What I utterly fail to understand is why NASA thinks they can get away with scrapping the only computer on the planet that can read the tapes, without spending a few days to read the tapes off first?????
Have you ever worked in an organization bigger than a baseball team? Obviously not, or you'd know that people make such mistakes all the time. Some administrator asks, "Why are we spending all that money housing and maintaining obsolete tape drives? Are we using them?" Whoever answered "No" obviously didn't do their homework well enough, but they didn't screw up as badly as you suggest. Dead media turns up all the time.
Jeez, talk about a kneejerk response. If the guy had made the usual arrogant comment about the U.S. saving Britain, I could sort of understand your response. But he just said "defended Britain". Maybe he should have said, "helped defend Britain", but sloppy self-expression doesn't merit the kind of flamebroil you just offered.
Also, the events you describe are important, but not the last word on the fate of the UK. Winning the Battle of Britain didn't prevent Operation Sealion, it just postponed it for a while. Der Fuhrer would have gotten back to Britain eventually if he hadn't been defeated a few years later. (Or maybe the the elements in Britain who thought this wasn't their war might have eventually prevailed -- as they very nearly did in 1939. Suppose Lord Halifax hadn't refused the PMship...) Hitler's defeat couldn't have happened if the U.S. had not only taken on a lot of the fighting, but provided most of the material resources necessary for victory. Churchill acknowledged this when he heard that the U.S. had entered the war, and said, "So, we're going to win after all."
My first thought was that your IP block must be on a blacklist. But it's not, at least not one that I know about. Very strange.
I used to work the help desk at a hosting company, and the most frustrating part of my job was helping people whose email was being unfairly classified as spam. I was supposed to hand off those cases to the abuse desk, but that department seemed better at antagonizing people than resolving the issue. So a couple times I tried to sort out the issue on my own. (Which probably helped get me fired.) What I discovered was that network admins are a law onto themselves, and often block email for all sorts of strange reasons. The most common reason is that they place too much faith in blacklists, but it's also pretty common for them to look at traffic patterns and tell themselves: "That block is hosting a lot of spammers!" It doesn't occur to them that there are legitimate newsletter and mailing list services that have good ant-spam policies, but that send out as much email as any spammer.
Here's your basic problem: Yahoo and Hotmail have no obligation to classify your email fairly, or even accept it at all. Nor are they required to document how they decide what's spam and what isn't. (And a big incentive not to: such documentation would be very useful to spammers!) But one thing they do is respond to complaints.
So fire off some email to abuse@hotmail.com and abuse@yahoo.com and ask them what's going on. I can't guarantee that they'll give you useful help, but they might -- provided you avoid antagonizing them. A confrontational attitude is not helpful in dealing with support people. They take a lot of shit for policies they don't determine, and won't take any more than they have to.
You could also talk to the support people at the ISP that leases you that IP number. The problem probably has nothing to do with them, but you never know. Besides, you might end up talking to somebody who's smart enough to figure this out, or who has seen this problem before.
I promised myself I'd ignore the weekly Firefox micro-milestone story, but I can't let this one go by. 75 million sounds like a real big number. But compare it to the total number of Internet users on the planet, which is probably something like 1 billion. So even if every download represents a user, Firfox is still around 7.5 percent. Where, despite all the gee-whiz stories, it's been hovering for about a year now.
Let me anticipate the usual flames: everybody who accesses your Babylon 5 fan site uses Firefox. Firefox is a much better browser. Anybody who cares about security should switch. We'll never have standards compliance as long as Microsoft is in the driver's seat.
All true. But face it, the big switch isn't happening. Time to figure out why and do something about it, and stop living in denial.
Good point. Aside from the flakiness issues you describe, GMail is not something you can recommend to the non-geek. They're totally rethinking the email concept with this project. Not a bad thing to do, but guaranteed to confuse a lot of people.
Fortunately, there are a lot of free email providers out there. Or if you don't like having ads in your messages, you can sign up for a paid account that costs $20 a year or thereabouts. Which is a lot cheaper than keeping your AOL account open just to get email. Something a lot of people do!
