You're the second jackass to accuse me of imitating the idiot pres, and I'd be insulted if I took you at all seriously.
One sign of diminished intelligence is a fondness for quoting fallacy definitions without really understanding them. Though I can't blame you in this case. "Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision)" is so vague as to be meaningless. "Captain, slow down! There are icebergs ahead!" "Oh, stop arguing from adverse consequences!"
You make a good point. (Which is unfair of you, since you're on my foes list!) It would make sense for the Wayback machine to not enforce robots.txt retroactively when the web site has obviously changed hands. Problem is, that's something you can't automate — and checking millions of web sites by hand is just not doable!
Actually, I don't think most people have the vaguest notion what a planet is. Ever notice that when people who aren't SF geeks talk about SF, they use the words "interplanetary" and "intergalactic" interchangably?
To be honest, the whole argument seems quite ridiculous to me. If the definition if a planet is so waffley that astronomers can't agree on it, then astronomers shouldn't be using the word for anything important in the first place.
If your only consideration is linguistic precision, then you're right. I often resort to this policy in my work as a technical writer. But in ordinary conversation, you can't tell people to stop using words that they've used all their lives, at least not without a better excuse than "it's too waffley". If astronomers look silly arguing over the definition of such a common word, imagine how they'd look if they told everybody to stop using the word altogether!
Because TNOs collectively are a lot different from the planets. They're smaller, and their orbits are much more erratic. It's very likely that their origin is very different from the planets.
Personally, I don't care what you call a planet. I'm just trying to explain astronomer's attempts to come up with a coherent definition. The fact is, we're probably going to end up with "planet" meaning different things to different people. It's sort of like the word "battleship". Most people use the word to refer to any armed vessel. This drives naval wonks crazy, because to them a battleship is a specific kind of large armored warship that was made obsolete by the invention of the airplane.
What more information do we need about Pluto? There's lots to learn, but nothing that bears on the argument at hand.
You seem to think that "planet" is a word astronomer's agree on, and we just don't know enough about Pluto to say whether it is one. It's the other way around.
Despite the headlines, astronomers are not arguing over whether Pluto's a planet. They're arguing over the right way to define "planet". Pluto's relevent only because lots of people are used to thinking of Pluto as a planet, and don't want a definition that leaves Pluto out. But that's hard to do. There are millions of trans-Neptunian objects. If Pluto is a planet, than so are many of them.
I heard an interview with an astronmer who described our solar system as it would be seen by an alien arriving from outside. The first thing the alien would notice is the huge cloud of trans-Neptunian objects. Then much further in he'd see 8 planets. Or maybe he'd view them as 4 rocky worlds and 4 gaseous worlds. But in any case he'd differentiate all 8, which orbit pretty much in a single plane, from the TNOs, which form a sort of donut-shaped cloud. If he noticed Pluto at all, he'd definitely classify it with the TNOs.
Then suppose he met us, and we tried to tell him that Pluto isn't a TNO, it's a planet, just because it was discovered before the TNOs. He'd think we were being pretty arbitrary — and he'd be right.
For this very reason one of the first setup steps I always do on a new machine is to turn off the startup sign.
I do it because having some corny sound play every time I reboot is just too much to bear.
What really bugs me is that Scoble says he can "see both sides" of the issue. What kind of workplace culture does Microsoft have, where they'd even consider imposing such an obnoxious feature?
This isn't going to happen, of course. The "you have got to be kidding" emails must be already pouring in. But the fact that this is an issue says nasty things about the Redmond mentality.
Who said anything about putting publically available information online? It might, for example, be private information about a building that makes it easier to blow it up. "Our new death star has a state of the art venting port, located for easy access at..."
It's funny that you accuse me of bad faith, since you're lumping me in with the Bush administration's crazy attempts to control information. I didn't say anything about censorship. I simply pointed out that a web site can have legitimate reasons for wanting to withdraw information that was previously on its site.
