i actually thought about that once i clicked post cause yeah, ebuilds are text. honestly, i gave up on gentoo (and linux in general) a while ago and just need to move my database server off it and onto FreeBSD. Otherwise, you are right, Gentoo's junk is just as editable as the FreeBSD junk.
In fact, I liked a lot about gentoo (well, besides the fact that it was about a 50/50 shot updating your system would work right)... i really like how all their console stuff was color and have liberally ripped a lot of their bash configuration stuff on my freebsd boxes. I sure wish more *unix systems would take a hint and colorize their consoles.
I love how you so narrowly define it as a "raster editor". Almost as if you are waiting for me to bite and ask you how to draw lines, circles and maybe even easy-to-resize test. Have these gotten better since when I last tried using it?
and the most common ones that people use are catered for
But everybody wants to use the product that has them all "just in case". The idea of software bloat is something dreamed up by grey-beards who used to do work on punch cards. As long as they are properly presented and organized in the program, the more features the merrier.
My favorite "useless feature" is track changes in Word. Do you have any idea how surprised people get when they send me a Word document and I send them back all my edits with cute little bubble comments next them? Does OO support track changes? Cause if they dont, that is a shame... it is a damn useful feature once somebody drops change-tracked document on your lap and you go "wow, I never knew this existed!". But I can only imagine the number of 37-signals followers who sit around and call it "useless bloat!!! off with its head!!"
Heard of apt or yum? Both are far superior that the "Windows Way".
Why? They essentially require access to proprietary repositories that do nothing but compile and repackage original software. Windows and OSX have none of this. You download the software directly from the vendor and go.
Going through "Bobs Rad Repository" sounds great until they take a month to finally support PostgreSQL 8.3.7 (I'm looking at you, Gentoo). "Bobs Rad Repository" also usually only has binaries for the latest and greatest version of "Bobs Rad Distro". Once a couple years go by, you can forget downloading binaries that work on your two-year-old version of Bobs Rad Distro.
I'll take the Windows Way, or failing that, the FreeBSD/BSD way where I can at least edit a damn Makefile in the portstree and submit a diff to the port maintainer when crap isn't up to date.
This is true, however how many people actually use the entirety of the features of $PRODUCT_X? I would daresay that the overwhelming majority of $USERS would suffice with $LESSER_PRODUCT, simply because they don't need half of the functionality $PRODUCT_X provides
The reason these claims are wrong is while they sound true, they are infact very wrong. Sure nobody uses every feature in a product (say, $PRODUCT_X). The thing is, every user has a different subset of features they use.
To be honest, I haven't played with it enough to tell you. But I can say that PostgreSQL is great up to a point, at which time you pretty much need to go with the big-boy databases.
Linux advocates frequently over promise and vastly undeliverable. Your soon to be 5+ post is a shining example of that.
If you think Gimp is even close to the same as Photoshop, you are smoking crack. Blender vs the other guys? I dont know, I tried blender for about 30 seconds before giving up and playing around with the student editions of the big-boys stuff. PostgreSQL is awesome (seriously, I love PostgreSQL), but it is not even close to Oracle (DB2, maybe). Apache, Lighttpd and my current favorite nginx are awesome, but they dont have the close integration with their development tools and operating system that IIS does. Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
If you want Linux to gain acceptance, you need to stop with the hyperbole and start accepting the truth. The truth is:
- There is no common way to install and remove software. - There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support) - There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts. - Gimp is *not* Photoshop. Sorry. I know I mentioned this, but I'll repeat it again. You insult people who actually use Photoshop by making this claim. - Ponies.
It's only a matter of time.
Only if Linux advocates and developers take a realistic look at their product offerings and their standing in the market.
You think they are going to notice the cost of replacing four lightbulbs in a month?!
Yes. Look at the mortgage crisis. Lots of folks bought huge-ass houses that in reality they had no business buying. After all, real estate is a never-fail, never-lose-money, get-rich-quick thing, right?
