This is just one more argument for not having all tehse srevices be free.
If people had to pay even a nominal fee ($12/year) the majority of the spam blogs would disappear. And probably 90% of the crap blogs, too. They'd either quit because it's not worth the cost, or (in a minority of cases) they'd actually start thinking more before blogging (which has to be one of the stupidest words of the last 100 years, right up there with "bling-bling").
The web was around long before blogs. Google was necessary, successful and incredibly useful long before blogs.
Blogs are fine. But 99% of the time, they are useless to me when I'm searching for something. I'm often after technical data or reviews, and blogs are not usually the best source, or the best venue, for such things.
One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options...
So add it to the "Advanced Search" page. A handful of extra checkboxes there, like "No blogs" and "No commercial sites" (anything with lots of currency symbols) would be easy enough to deal with, and wouldn't affect the masses who just want the "one click" experience Amazon babbles about.
If the reviewer has come to rely on that sort of reading experience, perhaps it's because they've not been reading the right sort of books. Put down those technical manuals...
I was thinking this is probably the first book he's read since mgrade school. All his reading since has been on the web. That explains the whole review, not just the one point. 8^)
While i've technically done a "Good Thing"(tm) i still feel a bit evil as my actions generally cause another person to loose his job.
No, his actions caused him to lose his job. Had he behaved ethically and responsibly, he would still have his job. He asked for it, he got it (Toyota).
If it's my house, my business, my whatever, it's mine. Not yours. Not New London's. Not whomever else's. I worked for it. Mine. It's utterly irrelevant how much you're prepared to pay for it if I don't want to sell. It is black and white.
You want to build something else? Fine. Go take over the city council's properties. Leave mine alone. This is theft, pure and simple. There;'s precious little difference between this and Cuba's "nationalization" of property after the revolution.
You wait and see. There will now be a LOT of cases where governments decide to "streamline" the process of changing their cities, counties, states, or whatever just to please whoever's in charge, or the local big business they want to buddy up to.
It won't usually involve $17M/acre. It will be backed up with guns if necessary. And it could just as easily be you as anyone else.
Based purely on this one ruling, those judges should be (at a minimum) in public stocks the rest of their lives. Preferably on a flatbed trailer so they can be toted around the country for everyone to laugh at, maybe throw a few tomatoes. I wouldn't have a problem with flogging, either.
But while we're at it, throw in the New London governmental morons who started this.
It's actually quite clever. Feel free to come up with something even remotely that short that conveys it any better. The abbreviation is meaningless outside the group of people who care about it, but so is most geek speak and a great deal of the body of scientific language-- regardless of the language of origin.
Frankly, I've never understood why people think the internet should be free (as in root beer). That's just absurd. SOMEONE has to pay for it. I'd far rather pay for it myself. And in fact I always have. I've paid for internet services for almost 20 years. Including web space. It's let me do whatever I want (within resason and the law) without having ads screw up my pages or email.
(It hacks me off to have all these ads in my face when I'm already paying!)
Anyway, sure, in China and Cuba, I'd expect free internet. They're the workers' paraadises, after all. And in some more socialist countries, I'd expect free internet. But I bet those places don't have ads. Well, maybe government ads, but in China and Cuba at least, that's a part of life. But in the USA, there's no reason to expct free internet services.
And frankly, I'd be a lot happier without it. The people who really have something to say will generally find a way to say it, The people who really need the net will get it. If the government is worried enough about the digital divid eto provide free or reduced cost internet to certain individuals, I can live with that. BBut most of us should expect to pay for the internet just like we do for electricity or phones.
What about TV, you might ask? I don't even own one. Haven't for years. As advertisements took over more and more of the time, and the programming got worse (driven more by ad bucks than consumer interest) it just wasn't worth it.
I might get one now, but it would be for paid chanels, not for the crap with the ads. I'd rather watch paint dry than most of that. Your mileage probably varies.
What I really find interesting about this Thievs/Hackers analogy is that you never hear people telling the victims of Theives that they should have had three deadbolts on the door, or saying "shame on you you don't have bars on your windows, of course you'll get broken into."
You must live in an awfully safe place.
First off, just about every cop who responds to a breakin where security measures weren't taken says exactly this.
Secondly, if you live somewhere this is at all likely to happen (most cities, lots of suburbs), I would say something similar. You have to take appropriate measures for your environment. In a rough part of town, if you don't have burglar bars on ground and accessible floors (that release in case of fire, duh) you're doomed. In other areas, you need more than one deadbolt. Where I live, most people lock their doors at night, but that's about it. Then again, we're a little farther out, and most everyone has dogs, and guns, and notices who's in the area.
