you're assuming "corporate" software goes through a lot of QA, or for that matter adequate QA.
I am not assuming this. I specifically stated that people assume this. I have a very good idea how QA general software goes through, but the mass market does not (since they still believe that the product they get is the final, highest quality version). You can mouth off all you want about how much you know, but the fact that Microsoft sells so much product and that everyone uses it tells people in general that they make a good product that everyone can use, thus when they have a screwup, it raises doubts on all of software in general
This is a quote from the leading online gaming source, Blue's News.
There are scary implications here. When you cannot trust software made by one of the world's largest software companies, what do you do when if[sic] comes to all the little homebrew progams that are available?
This is exactly the mentality that keeps open-source from advancing. As strange as it may seem, the corporate world does not see open-source software go through the same sort of rigorous QA that (they assume) corporate products go through. An event such as this is only going to serve to make people doubt more software in general and that has a negative effect on open-source software which already has to face the FUD about its quality.
No, this isn't Heaven's Gift, it's Satan's Blessing. Too many people see Microsoft as the sort of God of software and when your God fails you, where do you turn? Certainly not to the meek.
To paraphrase gilroy's dinosaur analogy below(apologies for not responding directly), each corp is a herd. The herd attracts like individuals to it, and those that aren't are driven out. The herd will not react to anything less than another herd, for it lacks the language to deal with anything smaller. (Ahhh frick, I;m out of practive with coming up with analogies. But I hope the gist remains.)
But the dinosaur analogy is a flawed one. Herds imply a certain homogeneity, that is, everything is essentially one species, but corporations, especially large ones, aren't like that. They are much more diversified because they have to be, because they have to manage so many disparate variables. The end result is that not everyone in a corporation shares the sort of guiding vision that a 'herd' might, and the barriers between these groups are most often found between the lower ranks and the higher ranks, as well as across the different positions within the company.
... the problem is that Pinkerton, as a corporation, is comprised of the very people that comprised the tormentors of geeks in high school.
That is as much of a stereotype as the one that you are purporting that Pinkerton is advancing. The fact that because you see big, jock-like bouncers and musclehead security guards does not mean that Pinkerton is run by the anti-geeks. Pinkerton is a huge, diverse corporation. They have marketing people (people who could easily have been artists in school), web programmers (most likely geeks like yourself), psychologists (hell, that one can go either way; I knew both in college), accountants (that word itself is a stereotype), economists, managers, and business. The president of my company, an Internet provider which is known for having rather geeky employees, is an ex-football player who is proud, forceful, strongminded, and very perceptive about the Internet world. The President of the NFL, Paul Tagliabue, is a scrawny former basketball player, known for being a brilliant and shrewd legal mind (he looks like a geek, too).
Do not stereotype Pinkerton the corporation because of what you see at the lowest of their levels. The Pinkerton representatives that you see are not the same ones that are developing WAVE America. If you stereotype them, you stoop to the same level that they have, and your arguments are just as shallow and invalid.
Face it, it just isn't cost effective to manage shell accounts anymore for such a small subset of customers, especially given the numerous shell providers out there. Yes, it sucks that those who want shells from their ISP can't get them, but it also sucks when the ISP has to manage a shell server for roughly 5-10% of their customer base. Considering that those shell servers are most often the servers that are abused by script kiddies and hackers (not crackers), it's in the better interests of the company to not have one period.
You don't need a shell server to do procmail-like filtering. It's very easy for an ISP to write up a simple web-based utility for its customers that will allow them to perform the same type of e-mail management (and that's a system that everyone can use).
Like the good old C=64. Hackable like h*ll. And people love(d) it.\
People didn't love it. Hackers loved it. There's a big difference. Netpliance isn't marketing this thing to hackers. They're marketing it to a much less technologically adept person than a hacker. The whole point is that it shouldn't just be cheap, but be so easy that a two-year old could do it. Old C64's while great, were not machines from grandma. Any machine is hackable given the right person. While hackable computers are nice, they should not be the business model. Face it, Slashdot may think it's this superimportant group, but in terms of market power, they are small, and Netpliance is not going to make money trying to cater to them.
Everyone seems up in a flurry about Jon Katz's use of the stereotypical 'chickclicker', as well as the term itself, which one post has already called 'vaguely insulting'. Let's take a look at some of the stereotypes that Jon missed (please feel free to add your own):
Fe-mailer Women use e-mail, and why shouldn't they have their own type of e-mail? Today, more and more women are fe-mailers, using one of the oldest of mediums to spam other women.
