I didn't know it was the same thing in the same place. I remembered once seeing the tab in XP but couldn't tell you how to get to it. And the one in Vista might be new or different... you know, being an 'upgrade' and all... IIRC, the one in XP, while handy, didn't make a night-and-day difference, but the GP made it sound like a big deal. XP with the Classic theme on my 2.8 GHz/1GB P4 here at work still has little hitches and lags compared to the 933 MHz PIII with 512 MB and W2K that it replaced. I thought "performance" might actually have a BIG impact on, you know... performance. Like how laptops let you tweak settings between performance and power conservation.
A couple more notes:
- I've never paid that much attention to the "performance" tab because as far as I can tell you can pretty much accomplish the same thing in Desktop -> Appearance -> Effects.
- I've always turned off all the effects anyway, not for performance reasons, but because they're just stupid and ugly. I'd turn off half the crap in OS X if I could, too, but at least Apple's are generally more nicely done. (The big exception being all the new crap in 10.5.) The 'performance boost' I see isn't that a menu draws in 0.01 seconds instead of 0.02 because there's no drop shadow--rather, it's faster because it spends ZERO seconds doing a little fade-in or slide effect. (I remember going into the registry in Win95 and setting MenuShowDelay to 0ms instead of the default of 400ms. And turning off 'menu blinking' in Mac OS 7-9.) So it doesn't quite count. Yeah, it's a little boost, but it's doing less... not especially impressive. You want to see impressive, put BeOS R5 for Intel onto a 300 MHz AMD K6-2. Watch it boot in 15 seconds after POST, then watch it play six movies at the same time without dropping any frames.
Click Start > Right Click 'Computer' > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Adjust For Best Performance
Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?
What does this option do that turning off Aero (or going all the way back to 'Windows Classic' theme) doesn't do? Does this work on desktops, or is it a laptop-only thing where the other option is "Optimize for battery life"? Sorry, I don't have a Vista machine here or else I'd check for myself. Really, I want to know. I remember a tab like that in XP but all it did was turn off visual effects.
I agree 1000%. I'm not interested in Vista for any reason (I was reasonably happy with Win95/98, loved 2K; never liked XP, other than the fact that tablets are kind of fun, though not especially useful) but I was curious to see if Vista would finally fix the spyware situation for MS. If my neighbor's computer is any indication, then the answer is no. I don't know what he did (i.e., which sites visited, or what he downloaded) or what he didn't do (i.e., was Defender on? is it on by default?) but I do know for sure that his 3-month-old computer is infested enough to be really annoying/borderline useless.
On the other hand, the absolutely stock, 3-year-old Mac mini with 10.4 that my 15-year-old son uses--the one who can turn a perfectly-good PC into an infested mess in a single unsupervised afternoon--works perfectly.
Now, you can argue all day as to whether Macs don't get viruses because they're inherently better designed or because the market is too small, but the one thing you can't argue with is that there has not been one single self-replicating in-the-wild virus for Mac OS X in the (checks Wikipedia) seven years it has been out. Not one. Ever. Period.*
* Same goes for Linux, which I have used to varying degrees since 1998. I just prefer OS X. In fact, the aforementioned neighbor recently bought his shiny new Vista PC because, I guess, the 500 MHz computer with Ubuntu 6 that I gave him a couple years ago was too slow for his tastes, and he had some money from his new job burning a hole in his pocket.
Former FBI Agent Patrick J. Dempsey warns that the Internet has become a sanctuary for cyber criminals and the only way to rectify this is to create a second, more secure Internet.
approach to fighting crime. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Criminals can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop crime for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it (x) Requires too much cooperation from criminals (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ... Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
But how much is enough to be useful, versus "just enough to be dangerous"? I can imagine a programmer knowing a bit of assembly and therefore spending too much time trying to (over-)optimize some particular thing, when a) it's already optimized as much as it can be, or b) putting effort into another part would yield much greater returns. You need look no further than the daily wtf for proof.
