Does this sound incredibly petty to anybody? Removing the infringing material is one thing but an apology and a required link? They have no right to demand that.
Well, actually, they can demand that you paint yourself blue, put on a tutu and go dance live on Fuji TV if they want to. If the sites have indeed violated Fuji's copyrights, Fuji could immediately start legal action based on what has already happened, instead of giving the violator an easy way out.
(Not that any of this makes Fuji's actions less stupid, but...)
Further, would terrorists locate their sites there? And outfits like Cult of the Dead Cow, who might benefit from migrating to a data haven? Would you trust your sensitive data to a location that the government (in this case, the UK government) might seize at any moment?
It would be considerably more difficult to seize the data in Sealand, where you'd need to mount a full-scale military invasion, than to seize the data in the US or the UK, where all the government needs is a search warrant.
I think the natural choice for distributing written works such as novels is HTML. You end up with a file that is negligibly larger than the equivalent text file, but have some control of formatting. Everyone has a web browser.
Definitely. I've put up quite a few of my travel stories up on the net. Travel writing is practically impossible to sell and so I haven't even tried, but on the Net, with no advertising other than a few search engine submissions, I've gotten thousands of readers and lots of feedback. Write a really good story, like Philip Greenspun, and you'll get hundreds of thousands.
Philip also explains why he isn't a writer and why the Net is far better medium than dead trees. Excellent reading.
As someone who has implemented a medium-scale WAP application, I have only one thing to say: WAP sucks.
Damn straight. And the bizarre thing is, these is a WAP equivalent that does not suck: NTT Docomo's i-mode. Unfortunately, it's a proprietary PDC (Japan-only) system and so it will never be seen elsewhere, but it has managed to avoid the key mistakes which are likely to doom WAP to oblivion.
Mistake 1: WAP phones do not allow access to the Internet (yes, I know about gateways and such, but they're a hack). i-mode phones do. Result: right off the bat the i-mode can access a lot more content.
Mistake 2: WAP is so overpriced it's not even funny. Here in Finland, which usually has very low prices for cellular use, a single WAP call can easily cost several dollars -- compare this with less than 10c for an SMS or a one-minute call. In Japan, i-mode costs a low fixed monthly fee and e.g. e-mail costs one yen (approx. 1c) a pop.
Mistake 3: WAP phones are normal phones with teensy screens. i-mode phones have huge displays, the never models even have color screen. Usability is much better.
i-mode looks set to have 10 million subscribers by the end of the year. In Finland I don't know a soul who actually uses WAP, and I work at a company that develops WAP applications! Like most people here, I'll wait until UMTS is rolled out before buying my next phone, WAP simply does not provide any incentive to upgrade now.
A rubberized, ruggedized, waterproof cell phone. Call it the "sport phone"; maybe make it bright yellow. Teenagers and outdoor workers need it; many others would buy it. Eliminate the need for a carrying case to protect the thing. Radios, cordless phones, and walkie-talkies are available like that, but for some reason, not cell phones.
And it's been out for a year now, I almost bought one myself. You may, however, be correct in that such phones may not exist for the US market -- the 6250 is GSM 900/1800 only.
Cheers, -j. (a former Nokia employee, but glad to be out)
The reason why the teachers never mention these books is that they never read them. They don't want students to know something they don't. They don't want their students to learn new stuff.
Oh, bull-pucky. I don't know what school you went to, but my English classes in high school (in New York and Helsinki) included 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World as mandatory reading -- hell, in the IB program, there was an entire year about conflicts between individual and society, with horse doctor's doses of Camus, Ibsen, el-Saadawi, etc.
Of course, there are still some limits to what will be taught in school. Clockwork Orange is generally considered too extreme and graphic (although I still read it for the first time in the school library), and Huxley's post-60's work (Doors of Perception, Island, etc) is ignored -- not because the writing is any less skillful, but because portraying drug use or Tantric sex in a positive light would freak out the P.T.A. The contents of the curriculum tend to be set according to the collective sum of parental opinion, not because the teacher is Nazi in disguise.
There are many situations where collecting a particular piece of information is essentially worthless, yet it can stand to do a great deal of PR damage (possibly resulting in a push away from DoubleClick). For instance, if DoubleClick provided a profile on some website's users, say, SomeAIDSvictimsDiscussionSite.com, there would be little way for them to profit (legally and safely), yet it still exposes them to major liability and PR damage.
