I've been following Tom's Hardware for years now, since the days of truly atrocious english translations. I still check Tom's once a week or so for news and updates, and I find it a valuable resource.
However, to me at least, he seems far too emotionally attached to his subject matter to deliver unbiased opinions. Over the past few years, I've seen him be zealously anti-Intel, anti-AMD, anti-Intel, and now fairly anti-AMD again (albeit less fanatically than in the past). He's decidedly anti-Rambus (as am I, but I don't write articles purporting to be unbiased).
It's a good resource site, but very prone to sensationalism and exageration when flawed test results line up with his prejudices.
When serious reporters have all of their suspicions confirmed, they intentionally calm down and redouble fact-checking to make sure they don't embarrass themselves. Tom doesn't seem to have that concern, so I always read the site with a grain of salt and awareness of what his current emotional attachments are.
I agree that privacy is the first choice, and should be fought for. However, given the choice of limited privacy (in that corporations / the government / the elite can spy on you to their hearts' content, but you can't check up on them) or no privacy for anyone, I have to think that the no privacy for anyone option is preferable.
After all, many of those nosey intolerant neighbors might have a change of heart if you could look right back into their bedrooms.
Um, this probably isn't even worth replying to, but for the record (and in similarly idiotic shouting): DUH. DO YOU THINK, MAYBE, IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO NETWORK A BUNCH OF THESE SYSTEMS TOGETHER? LIKE, WITH THE INTERNET?
Does this moron really think the Carnivore system somehow magicly reads packets off of remote networks?
(Slashdot needs a "Post Idiotically" checkbox for people like this)
Well, I think it's more along the lines of Brin's Transparent Society idea: as long as the feds are going to have access to every byte sent on the net, damage to civil liberties can be minimized if *everyone* has access to that same information.
That way there's no mystery about what can/cannot be inferred from the data. There's no special class of people who have access to sniff every byte of communication you or anyone else sends. It levels the playing field at "no privacy for anyone, to anyone" which ironically enough is better for society than "no privacy for anyone, to the government"
Um, you're basically repeating the slashot post: "we have something that works fine, and worked fine for quite a while, but it's possible there's something better." Duh.
Here's a quick laundry list of things that we all currently take for granted that could, maybe, possible be improved upon: detergent, vitamins, condoms, whipped cream, sunglasses, transistors, paint, metal detectors, antennas.
Yes, treads can be superior to wheels in some applications. However, they have more internal friction due to the necessary joints in the treads. For the most efficient way to travel across relatively flat, rigid ground, nobody has beat the wheel yet.
So go ahead and find your niche solutions for your niche problems, but don't act like there's some easy silver bullet technology solution to any real problem: the easy stuff was done thousands of years ago. The difficult stuff was done a hundred years ago. The really, really diffucly stuff was done twenty years ago. The insanely difficult, well, that's what everyone's working on now.
We're still using *wheels* on our vehicles! I've got a nearly brand new car, and it's using 5,000 year old technology to get around? From Detroit to Stuttgart, automakers are clearly devoid of imagination!
Get over it -- sometimes it makes sense to stick with what works. A love of change for the sake of change is the one thing that unites geeks and fresh-out-of-school MBA's.
I read it three times and I'm still not sure that actually understood it.
"If Verizon fulfilled their Geek Guard duties with all the rapidity that they, say, install DSL lines for competing DSL providers, they would have 'rescheduled' their disaster response three times and we'd have an appointment for early November right now."
Speaking for myself only, I would mean "If you want adult content, prove to me that you are actually capable of paying for it at some point, even if I give you a bunch of free stuff first."
Adult site operators have no interest in having underage people cruising their sites. Quite the opposite: underage visitors represent civil and/or criminal liability, and will never pay for anything. There's no incentive whatsoever to serve porn to underage viewers.
The credit card solution kills two birds with one stone: you can be almost positive that they are over age, and that they are pre-qualified to purchase somehting in the future, so it's worth spending time, energy, and money entertaining them in the short term with the hopes of making a sale in the long term.
This is a pretty specious argument. What you're basically saying is that there's no sense in using credit cards, because porn companies are bound to do something illegal with the information.