I wasn't havlf way through the first page before I was thinking the same thing. This represents two problems.
1) There's a definite mindset in a scary percentage of US businesses and wannabes that there can only be one clear leader in any indutsry, and you have to find them and slavishly emulate them. And everyone else will die. This is a stupid attitude, the kiss of death.
2) A great deal of the mass market media has completely forgotten how to think for itself. They have picked a few clear leaders (in their minds) and slavishly emulate them. This is a stupid approach, the kiss of death.
Oh, wait. I guess that's just one thing, with a prime example!
They said (and have since the first announcement AFAIK) that there were as many as 40 million cards at risk. The official MC line never said there were 40M cards compromised. Merely at risk. Some media outlets may have reported this wrong, but every report I, personally, heard since last week got it right.
According to the article, the company in question has *never* been in compliance with MC's security rules. Since MC is supposedly doing audits and all, why have they not terminated the account and awarded it to someone else? They're leaving themselves wide open, and they're a much bigger target than the company that got caught.
He blames Linux marketshare on the BSD lawsuit. I'm sorry, but in this case, he sounds foolish. The way BSD was developed and promoted a decade ago had far more to do with Linux' acceptance than the BSD lawsuit.
At the time, *very* few businesses used Linux. Well under 1%, probably more like 1% of 1% of 1%. At any rate, if you wanted to use a free *nix OS, you had three choices besides Linux:
1) Paying a commercial BSD license fee (BSDi). This was a bit expensive for an individual, and even the commercial version didn't have drivers for a lot of the better hardware (like reasonably new Dell servers). 2) Writing your own device drivers for anything unsupported. 3) Sending a BSD vendor equipment so they could write your driver.
I wish I could remember which prject was which for #2 and #3. Whichever group was #2, when I asked on the net about a SCSI driver for our server (a friend and I were starting a business on the side), I was flamed by a core BSD developer for not just writing a driver. HELLO! I need to run a business, not write drivers!
I tried really hard to make BSD work on our hardware. I finally gave up and tried Linux at another friend's suggestion. It just worked.
Linux caught on with individuals, then with startups and small projects in larger companies, and only in the past 3-4 years has started to matter in the corporate marketplace at large.
The BSD community chased people away (that's not an indictment of the community, it's just the effect of how things were handled).
There's an old adage that says, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Even if that were still true (it's generally not), when you start beating them in the head with the mousetrap, don't complain when tehy don't buy it.
I'm not sure if Theo is merely ignorant of history, or is simply choosing to ignore it. Either way, he's in trouble. Those who ignore or forget the lessons of history are doomed to what? Repeat it. Theo's helping screw up BSD's chances all over again.
A swamp cooler pulls the air through the actual water. It uses evaporation for the cooling effect. That's rather different than this, which is just a crude radiator. effect.
Forget civil court for now, there has to be something she can file criminal charges for. Defamation of character, sexual harassment, stalking, any number of things. Then, while he's locked up, trying to make bail, you serve the civil papers as well.
If she didn't do any of that, her rights to go after anyone else should be forfeit.
If you would just RTA, you'd realize that this extinct plant that isn't extinct is "a unique part of our heritage".
Just think of that. Amazing, huh? I know that I, for one, feel my heritage is *much* more complete now.
Hey, I like wildflowers. I'm always glad to find out something isn't extinct, so long as the something isn't a mosquito, or killer bee, or fire ants, all of which could vanish tomorrow and I would dance on their grave. But I also tend not to lose sleep over a lot of this stuff.
At the same time, I do wonder... as these guys tramp across Mt. Diablo looking for extinct species, how many more species are they dooming with those big feet?
When I install Firefox or Netscape (or Opera) on a Windows PC, it's with the understanding that IE will not be used again. My experiences with IE show it to dangerous for use by merel mnorlats (that would be all of us). So if I'm going to install another browserm the end user better be willing to use it.
Otherwise, why bother? You want to keep taking your chances with IE, that's fine. Just don't waste my time.
All that said, I do have a couple of people at work who are forced by teir job descriptions to use IE-tainted websites. They do, indeed, use two browsers. But one's on a Mac, and Safari works fine. Fot the one on Windoze, we just use Firefox. So no problem.
The problem with OSS isn't lack of quality it's the goals. If someone codes a free and open project he might do it just to prove to himself that he's *technically* capable. However a technically capable project doesn't allways bode well with users.
