Yes, well ok, it might be a comparable problem to spam. Except that news servers simply can't deal with the flood of binaries anymore. About two years ago, my uni started dropping many messages in regular text groups, and they haven't stopped. And they actually block alt.binaries.*, it's just because of rogue binaries groups.
The other difference is that "unless they allow massive spamming, they're not going to replace real Usenet" would make me laugh, while your statement just made me angry...
Unless they allow massive binaries, they're not going to replace real Usenet.
Fuck binaries, binares aren't the real Usenet. They're what's killing the real Usenet. On a technical level, Usenet is totally unsuitable for massive binaries, and it's getting harder and harder to make it do its actual job (letting people send text messages to newsgroups and contact other people). Fuck binaries.
Much the same holds for IRC and its warez kiddies.
Microsoft's problem is not competition. In most markets, they own a huge share.
Their problem is competition, in a way. Has been for years. Competition of older versions of their own product, that is. Windows XP isn't selling as well as they want to, because of the Windows 2000 that people already have and that does what they want.
No, you're not alone. I did play Doom back in the day, a bit. I wasn't that bad at it, and it was fun, but I didn't play it a lot. Then the real 3D FPS came along and I couldn't do it anymore, I can't use the keyboard and a mouse that fast. But who cares.
Basically I don't play many games except chess (online on FICS against humans), Nethack, and Hattrick (web based football/soccer manager game). But that's because I run Linux. The one thing I envy Windows users for is all those role playing games. Morrowind is really my style of game.
Greg Egan is one of my absolute favourites (and I have read and like all the authors you list).
Character development is perhaps not his best side, but he cannot be beaten ideas-wise. If you're into SF that focuses on the logical implications of AI and VR technologies taken to the extreme, this guy is the best. I particularly recommend _Permutation City_ and _Diaspora_.
Ultimately, though, everything boils down to economics.
Which is why it is important that what people pay for their energy should reflect the real costs of that energy. Pollution should be cleaned up, and the costs should be part of the cost of the fuel. I don't care whether that happens by some government program or by private companies, but the problem now is that everything does boil down to economics, but the consumers don't pay the whole cost of what they consume.
1) Release crap albums until their contract runs out.
It's the label that decides whether to release it. If they don't, you have no released CD, and still x cds to go. There are artists who have simply been shut up by this mechanism - cannot release anything anymore.
Generally speaking, MS is more entrenched here than in the US, because in the US there is at least Apple, and here that is something a friend of a friend has heard of. These governments thinking about OSS are nice, but they're just a start.
That said, I think that at least in the Netherlands, where I am, the percentage of illegal copies of Windows is much larger.
This is common sense. Why now do we reverse our logic? To stop digital copying crimes, we must outlaw digital copying.
Some copying is legal. Some is illegal. For the distinction, see copyright law. For my purpose, I don't need to define what is legal and what isn't. It doesn't matter.
Say someone copies X. Then either:
It is illegal to copy X by copyright law. In which case it is ALREADY ILLEGAL, punishable by huge fines et cetera, and we don't need any new laws.
It is legal to copy X. This is not a "digital copying crime", so there is no need to stop it.
That would of course be nice to know, we are unlikely to get feedback from users about that. Hopefully some of them realize they want a bigger resolution, and buy a bigger monitor at our site:-)
On the other, we use a lot of space to show a lot of detail for products in the product lists; the table that shows the list of CPUs shows our product id, the brand name, the description of the cpu, the speed in GHz, max FSB speed, cache size, socket, whether it's OEM/boxed/etc, price, availability, availability at our supplier, guarantee period, and a tiny shopping cart icon. And we do get a lot of positive feedback about that, it makes it much easier to search for the part you want. You can sort the rows on the values of these properties, you can filter the list using pulldowns for different properties at the top of the list. We like our big list of properties, and it would be just too much information to put in a 800x600 site (with a menu bar with categories on the left).
