It's commonly accepted
nowadays that the Net's traditional forms of advertising (banners,
pop-ups and spam) have a very low success rate
As it turns out, the click-thru rate on my television and radio is exactly zero, which when compared to web click-thru results seems pretty abysmal. Yet people still buy tv and radio ads.
I thought the purposes of advertising was to raise the profile of your product; when I keep hearing "Drink Coke" all day, I'm more likely to think "Coke" when the question "What do you want to drink?" comes up.
By this measure, I think that web advertising might be just as successful as traditional advertising. However, somebody set us up the meme that a web ad that doesn't result in click-thru is ineffective. I find this reasoning inconsistent. You're going to have to prove to me that they're less effective than traditional magazine and newspaper ads, but until then, I find the "low success rate" argument a falacy.
I've submitted three stories to slashdot that were rejected, only to be posted days later, after someone else also re-submitted it.
This pisses me off more than it should. The slashdot editors have to sort through a lot of crap submissions, so I understand why they might be quick to dismiss. But it still feels like an insult to me anyway.
The slashdot FAQ answers that they don't want to add a "reason" column because that might cost them a lot of time (sure, it's just a little time each submission, but there are a lot). On the other hand, I think that the slashdot editors are ignoring the harm they are doing to their own community--I'll certainly be less likely to submit that cool story next time, since it's probably just going to be quickly dismissed. In an ideal world, they would have a reason for rejection, and perhaps even a name. (They would also automatically run ispell on all stories, as well as have peer review by another editor who cross-checks against old stories, but that's another topic.) This would take more time, but there are legions of layed-off dot-com employees begging to be hired to do just this sort of thing.
Just my two cents. At least know that you're not alone thinking that story rejection and posting is capricious and inconsistent.
But of course, the problem with his position is that unethical game developers might try to start passing off touched-up photos as the real deal. I guess we should thank Microsoft (king of the unethical) for proving this point. Good, uncensored reviews are important for the consumer; then it doesn't matter if the screenshots coming out of MS are fake. Informed consumers will be able to seek out and find the truth out for themselves.
Uninformed consumers, of course, will still be duped, but they already get duped by crappy games in great looking boxes covered with screenshots of pre-rendered cut scenes.
Why's it so surprising that there's tons of black
holes out there?
I agree: it doesn't seem very surprising. But this leads us to the opposite question: Why's there so much non-black hole stuff out there? According to the article, black holes were much more active in the past. Why did the situation change?
I thought my sarcasm was pretty good, thank you very much.
Perhaps my bile was uncalled for, but I'm sick of people implying "good design is easy, why doesn't someone just do it?"
Good design and usability are difficult. Do you think that the industry doesn't know that billions of dollars and instant fame and fortune are at stake here? Do you think that the industry doesn't try really, really hard to get that money?
There's a right way to criticize usablity--one author who does it right is Donald Norman (I'm sure there are others, but on this topic I've only read Mr. Norman's books). He manages to carefully consider what is wrong with a designs, discusses the alternatives, and points out how usablity could be improved.
There's also a wrong way. Say something "Why can't my computer be as easy to use as a toilet?" God, I'm getting pissed off again. What's the feature list of that toilet? And what's the feature list of your computer; can you even hope to cover that list in any amount of detail? In fact, does your computer actually even have a standing feature list, or do you actively install new software (and thus new features) constantly? Dammit, everybody who uses a computer has complex needs--I have a web browser, an email client, a remote telnet session, an mp3 player, and a "find file" all open RIGHT now, and I suspect that I'm pretty tame compared to the average slashdot reader. I'm going to play an online game with friends in another state shortly. I could spend hours describing what I want EACH ONE of these to do. I happen to think that all facts considered, the usability is pretty good. (And I might add: Damn, it's cool to live in the year 2001. This stuff rocks.)
Are things perfect? Of course not. One company has a monopoly on the desktop market and has very little incentive to innovate (in spite of their claims the contrary) and every incentive to continue to keep the status quo. Yes, the "START" button is retarded. Should we strive to improve the state-of-the art? Of course. Would it be awesome if it was easier to do my taxes? Sure, but are you absolutely you want the automated solution you described when it sacrifices transparency (are you sure your taxes were done correctly in that system) and possibly privacy (who's keeping track of all that information flowing between your income-payers and the government?) I actually think that TurboTax made my taxes about as easy as I'd like--it asked me a simple set of questions, I answered, and it was done. Any easier, and I'm not sure I'd completely trust it.