Yes, but if that were the case than the recipricol is also true... if a tech cannot express themselve clearly enough to be understood, the "business people" have a moral obligation NOT to support that tech's continued employment by translating either. And buddy, there is a hell of a lot of techs that do a shit job of being understood!
The problem is, we are trying to solve a social/political problem with technology. That is bound to fail.
Until it becomes unprofitable for comment spammers, they will continue to route around our efforts. How do you make it unprofitable? Shoot 'em dead, or pile them onto a launch vehicle and send them to the sun... anything less is letting them off the hook.
Interesting idea... except you'd need to use something other than IP (unless you lumped by subnet or something)
The "nice" thing about scraping assholes is they usually use a single IP address. Comment spammer assholes use a botnet or a list of open proxies to do their bidding. Because of this, the IP address is pretty much random.
However, I bet if you weighted the subnet, the country of the subnet, the user-agent and any other headers, you might be able to come up with some kind of probability a request is a spammer.
Other clues the "person" is a comment spammer are the fact often they never "HTTP GET" a page before "HTTP POST"'ing to the page. Normal traffic would first view a page, then POST to the page (or some similar pattern). I've seen comment spammers have a single IP address do all the page-fetching and then let their slave-machines do the posting. If you have an IP address that drops out of the clear blue sky and the first request that IP ever makes is "HTTP POST", you know damn well it is a spammer.
Comment spammers... almost worse than email spammers.
Riiiiight. The "consumer" would need to download an extra meg of comment spam only to filter it out? Sounds like a win to me!
Comment spammers leave large posts. Those posts slow down page-render time, eat up memory cache space, and lord know what else. Worse, it pisses off Google, whose search engine now thinks you are running a scam site and adjusts your page-rank accordingly. It pisses off AdSense, who now thinks your site is about Viagra and shows erectile dysfunction ads in a non-native language.
And beyond all that, why? Why do we need a common standard based feed for comments? What does it accomplish except providing leech sites and MFA (made for adsense) an even easier time of stealing content than RSS already does? What am I missing?
Well, prove it to me. You are the nerd, dig up the data! You have Google Analytics installed on our site, right? You should be able to tell me how many pages a normal visitor from a search engine makes vs. a "type-in" visitor.
You should also be able to set up a A/B test and optimize the hell out of the page. Maybe you have a related stories link but it is in the wrong place? Who knows?
Anecdotal evidence is mostly worthless, especially when it comes from insiders who develop the site. These days we have excellent, no-cost software that will provide exactly the kind of metrics needed to create a successful website.
How about instead of laughing, you think about what he actually means. Instead of thinking "OMG, stupid suits LOL", think "this guy knows more about business and marketing than I do, but doesn't know tech, what does he really mean".
We don't want users to search for our site. We need to focus on the users who are on our site and make it easier for them to find the content they want via our internal search
Translation:
We want people who hit our site to stick around. If people come in via Google search, I'm afraid they aren't going to browse our site and look at other bits of content. I think that by encouraging people to use our own search, they might stay for a while.
And he is right. People who come into a site via Google Search are the "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" kind. They hit the page, and go away. The only way to make money on this kind of traffic is to plaster your stories with advertising in hopes they exit via an ad rather than the back button. Is this what you want?
If you really want to be helpful, you should think about what the person means and help solve that. How can you make inbound Google traffic "sticky"? If you can't how can you maximize your ad revenue from that traffic? Is there a way to do both? Can you offer user-registration and when you visit when you are logged-in, strip out most of the ads (registered users never click on ads)? Can you somehow alter the layout of the page to offer additional content that might lure search engine traffic into reading more than just one page?
Think like a business person, not a nerd. Your president makes perfect sense.
I love when people throw this out. "The TV viewer is not the customer, the advertiser is." or "Google users aren't the customer, advertisers are".
