The reason for this being that _all_ US-based phones currently only support HDML. I'm actually at a conference where phone.com spoke today, and they made it amply clear that their primary reason for doing this was to provide content at all in the states, due to the general lack of WML-phones out there worldwide. Phone.com isn't the only criminal out there in this regard.. apparently Nokia's wireless browser follows the WAP spec differently than Phone.com's, and thus doesn't render pages in the same way. Ahh, browser fragmentation. Just like the old days with Netscape and IE.. wait, uh. -s
he sounds like many other old-style investors..
on
Irrational Exuberance
·
· Score: 1
..in that (from the way Katz described it) technology is all hype, and that investors who are buying in now are setting themselves up for a fall.
To my mind, internet-age technology is fundamentally changing the way that we need to look at companies and their valuations. Coca-Cola, 3M, and other old-economy companies do not have the huge growthrates that companies like Nortel and Nokia show.. Nortel grew revenues 48% this past first quarter. Compare that to Daimler-Chrysler, which grew revenues 17% in the first quarter. Both of these are huge companies, yet Nortel almost triples their growth rate.
Yes, I think some stocks are overvalued, but the recent crushing losses on the NASDAQ took care of a lot of the high-flyers with no tangible business like pets.com, drkoop.com, etc. A Cisco, a Nortel, a Nokia.. these companies are going to continue to have unbelievable growth rates over the next ten years as the internet becomes more and more part of our day-to-day existance. I personally would like to be a part of that.
..is a fairly ridiculous method of baiting people into not investigating the situation, but rather taking the arguments at face value and fighting against Metallica "for the kids."
This has absolutely nothing to do with children whatsoever.. it could be an 80-year old man in Des Moines (rawk!), or a 13-year old girl in Japan, but the illegality of what they're doing doesn't change. "Kids" just makes better copy.
Sure, the law itself isn't great, and there are certainly improvements to be made to the copyright and trademark systems, but that doesn't make Metallica any less wrong for what they're doing. They're protecting their intellectual property, which is very much the law.
I'm sure many of us wish that Metallica, Dr. Dre, and other artists would accept digital music trading as another form of audience building, but rather they're taking it as a bunch of "kids" trying to rip them off. Bleh.
Katz, quit grandstanding and rabble-rousing. Throwing gas on the flames of an argument tends not to be the best method of putting it out...
From an article by Jean-Louis Gasse' on Be's website..
The same can't be said of BeOS, and I can see the logic in Apple's decision not to help us with access to chipset technical data for a G3/G4 BeOS port.
Some have suggested that we look into the Linux sources for such data. Perhaps, but I see little reason to open ourselves to possible accusations of reverse-engineering. We're welcome on x-86 hardware, we're not welcome on Apple G3/G4. We respect the logic and that settles it for us.
Apple's closed hardware is preventing Be from moving to the new PPC hardware. Gasse' says as much.
..if it's at all true. I think it's unfortunate that BeOS, which is a fairly nifty OS in its own right, can't compete in this marketplace.. Apple's closed hardware is really taking away from their chances.
With the breadth of PC hardware out there, it's very difficult to support everything (as evidenced by Microsoft's inability to make a 100% stable OS). If Be were able to produce BeOS for G3/G4 hardware, which is much easier to support, they'd be able to compete with Apple on their own ground -- video editing, desktop publishing, sound, and general multimedia apps.
Obviously, this is less than appealing to Apple, but unfortunate nonetheless:)
I hope more of the BeOS gets open sourced -- Be shouldn't let it die like NeXT did.
For those that are interested in Moog music, the Dark Side of the Moog series on FAX Records out of Germany.. it's a collaboration between Pete Namlook, Klaus Schulze, and on a couple of the albums in the series, Bill Laswell. Really interesting stuff. Dark Side of the Moog I has been re-released a number of times on Ambient World records, as well as a couple of other labels, and is a fantastic example of what the Moog organ can do.
The problem is that the laws that are being used to go after Microsoft aren't really applicable in this day and age.. sure, they've had some questionable business practices, but does _anyone_ really think we'll get better goods/services or an improved market from breaking up Microsoft? If anything, the consumer is going to suffer from having to deal with multiple corporations that provide OS, apps, and internet products.
The consumer is the big loser in this equation, regardless of how you chop it up.
