It's not so much that society revolves around the device, it's that people assume that you'll be reachable regardless of location.
Interesting. One of the reasons I prefer cell phones to the point of now using one as my regular phone is that I have precisely the opposite experience: people expect not to always be able to reach you on your cell phone. They expect that sometimes it'll be off, or in the next room, or you could be in a no-service area, or you could be driving in traffic and not feel comfortable answering the phone, or you could just be busy (since it seems that ignoring a cell call because you're busy is acceptable, while a landline call is expected to interrupt anything you're doing). If I ignore a call on my cell phone, no one thinks twice about it. If I ignore a land-line call, I'd better not have been home.
But maybe I just know strange people. I have literally never sent anyone an SMS message, nor received one.
Re:All of Mr. Nixon's points are easily refuted
on
Usenet Encoding: yEnc
·
· Score: 2, Informative
As a "pretty active Usenet poster and binary downloader," I bet you know your stuff pretty well. You could switch to anything in a short time, I bet. That's great, so could I. You're not looking at the average user, though.
Since I put my page up, my mailbox is overflowing with messages from people who are agreeing with me, but for the wrong reason -- they are saying, yeah, right on, this yEnc thing sucks, I can't figure the thing out and I can't get half the binaries anymore, how do we get everyone to go back to the old way?
If you just look at the people who know what they're doing and know it well, of course you won't see much confusion. But a popular binaries group easily has several thousand times as many people downloading as it has posting, so I think you are grossly underestimating the level of confusion this is causing among the regular users.
I'm not worried about confusing them; it's inevitable. What I'm worried about is confusing them too many times in a row.
More, smaller messages -- what difference do you think that would possibly make?
My answer to yEnc is brewing, and frankly, I'm not arrogant enough to push anything which is "my" answer to yEnc. There are a lot of people out there who know what they are talking about and it would be stupid not to listen to them. So, don't look for "my" answer to yEnc... look for "the" answer to yEnc, developed not by one hacker but by a group of people who know what they're doing.
You just gotta love the speculation that runs rampant around here.
FYI, I am using a metered dialup account (actually ISDN, which isn't much faster, just more reliable). I cannot get unlimited, high-speed access (yet, I keep hoping). I pay well over $100 per month for Internet access at a fraction of the speed of peoples' cable modems and DSL lines, and it would be quite a lot more if I left it nailed up 24x7.
You, like several others here, seem to have somehow gotten the impression that I am opposed to smaller encoding. I can only conclude that someone is spoofing my web host's DNS and some of you are reading a different page than the one I wrote.
If you think this is going to decrease the amount of data transferred by customers, you need to take off those rose-colored glasses. I suspect it won't affect that at all.
Smaller encoding helps us (the providers), it doesn't hurt us. (Besides, one look at the Supernews price list versus the competition will reveal that metered individual accounts are hardly the main focus.) With the customers the actual money comes from, less downloads would increase the margins, not decrease them. In fact, to a lesser extent, it would do so with the individual accounts as well -- the pricing on individual Usenet accounts (at almost all of the top providers) is such that the margins are lower at higher download levels. At the highest levels, it's nearly break-even. So less downloading would even be somewhat better there.
If you really think that I'm against a smaller binary encoding scheme, then you completely missed the point of my essay -- and you also must have missed the part about how it was my first experimental code, implementing smaller encoding, from which yEnc was hatched. If I truly wanted to avoid smaller encoding, why would I have implemented it in the first place? Why would I have done it in public and then sent the code to several people, explicitely releasing it into the public domain? You think I would have done that to prevent the spread of smaller encoding?
Had Jürgen picked up where I left off and did the thing right, I would be singing an entirely different tune.
Read the yEnc spec before you say idiotic things like that. How do you suppose the client is meant to know there's a yEnc binary in the post BEFORE it downloads it?
The filename and other information is also in the Subject line. According to the spec. Which you obviously have not read.
