The kneejerkism is only apparent if you stop at the stupid ("FNL Attacks Google!") Slashdot headline or the also-stupid Betanews headline ("Google Book Effort Draws French Ire!"). Neither of which seems be based on the actual article, which says,
However his words may appear, Jeanneney insists that his remarks were not intended to be anti-American, and went out of his way to commend the short-term effects of Google's work as a "Messianic dream" that would "profit" under-privileged populations.
Plus, the response Jeanneney is advocating is not to demand that Google cute it out, but to match Google's efforts in non-English libraries.
As to the specifics -- getting two UPS feeds was pretty easy -- one came from the inverter that was "supposed" to feed us, and one from the cage row opposite us. It was getting the third, which required a construction order to run a conduit thirty-someodd feet from the other side of the room that took an act of deity.
So you really didn't have three different UPSs. You just had three different inverters, all part of the same building-wide UPS. That saved you from an inverter failure, but doesn't help you at all if the whole system goes down -- as happened in the other three cases we've been talking about.
You could have gotten your redundant inverters at HE, and probably with a lot less hassle, since they're a lot less bureaucratic than other providers. But by the same token, they're not very good at following, or even defining, procedures. And it was, as far as I can tell, a failure of procedure that caused their blackout.
Yours is a straw man argument. You accuse me of seeing a Big Conspiracy to turn America into a police state. It's true that a lot of people see that conspiracy, but I'm not one of them, and I never said there was one.
What I do see is a lot of federal bureaucrats and politicians with a tendency to abuse their authority. Nothing new about that, but right now they're under a lot of pressure to get results, by any means necessary. And indeed, many of them welcome this situation, since they've always thought current rules make their jobs too hard.
Cops are necessary, but they're also dangerous. It's not that they're bad people, but they have difficult dangerous jobs a face heavy, contradictory political pressures. That motivates use whatever shortcuts they can find. It's not paranoid to insist that these shortcuts be kept to a minimum.
Except that both the White House and Congress is controlled by a party with a solid majority, lots of a "safe" seats. Even if they were less sure of maintaining their hold on power, they'd only work harder to satisfy their main constituency, which is demanding stuff like wiping out terrorism, restoring "Christian" values, growing the economy, etc. etc. Hard to imagine that they'll care much whether we can share recordings of Extreme Makeover.
Nor is the other party likely to make it an issue either, even if they return to power in our lifetimes. They're the ones that appointed the current FCC chairman, you know.
Right now, the political system is wired for people with deep pockets. Until we can find a way to change that, voter "revolts" are good for just a few major issues, if anything.
From what I've seen of the list (the site is slashdotted, so I've just read the BBC article), the gadgets are chosen not by their popularity, but by their influence. So the first Tivo made this list, even though its long gone, and Tivo is only one of many PVR makers. And the first Walkman made the list, because it permanently changed the way people listen to music. MP3 players may cooler, easier to use, etc., but they just exploit a market created by that first Walkman.
You put the add banner in an application window tied to the internet connection. You close the window, and the internet connection gets taken down. Obviously there are going to be hacks to allow you to use the connection without the ad window -- but if the ad window is sufficiently non-obnoxious, most people won't bother. Indeed, if the ads are presented in a non-obtrusive way and relate to the what you're doing, people can even view them as a useful feature. That's why Google is so profitable.
One thing that bothers me about all current ad windows is that they're in always-on-top floating windows, and you keep having to move them around so you can see stuff behind them. If you're sufficiently clever with Windows shell programming, you can make the ad window a toolbar, which can be docked to the top or bottom of the screen. One free internet provider actually did this, but they were not one of the survivors.
There have always been incompetant bozos who ask "stupid" questions. It's a fact of life, and you can even argue that there are no "stupid" questions. It's just that these don't belong on Slashdot, and I can't understand why the editors don't see that.
It's a funny thing when people are so full of delusional self-importance that they think anybody out there gives a sh*t what TV shows they're watching or what books they're checking out of the library or what route they're taking to work.
