If a candidate has knowledge that applies to the problem, then I say, by all means, hire her!
I don't know. After all, we're talking about human beings rather than machines, and when dealing with human beings, there are other important factors to deal with besides whether or not their "specifications" are good enough.
Obviously a more extreme example, but would you really want to hire a highly-experienced code-grinder who insisted on clocking out at 5pm every day, had poor personal hygiene, lacked decent interpersonal skills, and went to KKK rallies on the weekends? Even if that person really was a top-notch programmer otherwise and willing to work cheaply?
Besides, maybe the company in question is trying to keep up with "cutting edge" developments with Java, and considers the ability to make the most of Java developments an important asset to their business model. If so, someone who has no opinion of "what exciting things are happening with Java" may not be too motivated to keep up, beyond a bare minimum to keep getting a paycheck.
Would you bitch and moan at C if some programmer decided he wanted to use straight braces instead of curly ones?
That wouldn't be the same thing, though, as curly braces are used in a few specific places, while spaces and tabs get used all throughout a program - whitespace separates EVERYTHING. I think people who dislike the whitespace-sensitivity tend to balk because of this, the same way they might balk if spaces were replaced with curly braces:
function{some_code(int{some_variable,int{some_othe r_variable){
{{{{{
{{{{{if{(some_variable>some_other_variable)
{{{{{{{{{{return{1;}
{{{{{else
{{{{{{{{{{return{0;}
{{{{}
Which braces are "separaters" and which are "block definers"? Even in this silly example, it should be relatively obvious if you LOOK at it, but it's not "intuitive".
I can understand where using whitespace, which is already used trivially throughout the code, to also represent something as significant as what constitutes a code block can be disturbing to some people...
For one thing, different tab stops screw up virtually every language, not just Python.
Only in terms of how "pretty" the source code is - none of the languages I've ever worked with (not that there are that many, nor that I'm a "master" of any of them, but...) actually had any problems due to varying tab sizes when it came time to actually compile and/or run the program
In other words, I think the problem is fundamentally that people who don't feel comfortable with Python mainly dislike the way it almost fits the definition of a bondage-and-discipline language (except that I think the amount of useful stuff being written in Python easily disproves the "demonstrably inadequate for...even vanilla general-purpose programming" clause, regardless of whether I dislike the syntactical quirks of the language or not:-) ) and don't like feeling so constrained.
...at least, as I recall from my hazy memory of an Advertising class I took over a decade ago in my misspent youth:
Advertising, regardless of what a few minimally-clueful, megalomaniacal marketroids may think, is not about "getting people to buy something", nor even about "getting people to like something", but rather "getting people familiar with something" (e.g. a brand name).
A successful advertising campaign should make its subject feel "familiar" to viewers, both in the sense of claimed values of the advertised product (e.g. "less filling and tastes great" [as compared to other brands] - obviously this aspect only applies until the consumer does the comparison themselves, but can at least help get the first sale...) and in terms of name recognition, because people tend to feel more "comfortable" with names they are "familiar" with.
This is why, as many other posts have pointed out, "click-through" is a really bad measure of ad success. Since almost nobody (statistically speaking) is going to see an ad for something and immediately decide that they need to go buy "Brand X Thingamajigs" right away, it might seem as though the ad isn't doing anything. What they can't measure well is how many people, weeks later, decide they could really use a "Thingamajig", and go to the store and buy "Brand X" because that's the one they subconsciously feel the most comfortable with. ("I've never owned a Thingamajig before, but I remember hearing about Brand X somewhere, whereas I've never heard or Y or Z, so I might as well get X...").
Of course, GOOD advertising should also avoid the "familiarity" including an association with feelings of annoyance. ("Brand X? Hey, that's those annoying jerks with those irritating ads! I think I'll try brand Y instead..."). For THAT reason, I would expect "pop-up" and other "interruption based" ads would be even more of a failure (especially full-page ones) on the whole, no matter whether the "click-through" rate goes up or not.
Personally, in the bizarre never-neverland of my twisted mind, I think this presents an opportunity to kill two metaphorical birds with one metaphorical stone: <OffTopic>With the problems of mass media producers tightening the screws on what few 'fair use' and related rights individuals have while buying up and absorbing (and/or putting out of business) smaller, more independent sources of "content", I'd like to see more "GPL-style" content (independent movies, animation, music, etc.)</OffTopic>, but obviously, somebody's got to pay for production and distribution of it. So...product placement. Here's what I keep thinking: (See, this long rant really does get to a point, eventually...)
Let's say Joe Schmoe decides to start up a daily web-based comic, initially for fun. It turns out to be pretty good and popular, and since Joe Schmoe doesn't sue people for setting up fansites, emailing copies of the comic to people, etc., word spreads quickly and soon Joe Schmoe needs to buy more bandwidth to handle the popularity. Now...one of Joe Schmoe's characters is, say, a cola junkie. Joe Schmoe might decide that this character seems like the sort who would like brand X, Y, or Z cola, so he emails the marketing departments of these real-world companies saying "Whoever offers the best sponsorship deal becomes this character's preferred brand of cola"...