I beg to differ. An insurance company would pay through the nose to get its hands on that AIDS victim data, but due to these niggling privacy concerns, DoubleClick can't sell that data legally. But would they do it if they could get away with it? Of course!
But just because he writes a line or two about their supposed 'evilness', doesn't make it true.
Corporations, like money itself, are neither inherently evil nor good. The problem here is that the consumer's good (privacy) conflicts with the corporation's good (profit).
A relatively well rounded board (on the surface atleast) to advise a CORPORATION on what they can, and should, realistically do.
Undoubtedly, but the whole point is that DoubleClick's board doesn't look terribly well-rounded.
This commentary is so ridiculously biased and paranoid that unfortunately this article tells you almost nothing, except Michael has been watching too many "1984" movies.
Paranoia and albino cats are indeed quite unnecessary, as DoubleClick's actions are backed by sound logic. DC is a for-profit company, and the more information about their customers they have, the more profit they can make. Hence privacy is detrimental to their bottom line, and it's in DC's best interest to fight against it -- as long as the public backlash from doing so doesn't outweigh the gains.
In this light, setting up that wonderfully named Consumer Privacy Advocacy Board is perfectly logical. Create a board so it looks like they care about privacy, and populate it with stooges (carefully selected from other organizations so it doesn't look too obvious) to prevent the board from actually interfering with their operations. Downright brilliant... unless you're a consumer. And without michael's research, would the average/. reader have noticed the "independent" board members' links to DC? I certainly wouldn't have.
All this tells me is that developers are selective in what they link to. Some tend to get together and link to each other.
And these, the knot in the bowtie, are the meat of the Internet: real content with links elsewhere to cover what's not on that site. One example would be Slashdot.
Some tend to link only to themselves.
Your average corporate site...
Some want to be noticed so they provide lots of links, but aren't truly interesting, so nobody links to them.
...and your average home page, which more often than not contains a 100K list of bookmarks.
And finally, we have the disconnected pages linked to originating sites, which are linkless homepages and other contentless cruft.
None of this is particularly surprising, we've all seen examples of each type, although the ratio might have been a bit of surprise -- it seems to be about a 50-50 split between commercial and non-commercial. What would be even more interesting is a traffic analysis: how much of the Web's traffic is in that compact 30% core? I'd wager around 90%.
Ive been pretty interested watching IPv6 talk come about, but im somewhat confused by what ive seen.
So it seems.
i would have thought the easiest and most backword compadable upgrade would to go from 255.255.255.255 to 64 bit 512.512.512.512 but ive seen mostly hex used in the docs that ive read.
Err...huh? 512 is 2^9, so you're proposing a 9*4 = 36-bit address. This would entail exactly as much work as going whole hog to a 64-bit address (2^16*4), as you'll still need 2 32-bit words for the address (which means absolutely everything has to be rewritten), but it would only double the address space. The reason those docs use hex is that it makes dealing with binary arithmetic easier, 0xFFFF is rounder than 65536.
"I'm just surprised that it's progressed to phones," said Malarkey. He was one of the first recipients of an apparently novel kind of unsolicited electronic advertising, or "spam," sent via the text-messaging service on his AT&T Wireless phone.
And once again the US is way out of date when it comes to cellphones. =) I got my first cellphone spam back in 1997, along with most Finnish cellphone owners at the time. (And it was a dial-a-porn ad!) Predictably, the public was outraged and the company responsible for the spam was promptly slapped with a massive fine. And I haven't had a cellphone spam since...
Anyway, there are a few crucial differences between Internet spam and cellphone spam. First of all, sending cellphone spam costs, even with bulk delivery agreements it's close to 10 cents per message here in Finland. This alone limits the set of possible spammers a lot. Second, enforcement of any anti-spamming law is much easier: the phone company can very easily figure out what number is sending the spam, and obtaining a fake number is considerably harder than obtaining a fake account (and illegal too!). Forging SMS headers and obfuscating your tracks is also next to impossible.
So basically, for cellphone spam the advertiser pays the cost and is held responsible for their actions. There simply isn't much scope for abuse here.
Being an American currently living in London, I'd have to say I'm surprised that you are saying the Europeans have more healthy eating habits than Americans.
Fortunately most of us Europeans aren't British. =) English cooking, aptly summarized as "cook it 'till it's dead, dead, dead", is rather infamous...
...not that the food is necessarily all that much healthier elsewhere in Europe, with the Scandinavians sticking to their meat-and-potatoes diet, the French drowning everything in butter, cream and oil, the East Europeans thinking that vegetarian food means deep-fried cheese, etc. But serving sizes are usually quite a bit smaller (even at McDonalds).