As for the article itself, I think the main point is correct--not that no one anywhere needs to know these things, but that fewer and fewer people need to know them, and that lots of us who've been around a while know lots of stuff that will never again be useful. I'm a huge believer that knowing history is a good thing and it gives you useful perspective and good general knowledge but these things just won't be day-to-day useful the way they once were. I am by no means the oldest guy in the room but I was working with computers in the mid-90s and I do remember fiddling with the dipswitches on the back of a 14.4 modem, then working out the proper AT commands, and moving IRQ jumpers on an ISA sound card, futzing with SCSI IDs and terminators on Mac equipment, etc etc etc. Many, many things that I'll never, ever, ever have to do again.
We've got White Guy, Asian Guy, white power-suit chick, asian chick, another white guy, a white guy in a wheelchair, and I'm not sure what Visual Studio Guy is supposed to be. But no black one! C'mon, even South Park knows that much. And right in the middle of Black History Month, too! I'm so mentally distraught. I'm going to sue them for twenty hojillion dollars.
So why in the name of FUCK would a Sith ever take on an apprentice?! Why would they even care about carrying on the Sith traditions? Honestly, that's probably the dumbest thing Lucas put in the nuTrilogy and I'm including midichlorians, the Anakin/Padme romance, and Jar-Jar Binks.
I've recently started reading SW-based novels and have been impressed with how good they are. The first one I read was Allegiance by Timothy Zahn (takes place just after Episode 4) which I picked up last Fall because of the stormtroopers on the cover. It was pretty good.
Next I read the first Darth Bane book, Path of Destruction (Drew Karpyshyn, 1003BBY-1000BBY*) which has the answer to your question in wonderful detail--both how it was when there were many, and why the 'rule of two' was created. I just finished the sequel, Darth Bane: Rule of Two (also by Drew Karpyshyn, 1000BBY-990BBY) which was just published last Fall and was also very good.
I also read Death Star (by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry; takes place just before/through Episode 4) which had surprising depth and lots of clever bits squeezed in. (Ever wonder why the guy says "Stand by" twice when the Death Star is about to fire for the last time?) Each of these books was much more enjoyable than any of the prequel movies.
I had read about SW novels for ages on Slashdot before finally picking one up, and I'm only sorry that I waited so long. Anyone who loved the old Star Wars mythos and was disappointed by the new movies should do the same. (Pick one up, that is--not wait a long time.:-) )
* for those who don't know, 'BBY' and 'ABY' are similar to B.C./A.D. in the real calendar. BBY = Before the Battle of Yavin; i.e., before the original Star Wars movie. ABY = After the Battle of Yavin. So the Darth Bane stuff happens about 1,000 years before the original Star Wars took place.
Slashdot itself costs too much to run without being ad-supported. Like most magazines and newspapers, it makes a tiny fraction of its income from subscribers; the bulk of its revenue comes from ads. Slashdot would not be what it is today without ads. I was online in the 90s, back when it was "every nerd for himself." Yeah, it was nice then, like a quaint little town, but there is orders of magnatude more information, and better information, now, and a large part of that is because there is real money to be made and that it is not all just hobby-level (or even obsession-level) sites.
I'm not saying advertising is great--I hate obtrusive ads as much as the next guy. But the fact is, advertising funds make more things possible.
Wouldn't it be better if we cut out the middle men, and all the disfigurement of our world that they generate, and just paid directly for those services that are currently ad-supported? The net cost to us would be unchanged (indeed reduced even, since the advertising business takes a cut) and the world would be prettier.
I totally agree. But it'll never happen, because people are greedy. Imagine we lived in that world, and we both owned bakeries. We're both doing just fine--we don't make a lot of money, but that's OK because everything is reeeeally cheap because no one wastes money on advertising. I've got a great standard of living... but I want more. I realize that if I give away one muffin for every 12 purchased, that will generate good word-of-mouth and I'll get more business overall, more than making up for the small loss I get from giving away that extra muffin. Then I realize, rather than waiting for word of mouth, I can put up a sign in my window. And then I think hey, the guy who sells coffee across the street always buys his morning muffin from me, so maybe he'll let me put up a sign in his window if I give him free muffins--again, it'll only take a couple extra customers to make up the loss of that one muffin. It works, things are going great for me, but people only need so many muffins, and the business I gain is a loss for you. So you decide to put up an ad of your own. And thus, the cycle starts...
