That's the crux of the issue, most customers of hosting companies are NOT IT professionals. Right, but I'm sure that most customers of hosting companies HAVE used Windows, and seen first-hand the potential problems computers can have. You suggest that these people discount their personal experience. That's definitely a personal problem.
It's the hosting company's job to know that backups are critical But is it their job to provide it, especially when the customer didn't ask for it and wasn't promised it? Suppose El Cheapo hosting's "hook" is "the cheapest hosting around." Their contract specifies exactly what you get - file space, a domain, some logins, and a net connection. The customers sign on the dotted line. Why should El Cheapo take it upon themselves to do ANYTHING that the customer didn't pay for? More on this point later...(*)
Most hosting customers ARE quite familiar with BSOD and GPF. They just assume that it's because they did something wrong I would disagree with your assertion. Most of the businesspeople I have worked with blame themselves last, regardless of the situation: their computers crash, they don't make their computer crash. Regardless, I don't think it's the problem of the web hosting company if a customer discounts their own experience.
The customer doesn't want to be lied to Have you EVER had to deal with the public in the capacity of telling them when something would be fixed, whether it was lawnmowers, TVs, or computers? People DO NOT want to hear "Oh, we've got quite a backlog, we can't get to this until next week" - they get really ticked really fast. On the other hand, they are really happy if you say "Yeah, we'll get to this and have it done by tomorrow afternoon." If you ask them, they won't say "yes, we want to be lied to," but their behavior says otherwise - they prefer to hear lies to truth. Oh, and when they call back tomorrow afternoon
The customer's mistake is in failing to realise how profoundly unprofessional some 'professional' hosting companies really are Quite the contrary; the customer's mistake is in failing to understand what they need, and failing to specify those needs in the contract. Is it the customer's fault that they didn't look out for their own best interests when those interests may have collided with the interests of the vendor? ABSOLUTELY! It is always in a seller's best interest to minimize what they deliver. This interest generall conflicts with the buyer's interest in getting the most for their money. Any buyer who doesn't realize this needs to exit the business world FAST.
There have been many firms who have made millions by offering good-enough product for less money than their competition; naturally, they had to cut costs somewhere in order to afford lower costs, and quality control is an easy place to do that. (OB MS slam: Microsoft is a prime example) "You get what you pay for" is common knowledge, though not always accurate. In this case I would say that it was definitely true.
Though it certainly sounds like it, I'm not trying to justify scurrilous business practices. I'm merely pointing out that they exist, and that people are STUPID to ignore the fact. People are also STUPID to make business decisions when they haven't the slightest idea what they are doing. At the very least, this has been an educational experience for some people; next time, maybe they'll know to drive a harder bargain. or maybe not; maybe they figure that they'll take the cheapest web hosting they can get, and they'll take their chances, too.
A week of downtime is what is unacceptable. Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?. If it is in your contract, then they took your money and lied about what you'd get - time to sue sue sue.
Data is fundamental to running a business. If a business loses data, it loses money. Since it is a given that systems will fail, backups are a requirement for businesses. Any business that cuts costs here will eventually learn why it's bad. If they're lucky, it will be a painful lesson; often the lesson is a fatal one.
The reason why backups are fundamental to sys administration is because the sysadmin is responsible for the data - like you said, lose the data, lose your job.
I would ask all of these companies, (all the people who signed contracts with the web hosting services) "Have you ever used a computer?" Any professional in the IT industry should know that computers are not 100% reliable, and anyone who has ever used a PC will have seen a few GPFs, or BSODs. When you contract with someone to provide computer services, you don't ask them "Do your systems crash?" You ask them "What do you do when the system crashes?"
Unfortunately, most people want to be lied to. Despite the fact that it's an OBVIOUS lie, that anyone with an ounce of common sense would disbeliev, they want to hear "Our systems never crash." If they don't hear that, they keep on looking until they find someone who will promise that. Of course, there's never anything like that actually in the contract...
If by "languages for morons" you mean "Written so that even morons can do something useful", I disagree. Granted, I can take anyone with half a brain cell and teach them to make a cute little "Hello, World!" program within 30 minutes. Given another 30 minutes, I can have them designing fairly complex dialog boxes.
