Sometimes. Brand recognition is clearly a big factor for people's selection process. When someone's buying a TV in their local Best Buy and they have a choice of a Sony, a Panasonic, and a Nikisawa, all with identical specs and prices, I can't tell you which one they'll buy, but I CAN tell you with 98% certainty which one they won't. BTW, did you notice that they were IN a Best Buy instead of the independent store that has a better discount? Guess why. And there are a lot of places that sell a better hamburger than McDonalds, but when you're short on time and you go to search on your smartphone for something nearby, same thing... you go with the one you know. Advertising isn't the only way to build recognition, but it does work.
It's also pretty successful when you have a novel product that people will want if they knew it existed. All the hype in the world isn't going to sell very many more chrome-plated toasters than if you just put the thing on the shelf next to the old white model. On the other hand when Apple came up with the iPod their ad guys put in some serious overtime, and it worked.
Somewhere in the gray area you have the things like IBM ads where they're selling... Well, you have a business problem, and IBM has "solutions", as if they have a product that's just the cure to your abstract business problem that everyone has. Of course they're really selling expensive consulting services to try to find a way to band-aid your problem. Consciously everyone knows that. Do people subconsciously start to think of IBM as a simple solution to complex problems because of the ads? Who the fuck knows. IBM certainly thinks so.
And that last bit is the really important part: The most successful thing advertisers have sold is advertising itself. They have some high-visibility cases where they've made multiple orders of magnitude difference: diamonds; Marlboro; Volkswagen; Nike. So they milk the hell out of those as if all products require advertising if you want to make it big, and regardless of the ambiguous general case, when it comes to advertising there are enough CEOs who are buying it.
Unfortunately, we may get a bad result of all this: if ads beside the content become entirely useless, the upstream providers will start putting the ads IN the content. Witness what happened to the bottom third of your screen after Tivo came out. When Adblock learns to block those, they'll just make it more subtle.
Product placements pioneered in-band advertising, but the first generation was pretty awkward. Diamonds are a notable exception. Those guys were brilliant. Instead of making a big deal of the rocks, they wrote a subtle preconception into the plots: that offering a girl a diamond is the universal standard when getting engaged. The girl is thrilled by the surprise proposal, but never surprised that he's offering a diamond. And thus the audience learns: she might be overjoyed by an unusually expensive one, but no diamond at all is NOT ACCEPTABLE. A hundred years ago, that wasn't even fiction; now it's reality.
Realize that this is still going on, and try to spot it. Don't just look for blatant logos smeared everywhere, and cumbersome shoehorning of brands into dialog... Those exist too, but that's just because not everyone can afford the genius advertising guys, even if there were enough of them to go around. But the subtle tricks of old are well known, and still in use. Look for the subtle stuff the cast takes completely for granted that you thought was just something the trendy conformist crowd was into... they are just the first to fall for it. Especially look for it in the news.
Now tell me how the hell you're going to slice that out of the content. Adblock isn't going to cut it.
I just want to point out that you put these two sentences end-to-end: "The Volt is awfully nice in a way that American cars have seldom been. I'm not ready to buy a Volt because they're still way too expensive."
Funny that.
That's not to say that I'm anti-Volt or anything. I think it's exactly the right next step in the evolution of the automobile.
I'm not sure it's done for self-serving reasons, but it's bullshit either way:
There is some content on the Internet that "any normal human being would be offended by,"
I don't think I could write a better one-sentence example of institutional conformism. "Normal human beings" are a myth, and even if such a thing existed, they have no inherent right to censor the abnormal ones. Almost everyone can be offended by the words of another sane, sincere human being.
Can I claim to be a normal human being who is offended by this proposal? Perhaps HE should be censored.
Because compared to the fence it's several orders of magnitude harder to get through several meters of concrete and steel. If they had a way I'm sure they'd post their own pictures.