It's an oversimplification to say people are just greedy. The bigger view is that people can get used to anything. This explains a wide range of behavior. Why do so many celebrities overdose? Because it's possible to just get used to having a ton of money and as many women as you want. (At the other end of the spectrum, how can people survive in POW camps?) Whenever you get used to something, you start wanting things to be better.
Someone sending you adverts for cheap Viagra is not evil.
OK, fine, so in the grand scheme of things, "evil" is a bit dramatic, but it's definitely more than a little bad when they steal very real resources (ever run a mail server?) and hide their identities and don't give you a reasonable way NOT to see their messages.
I'll see your <perspective> and raise you a <relative>. In this forum, sending spam is evil.
>> NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads,
> This meme must die. Advertising pays for nothing.
Do you like Slashdot as it exists today? It would not be here in its present form without advertising. Period.
Judging by your post and your.sig, I gather you feel pretty strongly about this, so I don't expect to change your mind with this post. True, advertising is more or less a zero-sum-game and an arms race. On the other hand, it is part of what fuels capitalism and, whatever you think of the consumer culture, you can't deny that "greed is good" capitalism has played a big part in giving us the high standard of living we enjoy today. It's led to some problems, too, but overall, I think we've come out ahead because of it. Humans will always be driven largely by self-interest; you may as well design a system that takes advantage of that.
General mass marketing is different from spam in two important ways: it costs the advertisers money, and thus it has some natural limiting built in, and it is subject to some regulation. Spammers, on the other hand, steal resources (CPU time from pwn3d Windows boxes, bandwidth from everyone) and hide behind forged headers. I don't mind watching a couple Viagra ads while watching Desperate Housewives. (I don't mind them, but I don't like them either, so I FF over them... but enough of the population doesn't mind so the decades-old model of advertising-supported broadcast television still works, at least for the moment.) However, I do mind logging into my personal email account, via a network connection that I pay for, and spending my time deleting v!agr@ messages. I'm not going to buy it, and I'm certainly not going to buy it 200 times a day, every day. I don't have the same problem with the handful of print ads that arrive in my physical mail box every day. The people who pay to send me things that go straight into my recycle bin can't afford to send me hundreds of messages per day. Scum-of-the-Earth working with stolen (free) resources, can. That's what separates the two.
As a matter of fact, I was on the Internet before 1996. You're right, it was "just fine" then. But you know what? It's a whole lot better now. And advertising pays for a lot of this.
NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads, so as long as these people do all the clicking, no one will mind if the rest of use use AdBlock, custom/etc/hosts files, etc.
Now, killing all the people who buy from spammers, I still support, though I'd rather kill the spammers themselves. Spammers are truly evil; the people who buy from them are merely stupid.
And this absolutely baffles me. Isn't the whole point of having different layers in the TCP/IP stack to make it not matter to an application how the network is physically configured? Why should Time Machine even KNOW, let alone CARE, how I'm connected? If TM can deal with an ethernet cable accidentally being unplugged or a server momentarily being unavailable for some reason, it ought to be able to deal with any glitches that WiFi brings to the table. Apple: I DON'T CARE if the first backup takes a long time. I DON'T CARE if subsequent backups sometimes take a while. (Hint: don't back up ~/Library/Caches/.) I don't care if increased network activity lowers my battery life while I'm sitting on the couch. (See above hint again.) I'm willing to accept all these shortcomings, just let me back up without plugging in! (And without having to buy a Time Capsule. I'd prefer to use my Mac Pro with File Sharing turned on, thankyouverymuch.)