They sound insightful, but they are false. In reality, the opposite of their statement is more is true. Without viewers, there would be nobody to look at the ads. Piss off the viewers so they don't view your content, you piss of the advertisers who wasted money. And if you have a loyal base of viewers, you can give your advertisers a little shit because they can't really get the same value elseware.
Take the New York Times. If they piss off their readers by publishing anonymous tips about McCain affairs and destroy their reputation, it lowers their eyeball count. If they lower their eyeball count, advertisers will spend their advertising money elseware. However, if they piss off off "Bobs Plumbing", who has had a daily full-page ad for years... so what? Will their readers stop looking at the newspaper because "Bobs Plumbing" isn't there? They will lose revenue, but they won't lose eyeballs.
In other words...
The home delivery subscriber is *not* the customer. The advertiser is.
... is basically "I think product x sucks" wrapped in bad reasoning and faulty logic.
Google should terminate its indexing of any newspaper that threatens to sue them.
Google needs them just as much as they need Google. Google can be an arrogant bunch at times, and they are a bit green in the ears when it comes to politics. The AP is threatening to sue because aside from legislation, it is one a point of leverage in negotiation.
I was going to say that Slashdot isn't a good example, but even this very story links to at least two major newspapers who I would guess are part of the NAA. What would Slashdot link to if they pulled the plug on aggregation?
Bottom line is, in the digital age how can you keep the people who write the stories that you and I are discussing employed?
Nothing is as easy as it first appears, and if it seems easy, you are probably forgetting something.
Google could just cut a deal with the smarter and/or more hungry papers to aggregate their stuff for free
You mean the trash rags? Google needs name-brand papers listed to make their news service worthwhile. Without the big boys, it would be spam-news.com, biased-news.com, and crappy-blogger.com.
If you think it is robots.txt that is the answer, you are incorrect. This is politics and Google doesn't have much experience with political plays plus they are highly arrogant.
Google has all the power in this business relationship and the Newspaper industry has very little. Threatening to sue is about the only realistic leverage they have. Going nuclear (aka robots.txt) isn't an option for either party.
That said, what about remote access from your mobile? Dunno if it is a requirement, but pretty much every mobile on the planet can speak MSN and AIM but I've yet to see one that can VPN into the office.
Course, both of those require the "server" to be AOL's or MSN's, not your own. Do any mobiles support Jabber?
The internet was not built with bussiness models in mind
The earth wasn't formed with business models in mind either. It didn't get formed with property lines or international borders, yet here we are with subdivided parcels of land, passports, fenced borders, and massive armies to protect the whole thing. Nowhere in the instruction manual for earth did it mention any of this.
"Both ways" implies this to be an either-or situation. I highly doubt it is either-or.
Perhaps this is just a political move on the part of newspapers to try getting Google to work with them. This is, or should be, a mutual business relationship. Just because you are hip tech company in Silicon Vally doesn't exempt you from working with your business partners.
That is because it is confusing. If newspapers blocked the search engines, they'd get no leech aggregators. They'd also never get traffic--which is bad if your employees paycheck comes from advertising.
Google might not be a leech aggregation, but there are a lot of them out there Google (and slashdot, digg, gizwhatever, arstechnica) link to. You know the kind--fuckers who take two paragraphs of the story, surround it with ads, and then manage to get linked to dig. Blog spam.
What do you do about those assholes? Sure they might not be breaking the law, but they are assholes none the less. And often, it seems, those assholes take a real bite of the bottom line. What do you do?
Well, lets hear them out! Maybe they have a valid case?
Maybe the AP tried to work with google to arrange a way both Google News and the newspapers represented by AP are happy. Maybe Google told them to piss up a rope instead of negotiating. What recourse do the newspapers have after that? Sue!
The thing you gotta realize is this isn't "tepples blog vs. Associated Press". This is two 800-pound gorillas here. Google drives a lot of traffic to these places and these places are what keep Google afloat. This is a business relationship and it sounds to me like Google is getting all the rewards and none of the loss while the newspaper is taking all the loss without any of the rewards. Worse, it seems Google has all the leverage in the relationship so rather than working with their "internet neighbors" they instead just tell the newspapers to fuck off.