Of course, this will only work if the marketing people "get it", but it would be perfect advertising - it's non-intrusive [and is, in fact, associated with a pleasant and popular web-comic], it gets spread widely anywhere copies of the webcomic go [because it's part of the actual CONTENT, not a separate intrusion that can be filtered out], and helps fund Joe Schmoe's hypothetical "open" content which is free of mainstream-media control.
End result - more "free" content, and less annoying ads. Could it work, at least on a small scale? Or am I just smoking crack?
You seem relatively "open" about your spamming practices, so perhaps you could answer some questions about spamming practices that I've been curious about:
I do not buy e-mail addresses from so called "online marketing organizations".
I'm curious here - is this because you think what they do is wrong, or just because it's cheaper to dredge the email addresses up yourself?
On a more technical note, I'd be interested to know if you do your mail harvesting "by hand" or do you have some sort of automated process that does it? If so, how does IT work (i.e. does it just record every string with a @ in it, or does it do some kind of parsing?)
I am well within my legal right in doing so
"Legal" and "decent" aren't always the same thing.
To analogize (it that a real word?:-) ) with telemarketing - I'm "well within my legal right" if I call your house every half hour every day until you demand that I stop...and then to note down your phone number and the time(s) of day that you answered (And how many times you answered before you told me not to call any more), and add that info to a database to sell to a collection of other telemarketers down the line.
Further, I think I'd be "well within my legal right" if I set up 5 different marketing corporations and have them ALL do the same thing. (Corporation A has been told to stop calling, so they stop. Then Corporation B calls selling something else until told to stop. Then Corporation C...etc., so long as they are all independent "legal entities".)
I believe I could even legally do something like this at your home - stand out on the public sidewalk in front of your house and provide my "services" to you by informing you of Amazing Offers(tm) with a bullhorn until you tell me to quit it...at which point I can note down what hours you seem to have been available to hear my "services" and how long I was able to continue before you told me to stop...and then sell your address with that info to the next guy that wants to try it. (Hey, you made your address publicly available by having the number printed on the house where it can be seen from public areas, right?)
I have no personal problem with "opted-out-by-default" email marketing (e.g. "sign up for our newsletter" and such), it's your "opted in whether you like it or not until you verify your email address by 'opting out'" method that really bugs me.
[...]you have chosen to make your e-mail address publicly available.
And I notice that you haven't. Don't you Like getting spammed? Incidentally, If someone's email address said "soandso@somewhere.com <No unsolicited ads, please!>", would you honor it, or just go ahead and spam anyway? (Regardless of your personal answer, though, I'd be willing to bet pretty much every spammer would just through the address on their lists anyway...)
I'd also be curious to know what kind of ISP(s) you sign up for - it seems like most of them have usage policies against spamming. I don't know about you or your spamming practices, but nearly every article of spam that I get comes from somebody flagrantly disregarding those rules, and is just hopping from ISP to ISP as they get cancelled. In those cases, I don't see that bulk emailers ARE "well within their legal right", since they supposedly agreed not to do it when signing up with those ISP's. How do you feel about THAT kind of practice?
And now, the obvious question: You say "I always include an option to unsubscribe.". You are aware that it is commonly held that these "unsubscribe" addresses are primarily used to verify the email addresses to be either unscrupulously re-used anyway or slighly-less-unscrupulously sold on to the next spammer, arent' you? Do you do this, and how do you feel about the practice?
One final question - do you know (either personally or by having regular dealings with them professionally) other spammers, and if so, how do their practices compare with yours?
Do you offer recipients a way to get their name off your list?
Of course, you just send a reply to "takemeoffyourlist@somewhereorother.com" with the subject "This is a real email address that gets read so stop sending me email but go ahead and sell this address to the NEXT guy in line as a 'verified' email adress to spam to"....
(It's commonly known that many [most?] of those reply addresses are for exactly that purpose...so even if you don't get more email from that source, you tend to get lots more from brand new sources who bought the "verified email list" from the guy you replied to...)
I just want to know I'm not nuking the little motor.
Actually, most fishtank air pumps don't have motors (last time I checked). It's usually just an electromagnet that turns on and off, which pulls on (and releases) a metal strip that pumps a rubber bellows. The only moving parts are the bending and unbending of the metal strip and the rubber bellows. (Does anybody even make piston air pumps for fishtanks any more?)
Given that, I wouldn't THINK there's any harm to the air pump from being attached to any UPS...as far as I know.
it appears to me VERY likely that in the next decade China will either invade Taiwan or at least assist sympathetic residents in a coup attempt.
Here's a funny thought - if the US offered citizenship and amnesty to any Taiwanese citizen that wanted it, what are the odds that we could evacuate most of the people as well as economic and "intellectual" assets to mainland USA before China could take over? ("Ha!", says the Chinese military, "We have captured your evacuated island with a bunch of empty buildings on it! We win!"....)
After that of course, you can prove how a fast moving plane is able to avoid the turn of a slower plane if the slower plane moves into the path it is flying.
Your sarcasm is a bit misplaced if you consider that to make the analogy work, you need to have the motorcycle rider driving circles around the container truck, trying to force it off of the road...
it seems like major players in the Unix world are going to Gnome?