Another example: someone I know wrote an essay that he thought only people in his class would ever see. It contained one or two mildly embaressing disclosures, not terribly personal, but not something you'd want a complete stranger to know about you. Some idiot put it up on the school web site without his permission.
Here's a nasty possibility. Suppose somebody unintentionally publishes information useful to terrorists. DHS drops by and points out the error, and the information is withdrawn. Does Wayback Machine have a right to keep the information online?
In fact, Wayback Machine has never asserted their right to keep anything online. As the article points out, they'll remove stuff that's noncompliant with the current robots.txt, even though it was compliant at the time it was spidered. This lawsuit wasn't about their right keep stuff online. It was just somebody accusing them of being negligent about enforcing their own policies.
I'm not convinced other typically used backup-media are significantly more reliable than say a usb-connected external harddisc.
Get real. The more complicated something is, the more points of failure it has. Recordable optical disks don't have head crashes. Of course, they will degrade eventually (longer if you buy archive quality), but that's something you can plan for. And they can stored in a fireproof box and/or offsite. A special hard disk, you have to leave plugged into your computer, where it's subject to pretty much the same hazards as your computer.
The thing is, even though the harddisc in your computer, and the one in the usb-enclosure are both certainly going to fail, odds are good that they don't fail at precisely the same moment. Aslong as they don't fail at the same time, it does not *matter* that they fail.
The presupposes that simple disk failure is your only enemy. Nowadays, disks rarely fail that way. (If that weren't true, you wouldn't even be considering a hard disk as a backup medium!) It's more likely to be damaged by external forces: fire, flood, malicious or buggy software. A lightening strike that fries all your hardware, including your UPS. A burglar who just grabs everything that looks like it's worth selling.
Dude, your salesperson's loyalty to your product is blinding you to its faults. Having a "one button" solution does not make up for all the problems you are refusing to address. It's not even relevent. I can offer a solution that even easier and cheaper, and which has many satisified customers. I refer, of course, to not backing up at all.
So, Radio Shack would rather have people who can politely tell you they have no idea what you're talking about and can't help you at all, vs. someone who knows what you're talking about, and has suggestions to solve the problem that you might not even thought of but doesn't say 'sir', slouches, and doesn't look you firmly in the eye?
Well, that wouldn't be so bad if they knew they didn't know what they're about.
when they try, the only response on my part should be 'Well, we've determined that you cannot, in fact, help me, because you have much less knowledge about this than I do, despite you working in a damn store selling the things'.
Hey, get real — people working in retail mostly don't know that much about technology. If they did, they wouldn't be working in retail. That's OK when the salesperson is humble enough to acknowledge their own ignorance and let you help them help you. Alas, RS employees never do that. I suspect their employee handbook expressly forbids saying "I don't know."
Spare us the marketspeak. That's not backup, that's just copying files to an external hard drive. Hard drives fail. That's why you do backup in the first place. And many disasters that would take out your main hard will take out any hardware connected to your computer.
A serious backup solution means backing up to offline media, which is less fragile, and can be stored separately from your system — offsite if you care enough about your data.
I've seen a lot of home backup solutions come and go. None of them seem to stay on the market very long. I think the problem is economic. Home users are averse to spending a lot of money, so they won't buy solutions that require the expensive tape drives that are used in data centers. (There used to be a lot of cheap tape drives for PCs. They went away when people realized how unreliable they were.) That leaves a software solution that makes the user do a lot of work keeping track of optical disks. Technically feasible, but simple human laziness makes it a small market, so there's no chance of making a buck designing such a system.
...the human eye is a much less sophisticated device than the eyes of other creatures such as birds, turtles and even many fish species who see in many more "channels" than we do with greater color discrimination (and they can often fix their retinas when damaged unlike us who suffer when AMD or retinal degenerative diseases hit us).
Something to mention the next time some bozo points to the human eye as proof that we were "designed".
And if you take the hot rod analogy a little further, you find guys who like to think of themselves as hot rodders (or techies) but really aren't. So they by a car (or a computer) that looks vaguely like a souped-up car (or computer), but is actually just a stock car (or white box) with overpriced decorations.
