If you are like I was, and have sworn off redhat for hacking/non-work purposes for whatever ideological reasons, I urge you to read the unofficial Fedora FAQ and actually give it a try
yeah, but if i wanted to use a community-supported distro, why not use debian? it's stable, got a predictable development cycle, etc.
i, and i suspect a lot of other people, were using redhat out of inertia, and because it was the market leader. if it's not the market leader because they've decided to fragment, and i've got to upgrade my rh8 box anyway, why should i use some new, unpredictable bastard stepchild?
not that i'm bitter. at least now i've got apt-get.
We're just as American as you are, thank you very much. And it's not like we're unaffected by US Government policy...
Not only that, but Americans living abroad are likely to return to the US. Lots of people live abroad for short periods of time and come back. Businesses do this, universities do this. And, of course, the military does this all the time.
In my case, I'm out of the country for 2.5 years, and there are three elections (02 primary, 02 general, 04 primary). Just because I'm out of the country for a couple of years doesn't mean that I'm not going to be affected by the outcome of these elections when I come back.
the first time I heard about mp3 was from a coworker in 1996 who was always going on about random new tech -- like firewire and this new tech to compress CDs to 1/10th the size.
the first file i downloaded was abba's dancing queen. i've lost my mp3 collection twice since then, and i've redownloaded it both times just for nostaligia's sake. i had heard some people complaining about the quality, but i thought it was very good (and still do...).
i've gone through a couple different players (and OSes) since then. i never liked winamp, so i started with apollo (freeware windows mp3 player whose license only requires you to not be a bigot or homophobe). i switched to linux fulltime around then and used xmms and alsaplayer for a while. now i'm on to macosx and itunes.
Existing OS, rewritten GUI, standard installer, one decent app for each task -- this sounds like MacOSX to the letter. Some of the config stuff is in a directory server (NetInfo) -- like the users, lookup, etc. The vast majority of config stuff is in XML files though.
In the end, I don't think Linux is ever going to get there -- there are too many people who are independent and have no real motivation for coming together. Your best hope is one of the major distributions spending a lot of time on usability and polishing up the applications.
Personally, I got tired of waiting for a decent distro where everything just worked. I bought a PowerBook with MacOSX and haven't regretted it once. I've still got my old Linux box chugging away as a NAT/file server, though. Linux has already made great inroads for servers (especially at the low end) and I expect it'll keep doing well in that space. In the desktop market, unless you're an extreme free-software advocate, I think MacOSX is a much better choice.
the reason they are worried is that they make a majority of their money from people who know they don't want whatever the telemarketer is selling, but can't say no. whether because they're too nice, or don't like conflict, there are a lot of people who find it hard to say no to a person talking to them on the phone -- especially since the telemarketers have perfected having an answer for every imaginable excuse.
i was surprised about their objections to the do-not-call list, too, until i saw several articles pointing this out. makes me hate the bastards even more....
i agree with you -- the definitions and policies regarding untrusted code are the crux of the matter.
i can definitely see the potential for a DRM world where you can't listen to your CDs, watch your DVDs, access the network, use your peripherals, etc. unless you've bought into the DRM infrastructure that takes all your rights away. or worse, you can't get a new computer because the hardware won't run the OS you want to run.
one of the main things that makes the initial attempts to impose DRM tolerable is that they have failed so miserably. the DVD region-encoding is a great example -- there are so many ways around this it's not even funny. so combining an effective capabilities restriction model with the obvious intent of the media companies would be truly terrible. i think it's a serious threat to our freedoms and to our culture -- with an eternal copyright system and the DMCA, it's now illegal to properly preserve DVDs. it may not be long until all digital content falls into that pit.
but the idea of a capabilities model with reduced-capabilities environments isn't, in itself, bad. it's really just broadening and generalizing the javascript/applet restricted environment. i assume that it would be outside of DRM -- the administrator of the machine would still have total control. users might be limited, depending on the user and situation. and then each user could determine what level they wanted to invoke each program at -- normal users might just have "normal" and "restricted" modes, so their email-attachements would be restricted. so you would still be able execute your own code with full capabilities. though as a programmer, you might enjoy being able to run it in a restricted environment. i understand kernel developers use VMWare to do just this.
though, the mere existence of such a system would make effective DRM a lot easier. programs could refuse to run if you don't have settings foo and bar disabled. i imagine the next media disc format would require raw-access to be forbidden in order to let the OS read the disc.