On the one hand, it's wildly inaccurate. I operate a very successful adult site; in the past 5 years, we've billed tens of thousands of unique people for hundreds of thousands of membership-months. No fraud, no abuse of personal info, no complaints (except for busted husbands who piteously wail to their wives, "I would never have signed up for such a site! It must be credit card fraud!").
However, let's grant the idea that all (or even most, or even many) porn sites abuse credit card data. Why not have stricter enforcement of privacy and fraud standards? Punish criminal behavior rather than throwing out a perfectly good age verification scheme becasue such criminal behavior could maybe be possible under the scheme.
I know most of the big and medium players in adult sites. The vast majority are ethical, resonable people who hate spammers and mouse traps just like anyone else.
I think it's a good idea for ISP's to offer customers an opt-in blacklist. You're basically telling the ISP "I don't trust myself / my husband / my child, so I want you to block access to adult sites." I don't think it should be required by any means; let the market decide. People who have issues like that should use that kind of service, or local blocking software on their own machines (though the ISP route is probably more secure).
This weird "you can't trust porn companies because you are embarassed about doing business with them and they will therefore steal the gold fillings from your teeth" mentality is silly. If you're embarassed about buying porn, or if you're convinced that the entire adult industry is made up of thieves, DON'T BUY PORN. Duh.
According to a recent CNN poll, 57% of Americans say they would "willingly allow the government to read their email to help the fight against terrorism". I'd post the link but CNN's search engine sucks. It was on the Wolf Blitzer special report page yesterday, 9/20/2001.
We live in a democracy: clearly, if people here want to trade freedom for the illusion of security, that's what's going to happen. Especially if big corporations back the same laws, albeit for different reasons.
Between the people and corporations here in America, nobody really wants privacy. Nevermind little issues like your credit cards selling your purchasing habits; people are ready to live in glass houses and let the government and big business watch every bit of communication with the hope of making an arrest or a sale.
It's all for our own good, of course, since apparently Americans no longer believe that they are capable of taking care of themselves, and they no longer trust each other, and that massive government and corporate intervention is the only way to right matters.
It's a psychotic vicious circle: the more we abdicate responsibility, the more we need someone to take care of us, and the worse things get. What a surprise.
Sorry for the rant. Here's the bottom line: if you truly value freedom and privacy, the US is no longer the country for you. The aging population is tired of that sh*t, and has long since traded in principle for pragmatism. The odds of making a difference by writing letters are roughly the same as those of being suddenly turned into a 200 foot tall statue of the Marx Brothers.
So, write your letters. Make your calls. But when it really starts coming down, remember that you can vote with your feet: there are plenty of countries out there that are still civilized and that still respect the individual, and until the real exodus starts, almost every country will happily take the best and the brightest from the US, even if they are geeks / libertarians / gays / goths / vegans / anyone else who may not quite fit in to a mainstream police state.
-b
PS: don't bother replying with bogus patriotic "if you hate the US, leave" messages. In fact, I love the US, and have done more to demonstrate that than you'll ever know. But love does not necessitate blind jingoism, as some would have it.
Well, yes, I'd say that if you're "liberal" by your standards and want to trust people and society to navigate difficult moral ground, yes, that's "open."
That's versus "closed," or the conservative vision that government should step in and use the threat of force to coerce individual or social moral decisions. It still hasn't dawned on conservatives (and many liberals, to be fair) that *there may be no one "proper" moral code*.
Yes, there are legitimate moral issues surrounding stem cell research. No, government has no business taking those moral choices away from researchers, academics, and everyday joes.
So yes, the quote you selected is 100% fair. Bush was driven by conservative thinking and fear of the unknown.
Yes, actually: there's VMI (Cybererotica), CEN, iGallery, and RJB. At a guess thsoe three make up 50% or more of the online porn industry. I guess MSN or Time Warner is maybe the other big player on the net.
Well, I'm off in October to find a place. I'll be travelling through the mediteranian coast of Spain, the south of France, the Geneva area, and the Tuscany area of Italy.
Of course, they all have their problems, as someone else noted. Scandinavia would be nice, but I'm a weather wimp and would freeze to death in my first winter (I don't own, and refuse to own, a heavy coat).
I realize that much of Europe has their own issues, but in my opinion they are more honest about them. Sure, taxes are high. Gas is expensive. France in particular has legal and globalization issues.
