Of course, real tech support, on hearing that the application regularly crashes every ten minutes will ask questions like,
"Does it always crash after 10 minutes, for example even if you just start it and walk away?"
"How many times has it done this so far?"
"Can you make it crash at will?"
"is there anything else you or your computer does every ten minutes?"
"How much ram do you have?"
"Run it from the command line and tell me if you get any messages from the program while you're using it"
Then if none of that is enlightening, the tech support would probably ask a number of questions having to more directly with Product X.
I've done various kinds of support, and I don't believe the distribution or other differences are as important as everyone seems to think. If the user knows enough to customize their computer a lot, they will know enough to know what they've changed and what it's about. Otherwise, simple commands like "vmstat, ldconfig -v | grep..., free, df,..." will tell support enough to know if they are within support boundaries or not. Most applications won't care where files are as long as expected binaries are in the path and libraries are found the usual way. Most of this would be checked at install time. Heck, I think I'd rather support unix (not just linux) over the phone than windows or MacOS.
meaning that if you're idealogically opposed to the way a console company makes money, you're screwed out of that market.
Hell yeah. If you knowingly do business with a company you don't agree with, you're either compromising or you're a hypocrit or both.
You're not giving GNU/Linux or the rest of the Free Software world enough credit in your post. It is not impossible for a company to create a money-making yet entirely Free Software console, though it isn't likely to happen as long as people are compromising.
I didn't read the article, but I bet RMS does know all about consoles, and doesn't see any reason why they should be the way they are, and he's right. He's also right if he says the Free Software movement is opposed to their existance (as they currently exist). That doesn't mean there shouldn't be consoles, it means we want them to be free, just like everything else.
Measure twice, cut once. Think twice, act once. Comprimising your principles is the nearest thing to "selling your soul". Not doing it right the first time just means you have to do it right later and you've lost the time in between.
Nutty folks like RMS are necessary to help us decide for ourselves what our own extremes are and what the highest road we're comfortable taking is. I tip my hat to all the "crack pots" out there, whether I agree with them or not. I hope some day people say I'm too idealistic. Then I'll know my efforts are not in vain.
I know it's flamebait, I know I'm weak for caving, I know nobody is going to change their mind about anything just because of my little post, BUT...
Destructive uses for a tool don't make the tool a step backwards.
If (when?) someone developes the ultimate book scanner that can copy and compress Salon magazine fast and cheap enough to make it unstoppable, I will still chear the accomplishment. That same technology can be used to copy and compress the bible, old government documents, or the rosetta stone. Besides, content authors will be forced to find a way to make money without killing trees.
Don't fear technology, understand that with all changes there are many consequences. Take the big picture into account. Yes, the industrial revolution led to phenomenal pollution, but it also led to amazingly cheap consumer products. We as a species have not yet caught up with our own technology, but that doesn't make the technology bad. Whereas 150 years ago children died in sweatshops running looms, today everything is robotic and 90% of what you pay for at K-Mart is marketing.
You can't put the demons back in Pandora's box. Look deeper into the box and see there is also hope inside. Our salvation is in changing our own processes and mindsets to take advantage of the new technology. All of the advances we have made to save us time in the kitchen, to make food cheaper, to keep us healthier and safer have resulted in surpluses which we are squandering in the form of large useless institutions (governments, churches, lobbying orginizations, the popular media). It's not time for a revolution yet, but when it comes, it will only be possible because of technology, and it will happen so that humans can focus on the things we enjoy most: art, philosophy, and procreation.:)
What I meant was that we will pass on the cost to those customers who drive our costs up. In other words, you'd only see an increase in price if you used more, not if your neighbor does.
Short answer: people who try to make money selling bandwidth will have to pay full price for it in the first place.
As System Administrator and part owner of Got.net, I can say we will not wig out. It's true that part of our niche is over-selling or aggregating our resources: bandwidth, phone lines, modems, disk space. We operate in a similiar way to how banks do. Banks loan out about five times as much money as they have on hand. This ratio is maintained by the government. I think it's called the "prime lending rate" or something.
ISPs sell about 10 times as many dialups as they have modems, and likewise with bandwidth. It's true that if all our nailed-up customers used all their bandwidth we'd be in trouble. However, that doesn't mean we're going to charge EVERYONE more.
We buy bandwidth from our provider under a contract which provides us a minimum committed data rate, and if the lowest 95% of our traffic is over that, we are charged for our overage. We can burst our connection in San Jose at 100Mbps, but as long as 95% of our traffic is under 6Mbps, we won't have any surprises on our bill.