Basically, it makes the point that we cannot trust people not to run programs that break their own (or others) computers, so the task of limiting what (possibly malicious) code can run falls to the OS.
you know, this basic premise doesn't have to be tied up in DRM. i think any decent security model is going to involve partitioning off system capabilities that aren't appropriate to the current user/situation/time of day/etc.
unix has had this sort of thing for ages, in the form of user permissions, and ulimit. ulimit supports various parameters -- files, memory, cpu, etc. that can be consumed. taking this to its logical conclusion and including bandwidth, address book access, connections to various servers, etc. could provide a pretty logical way to fence in worms.
providing even more restricted environments (like chroot jails or the applet runner) for untrusted code would be a good idea, too. if microsoft is going to insist on allowing people to email executables (screen savers, vbscript, etc.), the world will be better off if they execute in an environment that can't access the network, DoS the local machine, etc.
i think a lot of people are missing the boat in talking about the problems users and software vendors cause. because we've had stupid users and terrible software on a lot of PCs for a couple of decades now, and it hasn't been that much of a problem. the problems were localized, and it didn't affect millions of users when your machine went berserk. so blaming the users and software, when they haven't changed much, is pretty pointless.
what's different is the network connectivity. and the people responsible for that are the ISPs. they have the power to localize problems to their local networks, and to go even further and isolate each node to really limit the potential for problems to spread.
it also turns out that the ISPs (i.e., telephone and cable companies) are already regulated (not as heavily as in the past, but that's another issue), and have the wherewithal to do something about the problems. i think the ISPs could setup a system where, as quickly as virus updates are released now, they could install new filters to block the network traffic and email messages from new worms and virii. that's about the only thing that's really going to be effective.
everything else is just rights-shredding and ucita-promoting.
The only practical problem with selling/trading/loaning iTMS songs I've seen voiced is that Apple would need to reauthorize the new computer when the song was transferred.
But I don't think this is true. All they would have to do is not prohibit someone from developing an application that would take a valid iTunes authorization and the new computer's ID, and create a new authorization for the new computer, and remove the authorization from the old computer.
If they wanted to be really helpful, and avoid the problem of someone being able to make a variant that didn't remove the original auth, they could provide an API where removing the authorization gave you a token that could then be sold or transferred.
privacy is not the real issue here -- as you say, there is no privacy in public.
but our behavior in public, particulary in big cities, is generally anonymous. i have lived in big cities most of my life and have run into people out in public only a few times -- and only at places where we were both frequent visitors (grocery store, popular restaurant, etc.). in general, you almost never see anyone you know.
the transparent society would end the anonymity of our public behavior, and this has huge consequences.
with our current anonymity, we are not typically held accountable for our actions that are offensive, but fall short of breaking laws. cutting people off, being rude to waitresses, etc. are all very antisocial behaviors that are common in big cities because it's never anyone you know who you're trampling on. with a transparent society, your friends/family/boss/etc. could be watching you, so you become more accountable for this kind of behavior.
the other side of this is that it would become a lot easier to stalk people (either privately or as part of a government plot). and removing the anonymity of public behavior would have a huge impact on many political activities. for example, if you run a business and are trying to prevent your workers from organizing a union, your job gets a lot easier if you could see who your employees are meeting with after hours. of course, all the travel to meet with union organizers would be public, but it would be anonymous.
so it's all well and good to say that it's only public behavior so it's not a privacy issue. but in fact, there are a lot of issues surrounding privacy that are impacted by the existence of a police-state aparatus.
The problem with smaller companies is that there is little (if any) insulation from the whims of the owners and management. In large companies, universities, etc. there are generally several layers of management, unions, contracts, committees, etc. that really constrain what your supervisor can do to you.
Not so at a small company. I worked at a 16-person company and inherited the job of running the office server and internet gateway. The owner of the company would often come in at 5:30 on a Friday and demand that I work all weekend (and then not show up for hours after I was supposed to be there). One day I got a 20% pay cut.
This kind of crap is much less likely at larger orgs -- you might be forced to work all weekend and have your pay cut, but you'll at least get some notice.
The criteria you lay out are fine and good, but leave out a crucial aspect: for a system to be 64-bit, it's assumed these tasks are done with minimal software intervention.
So while the G5 can handle 64-bit math and memory/file addressing, it sounds like 10.2.7 and apps running on it aren't going to be using those. They're going to be using the existing emulations, and a few extra hacks bolted on a the last minute to get a few extra bits on the memory address space.
IMHO, if it's still thunking 64-bit operations down to 32-bit operations in software, it's not really 64-bit.
