Mod Parent Up. This is exactly what I thought of, but of course I wasn't FP.
Depending upon your "type of parent", just blame it on some random unknown hacker. Or if you pick the "It was me" approach, you add "and I'm just an amateur. The profesional Black Hats could run circles around me."
On a different level though, this is the discussion of the Age of Terror. "How exhausted do I want to be following security procedures compared to the risk of real damage?" For example, if you wanted the same effect as logging off, what if you just shut down the net conmnectivity, and told them "you have to double click this to get back on the net".
I would look for an 80-20 compromise that ALMOST protects them with the best value per minute ratio, and then hope for the best.
In fact, this is very easy. The guys on the "Linux partnership team" will certainly be different from the guys coding front line Windows software. They'll get about 75% of something coded to some level of Beta stage for Linux. Then some manager will decide "This use of resources is no longer in keeping with our direction". Thus all effort will be removed towards "other priorities".
Imagine for example if PlaysForSure were open source. The way Microsoft dropped it in favor of Zune is exactly the cycle I am describing. (I'm dying to see the Quarterly report for that one!)
Of course Slashers will figure it out. But since when does Microsoft care about something as harmless as a blog? They take on entire countries worth of AntiTrust units daily.
The Preview word for this post is Penguin. (Note to self: Get test machine to explore Linux Distros.)
I have to coin a term for this, because piecing this story together from the posts, it's just SO wrong on SO many levels. A lot of them imply M$ is stupid. I don't think so. Not... quite. Unable to compete creatively, unable to understand real customer needs, etc. But not quite stupid. But we all agree they ARE sneaky. Time to invent a word: FUDware.
1. In their partnership, they first acquire "usage" to someone's hot core tech they could never reverse engineer.
2. Team A proceeds to make Vista ports of the stuff. They'll need forever, which is what their entire rest of the plan is desiged for.
3. Team B shares a worthless early version of something, plus some tasty cash. True to their word, CodeFragment1 will indeed be "Free OSS". But if the free portion has swiss cheese holes in it, someone is going to have to write patchware for it. M$ beats them to the punch, with "proprietary" patchware "today".
4. This slows down external developers, who don't wish to duplicate M$'s direct work. Magically, M$'s Patchware slips a deadline or three.
5. Then M$ has bought themselves enough time to bury it all in BlackComb, then drill everyone with a snaky glare and dare them to sue.
EVEN if all those myriad other examples are ignored as "the Net was young", the Zune move M$ pulled on all its PlaysForSure partners silences all doubt.
Microsoft updated the terms of Vista to include "One Additional Pumpkin Usage". An anonymous official has said, "we want our users to have Holiday functionality".
Everyone in the world agrees that Win95 was awful. What excited the business world is that far sighted managers saw through the initial stability problems, and correctly guessed that MS had mostly nailed the front end.
After several years using early Macs, I received a Win98 P133 machine as a gift (Free as in ?). Two years is not truly a lot of time, so I barely had time to learn the basics of where Microsoft put things, visit Shawn Fanning's creation, and then, per my pattern, hunker down with a bargain Win2000 machine to wait 4 years for Microsoft to sort itself out.
I'll be getting another long haul machine early next year combining new Intel hardware with the last, best copy of XP while I wait for another 4 years for Microsoft to sort itself out again.
It seems to me the powerhouse developer crowd here will do just fine with whatever state high grade XHTML will be in once MS IE7 gets its act together and renders standards properly (3rd Quarter 2008?) However, the brilliance behind some of the initial design of HTML was that the inclusive concept of the Web only works if *everyone* feels they have a chance to get in on the fun.
Example: Miss Pelling is an assistant school administrator by day, takes care of her family, and plays Hearts on the third thursday of the month. She wants to make a small webpage to list the results of the four Hearts teams in her gaming group. She only has time to study a little HTML about 5 hours a month, and within 3 months her page is up, and a couple months later, she has fixed the worst of the initial goofs and found a nice background her nephew told her about. About in line with her patience level, starting with month 7 her page is just how she likes it, and she gleefully posts her victory.
I support a parallel development of a "Training Version" of HTML that slowly encourages some of the changes that will eventually prove necessary for someone who wants to graduate to XHTML. Many people want to learn comptuter skills in as forgiving an environment as possible. (Don't we always get called upon for "free IT" every time an Adobe PDF locks up the printer?) However badly distorted in Hollywood, Revenge of the Nerds nailed the mood dead-center: As of 1983, computers simply weren't ready for the masses.
