The problem is more that the URL doesn't necessarily mean a lot. For instance, in one e-commerce project I'm working on, most of the pages are served by a single program and POST data is what makes it behave differently. So I suppose I would have one huge building and that would be it.
It's certainly trivial to put it in the page template, but I don't see it as meaning much, unless I wanted to see busses taking off and driving from corder to corder.
I think the number of people from Slashdot requesting free trials would have bankrupted them.
Their bandwidth isn't doing so great with the Slashdot effect, so I'm not sure if they're even ready for all the customers this is going to bring them. (I'm probably going to give it a try myself).
Nice try, but since it's web only it's not going to handle email:-(.
Looks like it works by putting a tracking image on your web site that resides on their servers and then using that to track remotely. Clever since it means you don't have to install any software on the web site or have control over your web server. On the other hand it would be a bit of a pain to edit all those pages. I'll have to dig deeper to see if it works with web sites that are all dynamic.
I have to say that I like the idea enough that I may well exhume my Windows machine to give it a go. Pity there's no Mac or Linux version:-(.
If you want the machine, buy it and upgrade incrementally. There's no law that says that the second you buy your machine you have to load it up with memory and disk.
My dual 2ghz G5 performs great with the stock 512mb RAM. I've upgraded it to 3.5gb, and there is a difference (mainly in switching applications), but the system with its stock RAM configuration is perfectly usable.
My 160gb system disk lasted about 8 months before I had to buy a new 250gb to fit the empty slot. I would have gained nothing by buying the 250g disk with the system.
Apple makes fantastic computers, and I'm a fanatical Apple loyalist -- but you'll get everything cheaper if you go to Fry's(*) or shop on the net for components like memory and disk. Memory upgrades are universally about triple the going rate if you get them from Apple, and Apple's brilliant case design makes them easy to install.
Always upgrade incrementally. It will let you spread the financial pain and you'll enjoy getting the performance boost treats spread over time.
Hope that helps.
D
(*) If you're not in California, you may have never heard of Fry's. It's a huge retail store, designed by scions of a prominent supermarket family, that works basically like a supermarket for computer gear. If it exists, and it has to do with computers or salty snacks, it's probably hiding somewhere in Fry's, waiting patiently for you to discover it.
It's not necessarily resolution, though - the quality of the camera itself makes a huge difference. If you compare a throwaway camera with my Canon EOS D30, and you scale both images down to 640x480 (the throwaway's maximum resolution), you're still going to see higher quality on the D30 thanks to the quality optics and image sensor.
Whether luck is a big factor depends on the image. If I'm shooting a moving subject, I might be able to get a more striking image out of my Canon XL1, which shoots at 30 frames per second, by picking the right frame out of thousands. This is true even though image quality of my XL1 is far inferior to the D30 due to low resolution and heavy compression inherent in the MiniDV format.
But when I'm shooting a landscape, where motion isn't as much of a factor, I should be able to make most of my images count unless I'm experimenting with exposure, and the additional resolution counts hugely; XL1 landscapes are pretty much blobs, while there is a wealth of fine detail using the D30.
I find that unless I make grave technical errors (out of focus, terrible exposure, etc) I wind up wanting to keep most of my pictures, and I take thousands of digital images a year.
Before Jobs, Apple was an all but failed company. It hadn't managed to put together a successor to Classic MacOS, despite enormous effort. Its products were uninspired beige boxes.
After Jobs, Apple became far more innovative. It started making interesting products again. A lot of the same people were doing the same jobs (bad pun, sorry) under Amelio, but their brilliance was unleashed under Jobs.
Clearly Steve Jobs' management made a huge difference in the company and its perception in the world. And it was his meticulousness that made MacOS X a superbly designed and crafted product.
I'm not saying it's easy to work for someone like Steve. But this kind of obsessiveness is how great products get made... and, most likely, is why there are so few truly great products.
It's not a very good analogy because in the case of auto theft, the burden is on the owner of the vehicle. BMW may even be helped if your BMW is stolen, since you will probaly get another one.
In the case of software theft, the producers of the software are the victims. Customers do not lose in any way when software is stolen, since they can still use it. That's why software piracy is so common.
But in the end, BMW might well be sued and lose in this incident, so we could make a pretty good case for Microsoft being obligated to do the updates.