Yeah, the same way the first words out of my kid's mouth are "I'm sorry"... AFTER he gets caught. Does anyone really expect us to belive that no one with a clue could have seen this coming? This is just business as usual at MS: they'll do whatever we want, who cares if there's any benefit at all for the user. So, there's no benefit, and in fact it does more harm than good? Eh, whatever. Whenever something goes wrong in MS-land, IF there is a HUGE outcry then MAYBE they'll respond. It's like in Fight Club: "If A times B times C is less than X, we don't do a recall."
The thing is, your software phones home repeatedly. Not just once upon activation. Can you say "single point of failure"? So your machine could go dark at any time. And are you really going to trust the same bunch of retards who had their service interrupted because they let a domain name expire?
I agree 100%--if you want it to be really good, hire someone. HOWEVER--it IS entirely possible to learn the basics of good design and use them. There is plenty of good-looking stuff you can do which, while it won't win awards, it will be more appealing that totally-unformatted HTML. Go to a bookstore and browse through their design section and find some basic books on design. There are lots and they're easy to find, like The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. (Not the comedian.) You can do plenty of nice work by learning a few basic rules and staying conservative. And copy, copy, copy! Find a color scheme you like, find a layout you like that works with your content, and go with it. If the organization has colors, start with that. (Just hope they picked well in the first place.) Just don't go too far with your copying.:-)
"... Namco Bandai is shuttering between 50 and 60 arcades in Japan and blaming the success of the Wii for the closures... To be fair they also blame the high cost of gasoline as well."
Boo-fucking-hoo. I say we ban AL change, for the good of all existing businesses! Just because I don't have a guarantee that I'll live to see tomorrow or be able to feed myself if I do, does not mean that arcade operators, music and movie companies, highly-paid sports figures, and business executives shouldn't be guaranteed a lifetime of support for their business model.
Sec. 64.1601 Delivery requirements and privacy restrictions. * * * * * (e) Any person or entity that engages in telemarketing, as defined in section 64.1200(f)(7) must transmit caller identification information. ... (3) Tax-exempt nonprofit organizations are not required to comply with this paragraph.
And looking for 64.1200(f)(7) brings me here, which also states...
Sec. 64.1200 Delivery restrictions....
(f) As used in this section: ... (7) The term telemarketing means the initiation of a telephone call or message for the purpose of encouraging the purchase or rental of, or investment in, property, goods, or services, which is transmitted to any person.
So again, since they're not selling anything, they're given a pass. I guess the gov't figured that charities wouldn't be run by pushy assholes that I don't want to hear from.
... can make a search engine. If he doesn't like how Yahoo and Google are treating him, he should just make his own search engine. With blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the search engine...
... the DNC included charities, too. My wife doesn't like confrontations, doesn't like saying no, and can't bring herself to just say "Not interested" and hang up. We've also got a lot going on, what with our two-pound-six-ounce prematurely-born baby and all, so a lot of times the easiest way for her to get rid of them is to just say 'Yes.' In particular, the Florida Highway Patrol calls a lot. Actually, it's not really the FHP--any group that wants to collect money on their behalf can do so, so even if you ask them not to call, another group will call later. And it's just a waste--90% of the money they collect goes to overhead. Very little gets to whatever it's actually being collected for. (According to an actual state trooper we asked.)
Oh, and they usually block their caller ID too... scumsucking turds. We wouldn't answer blocked calls at all except her family and some business contacts are in Europe and those numbers sometimes show up as 'unknown' too. It should be an absolute law that no company, organization, charity, or political party should be allowed to call with a blocked caller ID. It's just as bad as forged FROM: headers in spam.
As for robo-calls, I don't mind those so much... I don't get many, and at least they're easy to hang up on. That doesn't mean they should be allowed, though. NO group should be able to waste your time, no matter what they're selling, be it a product or a point of view.
