Re:Choose Examples Carefully
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Browsing Alone
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Wow, I found part of that quite familiar. But I think you made the argument better than I did:) This meme is only going to get more popular I imagine...
Re:Ahh yes. More newsbites
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Browsing Alone
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What's never mentioned in these sensational diatribes on how TV, the Internet, Automobiles, Reading, and Fire
isolate us from our community is how social people tend to be social and non-social people tend to be non-social.
I'd never thought of it that way, but it is very accurate. Perhaps socializing is decreasing because society is seeking the true equilibrium point of social vs. non-social behavior. In past centuries, people were forced to be more social in order to survive. Now that it has become more possible to live without affecting your physical neighbors, maybe people are doing so more and more because that's really what the human animal prefers. Yes, it's a change from the past. Jon's mistake is assuming that this is an entirely bad change - maybe we'll find that a more socially distant population will be more willing to accept dissent, more likely to encourage genius, and less inclined to just follow the herd.
Actually, I disagree with that. Would it be OK for a company to buy up all the words in the English language so that you couldn't complain about them? How can it be OK for them to buy up all the derogatory domain names, then? Granted, you can still criticise them with a different domain name, but having a -sucks.com address does heighten your visibility.
The problem is that people just aren't used to criticism of any variety, not realizing that criticism blocked just becomes that much more virulent.
I submit that the market for this device is specifically people who are totally OK with wizard-driven configuration. This just takes all of that unnecessary clicking of buttons out of the loop:)
I agree - this is the way things will really go. Think about it - you don't subscribe to the AP, a regional newsfeed, a city news feed, and a local news feed, do you? No, you just subscribe to a newspaper that contains all of them. Likewise, if all of the comics that I read regularly were in a conglomerate like that, I'd have no problem subscribing to demonstrate how much I've enjoyed Sluggy Freelance, etc. over the years. Keenspot is a good start, at least. You just have to make sure that the money really goes where it needs to go - just like in other artists conglomerates, you don't want the lion's share of the money going to Britney Spears or Scott Adams (better example: Jim Davis); you want your payment to encourage more of the innovative humor that you were looking for in the first place.
It seems to me that the real gravy train for a comic artist would be breaking into a real paper, though. I wonder why more web comics haven't been picked up by major papers recently - they're a lot more fun than the repetitive blandness of being that is Cathy or Garfield or Family Circus (the non-disfunctional one). Although I imagine that web comic authors get used to being able to vary their use of color, number of panels, and layout on an almost daily basis, combined with intense online interaction with fans that you just wouldn't get with the printed page.
Maybe reading Megatokyo in the morning paper is the impossible dream, but I'm not giving up hope. After all, my wife actually sat through Cowboy Bebop last night, so anything's possible:)
Looks like somebody spent way too much on monitors - there's one with practically every server! What a waste - think how much accessibility that could have bought:)
IMHO, link color should be different, not the underlining. I have "underline links" turned off in my browser, and I find it very annoying when some sites force it back on for me. Just make the links standard blue before I click them, and that purplish shade afterwards, and I'm happy.
BTW,/. itself is broken WRT link color: the color for "followed link" blends right in with the regular text on the page, making it tough to find the link that you followed half an hour ago and now want to revisit.
I can't believe it's 2002 and there's still all this FUD - you'd think you'd at least make up something original by now:)
You can buy centralized Linux support, including customization for your business if you pay for it, from many major Linux vendors, and even from IBM. You can get centralized support but also take control of some parts of the OS in your own way at the same time, an advantage which will be a long time coming from Microsoft, since it requires empowering customers with source code.
At least Sony is pretty good about this - all of the trailers that I've seen are sony.com/moviename. The problem with this is: what if you don't know the production company's name? Which is where Google comes in, I guess.
I admit that I'm somewhat miffed by Mr. Gillmor's column, since I've been predicting that search engines would take over from DNS for the past couple years now. But not as a pundit, apparently, which makes all the difference:)
I think in this case OSS might be off the hook, though - Microsoft has a giant war chest full of essentially ill-gotten gains. It's not fair to say that OSS has failed because it couldn't compete with an adversary who has almost unlimited funds for development. Nor does such a loss mean that OSS isn't still a better solution than most of the commercial software out there which doesn't come from giants such as Microsoft.