I'm not condoning software piracy; all the software I have on my computer is legal. I am saying the cost of making the update available to all is minimal, seeing that the update is not meant to be revenue generating in any event.
A safety-related update is not a perk of ownership. Free roadside assistance is a perk. When I ask for it for my Mercedes, they take my VIN, and I have to assume that if it had been stolen, they'd send the cops instead of the repair crew. But as a Mercedes owner, I would not consider a safety-related recall a perk; after all, it's an inconvenience more than anything else, just as Software Update is.
Unfortunately, the drive to Accomplish Great Things makes many people tough to work with. You either accept the Great Things His Way, or you leave.
If you consider that there are plenty of people who are lousy to work with who don't Accomplish Great Things, I'm inclined to cut Steve Jobs a little slack - because nobody can say that he doesn't Accomplish Great Things.
Even if the changes to this poster aren't one of them.
They could, but doing it once would eliminate a trust relationship that they'd like even pirates to have.
And if you were a legitimate customer, wouldn't you think twice about accessing a MS update web site when you knew it might arbitrarily associate you with a bum code? It's not impossible for MS's data to be wrong, you know. The original purchaser of software with a code that got into the wild isn't necessarily the person who sent it out, after all.
Could you imagine the public relations fallout if someone who got hit in that way dug up a legitimate invoice for Windows XP?
The patched machines won't get these worms, but certainly the worms are chomping up bandwndth and making our broadband connections overall less useful to us. So you're not immune to the impact of the worms even if you personally don't get any.
The problem with not letting people patch systems is that there's a huge amount of collateral damage, to ISPs and customer networks. Not to mention use by spammers.
I have a legitimate copy of Windows XP (which I don't use much since I'm a Mac guy, but let's pretend I use it).
Worms are crawling all over my network and impacting me all the time. Let's say they are coming from unpatchable machines. I am the unwitting victim of a policy of Microsoft not to allow other machines to be patched.
Frankly, this doesn't seem fair to me as a paying customer. I sympathise with their hatred of piracy, but when something like this affects all users, not just the pirates, I don't think it's good.
Maybe they could produce "SP-2 Pirate Edition" which would just contain the security fixes and no enhancements?
I think the original poster was complaining, quite rightly, about the low screen resolution. Modern video editing programs really need at least a 1024x768 screen and even that's not the full experience.
Of course as a Mac user he's almost certainly a Final Cut Pro loyalist in any event (as am I), so it would take radical change to switch him to XP in any event.
Of course if Apple did make a similar device, it would sell like hotcakes to obsessed Apple users all over the place. Ever since the Newton was discontinued, they've been practically begging for a replacement - and if my memory serves, the Newton form factor was almost identical to this device. And maybe they'd even create a special Final Cut screen arrangement for it that would maximize the tiny screen space.
So I think I agree with the original poster - Apple should do something like this, and it would sell to Apple's built-in base of high-end affluent customers who love lavishing money on their products. (I personally have spent over $8,000 on Apple products in the last two years). It would be a lot easier to confuse us than to convince el cheap Windows users (happy with crummy $500 PCs) to trust an unknown brand for something like this.
(Maybe that's why Windows innovations, such as the Tablet PC, do so poorly).
I'll bet Sony's giving away the song for free in an effort to jumpstart their apparently failing format, and that's why Apple didn't succeed in their bid. That's a pretty hefty investment in royalties, but I doubt there's a lot of room in the margin of a Big Mac meal.
If you have to download a program you wouldn't normally load for a low-value prize, a lot of people aren't going to be interested. Perhaps this is also why the iTunes promotion wasn't successful, and their program has a flawless reputation with rave reviews.
I think it depends on the kind of photography you do. If you're shooting images such as landscapes with huge amounts of detail, then go ahead and buy a film camera and pay through the nose for film, developing and printing.
But if you're like me and enjoy the sheer act of taking a lot of pictures, that kind of approach would bankrupt you. I love my Canon EOS D30 3.5mp digital SLR because I can take as many pictures as I want without worrying about the cost. In my first year of ownership, I took over 7,500 shots - which would have probably cost more than my digital SLR to make and print - and I paid $3,300 for it.