Nowadays, I use a mailbox on my web hosting provider. But I used to use MailSnare, which has good IMAP support.
Whether or not Microsoft wants Windows XP or Windows Vista to run on Intel-based Macs, it will.Maybe on a few desktops belonging to sufficiently clever hackers. But there will be no broad, supportable deployment of such hacks -- Microsoft and Apple lawyers will see to that.
Not to mention the economic absurdity of running Windows on a Mac. Even with cheaper Intel chipsets, a Mac is just not a commodity system.
Why not? Because it "might break"? All hardware breaks. If you can't afford downtime, you just build enough redundancy into your system to allow for for it. You can do that with a little expensive hardware or a lot of cheap hardware. Either way, you allow for Murphy's Law -- you don't waste a lot of money trying to repeal it.
In the original version of 2001, they had Saturn instead of Jupiter as the source of the Big Mystery. Clarke thought it was an "interesting coincidence" that Saturn's rings supposedly formed at about the same time the first humans evolved. (Can't verify whether that's accurate, and am dubious as to the meaning of "coincidence" at that time scale.) The extra difficulty of doing SFX with the rings was just a little bit too much, and they changed it to Jupiter. If they'd stuck with Saturn, imagine the silly comments that this discussion would have!
Please. Spam pisses me off too, but on the scale of illegal activities, it just doesn't rate. There are very few places where a spammer runs the risk of getting beaten to death. Russia is one of them, because it's practically ruled by the mob. But when you have a mobocracy, it isn't what you do, it's who you do it to. There are places in the U.S. where it's worth your life to steal a bicycle -- if it's the wrong bicycle.
Space is a complete vaccuum, just like the kind in thermos bottles, and it's a VERY good thermal insulant. If your arm is at 37C, and you stick it in the best insulant possible, it will remain at 37C.
Vacuum prevents heat from being conducted away. It doesn't prevent heat from being radiated away. (And a good thing too, if you consider the Sun an important heat source.) That's why thermoses have silver insides. I don't remember enough physics to calculate how much heat a bare arm radiates, but it's certainly not zero.
Your overall picture is correct, according to authorities like this. But your physics is too simplistic.
Every time you write about some obscure bit of technology, you need to address the needs of people who have never heard of it. Which means asking yourself "What is it?" and answering yourself with a simple one-sentence description like that one. Alas, that takes more mental effort than most Slashdot submitters can spare.
I've tried Konfabulator. Lost interest when I realized it was for people who like to have messy desktops with lots of little apps open. (And transparent windows so you can see them all!) Which pretty much describes the standard MacOS desktop, and the working style of a lot of Windows and Linux geeks. But that only works if you have a high capacity for divided attention. Most people don't.
You seemed to be talking about people who can't run W2k. I guess you were talking about people who can't be bothered to upgrade. But does it matter? Both groups of people obviously lack motivation to experiment with new software. Yeah, people try to sell them software anyway. Just proves that some advertisers don't know their market.
Any brand new PC can run Windows XP, to say nothing of W2K. If somebody is still running an old computer that can't run W2K, I think it's a safe bet they're not interested in the latest/greatest technology.
But that's not really typical. More typical is the office I work in part time. (And over which I have zero IT input, so don't start.) Almost all their systems are these fancy Fujitisu all-in-one boxes that look like they bought them 5 years ago. All of them have little plaques that say that they're certified to run Windows 98 and Windows 2000. (From the specs, they could probably run XP, though I'd want a memory upgrade first.) Guess which one they're running? Right, Windows 98.
I haven't suggested that they upgrade because I know they'll say something I hear a lot: "What's wrong with what we have? It does what we need it to do." People like that are not good candidates for the latest/greatest web browsers. And people like that are most people.
Technogeeks need to remember that other people don't worship technology the way they do.
And what are the "must have" features of the latest releases of IE or Firefox? I don't mean the ones that appeal to geeks, I mean the ones that would appeal to ordinary people who see nothing wrong with running 8-year-old software.