Witch We can't forget the trolls, now can we, but troll is so male. Let's acknowledge all the women on Slashdot trying to piss off other women with their own title (and moderation status, Rob?).
Script-gurlies With the rise of women online, more and more are turning to the annoying methods of their male counterparts in an effort to annoy the patriarchal IRC server admins.
Mamallama These are girls who are new to the whole gaming experience. They're not very good, but all the other llamas tend to congregate towards them because they are women.
Come on, Jon, there are so many girlie fields that you (and probably I) have left out. Why must you only focus in on the chickclickers? Please, do some more research next time. You might find a much more diversified group of stereotypes to choose from.
"If there's going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI."
What's more is that when you only print one line from any source without the surrounding quote, you completely take the quote out of context and nine times out of ten misquote the person. This is what in the news world is called "bad journalism" and it has become a hallmark of YRO reporting on Slashdot (that's right, hallmark, like the standard identifying trait, like the one thing that discredits YRO more than anything else, including the paranoid posters).
What Paul George, the FBI guy, was saying is that everyone knows the FBI could be the Big Brother which is why they're regulated so tightly to prevent something like that from ever happening. He was making a point about how the FBI is being suffocated, prevented by law from being able to do its job, which is monitoring criminal activity, effectively because people are so paranoid that it could be them being monitored. You may not trust your government, but I trust mine, and frankly, I'm happy that someone out there is doing this because it's too damn easy for people to wreak havoc in this world. Trust me, the FBI can do it a lot better than a group put together by Slashdot ever could.
So what more is there to say? Try telling the whole story instead of just one line of it. Then maybe people can make informed, rational decisions instead of the irrational paranoia we see in YRO every other day.
If there is a combined CDPlayer and MP3 unit, the logical feature would be to ripping from the CDRom and play tracks as MP3. This not only saves power, but prevents skipping.
I may be misunderstanding you (and oh Lord, please say that I am), but that is the most illogical thing I have ever heard. You want to do this?
CD->Encoder->Save->Decoder->Audio
How does this save power? You still have to spin up the CD but now you have to take the time to encode the file, save it to memory, in addition to decode and play it. As I see it, you're using more power in the encoding and saving portions, not saving. And as for preventing skips, maybe. More likely, it's going to have to account for skips during the encoding process, which, honestly, isn't that what shock protection is for?
No, the logical feature in an MP3/CD player is to play the MP3s off of a CD. Yes, you might get skipping, but for me anyway, the benefits of having 10 hours of music on a handily transported medium that can be used in a player that will also play my other handily transported mediums far outweight issues of power (of which these devices probably don't use much more than regular CD players) and skipping.
I remember having this great debate in my high school economics class (I'd like to give a shout-out to Mr. Magnon at MacArthur High School: I hated you and you hated me; peace out) about whether or not we should have a sales tax over an income tax.
Granted, the benefits to have a national sales tax are quite appealing. The amount of commerce every year would provide a huge financial bonus to the country. People will always buy things and if the government gets even a small percentage of this (I think 4% was break even, but I'm not sure), they make a ton of money (e.g gas tax). Furthermore, from a bureaucratic standpoint, you don't have to worry about auditing incomes and worrying about exemptions and tax breaks, etc. etc. It seems like a dream, right? Everyone pays the same percentage on everything.
And therein lies the problem. Sales taxes, because of their total fairness in percentage are completely unfair to the lower middle class and impoverished. Essentially, those classes end up paying a greater percentage of their income to taxation than do the wealthy, miring them in even more poverty. It would be a government supported step towards the old "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" adage. A national sales tax would increase the ever growing disparity between the poor and the wealthy in this country, and that's why we don't have it (it's a political hot potato no politician wants to lay their hands on).
And guess what, an Internet tax (not a sales tax, an Internet sales tax) is not going to adversely affect the poor. Why? Because most poor people aren't on the 'Net, nor do they have the resources to purchase on the 'Net. They won't be taxed, but the wealthier people will, and that's who we want to tax. The goal of the national government (not so much the state governments) is to tax the wealthy more than the poor (that's why Steve Forbes 'flat tax' was such a flop). In doing so, they help to balance some of the disparity that occurs when states, who don't have the means nor the scale for monitoring such disparites, implement simple taxes, like the sales tax.
So, yes, all taxes are unfair, I agree, but they are necessary, and I would rather have taxes that are 'more fair' than 'more unfair'.