I didn't print many of my images until I bought a HP Color LaserJet 3500, which made it inexpensive to do so. Now I've made maybe 100 prints, all of which look beautiful, even 8x10s from my 3.5mp camera. You're going to say that you'd get better detail and finer resolution and glossier prints with an photo inkjet, and you're right -- but how many photos will you print out at $2 per page?
In other words, there's a quantity versus quality question. The more pictures you can take, the more you'll learn and the better you'll get. If you're restricted by budgetary limitations, you'll wish you got your digital SLR.
Correct to a point, but I seem to remember X is big, complex and unwieldy, making it a significant impediment to having a responsive GUI. And if there's one thing you can say about BeOS, it was outstandingly responsive even on relatively poky hardware.
On the other hand, nowadays computers are so fast that even X can be made to perform well. So it might be that gaining more drivers would be worth the possibly slight performance hit.
Well, I meant that was what a DNS server does. It gets a request, and looks it up in a lookup table. That's all most people running DNS servers really need.
You're over-complicating things for simple applications if you use the software meant to distribute DNS over an entire network of servers for your single web site which just needs to receive a request for www.amazing.com and return an addresss.
Well, if I could listen to the free music on my computer, I might give it a try... except for one thing: My computer's a Mac. I understand you can listen to it on your computer if you use Windows, and if you use their (apparently ugly) proprietary player. Does anyone have firsthand knowledge of it? My only source of information is a pro-Mac site and they understandably trashed it.
Since I hate McDonalds food (it all tastes like cardboard to me), this is less than relevent, I suppose. I did try switching to Pepsi for a while for the iTunes contest, but unfortunately I don't like Pepsi in bottles at all, so that didn't work for me.
I think the Pepsi contest was a better idea because soft drink consumption is a lot more frequent than fast food consumption, at least for me. I'll drink a Coke at every meal, but won't consume a Big Mac at every meal, so the odds have to be pretty good for people to win.
I really liked the Pepsi promotion a lot and I was sorry it didn't do better (because I would have enjoyed seeing it run again). McDonalds is a lot less compelling. But then again, I hate their food anyway...
As others have said, I think the main reason people use BIND is that it's in all the examples in the standard books (mainly O'Reilly) we use to learn.
I was unaware DNS servers really needed much in the way of features for most people. In fact, I thought it was about the simplest thing in the world - get a request, look it up in a table and return the results. Not exactly rocket science, and the BIND configuration file's pretty ugly looking if my memory serves.
I think overcomplexity is one of the biggest problem with the software world as it is today. It's worst on Windows, of course, but Sendmail and BIND are proof that Unix has similar problems too.
D
My match.com spam video
on
Spam as Poetry
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I created a little humour piece on penis enlargement ads as my match.com video. Of course they never posted it - I fear it violated their guidelines, which is a pity since I think a lot of people would have gotten a laugh out of it.
It took me two hours, concept to completion, which just goes to show that sometimes it's nice to have a Canon XL1 and Final Cut Pro lying around ready to use:-).
Hope you enjoy:-)
D
Re:Is /. a helpline for incompetent businesses...?
on
Becoming a CLEC?
·
· Score: 1
Actually, I think it's an interesting question.
Many of the other answers were genuinely helpful and interesting, too.
I'm not a fanatical supporter of Slashdot's editors - their literacy level occasionally borders on farce - but if you don't like a story, just ignore it.
Of course if there was any kind of rootkit or similar nasty installed, it was probably installed off the command line from a tar.gz file, so it wouldn't appear there.
Nice try, but it probably wouldn't help in this instance.
I want to support companies that innovate, so I generally buy Apple or IBM products. With HP being the leader in printer innovation, I bought a HP Color LaserJet 3500 and have been very happy with it.
There's a visceral reaction in my mind against Dell, simply because I don't want to buy from a company whose business model is simply copying other people's work. I find it, frankly, disgusting.
I want to make sure our industry continues innovating, because if it doesn't, we're all dead in the end. I know Dell makes a decent product, and it's cheap -- but the business model undermines the ideals of creativity and originality I value more than a couple of hundred bucks saved at the cash register.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is more that the URL doesn't necessarily mean a lot. For instance, in one e-commerce project I'm working on, most of the pages are served by a single program and POST data is what makes it behave differently. So I suppose I would have one huge building and that would be it.
It's certainly trivial to put it in the page template, but I don't see it as meaning much, unless I wanted to see busses taking off and driving from corder to corder.