It isn't polite to tell people to fuck off on the way up. You'll be needing their help on the way back down.
Slashdot Mirror
i actually thought about that once i clicked post cause yeah, ebuilds are text. honestly, i gave up on gentoo (and linux in general) a while ago and just need to move my database server off it and onto FreeBSD. Otherwise, you are right, Gentoo's junk is just as editable as the FreeBSD junk.
In fact, I liked a lot about gentoo (well, besides the fact that it was about a 50/50 shot updating your system would work right)... i really like how all their console stuff was color and have liberally ripped a lot of their bash configuration stuff on my freebsd boxes. I sure wish more *unix systems would take a hint and colorize their consoles.
I love how you so narrowly define it as a "raster editor". Almost as if you are waiting for me to bite and ask you how to draw lines, circles and maybe even easy-to-resize test. Have these gotten better since when I last tried using it?
But everybody wants to use the product that has them all "just in case". The idea of software bloat is something dreamed up by grey-beards who used to do work on punch cards. As long as they are properly presented and organized in the program, the more features the merrier.
My favorite "useless feature" is track changes in Word. Do you have any idea how surprised people get when they send me a Word document and I send them back all my edits with cute little bubble comments next them? Does OO support track changes? Cause if they dont, that is a shame... it is a damn useful feature once somebody drops change-tracked document on your lap and you go "wow, I never knew this existed!". But I can only imagine the number of 37-signals followers who sit around and call it "useless bloat!!! off with its head!!"
Why? They essentially require access to proprietary repositories that do nothing but compile and repackage original software. Windows and OSX have none of this. You download the software directly from the vendor and go.
Going through "Bobs Rad Repository" sounds great until they take a month to finally support PostgreSQL 8.3.7 (I'm looking at you, Gentoo). "Bobs Rad Repository" also usually only has binaries for the latest and greatest version of "Bobs Rad Distro". Once a couple years go by, you can forget downloading binaries that work on your two-year-old version of Bobs Rad Distro.
I'll take the Windows Way, or failing that, the FreeBSD/BSD way where I can at least edit a damn Makefile in the portstree and submit a diff to the port maintainer when crap isn't up to date.
The reason these claims are wrong is while they sound true, they are infact very wrong. Sure nobody uses every feature in a product (say, $PRODUCT_X). The thing is, every user has a different subset of features they use.
To be honest, I haven't played with it enough to tell you. But I can say that PostgreSQL is great up to a point, at which time you pretty much need to go with the big-boy databases.
Linux advocates frequently over promise and vastly undeliverable. Your soon to be 5+ post is a shining example of that.
If you think Gimp is even close to the same as Photoshop, you are smoking crack. Blender vs the other guys? I dont know, I tried blender for about 30 seconds before giving up and playing around with the student editions of the big-boys stuff. PostgreSQL is awesome (seriously, I love PostgreSQL), but it is not even close to Oracle (DB2, maybe). Apache, Lighttpd and my current favorite nginx are awesome, but they dont have the close integration with their development tools and operating system that IIS does. Speaking of development tools... there is no open source equivalant of Visual Studio and there is no MSDN of open source.
If you want Linux to gain acceptance, you need to stop with the hyperbole and start accepting the truth. The truth is:
- There is no common way to install and remove software.
- There is no stable base to write drivers (thus no hardware support)
- There are too many distros with too many proprietary ways of doing things. Too many proprietary repositories, too many proprietary package systems, to many proprietary filesystem layouts.
- Gimp is *not* Photoshop. Sorry. I know I mentioned this, but I'll repeat it again. You insult people who actually use Photoshop by making this claim.
- Ponies.
Only if Linux advocates and developers take a realistic look at their product offerings and their standing in the market.
Indeed, you aren't even supposed to feed tuna to kids. Thanks coal power!