I've just gotten to the point where I want to deal with *different* problems. Between a seriously sick attitude towards sex, and a seriously sick attitude towards encryption, copyright, and technology in general, and a seriously sick attitute towards drugs and addicts, I've had it here.
In the US, the answer to everything is a new law and more prisons. That is simply not acceptable to me. It's only a matter of time before something I'm into goes illegal.
Voting every November doesn't do any good, so I'm voting with my feet. And wallet, for that matter, as I'll continue to collect a check from a US company... but I'll be spending it abroad.
I think the whole conviction/prosecution thing is a non-issue. We're not talking about police searching someone's house, or taking away voting rights.
We're talking about a private business that believes that it has enough of a shoplifting problem to justify the potential bad PR of using this system.
I have no problem whatsoever if they want to ask anyone who remotely resembles a shoplifter to leave. I'd probably stop going there before that happened to me, though, just because when I want a book I don't want to feel like I have to somehow merit purchasing it.
Heck, if they want to say "nobody under 40 years old is allowed in here," that's fine with me too. If you don't like how someone runs their business, shop elsewhere (and this is certainly practical in the book market, unlike certain other markets... like word processors).
This is a classic case where the market will decide what degree of difficulty / embarassment / prying consumers will tolerate. If they drive off 1% of their customers but cut shoplifting by 30%, it makes sense for them to do so. More power to 'em.
I am definitely troubled by this technology, and I see some complex moral and ethical issues it presents. But I can't see any way of telling a private business that they can't screen their customers that won't just complicate the quadmire.
It should be noted that "rights" are much less intrinsic when on someone else's private property. Now, I think there should perhaps be notifications required of just what kinds of invasion of privacy are going on someplace so people can make an educated decision about whether to enter the property, but even in the absence of such notices, I have a hard time getting upset about this.
- You're not shipping big queries over to the databnase. Some latency saved.
- SP's are compiled once they've been run once, so you're not re-interpreting text SQL queries into DB commands.
- Depending on the database and the type of SP, you may or may not be able to re-use query plans. If so, you save the optimization time. Even if not, you get the benefits of reducing network and interpretation overhead.
What I want to know is if the mySQL SP implementation actually compiles the SP's, or if it has to reinterpret them every time.
...supposedly the DoD has had this capability for years, including in foreign languages. The idea being that the US can intercept enemy radio communications and replace them with confusing or erroneous instructions, *in real-time, in the original radio operator's voice*.
It's not like it's some big national secret; I first found this in a story on CNN, though I can't find it in a search right now.
Why *would* I pay for content when I can get comrpable content elsewhere for free. People would rather not pay than pay, right? That provides a strong incentive for content produces to find a business model whereby content consumers don't have to pay. Advertising is the obvious one, but there are others.
As long as someone's making a go of it offering free content, it's going to be pretty hard for other people in that same market to charge for content without some kind of strong differentiation (like HBO versus CBS).
....Don't pay some self-appointed hotshot $140. Go to Internext. You'll learn infinitely more, from more qualified people. It costs a tiny bit more, but it's well worth it.
This isn't a great time to get into the industry, though. There's still tons of money, of course, but even porn is going through something of a consolidation. There's not a lot of room for "just another small porn site" businesses. Now, if you've got the proverbial better mousetrap, there's always money to be made. Of course, that's true in the mainstream as well.
Heck, I'll let you in on a little secret about porn spammers, while I'm at it. You know what? They don't really make any money. Between having their sites shut down, constantly looking for open relays or bouncing between service providers.... they probably put in twice the energy that legitimate porn sites do, and make about one one-hundredth the revenue. I almost feel sorry for them; they're just gullible people who believe that there's such a thing as "get rich quick." There ain't, in porn or any other business.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been following Tom's Hardware for years now, since the days of truly atrocious english translations. I still check Tom's once a week or so for news and updates, and I find it a valuable resource.
However, to me at least, he seems far too emotionally attached to his subject matter to deliver unbiased opinions. Over the past few years, I've seen him be zealously anti-Intel, anti-AMD, anti-Intel, and now fairly anti-AMD again (albeit less fanatically than in the past). He's decidedly anti-Rambus (as am I, but I don't write articles purporting to be unbiased).
It's a good resource site, but very prone to sensationalism and exageration when flawed test results line up with his prejudices.