Jeremy
A few words from the original author
on
Usenet Encoding: yEnc
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Well then. When I put that page up, I honestly didn't expect many people to read it outside news.software.nntp and a few curious folks in alt.binaries.news-server-comparison. I certainly wan't expecting to get Slashdotted. Well, that's fine, except that the uproar might have waited a little bit.
In my essay, I state that what Usenet needs is "a better way to post Binaries". The next piece of the puzzle, of course, is to answer the question, "What IS a better way to post binaries?" I was thinking about finishing that page up tonight, but I am writing code at the moment instead.
So, when reading my comments, just keep in mind that, yes, I DO have some answers to that question, too. It's just that it's a bit of a more time-consuming question, so that page isn't done yet.
This time around, though, I will make sure to include a prominent warning to NOT run off and implement the ideas as quickly as possible, and to please not use all of Usenet as beta-testers. The idea that whatever gets done fastest is best just doesn't work for me. There were good reasons I didn't go and get people to implement my smaller encoding ideas when I first wrote the code. If only the yEnc implementor had continued where I left off rather than going down his rather misguided path...
All the comments are welcome. I've been getting some interesting email, too, of course. Many programmers of Usenet client software absolutely despise the thing and are quite annoyed at the amount of their time it is wasting. I guess it's just more of that never-ending divide between the users and the techies. So it goes.
yEnc is here, that's for sure. Now we just have to try to deal with it.
However, my understanding (IANAL) is that if you do start picking and choosing what pages you will or won't put up, you lose your "common carrier" status and have editorial responsibility for everything on your site. You are then a target for libel/slander or other suits regarding that content.
This is one of those things that has been repeated so often that everyone starts to believe it. It's basically a myth. There is no ISP with common carrier status. Common carrier status is something that has to be specifically granted by the government, and it comes along with a whole lot of regulations that ISPs don't want to deal with.
Yesterday was a sad day for freedom and liberty and personal choice.
Look at it this way. I've got a Microsoft Natural Keyboard plugged into my Unix system. Why did I buy the Microsoft one? I went to the store looking for a natural keyboard. There was a whole big shelf of them, one of which was Microsoft's. I tried them all out, and the one that felt best was Microsoft's, so I bought it.
If they competed like that on everything, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting. One of the reasons I prefer cell phones to the point of now using one as my regular phone is that I have precisely the opposite experience: people expect not to always be able to reach you on your cell phone. They expect that sometimes it'll be off, or in the next room, or you could be in a no-service area, or you could be driving in traffic and not feel comfortable answering the phone, or you could just be busy (since it seems that ignoring a cell call because you're busy is acceptable, while a landline call is expected to interrupt anything you're doing). If I ignore a call on my cell phone, no one thinks twice about it. If I ignore a land-line call, I'd better not have been home.
But maybe I just know strange people. I have literally never sent anyone an SMS message, nor received one.
As a "pretty active Usenet poster and binary downloader," I bet you know your stuff pretty well. You could switch to anything in a short time, I bet. That's great, so could I. You're not looking at the average user, though.
Since I put my page up, my mailbox is overflowing with messages from people who are agreeing with me, but for the wrong reason -- they are saying, yeah, right on, this yEnc thing sucks, I can't figure the thing out and I can't get half the binaries anymore, how do we get everyone to go back to the old way?
If you just look at the people who know what they're doing and know it well, of course you won't see much confusion. But a popular binaries group easily has several thousand times as many people downloading as it has posting, so I think you are grossly underestimating the level of confusion this is causing among the regular users.
I'm not worried about confusing them; it's inevitable. What I'm worried about is confusing them too many times in a row.
Jeremy
More, smaller messages -- what difference do you think that would possibly make?
My answer to yEnc is brewing, and frankly, I'm not arrogant enough to push anything which is "my" answer to yEnc. There are a lot of people out there who know what they are talking about and it would be stupid not to listen to them. So, don't look for "my" answer to yEnc... look for "the" answer to yEnc, developed not by one hacker but by a group of people who know what they're doing.