I would contend there's far more to it than that. Even if you produce a technically perfect product that is End User Heaven, you're still only going to go so far with it.
There was a time, perhaps, when "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your dorr" was true. Today, it doesn't matter what you produce, if you can't market it with the big guys and gals, only a small %age (of western culture, at least) will even notice. I strongly suspect this applies in the more "advanced" eastern countries as well... (If, for example, Japan and Taiwan are not marketing driven, feel free to set me straight.)
Assuming his statement is literally true, then his beef isn't even with open source, it's with giving away support. Which he didn't have to do. Just say, "OK, use this for free, but you're on your own". If they don't like it, they don't have to use it.
This would be true whether he was giving the software to OSS projects, schools, hospitals, churches, the homeless, or whatever.
His base argument is that he's lost money giving away support. That has nothing to do with open source.
As for his arguments against open source, some of them that deal with business models are valid. But a lot of what he says is utterly bogus. You could just as well apply his arguments against closed source, citing MS as an example. The vast majority (if not all) of their software is based on someone else's software or ideas. But while I abhor many of their business practices and most of their software, I have to admit their business model has been very successful-- the opposite of what applying Mr. McVoy's argument would conclude.
We have about ~300 systems-- >80% Linux, 5% Solaris, 5% Mac, 10% Windows. We have 2 people f/t in sysadmin and anoter guy who helps out when necessary. We spend well over 10% of our time on Windows issues. If we had a higher % of Windows systems, we'd spend an even higher % of our time realive to that on Windows issues.
Other than we do wholesale, massive upgrades to the OS we have very few Linux issues, just hardware issues we have with all architectures (albeit more with lower end PCs than anything else, regardless of what OS they run-- we're moving away from having any low end PCs).
Hiw, we're Intel, and we make random, new products because we think they're cool. We hope you like them, too. Maybe one day we'll get around to asking you what you want.
Not that Intel is alone in this, but they are supposed to be a market leader. Leading by random acts of management doesn't do much for me, though.
As Scot Adams says, "Don't step in the management!"
Slashdot Mirror
This is just one more argument for not having all tehse srevices be free.
If people had to pay even a nominal fee ($12/year) the majority of the spam blogs would disappear. And probably 90% of the crap blogs, too. They'd either quit because it's not worth the cost, or (in a minority of cases) they'd actually start thinking more before blogging (which has to be one of the stupidest words of the last 100 years, right up there with "bling-bling").
The web was around long before blogs. Google was necessary, successful and incredibly useful long before blogs.
Blogs are fine. But 99% of the time, they are useless to me when I'm searching for something. I'm often after technical data or reviews, and blogs are not usually the best source, or the best venue, for such things.
One reason I think Google's strayed from taking such a hardline on blogs is simply out of ease of use. Google doesn't want to complicate life with a million more search options...
So add it to the "Advanced Search" page. A handful of extra checkboxes there, like "No blogs" and "No commercial sites" (anything with lots of currency symbols) would be easy enough to deal with, and wouldn't affect the masses who just want the "one click" experience Amazon babbles about.
If the reviewer has come to rely on that sort of reading experience, perhaps it's because they've not been reading the right sort of books. Put down those technical manuals...
I was thinking this is probably the first book he's read since mgrade school. All his reading since has been on the web. That explains the whole review, not just the one point. 8^)
While i've technically done a "Good Thing"(tm) i still feel a bit evil as my actions generally cause another person to loose his job.
No, his actions caused him to lose his job. Had he behaved ethically and responsibly, he would still have his job. He asked for it, he got it (Toyota).
If it's my house, my business, my whatever, it's mine. Not yours. Not New London's. Not whomever else's. I worked for it. Mine. It's utterly irrelevant how much you're prepared to pay for it if I don't want to sell. It is black and white.
You want to build something else? Fine. Go take over the city council's properties. Leave mine alone. This is theft, pure and simple. There;'s precious little difference between this and Cuba's "nationalization" of property after the revolution.
You wait and see. There will now be a LOT of cases where governments decide to "streamline" the process of changing their cities, counties, states, or whatever just to please whoever's in charge, or the local big business they want to buddy up to.
It won't usually involve $17M/acre. It will be backed up with guns if necessary. And it could just as easily be you as anyone else.
Based purely on this one ruling, those judges should be (at a minimum) in public stocks the rest of their lives. Preferably on a flatbed trailer so they can be toted around the country for everyone to laugh at, maybe throw a few tomatoes. I wouldn't have a problem with flogging, either.
