It just happens to be based on the belief that more growth for everyone means more profit for me.
It is the belief that knowledge, time and services are greater commodities than just stuff you dig out of the ground and sell because it is shiny.
Otherwise, a lot of corporations are making the wrong bet.
Let's face it: if I do web design for a living, I benefit if more people, worldwide, are making websites and using them because it increases the likelihood that one of those new sales will come my way.
Freedom is mostly an idealistic notion created by northern Europeans to justify the notion that we all claim landholdings to the exclusion of the interests of others.
Freedom -- particularly property freedom -- is a distinctly northern European concept that has very little to do with anything going on in the modern world.
Access, information, transactions, business... those are things of value.
We all know we're not free in the absolutist or even libertarian sense of the word.
Our government exists to enable a standard of living. Thus why we build interstate highways, tax cigarettes, raise armies, build levees, etc.
Sorry. I'm over east, and we'd call 3-400 residents "abandoned".
Our idea of rural is less than 5,000 residents.
Which is probably a factor in availability. Let's face it: if you have cities 100 miles away that can support a based of hundreds of thousands, why bother with the sticks?
On the other hand, out west there are stretches where you won't see a town of 5,000 people for several counties. So that would be seen as a target market.
Remember all those awful B&W Macs? They were decked out as office machines.
It still didn't discourage kids from wondering what made all that happen.
Hell, I learned Pascal on B&W Mac. But, even then you could see the outliers of what has happened. I can remember sitting there at 12 y.o. banging away trying to learn Pascal while other kids were jerking around typing swear words into King's Quest, then Sim City and onward until you have WoW and Nintendogs.
Most human behavior is inherent. Most people are idle and generally uninterested in growing if it is not absolutely necessary.
This of course is why geeks sit there snarling at much of the rest of the world. They have something to defend.
1. A dithered image. Dithering was the way you got old systems that didn't support true color (24-bit colors) to display a larger palette.
For example, on systems that could only display four colors you placed those colors next to each other in a box of pixels. So if I put a couple blue pixels in the box with a couple red pixels this would appear to be purple (or, so the theory goes).
2. High school programming. Do what I did. Complete your class projects ASAP and use the free time to work on your own stuff. I didn't own a computer of my own until senior year because they were still too expensive.
Your HS programming teachers are almost always math teachers who got stuck with the job.
Usuaully, they have you dope around with some exercises and that's it.
If you're lucky, they might break you out of procedural code, but most likely not.
As for resetting the admin pwd, there are easier ways than using Knoppix. Especially if it's a Windows system, since I have yet to see a single HS computer that had the Windows folder protected properly.
3. Be very glad you live with the internet now.
Even in the proto-internet stages (BBS, text-based mail systems, etc) it was hard to find good programming tutorials.
Now you have companies like IBM churning out excellent free stuff for young programmers to learn from.
It was a hell of a lot harder when you had to go fishing through the public library to find two or three books that had some decent routines to try. Although, in fairness, 80's programming books had great covers.
In fairness, part of the early push into programming was because it was different and neat.
You really had to be something if you could pull anything off.
I can remember working with the better students in our 8th grade class to create a dithering routine for images displayed on Apple II and Apple III systems.
At the time, it felt like a gigantic accomplishment.
Can you imagine the dirty looks kids would give you now for even showing them a dithered image?
A lot of the really cool frontiers have been supplanted. For example, overclocking is now seen as cooler than programming.
Now, any true geek knows that hardware geeks are the slum dwellers of the geek world. It's a nothing skill compared to something like building a secure interface and database for a user-driven website and putting it out live on the internet to be assaulted by every kid with some CMS hacking bot.
I was talking to a 15 yr old kid who thinks he's a hacker because he can run a couple scripts to piss with Yahoo Messenger chats!
It was impossible to explain to him that he needs to channel that interest into real programming, and not just downloading someone else's program and committing vandlism with it.
I've lived most of my life in rural areas and companies like Verizon are loath to spend on the infrastructure to bring those areas up to DSL speed (never minding that farmers are among the most likely Americans to buy premium services such as DSL, HBO cable packages, etc when offered).
It's a little selfish for a company to pressure those consumers when the company is unwilling to invest in bringing them into the future.
But, while I'm not the head of a giant corporation, from my own business experience I've learned that invading someone else's marketspace is dangerous at best and plain ignorant at worst.
As a website business, we could easily invade the domains of neighboring graphics businesses (and, in fact, very few of them have even been any good for our business). But, we still opt to avoid because:
1. It's not our marketspace.
2. They will trash your name.
3. Sometimes it suits just to be a good neighbor.
It's my feeling that with something like PS's dominance, there is no point making a half-hearted attempt to invade that marketspace.
I would have to be incredibly convinced I had The Killer Imaging App before I'd joke about it.
Because a key selling point for any product is to see how long it takes to get Linux on it.
If they really wanted to make a killing, they'd hamstring the machine to ensure that it could never run Linux, and then the company would make outlandish claims about how Linux will never run on their machine.
Then, there would be a rush of people trying put whatver toaster oven version of Linux on the thing.
