Micorsoft taking on Google? This is like those Iraqi press conferences where they claim that they're going to lash out and smite the agressors. Sheesh.
Come to think of it, are we really sure Bill Gates is alive? I mean, I'm sure it's him in those videotapes, but you really can't be sure of when they're made. You notice he never holds up a current newspaper when you see him on TV?
Seriously, one of the big reasons Google is popular is that it's not at all like Microsoft. It will be difficult for Microsoft to duplicate that formula.
I have to wonder about the wisdom of trying to bleed Bill Gates dry by paying people to not use his stuff. Seems like we'd run out of money before he would.
Tell the donor to support something constructive, such as making a donation so the university can produce some Free Software, which others can then benefit from. That would serve the cause much better.
Whoopeee. The marketers will start using this to identify trends, and next thing you know, we'll have some fast food named "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys."
This is slightly off-topic and sftp isn't what he should be using, but you can change the user's shell to/usr/bin/sftp and add it to/etc/shells. I've only tried it with OpenSSH under Linux, so YMMV. I got the idea from an OpenBSD list, though, so it should work most anywhere.
To answer the original question, when given a choice, I always download by http. It usually takes less time to set up the connection, probably becasue of those ident lookups that most ftpd's still run by default.
I believe they've also exempted political candidates, in the name of free speech. That's why I'm not excited about this, and frankly kind of pissed off about it. Do Not Call means Do Not Call. It sure as hell is no less annoying if somebody is soliciting power or pushing some dumbass cause.
What I make of this is that it's okay to call me up and ask for money, as long as you don't give me anything in return for it. This is better?
Great, the site is linked both here and on Drudge.... which pretty much ensures that nobody can access it. Clear proof that both sites are tools of the CIA.
Well, if screen-scraping is illegal (and in some forms, it certainly is), then somebody should sue the people who sell programs that harvest e-mail addresses from web sites.
>> the Baby Bell PR-speak that deregulation is the solution to everything
Say what? They THRIVE on regulation; the most significant of course, is their ongoing monopoly over the last mile.
Christmas, the FCC's response to deregulation is to write a bunch of regulations regulating how deregulation is supposed to happen. The article notes "the Federal Communications Commission [is] ready to revamp its competition rules in the next two weeks..." Good grief. Trying to manage "competition" is regulation, plain and simple. If we were really deregulating, we could dismantle 98% of the FCC. Which, of course, is why they interpret "deregulation" the way they do.
This kind of "deregulation" is a sham, it's just an invitation to the various players to ante up some campaign contributions and expensive lunches. As long as we have the last-mile monopolies and an FCC that thinks it knows how structure the industry, then we're going to get screwed by the telecom companies. If you side with the Baby Bells or the Long-Distance carriers, you're just choosing between missionary and doggy.
Well, whatever Carmack does, tell him he's wasting his time if he asks for help from the UN Weapons Inspectors. Those guys couldn't find rocket fuel if you shot one up their collective ass.
Our sysadmins hack new web apps before the developers deploy them. It's legal and productive. And we usually end up with bragging rights over the code monkeys.
(Hint to coders, write a freaking input verification function and use it!)
(PS - Hint to sysadmins, make sure they're not pointed to a production database when you do this)
What this shows is simply that the AOL model of bundling connectivity with content is failing.
We all knew it would... it makes some sense to use content to sell connectivity. But that means you have to either break even or lose money on the content, otherwise your connectivity will be overpriced.
Another approach is the revers... using connectivity to sell content. Again, same situation... you couldn't make money on connectivity.
AOL's early success convinced a lot of people that there was some natural synergy between the two. There's isn't. AOL's business model (and the Time merger) are based on the theory that by combining the two, they could make more money on content AND more money on connectivity. Can't work.
Even more amazing is the number of companies that saw the growth of AOL and concluded that bundling the way to go. Excite@home was one of the most spectacular failures that was fueled by this erroneous analysis.
Actually, the notion of depleting resources is quite an old one as well, responsible for numerous predictions over the years that, in restrospect, look ridiculous. Most famous were those of Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, that the planet would run out of food in 1900. His mathmatics were impeccable, but his understanding of people and societies was slim.
The short explanation that I feel compelled to give is that floating prices in free markets cause people to use less of something when it becomes scarcer, and to find substitutes long before the commodity actually becomes depleted. A perfect example... we've never run out of Gold, even though there's a very limited supply. But the price has gone up so much that we no longer use it for mundane items like coins.
>> Corporations have rights that are given to them by the lawyers who created them
As a generally libertarian thinker, I've recently been tossing around the notion that there have been two great government interventions since the time of Adam Smith, and that these are at the root of most modern discontent with free markets.