But have you ever tried to produce something truly useful out of VB? It is useless for everything except Windows programming, and it is useless in Windows unless you know how to use all the @*&$ing objects that come with it. The language itself is simple enough, I'll admit, which is about as relevant as saying the English alphabet is simple. Written for morons? Not likely. Designed by morons? Apparently.
Sorry; you're wrong. It is legal - and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court - for law enforcement to seize property which has been used in the commission of a crime, regardless of the involvement of the property owner. This has been used most frequently in connection with drug laws. So you're driving down the street with a friend, you're pulled over for speeding, and a joint falls out of your friends pocket. Your car can be seized; you lose it and are not compensated. You host a party, a guy crashes the party and sells crack to a couple of party-goers. He's busted by a plain-clothes cop who also crashed the party. Law enforcement authorities can seize the house - you lose it with no compensation.
The Supreme Court ruled that this is a civil action against property, not a criminal action against property-owners, and is therefore not subject to a whole boatload of civil-rights protections. I know of one case where a 70-year-old woman lost her home because her son was making crystal meth in the basement. "How could she not know about it?" you ask. She had no sense of smell, she couldn't use stairs, she was half deaf, and half blind. Her son moved in (as far as she knew) to take care of her. A more cognizant question might be "How COULD she know about it?" This was a neighbor of my grandfather, and I have no idea how the story ended - she lost the house and we never heard from her (or her son) again.
I'm going off memory here (and it's been awhile), but I Godwin's law has nothing to do with winning or losing. It merely states that the probability of Hitler being mentioned in a thread is proportional to the nubmer of messges in the thread; as the thread grows, the probability of Hitler being mentioned approaches 1.
the Web is moving faster than anyone can keep up. So you can never have a total history.
This is true regardless of the area you are trying to chronicle. There are 6E9 people in the world right now. A chronicle of any individual life would fill bookshelves. Any abstraction of these lives is limited. If you choose to limit your abstractio to a certain small area (like the technology of the WWW), you are obviously missing WAY more than you are including. All knowedge is incomplete.
I read the first few high-rated commments before reading the story. Unless it REALLY interests me, I don't read a story until there are 50-100 comments. I never run into the problem you describe. So what if the first comment (ie the posting by the/. staff) has errors? The community fixes them.
While I think there should be some effort to avoid errors (and I'm sure there is), I don't know that the/. staff need to try to rectify it all; the posting and moderation system see to it that it will be fixed fairly quickly.
The AK-47 won't do you much good, since you're one person. When you run into a group of well-drilled expert-marksman survivalists, you'll be toast. When you run into an SUV accessorized with half-inch steel plate, you'll be toast. And roadkill. When you try taking something from a house with murder holes over the front porch, you'll be chipped meat on toast. Literally.
Come on, Slashdot people, research a story for 5 seconds before you post it.
Approximately 17 minutes after the story was posted with an incorrect URL, a correction was posted (ie the post I'm replying to). Over the next few hours, it had been moderated up. Now it's at the top of the list*. It's an amazing thing, the power of many eyeballs.
While I agree that accuracy is important, I can't help but be impressed with the self-correcting nature of the slashdot community as a whole.
I can't believe that the average person still uses it Who has made an effort to see that the average person can learn the metric system effortlessly? Certainly not the government. Some sports have; I ran track and cross country in high school and learned metric distances fairly well - the 5K, 1600m, and 3200m runs helped with that. The soft drink industry has - do you want a 1 liter, 2 liter, or 3 liter bottle of soda? Time is already metric, of course. I would think that dieters would readily convert to metric - would you rather weigh 300 pounds, or 136 kilograms?
DDT is still in widespread use outside the US. The magazine Invention & Technology has a great article about this in its latest issue. Malaria is no longer a real threat in this country, but in countries where it is, they have resisted all appeals to do away with it.
A friend of mine still uses DDT. When he heard that it was going to be taken off the market, he bought mass quantities.
Several others in this thread have already made comments amounting to "a tool is a tool", so I'll chime in with this. I have a friend who is fluent in 486 assembler (he does embedded control work). He also knows C. I ask you, why would someone who knows assembler use a compiler to create binaries?