I actually don't know why you're arguing, since in at least one respect, you agreed with me. You said:
Simplicity of interface, sheer useability, takes a lot of talent, skill and
creativity.
If you think about it, the article in question basically said these are all trivial, require little skill or talent, and they said it with a condescending attitude. It's actually really really hard. Dismissing the problem is unwarranted and deserves and equally scathing reply.
First of all, they contradict themselves. "Computers are too hard," they whine, but when a computer interface remains consistent and usable for twenty years, "If Rip Van Wrinkle went to sleep in 1982 and woke up today, he'd be able to drive our modern computers with no problem because they're essentially unchanged".
Second, they recommend creating "simpler" and "distributed" devices instead of monolithic boxes that do everything. What the hell does this mean, what devices really need more intelligence? All I can think of is one of those computerized thermostats. Whoopee.
Look. Computers are complex because your needs are complex. Worse yet, my complex needs are inconsistent the needs of others. Try to download mp3s on your toaster. Try to do your taxes while downloading porn while instant messaging your friend in France while checking the weather on one of their great appliances. Try to use that "more intelligent than a computer" airport toilet to write up your Powerpoint slides, you pompus pricks.
Actually, in this case, that might have actually worked.
Hold on, Captain Mods-Me-Down, I have a good point here.
Linux will survive no matter what. First, ask yourself: "What is Linux, anyway?" There are many ways you could answer that, but this time, I'll answer it this way: It's an operating system that's written by a dedicated cadre of highly skilled, super-intelligent, uber-geeks. They create it for themselves, because they need it for themselves.
Now ask yourself: How can you stop them? I don't think you actually can. Outmarket them? They don't care, the kernel-hackers keep on creating. Make strategic alliances, meta-conglomerate mega deals that lock linux out? The kernel-hackers keep on creating, still ceasing to care. In fact, short of taking away their computers, the uberhackers will continue to hack no matter what the rest of the world does.
The funny part is that in spite of their lack of caring about market success, Linux has become a huge market success. Now that I think about it, that might even be the REASON it's become successful. Ironic, isn't it.
In any case, I think that Linux-based companies have to be worried about survival, Linux will survive simply because there is a group of people who will never stop working on it.
The hacking museum is one of the coolest things about MIT--it gives current and former students a shared culture, and it gives new students something to aspire to. After all, what could be cooler than being imortalized in a museum of cool hacks? (And come on, MIT students: You may claim that you went there for the academics, but we all know that you all secretly want to be the Val Kilmer character from Real Genius.)
I knew of a few cool hacks that happened at my school while I was there, and I'm sure that there were cool hacks in the past, and cool hacks after I left. But these hacks are destined to fade into history until they are forgotten, which is really too bad. I sure hope someone at MIT wises up and does everything possible to keep the museum alive and opened; it would be a shame for them to lose something that makes the school unique and cool.
While The Art of Unix Programming is a fun to read, I think that it's actually pretty devoid of useful content. With a name starting with "The Art Of...", I was hoping for something more technically oriented. Knuth set the standard with his classic The Art of Computer Programming; perhaps a discussion of standard Unix APIs, services, etc is what I wanted. (But I guess Richard Stevens covered this already in Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment.)
Instead, we're getting a slightly gussied up advocacy piece, which really isn't much more than a retread of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, with a dash of superficial advice thrown in. As a UNIX programmer, I've found the existing chapters to be useless--I already believe in the UNIX way, and there's nothing concrete in there I don't already know. There are little hints of goodness, but so far, no topic has been covered simply enough to be useful to a novice, or in sufficient depth to be of value to an expert.
I guess I'm not in the intended audience--this really is a book for people relatively new to UNIX. But I wish Raymond had chosen a title which was more honest and less pretentious. I guess the "Who should read this book" is honest on what the book covers, but I was still disappointed. Perhaps the title "The Art of..." set my expectations too high.
Calling the DES replacement AES is like naming a specific product "new" or "ultimate".
I always thought the same thing about the "Very Large" qualifier in VLSI, or the V and U in VHF and UHF.
Five years later it isn't
new, and what are you going to call its replacement?
