User: This program is slow Me: Really? Which part? User: When I click the "report" icon Me: Oh (tinkers with report code). Try it now. User: It's still slow Me: (shakes BOFH excuse 8-ball) Hrmm, must be interference from sunspots, try it again tommorrow
What you're asking for is a ship captain that doesn't know how the ship works!
No, what he's asking for is a ship captain that doesn't neccessarily understand how the ship's engine works. The captain should understand how to manage the workers in the engine room to get the most productivity out of them while keeping them happy, while interfacing with the passengers of the ship who keep yelling for the ship to go faster or slower so that the workers in the engine room don't have to deal with them. The ship captain should understand how to manage, run, and guide the ship - not tear it apart and reassemble it.
Clarion does.. See for yourself. 'Tis a shame, cause I wanted a Kenwood or Clarion receiver, but ended up getting an alpine because I wanted XM instead of Sirius.
Anyone care to take that bet? Satellite radio is going to fail, plain and simple. The vast majority of people will never pay for it, and the relatively small number of adopters will not be enough to support the whole network with its tech upkeep, royalty payments, and all.
Yup, I'd take that bet. Now I'll concede that the market will not bear two players, and that either one will buy the other or one will go belly up, but as a whole satellite radio is a WHOLE different proposition than satellite cell service. Remember, the primary reason Iridium failed was that by the time the network was running the cost of satellite cell service was insane (several $$ per minute IIRC). No one could afford it. Also by that time land based cell service had gotten so ubiquitous and affordable Iridium was irrelevant.
Unless there's something on the horizon I'm just blind to, I don't see satellite radio getting any worthy competition.. Comparing satellite radio to terrestrial radio is like comparing DirecTV to local broadcast channels.. There is no comparison. For $9.95 I think people will jump over themselves to have it. I know I am planning on taking the plunge as soon as the hardware gets around the $100 mark (including antenna).
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this... I absolutely HATE the idea of making/x the default.. To me whitespaced and commented regexps are an order of magnitude harder to read.. Let's say I want to match the phrase "this is a sentence". Here's the easiest perl5 way to do it:
/this is a sentence/
Now perl6:
/this<sp>is<sp>a<sp> sentence/ or:/this <sp> is <sp> a <sp> sentence/ or:/this <sp> is <sp> # sentence's verb a <sp> sentence/ # YUCK! or:/this \s+ is \s+ a \s+ sentence/
Maybe it's just my personal bias, but I think comments, newlines and whitespace should be left OUT of regular expressions.
Transfer limits seems like the lazy way out. Intelligent throttling based on demand or lowered speeds (600k down instead of T1 down) will probably win out.
Actually, I think you're incorrect here.. I was a DirecPC customer for a couple of years, and for those who aren't familiar with them, they implement a Fair Access Policy (FAP) which does exactly this. Basically they spend all of this time and money implementing this sytem to keep would-be bandwidth hogs on their system, and they end up creating a group of very vocal disgruntled customers in the process (if you don't believe me spend some time in alt.satellite.direcpc). What Time Warner and Comcast are doing is essentially saying to the bandwidth hogs "we don't want you". The end result is they spend no money or time catering to them (implementing intelligent bandwidth throttling, etc), and the customers they have remaining are very happy.. For those that do stick around they make (presumably) enough extra money off of them to cover their extra bandwidth charges. Yeah, the ones they chase off are pissed for a while, but I'm sure they would rather have a few pissed former-customers than a group of highly pissed current-customers. DirecPC had a class-action lawsuit on their hands when they implemented the FAP.
I'm not saying I agree with what Time Warner and Comcast are doing (I'm currently a time warner cable modem subscriber), but I really don't see them going to any lengths trying to keep "heavy" users as customers. In a past life I was a network admin for a local ISP, and one of my tasks at the end of every month was to run report from the radius logs which compiled usage by screen name and sorted out the top 20 resource hogs. Management generally took that report and cancelled out any of those users that were over a certain threshold of time online and/or bandwidth consumed. They had the same screwy logic: ditch the top 1% of users and we gain 80% of our bandwidth/modem capacity back. Needless to say they are no longer in business.