"Everybody's doing it" never struck me as an important reason to do anything:-)
I, on the other hand, haven't used Gnome recently. My impression of the differences from an end-user perspective (note:based entirely on hearsay, posts on Slashdot, voices in my head, and other incredibly reliable sources!) is that KDE has a more "tightly 'integrated'" feel than Gnome does (this may or may not be a good thing, depending on your tastes). Gnome, on the other hand (aside from Antialiased fonts), has a reputation for being better with the eye-candy. I also get the impression(again, just an impression) that Galeon isn't yet as "polished" as Konqueror is [this may or may not still be true).
Yet another possibly unfounded impression - I get the feeling that KDE development is moving faster than Gnome development at the moment, though I gather that Gnome development is still clicking along quite well.
In the end, honestly, I think it's as much a "look and feel" thing as anything else, unless you intend to contribute to the development, in which case if you're in the "Ewww! C++ Sucks!" category, you go with Gnome.:-)
In short - I'd say pull down the KDE 2.1.1 packages for your favorite distribution and try it out. I recommend using it just long enough to get over the traditional "this sucks because it's not what I'm used to" phase...then decide. You may very well decide that you still prefer Gnome, in which case, no big loss. You may also decide that you like KDE better. Also no big loss. You may not be able to decide, and find yourself switching back and forth regularly. That'll cost you a little extra time and effort due to possible addiction to bleeding-edge updates from 2 large projects instead of one, but still fun...
The more people that try both, the more "interoperability" improvements between the two will be suggested and implimented...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
last time I checked, nobody was addicted to Windows ME.
By the same token, nobody's really addicted to "cigarettes"...just to the act of smoking them to get the chemicals. (Semantics, I know, but that's the point - it's not specifically "Windows ME", it's "MS Products". You can't be addicted to "A cigarette"...just cigarettes in general.)
Similarly, I've seen the desperate dependence on MS products and inability to get off of the "upgrade treadmill" likened to addiction many times...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
what other OS are the clueless AOL newbies going to use?
One that doesn't (as the cliche' goes) "give them enough rope to hang themselves". A large proportion of windows support seems to be along the lines of "I was playing around and I clicked on this thing and now windows won't start any more"...
The point being simply that stable OS with a well-designed narrow configuration should stand up to 'clueless AOL newbies' (and their ilk) even better.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
The evil entity, instead of "MCP" can be "MPAA" ("Master Proprietary Access Algorith"?)
Instead of a video game, the hero wrote a program for watching DVDs, which "MPAA" has stolen by cracking the author's website, then had the author's computer confiscated by sending anonymous email to the police accusing him of DMCA violations (and/or kiddie porn trade).
Of course, the tireless program doggedly continuing to keep the processes going to overthrow the Evil inside the MPAA 'mainframe' (a 'cluster' of two NT/W2K machines) isn't "Tron", it's "Cron".
Hey, this has potential...an action-comedy-special effects movie for all ages! (I know I'd pay to see it!) --- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
But don't worry. Your video rental records are secure.
Don't be too sure about that. Anybody sign up for Blockbuster's special movie rental program? (I can't remember what funky marketroid name they gave it - basically, every month they send you a small advertisement with a coupon for a free rental in it for $5/year, and you get an extra free rental for every so many paid rentals you have, etc.). I recently noticed the ads now have a tiny form (~ 2" x 3.5" or so) next to the coupon. On it is a notice, in tiny print, that says (to paraphrase) "If you don't notice, fill out, clip out, stuff it in an envelope, buy a stamp for it, and mail it to our marketing department with the 'I don't want more junkmail' box checked we're going to sell your info to our 'affiliates' so they can put you in their databases, too, and send you junkmail, too." I wonder how many people even notice that tiny form, and how few of them will feel like going through the effort involved in filling it out and sending it in. Looks like Blockbuster's counting on that and is now in the "mailing list" business as well....
The thing that really bugs me about it is that it's obviously an "opt-out" rather than an "opt-in" program, and they've done their best to make "opting out" a hassle while still being able to say "Hey, we TOLD them they could be left off of the list, it's their own fault if they didn't let us know..."
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
the costs incurred with those choices are incidental to the hardware, the development time, testing, deployment, help desk support, training, documentation, etc.
This has been on my mind lately. I've noticed the costs of all of THOSE things seem to be a lot more on Windows-based machines than on the Linux machines in our small company. The hardware requirements seem higher to get the same performance, development seems quite easy on the Linux machines - at least as much so as it would be on the windows machines [web-based stuff which can also be accessed from other platforms, so long as a decent web browser is available on it], testing and deployment are simple enough, the Linux machines have thus far required a lot less help-desk support than the windows machines....you get the idea.
On the other hand, I haven't yet tried Linux on an "ordinary user's" desk. I'm hoping to get a spare, older machine set up as an X terminal for all of the employees who don't have their own computers to get email, do web browsing, etc, with. We'll see how that goes...but I fully expect the support for this will still be a lot easier than another windows machine would be.