For my own mail archives I just use mutt and weed things a bit by hand. I find that 90% of the mbox size is in fewer than a dozen attachments, so I can hand-filter those out in ten minutes once a year. Beyond that disk is too cheap to care and time is too valuable to make a really comprehensive solution. So what I do: 'mutt -f archive.mbox' ':set pager_index_lines=6' (Lets you see the message index split above the body) 'o' (Order), 'z' (siZe), End (last entry), Enter (Open). while(mbox.size > acceptable_size) {
'v' (View attachments)
'jjj' (down a few times to the attachment I want to nuke)
'd' (Delete)
while(more attachments) { 'd' (Delete more attachments) }
'q' (Quit back to the message view)
'k' (previous message) } 'q' (Quit back to index) '$' (Sync changes to disk) 'q' (Quit mutt)
Note the 'j' and 'k' are vi-style up/down. The arrow keys work too if you're not a home row junkie like me.
I don't know a good fully automated way to do this that's ready to slice it right out of the box. If you want to roll your own, just pick up a library like RMail or TMail for Ruby, or equivalent for the language you prefer. That's 80% of the work done but you'll still probably find a dozen corner cases involving oddly-named HTML-alternatives named things that look like binary attachments or terribly malformed spam.
Thanks for writing all that. I'm not sold yet - you're making a lot of assertions without citations - but you've prodded me to spend some more time reading to make sure I'm not on the wrong side of the fence.
Actually, we were just considering this idea in my town of about a thousand homes.
We're a rural, unincorporated town (the county is the only government here). However, we do have a HOA which can collect money and run a little public works project on this scale.
My ideal model is to trench in dark fiber to every house in the area, and run it back to a central facility somewhere. We could then have a few ISPs from the nearest city (about 30 miles away) drop a switch in our little CO / shed, and cross-connect any home for a small monthly fee to cover our costs.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a project like this started? Any case studies of where it's worked? Estimates of what it'd cost per home to trench fiber? How much per mile to get fiber strung to the city? Any suggestions for what kind of triple-play equipment to terminate the fiber into on each home, or should we just leave a pair of SC connectors for the ISPs and let them work it out? Other suggestions or pitfalls we should know about?
It affects normal everyday end-user things like installing software (dpkg!), Firefox (which has to hang briefly while doing synchronous updates to the sqlite3 DBs very frequently), and even starting up the system creates a lot of transactional writes (logs, atime, etc). It's not a niche thing, and you'd be really surprised how much it slows things down. Everything runs a ton smoother and faster with write-back cache.
Regardless, it's very easy to provide both read and write-back cache.
I would buy one now if they would implement it as a write-back cache. It wouldn't be hard to do. Take a GB of flash, structure it as a ring buffer. That eliminates the "small random writes" problem - you're just writing a linear journal, and the places you're writing are pre-erased and ready to go. If the power fails the drive just plays back the cache when the power comes back on.
That would let you have massive improvements in write performance. Metadata updates leave you seeking all over the disk. BTRFS is currently very slow to fsync because of this. But if it could just blast it to a big flash cache, and the drive could confirm that as committed to disk immediately, it'd scream.
Unfortunately all the manufacturers seem to just want to use it as a big persistent read cache to make Windows boot faster.
... promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony...
I don't find it ironic. It's just a visible example of how far modern law has deviated from the principles of the Constitution.
Unfortunately that means you have to wear a spandex bodysuit all the time. That's not going to be desirable to someone who just wants to wear shorts and go for a walk in the park without looking weird.
To just isolate spectrum you can just run an optical fiber down their leg. Maybe have a little velcro band to strap it down in one or two places so it won't flop.
But wireless is really the way to go if you can get a small band of reserved low power spectrum.
They say it's standard HTML. If that's true, it's great - I'll be able to use it on any device anywhere. As long as it can be saved and printed, I'll cheerlead this one all the way.
If they change their mind and add DRM it'll screw up those benefits. So, Nature, do you have the cojones to keep it in an open format?
