Awesome! I've got lots of grow-lights. I'll get them creating bio-mass as soon as I'm done posting this. Hmm, maybe I should consider using white LEDs though to make it more efficient. I'll do that with the profits from my biomass. It is always good to reinvest, ya know?
Hey, I just pre sc ribed V.1.4.G.R.A to a patient today.
The monk said to the fox, why don't the squirrels to be or not to be, that is my answer. The fog was as thick as umbrellas in the wind thought the old maid.
Sure, but if you could install a relatively simple extension to your OS that would not only guarantee (well, almost) that your OS would never violate any of your rules, but actually removed the offending "objects" altogether, why wouldn't you use it? Why would you just hope that OS/advertisers would obey your rules?
Let's take Microsoft's clippy, for example. Let's say clippy only came up every once in a while. Most of the time Office follows your rules except for the few times clippy comes up to annoy you. Maybe clippy is actually useful like 1 in 100 times, but you could get the same effect by going to the Help menu and searching there. If you could change a setting that told clippy to just never come up even though it *usually* didn't annoy you and was rarely useful, wouldn't you do it?
I view ads like clippy. Rather than maintain a complicated list of rules that websites/OS should follow (and they inevitably won't), I take control. Just block it all indiscriminately. If the OS sometimes steals my focus, I install something or change some setting that makes sure it NEVER happens. I don't owe advertisers/OS makers anything. It is my computer. I'll view content however I want.
Yeah, for some reason that blank space was hard to get rid of. At one point I actually installed the stylish plugin to apply custom CSS to the page to resize divs to fill in the space. Kinda silly to go through all that work. Was a good exercise in CSS/page debugging though, I suppose.:-)
BTW, do you use Filterset.G or a regular ABP subscription? Someone here recently let me know tht Filterset.G isn't recommended with ABP. I just switched to EasyList and EasyElement filter lists. They seem to handle Slashdot better. And I was able to remove my Remove It Permanently rules on some sites as well.
Ah, thanks. I wasn't aware. I guess the big problem is that Filterset.G slows down browsing? I guess I've been using adblock so long that I didn't keep up to date other than simply installing the Filterset.G updater extension out of habit.
Anyway, I just subscribed to EasyList and EasyElement. So far it looks pretty good. I've been able to remove some of the Remove It Permanently rules.
But why bother? Why go through the trouble of selecting which ads to keep and which to block? There's absolutely nothing wrong with just filtering out all ads. You didn't sign any contract. It is your internet connection. Your computer. You can view the web however you damn well please. So why not just get a good filter (Filterset.G for Adblock Plus is awesome) and save yourself the work? Are you afraid of missing something? Are you afraid that there aren't perfectly adequate resources for finding out about products if and when you feel the need to seek them out? Do you feel some ethical problem with ad blocking? What is it?
Why do advertisers deserve a "chance?" I feel that I've already given those soulless worms a good 25 years of my life (I'm 32 now and have blocked ads for about 4 years). Enough is enough. They've had their chance. I want the parts of my brain that are wasted storing stupid jingles and subliminal messages back. I've got better things to store there.
Heaven forbid they don't take your word for it. What if they have a product never before seen on this planet. How exactly do you plan for them to make it known that they have something good for you to buy. They have to not only show you what it is but they have, but how it's going to revolutionize the way you live. And it would too, as long as you knew about it.
You write infomercials, don't you?
Unless you keep track of everything(and who has the time), sometimes ads can do some good as well as bad. I'm not saying that ads are the best thing in the world since a lot of advertisers get very annoying for very bad products but it'd be worse if you didn't get to see any new product that was coming out.
Well, at first I thought that would happen with TV shows. LIke if I didn't watch TV (and the ads) I would never hear about new shows and would just stop watching TV as old favorites got canceled. But word of mouth or just simple searches find me interesting shows to download. I don't miss the ads one single bit. I actually save a lot of time because I don't have to sit through the 20 to 30 percent of broadcasting that is just plain useless, repetative advertising garbage. My wife and I watch our 3 or 4 downloaded shows a week and have the rest of the time to ourselves.