In listening to the left, you always hear anger directed at "Corporations", as if a corporation were something you could be angry at. But corporations are NOT people. They do not have souls, they cannot feel guilt, they cannot feel pain or love. Corporations existed at the time of Adam Smith, but they were scarce compared to today, when even a housewife with a part-time business is likely to incorporate in order to compete without risking her family's home.
The other huge government intervention into free markets has been intellectual property laws. While they existed in the 18th century, they were of little consequence compared to today. As copying technologies have advanced, so have the benefits of holding copyrights. And this has in turn has left us in the uncomfortable position whereby our IP laws are meaningless unless we impose them on other countries.
My thinking recently received some validation from the Alpha Libertarian himself, Frederich Hayek. In "Individualism and Economic Order" (published 1948, written earlier) Hayek devotes a chapter to some of areas where so-called "Free" enterprise is promoted, but where it is not truly free. And sure enough, a large part of the chapter is devoted to intellectual property laws and to the rights accorded to corporations.
To sumamrize Hayek's conclcusions, he basically agrees with the idea of protecting a songwriter or author's work, but that the direct extension of the laws of physical property is inappropriate and probably destructive. That may be "duh" material today, but sixty years ago it was prescient.
Likewise with corporations, he argues that direct extension of the rights of a human to a group of humans is bound to create distortions of freedom, and laments that it has created a situation whereby the size of a corporation becomes an advatantage far beyond what is dictated by economics of scale.
Reading that chapter was one of those "Bingo!" moments for me. It doesn't really provide a practical course of action to correct the situation (if we simply repealed the offending laws, economic chaos would ensue), yet it explains everything. I had noticed that most leftish people don't really dislike free commerce as much as you'd think based on the positions they take. Many of the more reasonable lefties at their heart enjoy commerce, they love the idea of "cottage industries" for example. Many, regardless of their politics, are personally just as independent-minded as many conservatives are.
If nothing else, Hayek's observations present a clear distinction between Free Markets and Capitalism; Hayek compellingly argues that what is often sold as "free" enterprise is really just supply-side Socialism.
Which brings us back to the subject of the article... folks, don't believe for a second that Feingold and McCain are doing you any favors. Once the structure of an industry is dictated by the political process, then the political process inevitably becomes corrupted to favor the existing players. The law may tough on the day it's passed, but in implementation, it will soon become a beaureaucratic playground where the big players have a huge advantage. They may oppose it up front, but you can be certain that they'll benefit in the end.
If politicians really want to help, the should roll back the regulations that created the situation they're trying to fix. But that course is rarely politically viable, for numerous structural reasons. Instead, as PJ O"Rourke notes, "Politicians spend much of their time as skunks going around with aerosol cans of room freshener."
One factor is that I suspect people are increasingly lowering their TTL's, expires, or whatever that parameter is. Most of the manage-it yourself DNS providers now allow an option toreduce that to a few minutes, which makes it much easier to move hosts around. And while a low setting increases DNS traffic, it rarely if ever incurs an extra cost to the domain holder.
Well, this may be a little off-topic, but when I was hiring (current position doesn't involve it), I NEVER looked for certifications. Never, ever, ever. It almost counted against somebody if they emphasized certs too much. Of course, that was me, and it's a fact of life that a lot of companies do look at them.
More to the point, though, is that hiring in IT is practically at a standstill right now, and it's not limited to Silicon Valley. As technology progresses, people are learning to do the job with fewer people. Five years ago, you'd figure one IT guy to support about 30 seats. Now it's more like one person per 70-90 seats. And the inrush of people during the bubble years means that the supply/demand balance is incredibly out of whack. My old boss in SF was the best I've ever worked for, he has the best connections you could have out there, 15+ years of big name experience, and he's been out of work for 18 months. So right now, it doesn't matter what you have on your resume, if you're not currently working, or don't know somebody who's hiring, it's going to be incredibly hard to get a job in IT. I wouldn't spend a nickle of my own money getting certified, because right now it just isn't going to help. A lot of the ads you see posted are just there so the hiring manager can say he did a thorough search, but odds are he already knows who he wants to hire.
I remember back when this suit first got started, and Sun complained that Microsoft hadn't included rmi in their Java distribution. Microsoft's position was that the agreeement only required that Microsoft make it available for download. Which, apparently, was true.
But, when you went to fetch the file from Microsoft, their web site contained an abscure reference to rmi, and directed you to their ftp site. I went to the ftp directory, and looked, and looked, and I couldn't find rmi.