LOVED RoTT.:-) Except that my roomie's 486 would often lock up in Dog mode--arf arf ARF-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F--frozen image, stuttering sound. That was the first game I played over a network. We didn't have ethernet back then, and not a long enough null modem cable to reach between the rooms, but we did have 2 phone lines in the house so we used modems.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know it was the same thing in the same place. I remembered once seeing the tab in XP but couldn't tell you how to get to it. And the one in Vista might be new or different... you know, being an 'upgrade' and all... IIRC, the one in XP, while handy, didn't make a night-and-day difference, but the GP made it sound like a big deal. XP with the Classic theme on my 2.8 GHz/1GB P4 here at work still has little hitches and lags compared to the 933 MHz PIII with 512 MB and W2K that it replaced. I thought "performance" might actually have a BIG impact on, you know... performance. Like how laptops let you tweak settings between performance and power conservation.
A couple more notes:
- I've never paid that much attention to the "performance" tab because as far as I can tell you can pretty much accomplish the same thing in Desktop -> Appearance -> Effects.
- I've always turned off all the effects anyway, not for performance reasons, but because they're just stupid and ugly. I'd turn off half the crap in OS X if I could, too, but at least Apple's are generally more nicely done. (The big exception being all the new crap in 10.5.) The 'performance boost' I see isn't that a menu draws in 0.01 seconds instead of 0.02 because there's no drop shadow--rather, it's faster because it spends ZERO seconds doing a little fade-in or slide effect. (I remember going into the registry in Win95 and setting MenuShowDelay to 0ms instead of the default of 400ms. And turning off 'menu blinking' in Mac OS 7-9.) So it doesn't quite count. Yeah, it's a little boost, but it's doing less... not especially impressive. You want to see impressive, put BeOS R5 for Intel onto a 300 MHz AMD K6-2. Watch it boot in 15 seconds after POST, then watch it play six movies at the same time without dropping any frames.
Click Start > Right Click 'Computer' > Advanced System Settings > Performance Settings > Adjust For Best Performance
Are you fucking kidding me? That's really in Vista? If it's a checkbox, why isn't it checked by default? If it's a slider, what does the other side say? "Needlessly consume CPU cycles"? "I'm stupid, tell me where to buy new hardware"?
What does this option do that turning off Aero (or going all the way back to 'Windows Classic' theme) doesn't do? Does this work on desktops, or is it a laptop-only thing where the other option is "Optimize for battery life"? Sorry, I don't have a Vista machine here or else I'd check for myself. Really, I want to know. I remember a tab like that in XP but all it did was turn off visual effects.
I agree 1000%. I'm not interested in Vista for any reason (I was reasonably happy with Win95/98, loved 2K; never liked XP, other than the fact that tablets are kind of fun, though not especially useful) but I was curious to see if Vista would finally fix the spyware situation for MS. If my neighbor's computer is any indication, then the answer is no. I don't know what he did (i.e., which sites visited, or what he downloaded) or what he didn't do (i.e., was Defender on? is it on by default?) but I do know for sure that his 3-month-old computer is infested enough to be really annoying/borderline useless.
On the other hand, the absolutely stock, 3-year-old Mac mini with 10.4 that my 15-year-old son uses--the one who can turn a perfectly-good PC into an infested mess in a single unsupervised afternoon--works perfectly.
Now, you can argue all day as to whether Macs don't get viruses because they're inherently better designed or because the market is too small, but the one thing you can't argue with is that there has not been one single self-replicating in-the-wild virus for Mac OS X in the (checks Wikipedia) seven years it has been out. Not one. Ever. Period. *
Bill Gates said that spam would be solved by 2006. If he would have made Windows secure he probably would have been right.
* Same goes for Linux, which I have used to varying degrees since 1998. I just prefer OS X. In fact, the aforementioned neighbor recently bought his shiny new Vista PC because, I guess, the 500 MHz computer with Ubuntu 6 that I gave him a couple years ago was too slow for his tastes, and he had some money from his new job burning a hole in his pocket.
This stuff will be illegal as soon as it is available because it will kill the revenue stream of too many rich people.
For those who haven't read it, I highly recommend this short story by Cory Doctorow.
I didn't have time to RTFA...
you mean WTFA.
Duh. Why don't they just make crime illegal?
Or, to put it another way...
But how much is enough to be useful, versus "just enough to be dangerous"? I can imagine a programmer knowing a bit of assembly and therefore spending too much time trying to (over-)optimize some particular thing, when a) it's already optimized as much as it can be, or b) putting effort into another part would yield much greater returns. You need look no further than the daily wtf for proof.
