I've always thought that the existence of white people proved that there was some important benefit to getting sunlight. Otherwise there would be no reason that skin would have lightened in the people who migrated north. I don't know what all the benefits might be, but I try to get a little sun on my pasty white skin most days.
Actually, the patent-arms-race strategy only works aginst companies that produce products and could in theory be infringing your defensive patents. But pure patent trolls exist, where there is no business, just a bunch of purchased patents and lawyers, and there's nothing to counter sue. "Companies" like that are pretty hard to deter.
I find it funny that people complain about ketosis on the Atkins diet, and then recommend eating less and getting exercise. Question: what do you think happens when you're running a calorie deficit? Hint: your body turns its excess fat into glucose through... ketosis! Many exercise regimens recommend doing longer slower exercise for this very reason: to burn through your blood sugar and force you into fat burning mode. By drastically reducing carbs in the diet, you can force the same transition.
Exercise is great for many reasons, and everyone who has an interest in health should be doing physical activities. But it seems most people can experience substantially improved weight loss while feeling less hungry on a low-carb diet. I know I can.
...but I sort of hope they get bit badly by this. Am I a fool to assume that the only way for patents to be reformed is for the big players to get bit so bad they start lobbying for change?
I've driven a Geo Metro, and it's not that surprising at all that my Prius gets roughly the same gas milage. The Geo was a miniscule car with absolutely no power and a crappy ride. My Prius is none of those things. It's not just about efficiency, it's about efficiency within a certain comfort level. Otherwise I'd just be riding a bicycle:)
Unlikely it'll change much... Hollywood chooses actors based on the popularity pull they have, not the quality of acting. Beyond a certain base level they don't care, they just want someone with a lot of fans. Since having fans usually means you're already big in the biz, is it any wonder we see the same actors over and over again? There are already plenty of great cheap actors that can't get a break. At least that's my thought.
At the very least, this might make watching popular but not-so-great actors a little more palatable. And how will this affect acting awards?
Oh, and who really cares... it's just entertainment:)
It is an arms race where the consumer always wins.
Nope, not even close. Having been on the receiving end of many patent attacks, I can tell you that it is just a way for big companies to extract money from anyone who manages to do something successful technology. Multiple large companies that you've heard of (which I unfortunately can't disclose) have basically written to my company and said "You do business online. You make a reasonable amount of money. We don't know what, but we are sure you infringe something in our extensive patent portfolio. Give us 1% of your revenue or be lawyered into the ground".
It just increases costs and both small business and the consumers lose. I can't even imagine that the good of having outweighs the bad at this point in time.
That was just the top 10. The whole list is very long:)
FYI, Mac Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 litter the teens under both PPC and Intel. All the prominent Mac Firefox entries combined pull about 1.8%. Mac IE really is dead, coming in at #44 with 0.05%.
The version splits make some things look smaller than they should. The analytics I'm using doesn't allow very fine grained control over improving that. What I'd like would be a way to group by work-alikes. But then that concept may not really hold anyways.
Here's the percentages for the site I work on. I can't reveal specific numbers, but we get many millions of unique visitors per day. As many other posters have mentioned, the answer of what to support greatly depends on who your audience is and what you're trying to achieve. Our audience is over 99% from the US, and represents a more average (read: less tech savvy) cross section of internet users, specifically, those that would buy shoes and apparel online. Your potential customer profile is likely much different, but here's the top 10 browsers/platform combonations we saw last week:
44.93% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows XP 26.48% - Internet Explorer 7.0 Windows XP 5.26% - Firefox 2.0 Windows XP 4.90% - Firefox 1.5 Windows XP 3.98% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 2000 2.29% - Safari 419 Macintosh PPC 1.82% - Safari 419 Macintosh Intel 1.39% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 98 0.92% - Safari 312 Macintosh PPC 0.52% - Firefox 1.0 Windows XP
We do our best to support normal operation on all of these platforms (and several others) because at our volume alienating even a fraction of a percent costs real money. And also in our case it's not hard to make things work cross browser because we use simple HTML and minimal javascript.
You ask what you lose by adding some IE only features. The equally important question is what you gain. Are the IE only features you're considering going to increase the value of your application enough to make up for what is lost in potential users? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. In general I think people overestimate how much fancy features are going to improve usefulness, so be honest with yourself there. Good luck figuring out where to draw the line.
The anonymous parent post, flagged as flamebait, is dead on. It's just so dead on it's sad. And I'll be proud to be modded down as well.