Finally, I found the file. Every file in that directory was listed in uppercase, except for rmi.zip, which was lower-case. This made it extrememly easy to overlook when scanning a directory listing.
I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed the cleverness of the whole thing.
Not sure if they've changed this on recent versions, but another zinger they've thrown out was that it would start up that system tray thingie when you installed it. And you couldn't get into the Preferences to disable it until you registered. It wasn't so bad back when they would let you register as "webmaster@real.com", but it looks like they've caught on to that one.
I gave serious thought to buying their All-In-One player, but crap like this makes me steer as far away from them as I can get. Microsoft looks positively benign by comparison.
Well, I don't think you could build much of a publishing company based on the material in the -1 posts. Perhaps Gilmor will give it a go.
But in reality,/. does have two valuable filtering functions in place; there's user moderation, of course, and there's the fact that only a few people are allowed to post stories in the first place. It was the user moderation that first caught my attention, since it's pretty effective at filtering completely worthless content (as opposed to filtering stuff that I simply disagree with). Likewise, even though I may think they're shallow, self-important, and ideologically confused, the/. editors manage to present a site that has a distinct personality. Soul, if you will.
This is one of the things that bugs me about Google News... yes, it does a great job of aggregating links to news stories. But there's no people behind it, and it feels that way when when I look through it.
Let me get this straight... these folks say they're promoting an "Open Standard" that costs twice as much to implement as much as Microsoft's proprietary solution?
Did the definition of "Open" change while I wasn't looking?
I haven't yet worked much with Postfix, but I hvae a couple of servers where I run qmail. I believed the hype at first, but eventually concluded that djb is one very, very disturbed person.
I guess it works okay, but only a badly twisted mind could have devised the configuration system that qmail uses. Once you add one of the various virtual domain hacks it becomes nearly impenetrable. Then you try to integrate a mail list manager or spam tool, and before you know it, you're waist deep in GID's and SUID bits and log files, and you find yourself trying to read a Google translation from the original Slovenian.
Slashdot Mirror
Micorsoft taking on Google? This is like those Iraqi press conferences where they claim that they're going to lash out and smite the agressors. Sheesh.
Come to think of it, are we really sure Bill Gates is alive? I mean, I'm sure it's him in those videotapes, but you really can't be sure of when they're made. You notice he never holds up a current newspaper when you see him on TV?
Seriously, one of the big reasons Google is popular is that it's not at all like Microsoft. It will be difficult for Microsoft to duplicate that formula.
I have to wonder about the wisdom of trying to bleed Bill Gates dry by paying people to not use his stuff. Seems like we'd run out of money before he would.
Tell the donor to support something constructive, such as making a donation so the university can produce some Free Software, which others can then benefit from. That would serve the cause much better.
That's nothing... wait until you see how long AMD has to wait to get paid.
Whoopeee. The marketers will start using this to identify trends, and next thing you know, we'll have some fast food named "Cheese-Eating Surrender Monkeys."
Not In Our Brand Name, say I.
This is slightly off-topic and sftp isn't what he should be using, but you can change the user's shell to /usr/bin/sftp and add it to /etc/shells. I've only tried it with OpenSSH under Linux, so YMMV. I got the idea from an OpenBSD list, though, so it should work most anywhere.
To answer the original question, when given a choice, I always download by http. It usually takes less time to set up the connection, probably becasue of those ident lookups that most ftpd's still run by default.
I believe they've also exempted political candidates, in the name of free speech. That's why I'm not excited about this, and frankly kind of pissed off about it. Do Not Call means Do Not Call. It sure as hell is no less annoying if somebody is soliciting power or pushing some dumbass cause.
What I make of this is that it's okay to call me up and ask for money, as long as you don't give me anything in return for it. This is better?
Great, the site is linked both here and on Drudge.... which pretty much ensures that nobody can access it. Clear proof that both sites are tools of the CIA.
Well, if screen-scraping is illegal (and in some forms, it certainly is), then somebody should sue the people who sell programs that harvest e-mail addresses from web sites.
>> the Baby Bell PR-speak that deregulation is the solution to everything
Say what? They THRIVE on regulation; the most significant of course, is their ongoing monopoly over the last mile.
Christmas, the FCC's response to deregulation is to write a bunch of regulations regulating how deregulation is supposed to happen. The article notes "the Federal Communications Commission [is] ready to revamp its competition rules in the next two weeks..." Good grief. Trying to manage "competition" is regulation, plain and simple. If we were really deregulating, we could dismantle 98% of the FCC. Which, of course, is why they interpret "deregulation" the way they do.