Just because the things we don't necessarily like are the most successful doesn't mean that we need some form of governmental intervention in order to "make things right" -- there will always be another Microsoft, or AT&T (see Bell Atlantic), or Standard Oil (see BP Amoco and Exxon Mobil).
..do you suggest we legislate AOL/Time Warner into the ground much like the government is trying to do with Microsoft? That's ridiculous! Monopolies can be built on the fact that they use unsound business practices, but at the same time, they can be built by consumers CHOOSING TO USE one thing more than any other.
It's called a free market. If the market didn't like AOL, then people wouldn't be using it. Something else would appear as competition, and defeat them.
Regardless, it's not like all of your news/entertainment content comes from AOL.. News Corp, the Hearst company, Viacom, and numerous others are very large and produce a great amount of content. If you don't like AOL/Time Warner, fine, don't view their content. Having the government step into every situation where a company has gotten "too big" for the outsider is silly. It reeks of sour grapes, especially when the person doing the ranting touts something else that didn't succeed in direct competition with the winner.
My personal favorite was e-trade's "monkey ad" -- it had two sloppily dressed goofy people sitting on either side of a chimpanzee wearing an e-trade t-shirt. The chimp was dancing to some sort of oompah music.. this went on for 15-20 seconds, and then was cut to a screen saying, "well, that was a waste of $2 million." The next screen read, "how do you want to invest your money?" or something along those lines..
Overall, the commercials were quite weak, but the game itself was very exciting:)
But what exactly is AOL Time Warner monopolizing here? They've just managed to get an edge on _one_ part of the net access/content delivery market, not all of it. It's not like AOL just said, "yo, the net's closed, go download new AOL 5.0 for access."
Katz didn't have this big of a hissy fit over the CBS/Viacom merger.. I think it's just cause AOL doesn't kowtow to him like the Boston Globe, etc etc.. I mean, please. Try to be at least a bit more subtle. Self-importance is one thing, but you don't need to share.
There are a number of classified facilities listed (including two in the top 10) that are listed only as "Classified" and "Government" -- so who knows where they're located.. perhaps even Ft. Meade:)
Why would it be advantageous at all to use Linux over Solaris in this case? I'm not courting flames here, but if you're in bed with one of the biggest UNIX vendors out there, who will surely provide hardware/software at little-to-no cost, why would you go with a competing alternative from outside of your company?
Besides that, AOL is already using Solaris.. why would they want to switch? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it..."
The CS requirements for me in both college and HS were very, very minimal, and I ended up going into SA stuff due to lack of coding knowledge.. It's scary knowing how many kids these days are just growing up with computers and the net, whereas us older folk were just getting PCs in the 80s.
Well, I'm a UI geek, so the underlying heinousness of Mach and the relatively mediocre hardware hold no truck with me:) Thankfully, both WebObjects and the NeXTStep UI live on...
Back in the day, there wasn't _anything_ out there that made navigation easier, so you tended to just walk through links and see where it took you.. now that there are directories and search engines coming out of our ears, there's no reason to just walk links, as there was before..
Of course, it's still fun just to goof around and see what you can find though:)
It's funny, it seems from reading comp.sys.sgi.admin and comp.sys.sgi.misc that the SGI employees (at least the vocal ones) are still fairly happy about the way things are going at SGI.. I have a few friends internally there, and they apparently are still drinking the Kool-Aid as well.
I just hope things work out for them in the long run.. it'd be sad to see another Cool UNIX Company (tm) like NeXT go down the tubes.
Too bad Iridium seems to be in such bad shape... after all their initial hype, they're losing so much money that they're apparently near closing their doors. Motorola is near pulling funding for them as well.
VH1/M2 are the music-oriented business at MTV Networks.. MTV has now positioned itself as more of a pop-cultural resource, rather than a music resource. I think a lot of what VH1 is doing right now is fairly exciting, showing a lot of interesting back-info about artists, focusing on specific artists, and taking a lot of the older MTV music-oriented material like Rockumentaries (essentially VH1 Behind The Music) and MTV Unplugged (VH1 Storytellers) and presenting them to a new audience. For all of the vitriol that MTV generates, it's still hugely popular.
As an employee of MTV Networks, I can say (for myself, of course, not for the company) that I don't personally like the content on MTV that much, but both M2 and VH1 are, well, pretty cool. A lot of what MTVN is planning to do in online upcoming looks like it'll be good as well -- Music First once again, and not just for VH1 watchers. I'm excited about it as a music fan, not as an employee of The Company.