No time to read the article, but I'll fill in some stats from our site:
640x480: 0.15%
800x600: 10.9%
1024x768: 54.8%
1280x1024: 19.7%
other/undetected: 14.4%
Our site was designed for 1024x768, this site is running since January; the stats are since the end of March. It's a webshop (computer hardware) in the Netherlands. Numbers were found using a hidden frame that posts a form with values filled in by a bit of javascript.
Of course, designing for a fixed resolution is bad, should always look good, yadda yadda... It'll work on lower resolutions but you may have to scroll sideways now and then.
So, if you take those 10,000 blogs and start looking around, you have a 0.4% chance of finding something good? Somehow it still doesn't seem worth the effort.
All that means is that "find random weblog, hit reload expectantly every five minutes" is not a perfect strategy for finding the good stuff.
Re:Bloggers?
on
Meet Joe Blog
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
What am I missing?
If you take ten thousand web logs, approximately 9954 of those are exactly what you think they are. The other 46 are made by people who are actually capable of creating something special. Finding real news, writing well, or just being amazingly ridiculous. Those are the ones that become popular.
We read about this in Psychology class. The textbook said that the schedule doesn't work long-term: even though you get more REM sleep, you don't get all of the physical rest that you normally get. It supposedly breaks down after about 2 months. According to my textbook. But they may be wrong. They're psychologists, after all.:-)
What happens after the two months? Could you sleep really heavily for a few days, go back to normal for a few more days, and then go back to the 3-hour-sleep schedule for two more months?
If there's a darwinian reason for homosexuality, I've never heard it
(this is just some idea of mine, no idea if other people have had it as well)
There are certain species of birds that live in colonies, who will help family members (siblings as well as nieces etc) raising their kids, if they don't have any themselves, or if their own didn't survive. This is obviously a survival trait - genes of birds whose genes lead them to help birds with similar genes have a higher chance to survive, because they in turn are more likely to be helped.
Humans did most of their recent evolution in small groups of hunter/gatherers. I believe it may well be good for the group if a percentage of adults does not have children of their own, is not in competition with the other males in the group, but is available for hunting with the group, protection from predators/other tribes, et cetera.
So such a group with one or two homosexuals could have a higher survival rate, as a group, even enough to make up for one or two fewer people with offspring of their own. Just an idea.
I use passwords from Nethack, e.g. #@d_..C# is me and my dog standing next to an altar with a centaur on the other side of the room. Not hackable by dictionary attack:-)
I was shocked to find the very same ads mentioned in the article on this site a while back. I've always thought of/. as a very pro-linux community...let alone the OSDN, who, I'm assuming serves the ads.
Let me explain: Linux is a set of software. It's great, it's free, it's powerful, although not for everything. I use it every day. But it's just some software. I guess the Slashdot people also like Linux.
Now what does that have to do with banning Microsoft ads? Since when do you have to be anti-Microsoft to the point of refusing their money because you happen to like using this software, that doesn't even have anything to do with Microsoft?
I also use Windows several days of the week. It's good for some things, bad for others. I don't see why that makes me special.
Remember, "liking Linux" is not a religion or anything. It doesn't mean you suddenly have to be anti-something. It's about running an operating system on your computer. Linus isn't trying to overthrow Microsoft, he's trying to build a rocking kernel.
This is cool. I've often seen comments how Slashdot is cool because it has not only programmer geeks, but also medical doctors, lawyers, et cetera. Now we actually have a tailor!:-)
B&B make it sound as if you happened to be on a tour and decided to overpower the minimal security force (two crew members + a couple of guards at best (isolated locations, remember?) then it's good to go - you already know the launch codes because it's always all zero's.
You assume the terrorists know that the password is 00000000. If they know that, they would also know if it were 46477571. If they didn't know, they wouldn't try this sort of thing. So in a way, it doesn't really matter what the password is. So it is as bad as you say that it never changed, and that too many people knew it, but I think it would have been as bad if it were any other number.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, well ok, it might be a comparable problem to spam. Except that news servers simply can't deal with the flood of binaries anymore. About two years ago, my uni started dropping many messages in regular text groups, and they haven't stopped. And they actually block alt.binaries.*, it's just because of rogue binaries groups.