Jeremy
You just gotta love the speculation that runs rampant around here.
FYI, I am using a metered dialup account (actually ISDN, which isn't much faster, just more reliable). I cannot get unlimited, high-speed access (yet, I keep hoping). I pay well over $100 per month for Internet access at a fraction of the speed of peoples' cable modems and DSL lines, and it would be quite a lot more if I left it nailed up 24x7.
You, like several others here, seem to have somehow gotten the impression that I am opposed to smaller encoding. I can only conclude that someone is spoofing my web host's DNS and some of you are reading a different page than the one I wrote.
Jeremy
If you think this is going to decrease the amount of data transferred by customers, you need to take off those rose-colored glasses. I suspect it won't affect that at all.
Smaller encoding helps us (the providers), it doesn't hurt us. (Besides, one look at the Supernews price list versus the competition will reveal that metered individual accounts are hardly the main focus.) With the customers the actual money comes from, less downloads would increase the margins, not decrease them. In fact, to a lesser extent, it would do so with the individual accounts as well -- the pricing on individual Usenet accounts (at almost all of the top providers) is such that the margins are lower at higher download levels. At the highest levels, it's nearly break-even. So less downloading would even be somewhat better there.
If you really think that I'm against a smaller binary encoding scheme, then you completely missed the point of my essay -- and you also must have missed the part about how it was my first experimental code, implementing smaller encoding, from which yEnc was hatched. If I truly wanted to avoid smaller encoding, why would I have implemented it in the first place? Why would I have done it in public and then sent the code to several people, explicitely releasing it into the public domain? You think I would have done that to prevent the spread of smaller encoding?
Had Jürgen picked up where I left off and did the thing right, I would be singing an entirely different tune.
Jeremy
Read the yEnc spec before you say idiotic things like that. How do you suppose the client is meant to know there's a yEnc binary in the post BEFORE it downloads it?
The filename and other information is also in the Subject line. According to the spec. Which you obviously have not read.
Jeremy
Well then. When I put that page up, I honestly didn't expect many people to read it outside news.software.nntp and a few curious folks in alt.binaries.news-server-comparison. I certainly wan't expecting to get Slashdotted. Well, that's fine, except that the uproar might have waited a little bit.
In my essay, I state that what Usenet needs is "a better way to post Binaries". The next piece of the puzzle, of course, is to answer the question, "What IS a better way to post binaries?" I was thinking about finishing that page up tonight, but I am writing code at the moment instead.
So, when reading my comments, just keep in mind that, yes, I DO have some answers to that question, too. It's just that it's a bit of a more time-consuming question, so that page isn't done yet.
This time around, though, I will make sure to include a prominent warning to NOT run off and implement the ideas as quickly as possible, and to please not use all of Usenet as beta-testers. The idea that whatever gets done fastest is best just doesn't work for me. There were good reasons I didn't go and get people to implement my smaller encoding ideas when I first wrote the code. If only the yEnc implementor had continued where I left off rather than going down his rather misguided path...
All the comments are welcome. I've been getting some interesting email, too, of course. Many programmers of Usenet client software absolutely despise the thing and are quite annoyed at the amount of their time it is wasting. I guess it's just more of that never-ending divide between the users and the techies. So it goes.
yEnc is here, that's for sure. Now we just have to try to deal with it.
Jeremy
This is one of those things that has been repeated so often that everyone starts to believe it. It's basically a myth. There is no ISP with common carrier status. Common carrier status is something that has to be specifically granted by the government, and it comes along with a whole lot of regulations that ISPs don't want to deal with.
Look at it this way. I've got a Microsoft Natural Keyboard plugged into my Unix system. Why did I buy the Microsoft one? I went to the store looking for a natural keyboard. There was a whole big shelf of them, one of which was Microsoft's. I tried them all out, and the one that felt best was Microsoft's, so I bought it.
If they competed like that on everything, I wouldn't have a problem with it.