If one of our co-location customers uses a consistantly high amount of bandwidth, we will pass our increased costs on to that customer. If they are doing it to gain Mojo, they will probably want to sell that mojo (maybe to us?). In other words, it's the micro-payments within MojoNation that make it viable. Whereas Napster just drags down a network, prompting private and public institutions to try to block it, an increase in MojoNation traffic is accompanied with an increase in Mojo, and therefore a means for compensating all parties effected.
Most likely, as an ISP, we will be one of the early adoptors and pushers of MojoNation. It will allow us to sell bandwidth and disk space we haven't committed to our official customers yet, which will decrease waste within our company. If our MojoNation agents use too much CPU or disk space, we'll just increase our agent pricing.
Yes, critical mass will be important, but security is one of the primary reasons for its existance. Worried about someone using up your disk space? Don't worry because if they do, they have to pay for it (it costs the sender money to publish a file). Worried about someone using up all your CPU? Don't worry, because if they do, you're compensated (virtually). Worried about someone running something on your machine that you don't approve of? Can't happen as the system is currently designed, because noone (currently) provides an open-ended cpu service. You can only do searches, and you are compensated when someone uses your machine to search the network.
The major goals of mojonation are security, privacy, scalability and decentralization. Everything within the network is distributed, including trust. I may be mistaken, but I believe even the compensation medium (mojo) is going to be decentralized. There will be no federal mojo reserve or official Mojo Authority.
A lot of the goals are still unimplemented, but some of the features exist now. The best example of where this is headed is how files are published: When you publish a file it is broken up into eight blocks, any four of which can be combined to re-create the original file. Those blocks are sent out to different servers without indication of their contents.
Even if you could hold Bill Gates' nose to a CRT and show him the grim reality, he would be proud of it. His goals are different from yours. He would see a unified environment where all MS products work well together as long as they're not exposed to the internet. NT4 and Office97 are a complete solution to small office problems. If you don't do anything "unusual" they work well, and Bill would be (and should be) proud of it.
The problems we see with Microsoft are not problems in Bill's eyes. He would just shrug and say "so what". If you showed him blue screens, he'd say "Are those MS approved drivers and hardware and software on that machine?" If you showed him the 65000 bugs people like to talk about, he would say this is not unreasonable for a product of this size and scope, and that patches are forthcoming, etc etc.
My sister's husband retired from Microsoft last year, and he loves NT. He wrote a big chunk of DirectX, so he knows exactly how gnarly the code is, and he still likes it. He used Unix in college and he prefers NT.
Folks, the world is not as black and white as we want it to be.
I work for a small ISP in the bay area. We had to change DSL carriers because our previous carrier was full of incompetent people, and the process of changing carriers has taken ENTIRELY too long. All of the delay seems to be due to communication problems between management types.
In any case, even when things work well they take forever, and it's not just DSL. It's any digital line. I'm getting a T1 installed at my apartment (my employer is chipping in), and while the physical line has been setup for almost a week already, the order is still held up in provisioning, which translates into "PacBell is overloaded".
...to all the DEA agents who would be out of work.
I have a better solution: mandatory castration for all males, lock their nuts up in a safe, preserve them cryogenically (the nuts, not the boys), and when they turn 25 or 30, they can have their nuts back.
Oh, and for the sake of the religious zealots out there, require that the guys be married already to get their nuts back. And if they want a divorce, they have to have their nuts removed again, and they still have to wait a couple months before they can have their divorce.
This should cut down on gang activity, road rage, unintended pregnancy, rape, "sports scholarships", and with any luck, we'd force some lawyers and politicians to get real jobs.
Re:Kills frame-squatting dead.
on
Typosquatting
·
· Score: 1
I'd take that bet. JavaScript is pretty pervasive now, IE 5.5 is forced down the throats of everyone who doesn't know they can choose their browser. For all the rest, Netscape 4.75 is the only browser that's useable on all too many of the popular sites. It's gotten so it's easier to get a new browser than only browse low-tech sites.
"I don't agree, Taco. Someone else is making bucks off your good rep, for $15 worth of capital. At best, somebody owes you a cut of the proceeds for your blood, sweat, and tears spent making a site yonder doofus could exploit."
