Are you sure that this calculation isn't skewed by some y2k bug?
(OT: at my company, we just now discovered a y2k bug in our customer database. x0,000 contacts with contract end-dates of Jan 01, 1899. - fortunately, the data's redundant and we can extrapolate from start-date and $ paid.)
This is the same argument that arose on a smaller scale on slashdot:
Back in the old days, it was a few hundred people posting to slashdot - then the trolls arrive. There was Meeept, and Og the caveman, and others. Some of the trolls were actually very entertaining, and often the only reason to read all the posts.
But then the first-posters came on the scene, and it became clear that SOMEBODY had to do SOMETHING to get rid of those fuckers. Anarchy was no longer acceptable. On the other hand, enforcing logins and such was not a good alternative, because back then, people used to actually post criticism of their employers. Even if their employers were the likes of IBM, Microsoft, other well-known companies. Lots of nice dirt was available back then. Despite the fact that/. was able to maintain anonymous posting, I think these whistle blowers have been scared away. Either by Echelon, or Carnivore, or any one of the zillions of other lawsuits that have happened.
But I digress.
Slashdot came up with moderation - then meta moderation (who babysits the babysitters?), then meta-meta-moderation (the bitchslap). This kept the hosers mostly under control. Is slashdot a better place because of it? Well, what's the value of Karma? Especially in a communistic system where nobody's allowed to accumulate more than 50 points. It's debatable. Moderation is better than Anarchy, and maybe there are better solutions out there, maybe not. But sometimes, I wish netizens could moderate based on a central authority - all websites and content providers. Then we could filter out the junk (AOL, etc.) and rate more highly, the good stuff. Then again, MSN would just astroturf itself to the top of the scale.
If you were really an old-timer, you'd have a 4-digit slashdot UID.
You sound like a grouchy old man. And I agree with you 100%.
But I think that only half the problem is the newcomers. AOL was added to the internet over 5 years ago. I think the real problem is the corporate consolidation of ISPs and the continually rising bar on being a content provider. It used to be that anyone with enough knowledge to hack together html in a text-editor was a content provider - that was the barrier to entry. Now, the barrier to entry is; people that either limit themselves to a Geocities page, or people who are willing to pay over $100/month for an ISP that doesn't limit their ability to run a server (static IP, less restricted bandwidth, more open ports, etc).
No - look at www.memepool.com. Look at the history. A year, two years ago, we'd see 10, 15 submissions, weird shit, web sites to go to every day. Now it's like 3-5 at best.
There is definately a decline in the amount of interesting places to go. I'm not talking about big organized established sites like news sites or software develepment sites. I'm talking about the quirky "too-much-time-on-their-hands" stuff that is interesting to check out when you're aimlessly surfing.
This decline may have something to do with maturity, again. Maybe a larger percentage of people no longer have too much time on their hands. Maybe all the neat weird quirky stuff has been done.
Or maybe it's getting harder and more expensive to host things, and these trivial sites are disappearing off the net as ISPs continue to raise the bar. (by increasing fees, increasing restrictions, all as a result of consolidation, less competition).
Or, it could be that people don't have as much free time to surf anymore because of the dip in the economy.
When I surf - I'm doing either one of two things. Either I'm looking for something specific (in which case, the fact that Google and Broadband make the task much more quick is not insignificant) - OR, I'm just aimlessly surfing. But if I have to go to work, or something, then I won't spend as much time aimlessly surfing.
Recession=on average, less money for more work for a given person; either that person has lost their job and is working another job or two at reduced salary, or that person narrowly escaped a RIF (Reduction In Force) or fears one, so that person is working harder to avoid being in the bottom 10%. Hence, they're not aimlessly surfing as much.
Maybe wouldn't have anything to do with the failure of broadband, the fact that pretty much anything worth looking at on the net is going pay-per-page when it used to be free, the fact that ISPs are starting to charge much more for hosting, and are limiting standard accounts so that if you want to host from your own machine you have to pay much more, or the fact that armies of hungry lawyers are scouring the net looking for anything that might be construed as copyrighted.
I don't have a problem, and you don't have a problem - we're technical people. I'm talking about the other 90% of people out there who are ending up as office drones. The ones who will make or break their careers on the utilization of the lesser-known whizbang features of PowerPoint. (sadly, I know many people like this).
Those are the ones who won't be able to do the same things on the other office suites.