Yeah, really. People get away with chargebacks that are outright fraud, never mind a customer with a long laundry list of legitimate complaints.
Restocking fees are for "I decided I didn't want it" situations, not defective merchandise that wasn't what you ordered. Of course, the customer service drone may try to tell you otherwise...
Spending thousands of dollars to buy a cutout of highly respected founders of Silicon Valley, then to bedeck them in garish Sun paraphanalia is juvenile, tacky...
Which pretty much describes everything Schwartz does.
...and demonstrative of an utterly deranged public relations department.
What makes you think Schwartz even talked to his PR people? I'm sure if he had, they would have tried to talk him out of it.
Here's an irony: recently, Schwartz sent an email to all employees, boasting that Sun doesn't "waste money" on art with which to decorate its corridors. Instead, it puts up these tacky posters where Sun employees talk about how great a place the company is to work. Just to thing to convince employees that the company isn't circling the drain!
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You're the second jackass to accuse me of imitating the idiot pres, and I'd be insulted if I took you at all seriously.
One sign of diminished intelligence is a fondness for quoting fallacy definitions without really understanding them. Though I can't blame you in this case. "Argument from adverse consequences (putting pressure on the decision maker by pointing out dire consequences of an "unfavorable" decision)" is so vague as to be meaningless. "Captain, slow down! There are icebergs ahead!" "Oh, stop arguing from adverse consequences!"
You make a good point. (Which is unfair of you, since you're on my foes list!) It would make sense for the Wayback machine to not enforce robots.txt retroactively when the web site has obviously changed hands. Problem is, that's something you can't automate — and checking millions of web sites by hand is just not doable!
Actually, I don't think most people have the vaguest notion what a planet is. Ever notice that when people who aren't SF geeks talk about SF, they use the words "interplanetary" and "intergalactic" interchangably?
"Insight" is probably the wrong word. I'm just good at explaining stuff. Speaking of which, please buy my book.
If your only consideration is linguistic precision, then you're right. I often resort to this policy in my work as a technical writer. But in ordinary conversation, you can't tell people to stop using words that they've used all their lives, at least not without a better excuse than "it's too waffley". If astronomers look silly arguing over the definition of such a common word, imagine how they'd look if they told everybody to stop using the word altogether!
Because TNOs collectively are a lot different from the planets. They're smaller, and their orbits are much more erratic. It's very likely that their origin is very different from the planets.
Personally, I don't care what you call a planet. I'm just trying to explain astronomer's attempts to come up with a coherent definition. The fact is, we're probably going to end up with "planet" meaning different things to different people. It's sort of like the word "battleship". Most people use the word to refer to any armed vessel. This drives naval wonks crazy, because to them a battleship is a specific kind of large armored warship that was made obsolete by the invention of the airplane.
What more information do we need about Pluto? There's lots to learn, but nothing that bears on the argument at hand.
You seem to think that "planet" is a word astronomer's agree on, and we just don't know enough about Pluto to say whether it is one. It's the other way around.
Despite the headlines, astronomers are not arguing over whether Pluto's a planet. They're arguing over the right way to define "planet". Pluto's relevent only because lots of people are used to thinking of Pluto as a planet, and don't want a definition that leaves Pluto out. But that's hard to do. There are millions of trans-Neptunian objects. If Pluto is a planet, than so are many of them.
I heard an interview with an astronmer who described our solar system as it would be seen by an alien arriving from outside. The first thing the alien would notice is the huge cloud of trans-Neptunian objects. Then much further in he'd see 8 planets. Or maybe he'd view them as 4 rocky worlds and 4 gaseous worlds. But in any case he'd differentiate all 8, which orbit pretty much in a single plane, from the TNOs, which form a sort of donut-shaped cloud. If he noticed Pluto at all, he'd definitely classify it with the TNOs.
Then suppose he met us, and we tried to tell him that Pluto isn't a TNO, it's a planet, just because it was discovered before the TNOs. He'd think we were being pretty arbitrary — and he'd be right.