I take your point about the name getting obsolete, but as an aside: AES will probably last longer than just 5 years. (DES lasted as a standard for a LONG time, much after most people thought it should have. Hopefully AES won't be thought of as weak for a long time.)
As a full time employee of a high-tech company, my question is:
where are we supposed to get cheap labor, if we can't use high school co-op students? I certainly don't want to do it.
I know this sounds likes like a smarmy dismissal of the question, but there really are some crappy jobs that need doing, and somebody's got to do them. Perhaps you should look into trying to automate these boring tasks (Perl, Python, VB, whatever makes sense in your environment) and not only will this make your life more interesting, you'll learn something in the process.
Also of interest: Three of the ideas they were floating before test groups. Personally, I think that the "Star Trek 90210" series sounded so bad that it's good, but I guess I'm in the minority.
This ia a little piece of history dealing with CCSO and UIUC dorm room servers.
Back in the stone ages, sometime in the 1993 or 1994 time frame, there was isr1022.urh.uiuc.edu. CCSO had ceased to carry the alt.binaries.* newsgroups, so one enterprising student with a 486 and 1.8 Gigs of hard drive space paid for an off-campus newsgroup feed and mirrored those groups. To make his and other's lives easier, he even used AUB to decode the newsgroups and made the resultant binaries available via FTP and HTTP.
Mind you, as a responsible network citizen, he limited access to the uiuc.edu domain. Still, at one point, he was doing 5 Gigs of traffic a day. The machine ran Slackware Linux and had the world's cheapest NE2000 10BaseT ethernet card ever. Even so, it rocked, and had pretty awesome response times. (BTW, 1.8 Gigs of HD space cost something like $800 back in those days)
I've heard that CCSO used to make up these pie charts that showed bandwidth by subnet. However, there was one slice of the pie that was notable, because instead of a subnet, it was a single machine: isr1022.
The other notable thing was that CCSO had refused to carry those newsgroups because of the "drain on resources". However, a crappy little 486 (albeit with a big ass hard drive) was able to handle resultant traffic with relative ease, so even back then, linux kicked ass.
In any case, I suspect that this machine got CCSO and URH thinking about what would happen when everybody had the ability to set up a server like this, and that today's 500M cap is a result of that thinking.
It seems rather shortsighted for the hard drive manufacturers to be trying to help put in place copyright protections, because, and let's be frank here, 'illegal' media has fueled their industry for years.
If people didn't have gigs of mp3s, pr0n, and pirated software, the market for huge hard drives would be much, much smaller. (Yes, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for needing a 80G drive, but 9 out of 10 people walking out of Best Buy with a 80G hard drive are going to use it for mp3s.)
Fortunately, I still believe that most corporations value $$ over everything else, and it will eventually dawn on them that even attempting such protections is against their bottom line.
Microsoft spends something like four billion dollars a year on research. Until now, the only useful thing I've really seen come out of that research was the Optical Intellimouse.
But I have to say that I've just tried the WM8 stuff, and it's pretty good. Actually, it's better than that--it's scary good. The audio compression blows away RealAudio, and although I've only listened to the few samples available, seems to be able to rival mp3 quality with a much better compression ratio. The video is pretty good (although I think that 'DVD quality' is a stretch--I easily noticed artifacts that I wouldn't tolerate on a DVD.)
That must have freaked you out. I actually read it as "Freenet has been destroyed by the content that it carries." Of course, that's not what the article is about. I'd suggest a better title would have been "Categorizing Freenet content."
Maybe from the magnetic field around? It's like the space tethers work: if you
pump electricity into them they'll push you up by reacting with planet's magnetic
field.
Actually, this isn't "reactionless"--as you use the earth's magnetic field to push off, you push the planet in the opposite direction. (After all, it's pushing against YOUR magetic field.) This obviously has its uses, but has limits as well--if there's no planet with a strong magnetic field in the vicinity, and if it's not oriented the way you need, you're not going anywhere.
I also don't think that's what the article is talking about-- after all, your idea of a space tether works fine without having to resort to any mumbo-jumbo about 'judder'. A true reactionless drive would indeed be a breakthrough, but as I mentioned in another response, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
It's possible that waving your hands and pointing frantically to Newton's 3rd law
is limiting your thinking, just like living in the rennaisance limited him... Maybe
challenging old precepts that make use of grand generalization (read: "every
force") will get you somewhere.