If Roger Ebert were really against the RIAA (and MPAA) he wouldn't bend over and wiggle his sexy little butt every time they wanted him to post a favorable review of another piece of crap movie. Wow, I WISH I could trust movie reviews, but honesty and integrity in that field went out of style maybe 15 years ago.
How in hell are they going to teach students how to use MS Office - the most widely used Office software in the world. Fail to do that, and you've failed to teach the kids how to make it in the real world. Just like teaching them how to use Macs does not teach them the skills they need on the job - which will all be Windows based. Unfortunate, but true. Skills are adaptable for technical people, but training people to be office drones (which is what most kids will end up bieng) - you need to teach them specific useful skills.
However, at MY company, there are always the odd marketroids who have nothing better to do with their time other than to write whitepapers or what have you with MS Word, using the latest version with all the bells and whistles. Often, crucial information like product roadmaps or whatever is embedded in such documents, and so - to do my job, I simply MUST read these documents. While a simple ASCII file would have sufficed, I am required by these yahoos to install MS Office just so I can read their freaking crap. Star Office won't display or translate these files properly, Claris Works won't open them, and I'm sure gobeProductive won't either.
For 100% of what I do when I produce documents, gobeProductive is most likely adequate. Hell, 95% of what I do; notepad.exe is adequate. But when I need to read these morons' documents, I have to have Office installed.
It's all about the file format. If the MS file format could be opened (and *ADEQUATELY* documented - and kept stable) then others could compete and it would spell the end of Office dominance. Until that happens, nothing will change, and we'll continue to have our data held captive to Microsoft's capricious whims.
That's so much bullshit. The amount of oil we're talking about isn't worth a fraction of the cost of the bombs dropped. You're listening to crap Arab propaganda trying to make people believe that the ONLY reason the US ever gets involved militarily anywhere is for oil. I heard the same bullshit story about Iraq, I heard the same bullshit story about Kosovo, I heard the same bullshit story about Somalia, and a different version of the story about Chechnya with the Russians. It's all bullshit. The Gulf War resulted in a huge drop in the flow of oil from the region. Kosovo and Chechnya have no amount of oil worth talking about, and Somalia has still not been properly surveyed, but the limited searches that have been done have yeilded not one fucking drop.
Yes, it would be a nice convenient world where we could blame all the problems of the world on the big evil selfish oil-hungry SUV driving USA now, wouldn't it?
regardless of where the onus is on someone proving their own scientific glory - the fact remains that it would be way uber cool if this stuff were real. It has the potential to change *everything*. It would be stupid to brush it aside based on some stubborn adherence to scientific dogma.
On the other hand, it's also stupid that we've wasted $2.6 million trying to prove it so far and have come up with nothing. Maybe we can sue him to provide the details of his experimental aparatus? Or at least torture him.
I'm upgrading my G3 Beige desktop with a G4 accellerator instead of buying a new G4 tower, because the new machines are overpriced. Apple is continually lagging behind the PC platform in bus speed. I'll say this though - the fact that I can take my 4 year old 233MHz G3 Beige and upgrade it with a 500MHz G4 speaks VOLUMES to the advantages of the Mac platform. The fact that I can take the G3 CPU out of the Beige, and drop it into a 9 year old 9500 with a $100 XLR8 CarrierZIF card, to me is phenominal, and the PC platform will never approach that kind of upgradability.
The only way that I am fucked by this deal is that Wacom won't support my ADB tablet under OSX.
I thought it would be cool to own an FP iMac, but the screen is really too small for serious graphics work (and OS X is quite screen-real-estate-intensive), and also the video card in the iMac is pretty weak. So I'm really into the market for the tower. And while Moronola is finally starting to do something about the MHz-gap on the CPU side, Apple hasn't delivered on the 200MHz system bus yet. I'm not going to pay $3500 on a machine with a 133MHz. If I'm paying that kind of money, I want this machine to last at least 5 years, and I don't think it's going to be adequate for that. So instead, I'm upgrading my Beige, and I'll consider buying a new desktop next year when Apple catches up to the rest of the industry.
um - BULLSHIT. I have a mac.com account, along with about a dozen other services, and mac.com is the LEAST reliable among them (yahoo, pacbell, hotmail, mail.com, etc). I'd say a full 50% of the time I can't even contact the mac.com server, and another 45% of the time, I can contact it, but it takes well over a minute. Mac.com has been nothing but a huge waste of time for me.