I just wish there was some way for the tiny minority who knew full well in advance that this war was a bad idea could have actually stopped it. But that's not how the world works. The hotblooded masses create a mess like this and then when it becomes obvious, they just embitter themselves against those who warned them rather than learn or admit they were wrong. Whatever.
And of course this is an appropriate venue for this dissent: it's a serious fucking war. It's more important than anything. If you're complaining about the subtleties of message board etiquitte you may want to rethink your priorities.
I am a happy mac user, but I don't think that Apple would be notably more ethical as the top dog than Microsoft was. You know that old adage "power corrupts"? It's not just a trite little saying. It really has a lot of meaning behind it. The implications are enormous, and are reflected in the need for a short-term presidency in any successful democracy. It is almost impossible for anyone to become powerful without being tempted to abuse that power from time to time. Some more egregiously than others, but it will happen. Yet we keep on thinking over and over that if we only got the right person/company in charge, things wouldn't be that way. I don't agree. I think that Apple will become anticompetitive and draconian as soon as they have less to fear by doing so. It seems the nature of things.
In fact, the better at it you get, the more obscure looking your programs get
Well, I can tell you that's not true. If you're willing to believe me, I'll claim that I've become very proficient at perl in the past 9 years and my code has become much easier to read. I think those who have worked with me would agree. Some have even said so specifically. You just have to have a little self dicipline and a sense of clarity and aesthetics.
Now, if you don't have such sense, or if you just like another language, that's totally cool. Whatever works for the job. But perl is a medium (like oil or watercolor) and you can make beautiful programs with it. It just doesn't do anything to assist you in that endeavor:) Still, it's my favorite language (I've only ever dug into java and c++ as alternates).
Hey now, it depends on the context. Sometimes it is good to just put text into a huge data structure. Sometimes it's not. In the end, a smart programmer who understands the issues is better than a rule.
The general motivation is to protect the company from lawsuits. There is the idea that the company has a lot of money and the user doesn't, and so this makes it possible for users to sue the company for mistakes without the company having any recourse. So by having these EULAs they can prevent frivolous lawsuits. Fair or not, that's the motivation.
But the article makes another point, which is that like patents, a troll could buy the remains of a company who has tons of users who agreed to some type of EULA and then sue them. Not that the original company would do this, but that a troll would.
It depends on how specifically you mean that, but the basic answer is "because they can".
No, really... sure, I'll sound like a mac fanboi, but I've used Windows, Linux, OSX each for years now. OSX comes a closer to "just working" than Windows. And Windows comes closer to "just working" than Linux. So it's not unreasonable for people to expect it to "just work"... at least as well as other things they've used.
History is littered with times when something superior did not gain mass adoption and instead an inferior product did.
I would argue this is less common and less egregious than you imply. I'd be happy to hear some more of your examples, but in general when you take the whole picture into account the better product wins. You just have to remember that the better product doesn't mean the one that is the most technically advanced (as many people on this board probably would define "best"), but rather the one that has the best overall balance of qualities.
I've not seen the mp3 player you're referring to, but I've seen several "better than iPod" players, but have not once found them to be particularly better. The #1 thing that is usually missing is iTunes integration... that combination made it easier to manage music than I'd ever seen before and even until now. The interface usability of both iTunes and the iPod was (and is still) less intimidating than just about anything else.
Marketing plays a role, but I'm convinced it's smaller than you think. It gets people to be aware, which is critical for new products. And for one-shot deals like movies, marketing is very, very powerful. But for a technology to be adopted and stick long term, it has to be pretty darn good at meeting the needs.
And this is coming from an ex amiga user. If anyone was made to whine about the best technology losing it would be me, but I've come to accept reality:)
You're right! I also like to remind people that landmines are natural.
You're right that humans and their technology are, in the big picture, part of nature. However you're playing semantics: there is an admittedly arbitrary consensus that we use the word "natural" to mean "not man made". And even then, there's no reason to think that man made stuff is inherintly better or worse than natural stuff... bubonic plague is natural, and the Sgt Pepper's album is man made, but I would rather have the latter than the former:)
And science, though more political than it should be, is certainly not just as political as politics. There is a reason for that: because for most of science, you can perform repeatable experiments. Politics is often wholly rhetorical. Politics aims to guide regardless of factual data. In general, science does not... your cynicism notwithstanding.