But while we're at it, throw in the New London governmental morons who started this.
It's actually quite clever. Feel free to come up with something even remotely that short that conveys it any better. The abbreviation is meaningless outside the group of people who care about it, but so is most geek speak and a great deal of the body of scientific language-- regardless of the language of origin.
Frankly, I've never understood why people think the internet should be free (as in root beer). That's just absurd. SOMEONE has to pay for it. I'd far rather pay for it myself. And in fact I always have. I've paid for internet services for almost 20 years. Including web space. It's let me do whatever I want (within resason and the law) without having ads screw up my pages or email.
(It hacks me off to have all these ads in my face when I'm already paying!)
Anyway, sure, in China and Cuba, I'd expect free internet. They're the workers' paraadises, after all. And in some more socialist countries, I'd expect free internet. But I bet those places don't have ads. Well, maybe government ads, but in China and Cuba at least, that's a part of life. But in the USA, there's no reason to expct free internet services.
And frankly, I'd be a lot happier without it. The people who really have something to say will generally find a way to say it, The people who really need the net will get it. If the government is worried enough about the digital divid eto provide free or reduced cost internet to certain individuals, I can live with that. BBut most of us should expect to pay for the internet just like we do for electricity or phones.
What about TV, you might ask? I don't even own one. Haven't for years. As advertisements took over more and more of the time, and the programming got worse (driven more by ad bucks than consumer interest) it just wasn't worth it.
I might get one now, but it would be for paid chanels, not for the crap with the ads. I'd rather watch paint dry than most of that. Your mileage probably varies.
Everything else seems to be...
What I really find interesting about this Thievs/Hackers analogy is that you never hear people telling the victims of Theives that they should have had three deadbolts on the door, or saying "shame on you you don't have bars on your windows, of course you'll get broken into."
You must live in an awfully safe place.
First off, just about every cop who responds to a breakin where security measures weren't taken says exactly this.
Secondly, if you live somewhere this is at all likely to happen (most cities, lots of suburbs), I would say something similar. You have to take appropriate measures for your environment. In a rough part of town, if you don't have burglar bars on ground and accessible floors (that release in case of fire, duh) you're doomed. In other areas, you need more than one deadbolt. Where I live, most people lock their doors at night, but that's about it. Then again, we're a little farther out, and most everyone has dogs, and guns, and notices who's in the area.
I wasn't havlf way through the first page before I was thinking the same thing. This represents two problems.
1) There's a definite mindset in a scary percentage of US businesses and wannabes that there can only be one clear leader in any indutsry, and you have to find them and slavishly emulate them. And everyone else will die. This is a stupid attitude, the kiss of death.
2) A great deal of the mass market media has completely forgotten how to think for itself. They have picked a few clear leaders (in their minds) and slavishly emulate them. This is a stupid approach, the kiss of death.
Oh, wait. I guess that's just one thing, with a prime example!
They said (and have since the first announcement AFAIK) that there were as many as 40 million cards at risk. The official MC line never said there were 40M cards compromised. Merely at risk. Some media outlets may have reported this wrong, but every report I, personally, heard since last week got it right.
I didn't have to log in. The ratilce just appeared when I clicked. I'm not registered with the Times, as far as I can recall.
According to the article, the company in question has *never* been in compliance with MC's security rules. Since MC is supposedly doing audits and all, why have they not terminated the account and awarded it to someone else? They're leaving themselves wide open, and they're a much bigger target than the company that got caught.
He blames Linux marketshare on the BSD lawsuit. I'm sorry, but in this case, he sounds foolish. The way BSD was developed and promoted a decade ago had far more to do with Linux' acceptance than the BSD lawsuit.
At the time, *very* few businesses used Linux. Well under 1%, probably more like 1% of 1% of 1%. At any rate, if you wanted to use a free *nix OS, you had three choices besides Linux:
1) Paying a commercial BSD license fee (BSDi). This was a bit expensive for an individual, and even the commercial version didn't have drivers for a lot of the better hardware (like reasonably new Dell servers).
2) Writing your own device drivers for anything unsupported.
3) Sending a BSD vendor equipment so they could write your driver.
I wish I could remember which prject was which for #2 and #3. Whichever group was #2, when I asked on the net about a SCSI driver for our server (a friend and I were starting a business on the side), I was flamed by a core BSD developer for not just writing a driver. HELLO! I need to run a business, not write drivers!
I tried really hard to make BSD work on our hardware. I finally gave up and tried Linux at another friend's suggestion. It just worked.
