I would rather pull (digital) cash out of my (digital) pocket to pay for TV shows. That way, Survivor wouldn't be getting any of my money, because I don't watch. As it is now, I'm not sure who advertises on Survivor, but I'll bet at least one company is one I do business with. That means Survivor is getting money indirectly from me even though I don't watch!
And why would Pepsi be more expensive if they didn't advertise? I would think it'd be cheaper if Pepsi didn't spend millions to advertise to me everyday. Read this earlier post of mine to see why I buy cheaper colas that don't advertise.
Mandrake 8 has a neat utility, I think it's just called the "Package Manager." You can search for RPMs in there. Just enter in the package name, it tells you which CDs to put in your drive, and it installs them. I'm pretty sure it also takes care of dependencies for you too.
On a little side note, I tried installing Red Hat 7.1 the other day. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that for REd Hat, you need both CDs. The installer won't continue without the second - unlike Mandrake, where it asks you at the beginning which ones you have. Anyway, I had a little trouble because the installer doesn't put the bootloader on the MBR until the end. My bootloader leftover from Mandrake 8 RC1 had been GRUB, but it was already gone. (If you don't know how GRUB works, it's so complicated that apparently it has to store part of itself on a partition instead of all in the MBR. Don't overwrite that partition!)
I eventually got Red Hat 7.1 installed. I think I'll stick with Mandrake. Red Hat can't seem to mount my NTFS partitions out-of-the-box. Didn't have my Soundblaster Live working out-of-the-box either. Has an old version of Mozilla (0.7) instead of (0.8). Its general look and feel is consistent with other Red Hat versions, but looks dated. These are just the things I noticed.
Am I the only one who finds it disturbing that all the media dose is provide "programming"?
Last time I checked these companies also printed books, magazines and other forms of media in addition to
programming like TV and movies.
Interesting. Your post made me think about this for a second. Correct me if I'm wrong, but book publishers aren't nearly as "evil" and controlling as TV or radio stations. Why is this? I think it's because book publishers generally don't produce content themselves. Authors come to them and commission them to publish their work. In TV and radio, this isn't so much the case. Maybe we ought to redefine what broadcasters are allowed to do. Maybe they should be more like book publishers by broadcasting others' work instead of their own.
Just an idea that came to me after two minutes of thinking...
Panic? I should hope we would still have the capability to not watch/listen/read the content of these evil conglomerations. We consumers should organize ourselves like they are. Then we can show them what's what.
What we're trying to do is educate
the population about what is appropriate, both from an ethical standpoint and from a
legal standpoint
There is no absolute right and wrong from an ethical standpoint. Both sides have good arguments. Content producers deserve compensation. Content consumers deserve to be able to access said content over new medias. They deserve not to be charged indefinitely for finite goods.
In the absence of an absolute moral/ethical standpoint, we have only the "legal" one. The law in the United States (for example) should protect the rights of the public. We have a government of the people. What we say goes. We just have to get involved in the process. So far, only the MPAA has been involved. But, we outnumber them:-).
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
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· Score: 1
Oh, and all the cells in your body work together. Try figuring out how a bunch of Win2k machines function together on a network just by looking at the source code of the OS. Better yet, try to figure out the Internet by looking at disassembled source code of Win2k or UNIX.
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 1
People have portrayed the task of unravelling the human genome as a Herculean task. Well, the entire genome can be fitted on a CDROM. That isn't very much data at all. Are we really saying that the human body is no more complex that a copy of Windows 2000?
The machinery inside a cell that "executes" pieces of your genetic code is far more complicated than the machinery that executes windows 2000. There are also many, many different kinds of cells.
The soft drinks I like to buy (in the grocery store, anyway) are the no-name, knock-off brands. Around here, we have "Big K" Cola, "Big K" Cherry Cola, "Dr K", etc. It tastes fine to me, and it's cheaper than all the big name stuff.