I do it because having some corny sound play every time I reboot is just too much to bear.
What really bugs me is that Scoble says he can "see both sides" of the issue. What kind of workplace culture does Microsoft have, where they'd even consider imposing such an obnoxious feature?
This isn't going to happen, of course. The "you have got to be kidding" emails must be already pouring in. But the fact that this is an issue says nasty things about the Redmond mentality.
Who said anything about putting publically available information online? It might, for example, be private information about a building that makes it easier to blow it up. "Our new death star has a state of the art venting port, located for easy access at ..."
It's funny that you accuse me of bad faith, since you're lumping me in with the Bush administration's crazy attempts to control information. I didn't say anything about censorship. I simply pointed out that a web site can have legitimate reasons for wanting to withdraw information that was previously on its site.
Why don't you ask them?
Another example: someone I know wrote an essay that he thought only people in his class would ever see. It contained one or two mildly embaressing disclosures, not terribly personal, but not something you'd want a complete stranger to know about you. Some idiot put it up on the school web site without his permission.
Here's a nasty possibility. Suppose somebody unintentionally publishes information useful to terrorists. DHS drops by and points out the error, and the information is withdrawn. Does Wayback Machine have a right to keep the information online?
In fact, Wayback Machine has never asserted their right to keep anything online. As the article points out, they'll remove stuff that's noncompliant with the current robots.txt, even though it was compliant at the time it was spidered. This lawsuit wasn't about their right keep stuff online. It was just somebody accusing them of being negligent about enforcing their own policies.
That joke is getting really old!
You're right, you don't need to back up all your data every week. That's why God invented incremental backups. All backup software has this feature.
Dude, your salesperson's loyalty to your product is blinding you to its faults. Having a "one button" solution does not make up for all the problems you are refusing to address. It's not even relevent. I can offer a solution that even easier and cheaper, and which has many satisified customers. I refer, of course, to not backing up at all.
If somebody knew what they were talking about, would they be working at Radio Shack?
Spare us the marketspeak. That's not backup, that's just copying files to an external hard drive. Hard drives fail. That's why you do backup in the first place. And many disasters that would take out your main hard will take out any hardware connected to your computer.
A serious backup solution means backing up to offline media, which is less fragile, and can be stored separately from your system — offsite if you care enough about your data.
I've seen a lot of home backup solutions come and go. None of them seem to stay on the market very long. I think the problem is economic. Home users are averse to spending a lot of money, so they won't buy solutions that require the expensive tape drives that are used in data centers. (There used to be a lot of cheap tape drives for PCs. They went away when people realized how unreliable they were.) That leaves a software solution that makes the user do a lot of work keeping track of optical disks. Technically feasible, but simple human laziness makes it a small market, so there's no chance of making a buck designing such a system.
And if you take the hot rod analogy a little further, you find guys who like to think of themselves as hot rodders (or techies) but really aren't. So they by a car (or a computer) that looks vaguely like a souped-up car (or computer), but is actually just a stock car (or white box) with overpriced decorations.
Yeah, really. People get away with chargebacks that are outright fraud, never mind a customer with a long laundry list of legitimate complaints.
Restocking fees are for "I decided I didn't want it" situations, not defective merchandise that wasn't what you ordered. Of course, the customer service drone may try to tell you otherwise...
What makes you think Schwartz even talked to his PR people? I'm sure if he had, they would have tried to talk him out of it.
Here's an irony: recently, Schwartz sent an email to all employees, boasting that Sun doesn't "waste money" on art with which to decorate its corridors. Instead, it puts up these tacky posters where Sun employees talk about how great a place the company is to work. Just to thing to convince employees that the company isn't circling the drain!
I give Scwartz a year, tops.
My porn collection wouldn't possibly fit on a thumb drive. I use a USB-powered hard disk. Quite handy for keeping embaressing files offline.
I said "proof" not "suspicious coincidence".
So how do you prove that somebody who made a 5% profit turning around a penny stock is the same guy who sent out the "we have a runner!" spam?