For a more healthy diet, take a look at Asia: authentic Japanese, Chinese and Indian food tends to have a lot less protein and fat (read: meat) than the average American or European diet.
In conclusion, this "CDs are too expensive" rhetoric is totally bogus. If someone was capable of giving the artist more money and getting the music to consumers for less, we'd see the record companies go out of business. But they're not.
Ah, but it is possible. A few years back here in Finland, a new record company called Levy-yhtiö ("The Record Company") signed up a few obscure punk bands and started releasing their singles for $2 a pop (a fifth of the $10 or so charged by the major labels) and even full-length albums at a 50% discount. Nothing unusual about this so far... except that one of those punk bands, Apulanta, managed to become the biggest seller in Finland for that year and is still going strong. The major labels went ballistic, but the company refused to sell out. After its initial success lots of other promising bands wanted to sign up, so quite a few more hits followed and everybody was happy -- except the majors, who were eventually forced to lower their prices as well!
The problem is that the retail style distribution model is inefficient.
But this is still true, and the above is the exception that proves the rule. In Finland, the market is small enough that it's possible for a small company to break a song on radio or get their record into all the stores, but this just isn't going to happen in the States... until the Internet lets the consumers bypass the stores entirely.
Considering that CDs can cost as little as a few pennies to produce, I can't possibly see a reason to release anything in vinyl form especially since a huge amount of people don't even have a functioning record player.
If you're making a million Britney Spears albums off a single master, yes, CD is cheaper. But the cost of mastering a CD tends to be considerably higher, so for small runs (N Of course, in some specialty areas (like techno), you pretty much need to release vinyl or the DJs won't touch it. Only the better/more popular stuff ends up on CD, and that only long after release.
Does anyone know of a cheap way of transfering music to vinyl? There is a lot of music which never makes it to vinyl which I would like to scratch to. The only way I've heard of is having it mass-pressed (500+ copies).
A sort of "Vinyl-R" does indeed exist, in the form of the Vestax VRX 2000 vinyl cutting lathe. I'm not quite sure "cheap" is the correct word for it though, it costs £4000 and the special disks it eats are over £10 each. It's not out yet, so there is no information on Vestax's home page yet, but check out this preview -- it should be coming out this summer and prototypes are already floating around.
Cheers, -j. (occasionally also known as DJ Gnosis)
The Tripod page that Download.com links to appears to be broken. The d/l link just recurses back to its own page. Or is that a Slashdot effect?
Huh? It is not broken, I just downloaded my own copy from there. Just click "Download Now" and the rest is magic. (The "Developer's Site" link, though, is definitely broken, or at least not showing anything related to Wrapster.)
Just in case though, I've now mirrored it on my own server:
After all, there's a 620 watt halogen bulb as the heat source. With that much light I'm sure that plant growth nearby is somewhat accelerated due to a billion year old invention known as photosynthesis.
The fact that they included this bit of information is a sure sign that this is a hoax.
At least I was instantly reminded of another product that accelerates the growth of plants:
Reminds me of something I saw a week or two ago (can't remember where), about a claim that there can be no "smallest uninteresting number", because that very fact makes it interesting.
And, appropriately enough, this proof is also by Ramanujan. I can't seem to dig up a reference on the Web now, but one of Martin Gardner's books discusses this, along with the theory of "interesting numbers" in general.
I guess if you know someone else's PIN... but then again, that's not very different than knowing someone's password. Either way, there's not much you can do about it...
But authentication for voting should be better than just having to enter a single PIN. What happens if somebody intercepts a bunch of physical this-is-your-PIN letters on their way to the voters, or -- better yet -- snoops on their PINs when they're being sent online? (According to another poster, the site doesn't even use SSL!)
The correct approach would be using public key encryption, which would eliminate the need to send out PINs (just grab the voting office's public key from the net) and, with a decent level of encryption like that offered by PGP, would make cracking the voting message nearly impossible. Unfortunately, I somehow doubt that the Powers That Be want to see PGP installed in every household, and the voting office still needs to get the public keys of all voters somehow. But there have been plenty of schemes for government-run public key authorities, and it's probably only a matter of time until the infrastructure for digital signatures is created.
In all, online voting is a nifty idea, but there are a lot of security issues that need to be considered very carefully when implementing it. As a trivial example, can you imagine the impact of a well-timed DoS attack?