I myself am not a professional coder. In my limited recreational time, I'm not interested in fixing obscure errors. I peeked at XHTML twice, and it's too much right now. But I am willing to fix some bad habits incrementally, so that some such year if I get a 3 month sabbatical, I might be able to learn. I think I just stumbled across some remark that says "tags should be in lower case letters". Oh.
No, the smart people show up, so that they quit getting letters from the Jury Commissioner. Then when we prove we have an IQ with at least 3 digits, we get dismissed by the prosecuting counsel because we're not pansies. Having duly appeared, we are then are exempt from nuisance for x years. Then we go back to our jobs with double-digit - per/hour wages.
1. Difference between Gary Brolsma and Ghyslain Raza: Gary Brolsma is kewl with himself now, and found a sponsor. Selling out means perks along the way. Raza disappeared in despair.
2. Rob Manuel Genius Meme factory. Name That Beard is safe enough for old ladies. I need to find the song used for Rasputin though.
3. George W. Bush Moron Meme factory. Trouble is, we elected him instead of Rob Manuel.
I second this approach. *Under the correct conditions*, I use an inexpensive pair of *very large* phones, and play the music.
The problem is, "the distracting noise" consists of your Boss telling you to do stuff completely different from the "high priority" he gave you an hour ago.
Now I hear people raving over these "web solutions".
Me: "Why would you want to use one of those?" Uncertain Proponent: "What if you are traveling and you have to get some work done?" Me: "My work is on my watch."
Therapist: "Okay, now it is time to address frustrations. Mac, express a frustration about PC. " Mac: "I'm really upset that you proved vulnerable to the virus we somehow loaded onto our flagship product." Therapist: "I see. PC, express a frustration about Mac." PC: "Mac, Why did you try to get me sick in the first place?"
Therapist: "Mac, maybe you'd better come in twice a week to deal with your anger-displacement issues."
75% of the posters above this point in the threading slammed this offering pretty badly. It's NOT meant to be opened between two subway passengers. A, you should know better than having delusions of concentration on the subway, and B, if you really are that good, print yourself 50 pages of email to read on your 38 minute commute.
You successfully arrive to your conference with the client, where you two can discuss **whatever** without feeling hemmed in by a typical laptop 14-ish inch screen. You have the full keyboard, so your typing doesn't go to pieces, and at the end of the meeting, you hand off your proposal, and pack it up.
Someone thinks there's a little durability built in here for once. Yes, it's nice not to have a laptop completely disintegrate because you dropped it once.
My only concern is the price break. This is October... therefore it's $2500-ish. presuming it doesn't Bomb and force Dell to retire it in embarassment, I'd buy it the minute it hits the $1500 range, perhaps next August.
I seem to recall a CAN-SPAM law passing some time back, requiring some firm restrictions on the type of mail sent. This led to the rash of fake names, some of which are hysterical, like "Amelia H. Beehives".
Has anyone "gathered data" by requesting say 10 gigs worth of the email that e360 sends, parsed it to probable 98% which violates CAN-SPAM as being unsolicited, then slam the daylights out of e360?
I know a tiny bit about the technology of bulk emailing. Exactly what would be stopping me from sending 10 million emails to that contact address? It's EVEN SOLICITED!!
One of you SlashDot Lawyers, help me out here. Did someone miss a glorious chance at Eye for Eye justice?
"I hereby sentence you to receiving the opinion of every adult american, by email, all 110 million of them"
This is the second time aspersions have been cast upon the intelligent population of internet users. Could this be a reaction to the declining usage of $100 per hour counseling sessions?
Both of these studies clearly have an agenda. The facts appear to be plausibly documented. It is the conclusion which is in doubt. The subjects of the study were described as having met with situations of cognitive dissonance. Instead of performing a deestructive act, they quietly went online, where it is even rumored they have been shopping. Even George W. Bush praised Americans for their shopping contributions to the economy, which stands as a counter statement against the attempt to create economic slowdowns through the promotion of fear.
Nearly all psychologists would agree that in the face of disturbing situations, any calm ctivity which allows the practice of distress tolerance is a candidate for an acceptible course of action. I see no biomedical information in the article, but I presume the internet activity reduced stress as indicated by common measures.
The flaw of this, and the previous article, is that it *automatically assumes* that "too much internet usage" is a negative event. This appears to be an incorrectly derived conclusion. Perhaps excepting pornography, internet usage in general statistically correlates with additional knowledge acquired. (The parallel humorous comment is dispensed with by remarking the other activity refines technique.)