When serious reporters have all of their suspicions confirmed, they intentionally calm down and redouble fact-checking to make sure they don't embarrass themselves. Tom doesn't seem to have that concern, so I always read the site with a grain of salt and awareness of what his current emotional attachments are.
Cheers
-b
I agree that privacy is the first choice, and should be fought for. However, given the choice of limited privacy (in that corporations / the government / the elite can spy on you to their hearts' content, but you can't check up on them) or no privacy for anyone, I have to think that the no privacy for anyone option is preferable.
After all, many of those nosey intolerant neighbors might have a change of heart if you could look right back into their bedrooms.
Cheers
-b
Um, this probably isn't even worth replying to, but for the record (and in similarly idiotic shouting): DUH. DO YOU THINK, MAYBE, IT WOULD BE POSSIBLE TO NETWORK A BUNCH OF THESE SYSTEMS TOGETHER? LIKE, WITH THE INTERNET?
Does this moron really think the Carnivore system somehow magicly reads packets off of remote networks?
(Slashdot needs a "Post Idiotically" checkbox for people like this)
Cheers
-b
Well, I think it's more along the lines of Brin's Transparent Society idea: as long as the feds are going to have access to every byte sent on the net, damage to civil liberties can be minimized if *everyone* has access to that same information.
That way there's no mystery about what can/cannot be inferred from the data. There's no special class of people who have access to sniff every byte of communication you or anyone else sends. It levels the playing field at "no privacy for anyone, to anyone" which ironically enough is better for society than "no privacy for anyone, to the government"
Interesting, and worthwhile, idea.
-b
Um, you're basically repeating the slashot post: "we have something that works fine, and worked fine for quite a while, but it's possible there's something better." Duh.
Here's a quick laundry list of things that we all currently take for granted that could, maybe, possible be improved upon: detergent, vitamins, condoms, whipped cream, sunglasses, transistors, paint, metal detectors, antennas.
Yes, treads can be superior to wheels in some applications. However, they have more internal friction due to the necessary joints in the treads. For the most efficient way to travel across relatively flat, rigid ground, nobody has beat the wheel yet.
So go ahead and find your niche solutions for your niche problems, but don't act like there's some easy silver bullet technology solution to any real problem: the easy stuff was done thousands of years ago. The difficult stuff was done a hundred years ago. The really, really diffucly stuff was done twenty years ago. The insanely difficult, well, that's what everyone's working on now.
Cheers
-b
We're still using *wheels* on our vehicles! I've got a nearly brand new car, and it's using 5,000 year old technology to get around? From Detroit to Stuttgart, automakers are clearly devoid of imagination!
Get over it -- sometimes it makes sense to stick with what works. A love of change for the sake of change is the one thing that unites geeks and fresh-out-of-school MBA's.
-b
And I was just about to go on vacation there, too!
-b
I read it three times and I'm still not sure that actually understood it.
"If Verizon fulfilled their Geek Guard duties with all the rapidity that they, say, install DSL lines for competing DSL providers, they would have 'rescheduled' their disaster response three times and we'd have an appointment for early November right now."
Dear God, someone call an editor, quick!
-b
You're close.
Speaking for myself only, I would mean "If you want adult content, prove to me that you are actually capable of paying for it at some point, even if I give you a bunch of free stuff first."
Adult site operators have no interest in having underage people cruising their sites. Quite the opposite: underage visitors represent civil and/or criminal liability, and will never pay for anything. There's no incentive whatsoever to serve porn to underage viewers.
The credit card solution kills two birds with one stone: you can be almost positive that they are over age, and that they are pre-qualified to purchase somehting in the future, so it's worth spending time, energy, and money entertaining them in the short term with the hopes of making a sale in the long term.
Cheers
-b
This is a pretty specious argument. What you're basically saying is that there's no sense in using credit cards, because porn companies are bound to do something illegal with the information.
On the one hand, it's wildly inaccurate. I operate a very successful adult site; in the past 5 years, we've billed tens of thousands of unique people for hundreds of thousands of membership-months. No fraud, no abuse of personal info, no complaints (except for busted husbands who piteously wail to their wives, "I would never have signed up for such a site! It must be credit card fraud!").