This kind of "deregulation" is a sham, it's just an invitation to the various players to ante up some campaign contributions and expensive lunches. As long as we have the last-mile monopolies and an FCC that thinks it knows how structure the industry, then we're going to get screwed by the telecom companies. If you side with the Baby Bells or the Long-Distance carriers, you're just choosing between missionary and doggy.
Well, whatever Carmack does, tell him he's wasting his time if he asks for help from the UN Weapons Inspectors. Those guys couldn't find rocket fuel if you shot one up their collective ass.
Our sysadmins hack new web apps before the developers deploy them. It's legal and productive. And we usually end up with bragging rights over the code monkeys.
(Hint to coders, write a freaking input verification function and use it!)
(PS - Hint to sysadmins, make sure they're not pointed to a production database when you do this)
>> CDE was getting a little bit outdated
Geez, too bad there's no mod option for "understatement".
What this shows is simply that the AOL model of bundling connectivity with content is failing.
We all knew it would... it makes some sense to use content to sell connectivity. But that means you have to either break even or lose money on the content, otherwise your connectivity will be overpriced.
Another approach is the revers... using connectivity to sell content. Again, same situation... you couldn't make money on connectivity.
AOL's early success convinced a lot of people that there was some natural synergy between the two. There's isn't. AOL's business model (and the Time merger) are based on the theory that by combining the two, they could make more money on content AND more money on connectivity. Can't work.
Even more amazing is the number of companies that saw the growth of AOL and concluded that bundling the way to go. Excite@home was one of the most spectacular failures that was fueled by this erroneous analysis.
Actually, the notion of depleting resources is quite an old one as well, responsible for numerous predictions over the years that, in restrospect, look ridiculous. Most famous were those of Thomas Malthus in the 19th century, that the planet would run out of food in 1900. His mathmatics were impeccable, but his understanding of people and societies was slim.
The short explanation that I feel compelled to give is that floating prices in free markets cause people to use less of something when it becomes scarcer, and to find substitutes long before the commodity actually becomes depleted. A perfect example... we've never run out of Gold, even though there's a very limited supply. But the price has gone up so much that we no longer use it for mundane items like coins.
>> Corporations have rights that are given to them by the lawyers who created them
As a generally libertarian thinker, I've recently been tossing around the notion that there have been two great government interventions since the time of Adam Smith, and that these are at the root of most modern discontent with free markets.
In listening to the left, you always hear anger directed at "Corporations", as if a corporation were something you could be angry at. But corporations are NOT people. They do not have souls, they cannot feel guilt, they cannot feel pain or love. Corporations existed at the time of Adam Smith, but they were scarce compared to today, when even a housewife with a part-time business is likely to incorporate in order to compete without risking her family's home.
The other huge government intervention into free markets has been intellectual property laws. While they existed in the 18th century, they were of little consequence compared to today. As copying technologies have advanced, so have the benefits of holding copyrights. And this has in turn has left us in the uncomfortable position whereby our IP laws are meaningless unless we impose them on other countries.
My thinking recently received some validation from the Alpha Libertarian himself, Frederich Hayek. In "Individualism and Economic Order" (published 1948, written earlier) Hayek devotes a chapter to some of areas where so-called "Free" enterprise is promoted, but where it is not truly free. And sure enough, a large part of the chapter is devoted to intellectual property laws and to the rights accorded to corporations.
To sumamrize Hayek's conclcusions, he basically agrees with the idea of protecting a songwriter or author's work, but that the direct extension of the laws of physical property is inappropriate and probably destructive. That may be "duh" material today, but sixty years ago it was prescient.
Likewise with corporations, he argues that direct extension of the rights of a human to a group of humans is bound to create distortions of freedom, and laments that it has created a situation whereby the size of a corporation becomes an advatantage far beyond what is dictated by economics of scale.
Reading that chapter was one of those "Bingo!" moments for me. It doesn't really provide a practical course of action to correct the situation (if we simply repealed the offending laws, economic chaos would ensue), yet it explains everything. I had noticed that most leftish people don't really dislike free commerce as much as you'd think based on the positions they take. Many of the more reasonable lefties at their heart enjoy commerce, they love the idea of "cottage industries" for example. Many, regardless of their politics, are personally just as independent-minded as many conservatives are.
If nothing else, Hayek's observations present a clear distinction between Free Markets and Capitalism; Hayek compellingly argues that what is often sold as "free" enterprise is really just supply-side Socialism.