Yes. Look at the mortgage crisis. Lots of folks bought huge-ass houses that in reality they had no business buying. After all, real estate is a never-fail, never-lose-money, get-rich-quick thing, right?
Yes, but if that were the case than the recipricol is also true... if a tech cannot express themselve clearly enough to be understood, the "business people" have a moral obligation NOT to support that tech's continued employment by translating either. And buddy, there is a hell of a lot of techs that do a shit job of being understood!
Nice idea until you quickly discover that the bad guys are using botnets. Every single request is basically a random IP.
Oh sheesh... Re-read what I wrote, only realize I'm smiling when I write it (and if this was a bar, I would have a drink in my hand).
Only on slashdot would people take you so literally :-)
The problem is, we are trying to solve a social/political problem with technology. That is bound to fail.
Until it becomes unprofitable for comment spammers, they will continue to route around our efforts. How do you make it unprofitable? Shoot 'em dead, or pile them onto a launch vehicle and send them to the sun... anything less is letting them off the hook.
Interesting idea... except you'd need to use something other than IP (unless you lumped by subnet or something)
The "nice" thing about scraping assholes is they usually use a single IP address. Comment spammer assholes use a botnet or a list of open proxies to do their bidding. Because of this, the IP address is pretty much random.
However, I bet if you weighted the subnet, the country of the subnet, the user-agent and any other headers, you might be able to come up with some kind of probability a request is a spammer.
Other clues the "person" is a comment spammer are the fact often they never "HTTP GET" a page before "HTTP POST"'ing to the page. Normal traffic would first view a page, then POST to the page (or some similar pattern). I've seen comment spammers have a single IP address do all the page-fetching and then let their slave-machines do the posting. If you have an IP address that drops out of the clear blue sky and the first request that IP ever makes is "HTTP POST", you know damn well it is a spammer.
Comment spammers... almost worse than email spammers.
Riiiiight. The "consumer" would need to download an extra meg of comment spam only to filter it out? Sounds like a win to me!
Comment spammers leave large posts. Those posts slow down page-render time, eat up memory cache space, and lord know what else. Worse, it pisses off Google, whose search engine now thinks you are running a scam site and adjusts your page-rank accordingly. It pisses off AdSense, who now thinks your site is about Viagra and shows erectile dysfunction ads in a non-native language.
And beyond all that, why? Why do we need a common standard based feed for comments? What does it accomplish except providing leech sites and MFA (made for adsense) an even easier time of stealing content than RSS already does? What am I missing?
Well, prove it to me. You are the nerd, dig up the data! You have Google Analytics installed on our site, right? You should be able to tell me how many pages a normal visitor from a search engine makes vs. a "type-in" visitor.
You should also be able to set up a A/B test and optimize the hell out of the page. Maybe you have a related stories link but it is in the wrong place? Who knows?
Anecdotal evidence is mostly worthless, especially when it comes from insiders who develop the site. These days we have excellent, no-cost software that will provide exactly the kind of metrics needed to create a successful website.
How about instead of laughing, you think about what he actually means. Instead of thinking "OMG, stupid suits LOL", think "this guy knows more about business and marketing than I do, but doesn't know tech, what does he really mean".
Translation:
And he is right. People who come into a site via Google Search are the "wham, bam, thank you ma'am" kind. They hit the page, and go away. The only way to make money on this kind of traffic is to plaster your stories with advertising in hopes they exit via an ad rather than the back button. Is this what you want?
If you really want to be helpful, you should think about what the person means and help solve that. How can you make inbound Google traffic "sticky"? If you can't how can you maximize your ad revenue from that traffic? Is there a way to do both? Can you offer user-registration and when you visit when you are logged-in, strip out most of the ads (registered users never click on ads)? Can you somehow alter the layout of the page to offer additional content that might lure search engine traffic into reading more than just one page?
Think like a business person, not a nerd. Your president makes perfect sense.
I love when people throw this out. "The TV viewer is not the customer, the advertiser is." or "Google users aren't the customer, advertisers are".