The online music initiatives should be broad and interesting, not pop-culture focused like the cable channel.
I've been ordering from Amazon.com since '95, when they included hand written notes thanking you for ordering from them.. now they're just another huge faceless corporation, no more exciting than going to your local Border's or Barnes & Noble. The addition of other junk just makes their site seem like buy.com, or onsale, or any of those other blue-light special sites.
The only reason that I didn't suggest SGI, who certainly do produce excellent products for this sort of thing, is my own worries about SGI's future in the UNIX market. Their strategies about NT in the desktop environment don't exactly engender the most confidence in their ongoing support of IRIX:) Admittedly, I do have a Challenge S and an Indy lashed on to my DSL though...
hee hee.
-s
Standard Disclaimer: I do _not_ speak for my employer.
I have to agree with a number of the other posters.. we've explored using large Linux-based systems at my workplace for storage and internal video/music streaming, and in the end decided to go with a 20tb hierarchichal storage system based on IBM storage and IBM ADSM HSM software, with a couple of high availability Sun servers.. The biggest problem for a project like this, i'd say, is that you want to _guarantee_ that your machines can be up full time. NT can't do that because of stability issues with disk and I/O issues like this... Linux can't do it for the same reason, plus support issues. If you don't know how to do a project like this already, doing it on Linux isn't going to be the best idea.
I love Linux, but at the same time, I have to be realistic about its limitations. Linux (and every other operating system) isn't the best tool for every job...
Standard Disclaimer: I do _not_ speak for my employer.
rs.internic.net, which used to be registration ser vices, now just has a page saying "if you want to register a domain, go to networksolutions.com." They're trying to make it as opaque as possible to people not in the know about the registration process.
From my understanding, they're running a hot-parallel EMC disk system, meaning that above and beyond the RAID1 mirroring they have, the EMC Symmetrix storage array has a second, also mirrored array which keeps a constantly updated, read only copy of the data -- perfect for situations such as these.
Interestingly enough, I read (somewhere, agh), that eBay is losing an estimated $10,000 a second due to the downtime. Aiee.
Slashdot Mirror
chipzilla and amd will be ripping off any ideas within months of it's final release as a product...
-s
The reason for this being that _all_ US-based phones currently only support HDML. I'm actually at a conference where phone.com spoke today, and they made it amply clear that their primary reason for doing this was to provide content at all in the states, due to the general lack of WML-phones out there worldwide. Phone.com isn't the only criminal out there in this regard.. apparently Nokia's wireless browser follows the WAP spec differently than Phone.com's, and thus doesn't render pages in the same way. Ahh, browser fragmentation. Just like the old days with Netscape and IE.. wait, uh. -s
..in that (from the way Katz described it) technology is all hype, and that investors who are buying in now are setting themselves up for a fall.
To my mind, internet-age technology is fundamentally changing the way that we need to look at companies and their valuations. Coca-Cola, 3M, and other old-economy companies do not have the huge growthrates that companies like Nortel and Nokia show.. Nortel grew revenues 48% this past first quarter. Compare that to Daimler-Chrysler, which grew revenues 17% in the first quarter. Both of these are huge companies, yet Nortel almost triples their growth rate.
Yes, I think some stocks are overvalued, but the recent crushing losses on the NASDAQ took care of a lot of the high-flyers with no tangible business like pets.com, drkoop.com, etc. A Cisco, a Nortel, a Nokia.. these companies are going to continue to have unbelievable growth rates over the next ten years as the internet becomes more and more part of our day-to-day existance. I personally would like to be a part of that.
-s
..is a fairly ridiculous method of baiting people into not investigating the situation, but rather taking the arguments at face value and fighting against Metallica "for the kids."
This has absolutely nothing to do with children whatsoever.. it could be an 80-year old man in Des Moines (rawk!), or a 13-year old girl in Japan, but the illegality of what they're doing doesn't change. "Kids" just makes better copy.
Sure, the law itself isn't great, and there are certainly improvements to be made to the copyright and trademark systems, but that doesn't make Metallica any less wrong for what they're doing. They're protecting their intellectual property, which is very much the law.