So? It's not taking anything from CmdrTaco or Slashdot, except perhaps causing some less than briliant individuals to think SlashDot has sold out...even more.:)
The real discrepancies here are: Banner ads are dumb and DNS is showing its age.
Banner ads are a stupid way to generate revenue because anyone who's likely to spend money will _look_ for what they want, rather than being convinced they want something by what amounts to an online billboard.
Domain names should not be typed in by hand very often. Use bookmarks and search engines. I forsee a day when there are multiple orthogonal online namespaces akin to Yahoo, and URLs will be passed around as "http://namespace/name/restofurl/". People will get used to it, and the namespaces will have short names like "xy.com", so people will say things like, "I love the recipies over at juliachild (via xy)" or "My favorite bakery has a site at SantaCruz,CA/Buttery (by city)" which would translate to http://santacruz.ca.us/buttery/.
I know it would be impossible to convince the companies to move this direction on their own, but eventually the existing namespaces will be so poluted as to be virtually useless and some alternative will prove to be far more attractive. Witness the frequent "AOL keyword" phrase in radio ads.
As for the MacDonald's analogy, I disagree with the equivalence because the cost of correcting the mistake is a lot higher in meat-space. If you tried to pull that trick, you'd get a lot more customers just because they're too lazy to go to the real McDonald's when they realize they've been fooled. Online, when you realize you've made a mistake, it's a lot easier to correct.
You are right that most people don't know or care how any of their tools work, but that's not a good thing! I've explained things like phones and cars to people and their reaction has always been something like "well that's not so complicated. Wow, why didn't anyone tell me before?" I fear people are becoming too dependant on "the system". They depend on the government to feed, cloth, house, and medicate them. They depend on their church to provide socialization, rules, etc. They depend on their mechanic to keep their cars running, they depend on the media to tell them what's cool. This is a broad over-generalization, and comes with the same caveats, but the trends are there.
I propose that people should at least know how their tools work, even if they don't maintain them. They should be able to have an intelligent conversation with their technicians. Animals specialize for efficiency, but if you over-specialize you become trapped in your role and the group is less adaptable.
I won't claim things should be harder to use, but I will claim the automatic transmission should be deprecated in favor of teaching people enough about cars so that manual transmissions are preferred.:)
Several readers have already replied to this post and made good points, but to summarize:
1. Technology to discourage deep linking exists.
2. Once published online, there's NOTHING anyone can do to prevent the content from propegating, either as a link or a copy. At least slashdot links to the site rather than doing a lynx -dump and posting that on their own site.
3. I wouldn't want it any other way. I have no interest in reading VoodooExtreme regularly to find the articles that interest me, nor would I be impressed if SlashDot posted a "there's a John Carmack interview somewhere on VoodooExtreme...go find it if you can!"
4. The issue of whether deep linking or mirroring is "wrong" is not clear-cut as you suggest with your "do the right thing" comment.
5. If VoodooExtreme asked Slashdot to remove the link, I bet Slashdot would be happy to oblige. I don't think VE cares that much. It's still publicity.
6. If I say "I saw an article in the local paper on page B6 about increasing medical costs..." I am not cheating the newspaper out of all the "page views" they would have gotten if I had left out the page number.
Even if you were right (that we were still using CISC), your rant would be mis-directed.
If a particular architechture is more efficient, it will win as long as the consumer is allowed to choose which they may use. The more efficient design, whatever it may be, will cost the consumer less in the long run (lower electric bill, longer battery life on laptops, etc). Noone wants waste. Waste exists because the market is coerced via monopolies and mis-directed government regulations.
While few will contest that humans are a very important part of ecology, the actual relationship between our actions and global warming is not decided. We don't have enough data. We should do the best we can with what we have, but the judgements you're making (seemingly against "greedy corporations") are not substantiated.
If it's even flying toaster screen savers consume enough energy to be noticable, it costs the people who power the machines. While it's true that they are costing the environment some minuscule amount, the only problem with the circle is that the cost of energy should probably be higher to account for the unknown costs of converting the original energy source into electricity.
Now even if your... argument?... weren't so tenuous, the dripping sarcasm can hardly inspire the guilty parties to change their minds. To over-simplify, this post is like a bumper-sticker that says "quit wasting, asshole!"
Yes, humans have a measureable impact on the environment. No, we don't know how how much of what's going on is within our power to manipulate. Yes, we should take full responsibility. No, angry, sarcastic, guilt-ridden rhetoric isn't getting us anywhere.
My post is probably redundant, I didn't read the others to see who said what.