I know how to use a screwdriver to turn screws by hand. I prefer a variable-speed drill with a screwdriver bit. A $39.95 Black & Decker works as well as a DeWalt.
Why the $1000 price tag? Simple: economies of scale.
once you have come up with the design and written the software This costs lots of money; R&D usually does.
shouldn't it be fairly inexpensive to produce a robot like this? Sure. Mass production is a wonderful thing.
When you combine the previous two with an expected market of 50 million, you can amortize R&D costs over many units - the manufacturing costs winout. However, if you expect to sell a relatively small number your R&D costs dominate.
I'm reading this in the Books section. It provides links to Amazon for purchase of books. There've been enough articles here slamming Amazon's patent practices, and enough negative comments from the/. staff that I find this hypocritical. If this was a case of necessary income, I'd understand. We all have to do things we don't like to make a living, but CmdrTaco's a millionaire now. He doesn't need the few dollars he gets for referral sales from Amazon.
The whole point of government is to serve the people. I agree inprinciple, but i disagree with your particular point. Government should serve "the people" (ie EVERYBODY - the whole group - not individuals) what they cannot provide for themselves (an army, the EPA, ambassadors, etc.) "The people" cannot generate a list of all zip codes, since only the Post Office has the information. It is reasonable to expect the government to provide us with a list of zip codes. On the other hand, given a list of zip codes, "the people" are quite capable of alphabetizing and sorting them on their own.
I would agree that if the government created a new computer system to maintain ZIP codes for governmental use, that system should either be a for the post office, then the information generated by the system should be available electronically. The marginal costs for doing this would be much lower than providing the same information on dead trees. The people who want to ftp it should get it for nearly nothing. the people who want the dead trees should pay for the printout.
I think the Government Printing Office should shrink, and some BIG ftp servers should take over some of its functions.
several of Word's quirkier features (e.g., macro language) which almost nobody uses
You picked a bad example here. Many companies use Word's macro language. Many companies like the ability to create custom features that MS will never put into Word. Many companies would see their productivity go down if they lost some of the custom features they've created and trained their employees to use. I wouldn't consider Word's macro language one of its "quirkier features" since for some of MS's customers, it is a major selling point. Especially the customers who write macro viruses...
...this should send a clear signal to all purchasing agents across the big and small companies...
This will do nothing of the sort. Companies, big and small, have the legal right to buy any software for any reason. Vendors cannot sue them for failing to follow their internal purchasing guidelines. Corel, as a vendor, can sue the DOL only because the government's purchasing guidelines the force of law, and DOL is liable if they fail to obey the law.
If ebay has their way, indexing data is equivalent to cracking into another's system illegally
I think what you meant to say was "If ebay has their way, accessing a copyrighted database and publishing information from it after explicitly being explicitly told not to is equivalent to cracking into another's system illegally."
I guess that means that we should do away with all search engines entirely... I'm afraid you're right. We're pretty close to a time when most web pages will be served up programmatically from what amount to copyrighted databases. Indexing such sites without explicit permission from the content owners would be legally risky.
According to the article, they were suing under a provision of a law originally intended to stop crackers. I think this would be legitimate IF they have asked Bidder's Edge to stop accessing their servers. I think it'd be like telling a group of people "You're all invited to my house" and then privately telling an individual in that group "I didn't mean you." if they showed up and you asked them to leave and they wouldn't then they'd be trespassing.
I'm pretty sure ebay has hired competent lawyers, and I can't imagine they'd sue over a trespass charge without laying the legal foundation for it by repeatedly telling Bidder's Edge to stay away from their servers.
1. It can't be legally suspect because of content. Oh, yes, it can. A compilation of uncopyrighted material can be copyrighted. I'm not sure what the minimum amount of material is, but I know that you can take 200 songs whose copyright has expired, publish them all as a book, and then copyright the songbook - this is how some hymnals are copyrighted.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the crux of the issue, most customers of hosting companies are NOT IT professionals.
Right, but I'm sure that most customers of hosting companies HAVE used Windows, and seen first-hand the potential problems computers can have. You suggest that these people discount their personal experience. That's definitely a personal problem.