You're asking an ethical question. Which means you're unlikely to get any useful answer from Slashdotters, who tend to have "I know what I know" attitudes on subjects like this. You'd probably get better advice with the obvious Google search. You could even hire a professional ethicist.
But here's one practical suggestion: ask the people you've offended. Since your company has made a bad reputation for itself, there must be lots of people out there who've added them to blacklists or blocked their email from networks. If you can get in touch with some of these people you can ask them "What kind of anti-spam policy would cause you to accept email from us?" I'm not sure you'll get any useful answers, but at least you'll help convince people that your company is serious about mending its ways.
Not a generalization, sweeping or otherwise. Just a simple, logical observation about human psychology. If somebody is happy with an old OS, why wouldn't they be happy with an old browser?
Hey, I'm not saying that they need to become IBM. But avoiding having too much structure doesn't mean they have to have too little. And probably they're beginning to realize this, what with all the projects that are still in beta mode years after being released!
As you point out, they're not in a bad place now: they're making money hand over fist, and everybody (including me) is impressed with their work. They could continue on this way indefinitely and still be in better shape than 99.9% of all high tech companies. That doesn't mean I can't wish they'd buckle down and do the boring part of the job that means taking their products out of beta mode. As I said before, I admire them, but I wish they'd grow up a little.
But anyway, to the point, I personally like the "beta" designation because it means they *are* actively working on it and improving it.
No, it means that they acknowledge that the product needs work. Which isn't the same as actually getting the work done.
In any software project, developers are always tempted to work on snazzy new features: it's more fun and much more satisfying to implement a cool new feature than to implement a boring bug fix or basic feature tweak. One job of project management is to see to that developers do the boring but important work ahead of the fun but secondary work. When you see developers doing this, it's a sure sign that project managers aren't doing their job. Sometimes this means that the PMs aren't competent, but more often (especially at a company like Google), it means that they don't have they clout they need to enforce sane priorities.
And I see this in Google Maps. Yes, it's the most advanced mapping application on the web. Yes, it's got impressive AJAX UI features. Yes it has three kinds of displays, including a fancy satellite/map overay.
But it still lacks basic features that every other online mapping app has. Like the ability to store often-used addresses. Or, like I said before, the ability to disambiguate addresses properly.
A lot of people don't seem to get that, so I'll spell it out. The example I gave before was "675 S Sixth, 95112" That's not a complete address, but it's enough for Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, and MSN Maps. But feed it to Google Maps, and you get "Did you mean: 675 S 6th St, San Jose, CA 95112 or
675 N 6th St, San Jose, CA 95112". Well of course I don't mean "N 6th" I said "S"! The parser seems to get hung up over that fact that I left out "St." Which shouldn't matter, since Sixth St. is the only Sixth anything on the San Jose map.
"Yeah, big deal, that's a puny little bug". That's precisely my point. It's a puny little boring bug. And nobody seems to be working on it, because they're too busy dreaming up cool variations on the AJAX theme. Such negligence of boring little reliablity features is not a good sign! It means there's no overall coordination of the project, and it's likely to remain in Beta forever.
I used to think that Google was using "beta" as a marketing term. But after a while it became obvious that it's their excuse for not having any real plan for products like Maps and GMail. They just pile on feature after feature. It is impressive that they can do this and still keep good control over their bugs. But the overall product is still something of a mess.
I guess it's a positive thing that they're honest enough to acknowledge that mess by refusing to remove the "beta" label. But it's sad that that label remains in place for years, and that nobody seems to have responsibility for removing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, the events you describe are important, but not the last word on the fate of the UK. Winning the Battle of Britain didn't prevent Operation Sealion, it just postponed it for a while. Der Fuhrer would have gotten back to Britain eventually if he hadn't been defeated a few years later. (Or maybe the the elements in Britain who thought this wasn't their war might have eventually prevailed -- as they very nearly did in 1939. Suppose Lord Halifax hadn't refused the PMship...) Hitler's defeat couldn't have happened if the U.S. had not only taken on a lot of the fighting, but provided most of the material resources necessary for victory. Churchill acknowledged this when he heard that the U.S. had entered the war, and said, "So, we're going to win after all."