And I'm sick and tired of this revisionist history concerning Netscape.
The whole point of the W3C process was that the browser vendors would try out new stuff in the real world and then the W3C would canonize the best ideas. That's exactly what NS did. Now you can say that they and MS didn't do a good job of going back to adhere to the standards when they were released, but the innovations in web content required experimentation.
And I don't think it's time to get over it. Microsoft used every resource at its disposal to "cut off their air supply" -- and still have not received more than a slap on the wrist. Netscape did what they could to compete. You may recall that Navigator was not free (except for academic use, which makes sense for a product that owes so much to UIUC/NCSA). It was only after Microsoft started giving IE away for free (and paying people to take it, and paying people to make other people take it) that Nav was free.
They're bitter (and so am I) because they were part of a revolution that promised so much, and in the space of a couple of years they saw it totally co-opted and controlled by Microsoft and a few other big corps. I don't know if you used the net much before 1995, but making shitloads of money and turning the web into another television channel weren't part of my visions for what the net could become. I'm guessing he said 1995 because that's when IE started getting rammed down everyone's throats.
No seriously, mod the parent down. Reprinting an entire article from a site that makes all it's income from ads is not Informative: it's just regular copyright infringement. There isn't even an annoying registration requirement like the NY Times.
This guy is even karma-whoring by not posting anonymously.
-Esme
Re:An ever worse word...
on
Isn't It Ironic?
·
· Score: 2, Funny
And you may have noticed that there are about ten other words in English that mean basically the same thing: truly, really, absolutely,... etc. Perhaps you're beginning to notice a pattern? Like it or not, they all had specialized meanings once upon a time, but now they're just generic intensifiers.
My favorite example is the phrase "literally and figuratively" (which is mostly used to mean "really, really, really"). A friend of mine who has a beef with the misuse of irony made the categorical statement that nothing was every literally and figuratively true, and we've had fun for years in pointing out the things that are -- mostly puns, of course.
I started out at a small (~15 people) company, and I mostly did desktop publishing stuff. I was also into Linux, so when the guy who had been running the office server left, I got that, too. I later left and got a job as a sysadmin.
But the department I was in had all kinds of programming needs that weren't being met by the programmers. There were a lot of admin. assistants doing tedious manual work when an Excel spreadsheet or Perl script could do it much faster. So I just started doing little apps for the people I knew and got a reputation as someone who could get stuff done.
Then I found another need -- there was a huge hole in our website (campus map for the university where I worked) that nobody had time to fix. So I made my own webapp for it and started talking to the people who ran the official site about using my version instead.
They hired me about six months later.
So my advice is: find an unmet need and meet it. Another post mentioned open source, which could be a good route. But if you fix something your boss needs, it's much more likely to result in a programming job.
Even better, in the US, I lived in La Jolla, which has exactly the same relationship to San Diego as Hove has with Brighton -- quieter coastal suburb. So I moved from San Diego (La Jolla, actually) to Brighton (Hove, actually).
I live in Brighton (well, Hove, actually) and telework as a programmer for a university in San Diego. My wife and I used to be there physically (she as a grad student, me as a regular employee). When she got a position at the U. of Sussex, we came and I kept my job.
The benefits you mention really are great. Especially if you're used to being salaried and managing your own time and working without much guidance. It's very easy to get distracted by housework, spending time with the kids, surfing the net, etc.
The only complaints I have are ones that other people have brought up: not being there physically has side effects. Other than email, the only contact I have with the office is a weekly 1-hour phone call, and a two or three day visit every six months or so. So I'm totally out of the office politics. My department used to be software-only, and recently got merged with the main IT department, so this can cause some stress. You can go in physically more often, so I'd suggest going in at least once every week or two to prevent this.
The other side of not being there is the reduced personal interaction. I'm a total introvert, so I didn't think it would be an issue, but it still is. You need to make sure you get human contact and don't just withdraw into your cocoon.
And one more thing -- expect the taxes to be really complicated if you work for a company in a different country. And expect both countries to be completely unhelpful when you're trying to figure anything out -- at least that's my experience. Just yesterday I had someone from the Centre for Non-Residents (e.g., UK expats) tell me they probably knew the answers to my questions, but wouldn't talk to me b/c I'm resident in the UK.
What Tolkien hated was when people reduced his complex world to a simple roman-a-clef for communism or fascism or nuclear war, or whatever. He didn't have any problem with people finding meaning in his works, finding it applicable to those events and drawing their own conclusions.