It's the hosting company's job to know that backups are critical
But is it their job to provide it, especially when the customer didn't ask for it and wasn't promised it? Suppose El Cheapo hosting's "hook" is "the cheapest hosting around." Their contract specifies exactly what you get - file space, a domain, some logins, and a net connection. The customers sign on the dotted line. Why should El Cheapo take it upon themselves to do ANYTHING that the customer didn't pay for? More on this point later...(*)
Most hosting customers ARE quite familiar with BSOD and GPF. They just assume that it's because they did something wrong
I would disagree with your assertion. Most of the businesspeople I have worked with blame themselves last, regardless of the situation: their computers crash, they don't make their computer crash. Regardless, I don't think it's the problem of the web hosting company if a customer discounts their own experience.
The customer doesn't want to be lied to
Have you EVER had to deal with the public in the capacity of telling them when something would be fixed, whether it was lawnmowers, TVs, or computers? People DO NOT want to hear "Oh, we've got quite a backlog, we can't get to this until next week" - they get really ticked really fast. On the other hand, they are really happy if you say "Yeah, we'll get to this and have it done by tomorrow afternoon." If you ask them, they won't say "yes, we want to be lied to," but their behavior says otherwise - they prefer to hear lies to truth. Oh, and when they call back tomorrow afternoon
The customer's mistake is in failing to realise how profoundly unprofessional some 'professional' hosting companies really are
Quite the contrary; the customer's mistake is in failing to understand what they need, and failing to specify those needs in the contract. Is it the customer's fault that they didn't look out for their own best interests when those interests may have collided with the interests of the vendor? ABSOLUTELY! It is always in a seller's best interest to minimize what they deliver. This interest generall conflicts with the buyer's interest in getting the most for their money. Any buyer who doesn't realize this needs to exit the business world FAST.
There have been many firms who have made millions by offering good-enough product for less money than their competition; naturally, they had to cut costs somewhere in order to afford lower costs, and quality control is an easy place to do that. (OB MS slam: Microsoft is a prime example) "You get what you pay for" is common knowledge, though not always accurate. In this case I would say that it was definitely true.
Though it certainly sounds like it, I'm not trying to justify scurrilous business practices. I'm merely pointing out that they exist, and that people are STUPID to ignore the fact. People are also STUPID to make business decisions when they haven't the slightest idea what they are doing. At the very least, this has been an educational experience for some people; next time, maybe they'll know to drive a harder bargain. or maybe not; maybe they figure that they'll take the cheapest web hosting they can get, and they'll take their chances, too.
A week of downtime is what is unacceptable.
Is that specified in your contract? If it's not in your contract, you essentially told them that it is acceptable. If you don't require them to do it, why should they spend extra money to do it?. If it is in your contract, then they took your money and lied about what you'd get - time to sue sue sue.
Nice line there. I like to take it one step further. From all people who claim "information wants to be free", I would like the following information:
Where do you live?
If you have an alarm system, how do I disable it?
Where in your home is your computer?
When will you be away from home?
Privacy concerns can quickly become personal security concerns. It is vital that not all information become free.
Data is fundamental to running a business. If a business loses data, it loses money. Since it is a given that systems will fail, backups are a requirement for businesses. Any business that cuts costs here will eventually learn why it's bad. If they're lucky, it will be a painful lesson; often the lesson is a fatal one.
The reason why backups are fundamental to sys administration is because the sysadmin is responsible for the data - like you said, lose the data, lose your job.
I would ask all of these companies, (all the people who signed contracts with the web hosting services) "Have you ever used a computer?" Any professional in the IT industry should know that computers are not 100% reliable, and anyone who has ever used a PC will have seen a few GPFs, or BSODs. When you contract with someone to provide computer services, you don't ask them "Do your systems crash?" You ask them "What do you do when the system crashes?"
Unfortunately, most people want to be lied to. Despite the fact that it's an OBVIOUS lie, that anyone with an ounce of common sense would disbeliev, they want to hear "Our systems never crash." If they don't hear that, they keep on looking until they find someone who will promise that. Of course, there's never anything like that actually in the contract...
languages for morons (VB comes to mind)
If by "languages for morons" you mean "Written so that even morons can do something useful", I disagree. Granted, I can take anyone with half a brain cell and teach them to make a cute little "Hello, World!" program within 30 minutes. Given another 30 minutes, I can have them designing fairly complex dialog boxes.