Certainly blind and unquestioning devotion to Newton is contrary to the healthy skepticism that fuels science. But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The article presented no evidence, no explanation, at all.
For those of you who are trying to remember exactly what law of physics this violates, it's Newton's Third Law of Motion, For every force there is an equal and opposite force. This means if you don't have something to push off from, you can't go anywhere. (Just for those few of us from the slow class: You can push out a stream of high pressure rocket fuel byproducts, which is how these things usually work.)
I don't see how an asymmetric magnetic field and superconductors help you out--where's the opposite and equal force supposed to come from? It's hard to see how the thing COULD do anything but 'sit there and vibrate'.
Obviously, people would try to get things like "www.goatse.kids" into the.kids domain all the time. It would be a constant battle, and the owners of.kids might be responsible for anything which slips through, which would make it a risky thing to own.
But the real problem isn't the clear-cut cases, it's the weird fringe ones. Should you let a site like Jessi The Kid onto the.kids domain, even though it's creepy as hell? How about Child Supermodels which seems to be another creep out site?
And it doesn't even have to get that creepy. On yesterday's Powerpuff Girls marathon, one episode involved the Mayor being naked, and they showed his animated, nude, behind. It was clearly funny, but when some lameass parent in Butfux, Nebraska complains about it, does www.powerpuff.kids get taken out of that domain?
How is this offtopic? Cliff obviously let the article sit on his desk for a week, and when he finally got around to posting it, it was a little late. Just giving him a little friendly advice, as well as pointing the events to people who didn't pick them up on their own. BTW, as a lifelong procrastinator myself, I understand how this stuff happens.
I mean, I've posted some offtopic stuff, but considering that the lead article itself is wrong at this point, this seemed pretty on the money to me.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we've done an article on this before, but I don't see it in the archives...
Let me be the first to congratulate you with a hearty handshake for being the first Slashdot editor to check the archives before posting! <grin>
It's commonly accepted nowadays that the Net's traditional forms of advertising (banners, pop-ups and spam) have a very low success rate
As it turns out, the click-thru rate on my television and radio is exactly zero, which when compared to web click-thru results seems pretty abysmal. Yet people still buy tv and radio ads.
I thought the purposes of advertising was to raise the profile of your product; when I keep hearing "Drink Coke" all day, I'm more likely to think "Coke" when the question "What do you want to drink?" comes up.
By this measure, I think that web advertising might be just as successful as traditional advertising. However, somebody set us up the meme that a web ad that doesn't result in click-thru is ineffective. I find this reasoning inconsistent. You're going to have to prove to me that they're less effective than traditional magazine and newspaper ads, but until then, I find the "low success rate" argument a falacy.
This is offtopic, but I can't help myself.
I've submitted three stories to slashdot that were rejected, only to be posted days later, after someone else also re-submitted it.
This pisses me off more than it should. The slashdot editors have to sort through a lot of crap submissions, so I understand why they might be quick to dismiss. But it still feels like an insult to me anyway.
The slashdot FAQ answers that they don't want to add a "reason" column because that might cost them a lot of time (sure, it's just a little time each submission, but there are a lot). On the other hand, I think that the slashdot editors are ignoring the harm they are doing to their own community--I'll certainly be less likely to submit that cool story next time, since it's probably just going to be quickly dismissed. In an ideal world, they would have a reason for rejection, and perhaps even a name. (They would also automatically run ispell on all stories, as well as have peer review by another editor who cross-checks against old stories, but that's another topic.) This would take more time, but there are legions of layed-off dot-com employees begging to be hired to do just this sort of thing.
Just my two cents. At least know that you're not alone thinking that story rejection and posting is capricious and inconsistent.
George Broussard of 3D Realms stated earlier this year that he opposed people taking their own screenshots and posting them on the web or using those shots in magazines. His interest, of course, is to prevent crappy screenshots from making his games look like crap.
But of course, the problem with his position is that unethical game developers might try to start passing off touched-up photos as the real deal. I guess we should thank Microsoft (king of the unethical) for proving this point. Good, uncensored reviews are important for the consumer; then it doesn't matter if the screenshots coming out of MS are fake. Informed consumers will be able to seek out and find the truth out for themselves.
Uninformed consumers, of course, will still be duped, but they already get duped by crappy games in great looking boxes covered with screenshots of pre-rendered cut scenes.