I used to work the help desk at a hosting company, and the most frustrating part of my job was helping people whose email was being unfairly classified as spam. I was supposed to hand off those cases to the abuse desk, but that department seemed better at antagonizing people than resolving the issue. So a couple times I tried to sort out the issue on my own. (Which probably helped get me fired.) What I discovered was that network admins are a law onto themselves, and often block email for all sorts of strange reasons. The most common reason is that they place too much faith in blacklists, but it's also pretty common for them to look at traffic patterns and tell themselves: "That block is hosting a lot of spammers!" It doesn't occur to them that there are legitimate newsletter and mailing list services that have good ant-spam policies, but that send out as much email as any spammer.
Here's your basic problem: Yahoo and Hotmail have no obligation to classify your email fairly, or even accept it at all. Nor are they required to document how they decide what's spam and what isn't. (And a big incentive not to: such documentation would be very useful to spammers!) But one thing they do is respond to complaints.
So fire off some email to abuse@hotmail.com and abuse@yahoo.com and ask them what's going on. I can't guarantee that they'll give you useful help, but they might -- provided you avoid antagonizing them. A confrontational attitude is not helpful in dealing with support people. They take a lot of shit for policies they don't determine, and won't take any more than they have to.
You could also talk to the support people at the ISP that leases you that IP number. The problem probably has nothing to do with them, but you never know. Besides, you might end up talking to somebody who's smart enough to figure this out, or who has seen this problem before.
Let me anticipate the usual flames: everybody who accesses your Babylon 5 fan site uses Firefox. Firefox is a much better browser. Anybody who cares about security should switch. We'll never have standards compliance as long as Microsoft is in the driver's seat.
All true. But face it, the big switch isn't happening. Time to figure out why and do something about it, and stop living in denial.
Fortunately, there are a lot of free email providers out there. Or if you don't like having ads in your messages, you can sign up for a paid account that costs $20 a year or thereabouts. Which is a lot cheaper than keeping your AOL account open just to get email. Something a lot of people do!
Nowadays, I use a mailbox on my web hosting provider. But I used to use MailSnare, which has good IMAP support.
Why not? Because it "might break"? All hardware breaks. If you can't afford downtime, you just build enough redundancy into your system to allow for for it. You can do that with a little expensive hardware or a lot of cheap hardware. Either way, you allow for Murphy's Law -- you don't waste a lot of money trying to repeal it.
In the original version of 2001, they had Saturn instead of Jupiter as the source of the Big Mystery. Clarke thought it was an "interesting coincidence" that Saturn's rings supposedly formed at about the same time the first humans evolved. (Can't verify whether that's accurate, and am dubious as to the meaning of "coincidence" at that time scale.) The extra difficulty of doing SFX with the rings was just a little bit too much, and they changed it to Jupiter. If they'd stuck with Saturn, imagine the silly comments that this discussion would have!
And what does any of that have to do with him being a spammer?
A feature matrix is fine when you're comparing features. "Easy to use" is a little more subtle than that.
Please. Spam pisses me off too, but on the scale of illegal activities, it just doesn't rate. There are very few places where a spammer runs the risk of getting beaten to death. Russia is one of them, because it's practically ruled by the mob. But when you have a mobocracy, it isn't what you do, it's who you do it to. There are places in the U.S. where it's worth your life to steal a bicycle -- if it's the wrong bicycle.
Your overall picture is correct, according to authorities like this. But your physics is too simplistic.
I've tried Konfabulator. Lost interest when I realized it was for people who like to have messy desktops with lots of little apps open. (And transparent windows so you can see them all!) Which pretty much describes the standard MacOS desktop, and the working style of a lot of Windows and Linux geeks. But that only works if you have a high capacity for divided attention. Most people don't.