It's not that I'm cheap. I'm willing to pay for quality. But I don't like paying Coca Cola or Pepsi to innundate me with ads. That's what some of that extra money goes towards. Their products are really just as average as anything else, and not worth the extra money.
I think this whole advertising thing has gotten out of hand. Especially on the Internet. How can we "vote with our dollars" and support the things we use and enjoy if advertisers pay for it all? It's much more indirect. They make all the decisions, not you.
That's odd...I noticed the colors too. I was just thinking about how I like them better than the colors found on the rest of Slashdot. But, maybe I just noticed them because this whole section is new.
ISPs aren't running out yet because they generally only give you one IP address. People just accept this, and if they have more than one computer, they just set up NAT or something. However, ISPs should be providing one IP address per computer. That's how the Internet was designed to work!
And there's also the fact that there are still alot of modem users who don't have to have an IP address all the time.
I don't have any exact numbers, but I'm under the impression that there is no way every computer on the Internet can have its own IP address. I am also under the impression that ISPs are happy about this, because they can make the people who really want/need IP addresses pay more money.
I used to think like this. But, realize this: the bulk of the U.S. Tax Code is not devoted to figuring out what percentage of income people pay. It is devoted to defining what your income is in the first place. The actual table lookup is probably not much harder than using a function such as the one you gave.
Take a look at The United States Code yourself. Specifically, Title 26: Internal Revenue.
Also, while I would like to see the tax code simplified, I have a feeling that doing so would actually open loopholes. Well, maybe there'd be less loopholes, but they'd probably be bigger because the tax code would be less specific.
You want roads to be private? Are you serious? The big three auto companies would buy them all up. Then they'd require that you use their automobiles on their roads. Or else, they'd be like banks, and charge you extra fees to use other cars on their roads. They'd also never allow legislation against this to see the light of day in the U.S. Congress.
You think that couldn't happen? Auto companies bought and dismantled mass transit systems across the U.S. in the last century. If you really want, I can dust of my old Sociology textbook where I read about this.
Instead of suffering through that nightmare of privately owned roads, why don't we just let some organization of the people maintain them on behalf of us all. Hmmmm. Such an organization, by definition is called a "government." Yes, I'd like to see a less corrupt, more responsible government. But A government nonetheless is what we want, I think.
I tend to think of fund drives as longer, less frequent ads. Yes, it's slightly annoying when they come. But instead of ignoring them like I do with most commercial advertisements (I'm using "commercial" as a adjective), I actually take the time to make a donation. Why? Simple: I want to support them.
I like this situation much better. I like supporting programming directly. Think about it. With commercial television, someone else is paying for your experience. This is great if you are a cheapskate or you think you are entitled to be entertained for free. But, in the best case, you are funding the programming indirectly, through the products you buy - but not before millions of those dollars are wasted on ads and go into the pockets of the marketers.
In the worst case, the programming you watch is controlled entirely by someone else. You are at their mercy. Good shows can be canceled for lack of a huge viewership. Even though I'll bet shows with even a tiny audience by advertiser standards could be funded entirely by its loyal viewers. If only that were possible. How are you going to support a commercial TV program? Buy more Pepsi? Then you are supporting every show that Pepsi advertises on...
Why did they have to change the stupid file format each time, though. Oh, wait. I know. To promote non-interopability. To achieve and maintain monopoly.
This is why I think document formats and the like should be open - by law, maybe. MS could then add whatever crap they wanted to Word. If it was really that great, people would buy it. Otherwise, they could use the old versions (or competing products!) with no problems. Competetion would be encouraged with open document formats.
Call me crazy, but I think the law should be enforced in this way. The MPAA shouldn't be able to shut down Napster, because they are just providing a service, blah blah. They should go after the individuals pirating music. That's what happened in this case.
I think the police should even start doing these raids in the US. Why? Because they'd have to arrest everybody. When people are affected by the MPAA's "enforcement" directly, they will demand that the law be changed. Most people can live with copy protection (the current enforcement method), but they can't live with being in jail. They'll see how the law is unjust if the raids begin.