D
I think the number of people from Slashdot requesting free trials would have bankrupted them.
Their bandwidth isn't doing so great with the Slashdot effect, so I'm not sure if they're even ready for all the customers this is going to bring them. (I'm probably going to give it a try myself).
D
Nice try, but since it's web only it's not going to handle email :-(.
:-(.
Looks like it works by putting a tracking image on your web site that resides on their servers and then using that to track remotely. Clever since it means you don't have to install any software on the web site or have control over your web server. On the other hand it would be a bit of a pain to edit all those pages. I'll have to dig deeper to see if it works with web sites that are all dynamic.
I have to say that I like the idea enough that I may well exhume my Windows machine to give it a go. Pity there's no Mac or Linux version
D
If you want the machine, buy it and upgrade incrementally. There's no law that says that the second you buy your machine you have to load it up with memory and disk.
My dual 2ghz G5 performs great with the stock 512mb RAM. I've upgraded it to 3.5gb, and there is a difference (mainly in switching applications), but the system with its stock RAM configuration is perfectly usable.
My 160gb system disk lasted about 8 months before I had to buy a new 250gb to fit the empty slot. I would have gained nothing by buying the 250g disk with the system.
Apple makes fantastic computers, and I'm a fanatical Apple loyalist -- but you'll get everything cheaper if you go to Fry's(*) or shop on the net for components like memory and disk. Memory upgrades are universally about triple the going rate if you get them from Apple, and Apple's brilliant case design makes them easy to install.
Always upgrade incrementally. It will let you spread the financial pain and you'll enjoy getting the performance boost treats spread over time.
Hope that helps.
D
(*) If you're not in California, you may have never heard of Fry's. It's a huge retail store, designed by scions of a prominent supermarket family, that works basically like a supermarket for computer gear. If it exists, and it has to do with computers or salty snacks, it's probably hiding somewhere in Fry's, waiting patiently for you to discover it.
It's not necessarily resolution, though - the quality of the camera itself makes a huge difference. If you compare a throwaway camera with my Canon EOS D30, and you scale both images down to 640x480 (the throwaway's maximum resolution), you're still going to see higher quality on the D30 thanks to the quality optics and image sensor.
Whether luck is a big factor depends on the image. If I'm shooting a moving subject, I might be able to get a more striking image out of my Canon XL1, which shoots at 30 frames per second, by picking the right frame out of thousands. This is true even though image quality of my XL1 is far inferior to the D30 due to low resolution and heavy compression inherent in the MiniDV format.
But when I'm shooting a landscape, where motion isn't as much of a factor, I should be able to make most of my images count unless I'm experimenting with exposure, and the additional resolution counts hugely; XL1 landscapes are pretty much blobs, while there is a wealth of fine detail using the D30.
I find that unless I make grave technical errors (out of focus, terrible exposure, etc) I wind up wanting to keep most of my pictures, and I take thousands of digital images a year.
D
Yes and no.
... and, most likely, is why there are so few truly great products.
Before Jobs, Apple was an all but failed company. It hadn't managed to put together a successor to Classic MacOS, despite enormous effort. Its products were uninspired beige boxes.
After Jobs, Apple became far more innovative. It started making interesting products again. A lot of the same people were doing the same jobs (bad pun, sorry) under Amelio, but their brilliance was unleashed under Jobs.
Clearly Steve Jobs' management made a huge difference in the company and its perception in the world. And it was his meticulousness that made MacOS X a superbly designed and crafted product.
I'm not saying it's easy to work for someone like Steve. But this kind of obsessiveness is how great products get made
D
It's not a very good analogy because in the case of auto theft, the burden is on the owner of the vehicle. BMW may even be helped if your BMW is stolen, since you will probaly get another one.
In the case of software theft, the producers of the software are the victims. Customers do not lose in any way when software is stolen, since they can still use it. That's why software piracy is so common.
But in the end, BMW might well be sued and lose in this incident, so we could make a pretty good case for Microsoft being obligated to do the updates.
I'm not condoning software piracy; all the software I have on my computer is legal. I am saying the cost of making the update available to all is minimal, seeing that the update is not meant to be revenue generating in any event.