You seemed to be talking about people who can't run W2k. I guess you were talking about people who can't be bothered to upgrade. But does it matter? Both groups of people obviously lack motivation to experiment with new software. Yeah, people try to sell them software anyway. Just proves that some advertisers don't know their market.
Not everybody buys ring tones. Certainly not the kind of people who keep their ten-year-old computers "because it does what I need".
I have to ask -- are you actually a customer of these guys? Or do you just think you're the only person in the world who knows how to Google?
But that's not really typical. More typical is the office I work in part time. (And over which I have zero IT input, so don't start.) Almost all their systems are these fancy Fujitisu all-in-one boxes that look like they bought them 5 years ago. All of them have little plaques that say that they're certified to run Windows 98 and Windows 2000. (From the specs, they could probably run XP, though I'd want a memory upgrade first.) Guess which one they're running? Right, Windows 98.
I haven't suggested that they upgrade because I know they'll say something I hear a lot: "What's wrong with what we have? It does what we need it to do." People like that are not good candidates for the latest/greatest web browsers. And people like that are most people.
Technogeeks need to remember that other people don't worship technology the way they do.
And what are the "must have" features of the latest releases of IE or Firefox? I don't mean the ones that appeal to geeks, I mean the ones that would appeal to ordinary people who see nothing wrong with running 8-year-old software.
But here's one practical suggestion: ask the people you've offended. Since your company has made a bad reputation for itself, there must be lots of people out there who've added them to blacklists or blocked their email from networks. If you can get in touch with some of these people you can ask them "What kind of anti-spam policy would cause you to accept email from us?" I'm not sure you'll get any useful answers, but at least you'll help convince people that your company is serious about mending its ways.
Not a generalization, sweeping or otherwise. Just a simple, logical observation about human psychology. If somebody is happy with an old OS, why wouldn't they be happy with an old browser?
As you point out, they're not in a bad place now: they're making money hand over fist, and everybody (including me) is impressed with their work. They could continue on this way indefinitely and still be in better shape than 99.9% of all high tech companies. That doesn't mean I can't wish they'd buckle down and do the boring part of the job that means taking their products out of beta mode. As I said before, I admire them, but I wish they'd grow up a little.
In any software project, developers are always tempted to work on snazzy new features: it's more fun and much more satisfying to implement a cool new feature than to implement a boring bug fix or basic feature tweak. One job of project management is to see to that developers do the boring but important work ahead of the fun but secondary work. When you see developers doing this, it's a sure sign that project managers aren't doing their job. Sometimes this means that the PMs aren't competent, but more often (especially at a company like Google), it means that they don't have they clout they need to enforce sane priorities.
And I see this in Google Maps. Yes, it's the most advanced mapping application on the web. Yes, it's got impressive AJAX UI features. Yes it has three kinds of displays, including a fancy satellite/map overay.
But it still lacks basic features that every other online mapping app has. Like the ability to store often-used addresses. Or, like I said before, the ability to disambiguate addresses properly.
A lot of people don't seem to get that, so I'll spell it out. The example I gave before was "675 S Sixth, 95112" That's not a complete address, but it's enough for Mapquest, Yahoo Maps, and MSN Maps. But feed it to Google Maps, and you get "Did you mean: 675 S 6th St, San Jose, CA 95112 or 675 N 6th St, San Jose, CA 95112". Well of course I don't mean "N 6th" I said "S"! The parser seems to get hung up over that fact that I left out "St." Which shouldn't matter, since Sixth St. is the only Sixth anything on the San Jose map.
"Yeah, big deal, that's a puny little bug". That's precisely my point. It's a puny little boring bug. And nobody seems to be working on it, because they're too busy dreaming up cool variations on the AJAX theme. Such negligence of boring little reliablity features is not a good sign! It means there's no overall coordination of the project, and it's likely to remain in Beta forever.
Easy or not, other mapping sites have been doing it for years. It's a pretty basic feature.
I guess it's a positive thing that they're honest enough to acknowledge that mess by refusing to remove the "beta" label. But it's sad that that label remains in place for years, and that nobody seems to have responsibility for removing it.