Back in September, Pine announced their MP3/CD player (link). It seemed pretty cool at the time. I thouht it was a Slashdot story, in fact, that brought this to my attention. They listed a pretty reasonable price, too, $280, and you can pre-order it at Outpost.com.
I get from this article that Slashdot thinks this is a negative thing, that by not publishing this information that we're somehow infringing on the press' privilege of universal access. Is this the same Slashdot that I see clamoring to clamp down on personal privacy information? Is there somehow a difference between accused criminals and ordinary Internet users? Guess what, when you make a decision to withold or not withold someone's information, you are performing an act of censorship. Either you are preventing someone from accessing information or you are preventing someone from protecting information.
Slashdot needs to make up its mind about what it wants. Someone, somewhere is not going to have access to the information they want and someone somewhere is going to have access to information someone else may not want them to have. Either way, you're screwed. Which is worse?
Information wants to be free. But not my information.
I mean, okay, I can definitely see Jolie filling the role of Lara Croft (and I'm quite unhappy that she'll be filling more than Lara's shoes as I was truly hoping that we'd see the more risque side of tomb raiding), but let's see who else we can think of to actually give some commentary beyond, "Oh, man, she's a hottie," and "OOG BONK HER OVER HEAD WITH OPEN SOURCE CLUB."
Dolly Parton Exemplifying boobies, like Lara
Kathy Bates The 'big-boned' tomb raider.
Jenna Jamison Doesn't tomb raider kind of sound like a porno?
Samuel L. Jackson The wise-crackin', ass-trashin', bitch-slappin, yoda-fashion tomb raider
The Pepsi Chick The cute tomb raider with the Pepsi tie-ins.
Tia Carrere The exotic tomb raider
Anne Heche The lesbian tomb raider
Personally, it looks like the films gonna suck, but at least we'll get some good adult film titles out of it, no?
I'm sure precedent has already been established somewhat. Back in the early days of British radio, there was heated dispute about whether radio could play songs off of records. The BBC would actually bring in big acts to record sets so that they could play them on the radio. These weren't acoustic versions or even live versions, but full-fledged recordings (perhaps you've seen some of them in the, ironically, music stores -- Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, etc.) that sounded great and were produced, mixed, etc. etc. etc.
So, basically, radio has gotten to the point where it can do whatever it wants (besides swear, apparently). The RIAA recognizes the important role that radio plays in establishing pop hits and in marketing new young hits. It's not about to destroy that relationship by doing stupid things like telling radio to stop releasing music that can't be accurately owned by the studio (hence studio and live recorded tracks).
Read the liner notes to Jimi Hendrix's BBC Sessions dual CD sometime (don't let the store owner catch you opening the case, though, heh). It's extremely enlightening.
I hope Netscape takes advantage of the theming capabilities of Mozilla and actually themes their browsers so that they look like the OS they are intended to install on. One of the major downsides to Mozilla (IMHO) is that they don't use the native widget set, effectively introducing another layer of complexity into the GUI which will probably end up confusing the end-user more than anything else. The easy decision now would be to make the Windows version have a default 'Windows' widget, the Mac version have a default 'Mac' widget, etc.
In terms of coding and portability, yes the current implementation is probably the best, but the end-user doesn't think in terms of coding and portability. They'll see Netscape 6 and think, "Oh, God, it made Windows look different."
Nominations For Geek Of The Year?
on
Homebrew S/ADSL
·
· Score: 5
Are they taking nominations yet? I'm not saying that this guy would or even should win, but he definitely should be nominated. Let me outline why (gives me a chance to use that fancy sign, too)
Dedicated to his high-speed access Not many people would go through the lengths to get DSL that this guy did, especially considering his telco did tell them that they were planning on rolling out DSL in the future (just not the near-enough future).
Dedicated to perfection Most people would've stopped after getting the first connection and been like, "Whoop! I rule!" but this guy actually tested out more equipment because, well, damn, that first DSL connection wasn't good enough.
Donated efforts to local groups Granted, it's part of his work, but he took his understanding to the public and got them up and running as well. A geek is not selfish, nor is he greedy.
Published This is most important. A true geek feels the need to let everyone know not just that he did it, but how he did it, in the sort of detail that allows it to be repeated by one and all.
Kudos to this dude. He gets a nod for a nomination for geek of the year. Is there a beanie award for this? If not, there should be.
Information does not want to be free. Information is a non-breathing, non-living entity with no feelings and no desires.