More generally, though, I think you're way off the mark to complain that people were finding meaning that you didn't intend. I think this is the ultimate compliment -- they found your work to be applicable to other experiences you hadn't thought of.
i don't know that i have any particular need to have blogs filtered out of the google index (i don't see them very often in the searches i do...).
but filtering out ephemeral content in general would be good -- blogs would be included in this. so would mailing list archives, news stories, online stores, auctions, discussion groups, etc.
when i'm searching, i almost always prefer a page that somebody authored and put up as a permanent resource (or as permanent as the web allows). the top-level pages of the ephemeral sites would probably be good to keep in the main index, though i'm not sure how you index, e.g., the/. homepage.
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, but if i wanted to use a community-supported distro, why not use debian? it's stable, got a predictable development cycle, etc.
i, and i suspect a lot of other people, were using redhat out of inertia, and because it was the market leader. if it's not the market leader because they've decided to fragment, and i've got to upgrade my rh8 box anyway, why should i use some new, unpredictable bastard stepchild?
not that i'm bitter. at least now i've got apt-get.
-esme
hey, some of us are employed! just because i'm employed writing java and xslt....
-esme
Not only that, but Americans living abroad are likely to return to the US. Lots of people live abroad for short periods of time and come back. Businesses do this, universities do this. And, of course, the military does this all the time.
In my case, I'm out of the country for 2.5 years, and there are three elections (02 primary, 02 general, 04 primary). Just because I'm out of the country for a couple of years doesn't mean that I'm not going to be affected by the outcome of these elections when I come back.
-esme
Well, there's sendmail.
Oh, wait. Err... well, there's BIND.
Umm.... well, OK, not really.
-Esme
the first time I heard about mp3 was from a coworker in 1996 who was always going on about random new tech -- like firewire and this new tech to compress CDs to 1/10th the size.
the first file i downloaded was abba's dancing queen. i've lost my mp3 collection twice since then, and i've redownloaded it both times just for nostaligia's sake. i had heard some people complaining about the quality, but i thought it was very good (and still do...).
i've gone through a couple different players (and OSes) since then. i never liked winamp, so i started with apollo (freeware windows mp3 player whose license only requires you to not be a bigot or homophobe). i switched to linux fulltime around then and used xmms and alsaplayer for a while. now i'm on to macosx and itunes.
but i've still got dancing queen...
-esme
I think what you're looking for is MacOSX.
Existing OS, rewritten GUI, standard installer, one decent app for each task -- this sounds like MacOSX to the letter. Some of the config stuff is in a directory server (NetInfo) -- like the users, lookup, etc. The vast majority of config stuff is in XML files though.
In the end, I don't think Linux is ever going to get there -- there are too many people who are independent and have no real motivation for coming together. Your best hope is one of the major distributions spending a lot of time on usability and polishing up the applications.
Personally, I got tired of waiting for a decent distro where everything just worked. I bought a PowerBook with MacOSX and haven't regretted it once. I've still got my old Linux box chugging away as a NAT/file server, though. Linux has already made great inroads for servers (especially at the low end) and I expect it'll keep doing well in that space. In the desktop market, unless you're an extreme free-software advocate, I think MacOSX is a much better choice.
-Esme
the reason they are worried is that they make a majority of their money from people who know they don't want whatever the telemarketer is selling, but can't say no. whether because they're too nice, or don't like conflict, there are a lot of people who find it hard to say no to a person talking to them on the phone -- especially since the telemarketers have perfected having an answer for every imaginable excuse.
i was surprised about their objections to the do-not-call list, too, until i saw several articles pointing this out. makes me hate the bastards even more....
-esme
i agree with you -- the definitions and policies regarding untrusted code are the crux of the matter.
i can definitely see the potential for a DRM world where you can't listen to your CDs, watch your DVDs, access the network, use your peripherals, etc. unless you've bought into the DRM infrastructure that takes all your rights away. or worse, you can't get a new computer because the hardware won't run the OS you want to run.
one of the main things that makes the initial attempts to impose DRM tolerable is that they have failed so miserably. the DVD region-encoding is a great example -- there are so many ways around this it's not even funny. so combining an effective capabilities restriction model with the obvious intent of the media companies would be truly terrible. i think it's a serious threat to our freedoms and to our culture -- with an eternal copyright system and the DMCA, it's now illegal to properly preserve DVDs. it may not be long until all digital content falls into that pit.