The costs of one-time software license purchases ARE tiny in the grand scheme of things...but the cost of many purchased upgrades and extra support, hardware, etc. over the years does add up...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I hope that there is a God and he will rule that the evil bastards at Monsanto are misusing HIS patent
Yes, but to do this, God will have to take the patent infringement suit to court and hire a laywer to deal with it, and <StupidOldJoke>where could the "Lord Of Heaven" possibly find a Lawyer?</StupidOldJoke>
Sorry...couldn't resist.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
This is not a problem associated with genetic engineering but with farming in general.[...]If anything GE well help preserve genetic diversity because at least we know the seeds will be available in some lab if required in the future.
Damn, where are my moderator points when I need them. Can anybody spare a "+1 insightful"?:-)
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
This genetically altered form of Canola is resitant to: Roundup. and what tis that? Monsanto's flagship Herbicide...is it any wonder the stuff is spreading around? If a Herbicide can't kill it, what can?
The way this works is that Roundup inhibits the plant form of a gene involved in amino acid synthesis (according to this
message, anyway). The "Roundup Resistant" plants have a version of the same gene that instead comes from a plant-infecting bacteria, which is not so sensitive to the chemical in Roundup, and continues chugging along producing the necessary biochemical products.
Here's an analogy - imagine the WWF didn't learn from the experience with the XFL and decides it wants to make it's own version of another sport - auto racing. Let's imagine that the rules of "Xtreme racing" specify that you must use Plymouth Neons as your car [perhaps they bid the highest for the ad rights...], but that you can make minor modifications and replacements.
Now imagine that you've developed a fuel additive that manages to clog every fuel injector manufactured in america, but for some reason doesn't bother Honda fuel injectors much. You replace the fuel injector in your car, otherwise identical to all of the other Plymouth Neon's in the race, with a Honda fuel injector...then spray your fuel additive into the racetrack's communal fuel tank.
The day of the race comes, and all of the cars with the standard fuel injectors die, while your car with the "foreign" fuel injector continues chugging along...just as the plants with the Agrobacterium gene keep chugging along while the plants with the off-the-shelf version of the same gene die.
Pretty straightforward and harmless. The overused "Frankenstein" analogy really doesn't fit here. It's a "labor saving" device allowing a farmer to spray a field rather than going through and more carefully weeding it.
I do worry, though, about the tendency towards lazy and harmful farming practices. Flood irrigation in California is slowly salinizing the soils, and those sprinklers spraying the water high into the air in the middle of summer end up wasting a great deal of water as it evaporates before it hits the ground...but both are cheaper and easier than installing and working with drip-irrigation systems.
While the herbicide resistance isn't itself much of an issue, if all farmers insist on using the same strain of plant from the same provider because they're cheap and easy, you're worries about having a disease come along that particularly likes the specific strains that Monsanto uses for their "roundup-ready" seeds can be a serious concern. The problem isn't "biotechnological" at all, but cultural. The solution is to discourage "monoculture" farming.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
As a result, I will not buy any products (including your own fine company's fine products) that include any product from Monsanto.
You know, I'd love to see more of this sort of attitude around - people willing to give up a little bit of convenience to avoid doing business with a company whose practices they don't agree with. Even in cases I don't agree with, I'd still rather have "natural" market pressures resulting from consumers THINKING about their buying habits than eco-terrorist vandalism and/or bad regulation by ignorant, slow government agencies...
Besides, I think that "Splenda" stuff tastes better than nutrasweet anyway...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'm not all that fond of Monsanto myself, and I will refrain from making tasteless comments about what makes Nestle "crunch" bars crunchy (I honestly have no idea what that "baby killing" comment is about)...
But This is silly: In regards to Asparatame, their toxic sweetner
Aspartame is a dipeptide of two amino acids - aspartic acid and phenylalanine. In short, it's a tiny piece of of quite digestible "protein". If you ever eat anything with protein in it, you've gotten PLENTY of both. If you haven't...you're dead. Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid (though people with phenylketonuria have to be careful about their intake, as they don't process it well).
This is why Nutrasweet is referred to as a "nutritive" sweetener - it's got actual substances used as nutrients by the body in it (as opposed to, say, "Splenda", which passes through the body unabsorbed).
The methanol they mention will be a minute by-product of normal metabolism of the amino acids.
Mind you, their PR people must be smoking canola if they actually worded an official statement that way, since as you've demonstrated, most people associate "methanol" with stupid people drinking industrial solvents rather than normal biochemistry...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
It's still to buggy for the next version of slack.
It may be true for some hardware configurations, but I've been running 2.4.x on several different slackware boxes, including one old laptop (Toshiba P-120 "Satellite Pro"), with no problems whatsoever (except for the glitches in loopback mounting, which I hear should be fixed in this release) for months now. Just download the source and go - why wait for an official.tgz?
I just wish Mosix would get updated for 2.4.x support - I've been itching to set it up at home again.
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'd rather wait 10 minutes while a 2 minute video clip downloads than watch the horribly crap-ified streamed version of the same clip.
I strongly agree! [insert random number of additional exclamation points here...]