As for the article itself, I think the main point is correct--not that no one anywhere needs to know these things, but that fewer and fewer people need to know them, and that lots of us who've been around a while know lots of stuff that will never again be useful. I'm a huge believer that knowing history is a good thing and it gives you useful perspective and good general knowledge but these things just won't be day-to-day useful the way they once were. I am by no means the oldest guy in the room but I was working with computers in the mid-90s and I do remember fiddling with the dipswitches on the back of a 14.4 modem, then working out the proper AT commands, and moving IRQ jumpers on an ISA sound card, futzing with SCSI IDs and terminators on Mac equipment, etc etc etc. Many, many things that I'll never, ever, ever have to do again.
We've got White Guy, Asian Guy, white power-suit chick, asian chick, another white guy, a white guy in a wheelchair, and I'm not sure what Visual Studio Guy is supposed to be. But no black one! C'mon, even South Park knows that much. And right in the middle of Black History Month, too! I'm so mentally distraught. I'm going to sue them for twenty hojillion dollars.
However, I love that webcast guy giving the thumbs-up. I don't know what it is about that little guy, but I think they should make him the boss of the whole crew.
He wrote a story. He submitted it. Someone approved it. End of mystery.
:-)
PS: I found this interesting. The third of it I skimmed, anyway.
So why in the name of FUCK would a Sith ever take on an apprentice?! Why would they even care about carrying on the Sith traditions? Honestly, that's probably the dumbest thing Lucas put in the nuTrilogy and I'm including midichlorians, the Anakin/Padme romance, and Jar-Jar Binks.
:-) )
I've recently started reading SW-based novels and have been impressed with how good they are. The first one I read was Allegiance by Timothy Zahn (takes place just after Episode 4) which I picked up last Fall because of the stormtroopers on the cover. It was pretty good.
Next I read the first Darth Bane book, Path of Destruction (Drew Karpyshyn, 1003BBY-1000BBY*) which has the answer to your question in wonderful detail--both how it was when there were many, and why the 'rule of two' was created. I just finished the sequel, Darth Bane: Rule of Two (also by Drew Karpyshyn, 1000BBY-990BBY) which was just published last Fall and was also very good.
I also read Death Star (by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry; takes place just before/through Episode 4) which had surprising depth and lots of clever bits squeezed in. (Ever wonder why the guy says "Stand by" twice when the Death Star is about to fire for the last time?) Each of these books was much more enjoyable than any of the prequel movies.
I had read about SW novels for ages on Slashdot before finally picking one up, and I'm only sorry that I waited so long. Anyone who loved the old Star Wars mythos and was disappointed by the new movies should do the same. (Pick one up, that is--not wait a long time.
* for those who don't know, 'BBY' and 'ABY' are similar to B.C./A.D. in the real calendar. BBY = Before the Battle of Yavin; i.e., before the original Star Wars movie. ABY = After the Battle of Yavin. So the Darth Bane stuff happens about 1,000 years before the original Star Wars took place.
Slashdot itself costs too much to run without being ad-supported. Like most magazines and newspapers, it makes a tiny fraction of its income from subscribers; the bulk of its revenue comes from ads. Slashdot would not be what it is today without ads. I was online in the 90s, back when it was "every nerd for himself." Yeah, it was nice then, like a quaint little town, but there is orders of magnatude more information, and better information, now, and a large part of that is because there is real money to be made and that it is not all just hobby-level (or even obsession-level) sites.
I'm not saying advertising is great--I hate obtrusive ads as much as the next guy. But the fact is, advertising funds make more things possible.
Wouldn't it be better if we cut out the middle men, and all the disfigurement of our world that they generate, and just paid directly for those services that are currently ad-supported? The net cost to us would be unchanged (indeed reduced even, since the advertising business takes a cut) and the world would be prettier.