but the idea of a capabilities model with reduced-capabilities environments isn't, in itself, bad. it's really just broadening and generalizing the javascript/applet restricted environment. i assume that it would be outside of DRM -- the administrator of the machine would still have total control. users might be limited, depending on the user and situation. and then each user could determine what level they wanted to invoke each program at -- normal users might just have "normal" and "restricted" modes, so their email-attachements would be restricted. so you would still be able execute your own code with full capabilities. though as a programmer, you might enjoy being able to run it in a restricted environment. i understand kernel developers use VMWare to do just this.
though, the mere existence of such a system would make effective DRM a lot easier. programs could refuse to run if you don't have settings foo and bar disabled. i imagine the next media disc format would require raw-access to be forbidden in order to let the OS read the disc.
-esme
you know, this basic premise doesn't have to be tied up in DRM. i think any decent security model is going to involve partitioning off system capabilities that aren't appropriate to the current user/situation/time of day/etc.
unix has had this sort of thing for ages, in the form of user permissions, and ulimit. ulimit supports various parameters -- files, memory, cpu, etc. that can be consumed. taking this to its logical conclusion and including bandwidth, address book access, connections to various servers, etc. could provide a pretty logical way to fence in worms.
providing even more restricted environments (like chroot jails or the applet runner) for untrusted code would be a good idea, too. if microsoft is going to insist on allowing people to email executables (screen savers, vbscript, etc.), the world will be better off if they execute in an environment that can't access the network, DoS the local machine, etc.
-esme
i think a lot of people are missing the boat in talking about the problems users and software vendors cause. because we've had stupid users and terrible software on a lot of PCs for a couple of decades now, and it hasn't been that much of a problem. the problems were localized, and it didn't affect millions of users when your machine went berserk. so blaming the users and software, when they haven't changed much, is pretty pointless.
what's different is the network connectivity. and the people responsible for that are the ISPs. they have the power to localize problems to their local networks, and to go even further and isolate each node to really limit the potential for problems to spread.
it also turns out that the ISPs (i.e., telephone and cable companies) are already regulated (not as heavily as in the past, but that's another issue), and have the wherewithal to do something about the problems. i think the ISPs could setup a system where, as quickly as virus updates are released now, they could install new filters to block the network traffic and email messages from new worms and virii. that's about the only thing that's really going to be effective.
everything else is just rights-shredding and ucita-promoting.
-esme
But I don't think this is true. All they would have to do is not prohibit someone from developing an application that would take a valid iTunes authorization and the new computer's ID, and create a new authorization for the new computer, and remove the authorization from the old computer.
If they wanted to be really helpful, and avoid the problem of someone being able to make a variant that didn't remove the original auth, they could provide an API where removing the authorization gave you a token that could then be sold or transferred.
-Esme
but our behavior in public, particulary in big cities, is generally anonymous. i have lived in big cities most of my life and have run into people out in public only a few times -- and only at places where we were both frequent visitors (grocery store, popular restaurant, etc.). in general, you almost never see anyone you know.
the transparent society would end the anonymity of our public behavior, and this has huge consequences.
with our current anonymity, we are not typically held accountable for our actions that are offensive, but fall short of breaking laws. cutting people off, being rude to waitresses, etc. are all very antisocial behaviors that are common in big cities because it's never anyone you know who you're trampling on. with a transparent society, your friends/family/boss/etc. could be watching you, so you become more accountable for this kind of behavior.
the other side of this is that it would become a lot easier to stalk people (either privately or as part of a government plot). and removing the anonymity of public behavior would have a huge impact on many political activities. for example, if you run a business and are trying to prevent your workers from organizing a union, your job gets a lot easier if you could see who your employees are meeting with after hours. of course, all the travel to meet with union organizers would be public, but it would be anonymous.
so it's all well and good to say that it's only public behavior so it's not a privacy issue. but in fact, there are a lot of issues surrounding privacy that are impacted by the existence of a police-state aparatus.
-esme
The problem with smaller companies is that there is little (if any) insulation from the whims of the owners and management. In large companies, universities, etc. there are generally several layers of management, unions, contracts, committees, etc. that really constrain what your supervisor can do to you.
Not so at a small company. I worked at a 16-person company and inherited the job of running the office server and internet gateway. The owner of the company would often come in at 5:30 on a Friday and demand that I work all weekend (and then not show up for hours after I was supposed to be there). One day I got a 20% pay cut.
This kind of crap is much less likely at larger orgs -- you might be forced to work all weekend and have your pay cut, but you'll at least get some notice.
