I've been thinking long and hard about this concept lately. I'm getting old(er), and I'm noticing that I'm starting to slow down. I've still got 20, maybe 30 years of good life left, but really I don't see the point of living much beyond my 60s.
Logan's Run had the right idea. People increasingly just "get in the way" of progress at a certain age. It does vary for some of us, but I'm already seeing that in some ways I'm holding society back by extending my life. The next generation is more tolerant, more enlightened, and certainly more technically competent than I could ever hope to be.
Your assumption that being French isn't a reason for selection is dubious.
US Customs officers at some border crossings are often more suspicious of US Citizens (based on behavior) than certain non-US citizens. I swear US Customs at the Interstate 5 crossing to Canada seem more suspicious of me than most Canadians crossing at the border checkpoint.
Funny, I found Diaspora to be easy to install.. no more difficult than any other "web 2.0" app. It does require something a little more than a simple "webhosting" account: you need to be able to configure Apache or whatever webserver to run the Passenger bits properly, and that's not something I think you can do on a $5 shared-hosting Dreamhost account (that said, it runs fine on Dreamhost VPS: I ran it that way for a while). And Diaspora does have ways of pushing to Facebook and Twitter: any more interaction than just pushing would require Facebook to open up their API, and that isn't happening.
Diaspora's solution is that the "personal information" is housed on a server that you trust (ie. one you run or know personally the administrator of). Nothing marked "private" is typically passed off the home node unless you specifically push it out.
At least in the US a lot of "personal information" can be obtained from public sources. And with Facebook's tendrils into other sites (with things like beacons and such) they can probably get a surprising amount of information from sources you wouldn't expect.
Install Ghostery sometimes and see how many websites you log in to every day have beacons that go to a Facebook-affiliated site.
Oregonian here who follows the happenings in our state capital.
IIRC the concern in Salem was institutionalized cheating: that is, a school district turning a blind eye to (or actively encouraging) cheating to improve scores. Without a law, there was no formal way to dictate a universal anti-cheating policy state-wide.
Computer science IS boring. It's a lot of math and logic and tedium. Once you've gone over Turing's proofs, you either go into Cognitive Science or go full Math Retard (I did the latter) and become one of those boring researchers on campus nobody talks to.
I worked for a regional ISP that serves about 50.000 subscribers. We had multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to various peering points, one of which happens to be where Netflix peered with us. Total cost for that peerage: the cost of the extra fiber capacity, plus engineering the peer.
As opposed to housing Netflix servers at our data center. First off, to service that many potential streams might require a few boxes and a not insignificant storage array. We actually did have a similar arrangement with another very large content provider: their stuff took about a half-rack. It then needs to be added to network monitoring, and you need to train your NOC staff what to do when that little red light comes on. And the equipment will fail: the "other content providers" equipment had a MTBF of a couple of months. The hard drives will take a pounding.
And we were small enough that when we asked Netflix to co-locate in our data center for free they actually said "Not interested."
My small city of around 200K just had one big wireless player (who also happened to be the cable company) announce they are leaving the market (and selling the spectrum licenses to one of the big guys) and the other three I know of buy their bandwidth from.. well, that same cable company and/or the local telephone company. There's no other place to ultimately buy bandwidth: there are three companies that transport and transit: the big regional telephone company, the local cable company, and Facebook. Everybody else is buying and selling Internet from the big guys.
I can't talk about the health of the small wireless ISPs here, but if you sit down and do the math, they are likely just barely making a profit. This may be why the local cable company has exited the wireless ISP market. (I live in an area with a small urban center surrounded by miles of farms and ranches, the cable company's strategy was to use the wireless to extend their range to these rural subscribers and infill in the few areas their cable network didn't cover). And this small cable company had the first LTE network on in the state, so they had a hell of a head start.
That's pretty much the picture in most places: the little guys are very little and increasingly getting smaller, and the big guys are only getting bigger.
> Indeed, no culture in the history of humanity has done so
[citation needed].
Many tribal cultures in the Americas and Africa not only acknowledged the possibility of non-child-bearing unions, many Tribal American cultures even had words for describing people in it.
" We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. "
Have you considered that those two points might be in conflict? That the precise reason for Slashdot's success might be that it speaks to the interests and habits of a fairly specific and narrow audience?
The fact that's buried in the Slashdot Blog and not prominently featured in either the "you're gonna get beta whether you like it or not!" popup and/or a sticky on the Slashdot front page tells this long-time Slashdot user that your "Product Team" isn't really interested in our honest feedback.
Beta sucks, period. It's a design change the users haven't asked for and don't want.