However, let's grant the idea that all (or even most, or even many) porn sites abuse credit card data. Why not have stricter enforcement of privacy and fraud standards? Punish criminal behavior rather than throwing out a perfectly good age verification scheme becasue such criminal behavior could maybe be possible under the scheme.
I know most of the big and medium players in adult sites. The vast majority are ethical, resonable people who hate spammers and mouse traps just like anyone else.
I think it's a good idea for ISP's to offer customers an opt-in blacklist. You're basically telling the ISP "I don't trust myself / my husband / my child, so I want you to block access to adult sites." I don't think it should be required by any means; let the market decide. People who have issues like that should use that kind of service, or local blocking software on their own machines (though the ISP route is probably more secure).
This weird "you can't trust porn companies because you are embarassed about doing business with them and they will therefore steal the gold fillings from your teeth" mentality is silly. If you're embarassed about buying porn, or if you're convinced that the entire adult industry is made up of thieves, DON'T BUY PORN. Duh.
-b
...you're fighting a losing battle, my friends.
According to a recent CNN poll, 57% of Americans say they would "willingly allow the government to read their email to help the fight against terrorism". I'd post the link but CNN's search engine sucks. It was on the Wolf Blitzer special report page yesterday, 9/20/2001.
We live in a democracy: clearly, if people here want to trade freedom for the illusion of security, that's what's going to happen. Especially if big corporations back the same laws, albeit for different reasons.
Between the people and corporations here in America, nobody really wants privacy. Nevermind little issues like your credit cards selling your purchasing habits; people are ready to live in glass houses and let the government and big business watch every bit of communication with the hope of making an arrest or a sale.
It's all for our own good, of course, since apparently Americans no longer believe that they are capable of taking care of themselves, and they no longer trust each other, and that massive government and corporate intervention is the only way to right matters.
It's a psychotic vicious circle: the more we abdicate responsibility, the more we need someone to take care of us, and the worse things get. What a surprise.
Sorry for the rant. Here's the bottom line: if you truly value freedom and privacy, the US is no longer the country for you. The aging population is tired of that sh*t, and has long since traded in principle for pragmatism. The odds of making a difference by writing letters are roughly the same as those of being suddenly turned into a 200 foot tall statue of the Marx Brothers.
So, write your letters. Make your calls. But when it really starts coming down, remember that you can vote with your feet: there are plenty of countries out there that are still civilized and that still respect the individual, and until the real exodus starts, almost every country will happily take the best and the brightest from the US, even if they are geeks / libertarians / gays / goths / vegans / anyone else who may not quite fit in to a mainstream police state.
-b
PS: don't bother replying with bogus patriotic "if you hate the US, leave" messages. In fact, I love the US, and have done more to demonstrate that than you'll ever know. But love does not necessitate blind jingoism, as some would have it.
There is no VRML porn.
'nuff said.
-b
Well, yes, I'd say that if you're "liberal" by your standards and want to trust people and society to navigate difficult moral ground, yes, that's "open."
That's versus "closed," or the conservative vision that government should step in and use the threat of force to coerce individual or social moral decisions. It still hasn't dawned on conservatives (and many liberals, to be fair) that *there may be no one "proper" moral code*.
Yes, there are legitimate moral issues surrounding stem cell research. No, government has no business taking those moral choices away from researchers, academics, and everyday joes.
So yes, the quote you selected is 100% fair. Bush was driven by conservative thinking and fear of the unknown.
-b
They are conveniently not listed by Media Matrix. If you subscribe to the for-pay reports you can request that you get "adult content" stats as well.
-b
Yes, actually: there's VMI (Cybererotica), CEN, iGallery, and RJB. At a guess thsoe three make up 50% or more of the online porn industry. I guess MSN or Time Warner is maybe the other big player on the net.
-b
Well, I'm off in October to find a place. I'll be travelling through the mediteranian coast of Spain, the south of France, the Geneva area, and the Tuscany area of Italy.
:)
Of course, they all have their problems, as someone else noted. Scandinavia would be nice, but I'm a weather wimp and would freeze to death in my first winter (I don't own, and refuse to own, a heavy coat).
I realize that much of Europe has their own issues, but in my opinion they are more honest about them. Sure, taxes are high. Gas is expensive. France in particular has legal and globalization issues.
I've just gotten to the point where I want to deal with *different* problems. Between a seriously sick attitude towards sex, and a seriously sick attitude towards encryption, copyright, and technology in general, and a seriously sick attitute towards drugs and addicts, I've had it here.