It's not "delusional self-importance" to worry about getting declared an "enemy combatant" and having your civil rights suspended. This is not a theoretical event, it's actually happened to thousands of people, including a few U.S. citizens.
Even if the Bush administration weren't trying so hard to find loopholes in the Bill of Rights, allowing the FBI to randomly monitor library records is a very bad thing indeed. They have a long track record of coming down on people simply because they have "dangerous" views. If ones choice of reading matter is enough to put you under suspicion, people will be very careful what they read. Not something you want in a free society.
...very few understand what exactly it does besides "record, stop live tv". Tivo failed miserably in the marketing department...
Absolutely correct. "Pause live TV" is probably one of the least important feature, because this device pretty much destroys your taste for live TV. During the six months between my box's arrival and its final failure (QA is another issue Tivo never properly addressed) I stopped even looking at the TV schedule, because I was more likely to find something I wanted to watch already recorded. Even when I did watch a live show, I'd wait at least 5 minutes after it started, so I could zip past the commercials.
The best feature of Tivo, the one the makes it worth the (rather high) cost is its ability to find shows for you. I'd come home saying, "I want to watch a nature documentary" and find that Tivo had already recorded a half dozen, including a couple I didn't even know were on. Judging from what I've heard from other Tivo owners, this is a universally popular feature. Yet they never advertised it at all.
... until TiVo either declares bankruptcy, gets acquired, or (hopefully) reports a profitable quarter.
I wish people would stop using "bankruptcy" to mean "going out of business". Bankruptcy is just a device for postpoining or cancelling your debts. Companies use it to stay in business.
Plus a lot of Comcast customers are complaining that their on-demand boxes freeze up a lot.
And before you post the obligatory "but I've never had any trouble with mine!" -- spare me. A high failure rate is a high failure rate, even if the non-failure rate is even higher.
I only disagree with you on one point: there will never be a shortage of clumsy carpenters!
What suprises me is that your colo provider was able to accommodate your request. At HE, the only power available comes from an inverter at the end of each cabinet row. (Power is converted from AC to DC, then back to AC; in effect the whole building is one big UPS.) You could, at some expense, wire a cabinet to multiple inverters, but that still wouldn't protect you from a failure at the main system -- which is, in fact where the failure happened.
What really bugged me at the time was the "shit happens" attitude afterwards. I was the only one who thought that maybe something was wrong with procedures (did anybody tell that tech, "don't touch that breaker"?). And since I was the clumsy ignorant newbie, my opinion counted for zilch.
Before HE calls its lawyers (we did part on bad terms), I should point out that they don't seem to do any worse than any other colo company -- as this string of power failures indicates.
What's needed is some kind of certification authority for colo and hosting providers. An independent person needs to go in and ask the hard questions: Redundant power systems? Redundant networks? (Most colo companies actually seem to have those, which says something about their mindset.) Well documented procedures? Sufficient staffing? Proper training? Enough money in the bank to keep operating?
That last one was particularly painful for me. HE itself is in good financial shape, but there are fly-by-night outfits that call themselves colo companies, but really just resell rack space. A couple of HE's resellers went out of business when I was there, and it was not fun to tell their customers they couldn't even get their machines back. And flaky hosting companies that consist of one machine and one or two semi-competent entrepreneurs are legion.
I had just begun working at Hurricane Electric when they had their big power failure. (It was the first day I was answering the phone on the help desk. Not a pleasant experience!) In that case the power loss was due to mistake by a technician servicing the backup power supply. Then there was the Internap failure, which seems to have been caused by a similar human error. Now a third provider has had some weird circuit breaker issues. That makes three major outages in less than a year. Either there's some evil conspiracy, or a lot of different companies are using the same bad procedures.
No one's arguing that Microsoft shouldn't try to fix its security problems. What has people up in arms is the fact that this fix comes in the form of a humungous patch that took them almost a year to get out the door, that can't be installed on many systems, and that breaks many applications.
And I'm and very, very tired of people defending bad technology with the statement, "But I've used it and I haven't had any problems." Even the most dangerous technology has some survivors!