Actually, I'd be quite happy just to find an RTSP-capable equivalent of wget, which would enable me to download clips to view at full quality later without any special work having to be done on the server side, but it appears nobody has done anything like this yet as far as I can tell. Something like this would let me pull down clips in Realvideo format (the only one www.atomfilms.com and many other sites offer that can be viewed on Linux it would seem) and watch them, regardless of the crappiness of my internet connection...
--- "They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know. After all, we're talking about human beings rather than machines, and when dealing with human beings, there are other important factors to deal with besides whether or not their "specifications" are good enough.
Obviously a more extreme example, but would you really want to hire a highly-experienced code-grinder who insisted on clocking out at 5pm every day, had poor personal hygiene, lacked decent interpersonal skills, and went to KKK rallies on the weekends? Even if that person really was a top-notch programmer otherwise and willing to work cheaply?
Besides, maybe the company in question is trying to keep up with "cutting edge" developments with Java, and considers the ability to make the most of Java developments an important asset to their business model. If so, someone who has no opinion of "what exciting things are happening with Java" may not be too motivated to keep up, beyond a bare minimum to keep getting a paycheck.
---
Hey, I think having an IBM "Peace, Love, and Linux" theme would be pretty darn funny, myself...I wonder how many of the first 100 will be just that?
---
That wouldn't be the same thing, though, as curly braces are used in a few specific places, while spaces and tabs get used all throughout a program - whitespace separates EVERYTHING. I think people who dislike the whitespace-sensitivity tend to balk because of this, the same way they might balk if spaces were replaced with curly braces: function{some_code(int{some_variable,int{some_othe r_variable){
For one thing, different tab stops screw up virtually every language, not just Python.{{{{{
{{{{{if{(some_variable>some_other_variable)
{{{{{{{{{{return{1;}
{{{{{else
{{{{{{{{{{return{0;}
{{{{}
Which braces are "separaters" and which are "block definers"? Even in this silly example, it should be relatively obvious if you LOOK at it, but it's not "intuitive".
I can understand where using whitespace, which is already used trivially throughout the code, to also represent something as significant as what constitutes a code block can be disturbing to some people...
Only in terms of how "pretty" the source code is - none of the languages I've ever worked with (not that there are that many, nor that I'm a "master" of any of them, but...) actually had any problems due to varying tab sizes when it came time to actually compile and/or run the program
In other words, I think the problem is fundamentally that people who don't feel comfortable with Python mainly dislike the way it almost fits the definition of a bondage-and-discipline language (except that I think the amount of useful stuff being written in Python easily disproves the "demonstrably inadequate for...even vanilla general-purpose programming" clause, regardless of whether I dislike the syntactical quirks of the language or not:-) ) and don't like feeling so constrained.
---
Advertising, regardless of what a few minimally-clueful, megalomaniacal marketroids may think, is not about "getting people to buy something", nor even about "getting people to like something", but rather "getting people familiar with something" (e.g. a brand name).
A successful advertising campaign should make its subject feel "familiar" to viewers, both in the sense of claimed values of the advertised product (e.g. "less filling and tastes great" [as compared to other brands] - obviously this aspect only applies until the consumer does the comparison themselves, but can at least help get the first sale...) and in terms of name recognition, because people tend to feel more "comfortable" with names they are "familiar" with.
This is why, as many other posts have pointed out, "click-through" is a really bad measure of ad success. Since almost nobody (statistically speaking) is going to see an ad for something and immediately decide that they need to go buy "Brand X Thingamajigs" right away, it might seem as though the ad isn't doing anything. What they can't measure well is how many people, weeks later, decide they could really use a "Thingamajig", and go to the store and buy "Brand X" because that's the one they subconsciously feel the most comfortable with. ("I've never owned a Thingamajig before, but I remember hearing about Brand X somewhere, whereas I've never heard or Y or Z, so I might as well get X...").
Of course, GOOD advertising should also avoid the "familiarity" including an association with feelings of annoyance. ("Brand X? Hey, that's those annoying jerks with those irritating ads! I think I'll try brand Y instead..."). For THAT reason, I would expect "pop-up" and other "interruption based" ads would be even more of a failure (especially full-page ones) on the whole, no matter whether the "click-through" rate goes up or not.
Personally, in the bizarre never-neverland of my twisted mind, I think this presents an opportunity to kill two metaphorical birds with one metaphorical stone: <OffTopic>With the problems of mass media producers tightening the screws on what few 'fair use' and related rights individuals have while buying up and absorbing (and/or putting out of business) smaller, more independent sources of "content", I'd like to see more "GPL-style" content (independent movies, animation, music, etc.)</OffTopic>, but obviously, somebody's got to pay for production and distribution of it. So...product placement. Here's what I keep thinking: (See, this long rant really does get to a point, eventually...)
Let's say Joe Schmoe decides to start up a daily web-based comic, initially for fun. It turns out to be pretty good and popular, and since Joe Schmoe doesn't sue people for setting up fansites, emailing copies of the comic to people, etc., word spreads quickly and soon Joe Schmoe needs to buy more bandwidth to handle the popularity. Now...one of Joe Schmoe's characters is, say, a cola junkie. Joe Schmoe might decide that this character seems like the sort who would like brand X, Y, or Z cola, so he emails the marketing departments of these real-world companies saying "Whoever offers the best sponsorship deal becomes this character's preferred brand of cola"...