This situation involved no hacking (or cracking, by definition),
Okay, so I'm waaaaay too bored (hey, it's 4:30 on Friday), but if you wanted to give it a 1337 term other than the boring "fraud" I think it would fall under phreaking (emphasis mine):
"1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks)"
Shayne
Re:My how things have changed.
on
Disconnecting
·
· Score: 2
I dropped AOL service a long time ago (when 28.2Kb modems were state of the art) and had no trouble at all. I did get a slew of letters from Steve Case wondering why I'd cancelled the service but no surly Customer Service person berating my reason for leaving.:-)
There's a good reason for this.. Up until recently computer sales were through the roof and the number of users going online was increasing exponentially. If you left AOL they really didn't care, they had 100 users coming on to take your place. I don't have any hard numbers, but with both the downturn in economy, and the fact that by now most people who were going to get online ARE online, customer retention becomes a much bigger deal. It's just a shame companies aren't smart enough to address that by providing superior service rather than resorting to underhanded tactics. Heck, when I first left AOL (*years* ago), there was a online cancellation form you could navigate to at one of the customer service keywords.
Someone should be explaining to Brian what the job market is like nowadays. Might just clear up that attitude problem he's got.
Agreed. A couple of years ago I was muttering to myself that I couldn't wait for the economic boom to end. I've always heard that service is horrible during a booming economy because all of the talented/dedicated people are employed with good jobs, leaving normally-unemployable rejects to fill the lower service-oriented jobs. Well, we now find ourselves in a downturn, and in my experience service is just as bad, if not worse, than it was. I know plenty of talented geeks that would be happy to have Brian's job right now. Granted, they wouldn't still be there a year from now like Brian will.
Some places will actually give you a confirmation number confirming your cancellation request. If you don't receive one, ask if they will provide you with one. I recently cancelled my DirecPC service after switching to cable modem and they did this voluntarily. Presumably this would give you some ammo if they continued to bill you.
I remember wondering what on earth a website would do with data from my microphone. Count the number of obscenities I muttered as I waited for the stupid flash-enabled splash screen to go away?
I'm just guessing in the dark here (hey, this is./ after all), but I imagine their intended purpose for this is to allow authors of flash apps a means to write applications which allow you to send video/audio greetings, take snapshots of yourself for profiles, record a voice greeting for a remote voicemail system, etc, etc. At least, the optimist in me wants to think these are the noble intentions they have (yeah, I'm probably wrong but in my fantasy world beer is free, pizza has no calories, and corporations are good - you'd like it here).
Keyboards are effectively disposable... I once had the brilliant idea to take all of my key caps off and clean my keyboard. After spending damn near an entire evening disassembling the thing, soaking the keys then scrubbing each one, then reassembling it I said never again. A new keyboard costs what, $6? $30 for a good one? I'll gladly pay $30 once every couple of years to avoid cleaning mine again.
I'm not familiar with G-Guide, but I don't think they're not using it in order to force you into subscribing. When your PVR phones home it checks to see if it's subscribed and and enables/disables features accordingly. Just stabbing in the dark, but PVRs keep guide data about two weeks out, so unless G-guide provides that much data (complete with subject data, actors, rerun info, etc) it wouldn't be feasible.
With the new Tivo version 3.0 software that is coming Really Soon Now, stand alone tivos will start getting their guide data over cable by broadcasting it over cheap timeslots and having the tivo tune in to record it. Apparently Tivo found out it's cheaper to buy broadcast time at 4am on discovery and foodtv than to license/support dial-ups for this purpose. The integrated DirecTivos have been getting their guide data and even software upgrades over the dish for a while now (since version 2.5 if I recall). Sometime during the 2am - 5am hour if it's not recording anything it tunes itself to a "reserved" channel which contains the data it needs. Tivo units still phone home nightly though to check your subscription status, report anonymized viewing statistics, and report your PPV purchases (directv units only).
If there were such a device, we wouldn't need business. Business is a means, not an end. There would be no need for money in a society where everyone has everything they want. There would be no need to work.
Err, while I enjoyed floating off into a magical daydream of another world while reading over your post, I think you've missed something pretty obvious here. In this fictional society where tangible items are free or basically free, you are still going to have to pay for services. Yeah, I'd probably continue to churn out code because I enjoy programming, but do you think people are going to keep riding on garbage trucks because they're fun? Or doing tech support because they love being yelled at?