They could, if they were actually in conflict with the guy who's trying to register the trademark. But if you read the updated story, it turns out that's not the case.
This is not Timothy's finest moment. The "story" here is that somebody saw the trademark registration, jumped to some stupid conclusions, and submitted it to Slashdot. He didn't even provide a stable link to the original Zophar post, so we can't even find out what they think is going on. Never should have accept this story.
You seem to have read only half the story. Linux is dominating one kind of R&D (robotics), but can't seem to find a following in another kind (handheld computing). The failure is as important as the success, and any Linux advocates would do well to compare them.
I think the big difference is inertia. When you have a lot of people doing things a certain way, it's hard to persuade them that they should change course. All the people who have invested huge amounts of time and money in Windows licenses, software, and training aren't going to walk away from that without a really compelling argument. Linux advocates can't seem to find that argument.
Robotics, on the other hand, doesn't grow out of any of Microsoft's existing marketplaces, so Windows doesn't have the same kind of inertia.
Doesn't one have to own the trademark before something is created in its name in order to sue the creators of the something?
Actually, the way you establish ownership of a trademark is by using it. Registering it is just a way of documenting your claim that you own it. So the guy who invented Bittorrent can claim that he already owns the trademark, whether he's registered it or not.
No, I'd definitely count any Gecko-based browser as non-Microsoft! But, as you say, W3Schools.com is obviously not representative. Ordinary users are less picky about their browsers, and hence tend to use IE just because it's what they have.
I do find it encouraging that IE6's share at W3Schools has been slipping since the middle of last year.
Just because you can't understand the concept of separating content from presentation, doesn't mean its not useful. Here's a simple demo: get a CSS 2.0 compliant browser (Firefox 1.0 will do) and go to att.com. Do File->Print Preview. You'll actually see a different version of the page, one that leaves off the flash graphic and explicitly lists the link URLs.
Later, there will be versions for cell phones, and text-only displays. All possible because the formatting is not specified in the HTML.
If you want to spend the rest of your life hacking out table-based pages that are impossible to maintain and not viewable except on precisely the same display you tested it on, fine. But the rest of us are moving on.
Slashdot Mirror
You could have gotten your redundant inverters at HE, and probably with a lot less hassle, since they're a lot less bureaucratic than other providers. But by the same token, they're not very good at following, or even defining, procedures. And it was, as far as I can tell, a failure of procedure that caused their blackout.
No intent to mislead -- I googled for news items on who appointed him, and read them carelessly.
What I do see is a lot of federal bureaucrats and politicians with a tendency to abuse their authority. Nothing new about that, but right now they're under a lot of pressure to get results, by any means necessary. And indeed, many of them welcome this situation, since they've always thought current rules make their jobs too hard.
Cops are necessary, but they're also dangerous. It's not that they're bad people, but they have difficult dangerous jobs a face heavy, contradictory political pressures. That motivates use whatever shortcuts they can find. It's not paranoid to insist that these shortcuts be kept to a minimum.
Nor is the other party likely to make it an issue either, even if they return to power in our lifetimes. They're the ones that appointed the current FCC chairman, you know.
Right now, the political system is wired for people with deep pockets. Until we can find a way to change that, voter "revolts" are good for just a few major issues, if anything.
From what I've seen of the list (the site is slashdotted, so I've just read the BBC article), the gadgets are chosen not by their popularity, but by their influence. So the first Tivo made this list, even though its long gone, and Tivo is only one of many PVR makers. And the first Walkman made the list, because it permanently changed the way people listen to music. MP3 players may cooler, easier to use, etc., but they just exploit a market created by that first Walkman.
One thing that bothers me about all current ad windows is that they're in always-on-top floating windows, and you keep having to move them around so you can see stuff behind them. If you're sufficiently clever with Windows shell programming, you can make the ad window a toolbar, which can be docked to the top or bottom of the screen. One free internet provider actually did this, but they were not one of the survivors.
There have always been incompetant bozos who ask "stupid" questions. It's a fact of life, and you can even argue that there are no "stupid" questions. It's just that these don't belong on Slashdot, and I can't understand why the editors don't see that.