Accusing MSNBC of rigging the poll is useless. It is impossible to make a useful poll online without some kind of identity management and information about the pollees. Furthermore, even if it is fixed, there's no way to tell if it's fixed by MSNBC or someone trying to make them look bad.
I haven't read it either, but I was going to say the same thing. Whether there is centralized control or not, and whether the project "organizes itself" are not related.
More to the point, the voluntary participation of all involved means that the better (from the participants' point of view) manager is available to them. If they aren't producing what he wants, he doesn't incorporate their work. If he isn't realizing their goals, they won't contribute. If the whole project is less successful from the user's point of view, they can "fix it themselves" or more likely use the product that is better for them. Don't get me wrong, I know there are bloody wars in any project, large or small. The difference is that when you're in a bad position at work, you have to consider changing your whole life to get around it. With voluntary projects you aren't forced to choose between your livelyhood and a bad manager.
Freedom of choice means none of the traditional metrics of software development matter. It doesn't matter who's code is cleaner, has less bugs, runs faster, looks better, who manages their project the best, who works the hardest, or which tastes better. You have the choice to pick the one that suits your needs, no matter what your role in the system.
This is the same mis-understanding people have about political freedoms. People seem to think that freedom is advertised as "automatically better", but that's not it at all. Freedom means you have to make your own life better, and there's noone else to blame but yourself.
Of course, this is true no matter what your environment is, but with free software and all other freedoms, there's less mis-representation. Noone is claiming to take care of you.
"Is it unfair that I have to pay more for gas in the city than out in the countryside?"
There are people who will blindly answer "yes" without any idea what's involved in selling gas. At the Oregon State Fair a few years back, my mother helped run a booth, and became aware that there were rules determining what price may be charged for soda. Apparently if you wanted to sell soda you had to sell it at the same price as everyone else who sold soda, no more, no less. This being a semi-private event which vendors participate in voluntarily, I can't complain too loudly, but I find the notion of comittee price fixing disgusting. However, it exists, and probably because someone said, "it's not fair that I should have to walk 100 yards to find a good price on Mountain Dew". Fair? Who cares? Do you want the drink or not? Do you like the price or not?
In any case, there are a lot of people out there who DO think they are the center of the universe and everything should be figured out for them because it's only "fair". Don't ask them questions to which they will be happy to give you the wrong answer.:)
What's so great about this olympic merchandise that it's worth more than the counterfit goods? If it's worthwhile to counterfit, it's because it costs way less to make it than people will pay for it. Why are people willing to spend so much on The Official Olympic Frob? Because some Australian jerked off on it?
Sports is cool, it gives us a place to research human improvements. Selling merchandise is cool, it helps pay for the whole thing. What I'm questioning is the margin the Olympics are getting for their merchandise.
'The average user will never know that it was overclocked (or even what that is), just that, "AMD makes junk!".'
There's the problem. Once the chip is in the box, they shouldn't expect AMD to control how the processor runs. If the vendor isn't overclocking, they could still be doing something else to break spec, like providing insufficient cooling or a faulty BIOS. In your example, the user should say "Micron makes junk!", which is true.:P
Demand quality from your vendor, not your vendor's vendor. There's nothing your vendor's vendor can do to police your vendor, nor should they.
"While the novice computer user that buys these secretly OC'ed systems isn't any the wiser."
If the OEM modifies the chip or runs it out of spec, AMD is absolved if the chip fails. Consumers need to hold vendors accountable to the claims _they_ make. If the vendor says their computer (regardless of chip) will run for 1 year without crashing, whether it does or doesn't is their problem. Whether they overclock the CPU or whatever is between them and their bottom line.
Why do people look to big entities like God, The Government, and AMD to protect them from loss? You're the only one who can protect you, and even that's not guarenteed. It's just as greedy of the consumer to expect a purchase to include more than it claims as it is for the vendor to run hardware out of spec.
----
I think AMD is trying to protect its brandname by making it as difficult as possible to make their chips unstable, but I also think they are fighting a futile battle. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, real tech support, on hearing that the application regularly crashes every ten minutes will ask questions like,
..., free, df, ..." will tell support enough to know if they are within support boundaries or not. Most applications won't care where files are as long as expected binaries are in the path and libraries are found the usual way. Most of this would be checked at install time. Heck, I think I'd rather support unix (not just linux) over the phone than windows or MacOS.
"Does it always crash after 10 minutes, for example even if you just start it and walk away?"