Assuming this rumor turns into reality, this has potential to be revolutionary. Some posters were sniping about AOL's target audience being "ultra-low-level" consumers, on the opposite end of the spectrum from Linux's current geek crowd -- but isn't that exactly the type of audience needed to achieve World Domination(tm)?
The way I see it, the benefits would be that first of all, Linux would (have to) get an interface designed for the mass audience. Linux's UI is currently developed by geeks for geeks, and it shows -- if they're serious about it, Corel/AOL/Intel have the muscle to develop something usable for the masses. Second, this would "sneak" Linux to a large group of people who would never otherwise even think about getting a Linux system, which will instantly increase the user base for all sorts of non-geek applications: more demand for games, more testers (guinea pigs?) for Corel Office, etc. And third, for every computer-illiterate AOLite mom who signs up so she can chat about soap operas, the same family will have a budding hacker kid who will now get the chance to grow up with Linux.
Or, to put a more pessimistic slant on the issue, until something like this happens I doubt Linux will ever be able to escape the server/geek-niche. But with more and more companies dishing out free PCs, ditching that expensive MS operating system will soon start to look mighty promising...
Does anyone else think that country is worthy of ridicule, that will crash $1.5 billion of equipment to avoid even the remote chance that it might hurt some single-celled bacteria, and then legalize the destruction of millions of unborn babies?
Slashdot Mirror
The server seems to be slashdotted, anybody got a mirror?
Or maybe I'll just go trawl Napster...
Cheers,
-j.
Well, actually, they can demand that you paint yourself blue, put on a tutu and go dance live on Fuji TV if they want to. If the sites have indeed violated Fuji's copyrights, Fuji could immediately start legal action based on what has already happened, instead of giving the violator an easy way out.
(Not that any of this makes Fuji's actions less stupid, but...)
Cheers,
-j.
It would be considerably more difficult to seize the data in Sealand, where you'd need to mount a full-scale military invasion, than to seize the data in the US or the UK, where all the government needs is a search warrant.
Cheers,
-j.
Definitely. I've put up quite a few of my travel stories up on the net. Travel writing is practically impossible to sell and so I haven't even tried, but on the Net, with no advertising other than a few search engine submissions, I've gotten thousands of readers and lots of feedback. Write a really good story, like Philip Greenspun, and you'll get hundreds of thousands.
Philip also explains why he isn't a writer and why the Net is far better medium than dead trees. Excellent reading.
Cheers,
-j.
Damn straight. And the bizarre thing is, these is a WAP equivalent that does not suck: NTT Docomo's i-mode. Unfortunately, it's a proprietary PDC (Japan-only) system and so it will never be seen elsewhere, but it has managed to avoid the key mistakes which are likely to doom WAP to oblivion.
- Mistake 1: WAP phones do not allow access to the Internet (yes, I know about gateways and such, but they're a hack). i-mode phones do. Result: right off the bat the i-mode can access a lot more content.
- Mistake 2: WAP is so overpriced it's not even funny. Here in Finland, which usually has very low prices for cellular use, a single WAP call can easily cost several dollars -- compare this with less than 10c for an SMS or a one-minute call. In Japan, i-mode costs a low fixed monthly fee and e.g. e-mail costs one yen (approx. 1c) a pop.
- Mistake 3: WAP phones are normal phones with teensy screens. i-mode phones have huge displays, the never models even have color screen. Usability is much better.
i-mode looks set to have 10 million subscribers by the end of the year. In Finland I don't know a soul who actually uses WAP, and I work at a company that develops WAP applications! Like most people here, I'll wait until UMTS is rolled out before buying my next phone, WAP simply does not provide any incentive to upgrade now.Cheers,
-j.
Really?
http://www.nokia.com/phones/6250/
And it's been out for a year now, I almost bought one myself. You may, however, be correct in that such phones may not exist for the US market -- the 6250 is GSM 900/1800 only.
Cheers,
-j. (a former Nokia employee, but glad to be out)
Oh, bull-pucky. I don't know what school you went to, but my English classes in high school (in New York and Helsinki) included 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World as mandatory reading -- hell, in the IB program, there was an entire year about conflicts between individual and society, with horse doctor's doses of Camus, Ibsen, el-Saadawi, etc.
Of course, there are still some limits to what will be taught in school. Clockwork Orange is generally considered too extreme and graphic (although I still read it for the first time in the school library), and Huxley's post-60's work (Doors of Perception, Island, etc) is ignored -- not because the writing is any less skillful, but because portraying drug use or Tantric sex in a positive light would freak out the P.T.A. The contents of the curriculum tend to be set according to the collective sum of parental opinion, not because the teacher is Nazi in disguise.