Of course, this will only work if the marketing people "get it", but it would be perfect advertising - it's non-intrusive [and is, in fact, associated with a pleasant and popular web-comic], it gets spread widely anywhere copies of the webcomic go [because it's part of the actual CONTENT, not a separate intrusion that can be filtered out], and helps fund Joe Schmoe's hypothetical "open" content which is free of mainstream-media control.
End result - more "free" content, and less annoying ads. Could it work, at least on a small scale? Or am I just smoking crack?
---
You seem relatively "open" about your spamming practices, so perhaps you could answer some questions about spamming practices that I've been curious about:
I do not buy e-mail addresses from so called "online marketing organizations".I'm curious here - is this because you think what they do is wrong, or just because it's cheaper to dredge the email addresses up yourself?
On a more technical note, I'd be interested to know if you do your mail harvesting "by hand" or do you have some sort of automated process that does it? If so, how does IT work (i.e. does it just record every string with a @ in it, or does it do some kind of parsing?)
I am well within my legal right in doing so"Legal" and "decent" aren't always the same thing.
To analogize (it that a real word? :-) ) with telemarketing - I'm "well within my legal right" if I call your house every half hour every day until you demand that I stop...and then to note down your phone number and the time(s) of day that you answered (And how many times you answered before you told me not to call any more), and add that info to a database to sell to a collection of other telemarketers down the line.
Further, I think I'd be "well within my legal right" if I set up 5 different marketing corporations and have them ALL do the same thing. (Corporation A has been told to stop calling, so they stop. Then Corporation B calls selling something else until told to stop. Then Corporation C...etc., so long as they are all independent "legal entities".)
I believe I could even legally do something like this at your home - stand out on the public sidewalk in front of your house and provide my "services" to you by informing you of Amazing Offers(tm) with a bullhorn until you tell me to quit it...at which point I can note down what hours you seem to have been available to hear my "services" and how long I was able to continue before you told me to stop...and then sell your address with that info to the next guy that wants to try it. (Hey, you made your address publicly available by having the number printed on the house where it can be seen from public areas, right?)
I have no personal problem with "opted-out-by-default" email marketing (e.g. "sign up for our newsletter" and such), it's your "opted in whether you like it or not until you verify your email address by 'opting out'" method that really bugs me.
[...]you have chosen to make your e-mail address publicly available.And I notice that you haven't. Don't you Like getting spammed? Incidentally, If someone's email address said "soandso@somewhere.com <No unsolicited ads, please!>", would you honor it, or just go ahead and spam anyway? (Regardless of your personal answer, though, I'd be willing to bet pretty much every spammer would just through the address on their lists anyway...)
I'd also be curious to know what kind of ISP(s) you sign up for - it seems like most of them have usage policies against spamming. I don't know about you or your spamming practices, but nearly every article of spam that I get comes from somebody flagrantly disregarding those rules, and is just hopping from ISP to ISP as they get cancelled. In those cases, I don't see that bulk emailers ARE "well within their legal right", since they supposedly agreed not to do it when signing up with those ISP's. How do you feel about THAT kind of practice?
And now, the obvious question: You say "I always include an option to unsubscribe.". You are aware that it is commonly held that these "unsubscribe" addresses are primarily used to verify the email addresses to be either unscrupulously re-used anyway or slighly-less-unscrupulously sold on to the next spammer, arent' you? Do you do this, and how do you feel about the practice?
One final question - do you know (either personally or by having regular dealings with them professionally) other spammers, and if so, how do their practices compare with yours?
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Of course, you just send a reply to "takemeoffyourlist@somewhereorother.com" with the subject "This is a real email address that gets read so stop sending me email but go ahead and sell this address to the NEXT guy in line as a 'verified' email adress to spam to"....
(It's commonly known that many [most?] of those reply addresses are for exactly that purpose...so even if you don't get more email from that source, you tend to get lots more from brand new sources who bought the "verified email list" from the guy you replied to...)
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Actually, most fishtank air pumps don't have motors (last time I checked). It's usually just an electromagnet that turns on and off, which pulls on (and releases) a metal strip that pumps a rubber bellows. The only moving parts are the bending and unbending of the metal strip and the rubber bellows. (Does anybody even make piston air pumps for fishtanks any more?)
Given that, I wouldn't THINK there's any harm to the air pump from being attached to any UPS...as far as I know.
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Here's a funny thought - if the US offered citizenship and amnesty to any Taiwanese citizen that wanted it, what are the odds that we could evacuate most of the people as well as economic and "intellectual" assets to mainland USA before China could take over? ("Ha!", says the Chinese military, "We have captured your evacuated island with a bunch of empty buildings on it! We win!"....)
Just a random thought...
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Your sarcasm is a bit misplaced if you consider that to make the analogy work, you need to have the motorcycle rider driving circles around the container truck, trying to force it off of the road...