A safety-related update is not a perk of ownership. Free roadside assistance is a perk. When I ask for it for my Mercedes, they take my VIN, and I have to assume that if it had been stolen, they'd send the cops instead of the repair crew. But as a Mercedes owner, I would not consider a safety-related recall a perk; after all, it's an inconvenience more than anything else, just as Software Update is.
D
True, but you could use NumLock to perform the same function.
D
Unfortunately, the drive to Accomplish Great Things makes many people tough to work with. You either accept the Great Things His Way, or you leave.
If you consider that there are plenty of people who are lousy to work with who don't Accomplish Great Things, I'm inclined to cut Steve Jobs a little slack - because nobody can say that he doesn't Accomplish Great Things.
Even if the changes to this poster aren't one of them.
D
They could, but doing it once would eliminate a trust relationship that they'd like even pirates to have.
And if you were a legitimate customer, wouldn't you think twice about accessing a MS update web site when you knew it might arbitrarily associate you with a bum code? It's not impossible for MS's data to be wrong, you know. The original purchaser of software with a code that got into the wild isn't necessarily the person who sent it out, after all.
Could you imagine the public relations fallout if someone who got hit in that way dug up a legitimate invoice for Windows XP?
D
The patched machines won't get these worms, but certainly the worms are chomping up bandwndth and making our broadband connections overall less useful to us. So you're not immune to the impact of the worms even if you personally don't get any.
The problem with not letting people patch systems is that there's a huge amount of collateral damage, to ISPs and customer networks. Not to mention use by spammers.
D
I have a legitimate copy of Windows XP (which I don't use much since I'm a Mac guy, but let's pretend I use it).
Worms are crawling all over my network and impacting me all the time. Let's say they are coming from unpatchable machines. I am the unwitting victim of a policy of Microsoft not to allow other machines to be patched.
Frankly, this doesn't seem fair to me as a paying customer. I sympathise with their hatred of piracy, but when something like this affects all users, not just the pirates, I don't think it's good.
Maybe they could produce "SP-2 Pirate Edition" which would just contain the security fixes and no enhancements?
D
I think the original poster was complaining, quite rightly, about the low screen resolution. Modern video editing programs really need at least a 1024x768 screen and even that's not the full experience.
Of course as a Mac user he's almost certainly a Final Cut Pro loyalist in any event (as am I), so it would take radical change to switch him to XP in any event.
Of course if Apple did make a similar device, it would sell like hotcakes to obsessed Apple users all over the place. Ever since the Newton was discontinued, they've been practically begging for a replacement - and if my memory serves, the Newton form factor was almost identical to this device. And maybe they'd even create a special Final Cut screen arrangement for it that would maximize the tiny screen space.
So I think I agree with the original poster - Apple should do something like this, and it would sell to Apple's built-in base of high-end affluent customers who love lavishing money on their products. (I personally have spent over $8,000 on Apple products in the last two years). It would be a lot easier to confuse us than to convince el cheap Windows users (happy with crummy $500 PCs) to trust an unknown brand for something like this.
(Maybe that's why Windows innovations, such as the Tablet PC, do so poorly).
D
I'll bet Sony's giving away the song for free in an effort to jumpstart their apparently failing format, and that's why Apple didn't succeed in their bid. That's a pretty hefty investment in royalties, but I doubt there's a lot of room in the margin of a Big Mac meal.
If you have to download a program you wouldn't normally load for a low-value prize, a lot of people aren't going to be interested. Perhaps this is also why the iTunes promotion wasn't successful, and their program has a flawless reputation with rave reviews.
D
I think it depends on the kind of photography you do. If you're shooting images such as landscapes with huge amounts of detail, then go ahead and buy a film camera and pay through the nose for film, developing and printing.
But if you're like me and enjoy the sheer act of taking a lot of pictures, that kind of approach would bankrupt you. I love my Canon EOS D30 3.5mp digital SLR because I can take as many pictures as I want without worrying about the cost. In my first year of ownership, I took over 7,500 shots - which would have probably cost more than my digital SLR to make and print - and I paid $3,300 for it.
I didn't print many of my images until I bought a HP Color LaserJet 3500, which made it inexpensive to do so. Now I've made maybe 100 prints, all of which look beautiful, even 8x10s from my 3.5mp camera. You're going to say that you'd get better detail and finer resolution and glossier prints with an photo inkjet, and you're right -- but how many photos will you print out at $2 per page?