Like someone else mentioned, the world you describe is essentially a Free Hardware system analogous to Free Software. I'll probably get flamed into hell for saying this, but generally Free Software suffers from poorer documentation, more bugs in the release versions, feature creep, etc.. This is because when you're not being paid to do something, you tackle the fun parts like coding new "gee whiz" features, and leave the documenting, bug squashing, and more mundane stuff to "someone else". Same thing would happen in a Free Hardware type of system.. Everyone would do the things they enjoyed, but who would pick up our trash, mow our lawns, dig our ditches, etc? Companies would still provide these services. Ironically this could make blue collar workers more valuable than white collar ones, since once a white collar worker created or accomplished something everyone else would immediately have it.. Blue collar workers would have to continually supply services.
Text ads... Open standards for content distribution... If only certain other sites would follow...
Apples and oranges... Google's bread and butter is their patented PageRank technology, which they license for what I'm sure is a lot of money. Slashdot, having made the decision to opensource slashcode do not have this option, therefore we're forced to endure banner ads and subscriptions as their only source of revenue. Ironic, eh? The people that screamed so loud about how long it took./ to release the source for slash are now bitching about subscriptions and banner ads.. Like it or not, if slashcode was proprietary it could be sold and licensed and you wouldn't have to see ads here (or at least not the larger ones). Sourceforge figured this out too late, and are now trying to sell the SourceForge software as a source of income.
Hopefully./ will wise up and figure out if they ever want to make any real money they'll have to offer a real service.. Like consulting to companies/webmasters to setup slashcode for customers (like MySQL AB does)... Too bad VA Linux went out of the hardware market. I think a pre-configured "Slash Appliance" (sort of like google's Search Appliance) would be cool as hell for companies needing an internal collaboration system../ has really missed the boat here, IMHO.
Yeah, just wait until amazon.com starts opening bars using this technology.. You'll see things like this printed on your receipt:
Customers who consumed 8 drafts also purchased: o Trojan Brand PreLubricated Latex Condoms o Freezer King Microwave Buritos o Certs Wintergreen Breath Mints o Pepto-Bismal (economy size) o Medic Ibuprofen (economy size) o Female Escort (1 hour minimum)
Remember the post from "Linus" [iu.edu] to the LKML demanding that the free software community practice better personal hygiene? That's the sort of thing I want to be seeing.
How about the story on linuxtoday about Linus abondoning Linux? I found some amusement there.
I have to admit, I thought Alan Cox's 8086 Linux (complete with web server) was a joke until I followed the link to elks.
This is the reason we're the #2 consulting company and you have to block.exe's.
Dude, chill. We're the largest REAL ESTATE company in our state, but guess what, my users are REAL ESTATE agents. We give them windows and outlook and big pretty buttons, but forget about try to teach them virus security. We own the network and computers, we have the right to filter anything we like.
And did anyone ask your CEO where he was posting his email address? No? Thought so.
Wow, you have some anger issues. I wish I could live in your utopian world where all of your users are savvy and viruses don't exist. His e-mail address is listed as administrative contact for several of our domains. His is a CEO, he has no concept of spam-proofing, using throwaway e-mail accounts, or what have you.. Nor should he be required to.
This is part of the insane attitude that one's workers are one's worst enemies. Letting people do these little things is far from bad for business. It is most likely actually good as it creates an environment where people feel invested and where they have the wild concept that maybe their employer sees them as more than "production units".
As I read the article, the point isn't "Joe smith just spent 10.3 minutes reading slashdot when he could have been working".. It has more to do with "Joe Smith just downloaded a pirated version of Photoshop to run on a company owned PC". Your doing some online shopping or checking your Hotmail (possibly) hurts your productivity, but NOT the productivity of others. Now imagine you're pulling up porn in your cube and Cindy M. Biblethumper happens to walk by... Or when you open your outlook and unleash the latest win32 virus on the network. This cost the company serious money above providing net access.
We're reached this point at my company. As the network admin I've taken to explicitly blocking any e-mail with a.exe,.vbs, or any one of a 100 different virus-carrying file-types across. I still allow.gif's,.zip's,.doc's, etc, but scan them before delivery. If they get upset because they can't receive dancingbaby.exe from their cousin in Toronto, that's too bad.. Let them download it home their home computer and infect it.
The same thing is happening with spam. For 5 years now our policy has been "we can't do anything about it", because we didn't want to be responsible for attemping to filter the incoming e-mail stream. It has reached the point that our CEO is receiving 15 - 30 porn spams a day and has had enough. We have to pay the costs while he's travelling in europe and dialed in to our 800 number at 28.8 downloading this shit. We're about to deploy spamassassin site-wide, and if it happens to catch someone's birthday card from his step-mother, that's too bad.