This is not to say I want to get rid of copyright. What I'd like to see is some sort of antitrust suit against MPAA organizations. I'd like to see artists NOT sign away their soul in exclusive contracts. I'd like to see people who are willing to pay for what they use from others. I'd like the MPAA to sell me music for download, instead of refusing to do so and manufacturing all this "illegal" pirating.
Oh, the MPAA is waiting to perfect "secure music"? Ha! Nothing can ever be totally secure. They should just make it easier on themselves and the rest of us by not crippling technology and just release music on the Internet already!
I use nedit, with the "emulated tabs" option turned on. That way, when I press tab, nedit inserts however many spaces I want instead. It'll even delete the same groups of spaces as if they were tabs - if you do it right after you create them.
The feature works well enough that I'm rarely annoyed by having to deal with many space characters rather than single tab characters. Besides, if I ever want to change the indentation of a block of code, I can just highlight it all and indent/deindent it all at once. So, spaces or tabs make little difference.
I'm sure other editors can do this, but if they didn't, I'd probably use tabs and put a comment at the beginning of the code to indicate what the tab setting was when the document was created. (It's no fun having to figure that out at some later date.)
Follow the "40th anniversary" link on today's APOD, and you'll see it leads to the APOD of five years ago, where they talk almost exclusively about the 35th anniversary of first man in space - as well as other early Soviet accomplishments and how the U.S. was behind.
Five years later, they use the APOD to do a little bragging about the space shuttle. I don't fault them for that.
Really? How come the Pentium Pro had a on die cache of 1 megabyte before all of this?
I think it was because the Pentium Pro was a huge, expensive monster. They were able to fit the cache on there, but it wasn't practical. So, Intel went with the slot architecture for awhile, so the cache could be separate until they eventually were able to make it smaller and faster.
I don't think they admitted this, though. All they said was "Slots are the way of the future!"
It's not just the "point and click" part. It's what to point at and when to click. What happens after you click, etc. How that's all organized makes a big difference.
For example, having a really nested organization to the Start Menu wastes alot of time, because wading throgh those menus every time you want to start a program is time-consuming.
Another example (a really minor example): Something about web browsers really annoys me. Say I'm reading a text document that has a URL, http://somewhere.com/. With my mouse, I can right-click, copy the URL, click on the icon to open Netscape, paste the URL into the address bar, BUT to get the browser to go anywhere, I have to reach my keyboard and press enter. Stupid. Annoying. And only really minor.
So is the problem that you lack resources to run a mailserver on your familyname domain or is the problem that you can't think of another name or variant? Like detroitzapfs or michzapfs or whatever.
It was just an idea I toyed with for awhile. The main reason it never got very far was that I didn't think it would be worth the effort. We all get email from providers more reliable than anything I could set up, anyway. The main advantage to having a family domain is similar to those of having a personal domain: Hopefully, web and email addresses will never change because your family is one "organization" that you'll probably never leave.
I just presented the idea here as a way to avoid having to use a geographical domain hierarchy. I think having family domains is slightly more sensible than having millions of personal domains. I realize that doing this on a large scale would be really complicated. Basically it would have to mirror the family tree...
I agree with you about the "lack of geographic portability." But, the same problem exisits with any classification - even familial, I guess.
As for X.500, I don't know much about it. But I know it's behind the directory system here at the University of Michigan. Seems to work well enough. I wouldn't mind seeing something like this at a national (or even global) level. But, I bet there'd be lots of issues with that. It'd have to have an administering body, and that body would have to do a good job, or we'll have rouges who want to do it all differently, just like in this story.
That makes more sense to me than having millions of people trying to register something like joeschmoe.com so they can have www.joeschmoe.com and joe@joeschmoe.com. It just won't work with that many people.
An alternative to using a geographical hierarchy might be to use families. For example, I've been thinking of registering a domain for my family, but it's already taken and I don't have enough resources to set up a mailserver anyway. Eventually, though, I don't think we can avoid a hierarchy of some sort.