In the US, the answer to everything is a new law and more prisons. That is simply not acceptable to me. It's only a matter of time before something I'm into goes illegal.
Voting every November doesn't do any good, so I'm voting with my feet. And wallet, for that matter, as I'll continue to collect a check from a US company... but I'll be spending it abroad.
I will write
-b
God, I want out of this god-damned country.
I'm no anti-corporatist (I hold several patents that I intent to profit from).
I'm no anarchist (I absolutely respect the rule of law).
I'm no L/libertarian (I can't stand people who talk about doing rather than doing).
I'm no American (I expect my government to respect me).
Bye-bye. I'm off to live in a free country.
-b
I think the whole conviction/prosecution thing is a non-issue. We're not talking about police searching someone's house, or taking away voting rights.
We're talking about a private business that believes that it has enough of a shoplifting problem to justify the potential bad PR of using this system.
I have no problem whatsoever if they want to ask anyone who remotely resembles a shoplifter to leave. I'd probably stop going there before that happened to me, though, just because when I want a book I don't want to feel like I have to somehow merit purchasing it.
Heck, if they want to say "nobody under 40 years old is allowed in here," that's fine with me too. If you don't like how someone runs their business, shop elsewhere (and this is certainly practical in the book market, unlike certain other markets... like word processors).
This is a classic case where the market will decide what degree of difficulty / embarassment / prying consumers will tolerate. If they drive off 1% of their customers but cut shoplifting by 30%, it makes sense for them to do so. More power to 'em.
I am definitely troubled by this technology, and I see some complex moral and ethical issues it presents. But I can't see any way of telling a private business that they can't screen their customers that won't just complicate the quadmire.
It should be noted that "rights" are much less intrinsic when on someone else's private property. Now, I think there should perhaps be notifications required of just what kinds of invasion of privacy are going on someplace so people can make an educated decision about whether to enter the property, but even in the absence of such notices, I have a hard time getting upset about this.
Yes, they're faster. For several reasons:
- You're not shipping big queries over to the databnase. Some latency saved.
- SP's are compiled once they've been run once, so you're not re-interpreting text SQL queries into DB commands.
- Depending on the database and the type of SP, you may or may not be able to re-use query plans. If so, you save the optimization time. Even if not, you get the benefits of reducing network and interpretation overhead.
What I want to know is if the mySQL SP implementation actually compiles the SP's, or if it has to reinterpret them every time.
-b
Well, I guess the test results are in. -b
...supposedly the DoD has had this capability for years, including in foreign languages. The idea being that the US can intercept enemy radio communications and replace them with confusing or erroneous instructions, *in real-time, in the original radio operator's voice*.
It's not like it's some big national secret; I first found this in a story on CNN, though I can't find it in a search right now.
Cheers
-b
naked.kids?
-b
Why *would* I pay for content when I can get comrpable content elsewhere for free. People would rather not pay than pay, right? That provides a strong incentive for content produces to find a business model whereby content consumers don't have to pay. Advertising is the obvious one, but there are others.
As long as someone's making a go of it offering free content, it's going to be pretty hard for other people in that same market to charge for content without some kind of strong differentiation (like HBO versus CBS).
I don't see why that's so hard to understand.
-b
....Don't pay some self-appointed hotshot $140. Go to Internext. You'll learn infinitely more, from more qualified people. It costs a tiny bit more, but it's well worth it.
This isn't a great time to get into the industry, though. There's still tons of money, of course, but even porn is going through something of a consolidation. There's not a lot of room for "just another small porn site" businesses. Now, if you've got the proverbial better mousetrap, there's always money to be made. Of course, that's true in the mainstream as well.
Heck, I'll let you in on a little secret about porn spammers, while I'm at it. You know what? They don't really make any money. Between having their sites shut down, constantly looking for open relays or bouncing between service providers.... they probably put in twice the energy that legitimate porn sites do, and make about one one-hundredth the revenue. I almost feel sorry for them; they're just gullible people who believe that there's such a thing as "get rich quick." There ain't, in porn or any other business.
Cheers
-b
Um, "Pursuit of happiness" is not equal to "happiness". Or do you think that anyone who makes you unhappy is violating your rights?
-b