The other difference is that "unless they allow massive spamming, they're not going to replace real Usenet" would make me laugh, while your statement just made me angry...
Unless they allow massive binaries, they're not going to replace real Usenet.
Fuck binaries, binares aren't the real Usenet. They're what's killing the real Usenet. On a technical level, Usenet is totally unsuitable for massive binaries, and it's getting harder and harder to make it do its actual job (letting people send text messages to newsgroups and contact other people). Fuck binaries.
Much the same holds for IRC and its warez kiddies.
Microsoft's problem is not competition. In most markets, they own a huge share.
Their problem is competition, in a way. Has been for years. Competition of older versions of their own product, that is. Windows XP isn't selling as well as they want to, because of the Windows 2000 that people already have and that does what they want.
But (from what I see in other threads) apparently Sun has already pulled this off.
It has been said before, perhaps Apple should buy Sun.
No, you're not alone. I did play Doom back in the day, a bit. I wasn't that bad at it, and it was fun, but I didn't play it a lot. Then the real 3D FPS came along and I couldn't do it anymore, I can't use the keyboard and a mouse that fast. But who cares.
Basically I don't play many games except chess (online on FICS against humans), Nethack, and Hattrick (web based football/soccer manager game). But that's because I run Linux. The one thing I envy Windows users for is all those role playing games. Morrowind is really my style of game.
Greg Egan is one of my absolute favourites (and I have read and like all the authors you list).
Character development is perhaps not his best side, but he cannot be beaten ideas-wise. If you're into SF that focuses on the logical implications of AI and VR technologies taken to the extreme, this guy is the best. I particularly recommend _Permutation City_ and _Diaspora_.
Ultimately, though, everything boils down to economics.
Which is why it is important that what people pay for their energy should reflect the real costs of that energy. Pollution should be cleaned up, and the costs should be part of the cost of the fuel. I don't care whether that happens by some government program or by private companies, but the problem now is that everything does boil down to economics, but the consumers don't pay the whole cost of what they consume.
Also, just imagine the view every morning when you wake up. Every. Single. Morning.
There would be no such thing as a "morning" anymore.
1) Release crap albums until their contract runs out.
It's the label that decides whether to release it. If they don't, you have no released CD, and still x cds to go. There are artists who have simply been shut up by this mechanism - cannot release anything anymore.
Generally speaking, MS is more entrenched here than in the US, because in the US there is at least Apple, and here that is something a friend of a friend has heard of. These governments thinking about OSS are nice, but they're just a start.
That said, I think that at least in the Netherlands, where I am, the percentage of illegal copies of Windows is much larger.
This is common sense. Why now do we reverse our logic? To stop digital copying crimes, we must outlaw digital copying.
Some copying is legal. Some is illegal. For the distinction, see copyright law. For my purpose, I don't need to define what is legal and what isn't. It doesn't matter.
Say someone copies X. Then either:
In which case it is ALREADY ILLEGAL, punishable by huge fines et cetera, and we don't need any new laws.
This is not a "digital copying crime", so there is no need to stop it.
What that so hard? Sorry for the shouting.
It probably is NP hard, but the bit about "not in finite time" is bogus, that would be an insolvable problem. All NP hard problems are solvable.
It will most likely take exponential time in the size of the map, ie be extremely slow, but it's certainly finite.
That would of course be nice to know, we are unlikely to get feedback from users about that. Hopefully some of them realize they want a bigger resolution, and buy a bigger monitor at our site :-)
On the other, we use a lot of space to show a lot of detail for products in the product lists; the table that shows the list of CPUs shows our product id, the brand name, the description of the cpu, the speed in GHz, max FSB speed, cache size, socket, whether it's OEM/boxed/etc, price, availability, availability at our supplier, guarantee period, and a tiny shopping cart icon. And we do get a lot of positive feedback about that, it makes it much easier to search for the part you want. You can sort the rows on the values of these properties, you can filter the list using pulldowns for different properties at the top of the list. We like our big list of properties, and it would be just too much information to put in a 800x600 site (with a menu bar with categories on the left).