In other words, there's a quantity versus quality question. The more pictures you can take, the more you'll learn and the better you'll get. If you're restricted by budgetary limitations, you'll wish you got your digital SLR.
D
Correct to a point, but I seem to remember X is big, complex and unwieldy, making it a significant impediment to having a responsive GUI. And if there's one thing you can say about BeOS, it was outstandingly responsive even on relatively poky hardware.
On the other hand, nowadays computers are so fast that even X can be made to perform well. So it might be that gaining more drivers would be worth the possibly slight performance hit.
D
Well, I meant that was what a DNS server does. It gets a request, and looks it up in a lookup table. That's all most people running DNS servers really need.
You're over-complicating things for simple applications if you use the software meant to distribute DNS over an entire network of servers for your single web site which just needs to receive a request for www.amazing.com and return an addresss.
D
Well, if I could listen to the free music on my computer, I might give it a try ... except for one thing: My computer's a Mac. I understand you can listen to it on your computer if you use Windows, and if you use their (apparently ugly) proprietary player. Does anyone have firsthand knowledge of it? My only source of information is a pro-Mac site and they understandably trashed it.
...
Since I hate McDonalds food (it all tastes like cardboard to me), this is less than relevent, I suppose. I did try switching to Pepsi for a while for the iTunes contest, but unfortunately I don't like Pepsi in bottles at all, so that didn't work for me.
I think the Pepsi contest was a better idea because soft drink consumption is a lot more frequent than fast food consumption, at least for me. I'll drink a Coke at every meal, but won't consume a Big Mac at every meal, so the odds have to be pretty good for people to win.
I really liked the Pepsi promotion a lot and I was sorry it didn't do better (because I would have enjoyed seeing it run again). McDonalds is a lot less compelling. But then again, I hate their food anyway
D
As others have said, I think the main reason people use BIND is that it's in all the examples in the standard books (mainly O'Reilly) we use to learn.
I was unaware DNS servers really needed much in the way of features for most people. In fact, I thought it was about the simplest thing in the world - get a request, look it up in a table and return the results. Not exactly rocket science, and the BIND configuration file's pretty ugly looking if my memory serves.
I think overcomplexity is one of the biggest problem with the software world as it is today. It's worst on Windows, of course, but Sendmail and BIND are proof that Unix has similar problems too.
D
I created a little humour piece on penis enlargement ads as my match.com video. Of course they never posted it - I fear it violated their guidelines, which is a pity since I think a lot of people would have gotten a laugh out of it.
:-).
:-)
Here it is, all 9mb of it.
(Warning: No X-rated content - just a joke. You have been warned).
It took me two hours, concept to completion, which just goes to show that sometimes it's nice to have a Canon XL1 and Final Cut Pro lying around ready to use
Hope you enjoy
D
Actually, I think it's an interesting question.
Many of the other answers were genuinely helpful and interesting, too.
I'm not a fanatical supporter of Slashdot's editors - their literacy level occasionally borders on farce - but if you don't like a story, just ignore it.
D
I own an XL1 bought in 1998, and I didn't even know there were firmware upgrades!
:-).
Guess that shows the audience how important they are
What kind of changes do they make?
D
Of course if there was any kind of rootkit or similar nasty installed, it was probably installed off the command line from a tar.gz file, so it wouldn't appear there.
Nice try, but it probably wouldn't help in this instance.
D
If I wanted a Windows notebook, I'd get a ThinkPad. I really like the way those machines are designed and constructed.
Since I'm an Apple loyalist, it's a PowerBook for me. I know they too are made by Quanta, but they're pretty darn nice machines.
I will agree, though, that overall notebook quality has gone down the drain, primarily because price pressures are more potent than quality pressures.
D
I want to support companies that innovate, so I generally buy Apple or IBM products. With HP being the leader in printer innovation, I bought a HP Color LaserJet 3500 and have been very happy with it.
There's a visceral reaction in my mind against Dell, simply because I don't want to buy from a company whose business model is simply copying other people's work. I find it, frankly, disgusting.
I want to make sure our industry continues innovating, because if it doesn't, we're all dead in the end. I know Dell makes a decent product, and it's cheap -- but the business model undermines the ideals of creativity and originality I value more than a couple of hundred bucks saved at the cash register.
D