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"Everybody's doing it" never struck me as an important reason to do anything :-)
I, on the other hand, haven't used Gnome recently. My impression of the differences from an end-user perspective (note:based entirely on hearsay, posts on Slashdot, voices in my head, and other incredibly reliable sources!) is that KDE has a more "tightly 'integrated'" feel than Gnome does (this may or may not be a good thing, depending on your tastes). Gnome, on the other hand (aside from Antialiased fonts), has a reputation for being better with the eye-candy. I also get the impression(again, just an impression) that Galeon isn't yet as "polished" as Konqueror is [this may or may not still be true).
Yet another possibly unfounded impression - I get the feeling that KDE development is moving faster than Gnome development at the moment, though I gather that Gnome development is still clicking along quite well.
In the end, honestly, I think it's as much a "look and feel" thing as anything else, unless you intend to contribute to the development, in which case if you're in the "Ewww! C++ Sucks!" category, you go with Gnome. :-)
In short - I'd say pull down the KDE 2.1.1 packages for your favorite distribution and try it out. I recommend using it just long enough to get over the traditional "this sucks because it's not what I'm used to" phase...then decide. You may very well decide that you still prefer Gnome, in which case, no big loss. You may also decide that you like KDE better. Also no big loss. You may not be able to decide, and find yourself switching back and forth regularly. That'll cost you a little extra time and effort due to possible addiction to bleeding-edge updates from 2 large projects instead of one, but still fun...
The more people that try both, the more "interoperability" improvements between the two will be suggested and implimented...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
By the same token, nobody's really addicted to "cigarettes"...just to the act of smoking them to get the chemicals. (Semantics, I know, but that's the point - it's not specifically "Windows ME", it's "MS Products". You can't be addicted to "A cigarette"...just cigarettes in general.)
Similarly, I've seen the desperate dependence on MS products and inability to get off of the "upgrade treadmill" likened to addiction many times...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
One that doesn't (as the cliche' goes) "give them enough rope to hang themselves". A large proportion of windows support seems to be along the lines of "I was playing around and I clicked on this thing and now windows won't start any more"...
The point being simply that stable OS with a well-designed narrow configuration should stand up to 'clueless AOL newbies' (and their ilk) even better.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Hmm. Let's see:
"If you see the blue screen, then my client should win. Uh.. 'Ween'."
No...how about
"If the OS Crashes then kick Microsoft's...uh...ashes?"
No.
"If MS gets too rich, then we should slap that...uh, no, nevermind."
This might be a difficult case for Cochran :-)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Cool, they can update it for the times:
- The evil entity, instead of "MCP" can be "MPAA" ("Master Proprietary Access Algorith"?)
- Instead of a video game, the hero wrote a program for watching DVDs, which "MPAA" has stolen by cracking the author's website, then had the author's computer confiscated by sending anonymous email to the police accusing him of DMCA violations (and/or kiddie porn trade).
- Of course, the tireless program doggedly continuing to keep the processes going to overthrow the Evil inside the MPAA 'mainframe' (a 'cluster' of two NT/W2K machines) isn't "Tron", it's "Cron".
Hey, this has potential...an action-comedy-special effects movie for all ages! (I know I'd pay to see it!)---
"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Don't be too sure about that. Anybody sign up for Blockbuster's special movie rental program? (I can't remember what funky marketroid name they gave it - basically, every month they send you a small advertisement with a coupon for a free rental in it for $5/year, and you get an extra free rental for every so many paid rentals you have, etc.). I recently noticed the ads now have a tiny form (~ 2" x 3.5" or so) next to the coupon. On it is a notice, in tiny print, that says (to paraphrase) "If you don't notice, fill out, clip out, stuff it in an envelope, buy a stamp for it, and mail it to our marketing department with the 'I don't want more junkmail' box checked we're going to sell your info to our 'affiliates' so they can put you in their databases, too, and send you junkmail, too." I wonder how many people even notice that tiny form, and how few of them will feel like going through the effort involved in filling it out and sending it in. Looks like Blockbuster's counting on that and is now in the "mailing list" business as well....
The thing that really bugs me about it is that it's obviously an "opt-out" rather than an "opt-in" program, and they've done their best to make "opting out" a hassle while still being able to say "Hey, we TOLD them they could be left off of the list, it's their own fault if they didn't let us know..."
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
This has been on my mind lately. I've noticed the costs of all of THOSE things seem to be a lot more on Windows-based machines than on the Linux machines in our small company. The hardware requirements seem higher to get the same performance, development seems quite easy on the Linux machines - at least as much so as it would be on the windows machines [web-based stuff which can also be accessed from other platforms, so long as a decent web browser is available on it], testing and deployment are simple enough, the Linux machines have thus far required a lot less help-desk support than the windows machines....you get the idea.
On the other hand, I haven't yet tried Linux on an "ordinary user's" desk. I'm hoping to get a spare, older machine set up as an X terminal for all of the employees who don't have their own computers to get email, do web browsing, etc, with. We'll see how that goes...but I fully expect the support for this will still be a lot easier than another windows machine would be.
The costs of one-time software license purchases ARE tiny in the grand scheme of things...but the cost of many purchased upgrades and extra support, hardware, etc. over the years does add up...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Who said anything about Netscape? What I want to know is has anyone found any security problems in Konqueror, Galeon, or Opera.