Why's it so surprising that there's tons of black holes out there?
I agree: it doesn't seem very surprising. But this leads us to the opposite question: Why's there so much non-black hole stuff out there? According to the article, black holes were much more active in the past. Why did the situation change?
I thought my sarcasm was pretty good, thank you very much.
Perhaps my bile was uncalled for, but I'm sick of people implying "good design is easy, why doesn't someone just do it?"
Good design and usability are difficult. Do you think that the industry doesn't know that billions of dollars and instant fame and fortune are at stake here? Do you think that the industry doesn't try really, really hard to get that money?
There's a right way to criticize usablity--one author who does it right is Donald Norman (I'm sure there are others, but on this topic I've only read Mr. Norman's books). He manages to carefully consider what is wrong with a designs, discusses the alternatives, and points out how usablity could be improved.
There's also a wrong way. Say something "Why can't my computer be as easy to use as a toilet?" God, I'm getting pissed off again. What's the feature list of that toilet? And what's the feature list of your computer; can you even hope to cover that list in any amount of detail? In fact, does your computer actually even have a standing feature list, or do you actively install new software (and thus new features) constantly? Dammit, everybody who uses a computer has complex needs--I have a web browser, an email client, a remote telnet session, an mp3 player, and a "find file" all open RIGHT now, and I suspect that I'm pretty tame compared to the average slashdot reader. I'm going to play an online game with friends in another state shortly. I could spend hours describing what I want EACH ONE of these to do. I happen to think that all facts considered, the usability is pretty good. (And I might add: Damn, it's cool to live in the year 2001. This stuff rocks.)
Are things perfect? Of course not. One company has a monopoly on the desktop market and has very little incentive to innovate (in spite of their claims the contrary) and every incentive to continue to keep the status quo. Yes, the "START" button is retarded. Should we strive to improve the state-of-the art? Of course. Would it be awesome if it was easier to do my taxes? Sure, but are you absolutely you want the automated solution you described when it sacrifices transparency (are you sure your taxes were done correctly in that system) and possibly privacy (who's keeping track of all that information flowing between your income-payers and the government?) I actually think that TurboTax made my taxes about as easy as I'd like--it asked me a simple set of questions, I answered, and it was done. Any easier, and I'm not sure I'd completely trust it.
I actually don't know why you're arguing, since in at least one respect, you agreed with me. You said:
Simplicity of interface, sheer useability, takes a lot of talent, skill and creativity.
If you think about it, the article in question basically said these are all trivial, require little skill or talent, and they said it with a condescending attitude. It's actually really really hard. Dismissing the problem is unwarranted and deserves and equally scathing reply.
Dammit, I hate these fuckers.
First of all, they contradict themselves. "Computers are too hard," they whine, but when a computer interface remains consistent and usable for twenty years, "If Rip Van Wrinkle went to sleep in 1982 and woke up today, he'd be able to drive our modern computers with no problem because they're essentially unchanged".
Second, they recommend creating "simpler" and "distributed" devices instead of monolithic boxes that do everything. What the hell does this mean, what devices really need more intelligence? All I can think of is one of those computerized thermostats. Whoopee.
Look. Computers are complex because your needs are complex. Worse yet, my complex needs are inconsistent the needs of others. Try to download mp3s on your toaster. Try to do your taxes while downloading porn while instant messaging your friend in France while checking the weather on one of their great appliances. Try to use that "more intelligent than a computer" airport toilet to write up your Powerpoint slides, you pompus pricks.
Actually, in this case, that might have actually worked.
Easy. Nothing.
Hold on, Captain Mods-Me-Down, I have a good point here.
Linux will survive no matter what. First, ask yourself: "What is Linux, anyway?" There are many ways you could answer that, but this time, I'll answer it this way: It's an operating system that's written by a dedicated cadre of highly skilled, super-intelligent, uber-geeks. They create it for themselves, because they need it for themselves.
Now ask yourself: How can you stop them? I don't think you actually can. Outmarket them? They don't care, the kernel-hackers keep on creating. Make strategic alliances, meta-conglomerate mega deals that lock linux out? The kernel-hackers keep on creating, still ceasing to care. In fact, short of taking away their computers, the uberhackers will continue to hack no matter what the rest of the world does.