I'm starting a slash-like site, and I went through the same process, evaluating slashcode, scoop, and most anything I could find at freshmeat.net. Eventually, I settled on YAWNS. It is written in perl, but struggles to avoid the server and perl module complexities associated with slash. Granted, it is not as full-featured as slash , nor will it scale like slashcode, but for a smallish hobbyist site it works well.
Full disclosure: Although not "officially" associated with YAWNS, I've contributed some code to the project and plan to contribute more.
I've been waiting on someone with common sense to make this point. RedHat is primarily (AFAIK) geared toward servers, which will generally be the latest and greatest hardware. No offense to anyone here, but highly-caffienated hackers living in their parents' basements (myself included) probably aren't high on RedHat's priority list.
That said, check out Core Linux. I did an install on an old P133 with 32megs of ram last week, and this distro was well suited for the job. It's a little rough around the edges, but if you're willing to put in a little time with it it beats RedHat hands down for older hardware. As their slogan says "Simply put, no crap", it's the bare minimum stuff to get you up and running linux. The good thing is you get up to date libs, gcc, and other components in a compact distro, as opposed to what you'd get if you installed a 1996 version of slackware.
One word of caution, they don't include a "starter" kernel, so before you can be running you'll have to either compile your own (which could take a while if you do it old hardware), or scrounge up a compatible one from somewhere else.
Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor.
That's not really what I had in mind... HTML errors are nowhere NEAR as annoying as pr0n sites that pop open ads all over the place, resize your browser, bookmark themselves, etc, etc. That's what I mean by annoyance, the kind of site that makes Joe Sixpack (as well as me) get upset when he gets stuck in a loop that for every window he closes two pop open. I'm more worried about discouraging sites from using bad behavior than I am encouraging them to use proper html. Of course, malformed html should ADD to the annoyance factor, but not be the only thing counted. That's my opinion anyway.
Here's a free idea to anyone who has the time/initiative to code it (i.e. Not Me): a program that scans a page and rates it with an annoyance rating (x out of 100?) based on annoying things you'll find on the page if you open it: webbugs, cookies sent back to doubleclick, pop-unders, banner ads, java applets, BLINK tags, poorly formed HTML/CSS, broken images, sql/asp/php errors, etc. The higher the number the more annoying the page, and therefore the more likely the user is to click a different search result. Google could also tie it in to their ranking system to rank annoying pages lower in the results. Seems to me like it'd make the web a better place.
It should be obvious that only bidding in the closing minutes of the auction and only raising your bid the minimum amount would be the sensible thing to do and would get you a much better price than consistantly bidding and raising the price for several days.
Actually, there's an easier way than that to avoid paying outrageous prices for stuff on ebay.. When bidding simply figure out what the item is worth to YOU and put that in as your bid. Ebay will automatically raise your bid in the minimum increment as other people bid until they outbid what you're willing to pay. If that happens just move on to another auction... One thing I've found that helps is pick an odd amount for your maximum bid.. For example, if you're willing to pay $100 for something, enter your bid as $102. Most people will have $100 as their "too high" line and bow out of the bidding. I've won several auctions that way.
Slashdot Mirror
Me: Really? Which part?
User: When I click the "report" icon
Me: Oh (tinkers with report code). Try it now.
User: It's still slow
Me: (shakes BOFH excuse 8-ball) Hrmm, must be interference from sunspots, try it again tommorrow
What you're asking for is a ship captain that doesn't know how the ship works!
No, what he's asking for is a ship captain that doesn't neccessarily understand how the ship's engine works. The captain should understand how to manage the workers in the engine room to get the most productivity out of them while keeping them happy, while interfacing with the passengers of the ship who keep yelling for the ship to go faster or slower so that the workers in the engine room don't have to deal with them. The ship captain should understand how to manage, run, and guide the ship - not tear it apart and reassemble it.
Shayne
Shayne
Anyone care to take that bet? Satellite radio is going to fail, plain and simple. The vast majority of people will never pay for it, and the relatively small number of adopters will not be enough to support the whole network with its tech upkeep, royalty payments, and all.
Yup, I'd take that bet. Now I'll concede that the market will not bear two players, and that either one will buy the other or one will go belly up, but as a whole satellite radio is a WHOLE different proposition than satellite cell service. Remember, the primary reason Iridium failed was that by the time the network was running the cost of satellite cell service was insane (several $$ per minute IIRC). No one could afford it. Also by that time land based cell service had gotten so ubiquitous and affordable Iridium was irrelevant.