Maybe I should sell some of my stock options, and take about $1000, and have some cheap T-Shirts printed up with:
"BAN SCIENTOLOGY NOW! - - www.xenu.net"
and donate them to the salvation army. I'd get the tax break, AND hundreds of people walking the street bearing my message. Hey, it worked for DeCSS. . .
I don't understand why, if they get tax-exempt status as a religion, do their "trade secrets" qualify for protection under the DCMA. The DCMA should not apply to them if they're a religion, and not a business.
Please, send me all the promotional email you want, as long as each and every one of the fuckers begins with "ADV" so I can filter it. Spam doesn't bother me one bit. It's the spam that pretends to be normal email that frustrates the hell out of me.
And Yahoo's spam filter is a joke. Mailing list email that I receive ends up going into the spam filter, but actual spam from companies like Bottom Line (I never opted it) ends up in my inbox. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that their spam filter is lame, and that spammers probably can pay yahoo a kickbox to be excluded from the filtering.
Fuck them. They already allow spam past their spam filters when it suits them (probably for kickbacks) - their service is slow, and unreliable. Often, some emails arrive without the content that the sender typed, and some emails just hang out on some server somewhere for weeks before the receiver gets them.
I've been a Yahoo customer for 5 years, and if they start charging for their service, fuck them, I'm gone. I'll start using the accounts pacbell gives me with my DSL service.
Re:Performance - doesn't anyone care?
on
Serial ATA Coming
·
· Score: 2
I had understood that FireWire did not suffer from this problem (CPU utilization)- that FireWire was derived from SCSI, and in fact, you can even transfer data between two FireWire devices NOT connected to a computer (provided you had a file-system interface of some kind).
In any case, the ATA/SCSI thing is true, ATA does use CPU, and SCSI doesn't (as much). And this is the reason why Intel promotes ATA and not SCSI, and why computer manufacturers include ATA controllers by default, and not SCSI. Because SCSI does not drive demand for more/faster Intel CPUs.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that this calculation isn't skewed by some y2k bug?
(OT: at my company, we just now discovered a y2k bug in our customer database. x0,000 contacts with contract end-dates of Jan 01, 1899. - fortunately, the data's redundant and we can extrapolate from start-date and $ paid.)
Anyone remember PLATO? That was da shit. Tiny little 5" touch-sensitive plasma screen, inside a 30"x30"X30" box. . .
This is the same argument that arose on a smaller scale on slashdot:
/. was able to maintain anonymous posting, I think these whistle blowers have been scared away. Either by Echelon, or Carnivore, or any one of the zillions of other lawsuits that have happened.
Back in the old days, it was a few hundred people posting to slashdot - then the trolls arrive. There was Meeept, and Og the caveman, and others. Some of the trolls were actually very entertaining, and often the only reason to read all the posts.
But then the first-posters came on the scene, and it became clear that SOMEBODY had to do SOMETHING to get rid of those fuckers. Anarchy was no longer acceptable. On the other hand, enforcing logins and such was not a good alternative, because back then, people used to actually post criticism of their employers. Even if their employers were the likes of IBM, Microsoft, other well-known companies. Lots of nice dirt was available back then. Despite the fact that
But I digress.
Slashdot came up with moderation - then meta moderation (who babysits the babysitters?), then meta-meta-moderation (the bitchslap). This kept the hosers mostly under control. Is slashdot a better place because of it? Well, what's the value of Karma? Especially in a communistic system where nobody's allowed to accumulate more than 50 points.
It's debatable. Moderation is better than Anarchy, and maybe there are better solutions out there, maybe not. But sometimes, I wish netizens could moderate based on a central authority - all websites and content providers. Then we could filter out the junk (AOL, etc.) and rate more highly, the good stuff. Then again, MSN would just astroturf itself to the top of the scale.
If you were really an old-timer, you'd have a 4-digit slashdot UID.
You sound like a grouchy old man. And I agree with you 100%.
But I think that only half the problem is the newcomers. AOL was added to the internet over 5 years ago. I think the real problem is the corporate consolidation of ISPs and the continually rising bar on being a content provider. It used to be that anyone with enough knowledge to hack together html in a text-editor was a content provider - that was the barrier to entry. Now, the barrier to entry is; people that either limit themselves to a Geocities page, or people who are willing to pay over $100/month for an ISP that doesn't limit their ability to run a server (static IP, less restricted bandwidth, more open ports, etc).