Which brings us back to the subject of the article... folks, don't believe for a second that Feingold and McCain are doing you any favors. Once the structure of an industry is dictated by the political process, then the political process inevitably becomes corrupted to favor the existing players. The law may tough on the day it's passed, but in implementation, it will soon become a beaureaucratic playground where the big players have a huge advantage. They may oppose it up front, but you can be certain that they'll benefit in the end.
If politicians really want to help, the should roll back the regulations that created the situation they're trying to fix. But that course is rarely politically viable, for numerous structural reasons. Instead, as PJ O"Rourke notes, "Politicians spend much of their time as skunks going around with aerosol cans of room freshener."
They should just buy the remains of Napster. Then it remain in circulation forever.
One factor is that I suspect people are increasingly lowering their TTL's, expires, or whatever that parameter is. Most of the manage-it yourself DNS providers now allow an option toreduce that to a few minutes, which makes it much easier to move hosts around. And while a low setting increases DNS traffic, it rarely if ever incurs an extra cost to the domain holder.
Well, this may be a little off-topic, but when I was hiring (current position doesn't involve it), I NEVER looked for certifications. Never, ever, ever. It almost counted against somebody if they emphasized certs too much. Of course, that was me, and it's a fact of life that a lot of companies do look at them.
More to the point, though, is that hiring in IT is practically at a standstill right now, and it's not limited to Silicon Valley. As technology progresses, people are learning to do the job with fewer people. Five years ago, you'd figure one IT guy to support about 30 seats. Now it's more like one person per 70-90 seats. And the inrush of people during the bubble years means that the supply/demand balance is incredibly out of whack. My old boss in SF was the best I've ever worked for, he has the best connections you could have out there, 15+ years of big name experience, and he's been out of work for 18 months. So right now, it doesn't matter what you have on your resume, if you're not currently working, or don't know somebody who's hiring, it's going to be incredibly hard to get a job in IT. I wouldn't spend a nickle of my own money getting certified, because right now it just isn't going to help. A lot of the ads you see posted are just there so the hiring manager can say he did a thorough search, but odds are he already knows who he wants to hire.
I remember back when this suit first got started, and Sun complained that Microsoft hadn't included rmi in their Java distribution. Microsoft's position was that the agreeement only required that Microsoft make it available for download. Which, apparently, was true.
But, when you went to fetch the file from Microsoft, their web site contained an abscure reference to rmi, and directed you to their ftp site. I went to the ftp directory, and looked, and looked, and I couldn't find rmi.
Finally, I found the file. Every file in that directory was listed in uppercase, except for rmi.zip, which was lower-case. This made it extrememly easy to overlook when scanning a directory listing.
I have to admit, I kind of enjoyed the cleverness of the whole thing.
Not sure if they've changed this on recent versions, but another zinger they've thrown out was that it would start up that system tray thingie when you installed it. And you couldn't get into the Preferences to disable it until you registered. It wasn't so bad back when they would let you register as "webmaster@real.com", but it looks like they've caught on to that one.
I gave serious thought to buying their All-In-One player, but crap like this makes me steer as far away from them as I can get. Microsoft looks positively benign by comparison.
Well, I don't think you could build much of a publishing company based on the material in the -1 posts. Perhaps Gilmor will give it a go.
/. does have two valuable filtering functions in place; there's user moderation, of course, and there's the fact that only a few people are allowed to post stories in the first place. It was the user moderation that first caught my attention, since it's pretty effective at filtering completely worthless content (as opposed to filtering stuff that I simply disagree with). Likewise, even though I may think they're shallow, self-important, and ideologically confused, the /. editors manage to present a site that has a distinct personality. Soul, if you will.
But in reality,
This is one of the things that bugs me about Google News... yes, it does a great job of aggregating links to news stories. But there's no people behind it, and it feels that way when when I look through it.
Great. So you can look for free, but if you want to play, you have to pay.
Seems I've heard that pitch elsewhere.
Let me get this straight... these folks say they're promoting an "Open Standard" that costs twice as much to implement as much as Microsoft's proprietary solution?
Did the definition of "Open" change while I wasn't looking?
I haven't yet worked much with Postfix, but I hvae a couple of servers where I run qmail. I believed the hype at first, but eventually concluded that djb is one very, very disturbed person.
I guess it works okay, but only a badly twisted mind could have devised the configuration system that qmail uses. Once you add one of the various virtual domain hacks it becomes nearly impenetrable. Then you try to integrate a mail list manager or spam tool, and before you know it, you're waist deep in GID's and SUID bits and log files, and you find yourself trying to read a Google translation from the original Slovenian.
Big Deal. They can change it all they want, but my dad still won't be able to figure it out.