The information age is here to stay. I do not wish to see any more articles copying symptoms from biochemical dependency diseases onto information acquisition usage. Copying symptoms is considered dubious for any other disease; therefore we must not allow this logical fallacy to remain unchallenged here.
So didn't some of you get picked on by Mauler the school bully, so you retreated to a club after school, then your room to watch TV while programming/gaming?
Young kids like "action". TV delivers "action", including the ads, at a higher pace than "sitting on the couch chillin". Fine, you finished your hour playing soccer in the yard, then it became time to do **something**.
The brighter kids probably went for computer games, the more average ones settled for three hours of TV with their friends. (Because TV is social, right? Didn't you invite Johnny from next door, after you asked Mom?)
Now that we're all older, all these comments are rescripting childhood.
I have to reply to this one, as it just so happens to match my Sig. Other remarks:
1. One piece of bad luck doesn't easily wipe out your entire library. (%^$%$%, I stepped on the screen).
2. Some of us actually hand-annotate our books with notes, and/or insert pages of "potential blog material".
3. This is Sony. Given their last experiment in user trust, I'm now very wary of their approach to media.
4. I think the 21st century struggle over DRM is drastically shortening the life of media. The great text files of 1985-era are still around. Microsoft is going for the record of marooning two proprietary formats in ten years. (Plays-for-Sure and Zune)
It took me a few minutes to decide the best comment to attach to.
It appears to me that one point of this discussion is not having the correct terms to separate our concepts with. Memory and its related processing is data/knowledge/information. No action is implied.
Standard IQ, measured on the classical tests, tests for conceptual throughput capability in areas such as math, language, spatial, and so on. However, thundering mountains of things are not gauged on the classical tests.
Daniel Goleman publicized his term for the missing elements. "Emotional Intelligence". Now that more accurate terms are present in the discussion, I would describe the poster's father had a very high conceptual ability indeed. However, his "Emotional Intelligence" was indeed very poor, and evenually caused a tragic loss of his former abilities. Please, recall his former glories, and treat him as a mixed character whose faults finally outweighed his gifts.
Instead, I think MyBubble is quite different than BuyBubble the first time around. As I see it, Bubble 1.0 was all about "Can we trade StoreFront rent (Location, Location, Location = expensive) into our profit margin?" A 1.0 site stocked a warehouse say in three funky locations where space is cheap, then DropShipped stuff to customers ordering remotely.
Problem developed, only the small (5%-ish?) experts made it work, a huge swath "spent little, did little", and the remainder spent gloriously... and croaked gloriously. At least Bubble 1.0 was simply a spin on the usual retail mechanics. When they traded the localization of customers, they landed into the globalization of competitors.
MyBubble sites start by trying to collect people doing NonCommercial activities. Eyeballs appear, and advertisers present things to eyeballs. However, the success rate might be even lower this time around! I think I'm reading that these sites have smaller Ops budgets, so they might be able to die whimpering rather than erupting.
If I recall my history theory correctly, the word that's becoming relevant is Oligarchy. "Rule by the Few". Okay, So Microsoft is not quite a *Monopoly*. However, noting I said "Rule" and not quite "Own", Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and your choice of an industrial back end OS DO Rule the computing world. Apple's iPod, SanDisk, Creative, and your choice of a couple more own the Mp3 market. I'm less versed on the names, but the gaming market is down to 5 players or less. *together*, Yahoo, Google, and your choice of #'s 3 & 4 own the search world.
Let's suppose MyBubble quietly loses air, the Big Players parcel everything among themselves, and everything settles into a plateau. I can't see ANY other models at all! Does anyone know? However fake, I recall the pseudo excitement of 1999. After everything shakes out in a few years, I forecast a vast DULL expanse that feels like it has the potential to go into PermaStasis for decades. (Allowance made for your choice of three minor blips: BioTech, Silicon Intelligence, and a guest third.)
Slashdot Mirror
Mod Parent Up. This is exactly what I thought of, but of course I wasn't FP.
Depending upon your "type of parent", just blame it on some random unknown hacker. Or if you pick the "It was me" approach, you add "and I'm just an amateur. The profesional Black Hats could run circles around me."
On a different level though, this is the discussion of the Age of Terror. "How exhausted do I want to be following security procedures compared to the risk of real damage?" For example, if you wanted the same effect as logging off, what if you just shut down the net conmnectivity, and told them "you have to double click this to get back on the net".