There's little sympathy for "rich" folks (read: anyone who doesn't work at a coffee shop), so I don't expect the law to change anytime soon, but this is an ongoing problem where the government taxes you on money you don't have. The AMT is the chief culprit here. I get that we need to close loopholes for rich people not paying tax, but at least wait until they have the money in hand, no? I'll be facing the AMT next year and the thing is that I'll owe taxes on options that I probably won't be able to sell. So I may have to declare bankruptcy. Or if I can sell them it might be at a steeply discounted price so that I may end up paying, in effect, 100% tax on them. Maybe even more, or, if I'm lucky less maybe only 80%-- but how does that make any sense? How about I pay the intended rate on the money once I actually have access to it? I'm happy to pay my share of taxes when the time comes, but AMT has some ridiculous side effects.
You are right! I shall retire off the proceeds from referring people to the spamassassion man page!
More seriously, I'm not saying that I can solve the world's spam problem, just that a motivated person can make spam a non-issue for themselves.
Actually I already posted my config in reply to another comment, but more importantly you have to feed it properly.
I think there may be a misunderstanding of what bayesian filters do when it is said that spammers can "generate messages which defeat baysean filters". Which bayesian filters? Certainly not all, because they're all different. That's the point. Unless you're using them site-wide, which kind of misses the point.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure I'm not convincing you of anything, but I thought I'd wind down with that.
Thanks for the post... I can see what you're saying here. I am under the threshold of "low" spam volume you define, so I perhaps haven't seen the filters break meaningfully yet. I don't think I get any false positives, but a couple slip through and if spam volume increased 100 fold I'd be screwed. But for now, I guess my question was more aimed at whether many slashdot users were still suffering with tens or hundreds of spams per day actually making it to their inbox.
I wonder what can be done to solves spam on a more basic level, though. Law enforcement raids as though it was a drug bust)? Or a secondary system with optional micropayments for "unwanted" mail? Or a trust network of mailservers of some kind? Or maybe we really are just screwed by our species' own greed and lack of consideration.
You are totally correct that if you can't get your users consistently following the right steps, it won't work. And that is a bigger and bigger challenge the more users you have. The creativity of the spammers has impressed me on occasion. News headlines is clever.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always thought that the existence of white people proved that there was some important benefit to getting sunlight. Otherwise there would be no reason that skin would have lightened in the people who migrated north. I don't know what all the benefits might be, but I try to get a little sun on my pasty white skin most days.
Actually, the patent-arms-race strategy only works aginst companies that produce products and could in theory be infringing your defensive patents. But pure patent trolls exist, where there is no business, just a bunch of purchased patents and lawyers, and there's nothing to counter sue. "Companies" like that are pretty hard to deter.
I find it funny that people complain about ketosis on the Atkins diet, and then recommend eating less and getting exercise. Question: what do you think happens when you're running a calorie deficit? Hint: your body turns its excess fat into glucose through... ketosis! Many exercise regimens recommend doing longer slower exercise for this very reason: to burn through your blood sugar and force you into fat burning mode. By drastically reducing carbs in the diet, you can force the same transition.
Exercise is great for many reasons, and everyone who has an interest in health should be doing physical activities. But it seems most people can experience substantially improved weight loss while feeling less hungry on a low-carb diet. I know I can.
...but I sort of hope they get bit badly by this. Am I a fool to assume that the only way for patents to be reformed is for the big players to get bit so bad they start lobbying for change?
But isn't diesel a more dense fuel than gasoline? Maybe the burn process is more efficient, too, but just comparing on volume is misleading, isn't it?
Also aren't Imperial gallons larger than American gallons? Or do they use the same gallon when talking about fuel?
I've driven a Geo Metro, and it's not that surprising at all that my Prius gets roughly the same gas milage. The Geo was a miniscule car with absolutely no power and a crappy ride. My Prius is none of those things. It's not just about efficiency, it's about efficiency within a certain comfort level. Otherwise I'd just be riding a bicycle :)
Unlikely it'll change much... Hollywood chooses actors based on the popularity pull they have, not the quality of acting. Beyond a certain base level they don't care, they just want someone with a lot of fans. Since having fans usually means you're already big in the biz, is it any wonder we see the same actors over and over again? There are already plenty of great cheap actors that can't get a break. At least that's my thought.
:)
At the very least, this might make watching popular but not-so-great actors a little more palatable. And how will this affect acting awards?
Oh, and who really cares... it's just entertainment
Cheers.
It is an arms race where the consumer always wins.
Nope, not even close. Having been on the receiving end of many patent attacks, I can tell you that it is just a way for big companies to extract money from anyone who manages to do something successful technology. Multiple large companies that you've heard of (which I unfortunately can't disclose) have basically written to my company and said "You do business online. You make a reasonable amount of money. We don't know what, but we are sure you infringe something in our extensive patent portfolio. Give us 1% of your revenue or be lawyered into the ground".
It just increases costs and both small business and the consumers lose. I can't even imagine that the good of having outweighs the bad at this point in time.