Even if the Bush administration weren't trying so hard to find loopholes in the Bill of Rights, allowing the FBI to randomly monitor library records is a very bad thing indeed. They have a long track record of coming down on people simply because they have "dangerous" views. If ones choice of reading matter is enough to put you under suspicion, people will be very careful what they read. Not something you want in a free society.
The best feature of Tivo, the one the makes it worth the (rather high) cost is its ability to find shows for you. I'd come home saying, "I want to watch a nature documentary" and find that Tivo had already recorded a half dozen, including a couple I didn't even know were on. Judging from what I've heard from other Tivo owners, this is a universally popular feature. Yet they never advertised it at all.
And before you post the obligatory "but I've never had any trouble with mine!" -- spare me. A high failure rate is a high failure rate, even if the non-failure rate is even higher.
What suprises me is that your colo provider was able to accommodate your request. At HE, the only power available comes from an inverter at the end of each cabinet row. (Power is converted from AC to DC, then back to AC; in effect the whole building is one big UPS.) You could, at some expense, wire a cabinet to multiple inverters, but that still wouldn't protect you from a failure at the main system -- which is, in fact where the failure happened.
What really bugged me at the time was the "shit happens" attitude afterwards. I was the only one who thought that maybe something was wrong with procedures (did anybody tell that tech, "don't touch that breaker"?). And since I was the clumsy ignorant newbie, my opinion counted for zilch.
Before HE calls its lawyers (we did part on bad terms), I should point out that they don't seem to do any worse than any other colo company -- as this string of power failures indicates.
What's needed is some kind of certification authority for colo and hosting providers. An independent person needs to go in and ask the hard questions: Redundant power systems? Redundant networks? (Most colo companies actually seem to have those, which says something about their mindset.) Well documented procedures? Sufficient staffing? Proper training? Enough money in the bank to keep operating?
That last one was particularly painful for me. HE itself is in good financial shape, but there are fly-by-night outfits that call themselves colo companies, but really just resell rack space. A couple of HE's resellers went out of business when I was there, and it was not fun to tell their customers they couldn't even get their machines back. And flaky hosting companies that consist of one machine and one or two semi-competent entrepreneurs are legion.
I had just begun working at Hurricane Electric when they had their big power failure. (It was the first day I was answering the phone on the help desk. Not a pleasant experience!) In that case the power loss was due to mistake by a technician servicing the backup power supply. Then there was the Internap failure, which seems to have been caused by a similar human error. Now a third provider has had some weird circuit breaker issues. That makes three major outages in less than a year. Either there's some evil conspiracy, or a lot of different companies are using the same bad procedures.
And I'm and very, very tired of people defending bad technology with the statement, "But I've used it and I haven't had any problems." Even the most dangerous technology has some survivors!
The electronics industry likes to talk about interoperability, but they seem to hate it in practice.
This is not Timothy's finest moment. The "story" here is that somebody saw the trademark registration, jumped to some stupid conclusions, and submitted it to Slashdot. He didn't even provide a stable link to the original Zophar post, so we can't even find out what they think is going on. Never should have accept this story.
I think the big difference is inertia. When you have a lot of people doing things a certain way, it's hard to persuade them that they should change course. All the people who have invested huge amounts of time and money in Windows licenses, software, and training aren't going to walk away from that without a really compelling argument. Linux advocates can't seem to find that argument.
Robotics, on the other hand, doesn't grow out of any of Microsoft's existing marketplaces, so Windows doesn't have the same kind of inertia.
Haberdashery is men's clothing.
Not the most carefully chosen acronym!
Better yet, switch to a text-only browser!
I do find it encouraging that IE6's share at W3Schools has been slipping since the middle of last year.
Later, there will be versions for cell phones, and text-only displays. All possible because the formatting is not specified in the HTML.
If you want to spend the rest of your life hacking out table-based pages that are impossible to maintain and not viewable except on precisely the same display you tested it on, fine. But the rest of us are moving on.