I'm sure many of us wish that Metallica, Dr. Dre, and other artists would accept digital music trading as another form of audience building, but rather they're taking it as a bunch of "kids" trying to rip them off. Bleh.
Katz, quit grandstanding and rabble-rousing. Throwing gas on the flames of an argument tends not to be the best method of putting it out...
-s
-s
..if it's at all true. I think it's unfortunate that BeOS, which is a fairly nifty OS in its own right, can't compete in this marketplace.. Apple's closed hardware is really taking away from their chances.
:)
With the breadth of PC hardware out there, it's very difficult to support everything (as evidenced by Microsoft's inability to make a 100% stable OS). If Be were able to produce BeOS for G3/G4 hardware, which is much easier to support, they'd be able to compete with Apple on their own ground -- video editing, desktop publishing, sound, and general multimedia apps.
Obviously, this is less than appealing to Apple, but unfortunate nonetheless
I hope more of the BeOS gets open sourced -- Be shouldn't let it die like NeXT did.
-s
I'd say about 90% of the archive is missing from the FTP site, which is obviously problematic...
-s
For those that are interested in Moog music, the Dark Side of the Moog series on FAX Records out of Germany.. it's a collaboration between Pete Namlook, Klaus Schulze, and on a couple of the albums in the series, Bill Laswell. Really interesting stuff. Dark Side of the Moog I has been re-released a number of times on Ambient World records, as well as a couple of other labels, and is a fantastic example of what the Moog organ can do.
-s
The problem is that the laws that are being used to go after Microsoft aren't really applicable in this day and age.. sure, they've had some questionable business practices, but does _anyone_ really think we'll get better goods/services or an improved market from breaking up Microsoft? If anything, the consumer is going to suffer from having to deal with multiple corporations that provide OS, apps, and internet products.
The consumer is the big loser in this equation, regardless of how you chop it up.
Just because the things we don't necessarily like are the most successful doesn't mean that we need some form of governmental intervention in order to "make things right" -- there will always be another Microsoft, or AT&T (see Bell Atlantic), or Standard Oil (see BP Amoco and Exxon Mobil).
-s
..do you suggest we legislate AOL/Time Warner into the ground much like the government is trying to do with Microsoft? That's ridiculous! Monopolies can be built on the fact that they use unsound business practices, but at the same time, they can be built by consumers CHOOSING TO USE one thing more than any other.
It's called a free market. If the market didn't like AOL, then people wouldn't be using it. Something else would appear as competition, and defeat them.
Regardless, it's not like all of your news/entertainment content comes from AOL.. News Corp, the Hearst company, Viacom, and numerous others are very large and produce a great amount of content. If you don't like AOL/Time Warner, fine, don't view their content. Having the government step into every situation where a company has gotten "too big" for the outsider is silly. It reeks of sour grapes, especially when the person doing the ranting touts something else that didn't succeed in direct competition with the winner.
-s
My personal favorite was e-trade's "monkey ad" -- it had two sloppily dressed goofy people sitting on either side of a chimpanzee wearing an e-trade t-shirt. The chimp was dancing to some sort of oompah music.. this went on for 15-20 seconds, and then was cut to a screen saying, "well, that was a waste of $2 million." The next screen read, "how do you want to invest your money?" or something along those lines..
:)
Overall, the commercials were quite weak, but the game itself was very exciting
-s
But what exactly is AOL Time Warner monopolizing here? They've just managed to get an edge on _one_ part of the net access/content delivery market, not all of it. It's not like AOL just said, "yo, the net's closed, go download new AOL 5.0 for access."
Katz didn't have this big of a hissy fit over the CBS/Viacom merger.. I think it's just cause AOL doesn't kowtow to him like the Boston Globe, etc etc.. I mean, please. Try to be at least a bit more subtle. Self-importance is one thing, but you don't need to share.
-s
There are a number of classified facilities listed (including two in the top 10) that are listed only as "Classified" and "Government" -- so who knows where they're located.. perhaps even Ft. Meade :)
-s
Why would it be advantageous at all to use Linux over Solaris in this case? I'm not courting flames here, but if you're in bed with one of the biggest UNIX vendors out there, who will surely provide hardware/software at little-to-no cost, why would you go with a competing alternative from outside of your company?
Besides that, AOL is already using Solaris.. why would they want to switch? "If it ain't broke, don't fix it..."
-s, solaris and linux user.