-Esme
*goes back to laughing.*
So while the G5 can handle 64-bit math and memory/file addressing, it sounds like 10.2.7 and apps running on it aren't going to be using those. They're going to be using the existing emulations, and a few extra hacks bolted on a the last minute to get a few extra bits on the memory address space.
IMHO, if it's still thunking 64-bit operations down to 32-bit operations in software, it's not really 64-bit.
-Esme
The whole point of the W3C process was that the browser vendors would try out new stuff in the real world and then the W3C would canonize the best ideas. That's exactly what NS did. Now you can say that they and MS didn't do a good job of going back to adhere to the standards when they were released, but the innovations in web content required experimentation.
And I don't think it's time to get over it. Microsoft used every resource at its disposal to "cut off their air supply" -- and still have not received more than a slap on the wrist. Netscape did what they could to compete. You may recall that Navigator was not free (except for academic use, which makes sense for a product that owes so much to UIUC/NCSA). It was only after Microsoft started giving IE away for free (and paying people to take it, and paying people to make other people take it) that Nav was free.
They're bitter (and so am I) because they were part of a revolution that promised so much, and in the space of a couple of years they saw it totally co-opted and controlled by Microsoft and a few other big corps. I don't know if you used the net much before 1995, but making shitloads of money and turning the web into another television channel weren't part of my visions for what the net could become. I'm guessing he said 1995 because that's when IE started getting rammed down everyone's throats.
-Esme
This guy is even karma-whoring by not posting anonymously.
-Esme
My favorite example is the phrase "literally and figuratively" (which is mostly used to mean "really, really, really"). A friend of mine who has a beef with the misuse of irony made the categorical statement that nothing was every literally and figuratively true, and we've had fun for years in pointing out the things that are -- mostly puns, of course.
-Esme
But the department I was in had all kinds of programming needs that weren't being met by the programmers. There were a lot of admin. assistants doing tedious manual work when an Excel spreadsheet or Perl script could do it much faster. So I just started doing little apps for the people I knew and got a reputation as someone who could get stuff done.
Then I found another need -- there was a huge hole in our website (campus map for the university where I worked) that nobody had time to fix. So I made my own webapp for it and started talking to the people who ran the official site about using my version instead.
They hired me about six months later.
So my advice is: find an unmet need and meet it. Another post mentioned open source, which could be a good route. But if you fix something your boss needs, it's much more likely to result in a programming job.
-Esme
-Esme
Even better, in the US, I lived in La Jolla, which has exactly the same relationship to San Diego as Hove has with Brighton -- quieter coastal suburb. So I moved from San Diego (La Jolla, actually) to Brighton (Hove, actually).
-Esme
Speaking of the advantages of teleworking, I spent a fair bit of the afternoon in the back garden with my daughter in a paddling pool.
Probably not a selling point for the boss, but it keeps me happy.
-Esme
The benefits you mention really are great. Especially if you're used to being salaried and managing your own time and working without much guidance. It's very easy to get distracted by housework, spending time with the kids, surfing the net, etc.
The only complaints I have are ones that other people have brought up: not being there physically has side effects. Other than email, the only contact I have with the office is a weekly 1-hour phone call, and a two or three day visit every six months or so. So I'm totally out of the office politics. My department used to be software-only, and recently got merged with the main IT department, so this can cause some stress. You can go in physically more often, so I'd suggest going in at least once every week or two to prevent this.
The other side of not being there is the reduced personal interaction. I'm a total introvert, so I didn't think it would be an issue, but it still is. You need to make sure you get human contact and don't just withdraw into your cocoon.
And one more thing -- expect the taxes to be really complicated if you work for a company in a different country. And expect both countries to be completely unhelpful when you're trying to figure anything out -- at least that's my experience. Just yesterday I had someone from the Centre for Non-Residents (e.g., UK expats) tell me they probably knew the answers to my questions, but wouldn't talk to me b/c I'm resident in the UK.
-Esme
More generally, though, I think you're way off the mark to complain that people were finding meaning that you didn't intend. I think this is the ultimate compliment -- they found your work to be applicable to other experiences you hadn't thought of.
-Esme
but filtering out ephemeral content in general would be good -- blogs would be included in this. so would mailing list archives, news stories, online stores, auctions, discussion groups, etc.
when i'm searching, i almost always prefer a page that somebody authored and put up as a permanent resource (or as permanent as the web allows). the top-level pages of the ephemeral sites would probably be good to keep in the main index, though i'm not sure how you index, e.g., the /. homepage.
-esme