No - look at www.memepool.com. Look at the history. A year, two years ago, we'd see 10, 15 submissions, weird shit, web sites to go to every day. Now it's like 3-5 at best.
There is definately a decline in the amount of interesting places to go. I'm not talking about big organized established sites like news sites or software develepment sites. I'm talking about the quirky "too-much-time-on-their-hands" stuff that is interesting to check out when you're aimlessly surfing.
This decline may have something to do with maturity, again. Maybe a larger percentage of people no longer have too much time on their hands. Maybe all the neat weird quirky stuff has been done.
Or maybe it's getting harder and more expensive to host things, and these trivial sites are disappearing off the net as ISPs continue to raise the bar. (by increasing fees, increasing restrictions, all as a result of consolidation, less competition).
Or, it could be that people don't have as much free time to surf anymore because of the dip in the economy.
When I surf - I'm doing either one of two things. Either I'm looking for something specific (in which case, the fact that Google and Broadband make the task much more quick is not insignificant) - OR, I'm just aimlessly surfing. But if I have to go to work, or something, then I won't spend as much time aimlessly surfing.
Recession=on average, less money for more work for a given person; either that person has lost their job and is working another job or two at reduced salary, or that person narrowly escaped a RIF (Reduction In Force) or fears one, so that person is working harder to avoid being in the bottom 10%. Hence, they're not aimlessly surfing as much.
yeah, right.
Maybe wouldn't have anything to do with the failure of broadband, the fact that pretty much anything worth looking at on the net is going pay-per-page when it used to be free, the fact that ISPs are starting to charge much more for hosting, and are limiting standard accounts so that if you want to host from your own machine you have to pay much more, or the fact that armies of hungry lawyers are scouring the net looking for anything that might be construed as copyrighted.
I don't have a problem, and you don't have a problem - we're technical people. I'm talking about the other 90% of people out there who are ending up as office drones. The ones who will make or break their careers on the utilization of the lesser-known whizbang features of PowerPoint. (sadly, I know many people like this).
Those are the ones who won't be able to do the same things on the other office suites.
If Roger Ebert were really against the RIAA (and MPAA) he wouldn't bend over and wiggle his sexy little butt every time they wanted him to post a favorable review of another piece of crap movie. Wow, I WISH I could trust movie reviews, but honesty and integrity in that field went out of style maybe 15 years ago.
How in hell are they going to teach students how to use MS Office - the most widely used Office software in the world. Fail to do that, and you've failed to teach the kids how to make it in the real world. Just like teaching them how to use Macs does not teach them the skills they need on the job - which will all be Windows based. Unfortunate, but true. Skills are adaptable for technical people, but training people to be office drones (which is what most kids will end up bieng) - you need to teach them specific useful skills.
However, at MY company, there are always the odd marketroids who have nothing better to do with their time other than to write whitepapers or what have you with MS Word, using the latest version with all the bells and whistles. Often, crucial information like product roadmaps or whatever is embedded in such documents, and so - to do my job, I simply MUST read these documents. While a simple ASCII file would have sufficed, I am required by these yahoos to install MS Office just so I can read their freaking crap. Star Office won't display or translate these files properly, Claris Works won't open them, and I'm sure gobeProductive won't either.
For 100% of what I do when I produce documents, gobeProductive is most likely adequate. Hell, 95% of what I do; notepad.exe is adequate. But when I need to read these morons' documents, I have to have Office installed.
It's all about the file format. If the MS file format could be opened (and *ADEQUATELY* documented - and kept stable) then others could compete and it would spell the end of Office dominance. Until that happens, nothing will change, and we'll continue to have our data held captive to Microsoft's capricious whims.
That's so much bullshit. The amount of oil we're talking about isn't worth a fraction of the cost of the bombs dropped. You're listening to crap Arab propaganda trying to make people believe that the ONLY reason the US ever gets involved militarily anywhere is for oil. I heard the same bullshit story about Iraq, I heard the same bullshit story about Kosovo, I heard the same bullshit story about Somalia, and a different version of the story about Chechnya with the Russians. It's all bullshit.
The Gulf War resulted in a huge drop in the flow of oil from the region. Kosovo and Chechnya have no amount of oil worth talking about, and Somalia has still not been properly surveyed, but the limited searches that have been done have yeilded not one fucking drop.
Yes, it would be a nice convenient world where we could blame all the problems of the world on the big evil selfish oil-hungry SUV driving USA now, wouldn't it?