Quit being a generic coder. As long as you're an interchangeable cog, you'll be treated like one and feel like one.
Find a niche. Do you like biology? Astronomy? Nuclear physics? Radio? Find something you enjoy that you can develop a deep skill in addition to being a coder, so you're now an "$whatever specialist" who's capable of understanding that deep problem and writing the code to solve it. And keep learning about it - unless you're learning something new as you go along, you're going to get bored.
And if you're really bored... Start writing code that controls fucking robots. That will ALWAYS be exciting, sometimes because it works, more often when it doesn't.
X11 has done network-transparent video since forever. Screens that don't exist have been around a long time too (Xvnc).
The part where this is better than existing solutions is you get a hardware-accelerated framebuffer without having to attach it to a physical monitor. Thus, you could get a hardware-accelerated Xvnc, or create a virtual second head and network-attach it to a second computer. You might even do that over VNC, so it's not really an alternative to VNC... it's a new capability.
The FAA knew when all planes that were in the air were 100% landed. There could have been other attacks still pending, but what possible useful instructions could have been broadcast for that?
And no, I didn't say the news was providing coherent information. They DID get across "OMFG planes!". For an emergency broadcast to be useful, it has to have better information than that, and there simply weren't any useful instructions that could be given.
People were already at 100% vigilance, so saying "keep an eye out for unusual stuff" would only increase the level of panic. Saying "We have things under control, keep calm and carry on" would be an outright lie, and wouldn't help anyone except politicians. So what SHOULD they have said?
Slashdot Mirror
By what metric?
For the user, rooting the iPhone was pretty easy with jailbreakme.com. Go there, click the button.
Or do you mean easy for the developer? On HTC phones you basically say "Jailbreak please" and it says "OK."
Does it work?
Sometimes. Brand recognition is clearly a big factor for people's selection process. When someone's buying a TV in their local Best Buy and they have a choice of a Sony, a Panasonic, and a Nikisawa, all with identical specs and prices, I can't tell you which one they'll buy, but I CAN tell you with 98% certainty which one they won't. BTW, did you notice that they were IN a Best Buy instead of the independent store that has a better discount? Guess why. And there are a lot of places that sell a better hamburger than McDonalds, but when you're short on time and you go to search on your smartphone for something nearby, same thing... you go with the one you know. Advertising isn't the only way to build recognition, but it does work.
It's also pretty successful when you have a novel product that people will want if they knew it existed. All the hype in the world isn't going to sell very many more chrome-plated toasters than if you just put the thing on the shelf next to the old white model. On the other hand when Apple came up with the iPod their ad guys put in some serious overtime, and it worked.
Somewhere in the gray area you have the things like IBM ads where they're selling... Well, you have a business problem, and IBM has "solutions", as if they have a product that's just the cure to your abstract business problem that everyone has. Of course they're really selling expensive consulting services to try to find a way to band-aid your problem. Consciously everyone knows that. Do people subconsciously start to think of IBM as a simple solution to complex problems because of the ads? Who the fuck knows. IBM certainly thinks so.
And that last bit is the really important part: The most successful thing advertisers have sold is advertising itself. They have some high-visibility cases where they've made multiple orders of magnitude difference: diamonds; Marlboro; Volkswagen; Nike. So they milk the hell out of those as if all products require advertising if you want to make it big, and regardless of the ambiguous general case, when it comes to advertising there are enough CEOs who are buying it.
Unfortunately, we may get a bad result of all this: if ads beside the content become entirely useless, the upstream providers will start putting the ads IN the content. Witness what happened to the bottom third of your screen after Tivo came out. When Adblock learns to block those, they'll just make it more subtle.
Product placements pioneered in-band advertising, but the first generation was pretty awkward. Diamonds are a notable exception. Those guys were brilliant. Instead of making a big deal of the rocks, they wrote a subtle preconception into the plots: that offering a girl a diamond is the universal standard when getting engaged. The girl is thrilled by the surprise proposal, but never surprised that he's offering a diamond. And thus the audience learns: she might be overjoyed by an unusually expensive one, but no diamond at all is NOT ACCEPTABLE. A hundred years ago, that wasn't even fiction; now it's reality.