The funny part is that in spite of their lack of caring about market success, Linux has become a huge market success. Now that I think about it, that might even be the REASON it's become successful. Ironic, isn't it.
In any case, I think that Linux-based companies have to be worried about survival, Linux will survive simply because there is a group of people who will never stop working on it.
The hacking museum is one of the coolest things about MIT--it gives current and former students a shared culture, and it gives new students something to aspire to. After all, what could be cooler than being imortalized in a museum of cool hacks? (And come on, MIT students: You may claim that you went there for the academics, but we all know that you all secretly want to be the Val Kilmer character from Real Genius.)
I knew of a few cool hacks that happened at my school while I was there, and I'm sure that there were cool hacks in the past, and cool hacks after I left. But these hacks are destined to fade into history until they are forgotten, which is really too bad. I sure hope someone at MIT wises up and does everything possible to keep the museum alive and opened; it would be a shame for them to lose something that makes the school unique and cool.
While The Art of Unix Programming is a fun to read, I think that it's actually pretty devoid of useful content. With a name starting with "The Art Of...", I was hoping for something more technically oriented. Knuth set the standard with his classic The Art of Computer Programming; perhaps a discussion of standard Unix APIs, services, etc is what I wanted. (But I guess Richard Stevens covered this already in Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment.)
Instead, we're getting a slightly gussied up advocacy piece, which really isn't much more than a retread of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, with a dash of superficial advice thrown in. As a UNIX programmer, I've found the existing chapters to be useless--I already believe in the UNIX way, and there's nothing concrete in there I don't already know. There are little hints of goodness, but so far, no topic has been covered simply enough to be useful to a novice, or in sufficient depth to be of value to an expert.
I guess I'm not in the intended audience--this really is a book for people relatively new to UNIX. But I wish Raymond had chosen a title which was more honest and less pretentious. I guess the "Who should read this book" is honest on what the book covers, but I was still disappointed. Perhaps the title "The Art of..." set my expectations too high.
Calling the DES replacement AES is like naming a specific product "new" or "ultimate".
I always thought the same thing about the "Very Large" qualifier in VLSI, or the V and U in VHF and UHF.
Five years later it isn't new, and what are you going to call its replacement?
I take your point about the name getting obsolete, but as an aside: AES will probably last longer than just 5 years. (DES lasted as a standard for a LONG time, much after most people thought it should have. Hopefully AES won't be thought of as weak for a long time.)
As a full time employee of a high-tech company, my question is: where are we supposed to get cheap labor, if we can't use high school co-op students? I certainly don't want to do it.
I know this sounds likes like a smarmy dismissal of the question, but there really are some crappy jobs that need doing, and somebody's got to do them. Perhaps you should look into trying to automate these boring tasks (Perl, Python, VB, whatever makes sense in your environment) and not only will this make your life more interesting, you'll learn something in the process.
There was some information on aint-it-cool-news last year:
TREK TV Series 5 to be called ENTERPRISE?
A Fifth life for the Star Trek TV Series?
Also of interest: Three of the ideas they were floating before test groups. Personally, I think that the "Star Trek 90210" series sounded so bad that it's good, but I guess I'm in the minority.
This ia a little piece of history dealing with CCSO and UIUC dorm room servers.
Back in the stone ages, sometime in the 1993 or 1994 time frame, there was isr1022.urh.uiuc.edu. CCSO had ceased to carry the alt.binaries.* newsgroups, so one enterprising student with a 486 and 1.8 Gigs of hard drive space paid for an off-campus newsgroup feed and mirrored those groups. To make his and other's lives easier, he even used AUB to decode the newsgroups and made the resultant binaries available via FTP and HTTP.
Mind you, as a responsible network citizen, he limited access to the uiuc.edu domain. Still, at one point, he was doing 5 Gigs of traffic a day. The machine ran Slackware Linux and had the world's cheapest NE2000 10BaseT ethernet card ever. Even so, it rocked, and had pretty awesome response times. (BTW, 1.8 Gigs of HD space cost something like $800 back in those days)
I've heard that CCSO used to make up these pie charts that showed bandwidth by subnet. However, there was one slice of the pie that was notable, because instead of a subnet, it was a single machine: isr1022.
The other notable thing was that CCSO had refused to carry those newsgroups because of the "drain on resources". However, a crappy little 486 (albeit with a big ass hard drive) was able to handle resultant traffic with relative ease, so even back then, linux kicked ass.