I would look for an 80-20 compromise that ALMOST protects them with the best value per minute ratio, and then hope for the best.
Please let this happen. {:>
"Always post the Doomsday Scenario. Good Luck can take care of itself."
In fact, this is very easy. The guys on the "Linux partnership team" will certainly be different from the guys coding front line Windows software. They'll get about 75% of something coded to some level of Beta stage for Linux. Then some manager will decide "This use of resources is no longer in keeping with our direction". Thus all effort will be removed towards "other priorities".
Imagine for example if PlaysForSure were open source. The way Microsoft dropped it in favor of Zune is exactly the cycle I am describing. (I'm dying to see the Quarterly report for that one!)
Of course Slashers will figure it out. But since when does Microsoft care about something as harmless as a blog? They take on entire countries worth of AntiTrust units daily.
The Preview word for this post is Penguin. (Note to self: Get test machine to explore Linux Distros.)
I have to coin a term for this, because piecing this story together from the posts, it's just SO wrong on SO many levels. A lot of them imply M$ is stupid. I don't think so. Not ... quite. Unable to compete creatively, unable to understand real customer needs, etc. But not quite stupid. But we all agree they ARE sneaky. Time to invent a word: FUDware.
1. In their partnership, they first acquire "usage" to someone's hot core tech they could never reverse engineer.
2. Team A proceeds to make Vista ports of the stuff. They'll need forever, which is what their entire rest of the plan is desiged for.
3. Team B shares a worthless early version of something, plus some tasty cash. True to their word, CodeFragment1 will indeed be "Free OSS". But if the free portion has swiss cheese holes in it, someone is going to have to write patchware for it. M$ beats them to the punch, with "proprietary" patchware "today".
4. This slows down external developers, who don't wish to duplicate M$'s direct work. Magically, M$'s Patchware slips a deadline or three.
5. Then M$ has bought themselves enough time to bury it all in BlackComb, then drill everyone with a snaky glare and dare them to sue.
EVEN if all those myriad other examples are ignored as "the Net was young", the Zune move M$ pulled on all its PlaysForSure partners silences all doubt.
Redmond, WA
Microsoft updated the terms of Vista to include "One Additional Pumpkin Usage". An anonymous official has said, "we want our users to have Holiday functionality".
Everyone in the world agrees that Win95 was awful. What excited the business world is that far sighted managers saw through the initial stability problems, and correctly guessed that MS had mostly nailed the front end.
After several years using early Macs, I received a Win98 P133 machine as a gift (Free as in ?). Two years is not truly a lot of time, so I barely had time to learn the basics of where Microsoft put things, visit Shawn Fanning's creation, and then, per my pattern, hunker down with a bargain Win2000 machine to wait 4 years for Microsoft to sort itself out.
I'll be getting another long haul machine early next year combining new Intel hardware with the last, best copy of XP while I wait for another 4 years for Microsoft to sort itself out again.
Poke 53280,0
Ready.
It seems to me the powerhouse developer crowd here will do just fine with whatever state high grade XHTML will be in once MS IE7 gets its act together and renders standards properly (3rd Quarter 2008?) However, the brilliance behind some of the initial design of HTML was that the inclusive concept of the Web only works if *everyone* feels they have a chance to get in on the fun.
Example: Miss Pelling is an assistant school administrator by day, takes care of her family, and plays Hearts on the third thursday of the month. She wants to make a small webpage to list the results of the four Hearts teams in her gaming group. She only has time to study a little HTML about 5 hours a month, and within 3 months her page is up, and a couple months later, she has fixed the worst of the initial goofs and found a nice background her nephew told her about. About in line with her patience level, starting with month 7 her page is just how she likes it, and she gleefully posts her victory.
I support a parallel development of a "Training Version" of HTML that slowly encourages some of the changes that will eventually prove necessary for someone who wants to graduate to XHTML. Many people want to learn comptuter skills in as forgiving an environment as possible. (Don't we always get called upon for "free IT" every time an Adobe PDF locks up the printer?) However badly distorted in Hollywood, Revenge of the Nerds nailed the mood dead-center: As of 1983, computers simply weren't ready for the masses.
I myself am not a professional coder. In my limited recreational time, I'm not interested in fixing obscure errors. I peeked at XHTML twice, and it's too much right now. But I am willing to fix some bad habits incrementally, so that some such year if I get a 3 month sabbatical, I might be able to learn. I think I just stumbled across some remark that says "tags should be in lower case letters". Oh.