"How many times has it done this so far?"
"Can you make it crash at will?"
"is there anything else you or your computer does every ten minutes?"
"How much ram do you have?"
"Run it from the command line and tell me if you get any messages from the program while you're using it"
Then if none of that is enlightening, the tech support would probably ask a number of questions having to more directly with Product X.
I've done various kinds of support, and I don't believe the distribution or other differences are as important as everyone seems to think. If the user knows enough to customize their computer a lot, they will know enough to know what they've changed and what it's about. Otherwise, simple commands like "vmstat, ldconfig -v | grep
meaning that if you're idealogically opposed to the way a console company makes money, you're screwed out of that market.
Hell yeah. If you knowingly do business with a company you don't agree with, you're either compromising or you're a hypocrit or both.
You're not giving GNU/Linux or the rest of the Free Software world enough credit in your post. It is not impossible for a company to create a money-making yet entirely Free Software console, though it isn't likely to happen as long as people are compromising.
I didn't read the article, but I bet RMS does know all about consoles, and doesn't see any reason why they should be the way they are, and he's right. He's also right if he says the Free Software movement is opposed to their existance (as they currently exist). That doesn't mean there shouldn't be consoles, it means we want them to be free, just like everything else.
Measure twice, cut once. Think twice, act once. Comprimising your principles is the nearest thing to "selling your soul". Not doing it right the first time just means you have to do it right later and you've lost the time in between.
Nutty folks like RMS are necessary to help us decide for ourselves what our own extremes are and what the highest road we're comfortable taking is. I tip my hat to all the "crack pots" out there, whether I agree with them or not. I hope some day people say I'm too idealistic. Then I'll know my efforts are not in vain.
I know it's flamebait, I know I'm weak for caving, I know nobody is going to change their mind about anything just because of my little post, BUT...
:)
Destructive uses for a tool don't make the tool a step backwards.
If (when?) someone developes the ultimate book scanner that can copy and compress Salon magazine fast and cheap enough to make it unstoppable, I will still chear the accomplishment. That same technology can be used to copy and compress the bible, old government documents, or the rosetta stone. Besides, content authors will be forced to find a way to make money without killing trees.
Don't fear technology, understand that with all changes there are many consequences. Take the big picture into account. Yes, the industrial revolution led to phenomenal pollution, but it also led to amazingly cheap consumer products. We as a species have not yet caught up with our own technology, but that doesn't make the technology bad. Whereas 150 years ago children died in sweatshops running looms, today everything is robotic and 90% of what you pay for at K-Mart is marketing.
You can't put the demons back in Pandora's box. Look deeper into the box and see there is also hope inside. Our salvation is in changing our own processes and mindsets to take advantage of the new technology. All of the advances we have made to save us time in the kitchen, to make food cheaper, to keep us healthier and safer have resulted in surpluses which we are squandering in the form of large useless institutions (governments, churches, lobbying orginizations, the popular media). It's not time for a revolution yet, but when it comes, it will only be possible because of technology, and it will happen so that humans can focus on the things we enjoy most: art, philosophy, and procreation.
What I meant was that we will pass on the cost to those customers who drive our costs up. In other words, you'd only see an increase in price if you used more, not if your neighbor does.
Short answer: people who try to make money selling bandwidth will have to pay full price for it in the first place.
As System Administrator and part owner of Got.net, I can say we will not wig out. It's true that part of our niche is over-selling or aggregating our resources: bandwidth, phone lines, modems, disk space. We operate in a similiar way to how banks do. Banks loan out about five times as much money as they have on hand. This ratio is maintained by the government. I think it's called the "prime lending rate" or something.
ISPs sell about 10 times as many dialups as they have modems, and likewise with bandwidth. It's true that if all our nailed-up customers used all their bandwidth we'd be in trouble. However, that doesn't mean we're going to charge EVERYONE more.
We buy bandwidth from our provider under a contract which provides us a minimum committed data rate, and if the lowest 95% of our traffic is over that, we are charged for our overage. We can burst our connection in San Jose at 100Mbps, but as long as 95% of our traffic is under 6Mbps, we won't have any surprises on our bill.
If one of our co-location customers uses a consistantly high amount of bandwidth, we will pass our increased costs on to that customer. If they are doing it to gain Mojo, they will probably want to sell that mojo (maybe to us?). In other words, it's the micro-payments within MojoNation that make it viable. Whereas Napster just drags down a network, prompting private and public institutions to try to block it, an increase in MojoNation traffic is accompanied with an increase in Mojo, and therefore a means for compensating all parties effected.