Realize that this is still going on, and try to spot it. Don't just look for blatant logos smeared everywhere, and cumbersome shoehorning of brands into dialog... Those exist too, but that's just because not everyone can afford the genius advertising guys, even if there were enough of them to go around. But the subtle tricks of old are well known, and still in use. Look for the subtle stuff the cast takes completely for granted that you thought was just something the trendy conformist crowd was into... they are just the first to fall for it. Especially look for it in the news.
Now tell me how the hell you're going to slice that out of the content. Adblock isn't going to cut it.
I just want to point out that you put these two sentences end-to-end: "The Volt is awfully nice in a way that American cars have seldom been. I'm not ready to buy a Volt because they're still way too expensive."
Funny that.
That's not to say that I'm anti-Volt or anything. I think it's exactly the right next step in the evolution of the automobile.
I'm not sure it's done for self-serving reasons, but it's bullshit either way:
There is some content on the Internet that "any normal human being would be offended by,"
I don't think I could write a better one-sentence example of institutional conformism. "Normal human beings" are a myth, and even if such a thing existed, they have no inherent right to censor the abnormal ones. Almost everyone can be offended by the words of another sane, sincere human being.
Can I claim to be a normal human being who is offended by this proposal? Perhaps HE should be censored.
We've had CERT for a long time.
Their auto-update service is paid, but the basic installer-ball is free.
Because compared to the fence it's several orders of magnitude harder to get through several meters of concrete and steel. If they had a way I'm sure they'd post their own pictures.
Thank you for Ninite. It will unsuck my life considerably.
Let me know when they actually get inside the building. Then I might care a bit.
For my own mail archives I just use mutt and weed things a bit by hand. I find that 90% of the mbox size is in fewer than a dozen attachments, so I can hand-filter those out in ten minutes once a year. Beyond that disk is too cheap to care and time is too valuable to make a really comprehensive solution. So what I do:
'mutt -f archive.mbox'
':set pager_index_lines=6' (Lets you see the message index split above the body)
'o' (Order), 'z' (siZe), End (last entry), Enter (Open).
while(mbox.size > acceptable_size)
{
'v' (View attachments)
'jjj' (down a few times to the attachment I want to nuke)
'd' (Delete)
while(more attachments) { 'd' (Delete more attachments) }
'q' (Quit back to the message view)
'k' (previous message)
}
'q' (Quit back to index)
'$' (Sync changes to disk)
'q' (Quit mutt)
Note the 'j' and 'k' are vi-style up/down. The arrow keys work too if you're not a home row junkie like me.
I don't know a good fully automated way to do this that's ready to slice it right out of the box. If you want to roll your own, just pick up a library like RMail or TMail for Ruby, or equivalent for the language you prefer. That's 80% of the work done but you'll still probably find a dozen corner cases involving oddly-named HTML-alternatives named things that look like binary attachments or terribly malformed spam.
Gesundheit!
Thanks for writing all that. I'm not sold yet - you're making a lot of assertions without citations - but you've prodded me to spend some more time reading to make sure I'm not on the wrong side of the fence.
Actually, we were just considering this idea in my town of about a thousand homes.
We're a rural, unincorporated town (the county is the only government here). However, we do have a HOA which can collect money and run a little public works project on this scale.
My ideal model is to trench in dark fiber to every house in the area, and run it back to a central facility somewhere. We could then have a few ISPs from the nearest city (about 30 miles away) drop a switch in our little CO / shed, and cross-connect any home for a small monthly fee to cover our costs.
Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a project like this started? Any case studies of where it's worked? Estimates of what it'd cost per home to trench fiber? How much per mile to get fiber strung to the city? Any suggestions for what kind of triple-play equipment to terminate the fiber into on each home, or should we just leave a pair of SC connectors for the ISPs and let them work it out? Other suggestions or pitfalls we should know about?
there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule,
So maybe the Nazis had it right?
Suggestion to moderators: 20% funny, 30% troll, 50% insightful.
It affects normal everyday end-user things like installing software (dpkg!), Firefox (which has to hang briefly while doing synchronous updates to the sqlite3 DBs very frequently), and even starting up the system creates a lot of transactional writes (logs, atime, etc). It's not a niche thing, and you'd be really surprised how much it slows things down. Everything runs a ton smoother and faster with write-back cache.
Regardless, it's very easy to provide both read and write-back cache.
I would buy one now if they would implement it as a write-back cache. It wouldn't be hard to do. Take a GB of flash, structure it as a ring buffer. That eliminates the "small random writes" problem - you're just writing a linear journal, and the places you're writing are pre-erased and ready to go. If the power fails the drive just plays back the cache when the power comes back on.
That would let you have massive improvements in write performance. Metadata updates leave you seeking all over the disk. BTRFS is currently very slow to fsync because of this. But if it could just blast it to a big flash cache, and the drive could confirm that as committed to disk immediately, it'd scream.
Unfortunately all the manufacturers seem to just want to use it as a big persistent read cache to make Windows boot faster.
... promoting the constitution have been heavily upvoted, while the post supporting the rule of law is actually downvoted as flamebait. Anyone else pondering the irony ...
I don't find it ironic. It's just a visible example of how far modern law has deviated from the principles of the Constitution.
Unfortunately that means you have to wear a spandex bodysuit all the time. That's not going to be desirable to someone who just wants to wear shorts and go for a walk in the park without looking weird.
To just isolate spectrum you can just run an optical fiber down their leg. Maybe have a little velcro band to strap it down in one or two places so it won't flop.
But wireless is really the way to go if you can get a small band of reserved low power spectrum.
They say it's standard HTML. If that's true, it's great - I'll be able to use it on any device anywhere. As long as it can be saved and printed, I'll cheerlead this one all the way.
If they change their mind and add DRM it'll screw up those benefits. So, Nature, do you have the cojones to keep it in an open format?
If it would let me terminate my friends and family's facebook accounts that easily, I would sign up today.
... and yes, I'm aware that "fucking robots" can be interpreted several ways. I believe my statement is applicable to all of them. :)
Quit being a generic coder. As long as you're an interchangeable cog, you'll be treated like one and feel like one.
Find a niche. Do you like biology? Astronomy? Nuclear physics? Radio? Find something you enjoy that you can develop a deep skill in addition to being a coder, so you're now an "$whatever specialist" who's capable of understanding that deep problem and writing the code to solve it. And keep learning about it - unless you're learning something new as you go along, you're going to get bored.
And if you're really bored... Start writing code that controls fucking robots. That will ALWAYS be exciting, sometimes because it works, more often when it doesn't.
X11 has done network-transparent video since forever. Screens that don't exist have been around a long time too (Xvnc).
The part where this is better than existing solutions is you get a hardware-accelerated framebuffer without having to attach it to a physical monitor. Thus, you could get a hardware-accelerated Xvnc, or create a virtual second head and network-attach it to a second computer. You might even do that over VNC, so it's not really an alternative to VNC... it's a new capability.
The FAA knew when all planes that were in the air were 100% landed. There could have been other attacks still pending, but what possible useful instructions could have been broadcast for that?
And no, I didn't say the news was providing coherent information. They DID get across "OMFG planes!". For an emergency broadcast to be useful, it has to have better information than that, and there simply weren't any useful instructions that could be given.
People were already at 100% vigilance, so saying "keep an eye out for unusual stuff" would only increase the level of panic. Saying "We have things under control, keep calm and carry on" would be an outright lie, and wouldn't help anyone except politicians. So what SHOULD they have said?