On the same note, notice that I don't have my own domain for my website. I don't need my own stinking domain. What's wrong with being identified as a member of some larger organization?
Here's a dumb question (I don't know anything about economics and stuff):
Who cares what a company's stock is trading at? What does that have to do with the health of a company? It seems to me that stock price of a company simply reflects the opinion of the not-so-bright masses about that company.
It also seems to me that a company worrying about its stock price is like Ford worrying about how much used Explorers are selling for. What does it matter? Ford has already sold the automobile. Covad has already sold the stock! The only people who should care are used-car dealers. In the case of the stock market, the only people who should care are traders.
I hope the stuff MIT puts on the web isn't like the course materials I've run accross at other Universities. Most often, I find slide shows from professors' lectures, or cryptic lecture notes. These really have little value in the absence of hearing the professor's actual lecture. Or, I find class-specific items, such as homework assignments, notes on how to use such-and-such compiler on the University lab machines, etc. Again, not very useful outside of the actual course.
I can't beleive anybody is bothering to post comments anymore (including myself). That's it, I'm just going to have to boycott Slashdot until Tuesday. Reverse DOS as a response to all this pointless nonsense.
Who's with me? C'mon. It'll be a belated April Fool's.
Nah. I think in honor of April Fools, the Slashdot editors are just picking submissions at random to post. Or they are looking for rediculous ones. Kind of a waste, if you ask me.
Slashdot Mirror
And why would Pepsi be more expensive if they didn't advertise? I would think it'd be cheaper if Pepsi didn't spend millions to advertise to me everyday. Read this earlier post of mine to see why I buy cheaper colas that don't advertise.
On a little side note, I tried installing Red Hat 7.1 the other day. Unfortunately, I didn't realize that for REd Hat, you need both CDs. The installer won't continue without the second - unlike Mandrake, where it asks you at the beginning which ones you have. Anyway, I had a little trouble because the installer doesn't put the bootloader on the MBR until the end. My bootloader leftover from Mandrake 8 RC1 had been GRUB, but it was already gone. (If you don't know how GRUB works, it's so complicated that apparently it has to store part of itself on a partition instead of all in the MBR. Don't overwrite that partition!)
I eventually got Red Hat 7.1 installed. I think I'll stick with Mandrake. Red Hat can't seem to mount my NTFS partitions out-of-the-box. Didn't have my Soundblaster Live working out-of-the-box either. Has an old version of Mozilla (0.7) instead of (0.8). Its general look and feel is consistent with other Red Hat versions, but looks dated. These are just the things I noticed.
Interesting. Your post made me think about this for a second. Correct me if I'm wrong, but book publishers aren't nearly as "evil" and controlling as TV or radio stations. Why is this? I think it's because book publishers generally don't produce content themselves. Authors come to them and commission them to publish their work. In TV and radio, this isn't so much the case. Maybe we ought to redefine what broadcasters are allowed to do. Maybe they should be more like book publishers by broadcasting others' work instead of their own.
Just an idea that came to me after two minutes of thinking...
Panic? I should hope we would still have the capability to not watch/listen/read the content of these evil conglomerations. We consumers should organize ourselves like they are. Then we can show them what's what.
There is no absolute right and wrong from an ethical standpoint. Both sides have good arguments. Content producers deserve compensation. Content consumers deserve to be able to access said content over new medias. They deserve not to be charged indefinitely for finite goods.
In the absence of an absolute moral/ethical standpoint, we have only the "legal" one. The law in the United States (for example) should protect the rights of the public. We have a government of the people. What we say goes. We just have to get involved in the process. So far, only the MPAA has been involved. But, we outnumber them :-) .
Oh, and all the cells in your body work together. Try figuring out how a bunch of Win2k machines function together on a network just by looking at the source code of the OS. Better yet, try to figure out the Internet by looking at disassembled source code of Win2k or UNIX.