Cheers.
Nice. He's essentially saying the Wii is for morons.
Or busy people. Let's remember that not everyone in the world has the same priorities as us. There's nothing stupid about that.
Thanks... I think that's the best answer anyone came up with.
Cheers.
That was just the top 10. The whole list is very long :)
FYI, Mac Firefox 1.5 & 2.0 litter the teens under both PPC and Intel. All the prominent Mac Firefox entries combined pull about 1.8%. Mac IE really is dead, coming in at #44 with 0.05%.
The version splits make some things look smaller than they should. The analytics I'm using doesn't allow very fine grained control over improving that. What I'd like would be a way to group by work-alikes. But then that concept may not really hold anyways.
Here's the percentages for the site I work on. I can't reveal specific numbers, but we get many millions of unique visitors per day. As many other posters have mentioned, the answer of what to support greatly depends on who your audience is and what you're trying to achieve. Our audience is over 99% from the US, and represents a more average (read: less tech savvy) cross section of internet users, specifically, those that would buy shoes and apparel online. Your potential customer profile is likely much different, but here's the top 10 browsers/platform combonations we saw last week:
44.93% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows XP
26.48% - Internet Explorer 7.0 Windows XP
5.26% - Firefox 2.0 Windows XP
4.90% - Firefox 1.5 Windows XP
3.98% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 2000
2.29% - Safari 419 Macintosh PPC
1.82% - Safari 419 Macintosh Intel
1.39% - Internet Explorer 6.0 Windows 98
0.92% - Safari 312 Macintosh PPC
0.52% - Firefox 1.0 Windows XP
We do our best to support normal operation on all of these platforms (and several others) because at our volume alienating even a fraction of a percent costs real money. And also in our case it's not hard to make things work cross browser because we use simple HTML and minimal javascript.
You ask what you lose by adding some IE only features. The equally important question is what you gain. Are the IE only features you're considering going to increase the value of your application enough to make up for what is lost in potential users? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. In general I think people overestimate how much fancy features are going to improve usefulness, so be honest with yourself there. Good luck figuring out where to draw the line.
Cheers.
This technology has nothing to do with politics, so knock it off.
Is there anyplace that dissent for a current war should be considered off topic? Really? Really?!?
The anonymous parent post, flagged as flamebait, is dead on. It's just so dead on it's sad. And I'll be proud to be modded down as well.
I just wish there was some way for the tiny minority who knew full well in advance that this war was a bad idea could have actually stopped it. But that's not how the world works. The hotblooded masses create a mess like this and then when it becomes obvious, they just embitter themselves against those who warned them rather than learn or admit they were wrong. Whatever.
And of course this is an appropriate venue for this dissent: it's a serious fucking war. It's more important than anything. If you're complaining about the subtleties of message board etiquitte you may want to rethink your priorities.
I am a happy mac user, but I don't think that Apple would be notably more ethical as the top dog than Microsoft was. You know that old adage "power corrupts"? It's not just a trite little saying. It really has a lot of meaning behind it. The implications are enormous, and are reflected in the need for a short-term presidency in any successful democracy. It is almost impossible for anyone to become powerful without being tempted to abuse that power from time to time. Some more egregiously than others, but it will happen. Yet we keep on thinking over and over that if we only got the right person/company in charge, things wouldn't be that way. I don't agree. I think that Apple will become anticompetitive and draconian as soon as they have less to fear by doing so. It seems the nature of things.
Cheers.
In fact, the better at it you get, the more obscure looking your programs get
:) Still, it's my favorite language (I've only ever dug into java and c++ as alternates).
Well, I can tell you that's not true. If you're willing to believe me, I'll claim that I've become very proficient at perl in the past 9 years and my code has become much easier to read. I think those who have worked with me would agree. Some have even said so specifically. You just have to have a little self dicipline and a sense of clarity and aesthetics.
Now, if you don't have such sense, or if you just like another language, that's totally cool. Whatever works for the job. But perl is a medium (like oil or watercolor) and you can make beautiful programs with it. It just doesn't do anything to assist you in that endeavor
Cheers.
The rest of us know better.
Hey now, it depends on the context. Sometimes it is good to just put text into a huge data structure. Sometimes it's not. In the end, a smart programmer who understands the issues is better than a rule.
Cheers.
Then why is it there?
The general motivation is to protect the company from lawsuits. There is the idea that the company has a lot of money and the user doesn't, and so this makes it possible for users to sue the company for mistakes without the company having any recourse. So by having these EULAs they can prevent frivolous lawsuits. Fair or not, that's the motivation.