But have you ever tried to produce something truly useful out of VB? It is useless for everything except Windows programming, and it is useless in Windows unless you know how to use all the @*&$ing objects that come with it. The language itself is simple enough, I'll admit, which is about as relevant as saying the English alphabet is simple.
Written for morons? Not likely. Designed by morons? Apparently.
Sorry; you're wrong. It is legal - and this has been upheld by the Supreme Court - for law enforcement to seize property which has been used in the commission of a crime, regardless of the involvement of the property owner. This has been used most frequently in connection with drug laws. So you're driving down the street with a friend, you're pulled over for speeding, and a joint falls out of your friends pocket. Your car can be seized; you lose it and are not compensated. You host a party, a guy crashes the party and sells crack to a couple of party-goers. He's busted by a plain-clothes cop who also crashed the party. Law enforcement authorities can seize the house - you lose it with no compensation.
The Supreme Court ruled that this is a civil action against property, not a criminal action against property-owners, and is therefore not subject to a whole boatload of civil-rights protections. I know of one case where a 70-year-old woman lost her home because her son was making crystal meth in the basement. "How could she not know about it?" you ask. She had no sense of smell, she couldn't use stairs, she was half deaf, and half blind. Her son moved in (as far as she knew) to take care of her. A more cognizant question might be "How COULD she know about it?" This was a neighbor of my grandfather, and I have no idea how the story ended - she lost the house and we never heard from her (or her son) again.
I'm going off memory here (and it's been awhile), but I Godwin's law has nothing to do with winning or losing. It merely states that the probability of Hitler being mentioned in a thread is proportional to the nubmer of messges in the thread; as the thread grows, the probability of Hitler being mentioned approaches 1.
the Web is moving faster than anyone can keep up. So you can never have a total history.
This is true regardless of the area you are trying to chronicle. There are 6E9 people in the world right now. A chronicle of any individual life would fill bookshelves. Any abstraction of these lives is limited. If you choose to limit your abstractio to a certain small area (like the technology of the WWW), you are obviously missing WAY more than you are including. All knowedge is incomplete.
I read the first few high-rated commments before reading the story. Unless it REALLY interests me, I don't read a story until there are 50-100 comments. I never run into the problem you describe. So what if the first comment (ie the posting by the /. staff) has errors? The community fixes them.
/. staff need to try to rectify it all; the posting and moderation system see to it that it will be fixed fairly quickly.
While I think there should be some effort to avoid errors (and I'm sure there is), I don't know that the
Actually, a good bonfire around any bunker will suck up enough oxygen to kill the inhabitants. This is a lot more probable than a Molotov cocktail.
The AK-47 won't do you much good, since you're one person. When you run into a group of well-drilled expert-marksman survivalists, you'll be toast. When you run into an SUV accessorized with half-inch steel plate, you'll be toast. And roadkill. When you try taking something from a house with murder holes over the front porch, you'll be chipped meat on toast. Literally.
Come on, Slashdot people, research a story for 5 seconds before you post it.
Approximately 17 minutes after the story was posted with an incorrect URL, a correction was posted (ie the post I'm replying to). Over the next few hours, it had been moderated up. Now it's at the top of the list*. It's an amazing thing, the power of many eyeballs.
While I agree that accuracy is important, I can't help but be impressed with the self-correcting nature of the slashdot community as a whole.
I can't believe that the average person still uses it
Who has made an effort to see that the average person can learn the metric system effortlessly? Certainly not the government. Some sports have; I ran track and cross country in high school and learned metric distances fairly well - the 5K, 1600m, and 3200m runs helped with that. The soft drink industry has - do you want a 1 liter, 2 liter, or 3 liter bottle of soda? Time is already metric, of course. I would think that dieters would readily convert to metric - would you rather weigh 300 pounds, or 136 kilograms?
DDT is still in widespread use outside the US. The magazine Invention & Technology has a great article about this in its latest issue. Malaria is no longer a real threat in this country, but in countries where it is, they have resisted all appeals to do away with it.
A friend of mine still uses DDT. When he heard that it was going to be taken off the market, he bought mass quantities.