They sound insightful, but they are false. In reality, the opposite of their statement is more is true. Without viewers, there would be nobody to look at the ads. Piss off the viewers so they don't view your content, you piss of the advertisers who wasted money. And if you have a loyal base of viewers, you can give your advertisers a little shit because they can't really get the same value elseware.
Take the New York Times. If they piss off their readers by publishing anonymous tips about McCain affairs and destroy their reputation, it lowers their eyeball count. If they lower their eyeball count, advertisers will spend their advertising money elseware. However, if they piss off off "Bobs Plumbing", who has had a daily full-page ad for years... so what? Will their readers stop looking at the newspaper because "Bobs Plumbing" isn't there? They will lose revenue, but they won't lose eyeballs.
In other words...
Google needs them just as much as they need Google. Google can be an arrogant bunch at times, and they are a bit green in the ears when it comes to politics. The AP is threatening to sue because aside from legislation, it is one a point of leverage in negotiation.
I was going to say that Slashdot isn't a good example, but even this very story links to at least two major newspapers who I would guess are part of the NAA. What would Slashdot link to if they pulled the plug on aggregation?
Bottom line is, in the digital age how can you keep the people who write the stories that you and I are discussing employed?
Nothing is as easy as it first appears, and if it seems easy, you are probably forgetting something.
You mean the trash rags? Google needs name-brand papers listed to make their news service worthwhile. Without the big boys, it would be spam-news.com, biased-news.com, and crappy-blogger.com.
If you think it is robots.txt that is the answer, you are incorrect. This is politics and Google doesn't have much experience with political plays plus they are highly arrogant.
Google has all the power in this business relationship and the Newspaper industry has very little. Threatening to sue is about the only realistic leverage they have. Going nuclear (aka robots.txt) isn't an option for either party.
That said, what about remote access from your mobile? Dunno if it is a requirement, but pretty much every mobile on the planet can speak MSN and AIM but I've yet to see one that can VPN into the office.
Course, both of those require the "server" to be AOL's or MSN's, not your own. Do any mobiles support Jabber?
The earth wasn't formed with business models in mind either. It didn't get formed with property lines or international borders, yet here we are with subdivided parcels of land, passports, fenced borders, and massive armies to protect the whole thing. Nowhere in the instruction manual for earth did it mention any of this.
"Both ways" implies this to be an either-or situation. I highly doubt it is either-or.
Perhaps this is just a political move on the part of newspapers to try getting Google to work with them. This is, or should be, a mutual business relationship. Just because you are hip tech company in Silicon Vally doesn't exempt you from working with your business partners.
That is because it is confusing. If newspapers blocked the search engines, they'd get no leech aggregators. They'd also never get traffic--which is bad if your employees paycheck comes from advertising.
Google might not be a leech aggregation, but there are a lot of them out there Google (and slashdot, digg, gizwhatever, arstechnica) link to. You know the kind--fuckers who take two paragraphs of the story, surround it with ads, and then manage to get linked to dig. Blog spam.
What do you do about those assholes? Sure they might not be breaking the law, but they are assholes none the less. And often, it seems, those assholes take a real bite of the bottom line. What do you do?
Well, lets hear them out! Maybe they have a valid case?
Maybe the AP tried to work with google to arrange a way both Google News and the newspapers represented by AP are happy. Maybe Google told them to piss up a rope instead of negotiating. What recourse do the newspapers have after that? Sue!
The thing you gotta realize is this isn't "tepples blog vs. Associated Press". This is two 800-pound gorillas here. Google drives a lot of traffic to these places and these places are what keep Google afloat. This is a business relationship and it sounds to me like Google is getting all the rewards and none of the loss while the newspaper is taking all the loss without any of the rewards. Worse, it seems Google has all the leverage in the relationship so rather than working with their "internet neighbors" they instead just tell the newspapers to fuck off.
It isn't polite to tell people to fuck off on the way up. You'll be needing their help on the way back down.