Most likely, as an ISP, we will be one of the early adoptors and pushers of MojoNation. It will allow us to sell bandwidth and disk space we haven't committed to our official customers yet, which will decrease waste within our company. If our MojoNation agents use too much CPU or disk space, we'll just increase our agent pricing.
Yes, critical mass will be important, but security is one of the primary reasons for its existance. Worried about someone using up your disk space? Don't worry because if they do, they have to pay for it (it costs the sender money to publish a file). Worried about someone using up all your CPU? Don't worry, because if they do, you're compensated (virtually). Worried about someone running something on your machine that you don't approve of? Can't happen as the system is currently designed, because noone (currently) provides an open-ended cpu service. You can only do searches, and you are compensated when someone uses your machine to search the network.
The major goals of mojonation are security, privacy, scalability and decentralization. Everything within the network is distributed, including trust. I may be mistaken, but I believe even the compensation medium (mojo) is going to be decentralized. There will be no federal mojo reserve or official Mojo Authority.
A lot of the goals are still unimplemented, but some of the features exist now. The best example of where this is headed is how files are published: When you publish a file it is broken up into eight blocks, any four of which can be combined to re-create the original file. Those blocks are sent out to different servers without indication of their contents.
It's not done yet, but it's also not a bad start.
Oh my goodness! You mean there's no such thing as a free lunch? Are you telling me everything in life has consequences? I can't believe it!
Does this mean there's no way to turn lead into gold? Is there no panacea? Is there no utopia?
Just don't tell me there are no absolutes! I couldn't stand it!
Even if you could hold Bill Gates' nose to a CRT and show him the grim reality, he would be proud of it. His goals are different from yours. He would see a unified environment where all MS products work well together as long as they're not exposed to the internet. NT4 and Office97 are a complete solution to small office problems. If you don't do anything "unusual" they work well, and Bill would be (and should be) proud of it.
The problems we see with Microsoft are not problems in Bill's eyes. He would just shrug and say "so what". If you showed him blue screens, he'd say "Are those MS approved drivers and hardware and software on that machine?" If you showed him the 65000 bugs people like to talk about, he would say this is not unreasonable for a product of this size and scope, and that patches are forthcoming, etc etc.
My sister's husband retired from Microsoft last year, and he loves NT. He wrote a big chunk of DirectX, so he knows exactly how gnarly the code is, and he still likes it. He used Unix in college and he prefers NT.
Folks, the world is not as black and white as we want it to be.
I work for a small ISP in the bay area. We had to change DSL carriers because our previous carrier was full of incompetent people, and the process of changing carriers has taken ENTIRELY too long. All of the delay seems to be due to communication problems between management types.
In any case, even when things work well they take forever, and it's not just DSL. It's any digital line. I'm getting a T1 installed at my apartment (my employer is chipping in), and while the physical line has been setup for almost a week already, the order is still held up in provisioning, which translates into "PacBell is overloaded".
Remember when 28.8k was fast? Heh heh.
...to all the DEA agents who would be out of work.
I have a better solution: mandatory castration for all males, lock their nuts up in a safe, preserve them cryogenically (the nuts, not the boys), and when they turn 25 or 30, they can have their nuts back.
Oh, and for the sake of the religious zealots out there, require that the guys be married already to get their nuts back. And if they want a divorce, they have to have their nuts removed again, and they still have to wait a couple months before they can have their divorce.
This should cut down on gang activity, road rage, unintended pregnancy, rape, "sports scholarships", and with any luck, we'd force some lawyers and politicians to get real jobs.
I'd take that bet. JavaScript is pretty pervasive now, IE 5.5 is forced down the throats of everyone who doesn't know they can choose their browser. For all the rest, Netscape 4.75 is the only browser that's useable on all too many of the popular sites. It's gotten so it's easier to get a new browser than only browse low-tech sites.
...
:)
apt-get install netscape
rpmfind
http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com/
etc
(what's a mac? is that a kind of truck?
"I don't agree, Taco. Someone else is making bucks off your good rep, for $15 worth of capital. At best, somebody owes you a cut of the proceeds for your blood, sweat, and tears spent making a site yonder doofus could exploit."
:)
So? It's not taking anything from CmdrTaco or Slashdot, except perhaps causing some less than briliant individuals to think SlashDot has sold out...even more.