Unless there's something on the horizon I'm just blind to, I don't see satellite radio getting any worthy competition.. Comparing satellite radio to terrestrial radio is like comparing DirecTV to local broadcast channels.. There is no comparison. For $9.95 I think people will jump over themselves to have it. I know I am planning on taking the plunge as soon as the hardware gets around the $100 mark (including antenna).
Shayne
StormReaver says: This isn't any easier to read.
/x the default.. To me whitespaced and commented regexps are an order of magnitude harder to read.. Let's say I want to match the phrase "this is a sentence". Here's the easiest perl5 way to do it:
/this is a sentence/
/this<sp>is<sp>a<sp> sentence/ /this <sp> is <sp> a <sp> sentence/ /this <sp> /this \s+ is \s+ a \s+ sentence/
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks this... I absolutely HATE the idea of making
Now perl6:
or:
or:
is <sp> # sentence's verb
a <sp>
sentence/ # YUCK!
or:
Maybe it's just my personal bias, but I think comments, newlines and whitespace should be left OUT of regular expressions.
Shayne
Transfer limits seems like the lazy way out. Intelligent throttling based on demand or lowered speeds (600k down instead of T1 down) will probably win out.
Actually, I think you're incorrect here.. I was a DirecPC customer for a couple of years, and for those who aren't familiar with them, they implement a Fair Access Policy (FAP) which does exactly this. Basically they spend all of this time and money implementing this sytem to keep would-be bandwidth hogs on their system, and they end up creating a group of very vocal disgruntled customers in the process (if you don't believe me spend some time in alt.satellite.direcpc). What Time Warner and Comcast are doing is essentially saying to the bandwidth hogs "we don't want you". The end result is they spend no money or time catering to them (implementing intelligent bandwidth throttling, etc), and the customers they have remaining are very happy.. For those that do stick around they make (presumably) enough extra money off of them to cover their extra bandwidth charges. Yeah, the ones they chase off are pissed for a while, but I'm sure they would rather have a few pissed former-customers than a group of highly pissed current-customers. DirecPC had a class-action lawsuit on their hands when they implemented the FAP.
I'm not saying I agree with what Time Warner and Comcast are doing (I'm currently a time warner cable modem subscriber), but I really don't see them going to any lengths trying to keep "heavy" users as customers. In a past life I was a network admin for a local ISP, and one of my tasks at the end of every month was to run report from the radius logs which compiled usage by screen name and sorted out the top 20 resource hogs. Management generally took that report and cancelled out any of those users that were over a certain threshold of time online and/or bandwidth consumed. They had the same screwy logic: ditch the top 1% of users and we gain 80% of our bandwidth/modem capacity back. Needless to say they are no longer in business.
Shayne
It was supposed to read:
male.libidoLevel := 60.00;
Which is SOO tragic, considering line 4:
female.bitchFactor *= male.libidoLevel;
Imagine how much better Universe SP1 will be. :)
Shayne
This situation involved no hacking (or cracking, by definition),
Okay, so I'm waaaaay too bored (hey, it's 4:30 on Friday), but if you wanted to give it a 1337 term other than the boring "fraud" I think it would fall under phreaking (emphasis mine):
"1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on communications networks)"
Shayne
I dropped AOL service a long time ago (when 28.2Kb modems were state of the art) and had no trouble at all. I did get a slew of letters from Steve Case wondering why I'd cancelled the service but no surly Customer Service person berating my reason for leaving. :-)
There's a good reason for this.. Up until recently computer sales were through the roof and the number of users going online was increasing exponentially. If you left AOL they really didn't care, they had 100 users coming on to take your place. I don't have any hard numbers, but with both the downturn in economy, and the fact that by now most people who were going to get online ARE online, customer retention becomes a much bigger deal. It's just a shame companies aren't smart enough to address that by providing superior service rather than resorting to underhanded tactics. Heck, when I first left AOL (*years* ago), there was a online cancellation form you could navigate to at one of the customer service keywords.
Someone should be explaining to Brian what the job market is like nowadays. Might just clear up that attitude problem he's got.
Agreed. A couple of years ago I was muttering to myself that I couldn't wait for the economic boom to end. I've always heard that service is horrible during a booming economy because all of the talented/dedicated people are employed with good jobs, leaving normally-unemployable rejects to fill the lower service-oriented jobs. Well, we now find ourselves in a downturn, and in my experience service is just as bad, if not worse, than it was. I know plenty of talented geeks that would be happy to have Brian's job right now. Granted, they wouldn't still be there a year from now like Brian will.