What shits me is the feminazis who complain about these Real Dolls as objectifying women.
They should go and see what Sybian has done as far as objectifying men. This sex robot doesn't even have a face.
regardless of where the onus is on someone proving their own scientific glory - the fact remains that it would be way uber cool if this stuff were real. It has the potential to change *everything*. It would be stupid to brush it aside based on some stubborn adherence to scientific dogma.
On the other hand, it's also stupid that we've wasted $2.6 million trying to prove it so far and have come up with nothing. Maybe we can sue him to provide the details of his experimental aparatus? Or at least torture him.
In my case, it *IS* the money.
I'm upgrading my G3 Beige desktop with a G4 accellerator instead of buying a new G4 tower, because the new machines are overpriced. Apple is continually lagging behind the PC platform in bus speed. I'll say this though - the fact that I can take my 4 year old 233MHz G3 Beige and upgrade it with a 500MHz G4 speaks VOLUMES to the advantages of the Mac platform. The fact that I can take the G3 CPU out of the Beige, and drop it into a 9 year old 9500 with a $100 XLR8 CarrierZIF card, to me is phenominal, and the PC platform will never approach that kind of upgradability.
The only way that I am fucked by this deal is that Wacom won't support my ADB tablet under OSX.
I thought it would be cool to own an FP iMac, but the screen is really too small for serious graphics work (and OS X is quite screen-real-estate-intensive), and also the video card in the iMac is pretty weak. So I'm really into the market for the tower. And while Moronola is finally starting to do something about the MHz-gap on the CPU side, Apple hasn't delivered on the 200MHz system bus yet. I'm not going to pay $3500 on a machine with a 133MHz. If I'm paying that kind of money, I want this machine to last at least 5 years, and I don't think it's going to be adequate for that. So instead, I'm upgrading my Beige, and I'll consider buying a new desktop next year when Apple catches up to the rest of the industry.
if this isn't "news for nerds", I don't know what is.
Could I run TightVNC server on my Win2k box, and then the regular VNC client on Mac OS X? Is there a TightVNC client for Mac OS X?
I pay. I look at their ads.
um - BULLSHIT.
I have a mac.com account, along with about a dozen other services, and mac.com is the LEAST reliable among them (yahoo, pacbell, hotmail, mail.com, etc). I'd say a full 50% of the time I can't even contact the mac.com server, and another 45% of the time, I can contact it, but it takes well over a minute. Mac.com has been nothing but a huge waste of time for me.
Maybe I should sell some of my stock options, and take about $1000, and have some cheap T-Shirts printed up with:
"BAN SCIENTOLOGY NOW! - - www.xenu.net"
and donate them to the salvation army. I'd get the tax break, AND hundreds of people walking the street bearing my message. Hey, it worked for DeCSS. . .
I don't understand why, if they get tax-exempt status as a religion, do their "trade secrets" qualify for protection under the DCMA. The DCMA should not apply to them if they're a religion, and not a business.
Please, send me all the promotional email you want, as long as each and every one of the fuckers begins with "ADV" so I can filter it. Spam doesn't bother me one bit. It's the spam that pretends to be normal email that frustrates the hell out of me.
And Yahoo's spam filter is a joke. Mailing list email that I receive ends up going into the spam filter, but actual spam from companies like Bottom Line (I never opted it) ends up in my inbox. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that their spam filter is lame, and that spammers probably can pay yahoo a kickbox to be excluded from the filtering.
Fuck them. They already allow spam past their spam filters when it suits them (probably for kickbacks) - their service is slow, and unreliable. Often, some emails arrive without the content that the sender typed, and some emails just hang out on some server somewhere for weeks before the receiver gets them.
I've been a Yahoo customer for 5 years, and if they start charging for their service, fuck them, I'm gone. I'll start using the accounts pacbell gives me with my DSL service.
I had understood that FireWire did not suffer from this problem (CPU utilization)- that FireWire was derived from SCSI, and in fact, you can even transfer data between two FireWire devices NOT connected to a computer (provided you had a file-system interface of some kind).
In any case, the ATA/SCSI thing is true, ATA does use CPU, and SCSI doesn't (as much). And this is the reason why Intel promotes ATA and not SCSI, and why computer manufacturers include ATA controllers by default, and not SCSI. Because SCSI does not drive demand for more/faster Intel CPUs.