The real discrepancies here are: Banner ads are dumb and DNS is showing its age.
Banner ads are a stupid way to generate revenue because anyone who's likely to spend money will _look_ for what they want, rather than being convinced they want something by what amounts to an online billboard.
Domain names should not be typed in by hand very often. Use bookmarks and search engines. I forsee a day when there are multiple orthogonal online namespaces akin to Yahoo, and URLs will be passed around as "http://namespace/name/restofurl/". People will get used to it, and the namespaces will have short names like "xy.com", so people will say things like, "I love the recipies over at juliachild (via xy)" or "My favorite bakery has a site at SantaCruz,CA/Buttery (by city)" which would translate to http://santacruz.ca.us/buttery/.
I know it would be impossible to convince the companies to move this direction on their own, but eventually the existing namespaces will be so poluted as to be virtually useless and some alternative will prove to be far more attractive. Witness the frequent "AOL keyword" phrase in radio ads.
As for the MacDonald's analogy, I disagree with the equivalence because the cost of correcting the mistake is a lot higher in meat-space. If you tried to pull that trick, you'd get a lot more customers just because they're too lazy to go to the real McDonald's when they realize they've been fooled. Online, when you realize you've made a mistake, it's a lot easier to correct.
Hm, now I feel like having McDonald's...
You are right that most people don't know or care how any of their tools work, but that's not a good thing! I've explained things like phones and cars to people and their reaction has always been something like "well that's not so complicated. Wow, why didn't anyone tell me before?" I fear people are becoming too dependant on "the system". They depend on the government to feed, cloth, house, and medicate them. They depend on their church to provide socialization, rules, etc. They depend on their mechanic to keep their cars running, they depend on the media to tell them what's cool. This is a broad over-generalization, and comes with the same caveats, but the trends are there.
:)
I propose that people should at least know how their tools work, even if they don't maintain them. They should be able to have an intelligent conversation with their technicians. Animals specialize for efficiency, but if you over-specialize you become trapped in your role and the group is less adaptable.
I won't claim things should be harder to use, but I will claim the automatic transmission should be deprecated in favor of teaching people enough about cars so that manual transmissions are preferred.
That's what I get for not previewing. I used > and < in that post.
I meant < SHIFT-8 > to be where * was before.
cd docset
Besides, none of this would even matter if DOS/NT had symlinks.
Several readers have already replied to this post and made good points, but to summarize:
1. Technology to discourage deep linking exists.
2. Once published online, there's NOTHING anyone can do to prevent the content from propegating, either as a link or a copy. At least slashdot links to the site rather than doing a lynx -dump and posting that on their own site.
3. I wouldn't want it any other way. I have no interest in reading VoodooExtreme regularly to find the articles that interest me, nor would I be impressed if SlashDot posted a "there's a John Carmack interview somewhere on VoodooExtreme...go find it if you can!"
4. The issue of whether deep linking or mirroring is "wrong" is not clear-cut as you suggest with your "do the right thing" comment.
5. If VoodooExtreme asked Slashdot to remove the link, I bet Slashdot would be happy to oblige. I don't think VE cares that much. It's still publicity.
6. If I say "I saw an article in the local paper on page B6 about increasing medical costs..." I am not cheating the newspaper out of all the "page views" they would have gotten if I had left out the page number.
Even if you were right (that we were still using CISC), your rant would be mis-directed.
... argument? ... weren't so tenuous, the dripping sarcasm can hardly inspire the guilty parties to change their minds. To over-simplify, this post is like a bumper-sticker that says "quit wasting, asshole!"
If a particular architechture is more efficient, it will win as long as the consumer is allowed to choose which they may use. The more efficient design, whatever it may be, will cost the consumer less in the long run (lower electric bill, longer battery life on laptops, etc). Noone wants waste. Waste exists because the market is coerced via monopolies and mis-directed government regulations.
While few will contest that humans are a very important part of ecology, the actual relationship between our actions and global warming is not decided. We don't have enough data. We should do the best we can with what we have, but the judgements you're making (seemingly against "greedy corporations") are not substantiated.
If it's even flying toaster screen savers consume enough energy to be noticable, it costs the people who power the machines. While it's true that they are costing the environment some minuscule amount, the only problem with the circle is that the cost of energy should probably be higher to account for the unknown costs of converting the original energy source into electricity.