I totally agree. But it'll never happen, because people are greedy. Imagine we lived in that world, and we both owned bakeries. We're both doing just fine--we don't make a lot of money, but that's OK because everything is reeeeally cheap because no one wastes money on advertising. I've got a great standard of living... but I want more. I realize that if I give away one muffin for every 12 purchased, that will generate good word-of-mouth and I'll get more business overall, more than making up for the small loss I get from giving away that extra muffin. Then I realize, rather than waiting for word of mouth, I can put up a sign in my window. And then I think hey, the guy who sells coffee across the street always buys his morning muffin from me, so maybe he'll let me put up a sign in his window if I give him free muffins--again, it'll only take a couple extra customers to make up the loss of that one muffin. It works, things are going great for me, but people only need so many muffins, and the business I gain is a loss for you. So you decide to put up an ad of your own. And thus, the cycle starts...
It's an oversimplification to say people are just greedy. The bigger view is that people can get used to anything. This explains a wide range of behavior. Why do so many celebrities overdose? Because it's possible to just get used to having a ton of money and as many women as you want. (At the other end of the spectrum, how can people survive in POW camps?) Whenever you get used to something, you start wanting things to be better.
Someone sending you adverts for cheap Viagra is not evil.
OK, fine, so in the grand scheme of things, "evil" is a bit dramatic, but it's definitely more than a little bad when they steal very real resources (ever run a mail server?) and hide their identities and don't give you a reasonable way NOT to see their messages.
I'll see your <perspective> and raise you a <relative>. In this forum, sending spam is evil.
>> NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads,
.sig, I gather you feel pretty strongly about this, so I don't expect to change your mind with this post. True, advertising is more or less a zero-sum-game and an arms race. On the other hand, it is part of what fuels capitalism and, whatever you think of the consumer culture, you can't deny that "greed is good" capitalism has played a big part in giving us the high standard of living we enjoy today. It's led to some problems, too, but overall, I think we've come out ahead because of it. Humans will always be driven largely by self-interest; you may as well design a system that takes advantage of that.
> This meme must die. Advertising pays for nothing.
Do you like Slashdot as it exists today? It would not be here in its present form without advertising. Period.
Judging by your post and your
General mass marketing is different from spam in two important ways: it costs the advertisers money, and thus it has some natural limiting built in, and it is subject to some regulation. Spammers, on the other hand, steal resources (CPU time from pwn3d Windows boxes, bandwidth from everyone) and hide behind forged headers. I don't mind watching a couple Viagra ads while watching Desperate Housewives. (I don't mind them, but I don't like them either, so I FF over them... but enough of the population doesn't mind so the decades-old model of advertising-supported broadcast television still works, at least for the moment.) However, I do mind logging into my personal email account, via a network connection that I pay for, and spending my time deleting v!agr@ messages. I'm not going to buy it, and I'm certainly not going to buy it 200 times a day, every day. I don't have the same problem with the handful of print ads that arrive in my physical mail box every day. The people who pay to send me things that go straight into my recycle bin can't afford to send me hundreds of messages per day. Scum-of-the-Earth working with stolen (free) resources, can. That's what separates the two.
As a matter of fact, I was on the Internet before 1996. You're right, it was "just fine" then. But you know what? It's a whole lot better now. And advertising pays for a lot of this.
NOOOOOOO!!!! We NEED these people! The WWW is supported by ads, so as long as these people do all the clicking, no one will mind if the rest of use use AdBlock, custom /etc/hosts files, etc.
Now, killing all the people who buy from spammers, I still support, though I'd rather kill the spammers themselves. Spammers are truly evil; the people who buy from them are merely stupid.
And this absolutely baffles me. Isn't the whole point of having different layers in the TCP/IP stack to make it not matter to an application how the network is physically configured? Why should Time Machine even KNOW, let alone CARE, how I'm connected? If TM can deal with an ethernet cable accidentally being unplugged or a server momentarily being unavailable for some reason, it ought to be able to deal with any glitches that WiFi brings to the table. Apple: I DON'T CARE if the first backup takes a long time. I DON'T CARE if subsequent backups sometimes take a while. (Hint: don't back up ~/Library/Caches/.) I don't care if increased network activity lowers my battery life while I'm sitting on the couch. (See above hint again.) I'm willing to accept all these shortcomings, just let me back up without plugging in! (And without having to buy a Time Capsule. I'd prefer to use my Mac Pro with File Sharing turned on, thankyouverymuch.)
