network in existence, and well-accepted as reasonable on any networks where it isn't. QOS is not a violation of network neutrality.
Here's an example. Let's say the coffee shop sat down and figured out that college kids account for 80% of their bandwith usage but only 20% of their revenue, whereas working-age people accounted for 15% of their bandwith and 60% of their revenue. They then decide to have their network deliver the New York Times and WSJ sites at full speed, and everything else at 5k.
Of course, even if this were the case, it wouldn't be that odious because users could just go to another coffee shop. Really, no matter how you slice it, it's very hard to make this situation look anything like the network neutrality debate.
In short, there's nothing contradictory about holding the two following opinions:
1) Network providers should take reasonable steps to avoid abuse, such as capping max download speeds.
2) Network providers should not be able to jack their rates up because you're making a lot of money with it, or throttle your connection down to nothing because you're accessing information they don't like.
The bottom line is that the free flow of information is a Greater Good which should not be "for sale."
The company charges 80 cents per student. That doesn't sound like a "non-profit" purpose to me.
"One would hope that as Sony is more agnostic on video formats than MS"
BWAAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHHAHA
*oh my god*
HAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
*wipes tear from eye*
I am a professional programmer at a small company, and all of our desktop machines and development servers run Gentoo. Although I would never use Gentoo on our production servers (they're managed RHEL boxes), Gentoo is the best choice for what we do around here. Pretty much every employee here can recompile his own kernel, write out a fstab by hand, and understand compilation errors.
I think it's a real problem that Gentoo gets compared to regular linux distro's....I prefer to call it a "meta-distro". It's a series of tools for creating a LFS system without having to deal with doing package management manually. If you're not comfortable working on that level, use a premade distro.
I keep seeing all of these dumb arguments like "With gentoo you can optimize your packages for your architecture and get speed gains!" or "With gentoo you won't have to worry about dependency hell ever again!". Of course, those two statements are partially true, but it frames the entire argument wrong by presenting Gentoo as if it were another distro, only different.
In other words, Gentoo is not the hardest way to install a linux distro, it's just the easiest way to make your own LFS system. I'd never want to discourage someone from trying it out, but non-gentoo users should regard us saying it's "easy" and a "time-saver" much the same way you'd regard a commercial airline pilot talking about flying a little cessna.
I don't mean to sound all holier-than-thou, but if you aren't either an expert linux user or willing to become one, you are not among Gentoo's target users.
In Soviet Russia trips plan...
Oh, hell. You people don't even make it challenging anymore.
First of all, as much as I hate pedants who always correct "linux" to "gnu/linux", their thinking is valid here. Let's remember that linux is a kernel and a philosophy, not a whole operating system, and as far as kernels go, it's among the best out there.
People who don't understand what linux is or what is about always go for this angle "ZOMG SUPPORT IPODS OR MICROSOFT WILL WIN", and it's a bit sad to see them get coverage. Linux is just the expression and manifestation of the belief that making things that are free and open and elegant is rewarding in and of itself, but furthermore, incidentally the way to make the best products.
Let microsoft spend its energy worrying about competition and survival. The author's and microsoft's concerns aren't sensical in a open-source mindset.
I browsed through an old story, found the first post, and cloned it.
Although I'm a fairly liberal, anti-war twentysomething, I mostly agree with your post. Even though I don't support the war, I feel that if someone's putting their life on the line for their country, they ought to be cut a little slack when it comes to things like music piracy, age restrictions, hell even black markets and so forth so long as they keep it on the proverbial DL.
However, your statement "if you are not putting your life on the line don't criticize others that do" makes me very nervous. There's a line between laws that are there to keep society orderly (i.e. drinking age, IP laws, etc) and laws that define what we stand for (prohibitions of killing defenseless people, torture, etc).
I make my living writing software, but I'd never condone cracking down on game piracy among the troops. Regardless of whether or not I support the war, I know a lot of guys aren't there because they want to be, and even if they're rabidly pro-war, I think they deserve some leeway due to the extraordinary danger they face. On the other hand, when they start breaking the laws that (at least in theory...) differentiate us from what we are fighting against, well then...that's when it becomes the DUTY of those who "aren't putting their life on the line" to criticize.