Cheers,
-j.
I beg to differ. An insurance company would pay through the nose to get its hands on that AIDS victim data, but due to these niggling privacy concerns, DoubleClick can't sell that data legally. But would they do it if they could get away with it? Of course!
But just because he writes a line or two about their supposed 'evilness', doesn't make it true.
Corporations, like money itself, are neither inherently evil nor good. The problem here is that the consumer's good (privacy) conflicts with the corporation's good (profit).
A relatively well rounded board (on the surface atleast) to advise a CORPORATION on what they can, and should, realistically do.
Undoubtedly, but the whole point is that DoubleClick's board doesn't look terribly well-rounded.
Cheers,
-j.
Paranoia and albino cats are indeed quite unnecessary, as DoubleClick's actions are backed by sound logic. DC is a for-profit company, and the more information about their customers they have, the more profit they can make. Hence privacy is detrimental to their bottom line, and it's in DC's best interest to fight against it -- as long as the public backlash from doing so doesn't outweigh the gains.
In this light, setting up that wonderfully named Consumer Privacy Advocacy Board is perfectly logical. Create a board so it looks like they care about privacy, and populate it with stooges (carefully selected from other organizations so it doesn't look too obvious) to prevent the board from actually interfering with their operations. Downright brilliant... unless you're a consumer. And without michael's research, would the average /. reader have noticed the "independent" board members' links to DC? I certainly wouldn't have.
Cheers,
-j.
And these, the knot in the bowtie, are the meat of the Internet: real content with links elsewhere to cover what's not on that site. One example would be Slashdot.
Some tend to link only to themselves.
Your average corporate site...
Some want to be noticed so they provide lots of links, but aren't truly interesting, so nobody links to them.
And finally, we have the disconnected pages linked to originating sites, which are linkless homepages and other contentless cruft.
None of this is particularly surprising, we've all seen examples of each type, although the ratio might have been a bit of surprise -- it seems to be about a 50-50 split between commercial and non-commercial. What would be even more interesting is a traffic analysis: how much of the Web's traffic is in that compact 30% core? I'd wager around 90%.
Cheers,
-j.
So it seems.
i would have thought the easiest and most backword compadable upgrade would to go from 255.255.255.255 to 64 bit 512.512.512.512 but ive seen mostly hex used in the docs that ive read.
Err...huh? 512 is 2^9, so you're proposing a 9*4 = 36-bit address. This would entail exactly as much work as going whole hog to a 64-bit address (2^16*4), as you'll still need 2 32-bit words for the address (which means absolutely everything has to be rewritten), but it would only double the address space. The reason those docs use hex is that it makes dealing with binary arithmetic easier, 0xFFFF is rounder than 65536.
Cheers,
-j.
And once again the US is way out of date when it comes to cellphones. =) I got my first cellphone spam back in 1997, along with most Finnish cellphone owners at the time. (And it was a dial-a-porn ad!) Predictably, the public was outraged and the company responsible for the spam was promptly slapped with a massive fine. And I haven't had a cellphone spam since...
Anyway, there are a few crucial differences between Internet spam and cellphone spam. First of all, sending cellphone spam costs, even with bulk delivery agreements it's close to 10 cents per message here in Finland. This alone limits the set of possible spammers a lot. Second, enforcement of any anti-spamming law is much easier: the phone company can very easily figure out what number is sending the spam, and obtaining a fake number is considerably harder than obtaining a fake account (and illegal too!). Forging SMS headers and obfuscating your tracks is also next to impossible.
So basically, for cellphone spam the advertiser pays the cost and is held responsible for their actions. There simply isn't much scope for abuse here.
Cheers,
-j.
Fortunately most of us Europeans aren't British. =) English cooking, aptly summarized as "cook it 'till it's dead, dead, dead", is rather infamous...
For a more healthy diet, take a look at Asia: authentic Japanese, Chinese and Indian food tends to have a lot less protein and fat (read: meat) than the average American or European diet.
Cheers,
-j.
Ah, but it is possible. A few years back here in Finland, a new record company called Levy-yhtiö ("The Record Company") signed up a few obscure punk bands and started releasing their singles for $2 a pop (a fifth of the $10 or so charged by the major labels) and even full-length albums at a 50% discount. Nothing unusual about this so far... except that one of those punk bands, Apulanta, managed to become the biggest seller in Finland for that year and is still going strong. The major labels went ballistic, but the company refused to sell out. After its initial success lots of other promising bands wanted to sign up, so quite a few more hits followed and everybody was happy -- except the majors, who were eventually forced to lower their prices as well!