Yeah, the same way the first words out of my kid's mouth are "I'm sorry"... AFTER he gets caught. Does anyone really expect us to belive that no one with a clue could have seen this coming? This is just business as usual at MS: they'll do whatever we want, who cares if there's any benefit at all for the user. So, there's no benefit, and in fact it does more harm than good? Eh, whatever. Whenever something goes wrong in MS-land, IF there is a HUGE outcry then MAYBE they'll respond. It's like in Fight Club: "If A times B times C is less than X, we don't do a recall."
The thing is, your software phones home repeatedly. Not just once upon activation. Can you say "single point of failure"? So your machine could go dark at any time. And are you really going to trust the same bunch of retards who had their service interrupted because they let a domain name expire?
I agree 100%--if you want it to be really good, hire someone. HOWEVER--it IS entirely possible to learn the basics of good design and use them. There is plenty of good-looking stuff you can do which, while it won't win awards, it will be more appealing that totally-unformatted HTML. Go to a bookstore and browse through their design section and find some basic books on design. There are lots and they're easy to find, like The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams. (Not the comedian.) You can do plenty of nice work by learning a few basic rules and staying conservative. And copy, copy, copy! Find a color scheme you like, find a layout you like that works with your content, and go with it. If the organization has colors, start with that. (Just hope they picked well in the first place.) Just don't go too far with your copying. :-)
"... Namco Bandai is shuttering between 50 and 60 arcades in Japan and blaming the success of the Wii for the closures... To be fair they also blame the high cost of gasoline as well."
Boo-fucking-hoo. I say we ban AL change, for the good of all existing businesses! Just because I don't have a guarantee that I'll live to see tomorrow or be able to feed myself if I do, does not mean that arcade operators, music and movie companies, highly-paid sports figures, and business executives shouldn't be guaranteed a lifetime of support for their business model.
Won't somebody think of the businesses?!?
Looking at this, it says...And looking for 64.1200(f)(7) brings me here, which also states...So again, since they're not selling anything, they're given a pass. I guess the gov't figured that charities wouldn't be run by pushy assholes that I don't want to hear from.
... can make a search engine. If he doesn't like how Yahoo and Google are treating him, he should just make his own search engine. With blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget the search engine...
... the DNC included charities, too. My wife doesn't like confrontations, doesn't like saying no, and can't bring herself to just say "Not interested" and hang up. We've also got a lot going on, what with our two-pound-six-ounce prematurely-born baby and all, so a lot of times the easiest way for her to get rid of them is to just say 'Yes.' In particular, the Florida Highway Patrol calls a lot. Actually, it's not really the FHP--any group that wants to collect money on their behalf can do so, so even if you ask them not to call, another group will call later. And it's just a waste--90% of the money they collect goes to overhead. Very little gets to whatever it's actually being collected for. (According to an actual state trooper we asked.)
Oh, and they usually block their caller ID too... scumsucking turds. We wouldn't answer blocked calls at all except her family and some business contacts are in Europe and those numbers sometimes show up as 'unknown' too. It should be an absolute law that no company, organization, charity, or political party should be allowed to call with a blocked caller ID. It's just as bad as forged FROM: headers in spam.
As for robo-calls, I don't mind those so much... I don't get many, and at least they're easy to hang up on. That doesn't mean they should be allowed, though. NO group should be able to waste your time, no matter what they're selling, be it a product or a point of view.
LOVED RoTT. :-) Except that my roomie's 486 would often lock up in Dog mode--arf arf ARF-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F--frozen image, stuttering sound. That was the first game I played over a network. We didn't have ethernet back then, and not a long enough null modem cable to reach between the rooms, but we did have 2 phone lines in the house so we used modems. :-)