Shayne
Shayne
I remember wondering what on earth a website would do with data from my microphone. Count the number of obscenities I muttered as I waited for the stupid flash-enabled splash screen to go away?
I'm just guessing in the dark here (hey, this is ./ after all), but I imagine their intended purpose for this is to allow authors of flash apps a means to write applications which allow you to send video/audio greetings, take snapshots of yourself for profiles, record a voice greeting for a remote voicemail system, etc, etc. At least, the optimist in me wants to think these are the noble intentions they have (yeah, I'm probably wrong but in my fantasy world beer is free, pizza has no calories, and corporations are good - you'd like it here).
Shayne
Shayne
With the new Tivo version 3.0 software that is coming Really Soon Now, stand alone tivos will start getting their guide data over cable by broadcasting it over cheap timeslots and having the tivo tune in to record it. Apparently Tivo found out it's cheaper to buy broadcast time at 4am on discovery and foodtv than to license/support dial-ups for this purpose. The integrated DirecTivos have been getting their guide data and even software upgrades over the dish for a while now (since version 2.5 if I recall). Sometime during the 2am - 5am hour if it's not recording anything it tunes itself to a "reserved" channel which contains the data it needs. Tivo units still phone home nightly though to check your subscription status, report anonymized viewing statistics, and report your PPV purchases (directv units only).
Shayne
If there were such a device, we wouldn't need business. Business is a means, not an end. There would be no need for money in a society where everyone has everything they want. There would be no need to work.
Err, while I enjoyed floating off into a magical daydream of another world while reading over your post, I think you've missed something pretty obvious here. In this fictional society where tangible items are free or basically free, you are still going to have to pay for services. Yeah, I'd probably continue to churn out code because I enjoy programming, but do you think people are going to keep riding on garbage trucks because they're fun? Or doing tech support because they love being yelled at?
Like someone else mentioned, the world you describe is essentially a Free Hardware system analogous to Free Software. I'll probably get flamed into hell for saying this, but generally Free Software suffers from poorer documentation, more bugs in the release versions, feature creep, etc.. This is because when you're not being paid to do something, you tackle the fun parts like coding new "gee whiz" features, and leave the documenting, bug squashing, and more mundane stuff to "someone else". Same thing would happen in a Free Hardware type of system.. Everyone would do the things they enjoyed, but who would pick up our trash, mow our lawns, dig our ditches, etc? Companies would still provide these services. Ironically this could make blue collar workers more valuable than white collar ones, since once a white collar worker created or accomplished something everyone else would immediately have it.. Blue collar workers would have to continually supply services.
Shayne
Text ads... Open standards for content distribution... If only certain other sites would follow...
Apples and oranges... Google's bread and butter is their patented PageRank technology, which they license for what I'm sure is a lot of money. Slashdot, having made the decision to opensource slashcode do not have this option, therefore we're forced to endure banner ads and subscriptions as their only source of revenue. Ironic, eh? The people that screamed so loud about how long it took ./ to release the source for slash are now bitching about subscriptions and banner ads.. Like it or not, if slashcode was proprietary it could be sold and licensed and you wouldn't have to see ads here (or at least not the larger ones). Sourceforge figured this out too late, and are now trying to sell the SourceForge software as a source of income.
Hopefully ./ will wise up and figure out if they ever want to make any real money they'll have to offer a real service.. Like consulting to companies/webmasters to setup slashcode for customers (like MySQL AB does)... Too bad VA Linux went out of the hardware market. I think a pre-configured "Slash Appliance" (sort of like google's Search Appliance) would be cool as hell for companies needing an internal collaboration system. ./ has really missed the boat here, IMHO.
Shayne
Yeah, just wait until amazon.com starts opening bars using this technology.. You'll see things like this printed on your receipt:
Customers who consumed 8 drafts also purchased:
o Trojan Brand PreLubricated Latex Condoms
o Freezer King Microwave Buritos
o Certs Wintergreen Breath Mints
o Pepto-Bismal (economy size)
o Medic Ibuprofen (economy size)
o Female Escort (1 hour minimum)
Please visit our gift shop on the way out
Shayne
Remember the post from "Linus" [iu.edu] to the LKML demanding that the free software community practice better personal hygiene? That's the sort of thing I want to be seeing.