My life has actually improved significantly since I've started really filtering out all advertisements. I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. I feel much more free.
Even if you found out about them from a friend I could argue that is simply a free form of (guerrilla?) advertising.
See, I don't consider that advertising. Companies might think of it as advertising, but is just word of mouth... being social.
I certainly hope you berate your friends every time they mention the latest Vaio or Zune or whatever - since that's information which you could have gone out and gotten yourself if it interested you enough.
I would berate them if they took money from a company to talk to me about the latest Vaio or Zune. If it is genuine interest/conversation, that is fine. I like to hear about what my friends like and don't like. But if they willingly turn themselves into live advertisements? That's just sad and I'm proably not going to be spending much time with them. People who sell ad space at their weddings? Pathetic.
I disagree, and would argue that the web started with DARPA.
But there was a time when the vast majority of content was essentially ad free. Much of it even useful information. Heck, even today I visit plenty of sites that have no ads nor do charge for content. Although maybe that has changed in the last couple years. Adblock Plus is just so effective, I'm often shocked if for some reason I have to browse without it. Like I am actually overwhelmed. You just don't realize how in prevelent advertising is until you've shielded youself from it for a while. Mass ad blocking is like a drug. A sweet, sweet drug that I never want to come off.;-)
I think he's saying that most sites simply wouldn't get any revenue because at least he (and probably myself) would neither pay for the content (in most cases) nor suffer ads. I think he's just being honest. Fact is that a lot of sites just wouldn't exist without ad support. But then, so what? That isn't his (or my) problem beyond there being a smaller number of sites available to browse. There was an internet before advertising was ubiquitous, ya know. Even today, plenty of sites manage to get by without advertising OR charging for content.
Finally, what's the "winning" scenario here - consumers (if they can be called that) - getting everything for free?
Winning is businesses finding better ways to make money than by annoying the general user. And yes, I find any and all ads annoying. I don't care if they are relevent or targetted or whatever. If I want to see/here about a company, I will seek them out. If there is any "legitimate" form of advertising, it is in the form of yellowpages-like directories or catalogs. Beyond that, I don't want to see it or here it. And quite frankly, I don't give a crap how it affects business.
I agree with you and I block all ads everwhere I possibly can, but I wonder if consumers blocking might actually be what pushes things to a "Minority Report" state.
Because God knows that if I'm searching for "New Cars" I damn sure don't want to see any advertisements about car dealerships, finance companies, or anythign like that.
I don't know about you, but I don't. If I'm doing an active search, I don't really give a crap what dealer/maker happened to pay to get seen by me. If I use that as a criteria for my purchase, I might as well just throw dice and buy a car that way...
But I guess I'm the type of person who blocks all ads, everywhere I can. And I think my quality of life is much better for it. Not that I would necessarily impose that on anyone else through legislation, but still.
Ok, I will admit that one time I did buy something primarily based on an ad I heard on the radio. I had just moved to a new apartment and heard an ad for DSL internet. So I ordered it without doing much further research. The order got delayed and ultimately cancelled so I ended up doing some actual research and I chose Speakeasy. I would have had been better off if I hadn't even listened to that ad. I wish I could block out radio ads just like I do TV and internet. They're useless, distracting, and annoying.
yeah that is a good idea if you run on identical hardware and have a good reason to use a custom kernel.
This isn't Windows. LInux is pretty forgiving about different hardware. For most machines, the only significant difference is the ethernet card. And you can have all those compiled as modules.
but why worry about supporting a custom kernel when you don't have to?
Perhaps if you don't have to, yoiu shouldn't. But often there are good reasons. Biggest reason (for me) to compile a customer kernel is to get rid of initrd and simplify your bootup procedure. Another reason is to get new features and hardware support. If you have one machine that needs some special hardware driver, it is easier to just build a single kernel package and distribute it to all machine than to keep track of which ones have a custom driver/kernel. Debian kernels, like the rest of the packages, have nasty habit of getting pretty outdated.
are marginal performance gains really worth the hassle of maintaining one or more custom kernels for the boxes you administer?
No, when you become a professional, you make a custom kernel package and distribute it to all your servers running Debian... preferably through your own custom package repository... because that way it is easily available and it works.