Now even if your
Yes, humans have a measureable impact on the environment. No, we don't know how how much of what's going on is within our power to manipulate. Yes, we should take full responsibility. No, angry, sarcastic, guilt-ridden rhetoric isn't getting us anywhere.
My post is probably redundant, I didn't read the others to see who said what.
Accusing MSNBC of rigging the poll is useless. It is impossible to make a useful poll online without some kind of identity management and information about the pollees. Furthermore, even if it is fixed, there's no way to tell if it's fixed by MSNBC or someone trying to make them look bad.
Both the poll and the accusations are useless.
I haven't read it either, but I was going to say the same thing. Whether there is centralized control or not, and whether the project "organizes itself" are not related.
More to the point, the voluntary participation of all involved means that the better (from the participants' point of view) manager is available to them. If they aren't producing what he wants, he doesn't incorporate their work. If he isn't realizing their goals, they won't contribute. If the whole project is less successful from the user's point of view, they can "fix it themselves" or more likely use the product that is better for them. Don't get me wrong, I know there are bloody wars in any project, large or small. The difference is that when you're in a bad position at work, you have to consider changing your whole life to get around it. With voluntary projects you aren't forced to choose between your livelyhood and a bad manager.
Freedom of choice means none of the traditional metrics of software development matter. It doesn't matter who's code is cleaner, has less bugs, runs faster, looks better, who manages their project the best, who works the hardest, or which tastes better. You have the choice to pick the one that suits your needs, no matter what your role in the system.
This is the same mis-understanding people have about political freedoms. People seem to think that freedom is advertised as "automatically better", but that's not it at all. Freedom means you have to make your own life better, and there's noone else to blame but yourself.
Of course, this is true no matter what your environment is, but with free software and all other freedoms, there's less mis-representation. Noone is claiming to take care of you.
"Is it unfair that I have to pay more for gas in the city than out in the countryside?"
:)
There are people who will blindly answer "yes" without any idea what's involved in selling gas. At the Oregon State Fair a few years back, my mother helped run a booth, and became aware that there were rules determining what price may be charged for soda. Apparently if you wanted to sell soda you had to sell it at the same price as everyone else who sold soda, no more, no less. This being a semi-private event which vendors participate in voluntarily, I can't complain too loudly, but I find the notion of comittee price fixing disgusting. However, it exists, and probably because someone said, "it's not fair that I should have to walk 100 yards to find a good price on Mountain Dew". Fair? Who cares? Do you want the drink or not? Do you like the price or not?
In any case, there are a lot of people out there who DO think they are the center of the universe and everything should be figured out for them because it's only "fair". Don't ask them questions to which they will be happy to give you the wrong answer.
...is like taking pee out of a swimming pool.
-- Jimmy James, News Radio
Except most people wait until seeing a little skin before they "submit a DNA sample"
What's so great about this olympic merchandise that it's worth more than the counterfit goods? If it's worthwhile to counterfit, it's because it costs way less to make it than people will pay for it. Why are people willing to spend so much on The Official Olympic Frob? Because some Australian jerked off on it?
Sports is cool, it gives us a place to research human improvements. Selling merchandise is cool, it helps pay for the whole thing. What I'm questioning is the margin the Olympics are getting for their merchandise.
'The average user will never know that it was overclocked (or even what that is), just that, "AMD makes junk!".'
:P
There's the problem. Once the chip is in the box, they shouldn't expect AMD to control how the processor runs. If the vendor isn't overclocking, they could still be doing something else to break spec, like providing insufficient cooling or a faulty BIOS. In your example, the user should say "Micron makes junk!", which is true.
Demand quality from your vendor, not your vendor's vendor. There's nothing your vendor's vendor can do to police your vendor, nor should they.
"While the novice computer user that buys these secretly OC'ed systems isn't any the wiser."
If the OEM modifies the chip or runs it out of spec, AMD is absolved if the chip fails. Consumers need to hold vendors accountable to the claims _they_ make. If the vendor says their computer (regardless of chip) will run for 1 year without crashing, whether it does or doesn't is their problem. Whether they overclock the CPU or whatever is between them and their bottom line.
Why do people look to big entities like God, The Government, and AMD to protect them from loss? You're the only one who can protect you, and even that's not guarenteed. It's just as greedy of the consumer to expect a purchase to include more than it claims as it is for the vendor to run hardware out of spec.
----
I think AMD is trying to protect its brandname by making it as difficult as possible to make their chips unstable, but I also think they are fighting a futile battle. Oh well.