The argument can (and should) be made that I shouldn't have to use browser tools like NoScript to make a site "readable." And few people will:
This "new look" for Slashdot pretty much guarantees Slashdot continues down the path of irrelevancy, as another wave of people decide the downsides of (say) Reddit now aren't nearly as bad as the Microsoft Windows 8-inspired Slashdot.
FWIW, while I'm sure Linus is living quite comfortably, and may in fact be a millionaire (which really isn't that much money these days: my parents were paper millionaires and they were a postal carrier and a government clerk.. they only were "millionaires" because the Southern California house they owned wound up being worth $600,000, plus another $400,000 combined in retirement assets), but he's not exactly living the life of a 1%er. From what I understand, he earns a respectable salary from the Linux Foundation, but not anything out-of-line for a talented software engineer in Portland.
He's not exactly shuttling around the West Hills in a limo. Unless you consider TriMet MAX (Portland's light-rail system) a limo.
Nagios can be built and designed in such a way that there are no false criticals and few spurious alerts. but it requires dedication, documentation, and attention to detail. Most Nagios installations I've run across are built and maintained by people who often lack one (or more) of these three traits, or are a single-man IT operation that can never devote the time or resources to doing it properly.
I have seen systems of Nagios and Zenoss (and a few others) that are devastatingly precise, accurate, and timely. However, they were typically set up by a highly dediated TEAM of sysadmins who's entire job for the organizations they work for is managing the tactical systems. It's a full-time job in and of itself, and not one that many organizations really devote the manpower to do "right." They do it just "good enough", which is why you are used to seeing the installations you are seeing.
Google's exactly the kind of organization that has the man- and brain-power to do it right. And it's not really that hard, it's mostly just simple attention to detail. And that's a trait I've found is lacking in a lot of the current crop of junior system administrators I've run across.
Slashdot Mirror
Change the $ to BTC and you may have what some of the "faucets" are, in fact, doing.
I've been thinking long and hard about this concept lately. I'm getting old(er), and I'm noticing that I'm starting to slow down. I've still got 20, maybe 30 years of good life left, but really I don't see the point of living much beyond my 60s.
Logan's Run had the right idea. People increasingly just "get in the way" of progress at a certain age. It does vary for some of us, but I'm already seeing that in some ways I'm holding society back by extending my life. The next generation is more tolerant, more enlightened, and certainly more technically competent than I could ever hope to be.
There's a big difference between indexing files and distributing files.
And I think most people who write GPLed software know the difference.
> Nobody lives in the California Desert.
Las Vegas would disagree. Technically, that is the northeastern edge of the Mojave Desert.
Your assumption that being French isn't a reason for selection is dubious.
US Customs officers at some border crossings are often more suspicious of US Citizens (based on behavior) than certain non-US citizens. I swear US Customs at the Interstate 5 crossing to Canada seem more suspicious of me than most Canadians crossing at the border checkpoint.
Funny, I found Diaspora to be easy to install.. no more difficult than any other "web 2.0" app. It does require something a little more than a simple "webhosting" account: you need to be able to configure Apache or whatever webserver to run the Passenger bits properly, and that's not something I think you can do on a $5 shared-hosting Dreamhost account (that said, it runs fine on Dreamhost VPS: I ran it that way for a while). And Diaspora does have ways of pushing to Facebook and Twitter: any more interaction than just pushing would require Facebook to open up their API, and that isn't happening.
Diaspora's solution is that the "personal information" is housed on a server that you trust (ie. one you run or know personally the administrator of). Nothing marked "private" is typically passed off the home node unless you specifically push it out.
At least in the US a lot of "personal information" can be obtained from public sources. And with Facebook's tendrils into other sites (with things like beacons and such) they can probably get a surprising amount of information from sources you wouldn't expect.
Install Ghostery sometimes and see how many websites you log in to every day have beacons that go to a Facebook-affiliated site.
Yes. ILI Oregon, where it's 0%.
.. to use that on my "broadband" connection at home that's 3 Mb/s down and 384k up.
Can we just stop giving PeTA any attention? They're 100% trolls. The sooner we all ignore them the sooner they go away.
Oregonian here who follows the happenings in our state capital.
IIRC the concern in Salem was institutionalized cheating: that is, a school district turning a blind eye to (or actively encouraging) cheating to improve scores. Without a law, there was no formal way to dictate a universal anti-cheating policy state-wide.
I designed and built a custom CPU in college. And it had to be somewhat Turing complete.
Computer science isn't what it used to be.
I've spent some time doing "computer science".
Computer science IS boring. It's a lot of math and logic and tedium. Once you've gone over Turing's proofs, you either go into Cognitive Science or go full Math Retard (I did the latter) and become one of those boring researchers on campus nobody talks to.