People want information to be free, and that's the crux of the problem. As soon as capitalism returns to its roots and begins giving people what they want (in order to make more money, of course), then we'll see a resolution to this problem.
See, here where I am, it's 12:21am and I've been working in the studio all evening. This means that my comprehension of complex physics equation is lacking a bit (it may also have to do with the fact that he's using some funny characters).
Still, it seems completely feasible. If you can create whatever it is that makes that screensaver at the bottom, I'm sure you can push a spacecraft to superluminal velocities.
Great, AOL has been added to ORBS. This will probably serve to invalidate ORBS more than anything else. The fact of the matter is that an ISP can not refuse AOL e-mail. AOL simply puts out too much legitimate e-mail to make blocking them outright even a possibility. The customer complaints would be tremendous and it would cause an ISP to lose credibility with customers who don't understand things like ORBS and open relays, who only understand things like grandma can't e-mail her granddaughter happy birthday. What's that mean? Selective entries on ORBS will start being ignored and once you start down that slippery slope, you may as well wave bye-bye to any sort of influence that list may have.
What needs to happen is a bunch of ISPs need to get together and file a lawsuit against AOL for allowing so much spam through their systems. A groundbreaking case for responsible management of systems on the Internet would serve our fair network well.
It may not be over for Mattel. Yes, they reign in control over the product that decrypts their site list, but that site list has already been made public several times and it shows some questionable decisions on the part of Mattel. Several CyberPatrol customers could easily get together and file a class-action lawsuit for, at the least, false advertising since sites that did not fit the particular descriptions were blocked. Sites themselves may still have a case for libel (representing knowingly that something false about another person is true) for those sites that were blocked inaccurately (and indeed, on purpose). If people still want to, they can attack Mattel (as opposed to defending themselves from them).
How come no one ever reads the Bible anymore? If Judaism taught us one thing, it's 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' This guy needs to quit his bawling and setup a student review web site. I can only imagine what professors must say about their students behind closed doors. Well, get some of that out into the open and make these kids eat their words. Let's get this brawl started, baby!
I can only imagine what they'd say about me: This little bastard came in and told me how to do my job. The little prick. I made one stinkin' mistake on the blackboard and he had to point it out in a 'it is obvious that you made a mistake but I'll let you find it' question. That's right after waking up from a 45-minute nap which he pulled off in the front row! Pray to God you never get this kid.
I bet he has fun with little boys down on Polk Street.
Sheesh, honestly folks, if people are going to act childish, well, make sure they do it right, dammit.
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
It's not uncommon for monopolies to exist in infrastructure environments (take the phone company, the electric company, the water system, the cable company, the list goes on, at least in the US). This is because those organizations tend to deal in a highly standardized environment where it pays if everyone's working on the same sheet. I would honestly hate to have more than one or two companies managing the power grid in my city. The possibilities for some sort of mishap increase, as does the cost as each company has to maintain its own network.
With that said, Cisco happens to have a good grip on the hardware implementation of one of these infrastructures and what's keeping them there is a) an excellent product, b) good marketing and c) interrelated systems. However, Cisco would have a hard time locking people out of the router business with changes in their product. They're still dealing in standard protocols when communicating between machines. Cisco routers will work just fine with 3Com Total Control units and hubs because nothing special is happening with the data. When the machines work in parallel, yes you want them to be the same and intercommunicate, but Cisco doesn't need to do anything to lock people out because you generally don't want many different setups doing the same task anyway (look at the pain in the ass handling both K56 and x2 was). The fact that Cisco makes a superior product is primarily what keeps it in control. You can bet, though, that if their work started becoming shoddy, ISPs would jump ship to the next best alternative, and they can because of those common protocols.
I don't think people understand exactly how much control Cisco has over the Internet. Not only do they make routers, they also make dial-in equipment as well as the OS which runs all this equipment. What's so great about that, you might ask? Well, it's completely possible (and in fact, it's a reality) that an ISP can have 85% of their network infrastructure be Cisco products. It's something they've been able to do very quietly because a) they don't interact with the common consumer the way that MS does and b) they have a reputation for both making solid products and backing them up with solid service. They have certification programs that are very similar to Microsoft certification programs and they maintain a pretty constant flow of OS revisions for their routers. They're not without their problems, though, one of which is to have nasty bugs (when they do have bugs) that are hard to track down. Still, they are a solid company (worth almost $600 billion, I dunno about).