But the article makes another point, which is that like patents, a troll could buy the remains of a company who has tons of users who agreed to some type of EULA and then sue them. Not that the original company would do this, but that a troll would.
Cheers.
Why should a computer 'just work'?
It depends on how specifically you mean that, but the basic answer is "because they can".
No, really... sure, I'll sound like a mac fanboi, but I've used Windows, Linux, OSX each for years now. OSX comes a closer to "just working" than Windows. And Windows comes closer to "just working" than Linux. So it's not unreasonable for people to expect it to "just work"... at least as well as other things they've used.
Cheers.
History is littered with times when something superior did not gain mass adoption and instead an inferior product did.
:)
I would argue this is less common and less egregious than you imply. I'd be happy to hear some more of your examples, but in general when you take the whole picture into account the better product wins. You just have to remember that the better product doesn't mean the one that is the most technically advanced (as many people on this board probably would define "best"), but rather the one that has the best overall balance of qualities.
I've not seen the mp3 player you're referring to, but I've seen several "better than iPod" players, but have not once found them to be particularly better. The #1 thing that is usually missing is iTunes integration... that combination made it easier to manage music than I'd ever seen before and even until now. The interface usability of both iTunes and the iPod was (and is still) less intimidating than just about anything else.
Marketing plays a role, but I'm convinced it's smaller than you think. It gets people to be aware, which is critical for new products. And for one-shot deals like movies, marketing is very, very powerful. But for a technology to be adopted and stick long term, it has to be pretty darn good at meeting the needs.
And this is coming from an ex amiga user. If anyone was made to whine about the best technology losing it would be me, but I've come to accept reality
Cheers.
You're right! I also like to remind people that landmines are natural.
:)
You're right that humans and their technology are, in the big picture, part of nature. However you're playing semantics: there is an admittedly arbitrary consensus that we use the word "natural" to mean "not man made". And even then, there's no reason to think that man made stuff is inherintly better or worse than natural stuff... bubonic plague is natural, and the Sgt Pepper's album is man made, but I would rather have the latter than the former
And science, though more political than it should be, is certainly not just as political as politics. There is a reason for that: because for most of science, you can perform repeatable experiments. Politics is often wholly rhetorical. Politics aims to guide regardless of factual data. In general, science does not... your cynicism notwithstanding.
Cheers.
There's little sympathy for "rich" folks (read: anyone who doesn't work at a coffee shop), so I don't expect the law to change anytime soon, but this is an ongoing problem where the government taxes you on money you don't have. The AMT is the chief culprit here. I get that we need to close loopholes for rich people not paying tax, but at least wait until they have the money in hand, no? I'll be facing the AMT next year and the thing is that I'll owe taxes on options that I probably won't be able to sell. So I may have to declare bankruptcy. Or if I can sell them it might be at a steeply discounted price so that I may end up paying, in effect, 100% tax on them. Maybe even more, or, if I'm lucky less maybe only 80%-- but how does that make any sense? How about I pay the intended rate on the money once I actually have access to it? I'm happy to pay my share of taxes when the time comes, but AMT has some ridiculous side effects.
Cheers.
You are right! I shall retire off the proceeds from referring people to the spamassassion man page!
More seriously, I'm not saying that I can solve the world's spam problem, just that a motivated person can make spam a non-issue for themselves.
Actually I already posted my config in reply to another comment, but more importantly you have to feed it properly.
I think there may be a misunderstanding of what bayesian filters do when it is said that spammers can "generate messages which defeat baysean filters". Which bayesian filters? Certainly not all, because they're all different. That's the point. Unless you're using them site-wide, which kind of misses the point.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure I'm not convincing you of anything, but I thought I'd wind down with that.
Cheers.
Thanks for the post... I can see what you're saying here. I am under the threshold of "low" spam volume you define, so I perhaps haven't seen the filters break meaningfully yet. I don't think I get any false positives, but a couple slip through and if spam volume increased 100 fold I'd be screwed. But for now, I guess my question was more aimed at whether many slashdot users were still suffering with tens or hundreds of spams per day actually making it to their inbox.
I wonder what can be done to solves spam on a more basic level, though. Law enforcement raids as though it was a drug bust)? Or a secondary system with optional micropayments for "unwanted" mail? Or a trust network of mailservers of some kind? Or maybe we really are just screwed by our species' own greed and lack of consideration.
Cheers.
You are totally correct that if you can't get your users consistently following the right steps, it won't work. And that is a bigger and bigger challenge the more users you have. The creativity of the spammers has impressed me on occasion. News headlines is clever.
Cheers.