Our site was designed for 1024x768, this site is running since January; the stats are since the end of March. It's a webshop (computer hardware) in the Netherlands. Numbers were found using a hidden frame that posts a form with values filled in by a bit of javascript.
Of course, designing for a fixed resolution is bad, should always look good, yadda yadda... It'll work on lower resolutions but you may have to scroll sideways now and then.
So, if you take those 10,000 blogs and start looking around, you have a 0.4% chance of finding something good? Somehow it still doesn't seem worth the effort.
All that means is that "find random weblog, hit reload expectantly every five minutes" is not a perfect strategy for finding the good stuff.
What am I missing?
If you take ten thousand web logs, approximately 9954 of those are exactly what you think they are. The other 46 are made by people who are actually capable of creating something special. Finding real news, writing well, or just being amazingly ridiculous. Those are the ones that become popular.
That's all nice and well, but do these things run Linux?
We read about this in Psychology class. The textbook said that the schedule doesn't work long-term: even though you get more REM sleep, you don't get all of the physical rest that you normally get. It supposedly breaks down after about 2 months. According to my textbook. But they may be wrong. They're psychologists, after all. :-)
What happens after the two months? Could you sleep really heavily for a few days, go back to normal for a few more days, and then go back to the 3-hour-sleep schedule for two more months?In contrast, a human being can run 26 miles in 2.5 hours, and keep running all day.
Some, as in very few humans can do that. I certainly can't (I can't even run a single mile, though I'm ok on a bicycle). I highly doubt you can.
Horses, on the other hand...
What the hell happened to keeping the federal government out of private buisness?
It completely failed to work, that's what happened.
If there's a darwinian reason for homosexuality, I've never heard it
(this is just some idea of mine, no idea if other people have had it as well)
There are certain species of birds that live in colonies, who will help family members (siblings as well as nieces etc) raising their kids, if they don't have any themselves, or if their own didn't survive. This is obviously a survival trait - genes of birds whose genes lead them to help birds with similar genes have a higher chance to survive, because they in turn are more likely to be helped.
Humans did most of their recent evolution in small groups of hunter/gatherers. I believe it may well be good for the group if a percentage of adults does not have children of their own, is not in competition with the other males in the group, but is available for hunting with the group, protection from predators/other tribes, et cetera.
So such a group with one or two homosexuals could have a higher survival rate, as a group, even enough to make up for one or two fewer people with offspring of their own. Just an idea.
I use passwords from Nethack, e.g. #@d_..C# is me and my dog standing next to an altar with a centaur on the other side of the room. Not hackable by dictionary attack :-)
I was shocked to find the very same ads mentioned in the article on this site a while back. I've always thought of /. as a very pro-linux community...let alone the OSDN, who, I'm assuming serves the ads.
Let me explain: Linux is a set of software. It's great, it's free, it's powerful, although not for everything. I use it every day. But it's just some software. I guess the Slashdot people also like Linux.
Now what does that have to do with banning Microsoft ads? Since when do you have to be anti-Microsoft to the point of refusing their money because you happen to like using this software, that doesn't even have anything to do with Microsoft?
I also use Windows several days of the week. It's good for some things, bad for others. I don't see why that makes me special.
Remember, "liking Linux" is not a religion or anything. It doesn't mean you suddenly have to be anti-something. It's about running an operating system on your computer. Linus isn't trying to overthrow Microsoft, he's trying to build a rocking kernel.
This is cool. I've often seen comments how Slashdot is cool because it has not only programmer geeks, but also medical doctors, lawyers, et cetera. Now we actually have a tailor! :-)
B&B make it sound as if you happened to be on a tour and decided to overpower the minimal security force (two crew members + a couple of guards at best (isolated locations, remember?) then it's good to go - you already know the launch codes because it's always all zero's.
You assume the terrorists know that the password is 00000000. If they know that, they would also know if it were 46477571. If they didn't know, they wouldn't try this sort of thing. So in a way, it doesn't really matter what the password is. So it is as bad as you say that it never changed, and that too many people knew it, but I think it would have been as bad if it were any other number.