A couple of years ago, my dad, who's a stock market junkie in his retirement, asked me which stocks were the best to buy. He was thinking of stocks like Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and I steered him towards more product driven companies, especially those involved with the infrastructure of the Internet, those that are less visible in the news. It's paid off. Luckily, he manages my portfolio as well. Stocks of companies that provide primarily services (Yahoo, Netpliance, Redhat) are traditionally more volatile than their product counterparts. I think anyone who's made an investment in such companies has generally done pretty well and had a much better chance for growth. This is, of course, long-term advice, not short-term advice. Yes, if you were in on Redhat in the initial period, you made a lot of money, but I wouldn't want to be my kids' future on companies that produce very little tangible product.
And to those worried about Cisco's OS, don't worry, Linux isn't going to be challenged anytime soon. The OS is made for administering routers, not for running games and what-not. It's very specific to its task and not exactly something you play around with.
The Pet Rock That's right. Some dude went out into a field, found a whole bunch of rocks, and started selling them. All of the suddent, he had the number one selling novelty/toy on the market. Of course, now you get laughed at if you have a pet rock.
Rockets That's right, Goddard was laughed at, but when he showed that you could launch anything with highly explosive fuel and not hurt yourself, governments started taking notice and now we have rockets everywhere.
NASCAR People used to think that NASCAR was a joke, something that a bunch of hillbillies watched when grandma wasn't showing them how well she could hit squirrels with pine cones, but then they actually counted the number of hillbillies watching NASCAR and saw that it was way more than the number that was watching NBA basketball and realized it was The Next Big Thing(tm). Now we have Jeff Gordon losing to the Pepsi girl and drivers going to Hardee's in their racecars.
Dell & Gateway
Hell, no one thought you could make a living selling computers out of your garage, but then everyone realized that it was cheaper and hipper to buy them from hicks than from corporate moneymen and now they have multi-gazillion dollar companies. Who woulda thunkit?
Slashdot
From humble a humble start as 'Chips N Dips' (or something), people started noticing Slashdot when they reported on things other than Microsoft. Now all of the sudden, Slashdot comments are quoted as insider comments ("Mr. Coward wrote in reply to the judge's findings, 'First post!'") and Slashdot is getting bought out by every major Linux company that exists.
The USA Everyone thought they were a wannabe country, a bunch of freedom fighters who were being brats about paying their taxes, but whoa, they started noticing when America would walk into other countries, pick fights and, holy cow, win! Now everyone recognizes that no matter how small others may think you are, all you have to do is speak softly and carry a big stick and you can put a McDonald's wherever you damn well please.
Christianity People thought these Christian Jews were wackos until they started converting everything under the sun. The world took notice when the largest empire in the world adopted Christianity through its emperor and the rest, well, it's in the Bible somewhere.
Come on people, we can make useless analogies all day long. Linux is a phenomena, and you can compare it to a lot of other phenomena. Trying to say it's like something else, though, takes away a little bit from the true magic of what happened in this specific instance and begins a group down the road of trying to develop in a manner similar to some other reference, which takes away from the spontaneity of what may happen and may serve to derail the power of the change.
The development of Linux is like the development of Linux. Enjoy the ride; don't analyze it. Everything big once started out small
You know, this idea of the celebrity death that didn't really happen isn't a new one. Sure, we have examples of Elvis or Jim Morrison or even Anastasia. But the practice goes back much much further. The Emperor Nero, who some have called one of the most hated emperors of ancient Rome, had a notable cult following after his death and there were many 'false Neros' in the fifty or so years after his (supposed) death. Jesus Christ's resurrection is assumed by many scholars to be a manifestation of this tendency for humans to not accept the death of people they deem important (coupled with a grave-robbing, a practice which was prevalent at the time, prevalent enough that they emperor issued a decree outlawing it). The reasons why people assume that such people aren't dead is unclear, but most of the times, it's just disbelief that the person could be dead. Look at our own Propaganda. JFK is alive and well and leading the charge against Redmond, fighting for the democratic ideals he must have died for (nevermind that he got us into Vietnam, supported the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco, and manipulated government to his own personal whims).
Should we disprove these ideas? I say no. Elvis fans happen to like thinking that Elvis is alive. It gives them comfort and solace which the real world can't give them. Some people will never accept the truth, and trying to rub it in their face will only exacerbate the problem.
As someone famous once said, "Let it go cause man, they're gone." I think it was Stuart Smalley referring to keys lost in a river of molten lava.
Slashdot Mirror
you're assuming "corporate" software goes through a lot of QA, or for that matter adequate QA.