How about the story on linuxtoday about Linus abondoning Linux? I found some amusement there.
I have to admit, I thought Alan Cox's 8086 Linux (complete with web server) was a joke until I followed the link to elks.
Shayne
This is the reason we're the #2 consulting company and you have to block .exe's.
Dude, chill. We're the largest REAL ESTATE company in our state, but guess what, my users are REAL ESTATE agents. We give them windows and outlook and big pretty buttons, but forget about try to teach them virus security. We own the network and computers, we have the right to filter anything we like.
And did anyone ask your CEO where he was posting his email address? No? Thought so.
Wow, you have some anger issues. I wish I could live in your utopian world where all of your users are savvy and viruses don't exist. His e-mail address is listed as administrative contact for several of our domains. His is a CEO, he has no concept of spam-proofing, using throwaway e-mail accounts, or what have you.. Nor should he be required to.
Shayne
This is part of the insane attitude that one's workers are one's worst enemies. Letting people do these little things is far from bad for business. It is most likely actually good as it creates an environment where people feel invested and where they have the wild concept that maybe their employer sees them as more than "production units".
As I read the article, the point isn't "Joe smith just spent 10.3 minutes reading slashdot when he could have been working".. It has more to do with "Joe Smith just downloaded a pirated version of Photoshop to run on a company owned PC". Your doing some online shopping or checking your Hotmail (possibly) hurts your productivity, but NOT the productivity of others. Now imagine you're pulling up porn in your cube and Cindy M. Biblethumper happens to walk by... Or when you open your outlook and unleash the latest win32 virus on the network. This cost the company serious money above providing net access.
We're reached this point at my company. As the network admin I've taken to explicitly blocking any e-mail with a .exe, .vbs, or any one of a 100 different virus-carrying file-types across. I still allow .gif's, .zip's, .doc's, etc, but scan them before delivery. If they get upset because they can't receive dancingbaby.exe from their cousin in Toronto, that's too bad.. Let them download it home their home computer and infect it.
The same thing is happening with spam. For 5 years now our policy has been "we can't do anything about it", because we didn't want to be responsible for attemping to filter the incoming e-mail stream. It has reached the point that our CEO is receiving 15 - 30 porn spams a day and has had enough. We have to pay the costs while he's travelling in europe and dialed in to our 800 number at 28.8 downloading this shit. We're about to deploy spamassassin site-wide, and if it happens to catch someone's birthday card from his step-mother, that's too bad.
Shayne
Full disclosure: Although not "officially" associated with YAWNS, I've contributed some code to the project and plan to contribute more.
Shayne
Shayne
That said, check out Core Linux. I did an install on an old P133 with 32megs of ram last week, and this distro was well suited for the job. It's a little rough around the edges, but if you're willing to put in a little time with it it beats RedHat hands down for older hardware. As their slogan says "Simply put, no crap", it's the bare minimum stuff to get you up and running linux. The good thing is you get up to date libs, gcc, and other components in a compact distro, as opposed to what you'd get if you installed a 1996 version of slackware.
One word of caution, they don't include a "starter" kernel, so before you can be running you'll have to either compile your own (which could take a while if you do it old hardware), or scrounge up a compatible one from somewhere else.
Shayne
Another idea is to just count the number of HTML errors as the annoyance factor.
That's not really what I had in mind... HTML errors are nowhere NEAR as annoying as pr0n sites that pop open ads all over the place, resize your browser, bookmark themselves, etc, etc. That's what I mean by annoyance, the kind of site that makes Joe Sixpack (as well as me) get upset when he gets stuck in a loop that for every window he closes two pop open. I'm more worried about discouraging sites from using bad behavior than I am encouraging them to use proper html. Of course, malformed html should ADD to the annoyance factor, but not be the only thing counted. That's my opinion anyway.
Shayne
Shayne
Actually, there's an easier way than that to avoid paying outrageous prices for stuff on ebay.. When bidding simply figure out what the item is worth to YOU and put that in as your bid. Ebay will automatically raise your bid in the minimum increment as other people bid until they outbid what you're willing to pay. If that happens just move on to another auction... One thing I've found that helps is pick an odd amount for your maximum bid.. For example, if you're willing to pay $100 for something, enter your bid as $102. Most people will have $100 as their "too high" line and bow out of the bidding. I've won several auctions that way.
Shayne