We're still stick in the old world, even with all the nice shiny technology around us.
NBC is in a world where they wish everyone watched Johnny Carson every night. Where politicians can't go on stage without flashing their wedding rings. Where they can, with impunity broadcast laughable stories from the Olympics.
They're still stuck in that world. And if you love the Olympics, so are we too.
Just came back here for sh*ts and giggles after approx 8 years.
Checked out the beta site.
Immediately my whole being relaxed. I could finally read the stories, enjoy the comments. Its so much cleaner and clearer and than before.
I'd say to the current owners of Slashdot. Make the change. Quickly.
Some of the neck-beards here would like you to run an ad-free site that looks like a circa 1985 newsgroup, while you keep taking fistfuls of money out of your wallet to run the servers and pay the employees forever without hope of any return.
Not sustainable. Not matter how we would want it like that.
You don't even know if it will be saleable. See, this is the thing that annoys the crap out of me. Right now, your product has zero value, because you have not started to sell it as yet. Absolutely zero.
Sell the darned thing first, see if people like it, if they do, then at least you have some stake in the marketplace and in any proceedings. You would have had the product out there, people may buy it, and you will have first mover advantage.
Right now, all you have is the possibility that someone "may" sue you, and thats just in your fevered imagination. Get coding boyo!
While it would be nice to have more competition in the space, the fact is that we trust Amazon with our bits now.
There are other players we could trust, but none with the sheer power of Amazon. Sure they go down once or twice a year, but hey, who among us can claim that nothing in our entire infrastructures never ever goes down?
Why would the submitter think that any other current player can keep their service growing and have the same reasonable uptimes that Amazon does? Here in the real world, we don't mind paying for crap that works. That's what makes economies run.
Really, the guys who say they host email at home because of wanting to protect their emails are dumb-asses.
The moment you send out an email, it has to land in someone else's mailbox. If you're paranoid, they're plenty of other things to be paranoid about. Email is long past the point of paranoia. You have no control over what happens to the email you send, and what happened to the copy of the email that you received (in the sender's outbox).
Yup. May be powerful and robust, but all the core is super heavy and not so easy to extend.
Don't even talk about "Joomla" and "Mambo". They're a nightmare to maintain, and a royal pain in the ASS for building an SEO friendly site with friendly URL's that don't look like a matrix reloaded computer screenshot.
Regardless of what is happening, i doubt facebook will every retire beacon. It will end up being fairly profitable for them. In fact, based on their CPM, that is probably the most profitable part of their business, and its the part that pisses off their users the most.
Really, when will mass market social network like facebook ever turn a profit? The only way to do that is to open the gates to their walled gardens. The only walled garden sites that really and truly make money are subscription based ones where you have to pay to go through the gate.
So I can tell you that these guys with powerplants will take forever to modernize to use this technology.
If you have a steady stream of income, and a reason to not go down, then you're gonna hate to do anything to cut into your profits and to also interrupt that stream of income for even a second. Inertia and income are the drivers for these plants to never, ever make any changes to benefit the environment.
News can do well to be published everyday people like us. We break stories and comment on stuff that's happening out there that ordinary reporters tend to miss.
However, many reporters are great writers, that give you the background to the story, as well as what's new happening. And reporters who are also good writers tend to make it easy and a pleasure to read.
Am I the only one underwhelmed by almost every new graphics card announcement these days?
Graphic cards have long since been really fast for 99.9999% of cases. Even gaming. These companies must be doing this for pissing contests, the few people who do super high end graphics work, or a few crazy pimply faced gamers with monitor tans
Nope. There are other alternatives.
For a long time we used apache + mongrel. Now we ditched apache and just use Litespeed, which is fabulous with rails.
I suppose its possible to go around with a camera and a microphone and log everything. But for the ethics of it, see the movie The Final Cut.
Who's gonna control your memories when you die? Do you really want to record everything, even when you cheat on your significant other? Do you really want to record when you're jacking off? Or taking a dump?
But hey, I don't watch live TV anymore, so, what fall lineup?
Seriously, one downside of Tivo'ing (or Myth'ing for the zealots) everything is that you FF through the ads and just never see the promotions for silly new shows. You also miss the movie promotions. So what then?
In my high school back in Jamaica, we all did the broad subjects until around 9th grade. Then by 10th and 11th grade (4th to 5th form there), we either chose majors, or one was foisted upon us.