Bandwidth is perhaps cheaper than you suspect.
I worked for a regional ISP that serves about 50.000 subscribers. We had multiple 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections to various peering points, one of which happens to be where Netflix peered with us. Total cost for that peerage: the cost of the extra fiber capacity, plus engineering the peer.
As opposed to housing Netflix servers at our data center. First off, to service that many potential streams might require a few boxes and a not insignificant storage array. We actually did have a similar arrangement with another very large content provider: their stuff took about a half-rack. It then needs to be added to network monitoring, and you need to train your NOC staff what to do when that little red light comes on. And the equipment will fail: the "other content providers" equipment had a MTBF of a couple of months. The hard drives will take a pounding.
And we were small enough that when we asked Netflix to co-locate in our data center for free they actually said "Not interested."
You apparently haven't been to Billings lately.
It has all of the above.
.. or the beating and civil wiretapping lawsuit for the cameras.
My small city of around 200K just had one big wireless player (who also happened to be the cable company) announce they are leaving the market (and selling the spectrum licenses to one of the big guys) and the other three I know of buy their bandwidth from.. well, that same cable company and/or the local telephone company. There's no other place to ultimately buy bandwidth: there are three companies that transport and transit: the big regional telephone company, the local cable company, and Facebook. Everybody else is buying and selling Internet from the big guys.
I can't talk about the health of the small wireless ISPs here, but if you sit down and do the math, they are likely just barely making a profit. This may be why the local cable company has exited the wireless ISP market. (I live in an area with a small urban center surrounded by miles of farms and ranches, the cable company's strategy was to use the wireless to extend their range to these rural subscribers and infill in the few areas their cable network didn't cover). And this small cable company had the first LTE network on in the state, so they had a hell of a head start.
That's pretty much the picture in most places: the little guys are very little and increasingly getting smaller, and the big guys are only getting bigger.
> Indeed, no culture in the history of humanity has done so
[citation needed].
Many tribal cultures in the Americas and Africa not only acknowledged the possibility of non-child-bearing unions, many Tribal American cultures even had words for describing people in it.
.. and that's still a pretty accurate description of the contents.
" We want to take our current content and all the stuff that matters to this community and deliver it on a site that still speaks to the interests and habits of our current audience, but that is, at the same time, more accessible and shareable by a wider audience. "
Have you considered that those two points might be in conflict? That the precise reason for Slashdot's success might be that it speaks to the interests and habits of a fairly specific and narrow audience?
The fact that's buried in the Slashdot Blog and not prominently featured in either the "you're gonna get beta whether you like it or not!" popup and/or a sticky on the Slashdot front page tells this long-time Slashdot user that your "Product Team" isn't really interested in our honest feedback.
Beta sucks, period. It's a design change the users haven't asked for and don't want.
The argument can (and should) be made that I shouldn't have to use browser tools like NoScript to make a site "readable." And few people will:
This "new look" for Slashdot pretty much guarantees Slashdot continues down the path of irrelevancy, as another wave of people decide the downsides of (say) Reddit now aren't nearly as bad as the Microsoft Windows 8-inspired Slashdot.
FWIW, while I'm sure Linus is living quite comfortably, and may in fact be a millionaire (which really isn't that much money these days: my parents were paper millionaires and they were a postal carrier and a government clerk.. they only were "millionaires" because the Southern California house they owned wound up being worth $600,000, plus another $400,000 combined in retirement assets), but he's not exactly living the life of a 1%er. From what I understand, he earns a respectable salary from the Linux Foundation, but not anything out-of-line for a talented software engineer in Portland.
He's not exactly shuttling around the West Hills in a limo. Unless you consider TriMet MAX (Portland's light-rail system) a limo.
Nagios can be built and designed in such a way that there are no false criticals and few spurious alerts. but it requires dedication, documentation, and attention to detail. Most Nagios installations I've run across are built and maintained by people who often lack one (or more) of these three traits, or are a single-man IT operation that can never devote the time or resources to doing it properly.
I have seen systems of Nagios and Zenoss (and a few others) that are devastatingly precise, accurate, and timely. However, they were typically set up by a highly dediated TEAM of sysadmins who's entire job for the organizations they work for is managing the tactical systems. It's a full-time job in and of itself, and not one that many organizations really devote the manpower to do "right." They do it just "good enough", which is why you are used to seeing the installations you are seeing.
Google's exactly the kind of organization that has the man- and brain-power to do it right. And it's not really that hard, it's mostly just simple attention to detail. And that's a trait I've found is lacking in a lot of the current crop of junior system administrators I've run across.