There's a bit more to asperger's than just lack of social skills or bad communication. Those are more or less side effects of the main problem which is the inability to read another's body language and sentiment. One can simply have poor social skills without asperger's though. But certainly anyone with poor social skill's and/or Asperger's would be attracted to any solitary occupation such as programming. A more generally accurate statement woudl be that programming selects for introversion.
I don't think that this is an intrinsic property of the software business, but rather a sign that there isn't enough competition.
As long as copying 1's and 0's is virtually free and unlimited, software business is very much different than any business that is limited by raw materials and labor to reproduce a product for sale.
If I write a piece of software, i can resell that software to as many people that want to buy it without much extra cost beyond the time it took come up with the initial source code. The margins on each copy are something like 99% (1% for packaging, distribution, bandwidth if you're letting people download it, etc...) This is why software/recording companies have to come up with ridiculous licenses and legislation to support their revenue streams. It is the reason piracy is so easy to justify for otherwise honest people. The tangible value of software is almost nothing. It is only worth the media is written on and/or the printed manual. If you can get it without media, then it has no real value. Well, it has value because you want it, but by copying it, you're not really stealing naything from the person who originally wrote it. At worst, your simply violating a contract which you never signed anyway. but I digress...;-)
For an auto maker, the "source code" (R&D) is just the first step. Each automobile produced costs significant amount of money and resources, which cuts into the margins. When I buy a car, I'm paying for the raw materials and the construction of that particular object. If I could somehow make an exact copy of the Hyndai in my garage, I doubt anyone would consider that stealing as long as I paid for the raw materials and the construction. Maybe it would be dishonest to put a Hyndai label on it, but even that is only a problem if I'm selling it.
Man, I love being on the IT side of things. I can run whatever I want. God help me if I ever take a job where the company I work for can actually dictate what I run on my desktop.
So basically this whole "protected processes" thing is just a hack to fix their orignal poor/insecure design? Imaging that. I seriously think Microsoft should just scrap Win32 and start from scratch (or adopt something that is known to be relatively secure and stable). Win32 blows.
Sure, but what kind of employees do these people make? And will they have the same motivation if they are being paid to do it? It is highly variable. You're little website is one thing, but if you're microsoft, you have a lot to lose. Maybe the hacker just wants to get on the inside to get better info for future illicit hacks... or worse, put in backdoors.
So what? The US government "seriously considers" lots of things. A good number of them really are stupid. I'm not impressed. I don't care who seriously considers it. It is still laughable.
You're comparing a small airport modified to "launch" what is essentially just a very high altitude airplane with the Kennedy space center? Are you kidding?
Slashdot Mirror
Awesome! I've got lots of grow-lights. I'll get them creating bio-mass as soon as I'm done posting this. Hmm, maybe I should consider using white LEDs though to make it more efficient. I'll do that with the profits from my biomass. It is always good to reinvest, ya know?
-matthew
Only if they write things like:
Hey, I just pre sc ribed V.1.4.G.R.A to a patient today.
The monk said to the fox, why don't the squirrels to be or not to be, that is my answer. The fog was as thick as umbrellas in the wind thought the old maid.
Sure, but if you could install a relatively simple extension to your OS that would not only guarantee (well, almost) that your OS would never violate any of your rules, but actually removed the offending "objects" altogether, why wouldn't you use it? Why would you just hope that OS/advertisers would obey your rules?
Let's take Microsoft's clippy, for example. Let's say clippy only came up every once in a while. Most of the time Office follows your rules except for the few times clippy comes up to annoy you. Maybe clippy is actually useful like 1 in 100 times, but you could get the same effect by going to the Help menu and searching there. If you could change a setting that told clippy to just never come up even though it *usually* didn't annoy you and was rarely useful, wouldn't you do it?
I view ads like clippy. Rather than maintain a complicated list of rules that websites/OS should follow (and they inevitably won't), I take control. Just block it all indiscriminately. If the OS sometimes steals my focus, I install something or change some setting that makes sure it NEVER happens. I don't owe advertisers/OS makers anything. It is my computer. I'll view content however I want.