I am not assuming this. I specifically stated that people assume this. I have a very good idea how QA general software goes through, but the mass market does not (since they still believe that the product they get is the final, highest quality version). You can mouth off all you want about how much you know, but the fact that Microsoft sells so much product and that everyone uses it tells people in general that they make a good product that everyone can use, thus when they have a screwup, it raises doubts on all of software in general
This is a quote from the leading online gaming source, Blue's News.
There are scary implications here. When you cannot trust software made by one of the world's largest software companies, what do you do when if[sic] comes to all the little homebrew progams that are available?
This is exactly the mentality that keeps open-source from advancing. As strange as it may seem, the corporate world does not see open-source software go through the same sort of rigorous QA that (they assume) corporate products go through. An event such as this is only going to serve to make people doubt more software in general and that has a negative effect on open-source software which already has to face the FUD about its quality.
No, this isn't Heaven's Gift, it's Satan's Blessing. Too many people see Microsoft as the sort of God of software and when your God fails you, where do you turn? Certainly not to the meek.
To paraphrase gilroy's dinosaur analogy below(apologies for not responding directly), each corp is a herd. The herd attracts like individuals to it, and those that aren't are driven out. The herd will not react to anything less than another herd, for it lacks the language to deal with anything smaller. (Ahhh frick, I;m out of practive with coming up with analogies. But I hope the gist remains.)
But the dinosaur analogy is a flawed one. Herds imply a certain homogeneity, that is, everything is essentially one species, but corporations, especially large ones, aren't like that. They are much more diversified because they have to be, because they have to manage so many disparate variables. The end result is that not everyone in a corporation shares the sort of guiding vision that a 'herd' might, and the barriers between these groups are most often found between the lower ranks and the higher ranks, as well as across the different positions within the company.
... the problem is that Pinkerton, as a corporation, is comprised of the very people that comprised the tormentors of geeks in high school.
That is as much of a stereotype as the one that you are purporting that Pinkerton is advancing. The fact that because you see big, jock-like bouncers and musclehead security guards does not mean that Pinkerton is run by the anti-geeks. Pinkerton is a huge, diverse corporation. They have marketing people (people who could easily have been artists in school), web programmers (most likely geeks like yourself), psychologists (hell, that one can go either way; I knew both in college), accountants (that word itself is a stereotype), economists, managers, and business. The president of my company, an Internet provider which is known for having rather geeky employees, is an ex-football player who is proud, forceful, strongminded, and very perceptive about the Internet world. The President of the NFL, Paul Tagliabue, is a scrawny former basketball player, known for being a brilliant and shrewd legal mind (he looks like a geek, too).
Do not stereotype Pinkerton the corporation because of what you see at the lowest of their levels. The Pinkerton representatives that you see are not the same ones that are developing WAVE America. If you stereotype them, you stoop to the same level that they have, and your arguments are just as shallow and invalid.
Face it, it just isn't cost effective to manage shell accounts anymore for such a small subset of customers, especially given the numerous shell providers out there. Yes, it sucks that those who want shells from their ISP can't get them, but it also sucks when the ISP has to manage a shell server for roughly 5-10% of their customer base. Considering that those shell servers are most often the servers that are abused by script kiddies and hackers (not crackers), it's in the better interests of the company to not have one period.
You don't need a shell server to do procmail-like filtering. It's very easy for an ISP to write up a simple web-based utility for its customers that will allow them to perform the same type of e-mail management (and that's a system that everyone can use).
Like the good old C=64. Hackable like h*ll. And people love(d) it.\
People didn't love it. Hackers loved it. There's a big difference. Netpliance isn't marketing this thing to hackers. They're marketing it to a much less technologically adept person than a hacker. The whole point is that it shouldn't just be cheap, but be so easy that a two-year old could do it. Old C64's while great, were not machines from grandma. Any machine is hackable given the right person. While hackable computers are nice, they should not be the business model. Face it, Slashdot may think it's this superimportant group, but in terms of market power, they are small, and Netpliance is not going to make money trying to cater to them.
- Fe-mailer
- Witch
- Script-gurlies
- Mamallama
Come on, Jon, there are so many girlie fields that you (and probably I) have left out. Why must you only focus in on the chickclickers? Please, do some more research next time. You might find a much more diversified group of stereotypes to choose from.Women use e-mail, and why shouldn't they have their own type of e-mail? Today, more and more women are fe-mailers, using one of the oldest of mediums to spam other women.