The difference is that you can use an existing OS monopoly to get everyone to use IE. You can't take advantage of a monopoly situation (a financial and marketing-oriented thing) to force security (a thinking and planning and reviewing process) to occur. Throwing money at it will not completely solve the problem either. The spreading of IE is nothing compared to the challenges of securing this far-flung empire. Remember - Microsoft is a marketing and investment business with a software front end. Is there actually any money in spending years to secure the whole thing, when you could be creating new features or new GUIs instead?
Even if this announcement were true (and so far I don't see why I should believe this any more than past dedications to security), no business will really embrace security unless its salable, and that won't happen until software purchasers understand that they really need security. That realization has been a long time coming, and for most people is still not here yet.
Favorite not-quite-cheating incident: a freshman C programming prof gives out a lab assignment which is to write a function that does what strstr() does, plus a little more. We haven't covered strstr at that point, and have no way of knowing about it. It was supposed to be a fun exercise in pointer arithmetic, etc.
Unfortunately a few of us knew what man pages were, and were looking for string comparison routines, found strstr(), and used it. The fact that they're all on the same man page may have led to that:) Prof was unhappy that we didn't do it the expected way, but he never said not to do it that way, so it ended up counting for credit.
I'd like to think that the ability to do the research and find existing routines to do what you want is worth something, but then again I know that I can write strstr() from scratch if I need to. So I don't feel like I missed out on any real learning.
Makes sense to me, but I'll put forward the Devil's Advocate viewpoint:
Napster took off just as the whole 'net boom was happening and disposable income was way, way up, and then when the economy took a nosedive, at about the same time CD sales went back down. Although I believe folks that say that they bought more CDs due to music exposure through Napster, I don't think there are enough of those folks to have caused the CD sale spike. I think it's more likely that the rising economic tide lifted the record industry, and now that people have less free money, they aren't buying as many CDs, and record sales are back down.
Napster's rise and fall happened to coincide with the CD sales spike because the Napster phenomenon was tied to the 'net explosion and subsequent implosion, which were driving the economic train that influenced the CD sales bump. Correlation does not equal causation, in other words, or at least make sure that you get the cause and effect arrow going in the right direction:)
Again, I have a lot of respect for people who heard a tune on Napster and went out and bought the album - the recording industry doesn't deserve you guys. But I think that for every principled music listener like that, there were probably five people in their dorm rooms or at home in high school who were just amassing free music because it was cheap and there. And this is the counterargument that the recording industry will make to any arguments of "Napster raised your sales." Even if Napster raised their sales, it was also uncontrollable by them, and these guys are all about control. That's why, even if Napster really had been good for the bottom line, that probably wouldn't have been enough to save them. They would have to have raised sales by insane amounts to earn the respect of the recording industry, and the ratio of principled/unprincipled music listeners isn't high enough for that IMHO. And the anecdotal evidence of 20 people replying to say "but I'm principled!" isn't enough to prove otherwise, unfortunately.
China will not take over existing root servers. But if they establish their own root server for use within China, then that will actually further their goal of controlling Chinese citizens' access to information. Even if no one else in the world uses the China root server, it could still help to control the Chinese population, which is their overall goal.
I think the third party argument comes back to avoiding monoculture - the appearance is that things are more secure if there's an independent set of eyes looking things over. That doesn't always make things more secure, but sometimes it does, and more importantly people have a gut instinct that it does.
Somehow I'm imagining a version of "The Running Man", where frightened IT managers must scurry around town buying licenses for their neglected department while avoiding BSA sharpshooters and merciless bounty hunters. If you manage to get all your machines licensed before they get you, you win the prize!
First, there is at least an appearance of more security when the AV vendor is separate from Microsoft. Why would you trust Microsoft to catch their security problems which they've already missed once?
Second, AV vendors represent one of the few large software markets on Windows that Microsoft hasn't already swallowed up or at least started on. Microsoft needs them to survive in order to provide part of a monopoly defense.
I would expect to see Microsoft start bundling antivirus software about as soon as all of the antitrust activity is over, though.
That's funny, since just last week I locked up the frickin' Win2k task bar. Reports of Win2k's increased stability do not seem to be borne out, in my experience. It has a long way to go before it's as stable as my home Linux box.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I found part of that quite familiar. But I think you made the argument better than I did :) This meme is only going to get more popular I imagine...