For me that was a good thing. I did not chose, but I was recognized as having a good technical aptitude (based on grades), so I was sent to Tech. Tech involved Electronics, Metal Shop, Wood Shop, Technical Drafting, more Advanced Math, Biology and basic physics. Of course we also still did all the standard courses such as geography, religious sciences, literature and english (yes, different). But the courses that were double sessions were tech.
Now looking back at all my friends, it seemed that we did not have an issue with choosing careers. I bumped into a guy who was into tech a few weeks ago, and surprise! He was a tech at one of the local cellphone companies, many of my friends who were into science are now in the medical fields. And the guys who went into arts and business also tended to gravitate to those fields.
I think it definitely helped. Of course in those days (late 70's) we had excellent teachers who could get you into the right area. Teachers make a lot of difference in those situations.
I dropped out of college and went to work, but that was for other reasons. So these days, I'm hiring guys who thought they knew what they were doing when the majored in psychology in college, but turned out to be super programmers. And I'm dismissing CS majors who went into their fields and were lousy developers.
No doubt in my mind that at around 15 years old, it makes sense to help nudge the student into the general direction where they show aptitude best.
As the publisher of two fairly popular websites, this is something to worry about. Recently all our sites spread across a few dedicated servers in one data center were down. Not because of a direct DDOS attack, but because of a peripheral attack which swamped the network infrastructure at the center.
Really, if these guys decided to do more frequent DDOS attacks, anyone could be a target and calling the FBI is cold comfort since in the meantime your sites are down and out.
Remember that this has been going on in the past several election cycles, remember in the last two we had the exact kind of story on Slashdot?
Generally, larger web development corporations will tend to develop with Windows. Smaller ones with Linux or open source alternatives. This is also mirrored in funding. Dems (especially this cycle) will tend to get lots of smaller donations, while Republicans will get larger and fewer donations. Check the news stories.
It only stands to reason when, say, the McCain (or Hillary) camp wants a new website, they'll turn to the establishment crowd that they are a part of and get a largish business to do the job. This largish business would more than likely tend to do jobs for corps who run windows through and through.
Smaller funded campaigns (Ron Paul, and initially Obama, and Dean who notably used a variant of drupal) would use open source solutions because of the younger college age tilt of the immediate people surrounding them.
So yes, it does have something to do with the candidates themselves, and almost perfectly mirrors what kind of people they hang around with -- and thus what their positions as candidates will be in relation to business and choice, even if it was the candidates proxies that made that choice for them.
I've discovered google bookmarks, and nothing beats bookmarking at work and going home or using the laptop to pickup where I left off. Places is a quantum leap behind that. You can use del.icio.us bookmarks and that toolbar too. Unless all you ever use is a single computer, I really don't see a good reason for Places.
Using Places is like paying per minute for domestic long distance, you can do it, buy why?
This is just a sign that the days of the white shirtsleeves are fast coming to an end. Several years ago, I interviewed for a programming position at a major wall street firm in New York. This IT department was filled with guys and gals in formal wear (coats, ties, long sleeve shirts etc). They were mostly banging out Perl and the pre-cursors to.net.
Yeah, the waste was incredible, and in I was glad I didn't get the job (regex skills weren't worth a damn those days -- who was I fooling?). I started working in a smaller shop dot-bomb shop and my regex skills improved overnight... this is all besides the point though:-)
Many of you here have worked on one project or another and you know that they frequently overrun both in terms of time and costs, and customer requirements that change even if no change was mandated in the contract. Can you imagine a few thousand projects like that in the IBM Global group? I can, and its a nightmare. Even though they charge the customers a mint, they must still be dramatically decreasing the size of their profits hand over foot.
But that pales in comparison, because we're into the era where you can now advertise on one of the popular tech blogs or Craigs List for your own people to come in, ramp up, do your project (you make the mistakes), ramp down and go into maintenance mode. Your contractors can also SSH in and make changes and tweaks from anywhere in the world, or in Pittsburg Pennsylvania (if you prefer to hire nationwide).
IBM Global is a holdover from pre-internet days when you contracted with a company to make a monolithic application that ran only on the Windows desktop or on your mainframe. Many corporate apps now run on an intranet in the browser and mostly consist of small apps that connect to the old monolithic applications. Heck, a friend of mine spent time hacking drivers that would connect through green screen terminal connections and get the data he wanted to spit out in html. Dare to make an app that only works in IE? Look to be embarassed in slashdot the next day.
Much time is spent talking about the latest version of thunderbird, or outlook, but the writing is on the wall. We're inexorably heading to the point where those kind of apps are moving to the way of the dodo bird. The future is gmail-like/google-like-apps for the majority of us. They just could not keep up.