No, the smart people show up, so that they quit getting letters from the Jury Commissioner. Then when we prove we have an IQ with at least 3 digits, we get dismissed by the prosecuting counsel because we're not pansies. Having duly appeared, we are then are exempt from nuisance for x years. Then we go back to our jobs with double-digit - per/hour wages.
So much for "Jury of your Peers".
(( Heard from a low level admin))
"Accounting called. They want to know the cost code for Sending Cakes to Competitors".
The top ones in my mind beyond All Your Base are:
1. Difference between Gary Brolsma and Ghyslain Raza:
Gary Brolsma is kewl with himself now, and found a sponsor. Selling out means perks along the way. Raza disappeared in despair.
2. Rob Manuel
Genius Meme factory. Name That Beard is safe enough for old ladies. I need to find the song used for Rasputin though.
3. George W. Bush
Moron Meme factory. Trouble is, we elected him instead of Rob Manuel.
Of course not.
Apple wouldn't allow PC QA equipment now, would they?
I second this approach. *Under the correct conditions*, I use an inexpensive pair of *very large* phones, and play the music.
The problem is, "the distracting noise" consists of your Boss telling you to do stuff completely different from the "high priority" he gave you an hour ago.
Now I hear people raving over these "web solutions".
Me: "Why would you want to use one of those?"
Uncertain Proponent: "What if you are traveling and you have to get some work done?"
Me: "My work is on my watch."
Therapist: "Okay, now it is time to address frustrations. Mac, express a frustration about PC. "
Mac: "I'm really upset that you proved vulnerable to the virus we somehow loaded onto our flagship product."
Therapist: "I see. PC, express a frustration about Mac."
PC: "Mac, Why did you try to get me sick in the first place?"
Therapist: "Mac, maybe you'd better come in twice a week to deal with your anger-displacement issues."
75% of the posters above this point in the threading slammed this offering pretty badly. It's NOT meant to be opened between two subway passengers. A, you should know better than having delusions of concentration on the subway, and B, if you really are that good, print yourself 50 pages of email to read on your 38 minute commute.
You successfully arrive to your conference with the client, where you two can discuss **whatever** without feeling hemmed in by a typical laptop 14-ish inch screen. You have the full keyboard, so your typing doesn't go to pieces, and at the end of the meeting, you hand off your proposal, and pack it up.
Someone thinks there's a little durability built in here for once. Yes, it's nice not to have a laptop completely disintegrate because you dropped it once.
My only concern is the price break. This is October... therefore it's $2500-ish.
presuming it doesn't Bomb and force Dell to retire it in embarassment, I'd buy it the minute it hits the $1500 range, perhaps next August.
I seem to recall a CAN-SPAM law passing some time back, requiring some firm restrictions on the type of mail sent. This led to the rash of fake names, some of which are hysterical, like "Amelia H. Beehives".
Has anyone "gathered data" by requesting say 10 gigs worth of the email that e360 sends, parsed it to probable 98% which violates CAN-SPAM as being unsolicited, then slam the daylights out of e360?
I know a tiny bit about the technology of bulk emailing. Exactly what would be stopping me from sending 10 million emails to that contact address? It's EVEN SOLICITED!!
One of you SlashDot Lawyers, help me out here. Did someone miss a glorious chance at Eye for Eye justice?
"I hereby sentence you to receiving the opinion of every adult american, by email, all 110 million of them"
Isn't Dinner at 9:30 every morning, after the nightly backup?
Special to SlashDot:
This is the second time aspersions have been cast upon the intelligent population of internet users. Could this be a reaction to the declining usage of $100 per hour counseling sessions?
Both of these studies clearly have an agenda. The facts appear to be plausibly documented. It is the conclusion which is in doubt. The subjects of the study were described as having met with situations of cognitive dissonance. Instead of performing a deestructive act, they quietly went online, where it is even rumored they have been shopping. Even George W. Bush praised Americans for their shopping contributions to the economy, which stands as a counter statement against the attempt to create economic slowdowns through the promotion of fear.
Nearly all psychologists would agree that in the face of disturbing situations, any calm ctivity which allows the practice of distress tolerance is a candidate for an acceptible course of action. I see no biomedical information in the article, but I presume the internet activity reduced stress as indicated by common measures.
The flaw of this, and the previous article, is that it *automatically assumes* that "too much internet usage" is a negative event. This appears to be an incorrectly derived conclusion. Perhaps excepting pornography, internet usage in general statistically correlates with additional knowledge acquired. (The parallel humorous comment is dispensed with by remarking the other activity refines technique.)