I'd never thought of it that way, but it is very accurate. Perhaps socializing is decreasing because society is seeking the true equilibrium point of social vs. non-social behavior. In past centuries, people were forced to be more social in order to survive. Now that it has become more possible to live without affecting your physical neighbors, maybe people are doing so more and more because that's really what the human animal prefers. Yes, it's a change from the past. Jon's mistake is assuming that this is an entirely bad change - maybe we'll find that a more socially distant population will be more willing to accept dissent, more likely to encourage genius, and less inclined to just follow the herd.
Actually, I disagree with that. Would it be OK for a company to buy up all the words in the English language so that you couldn't complain about them? How can it be OK for them to buy up all the derogatory domain names, then? Granted, you can still criticise them with a different domain name, but having a -sucks.com address does heighten your visibility.
The problem is that people just aren't used to criticism of any variety, not realizing that criticism blocked just becomes that much more virulent.
I submit that the market for this device is specifically people who are totally OK with wizard-driven configuration. This just takes all of that unnecessary clicking of buttons out of the loop :)
So it's one of those water-cooled systems, then?
I agree - this is the way things will really go. Think about it - you don't subscribe to the AP, a regional newsfeed, a city news feed, and a local news feed, do you? No, you just subscribe to a newspaper that contains all of them. Likewise, if all of the comics that I read regularly were in a conglomerate like that, I'd have no problem subscribing to demonstrate how much I've enjoyed Sluggy Freelance, etc. over the years. Keenspot is a good start, at least. You just have to make sure that the money really goes where it needs to go - just like in other artists conglomerates, you don't want the lion's share of the money going to Britney Spears or Scott Adams (better example: Jim Davis); you want your payment to encourage more of the innovative humor that you were looking for in the first place.
It seems to me that the real gravy train for a comic artist would be breaking into a real paper, though. I wonder why more web comics haven't been picked up by major papers recently - they're a lot more fun than the repetitive blandness of being that is Cathy or Garfield or Family Circus (the non-disfunctional one). Although I imagine that web comic authors get used to being able to vary their use of color, number of panels, and layout on an almost daily basis, combined with intense online interaction with fans that you just wouldn't get with the printed page.
Maybe reading Megatokyo in the morning paper is the impossible dream, but I'm not giving up hope. After all, my wife actually sat through Cowboy Bebop last night, so anything's possible :)
And, he correctly used "it's" twice, and steered clear of the "their"/"they're" minefield. Again, an excellent job :)
Hmmm, a better hack would be to add a front page news story about some famous U.S. athlete testing positive for drugs :)
"Michelle Kwan! But she's so wholesome and good?!"
Looks like somebody spent way too much on monitors - there's one with practically every server! What a waste - think how much accessibility that could have bought :)
IMHO, link color should be different, not the underlining. I have "underline links" turned off in my browser, and I find it very annoying when some sites force it back on for me. Just make the links standard blue before I click them, and that purplish shade afterwards, and I'm happy.
BTW, /. itself is broken WRT link color: the color for "followed link" blends right in with the regular text on the page, making it tough to find the link that you followed half an hour ago and now want to revisit.
Maybe you should have held out for a bigger bribe - apparently the organizing committee understands those just fine :)
So, do you ever post something that's not a shill for KAOS?
Oh wait, I see that you troll as well. Question answered :)
I can't believe it's 2002 and there's still all this FUD - you'd think you'd at least make up something original by now :)
You can buy centralized Linux support, including customization for your business if you pay for it, from many major Linux vendors, and even from IBM. You can get centralized support but also take control of some parts of the OS in your own way at the same time, an advantage which will be a long time coming from Microsoft, since it requires empowering customers with source code.
At least Sony is pretty good about this - all of the trailers that I've seen are sony.com/moviename. The problem with this is: what if you don't know the production company's name? Which is where Google comes in, I guess.
I admit that I'm somewhat miffed by Mr. Gillmor's column, since I've been predicting that search engines would take over from DNS for the past couple years now. But not as a pundit, apparently, which makes all the difference :)
I think in this case OSS might be off the hook, though - Microsoft has a giant war chest full of essentially ill-gotten gains. It's not fair to say that OSS has failed because it couldn't compete with an adversary who has almost unlimited funds for development. Nor does such a loss mean that OSS isn't still a better solution than most of the commercial software out there which doesn't come from giants such as Microsoft.
I always heard that as "It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." Not sure who to attribute that to, though.