I mean, come on. People just want a pill to fix their woes. How many times have you met someone that you know have a condition that can be easily fixed through diet and exercise alone?
Besides cancers and other similar conditions, most problems facing the health care industry are caused by lack of exercise and eating the wrong kinds of food, and its a hard thing for people to change. And generally health care professionals are afraid to give definitive health advice because of the opportunity of lawsuits. How many times have doctors told patients that they should "reduce" instead of "eliminate" or "substitute" some offending substance?
There tons of evidence that most medications (some help) have horrendous side effects and yet people continue taking them as if there's no tomorrow. I think that no matter what doctors, tech, or the government does, its gonna take a sea change for Americans to wake up and smell the coffee and start taking their own health in their hands.
3 Months ago I installed Ubuntu.. in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and installing Automatix, I could do stuff.
2 days ago I replaced that Ununtu desktop with Fedora 6... in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and finding the excellent HowoToForge doc on spiffing up Fedora,: http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_fedo ra_core6
I could do everything I wanted with just slightly more effort. (My reasons for switching has nothing to do with not liking Ubuntu. Its just that my hard drive crashed and I wanted to try Fedora 6 upon re-installing a new desktop).
Out of the box, both Distros offer the same capabilities, and lack of proprietary drivers, codecs, etc. The user has to do it for themselves by going to third part websites for these.
I find myself traveling around once per month, and its the one zine that you can totally engross yourself if you have no interruptions for an hour or so. Science. Technology. Culture. Totally directed to the geek technorati, and one of the last bastions of the long-form tech article that you'll find anywhere.
The writing is a little less cocky and in-your-face since the last few months, and that's a good thing. They've started to report more on the subject of the articles instead of telling us readers what's good for us. A subtle shift, but well overdue.
Slashdot Mirror
We're still stick in the old world, even with all the nice shiny technology around us. NBC is in a world where they wish everyone watched Johnny Carson every night. Where politicians can't go on stage without flashing their wedding rings. Where they can, with impunity broadcast laughable stories from the Olympics. They're still stuck in that world. And if you love the Olympics, so are we too.
Just came back here for sh*ts and giggles after approx 8 years. Checked out the beta site. Immediately my whole being relaxed. I could finally read the stories, enjoy the comments. Its so much cleaner and clearer and than before. I'd say to the current owners of Slashdot. Make the change. Quickly. Some of the neck-beards here would like you to run an ad-free site that looks like a circa 1985 newsgroup, while you keep taking fistfuls of money out of your wallet to run the servers and pay the employees forever without hope of any return. Not sustainable. Not matter how we would want it like that.
Look, 2 people "really like" the product.
You don't even know if it will be saleable. See, this is the thing that annoys the crap out of me. Right now, your product has zero value, because you have not started to sell it as yet. Absolutely zero.
Sell the darned thing first, see if people like it, if they do, then at least you have some stake in the marketplace and in any proceedings. You would have had the product out there, people may buy it, and you will have first mover advantage.
Right now, all you have is the possibility that someone "may" sue you, and thats just in your fevered imagination. Get coding boyo!
While it would be nice to have more competition in the space, the fact is that we trust Amazon with our bits now. There are other players we could trust, but none with the sheer power of Amazon. Sure they go down once or twice a year, but hey, who among us can claim that nothing in our entire infrastructures never ever goes down? Why would the submitter think that any other current player can keep their service growing and have the same reasonable uptimes that Amazon does? Here in the real world, we don't mind paying for crap that works. That's what makes economies run.
The days of getting slashdotted are over! Slashdot does not have enough traffic to do that anymore :-)
Really, the guys who say they host email at home because of wanting to protect their emails are dumb-asses.
The moment you send out an email, it has to land in someone else's mailbox. If you're paranoid, they're plenty of other things to be paranoid about. Email is long past the point of paranoia. You have no control over what happens to the email you send, and what happened to the copy of the email that you received (in the sender's outbox).
Stop being stupid.
Yup. May be powerful and robust, but all the core is super heavy and not so easy to extend.
Don't even talk about "Joomla" and "Mambo". They're a nightmare to maintain, and a royal pain in the ASS for building an SEO friendly site with friendly URL's that don't look like a matrix reloaded computer screenshot.
Sigh.
Regardless of what is happening, i doubt facebook will every retire beacon. It will end up being fairly profitable for them. In fact, based on their CPM, that is probably the most profitable part of their business, and its the part that pisses off their users the most.