The machinery inside a cell that "executes" pieces of your genetic code is far more complicated than the machinery that executes windows 2000. There are also many, many different kinds of cells.
The soft drinks I like to buy (in the grocery store, anyway) are the no-name, knock-off brands. Around here, we have "Big K" Cola, "Big K" Cherry Cola, "Dr K", etc. It tastes fine to me, and it's cheaper than all the big name stuff.
It's not that I'm cheap. I'm willing to pay for quality. But I don't like paying Coca Cola or Pepsi to innundate me with ads. That's what some of that extra money goes towards. Their products are really just as average as anything else, and not worth the extra money.
I think this whole advertising thing has gotten out of hand. Especially on the Internet. How can we "vote with our dollars" and support the things we use and enjoy if advertisers pay for it all? It's much more indirect. They make all the decisions, not you.
That's odd...I noticed the colors too. I was just thinking about how I like them better than the colors found on the rest of Slashdot. But, maybe I just noticed them because this whole section is new.
And there's also the fact that there are still alot of modem users who don't have to have an IP address all the time.
I don't have any exact numbers, but I'm under the impression that there is no way every computer on the Internet can have its own IP address. I am also under the impression that ISPs are happy about this, because they can make the people who really want/need IP addresses pay more money.
Take a look at The United States Code yourself. Specifically, Title 26: Internal Revenue.
Also, while I would like to see the tax code simplified, I have a feeling that doing so would actually open loopholes. Well, maybe there'd be less loopholes, but they'd probably be bigger because the tax code would be less specific.
You think that couldn't happen? Auto companies bought and dismantled mass transit systems across the U.S. in the last century. If you really want, I can dust of my old Sociology textbook where I read about this.
Instead of suffering through that nightmare of privately owned roads, why don't we just let some organization of the people maintain them on behalf of us all. Hmmmm. Such an organization, by definition is called a "government." Yes, I'd like to see a less corrupt, more responsible government. But A government nonetheless is what we want, I think.
I like this situation much better. I like supporting programming directly. Think about it. With commercial television, someone else is paying for your experience. This is great if you are a cheapskate or you think you are entitled to be entertained for free. But, in the best case, you are funding the programming indirectly, through the products you buy - but not before millions of those dollars are wasted on ads and go into the pockets of the marketers.
In the worst case, the programming you watch is controlled entirely by someone else. You are at their mercy. Good shows can be canceled for lack of a huge viewership. Even though I'll bet shows with even a tiny audience by advertiser standards could be funded entirely by its loyal viewers. If only that were possible. How are you going to support a commercial TV program? Buy more Pepsi? Then you are supporting every show that Pepsi advertises on...
This is why I think document formats and the like should be open - by law, maybe. MS could then add whatever crap they wanted to Word. If it was really that great, people would buy it. Otherwise, they could use the old versions (or competing products!) with no problems. Competetion would be encouraged with open document formats.
I think the police should even start doing these raids in the US. Why? Because they'd have to arrest everybody. When people are affected by the MPAA's "enforcement" directly, they will demand that the law be changed. Most people can live with copy protection (the current enforcement method), but they can't live with being in jail. They'll see how the law is unjust if the raids begin.
This is not to say I want to get rid of copyright. What I'd like to see is some sort of antitrust suit against MPAA organizations. I'd like to see artists NOT sign away their soul in exclusive contracts. I'd like to see people who are willing to pay for what they use from others. I'd like the MPAA to sell me music for download, instead of refusing to do so and manufacturing all this "illegal" pirating.
Oh, the MPAA is waiting to perfect "secure music"? Ha! Nothing can ever be totally secure. They should just make it easier on themselves and the rest of us by not crippling technology and just release music on the Internet already!
Sheesh. I'll stop now.
The feature works well enough that I'm rarely annoyed by having to deal with many space characters rather than single tab characters. Besides, if I ever want to change the indentation of a block of code, I can just highlight it all and indent/deindent it all at once. So, spaces or tabs make little difference.