The CS requirements for me in both college and HS were very, very minimal, and I ended up going into SA stuff due to lack of coding knowledge.. It's scary knowing how many kids these days are just growing up with computers and the net, whereas us older folk were just getting PCs in the 80s.
An iMac in every pot, I suppose.
-s
Well, I'm a UI geek, so the underlying heinousness of Mach and the relatively mediocre hardware hold no truck with me :) Thankfully, both WebObjects and the NeXTStep UI live on...
-s
Back in the day, there wasn't _anything_ out there that made navigation easier, so you tended to just walk through links and see where it took you.. now that there are directories and search engines coming out of our ears, there's no reason to just walk links, as there was before..
Of course, it's still fun just to goof around and see what you can find though
-s
It's funny, it seems from reading comp.sys.sgi.admin and comp.sys.sgi.misc that the SGI employees (at least the vocal ones) are still fairly happy about the way things are going at SGI.. I have a few friends internally there, and they apparently are still drinking the Kool-Aid as well.
I just hope things work out for them in the long run.. it'd be sad to see another Cool UNIX Company (tm) like NeXT go down the tubes.
-s
Too bad Iridium seems to be in such bad shape... after all their initial hype, they're losing so much money that they're apparently near closing their doors. Motorola is near pulling funding for them as well.
Check out this article on wired for more.
-s
VH1/M2 are the music-oriented business at MTV Networks.. MTV has now positioned itself as more of a pop-cultural resource, rather than a music resource. I think a lot of what VH1 is doing right now is fairly exciting, showing a lot of interesting back-info about artists, focusing on specific artists, and taking a lot of the older MTV music-oriented material like Rockumentaries (essentially VH1 Behind The Music) and MTV Unplugged (VH1 Storytellers) and presenting them to a new audience. For all of the vitriol that MTV generates, it's still hugely popular.
As an employee of MTV Networks, I can say (for myself, of course, not for the company) that I don't personally like the content on MTV that much, but both M2 and VH1 are, well, pretty cool. A lot of what MTVN is planning to do in online upcoming looks like it'll be good as well -- Music First once again, and not just for VH1 watchers.
I'm excited about it as a music fan, not as an employee of The Company.
The online music initiatives should be broad and interesting, not pop-culture focused like the cable channel.
-s
as always, i don't speak for my employer.
I've been ordering from Amazon.com since '95, when they included hand written notes thanking you for ordering from them.. now they're just another huge faceless corporation, no more exciting than going to your local Border's or Barnes & Noble. The addition of other junk just makes their site seem like buy.com, or onsale, or any of those other blue-light special sites.
It's really sad...
-s
The only reason that I didn't suggest SGI, who certainly do produce excellent products for this sort of thing, is my own worries about SGI's future in the UNIX market. Their strategies about NT in the desktop environment don't exactly engender the most confidence in their ongoing support of IRIX :) Admittedly, I do have a Challenge S and an Indy lashed on to my DSL though...
hee hee.
-s
Standard Disclaimer: I do _not_ speak for my employer.
I have to agree with a number of the other posters.. we've explored using large Linux-based systems at my workplace for storage and internal video/music streaming, and in the end decided to go with a 20tb hierarchichal storage system based on IBM storage and IBM ADSM HSM software, with a couple of high availability Sun servers.. The biggest problem for a project like this, i'd say, is that you want to _guarantee_ that your machines can be up full time. NT can't do that because of stability issues with disk and I/O issues like this... Linux can't do it for the same reason, plus support issues. If you don't know how to do a project like this already, doing it on Linux isn't going to be the best idea.
I love Linux, but at the same time, I have to be realistic about its limitations. Linux (and every other operating system) isn't the best tool for every job...
Standard Disclaimer: I do _not_ speak for my employer.
rs.internic.net, which used to be registration ser vices, now just has a page saying "if you want to register a domain, go to networksolutions.com." They're trying to make it as opaque as possible to people not in the know about the registration process.
Go register.com! (or something.)
-s
From my understanding, they're running a hot-parallel EMC disk system, meaning that above and beyond the RAID1 mirroring they have, the EMC Symmetrix storage array has a second, also mirrored array which keeps a constantly updated, read only copy of the data -- perfect for situations such as these.
Interestingly enough, I read (somewhere, agh), that eBay is losing an estimated $10,000 a second due to the downtime. Aiee.
-s