Really, when will mass market social network like facebook ever turn a profit? The only way to do that is to open the gates to their walled gardens. The only walled garden sites that really and truly make money are subscription based ones where you have to pay to go through the gate.
bang her all day, or no way?
So I can tell you that these guys with powerplants will take forever to modernize to use this technology. If you have a steady stream of income, and a reason to not go down, then you're gonna hate to do anything to cut into your profits and to also interrupt that stream of income for even a second. Inertia and income are the drivers for these plants to never, ever make any changes to benefit the environment.
News can do well to be published everyday people like us. We break stories and comment on stuff that's happening out there that ordinary reporters tend to miss. However, many reporters are great writers, that give you the background to the story, as well as what's new happening. And reporters who are also good writers tend to make it easy and a pleasure to read.
Graphic cards have long since been really fast for 99.9999% of cases. Even gaming. These companies must be doing this for pissing contests, the few people who do super high end graphics work, or a few crazy pimply faced gamers with monitor tans
Nope. There are other alternatives. For a long time we used apache + mongrel. Now we ditched apache and just use Litespeed, which is fabulous with rails.
Who's gonna control your memories when you die? Do you really want to record everything, even when you cheat on your significant other? Do you really want to record when you're jacking off? Or taking a dump?
But hey, I don't watch live TV anymore, so, what fall lineup?
Seriously, one downside of Tivo'ing (or Myth'ing for the zealots) everything is that you FF through the ads and just never see the promotions for silly new shows. You also miss the movie promotions. So what then?
In my high school back in Jamaica, we all did the broad subjects until around 9th grade. Then by 10th and 11th grade (4th to 5th form there), we either chose majors, or one was foisted upon us.
For me that was a good thing. I did not chose, but I was recognized as having a good technical aptitude (based on grades), so I was sent to Tech. Tech involved Electronics, Metal Shop, Wood Shop, Technical Drafting, more Advanced Math, Biology and basic physics. Of course we also still did all the standard courses such as geography, religious sciences, literature and english (yes, different). But the courses that were double sessions were tech.
Now looking back at all my friends, it seemed that we did not have an issue with choosing careers. I bumped into a guy who was into tech a few weeks ago, and surprise! He was a tech at one of the local cellphone companies, many of my friends who were into science are now in the medical fields. And the guys who went into arts and business also tended to gravitate to those fields.
I think it definitely helped. Of course in those days (late 70's) we had excellent teachers who could get you into the right area. Teachers make a lot of difference in those situations.
I dropped out of college and went to work, but that was for other reasons. So these days, I'm hiring guys who thought they knew what they were doing when the majored in psychology in college, but turned out to be super programmers. And I'm dismissing CS majors who went into their fields and were lousy developers.
No doubt in my mind that at around 15 years old, it makes sense to help nudge the student into the general direction where they show aptitude best.
As the publisher of two fairly popular websites, this is something to worry about. Recently all our sites spread across a few dedicated servers in one data center were down. Not because of a direct DDOS attack, but because of a peripheral attack which swamped the network infrastructure at the center. Really, if these guys decided to do more frequent DDOS attacks, anyone could be a target and calling the FBI is cold comfort since in the meantime your sites are down and out.
And further, the disparity would have been even wider without Mitt's many smaller donations from Utah.0 00286&cycle=2008
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/geog.asp?id=N00
Dude, (or dudette), read this and weep:y cle=2008
0 00286&cycle=2008
http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/donordems.asp?c
For the under $200 donations, here's the breakdown:
Dems: 34,705
Reps: 27,710
From the graphs it looks like some other candidates get a larger portion of http://www.opensecrets.org/pres08/geog.asp?id=N00
So please, don't trot out the usual suspects (Hollywood and George Soros) before doing some research.
Remember that this has been going on in the past several election cycles, remember in the last two we had the exact kind of story on Slashdot?
Generally, larger web development corporations will tend to develop with Windows. Smaller ones with Linux or open source alternatives. This is also mirrored in funding. Dems (especially this cycle) will tend to get lots of smaller donations, while Republicans will get larger and fewer donations. Check the news stories.
It only stands to reason when, say, the McCain (or Hillary) camp wants a new website, they'll turn to the establishment crowd that they are a part of and get a largish business to do the job. This largish business would more than likely tend to do jobs for corps who run windows through and through.
Smaller funded campaigns (Ron Paul, and initially Obama, and Dean who notably used a variant of drupal) would use open source solutions because of the younger college age tilt of the immediate people surrounding them.