I'm sure other editors can do this, but if they didn't, I'd probably use tabs and put a comment at the beginning of the code to indicate what the tab setting was when the document was created. (It's no fun having to figure that out at some later date.)
Follow the "40th anniversary" link on today's APOD, and you'll see it leads to the APOD of five years ago, where they talk almost exclusively about the 35th anniversary of first man in space - as well as other early Soviet accomplishments and how the U.S. was behind.
Five years later, they use the APOD to do a little bragging about the space shuttle. I don't fault them for that.
I think it was because the Pentium Pro was a huge, expensive monster. They were able to fit the cache on there, but it wasn't practical. So, Intel went with the slot architecture for awhile, so the cache could be separate until they eventually were able to make it smaller and faster.
I don't think they admitted this, though. All they said was "Slots are the way of the future!"
It's not just the "point and click" part. It's what to point at and when to click. What happens after you click, etc. How that's all organized makes a big difference.
For example, having a really nested organization to the Start Menu wastes alot of time, because wading throgh those menus every time you want to start a program is time-consuming.
Another example (a really minor example): Something about web browsers really annoys me. Say I'm reading a text document that has a URL, http://somewhere.com/. With my mouse, I can right-click, copy the URL, click on the icon to open Netscape, paste the URL into the address bar, BUT to get the browser to go anywhere, I have to reach my keyboard and press enter. Stupid. Annoying. And only really minor.
It was just an idea I toyed with for awhile. The main reason it never got very far was that I didn't think it would be worth the effort. We all get email from providers more reliable than anything I could set up, anyway. The main advantage to having a family domain is similar to those of having a personal domain: Hopefully, web and email addresses will never change because your family is one "organization" that you'll probably never leave.
I just presented the idea here as a way to avoid having to use a geographical domain hierarchy. I think having family domains is slightly more sensible than having millions of personal domains. I realize that doing this on a large scale would be really complicated. Basically it would have to mirror the family tree...
I agree with you about the "lack of geographic portability." But, the same problem exisits with any classification - even familial, I guess.
As for X.500, I don't know much about it. But I know it's behind the directory system here at the University of Michigan. Seems to work well enough. I wouldn't mind seeing something like this at a national (or even global) level. But, I bet there'd be lots of issues with that. It'd have to have an administering body, and that body would have to do a good job, or we'll have rouges who want to do it all differently, just like in this story.
Phew! I hope this isn't too far offtopic.
That makes more sense to me than having millions of people trying to register something like joeschmoe.com so they can have www.joeschmoe.com and joe@joeschmoe.com. It just won't work with that many people.
An alternative to using a geographical hierarchy might be to use families. For example, I've been thinking of registering a domain for my family, but it's already taken and I don't have enough resources to set up a mailserver anyway. Eventually, though, I don't think we can avoid a hierarchy of some sort.
On the same note, notice that I don't have my own domain for my website. I don't need my own stinking domain. What's wrong with being identified as a member of some larger organization?
Who cares what a company's stock is trading at? What does that have to do with the health of a company? It seems to me that stock price of a company simply reflects the opinion of the not-so-bright masses about that company.
It also seems to me that a company worrying about its stock price is like Ford worrying about how much used Explorers are selling for. What does it matter? Ford has already sold the automobile. Covad has already sold the stock! The only people who should care are used-car dealers. In the case of the stock market, the only people who should care are traders.
Can someone explain this to me?
I hope the stuff MIT puts on the web isn't like the course materials I've run accross at other Universities. Most often, I find slide shows from professors' lectures, or cryptic lecture notes. These really have little value in the absence of hearing the professor's actual lecture. Or, I find class-specific items, such as homework assignments, notes on how to use such-and-such compiler on the University lab machines, etc. Again, not very useful outside of the actual course.
Who's with me? C'mon. It'll be a belated April Fool's.
Nah. I think in honor of April Fools, the Slashdot editors are just picking submissions at random to post. Or they are looking for rediculous ones. Kind of a waste, if you ask me.