Several others in this thread have already made comments amounting to "a tool is a tool", so I'll chime in with this. I have a friend who is fluent in 486 assembler (he does embedded control work). He also knows C. I ask you, why would someone who knows assembler use a compiler to create binaries?
I know how to use a screwdriver to turn screws by hand. I prefer a variable-speed drill with a screwdriver bit. A $39.95 Black & Decker works as well as a DeWalt.
Why the $1000 price tag?
Simple: economies of scale.
once you have come up with the design and written the software
This costs lots of money; R&D usually does.
shouldn't it be fairly inexpensive to produce a robot like this?
Sure. Mass production is a wonderful thing.
When you combine the previous two with an expected market of 50 million, you can amortize R&D costs over many units - the manufacturing costs winout. However, if you expect to sell a relatively small number your R&D costs dominate.
I'm reading this in the Books section. It provides links to Amazon for purchase of books. There've been enough articles here slamming Amazon's patent practices, and enough negative comments from the /. staff that I find this hypocritical. If this was a case of necessary income, I'd understand. We all have to do things we don't like to make a living, but CmdrTaco's a millionaire now. He doesn't need the few dollars he gets for referral sales from Amazon.
Isn't it interesting, then, that the way they generate buzz for their box is to port Linux to it?
The whole point of government is to serve the people.
I agree inprinciple, but i disagree with your particular point. Government should serve "the people" (ie EVERYBODY - the whole group - not individuals) what they cannot provide for themselves (an army, the EPA, ambassadors, etc.) "The people" cannot generate a list of all zip codes, since only the Post Office has the information. It is reasonable to expect the government to provide us with a list of zip codes. On the other hand, given a list of zip codes, "the people" are quite capable of alphabetizing and sorting them on their own.
I would agree that if the government created a new computer system to maintain ZIP codes for governmental use, that system should either be a for the post office, then the information generated by the system should be available electronically. The marginal costs for doing this would be much lower than providing the same information on dead trees. The people who want to ftp it should get it for nearly nothing. the people who want the dead trees should pay for the printout.
I think the Government Printing Office should shrink, and some BIG ftp servers should take over some of its functions.
several of Word's quirkier features (e.g., macro language) which almost nobody uses
You picked a bad example here. Many companies use Word's macro language. Many companies like the ability to create custom features that MS will never put into Word. Many companies would see their productivity go down if they lost some of the custom features they've created and trained their employees to use. I wouldn't consider Word's macro language one of its "quirkier features" since for some of MS's customers, it is a major selling point. Especially the customers who write macro viruses...
...this should send a clear signal to all purchasing agents across the big and small companies...
This will do nothing of the sort. Companies, big and small, have the legal right to buy any software for any reason. Vendors cannot sue them for failing to follow their internal purchasing guidelines. Corel, as a vendor, can sue the DOL only because the government's purchasing guidelines the force of law, and DOL is liable if they fail to obey the law.
If ebay has their way, indexing data is equivalent to cracking into another's system illegally
I think what you meant to say was "If ebay has their way, accessing a copyrighted database and publishing information from it after explicitly being explicitly told not to is equivalent to cracking into another's system illegally."
I guess that means that we should do away with all search engines entirely...
I'm afraid you're right. We're pretty close to a time when most web pages will be served up programmatically from what amount to copyrighted databases. Indexing such sites without explicit permission from the content owners would be legally risky.
According to the article, they were suing under a provision of a law originally intended to stop crackers. I think this would be legitimate IF they have asked Bidder's Edge to stop accessing their servers. I think it'd be like telling a group of people "You're all invited to my house" and then privately telling an individual in that group "I didn't mean you." if they showed up and you asked them to leave and they wouldn't then they'd be trespassing.
I'm pretty sure ebay has hired competent lawyers, and I can't imagine they'd sue over a trespass charge without laying the legal foundation for it by repeatedly telling Bidder's Edge to stay away from their servers.
1. It can't be legally suspect because of content.
Oh, yes, it can. A compilation of uncopyrighted material can be copyrighted. I'm not sure what the minimum amount of material is, but I know that you can take 200 songs whose copyright has expired, publish them all as a book, and then copyright the songbook - this is how some hymnals are copyrighted.