So yes, it does have something to do with the candidates themselves, and almost perfectly mirrors what kind of people they hang around with -- and thus what their positions as candidates will be in relation to business and choice, even if it was the candidates proxies that made that choice for them.
I've discovered google bookmarks, and nothing beats bookmarking at work and going home or using the laptop to pickup where I left off. Places is a quantum leap behind that. You can use del.icio.us bookmarks and that toolbar too. Unless all you ever use is a single computer, I really don't see a good reason for Places. Using Places is like paying per minute for domestic long distance, you can do it, buy why?
This is just a sign that the days of the white shirtsleeves are fast coming to an end. Several years ago, I interviewed for a programming position at a major wall street firm in New York. This IT department was filled with guys and gals in formal wear (coats, ties, long sleeve shirts etc). They were mostly banging out Perl and the pre-cursors to .net.
:-)
Yeah, the waste was incredible, and in I was glad I didn't get the job (regex skills weren't worth a damn those days -- who was I fooling?). I started working in a smaller shop dot-bomb shop and my regex skills improved overnight... this is all besides the point though
Many of you here have worked on one project or another and you know that they frequently overrun both in terms of time and costs, and customer requirements that change even if no change was mandated in the contract. Can you imagine a few thousand projects like that in the IBM Global group? I can, and its a nightmare. Even though they charge the customers a mint, they must still be dramatically decreasing the size of their profits hand over foot.
But that pales in comparison, because we're into the era where you can now advertise on one of the popular tech blogs or Craigs List for your own people to come in, ramp up, do your project (you make the mistakes), ramp down and go into maintenance mode. Your contractors can also SSH in and make changes and tweaks from anywhere in the world, or in Pittsburg Pennsylvania (if you prefer to hire nationwide).
IBM Global is a holdover from pre-internet days when you contracted with a company to make a monolithic application that ran only on the Windows desktop or on your mainframe. Many corporate apps now run on an intranet in the browser and mostly consist of small apps that connect to the old monolithic applications. Heck, a friend of mine spent time hacking drivers that would connect through green screen terminal connections and get the data he wanted to spit out in html. Dare to make an app that only works in IE? Look to be embarassed in slashdot the next day.
Much time is spent talking about the latest version of thunderbird, or outlook, but the writing is on the wall. We're inexorably heading to the point where those kind of apps are moving to the way of the dodo bird. The future is gmail-like/google-like-apps for the majority of us. They just could not keep up.
I mean, come on. People just want a pill to fix their woes. How many times have you met someone that you know have a condition that can be easily fixed through diet and exercise alone?
Besides cancers and other similar conditions, most problems facing the health care industry are caused by lack of exercise and eating the wrong kinds of food, and its a hard thing for people to change. And generally health care professionals are afraid to give definitive health advice because of the opportunity of lawsuits. How many times have doctors told patients that they should "reduce" instead of "eliminate" or "substitute" some offending substance?
There tons of evidence that most medications (some help) have horrendous side effects and yet people continue taking them as if there's no tomorrow. I think that no matter what doctors, tech, or the government does, its gonna take a sea change for Americans to wake up and smell the coffee and start taking their own health in their hands.
Yeah, but he all lost us all when he mentioned trucks.
Hmmm... that's just a load of bull.
o ra_core6
3 Months ago I installed Ubuntu.. in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and installing Automatix, I could do stuff.
2 days ago I replaced that Ununtu desktop with Fedora 6... in a virgin installation I could do nothing. After searching for and finding the excellent HowoToForge doc on spiffing up Fedora,:
http://www.howtoforge.com/the_perfect_desktop_fed
I could do everything I wanted with just slightly more effort. (My reasons for switching has nothing to do with not liking Ubuntu. Its just that my hard drive crashed and I wanted to try Fedora 6 upon re-installing a new desktop).
Out of the box, both Distros offer the same capabilities, and lack of proprietary drivers, codecs, etc. The user has to do it for themselves by going to third part websites for these.
Wired still rocks. Sometimes.
I find myself traveling around once per month, and its the one zine that you can totally engross yourself if you have no interruptions for an hour or so. Science. Technology. Culture. Totally directed to the geek technorati, and one of the last bastions of the long-form tech article that you'll find anywhere.
The writing is a little less cocky and in-your-face since the last few months, and that's a good thing. They've started to report more on the subject of the articles instead of telling us readers what's good for us. A subtle shift, but well overdue.
Overall I'll keep my subscription going.