-matthew
Yeah, for some reason that blank space was hard to get rid of. At one point I actually installed the stylish plugin to apply custom CSS to the page to resize divs to fill in the space. Kinda silly to go through all that work. Was a good exercise in CSS/page debugging though, I suppose. :-)
BTW, do you use Filterset.G or a regular ABP subscription? Someone here recently let me know tht Filterset.G isn't recommended with ABP. I just switched to EasyList and EasyElement filter lists. They seem to handle Slashdot better. And I was able to remove my Remove It Permanently rules on some sites as well.
-matthew
Ah, thanks. I wasn't aware. I guess the big problem is that Filterset.G slows down browsing? I guess I've been using adblock so long that I didn't keep up to date other than simply installing the Filterset.G updater extension out of habit.
Anyway, I just subscribed to EasyList and EasyElement. So far it looks pretty good. I've been able to remove some of the Remove It Permanently rules.
-matthew
But why bother? Why go through the trouble of selecting which ads to keep and which to block? There's absolutely nothing wrong with just filtering out all ads. You didn't sign any contract. It is your internet connection. Your computer. You can view the web however you damn well please. So why not just get a good filter (Filterset.G for Adblock Plus is awesome) and save yourself the work? Are you afraid of missing something? Are you afraid that there aren't perfectly adequate resources for finding out about products if and when you feel the need to seek them out? Do you feel some ethical problem with ad blocking? What is it?
Why do advertisers deserve a "chance?" I feel that I've already given those soulless worms a good 25 years of my life (I'm 32 now and have blocked ads for about 4 years). Enough is enough. They've had their chance. I want the parts of my brain that are wasted storing stupid jingles and subliminal messages back. I've got better things to store there.
-matthew
You write infomercials, don't you?
Well, at first I thought that would happen with TV shows. LIke if I didn't watch TV (and the ads) I would never hear about new shows and would just stop watching TV as old favorites got canceled. But word of mouth or just simple searches find me interesting shows to download. I don't miss the ads one single bit. I actually save a lot of time because I don't have to sit through the 20 to 30 percent of broadcasting that is just plain useless, repetative advertising garbage. My wife and I watch our 3 or 4 downloaded shows a week and have the rest of the time to ourselves.
My life has actually improved significantly since I've started really filtering out all advertisements. I don't feel like I'm missing anything at all. I feel much more free.
-matthew
See, I don't consider that advertising. Companies might think of it as advertising, but is just word of mouth... being social.
I would berate them if they took money from a company to talk to me about the latest Vaio or Zune. If it is genuine interest/conversation, that is fine. I like to hear about what my friends like and don't like. But if they willingly turn themselves into live advertisements? That's just sad and I'm proably not going to be spending much time with them. People who sell ad space at their weddings? Pathetic.
-matthew
But there was a time when the vast majority of content was essentially ad free. Much of it even useful information. Heck, even today I visit plenty of sites that have no ads nor do charge for content. Although maybe that has changed in the last couple years. Adblock Plus is just so effective, I'm often shocked if for some reason I have to browse without it. Like I am actually overwhelmed. You just don't realize how in prevelent advertising is until you've shielded youself from it for a while. Mass ad blocking is like a drug. A sweet, sweet drug that I never want to come off.
-matthew
I think that is the point... "just like contextual ads"... just much, much, much more annoying. Some of us don't want a future like that.
-matthew
Winning is businesses finding better ways to make money than by annoying the general user. And yes, I find any and all ads annoying. I don't care if they are relevent or targetted or whatever. If I want to see/here about a company, I will seek them out. If there is any "legitimate"
form of advertising, it is in the form of yellowpages-like directories or catalogs. Beyond that, I don't want to see it or here it. And quite frankly, I don't give a crap how it affects business.
-matthew
I agree with you and I block all ads everwhere I possibly can, but I wonder if consumers blocking might actually be what pushes things to a "Minority Report" state.
-matthew
I don't know about you, but I don't. If I'm doing an active search, I don't really give a crap what dealer/maker happened to pay to get seen by me. If I use that as a criteria for my purchase, I might as well just throw dice and buy a car that way...