Linux caught on with individuals, then with startups and small projects in larger companies, and only in the past 3-4 years has started to matter in the corporate marketplace at large.
The BSD community chased people away (that's not an indictment of the community, it's just the effect of how things were handled).
There's an old adage that says, "Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door." Even if that were still true (it's generally not), when you start beating them in the head with the mousetrap, don't complain when tehy don't buy it.
I'm not sure if Theo is merely ignorant of history, or is simply choosing to ignore it. Either way, he's in trouble. Those who ignore or forget the lessons of history are doomed to what? Repeat it. Theo's helping screw up BSD's chances all over again.
A swamp cooler pulls the air through the actual water. It uses evaporation for the cooling effect. That's rather different than this, which is just a crude radiator. effect.
Just great, assuming you have an infinite supply of free ice water. Add teh cost of the ice machine, and it costs a bit more than $24.
Forget civil court for now, there has to be something she can file criminal charges for. Defamation of character, sexual harassment, stalking, any number of things. Then, while he's locked up, trying to make bail, you serve the civil papers as well.
If she didn't do any of that, her rights to go after anyone else should be forfeit.
It's the same AP story.
If you would just RTA, you'd realize that this extinct plant that isn't extinct is "a unique part of our heritage".
Just think of that. Amazing, huh? I know that I, for one, feel my heritage is *much* more complete now.
Hey, I like wildflowers. I'm always glad to find out something isn't extinct, so long as the something isn't a mosquito, or killer bee, or fire ants, all of which could vanish tomorrow and I would dance on their grave. But I also tend not to lose sleep over a lot of this stuff.
At the same time, I do wonder... as these guys tramp across Mt. Diablo looking for extinct species, how many more species are they dooming with those big feet?
The whole thing is irrelevant to me.
When I install Firefox or Netscape (or Opera) on a Windows PC, it's with the understanding that IE will not be used again. My experiences with IE show it to dangerous for use by merel mnorlats (that would be all of us). So if I'm going to install another browserm the end user better be willing to use it.
Otherwise, why bother? You want to keep taking your chances with IE, that's fine. Just don't waste my time.
All that said, I do have a couple of people at work who are forced by teir job descriptions to use IE-tainted websites. They do, indeed, use two browsers. But one's on a Mac, and Safari works fine. Fot the one on Windoze, we just use Firefox. So no problem.
The problem with OSS isn't lack of quality it's the goals. If someone codes a free and open project he might do it just to prove to himself that he's *technically* capable. However a technically capable project doesn't allways bode well with users.
I would contend there's far more to it than that. Even if you produce a technically perfect product that is End User Heaven, you're still only going to go so far with it.
There was a time, perhaps, when "If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your dorr" was true. Today, it doesn't matter what you produce, if you can't market it with the big guys and gals, only a small %age (of western culture, at least) will even notice. I strongly suspect this applies in the more "advanced" eastern countries as well... (If, for example, Japan and Taiwan are not marketing driven, feel free to set me straight.)
Assuming his statement is literally true, then his beef isn't even with open source, it's with giving away support. Which he didn't have to do. Just say, "OK, use this for free, but you're on your own". If they don't like it, they don't have to use it.
This would be true whether he was giving the software to OSS projects, schools, hospitals, churches, the homeless, or whatever.
His base argument is that he's lost money giving away support. That has nothing to do with open source.
As for his arguments against open source, some of them that deal with business models are valid. But a lot of what he says is utterly bogus. You could just as well apply his arguments against closed source, citing MS as an example. The vast majority (if not all) of their software is based on someone else's software or ideas. But while I abhor many of their business practices and most of their software, I have to admit their business model has been very successful-- the opposite of what applying Mr. McVoy's argument would conclude.
We have about ~300 systems-- >80% Linux, 5% Solaris, 5% Mac, 10% Windows. We have 2 people f/t in sysadmin and anoter guy who helps out when necessary. We spend well over 10% of our time on Windows issues. If we had a higher % of Windows systems, we'd spend an even higher % of our time realive to that on Windows issues.
Other than we do wholesale, massive upgrades to the OS we have very few Linux issues, just hardware issues we have with all architectures (albeit more with lower end PCs than anything else, regardless of what OS they run-- we're moving away from having any low end PCs).
Hiw, we're Intel, and we make random, new products because we think they're cool. We hope you like them, too. Maybe one day we'll get around to asking you what you want.
Not that Intel is alone in this, but they are supposed to be a market leader. Leading by random acts of management doesn't do much for me, though.
As Scot Adams says, "Don't step in the management!"