The information age is here to stay. I do not wish to see any more articles copying symptoms from biochemical dependency diseases onto information acquisition usage. Copying symptoms is considered dubious for any other disease; therefore we must not allow this logical fallacy to remain unchallenged here.
--TaoPhoenix
We're on Slashdot because we're bright.
So didn't some of you get picked on by Mauler the school bully, so you retreated to a club after school, then your room to watch TV while programming/gaming?
Young kids like "action". TV delivers "action", including the ads, at a higher pace than "sitting on the couch chillin". Fine, you finished your hour playing soccer in the yard, then it became time to do **something**.
The brighter kids probably went for computer games, the more average ones settled for three hours of TV with their friends. (Because TV is social, right? Didn't you invite Johnny from next door, after you asked Mom?)
Now that we're all older, all these comments are rescripting childhood.
McDonalds, being the fast value place, "merely installed" a trojan, probably of mediocre quality.
Sony, being a high class electronics firm, installed the rootkit that cinched Mark Russinovich's job with Microsoft.
Right, so can I just collect say 7000 of these, strip the worm, and then resell them myself? What's the capacity?
I have to reply to this one, as it just so happens to match my Sig. Other remarks:
1. One piece of bad luck doesn't easily wipe out your entire library. (%^$%$%, I stepped on the screen).
2. Some of us actually hand-annotate our books with notes, and/or insert pages of "potential blog material".
3. This is Sony. Given their last experiment in user trust, I'm now very wary of their approach to media.
4. I think the 21st century struggle over DRM is drastically shortening the life of media. The great text files of 1985-era are still around. Microsoft is going for the record of marooning two proprietary formats in ten years. (Plays-for-Sure and Zune)
It took me a few minutes to decide the best comment to attach to.
It appears to me that one point of this discussion is not having the correct terms to separate our concepts with. Memory and its related processing is data/knowledge/information. No action is implied.
Standard IQ, measured on the classical tests, tests for conceptual throughput capability in areas such as math, language, spatial, and so on. However, thundering mountains of things are not gauged on the classical tests.
Daniel Goleman publicized his term for the missing elements. "Emotional Intelligence". Now that more accurate terms are present in the discussion, I would describe the poster's father had a very high conceptual ability indeed. However, his "Emotional Intelligence" was indeed very poor, and evenually caused a tragic loss of his former abilities. Please, recall his former glories, and treat him as a mixed character whose faults finally outweighed his gifts.
Instead, I think MyBubble is quite different than BuyBubble the first time around. As I see it, Bubble 1.0 was all about "Can we trade StoreFront rent (Location, Location, Location = expensive) into our profit margin?" A 1.0 site stocked a warehouse say in three funky locations where space is cheap, then DropShipped stuff to customers ordering remotely.
... and croaked gloriously. At least Bubble 1.0 was simply a spin on the usual retail mechanics. When they traded the localization of customers, they landed into the globalization of competitors.
Problem developed, only the small (5%-ish?) experts made it work, a huge swath "spent little, did little", and the remainder spent gloriously
MyBubble sites start by trying to collect people doing NonCommercial activities. Eyeballs appear, and advertisers present things to eyeballs. However, the success rate might be even lower this time around! I think I'm reading that these sites have smaller Ops budgets, so they might be able to die whimpering rather than erupting.
If I recall my history theory correctly, the word that's becoming relevant is Oligarchy. "Rule by the Few". Okay, So Microsoft is not quite a *Monopoly*. However, noting I said "Rule" and not quite "Own", Microsoft, Apple, Linux, and your choice of an industrial back end OS DO Rule the computing world. Apple's iPod, SanDisk, Creative, and your choice of a couple more own the Mp3 market. I'm less versed on the names, but the gaming market is down to 5 players or less. *together*, Yahoo, Google, and your choice of #'s 3 & 4 own the search world.
Let's suppose MyBubble quietly loses air, the Big Players parcel everything among themselves, and everything settles into a plateau. I can't see ANY other models at all! Does anyone know? However fake, I recall the pseudo excitement of 1999. After everything shakes out in a few years, I forecast a vast DULL expanse that feels like it has the potential to go into PermaStasis for decades. (Allowance made for your choice of three minor blips: BioTech, Silicon Intelligence, and a guest third.)
Is this the guy who was so rich we were all saying "So, the minute anyone with money puts up a fight, the RIAA runs away?"