Within weeks, the free publicity machine would splatter screen shots of those first beautiful lines of [FAILED] [OK] [OK] [FAILED] [DEAR GOD, WHAT DID YOU DO?]
Should be a screen with a site running in FF and another in IE.
I found the test to be a classic push poll approach.
This is like lining up 16 Nigerian hookers, two at a time , and asking you you to screw one and see if you get AIDS. Well, statistically one in four has AIDS, so by the 16th hooker, you have AIDS -- guaranteed.
But, would you actually screw a Nigerian hooker? Not if you had any knowledge of what you're getting into.
Anyone who goes to a free screensaver website deserves every single virus they ever get. In fact, they deserve to be booted in the head.
The test is rigged in a fashion that ensures that even competent people end up in the mid-range.
In all seriousness, how many web savvy people are going to the types of sites they depict? None.
Because the main things that brought on this current problem are 1, DSL price wars and 2, Google's windfall of wealth.
The price wars are a fairly understandable issue.
But, no one in the telecoms really admits that a portion of this is "Hey, if the damn government weren't sitting there, we could totally attack the ecommerce treasure ship and make off with the gold of the New Economy."
There, it isn't even a case of capitalistic maximum value.
This is classic mercantilism: any money someone else is making is money I'm losing.
Capitalism is based on the notion that money makes money. In essence, how the modern internet works. Google impresses people which encourages them to get DSL which makes SBC, Verizon, QWest, etc some bucks, not to mention the money made by millions of smaller businesses.
The telecoms are being very limited in their view of economics. Rather than thanking Google for its incredible work bringing subscribers to their hi-speed services, these companies plan to shit where they eat.
Their plan is to make the cost of entry into quality broadband services so expsensive that no one ever provides hi-end services except for them.
The problem is that this flies in the faces of the internet as a mentality.
We want diversity, selectivity and accessibility dirt cheap.
We want content on demand while we browse without obstruction.
The telecoms plan to destroy what made this business work for them in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It is the belief that knowledge, time and services are greater commodities than just stuff you dig out of the ground and sell because it is shiny.
Otherwise, a lot of corporations are making the wrong bet.
Let's face it: if I do web design for a living, I benefit if more people, worldwide, are making websites and using them because it increases the likelihood that one of those new sales will come my way.
Freedom -- particularly property freedom -- is a distinctly northern European concept that has very little to do with anything going on in the modern world.
Access, information, transactions, business ... those are things of value.
We all know we're not free in the absolutist or even libertarian sense of the word.
Our government exists to enable a standard of living. Thus why we build interstate highways, tax cigarettes, raise armies, build levees, etc.
Net Neutrality is no different.
Sorry, but effects claimed FX long before Firefox came along. And I use the abbreviation too often to abadon its current use.
On the other hand, I don't have an FF and I could care less about Fire-Space-Fox, so...
Given MSN, MSNBC, and various other media portal experiences from MS, MSYahoo ought to be stillborn.
I don't think MS knows how to package search.
Similarly, Firefox is gaining new traction. 1.5 seems to be a real killer app, because it showing up in the weblogs a lot more recently.
IE7 is very foreign. It's a weird decision to change the interface.
Worse, Mozilla's interface is very familiar to IE6 users.
MS is handing the browser war to FF on a platter, with ribbon, the whole shabang, lock stock and barrel, etc.
And thank goodness it is so easy for the average user to edit registry settings in Windows. That's a snap for many people.
The only paid software that hands-down beats its FOSS rival is Photoshop. In most cases they either level-peg (office) or underperform (web server).
Our idea of rural is less than 5,000 residents.
Which is probably a factor in availability. Let's face it: if you have cities 100 miles away that can support a based of hundreds of thousands, why bother with the sticks?
On the other hand, out west there are stretches where you won't see a town of 5,000 people for several counties. So that would be seen as a target market.
We don't get much choice, especially in rural areas, unless a company decides to take a chance.
Given that few major companies are in as deep with the mob as Sony, perhaps we could shake out some stuff from purportedly legitimate businesses.
RIAA told to take a ticket behind EFF. EFF and RIAA consider murder suicide pact rather than living in world where they are treated equally.
Damned bugle emulator was playing a pirated mp3 of "Taps".
But, if you live a mile off the main drag . . .
Well, I was helping a friend with his dial-up because their speeds had dropped to 7 kbps. Turns out, there were ants all through the nearest box.
It took Verizon two years before they finally replaced the whole system and now they can get 768 kbps.
Now, some folks nearby are lucky enough to have Alltel.
Alltel? They provide services to a guy who lives three miles from the nearest PAVED road!
So, I bame Verizon, all around.
It still didn't discourage kids from wondering what made all that happen.
Hell, I learned Pascal on B&W Mac. But, even then you could see the outliers of what has happened. I can remember sitting there at 12 y.o. banging away trying to learn Pascal while other kids were jerking around typing swear words into King's Quest, then Sim City and onward until you have WoW and Nintendogs.
Most human behavior is inherent. Most people are idle and generally uninterested in growing if it is not absolutely necessary.
This of course is why geeks sit there snarling at much of the rest of the world. They have something to defend.