The problem is that the retail style distribution model is inefficient.
But this is still true, and the above is the exception that proves the rule. In Finland, the market is small enough that it's possible for a small company to break a song on radio or get their record into all the stores, but this just isn't going to happen in the States... until the Internet lets the consumers bypass the stores entirely.
Cheers,
-j.
If you're making a million Britney Spears albums off a single master, yes, CD is cheaper. But the cost of mastering a CD tends to be considerably higher, so for small runs (N Of course, in some specialty areas (like techno), you pretty much need to release vinyl or the DJs won't touch it. Only the better/more popular stuff ends up on CD, and that only long after release.
Cheers,
-j.
A sort of "Vinyl-R" does indeed exist, in the form of the Vestax VRX 2000 vinyl cutting lathe. I'm not quite sure "cheap" is the correct word for it though, it costs £4000 and the special disks it eats are over £10 each. It's not out yet, so there is no information on Vestax's home page yet, but check out this preview -- it should be coming out this summer and prototypes are already floating around.
Cheers,
-j. (occasionally also known as DJ Gnosis)
Huh? It is not broken, I just downloaded my own copy from there. Just click "Download Now" and the rest is magic. (The "Developer's Site" link, though, is definitely broken, or at least not showing anything related to Wrapster.)
Just in case though, I've now mirrored it on my own server:
http://jpatokal.iki.fi/tmp/wrapster.exe
Cheers,
-j.
http://download.cnet.com/downloads/0-10080-100-158 1508.html?tag=st.dl.10001_103_1.lst.td
Cheers,
-j.
The fact that they included this bit of information is a sure sign that this is a hoax.
At least I was instantly reminded of another product that accelerates the growth of plants:
http://www.tuxedo .org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/SNAFU-principle.html
Coincidence?
Cheers,
-j.
And, appropriately enough, this proof is also by Ramanujan. I can't seem to dig up a reference on the Web now, but one of Martin Gardner's books discusses this, along with the theory of "interesting numbers" in general.
Cheers,
-j.
But authentication for voting should be better than just having to enter a single PIN. What happens if somebody intercepts a bunch of physical this-is-your-PIN letters on their way to the voters, or -- better yet -- snoops on their PINs when they're being sent online? (According to another poster, the site doesn't even use SSL!)
The correct approach would be using public key encryption, which would eliminate the need to send out PINs (just grab the voting office's public key from the net) and, with a decent level of encryption like that offered by PGP, would make cracking the voting message nearly impossible. Unfortunately, I somehow doubt that the Powers That Be want to see PGP installed in every household, and the voting office still needs to get the public keys of all voters somehow. But there have been plenty of schemes for government-run public key authorities, and it's probably only a matter of time until the infrastructure for digital signatures is created.
In all, online voting is a nifty idea, but there are a lot of security issues that need to be considered very carefully when implementing it. As a trivial example, can you imagine the impact of a well-timed DoS attack?
Cheers,
-j.
The way I see it, the benefits would be that first of all, Linux would (have to) get an interface designed for the mass audience. Linux's UI is currently developed by geeks for geeks, and it shows -- if they're serious about it, Corel/AOL/Intel have the muscle to develop something usable for the masses. Second, this would "sneak" Linux to a large group of people who would never otherwise even think about getting a Linux system, which will instantly increase the user base for all sorts of non-geek applications: more demand for games, more testers (guinea pigs?) for Corel Office, etc. And third, for every computer-illiterate AOLite mom who signs up so she can chat about soap operas, the same family will have a budding hacker kid who will now get the chance to grow up with Linux.
Or, to put a more pessimistic slant on the issue, until something like this happens I doubt Linux will ever be able to escape the server/geek-niche. But with more and more companies dishing out free PCs, ditching that expensive MS operating system will soon start to look mighty promising...
Cheers,
-j.
I couldn't agree more. Criminalize masturbation NOW!
This is incredibly stupid.
At least you got one thing right.
Cheers,
-j.
Because years that are divisible by 100 are not leap years, despite being divisible by 4. (Unless they're divisible by 400, that is.)
Cheers,
-j.
You don't have to -- SSH happens to be from Finland. <grin>
ObURL: http://www.ssh.com/about/company/
Cheers,
-j.