In any case, I suspect that this machine got CCSO and URH thinking about what would happen when everybody had the ability to set up a server like this, and that today's 500M cap is a result of that thinking.
It seems rather shortsighted for the hard drive manufacturers to be trying to help put in place copyright protections, because, and let's be frank here, 'illegal' media has fueled their industry for years.
If people didn't have gigs of mp3s, pr0n, and pirated software, the market for huge hard drives would be much, much smaller. (Yes, there are plenty of legitimate reasons for needing a 80G drive, but 9 out of 10 people walking out of Best Buy with a 80G hard drive are going to use it for mp3s.)
Fortunately, I still believe that most corporations value $$ over everything else, and it will eventually dawn on them that even attempting such protections is against their bottom line.
Microsoft spends something like four billion dollars a year on research. Until now, the only useful thing I've really seen come out of that research was the Optical Intellimouse.
But I have to say that I've just tried the WM8 stuff, and it's pretty good. Actually, it's better than that--it's scary good. The audio compression blows away RealAudio, and although I've only listened to the few samples available, seems to be able to rival mp3 quality with a much better compression ratio. The video is pretty good (although I think that 'DVD quality' is a stretch--I easily noticed artifacts that I wouldn't tolerate on a DVD.)
That must have freaked you out. I actually read it as "Freenet has been destroyed by the content that it carries." Of course, that's not what the article is about. I'd suggest a better title would have been "Categorizing Freenet content."
Maybe from the magnetic field around? It's like the space tethers work: if you pump electricity into them they'll push you up by reacting with planet's magnetic field.
Actually, this isn't "reactionless"--as you use the earth's magnetic field to push off, you push the planet in the opposite direction. (After all, it's pushing against YOUR magetic field.) This obviously has its uses, but has limits as well--if there's no planet with a strong magnetic field in the vicinity, and if it's not oriented the way you need, you're not going anywhere.
I also don't think that's what the article is talking about-- after all, your idea of a space tether works fine without having to resort to any mumbo-jumbo about 'judder'. A true reactionless drive would indeed be a breakthrough, but as I mentioned in another response, extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
It's possible that waving your hands and pointing frantically to Newton's 3rd law is limiting your thinking, just like living in the rennaisance limited him... Maybe challenging old precepts that make use of grand generalization (read: "every force") will get you somewhere.
Certainly blind and unquestioning devotion to Newton is contrary to the healthy skepticism that fuels science. But extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. The article presented no evidence, no explanation, at all.
For those of you who are trying to remember exactly what law of physics this violates, it's Newton's Third Law of Motion, For every force there is an equal and opposite force. This means if you don't have something to push off from, you can't go anywhere. (Just for those few of us from the slow class: You can push out a stream of high pressure rocket fuel byproducts, which is how these things usually work.)
I don't see how an asymmetric magnetic field and superconductors help you out--where's the opposite and equal force supposed to come from? It's hard to see how the thing COULD do anything but 'sit there and vibrate'.
Finally, we can get a new Sailor Moon senshi!
Obviously, people would try to get things like "www.goatse.kids" into the .kids domain all the time. It would be a constant battle, and the owners of .kids might be responsible for anything which slips through, which would make it a risky thing to own.
But the real problem isn't the clear-cut cases, it's the weird fringe ones. Should you let a site like Jessi The Kid onto the .kids domain, even though it's creepy as hell? How about Child Supermodels which seems to be another creep out site?
And it doesn't even have to get that creepy. On yesterday's Powerpuff Girls marathon, one episode involved the Mayor being naked, and they showed his animated, nude, behind. It was clearly funny, but when some lameass parent in Butfux, Nebraska complains about it, does www.powerpuff.kids get taken out of that domain?
Down at the bottom of the article in question, there's a bit of text that reads:
Whoops.
How is this offtopic? Cliff obviously let the article sit on his desk for a week, and when he finally got around to posting it, it was a little late. Just giving him a little friendly advice, as well as pointing the events to people who didn't pick them up on their own. BTW, as a lifelong procrastinator myself, I understand how this stuff happens.
I mean, I've posted some offtopic stuff, but considering that the lead article itself is wrong at this point, this seemed pretty on the money to me.
Cliff, you gotta stop letting these things sit on your desk for a week before posting, or this sort of embarassing stuff happens.