We can't forget the trolls, now can we, but troll is so male. Let's acknowledge all the women on Slashdot trying to piss off other women with their own title (and moderation status, Rob?).
With the rise of women online, more and more are turning to the annoying methods of their male counterparts in an effort to annoy the patriarchal IRC server admins.
These are girls who are new to the whole gaming experience. They're not very good, but all the other llamas tend to congregate towards them because they are women.
"If there's going to be a Big Brother in the United States, it's going to be us. It's going to be the FBI."
What's more is that when you only print one line from any source without the surrounding quote, you completely take the quote out of context and nine times out of ten misquote the person. This is what in the news world is called "bad journalism" and it has become a hallmark of YRO reporting on Slashdot (that's right, hallmark, like the standard identifying trait, like the one thing that discredits YRO more than anything else, including the paranoid posters).
What Paul George, the FBI guy, was saying is that everyone knows the FBI could be the Big Brother which is why they're regulated so tightly to prevent something like that from ever happening. He was making a point about how the FBI is being suffocated, prevented by law from being able to do its job, which is monitoring criminal activity, effectively because people are so paranoid that it could be them being monitored. You may not trust your government, but I trust mine, and frankly, I'm happy that someone out there is doing this because it's too damn easy for people to wreak havoc in this world. Trust me, the FBI can do it a lot better than a group put together by Slashdot ever could.
So what more is there to say? Try telling the whole story instead of just one line of it. Then maybe people can make informed, rational decisions instead of the irrational paranoia we see in YRO every other day.
If there is a combined CDPlayer and MP3 unit, the logical feature would be to ripping from the CDRom and play tracks as MP3. This not only saves power, but prevents skipping.
I may be misunderstanding you (and oh Lord, please say that I am), but that is the most illogical thing I have ever heard. You want to do this?
CD->Encoder->Save->Decoder->Audio
How does this save power? You still have to spin up the CD but now you have to take the time to encode the file, save it to memory, in addition to decode and play it. As I see it, you're using more power in the encoding and saving portions, not saving. And as for preventing skips, maybe. More likely, it's going to have to account for skips during the encoding process, which, honestly, isn't that what shock protection is for?
No, the logical feature in an MP3/CD player is to play the MP3s off of a CD. Yes, you might get skipping, but for me anyway, the benefits of having 10 hours of music on a handily transported medium that can be used in a player that will also play my other handily transported mediums far outweight issues of power (of which these devices probably don't use much more than regular CD players) and skipping.
I remember having this great debate in my high school economics class (I'd like to give a shout-out to Mr. Magnon at MacArthur High School: I hated you and you hated me; peace out) about whether or not we should have a sales tax over an income tax.
Granted, the benefits to have a national sales tax are quite appealing. The amount of commerce every year would provide a huge financial bonus to the country. People will always buy things and if the government gets even a small percentage of this (I think 4% was break even, but I'm not sure), they make a ton of money (e.g gas tax). Furthermore, from a bureaucratic standpoint, you don't have to worry about auditing incomes and worrying about exemptions and tax breaks, etc. etc. It seems like a dream, right? Everyone pays the same percentage on everything.
And therein lies the problem. Sales taxes, because of their total fairness in percentage are completely unfair to the lower middle class and impoverished. Essentially, those classes end up paying a greater percentage of their income to taxation than do the wealthy, miring them in even more poverty. It would be a government supported step towards the old "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" adage. A national sales tax would increase the ever growing disparity between the poor and the wealthy in this country, and that's why we don't have it (it's a political hot potato no politician wants to lay their hands on).
And guess what, an Internet tax (not a sales tax, an Internet sales tax) is not going to adversely affect the poor. Why? Because most poor people aren't on the 'Net, nor do they have the resources to purchase on the 'Net. They won't be taxed, but the wealthier people will, and that's who we want to tax. The goal of the national government (not so much the state governments) is to tax the wealthy more than the poor (that's why Steve Forbes 'flat tax' was such a flop). In doing so, they help to balance some of the disparity that occurs when states, who don't have the means nor the scale for monitoring such disparites, implement simple taxes, like the sales tax.
So, yes, all taxes are unfair, I agree, but they are necessary, and I would rather have taxes that are 'more fair' than 'more unfair'.
Back in September, Pine announced their MP3/CD player (link). It seemed pretty cool at the time. I thouht it was a Slashdot story, in fact, that brought this to my attention. They listed a pretty reasonable price, too, $280, and you can pre-order it at Outpost.com.