The difference is that you can use an existing OS monopoly to get everyone to use IE. You can't take advantage of a monopoly situation (a financial and marketing-oriented thing) to force security (a thinking and planning and reviewing process) to occur. Throwing money at it will not completely solve the problem either. The spreading of IE is nothing compared to the challenges of securing this far-flung empire. Remember - Microsoft is a marketing and investment business with a software front end. Is there actually any money in spending years to secure the whole thing, when you could be creating new features or new GUIs instead?
Even if this announcement were true (and so far I don't see why I should believe this any more than past dedications to security), no business will really embrace security unless its salable, and that won't happen until software purchasers understand that they really need security. That realization has been a long time coming, and for most people is still not here yet.
Favorite not-quite-cheating incident: a freshman C programming prof gives out a lab assignment which is to write a function that does what strstr() does, plus a little more. We haven't covered strstr at that point, and have no way of knowing about it. It was supposed to be a fun exercise in pointer arithmetic, etc.
Unfortunately a few of us knew what man pages were, and were looking for string comparison routines, found strstr(), and used it. The fact that they're all on the same man page may have led to that :) Prof was unhappy that we didn't do it the expected way, but he never said not to do it that way, so it ended up counting for credit.
I'd like to think that the ability to do the research and find existing routines to do what you want is worth something, but then again I know that I can write strstr() from scratch if I need to. So I don't feel like I missed out on any real learning.
Very good points, and an excellent counterargument. Now I have some ammunition for whenever I hear that particular devil's advocate position :) Thanks.
Makes sense to me, but I'll put forward the Devil's Advocate viewpoint:
Napster took off just as the whole 'net boom was happening and disposable income was way, way up, and then when the economy took a nosedive, at about the same time CD sales went back down. Although I believe folks that say that they bought more CDs due to music exposure through Napster, I don't think there are enough of those folks to have caused the CD sale spike. I think it's more likely that the rising economic tide lifted the record industry, and now that people have less free money, they aren't buying as many CDs, and record sales are back down.
Napster's rise and fall happened to coincide with the CD sales spike because the Napster phenomenon was tied to the 'net explosion and subsequent implosion, which were driving the economic train that influenced the CD sales bump. Correlation does not equal causation, in other words, or at least make sure that you get the cause and effect arrow going in the right direction :)
Again, I have a lot of respect for people who heard a tune on Napster and went out and bought the album - the recording industry doesn't deserve you guys. But I think that for every principled music listener like that, there were probably five people in their dorm rooms or at home in high school who were just amassing free music because it was cheap and there. And this is the counterargument that the recording industry will make to any arguments of "Napster raised your sales." Even if Napster raised their sales, it was also uncontrollable by them, and these guys are all about control. That's why, even if Napster really had been good for the bottom line, that probably wouldn't have been enough to save them. They would have to have raised sales by insane amounts to earn the respect of the recording industry, and the ratio of principled/unprincipled music listeners isn't high enough for that IMHO. And the anecdotal evidence of 20 people replying to say "but I'm principled!" isn't enough to prove otherwise, unfortunately.
Just my 2c, disagree away!
China will not take over existing root servers. But if they establish their own root server for use within China, then that will actually further their goal of controlling Chinese citizens' access to information. Even if no one else in the world uses the China root server, it could still help to control the Chinese population, which is their overall goal.
I think the third party argument comes back to avoiding monoculture - the appearance is that things are more secure if there's an independent set of eyes looking things over. That doesn't always make things more secure, but sometimes it does, and more importantly people have a gut instinct that it does.
Somehow I'm imagining a version of "The Running Man", where frightened IT managers must scurry around town buying licenses for their neglected department while avoiding BSA sharpshooters and merciless bounty hunters. If you manage to get all your machines licensed before they get you, you win the prize!
Two reasons:
First, there is at least an appearance of more security when the AV vendor is separate from Microsoft. Why would you trust Microsoft to catch their security problems which they've already missed once?
Second, AV vendors represent one of the few large software markets on Windows that Microsoft hasn't already swallowed up or at least started on. Microsoft needs them to survive in order to provide part of a monopoly defense.
I would expect to see Microsoft start bundling antivirus software about as soon as all of the antitrust activity is over, though.
That's funny, since just last week I locked up the frickin' Win2k task bar. Reports of Win2k's increased stability do not seem to be borne out, in my experience. It has a long way to go before it's as stable as my home Linux box.