And ARE there any...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Bt morals? Is that like Bt Corn or Cotton?
Are you implying that Microsoft employees are products of recombinant DNA experiments, and they now produce their own natural insecticide?
Microsoft must be really desperate to find a way to deal with all of the bugs in their software if this is true...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Yes, but to do this, God will have to take the patent infringement suit to court and hire a laywer to deal with it, and <StupidOldJoke>where could the "Lord Of Heaven" possibly find a Lawyer?</StupidOldJoke>
Sorry...couldn't resist.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
Damn, where are my moderator points when I need them. Can anybody spare a "+1 insightful"? :-)
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
The way this works is that Roundup inhibits the plant form of a gene involved in amino acid synthesis (according to this message, anyway). The "Roundup Resistant" plants have a version of the same gene that instead comes from a plant-infecting bacteria, which is not so sensitive to the chemical in Roundup, and continues chugging along producing the necessary biochemical products.
Here's an analogy - imagine the WWF didn't learn from the experience with the XFL and decides it wants to make it's own version of another sport - auto racing. Let's imagine that the rules of "Xtreme racing" specify that you must use Plymouth Neons as your car [perhaps they bid the highest for the ad rights...], but that you can make minor modifications and replacements.
Now imagine that you've developed a fuel additive that manages to clog every fuel injector manufactured in america, but for some reason doesn't bother Honda fuel injectors much. You replace the fuel injector in your car, otherwise identical to all of the other Plymouth Neon's in the race, with a Honda fuel injector...then spray your fuel additive into the racetrack's communal fuel tank.
The day of the race comes, and all of the cars with the standard fuel injectors die, while your car with the "foreign" fuel injector continues chugging along...just as the plants with the Agrobacterium gene keep chugging along while the plants with the off-the-shelf version of the same gene die.
Pretty straightforward and harmless. The overused "Frankenstein" analogy really doesn't fit here. It's a "labor saving" device allowing a farmer to spray a field rather than going through and more carefully weeding it.
I do worry, though, about the tendency towards lazy and harmful farming practices. Flood irrigation in California is slowly salinizing the soils, and those sprinklers spraying the water high into the air in the middle of summer end up wasting a great deal of water as it evaporates before it hits the ground...but both are cheaper and easier than installing and working with drip-irrigation systems.
While the herbicide resistance isn't itself much of an issue, if all farmers insist on using the same strain of plant from the same provider because they're cheap and easy, you're worries about having a disease come along that particularly likes the specific strains that Monsanto uses for their "roundup-ready" seeds can be a serious concern. The problem isn't "biotechnological" at all, but cultural. The solution is to discourage "monoculture" farming.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
You know, I'd love to see more of this sort of attitude around - people willing to give up a little bit of convenience to avoid doing business with a company whose practices they don't agree with. Even in cases I don't agree with, I'd still rather have "natural" market pressures resulting from consumers THINKING about their buying habits than eco-terrorist vandalism and/or bad regulation by ignorant, slow government agencies...
Besides, I think that "Splenda" stuff tastes better than nutrasweet anyway...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I'm not all that fond of Monsanto myself, and I will refrain from making tasteless comments about what makes Nestle "crunch" bars crunchy (I honestly have no idea what that "baby killing" comment is about)...
But This is silly:
In regards to Asparatame, their toxic sweetner
Aspartame is a dipeptide of two amino acids - aspartic acid and phenylalanine. In short, it's a tiny piece of of quite digestible "protein". If you ever eat anything with protein in it, you've gotten PLENTY of both. If you haven't...you're dead. Phenylalanine is an essential amino acid (though people with phenylketonuria have to be careful about their intake, as they don't process it well).
This is why Nutrasweet is referred to as a "nutritive" sweetener - it's got actual substances used as nutrients by the body in it (as opposed to, say, "Splenda", which passes through the body unabsorbed).
The methanol they mention will be a minute by-product of normal metabolism of the amino acids.
Mind you, their PR people must be smoking canola if they actually worded an official statement that way, since as you've demonstrated, most people associate "methanol" with stupid people drinking industrial solvents rather than normal biochemistry...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
It may be true for some hardware configurations, but I've been running 2.4.x on several different slackware boxes, including one old laptop (Toshiba P-120 "Satellite Pro"), with no problems whatsoever (except for the glitches in loopback mounting, which I hear should be fixed in this release) for months now. Just download the source and go - why wait for an official .tgz?
I just wish Mosix would get updated for 2.4.x support - I've been itching to set it up at home again.
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"
I strongly agree! [insert random number of additional exclamation points here...]
Actually, I'd be quite happy just to find an RTSP-capable equivalent of wget, which would enable me to download clips to view at full quality later without any special work having to be done on the server side, but it appears nobody has done anything like this yet as far as I can tell. Something like this would let me pull down clips in Realvideo format (the only one www.atomfilms.com and many other sites offer that can be viewed on Linux it would seem) and watch them, regardless of the crappiness of my internet connection...
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"They have strategic air commands, nuclear submarines, and John Wayne. We have this"