For example, on systems that could only display four colors you placed those colors next to each other in a box of pixels. So if I put a couple blue pixels in the box with a couple red pixels this would appear to be purple (or, so the theory goes).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Dithering_examp le_red_blue.png
2. High school programming. Do what I did. Complete your class projects ASAP and use the free time to work on your own stuff. I didn't own a computer of my own until senior year because they were still too expensive.
Your HS programming teachers are almost always math teachers who got stuck with the job.
Usuaully, they have you dope around with some exercises and that's it.
If you're lucky, they might break you out of procedural code, but most likely not.
As for resetting the admin pwd, there are easier ways than using Knoppix. Especially if it's a Windows system, since I have yet to see a single HS computer that had the Windows folder protected properly.
3. Be very glad you live with the internet now.
Even in the proto-internet stages (BBS, text-based mail systems, etc) it was hard to find good programming tutorials.
Now you have companies like IBM churning out excellent free stuff for young programmers to learn from.
It was a hell of a lot harder when you had to go fishing through the public library to find two or three books that had some decent routines to try. Although, in fairness, 80's programming books had great covers.
Now you have Google.
You really had to be something if you could pull anything off.
I can remember working with the better students in our 8th grade class to create a dithering routine for images displayed on Apple II and Apple III systems.
At the time, it felt like a gigantic accomplishment.
Can you imagine the dirty looks kids would give you now for even showing them a dithered image?
A lot of the really cool frontiers have been supplanted. For example, overclocking is now seen as cooler than programming.
Now, any true geek knows that hardware geeks are the slum dwellers of the geek world. It's a nothing skill compared to something like building a secure interface and database for a user-driven website and putting it out live on the internet to be assaulted by every kid with some CMS hacking bot.
I was talking to a 15 yr old kid who thinks he's a hacker because he can run a couple scripts to piss with Yahoo Messenger chats!
It was impossible to explain to him that he needs to channel that interest into real programming, and not just downloading someone else's program and committing vandlism with it.
That's just the state of things.
It's a little selfish for a company to pressure those consumers when the company is unwilling to invest in bringing them into the future.
In light of the fact we all only have one thought.
Then what marketspace is Apple gunning for?
Like with AIDS, computer virus contraction is an education issue. The public isn't educated enough to realize what they need to do.
The original article only makes that problem worse because it implies your system is going to be infected no matter what.
When people develop that attitude, they generally stop trying to fix problems.
I probably should have considered the articulate approach to saying that rather than being glib.
As a website business, we could easily invade the domains of neighboring graphics businesses (and, in fact, very few of them have even been any good for our business). But, we still opt to avoid because:
1. It's not our marketspace.
It's my feeling that with something like PS's dominance, there is no point making a half-hearted attempt to invade that marketspace. I would have to be incredibly convinced I had The Killer Imaging App before I'd joke about it.2. They will trash your name.
3. Sometimes it suits just to be a good neighbor.
If they really wanted to make a killing, they'd hamstring the machine to ensure that it could never run Linux, and then the company would make outlandish claims about how Linux will never run on their machine.
Then, there would be a rush of people trying put whatver toaster oven version of Linux on the thing. Within weeks, the free publicity machine would splatter screen shots of those first beautiful lines of [FAILED] [OK] [OK] [FAILED] [DEAR GOD, WHAT DID YOU DO?]Guess their partners weren't strategic enough.
But, you'd take your chance of running that gauntlet?
I found the test to be a classic push poll approach.
This is like lining up 16 Nigerian hookers, two at a time , and asking you you to screw one and see if you get AIDS. Well, statistically one in four has AIDS, so by the 16th hooker, you have AIDS -- guaranteed.
But, would you actually screw a Nigerian hooker? Not if you had any knowledge of what you're getting into.
Anyone who goes to a free screensaver website deserves every single virus they ever get. In fact, they deserve to be booted in the head.
The test is rigged in a fashion that ensures that even competent people end up in the mid-range.
In all seriousness, how many web savvy people are going to the types of sites they depict? None.
The price wars are a fairly understandable issue.
But, no one in the telecoms really admits that a portion of this is "Hey, if the damn government weren't sitting there, we could totally attack the ecommerce treasure ship and make off with the gold of the New Economy."
There, it isn't even a case of capitalistic maximum value.
This is classic mercantilism: any money someone else is making is money I'm losing.
Capitalism is based on the notion that money makes money. In essence, how the modern internet works. Google impresses people which encourages them to get DSL which makes SBC, Verizon, QWest, etc some bucks, not to mention the money made by millions of smaller businesses.
The telecoms are being very limited in their view of economics. Rather than thanking Google for its incredible work bringing subscribers to their hi-speed services, these companies plan to shit where they eat.
Their plan is to make the cost of entry into quality broadband services so expsensive that no one ever provides hi-end services except for them.
The problem is that this flies in the faces of the internet as a mentality.
We want diversity, selectivity and accessibility dirt cheap.
We want content on demand while we browse without obstruction.
The telecoms plan to destroy what made this business work for them in the first place.
It's a mentality more suited to 1500 than 2006.