But I guess I'm the type of person who blocks all ads, everywhere I can. And I think my quality of life is much better for it. Not that I would necessarily impose that on anyone else through legislation, but still.
Ok, I will admit that one time I did buy something primarily based on an ad I heard on the radio. I had just moved to a new apartment and heard an ad for DSL internet. So I ordered it without doing much further research. The order got delayed and ultimately cancelled so I ended up doing some actual research and I chose Speakeasy. I would have had been better off if I hadn't even listened to that ad. I wish I could block out radio ads just like I do TV and internet. They're useless, distracting, and annoying.
-matthew
This isn't Windows. LInux is pretty forgiving about different hardware. For most machines, the only significant difference is the ethernet card. And you can have all those compiled as modules.
Perhaps if you don't have to, yoiu shouldn't. But often there are good reasons. Biggest reason (for me) to compile a customer kernel is to get rid of initrd and simplify your bootup procedure. Another reason is to get new features and hardware support. If you have one machine that needs some special hardware driver, it is easier to just build a single kernel package and distribute it to all machine than to keep track of which ones have a custom driver/kernel. Debian kernels, like the rest of the packages, have nasty habit of getting pretty outdated.
It isn't necessarily about performance.
-matthew
No, when you become a professional, you make a custom kernel package and distribute it to all your servers running Debian... preferably through your own custom package repository... because that way it is easily available and it works.
-matthew
If nothing else, initrd has to go!
There's a bit more to asperger's than just lack of social skills or bad communication. Those are more or less side effects of the main problem which is the inability to read another's body language and sentiment. One can simply have poor social skills without asperger's though. But certainly anyone with poor social skill's and/or Asperger's would be attracted to any solitary occupation such as programming. A more generally accurate statement woudl be that programming selects for introversion.
-matthew
Nah, they're just on their way to becoming the next IBM. Big, but mostly harmless.
As long as copying 1's and 0's is virtually free and unlimited, software business is very much different than any business that is limited by raw materials and labor to reproduce a product for sale.
If I write a piece of software, i can resell that software to as many people that want to buy it without much extra cost beyond the time it took come up with the initial source code. The margins on each copy are something like 99% (1% for packaging, distribution, bandwidth if you're letting people download it, etc...) This is why software/recording companies have to come up with ridiculous licenses and legislation to support their revenue streams. It is the reason piracy is so easy to justify for otherwise honest people. The tangible value of software is almost nothing. It is only worth the media is written on and/or the printed manual. If you can get it without media, then it has no real value. Well, it has value because you want it, but by copying it, you're not really stealing naything from the person who originally wrote it. At worst, your simply violating a contract which you never signed anyway. but I digress...
For an auto maker, the "source code" (R&D) is just the first step. Each automobile produced costs significant amount of money and resources, which cuts into the margins. When I buy a car, I'm paying for the raw materials and the construction of that particular object. If I could somehow make an exact copy of the Hyndai in my garage, I doubt anyone would consider that stealing as long as I paid for the raw materials and the construction. Maybe it would be dishonest to put a Hyndai label on it, but even that is only a problem if I'm selling it.
-matthew
Man, I love being on the IT side of things. I can run whatever I want. God help me if I ever take a job where the company I work for can actually dictate what I run on my desktop.
So basically this whole "protected processes" thing is just a hack to fix their orignal poor/insecure design? Imaging that. I seriously think Microsoft should just scrap Win32 and start from scratch (or adopt something that is known to be relatively secure and stable). Win32 blows.
-matthew
Sure, but what kind of employees do these people make? And will they have the same motivation if they are being paid to do it? It is highly variable. You're little website is one thing, but if you're microsoft, you have a lot to lose. Maybe the hacker just wants to get on the inside to get better info for future illicit hacks... or worse, put in backdoors.
-matthew
It is coming out of your pocket, not mine.
-matthew
So what? The US government "seriously considers" lots of things. A good number of them really are stupid. I'm not impressed. I don't care who seriously considers it. It is still laughable.
-matthew
You're comparing a small airport modified to "launch" what is essentially just a very high altitude airplane with the Kennedy space center? Are you kidding?