I get from this article that Slashdot thinks this is a negative thing, that by not publishing this information that we're somehow infringing on the press' privilege of universal access. Is this the same Slashdot that I see clamoring to clamp down on personal privacy information? Is there somehow a difference between accused criminals and ordinary Internet users? Guess what, when you make a decision to withold or not withold someone's information, you are performing an act of censorship. Either you are preventing someone from accessing information or you are preventing someone from protecting information.
Slashdot needs to make up its mind about what it wants. Someone, somewhere is not going to have access to the information they want and someone somewhere is going to have access to information someone else may not want them to have. Either way, you're screwed. Which is worse?
Information wants to be free. But not my information.
- Dolly Parton
- Kathy Bates
- Jenna Jamison
- Samuel L. Jackson
- The Pepsi Chick
- Tia Carrere
- Anne Heche
Personally, it looks like the films gonna suck, but at least we'll get some good adult film titles out of it, no?Exemplifying boobies, like Lara
The 'big-boned' tomb raider.
Doesn't tomb raider kind of sound like a porno?
The wise-crackin', ass-trashin', bitch-slappin, yoda-fashion tomb raider
The cute tomb raider with the Pepsi tie-ins.
The exotic tomb raider
The lesbian tomb raider
I'm sure precedent has already been established somewhat. Back in the early days of British radio, there was heated dispute about whether radio could play songs off of records. The BBC would actually bring in big acts to record sets so that they could play them on the radio. These weren't acoustic versions or even live versions, but full-fledged recordings (perhaps you've seen some of them in the, ironically, music stores -- Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, etc.) that sounded great and were produced, mixed, etc. etc. etc.
So, basically, radio has gotten to the point where it can do whatever it wants (besides swear, apparently). The RIAA recognizes the important role that radio plays in establishing pop hits and in marketing new young hits. It's not about to destroy that relationship by doing stupid things like telling radio to stop releasing music that can't be accurately owned by the studio (hence studio and live recorded tracks).
Read the liner notes to Jimi Hendrix's BBC Sessions dual CD sometime (don't let the store owner catch you opening the case, though, heh). It's extremely enlightening.
I hope Netscape takes advantage of the theming capabilities of Mozilla and actually themes their browsers so that they look like the OS they are intended to install on. One of the major downsides to Mozilla (IMHO) is that they don't use the native widget set, effectively introducing another layer of complexity into the GUI which will probably end up confusing the end-user more than anything else. The easy decision now would be to make the Windows version have a default 'Windows' widget, the Mac version have a default 'Mac' widget, etc.
In terms of coding and portability, yes the current implementation is probably the best, but the end-user doesn't think in terms of coding and portability. They'll see Netscape 6 and think, "Oh, God, it made Windows look different."
sign, too)
- Dedicated to his high-speed access
- Dedicated to perfection
- Donated efforts to local groups
- Published
Kudos to this dude. He gets a nod for a nomination for geek of the year. Is there a beanie award for this? If not, there should be.Not many people would go through the lengths to get DSL that this guy did, especially considering his telco did tell them that they were planning on rolling out DSL in the future (just not the near-enough future).
Most people would've stopped after getting the first connection and been like, "Whoop! I rule!" but this guy actually tested out more equipment because, well, damn, that first DSL connection wasn't good enough.
Granted, it's part of his work, but he took his understanding to the public and got them up and running as well. A geek is not selfish, nor is he greedy.
This is most important. A true geek feels the need to let everyone know not just that he did it, but how he did it, in the sort of detail that allows it to be repeated by one and all.
Information does not want to be free. Information is a non-breathing, non-living entity with no feelings and no desires.
People want information to be free, and that's the crux of the problem. As soon as capitalism returns to its roots and begins giving people what they want (in order to make more money, of course), then we'll see a resolution to this problem.
I want my information free. Don't you?
See, here where I am, it's 12:21am and I've been working in the studio all evening. This means that my comprehension of complex physics equation is lacking a bit (it may also have to do with the fact that he's using some funny characters).
Still, it seems completely feasible. If you can create whatever it is that makes that screensaver at the bottom, I'm sure you can push a spacecraft to superluminal velocities.
/me returns to staring at pretty swirly image.
Great, AOL has been added to ORBS. This will probably serve to invalidate ORBS more than anything else. The fact of the matter is that an ISP can not refuse AOL e-mail. AOL simply puts out too much legitimate e-mail to make blocking them outright even a possibility. The customer complaints would be tremendous and it would cause an ISP to lose credibility with customers who don't understand things like ORBS and open relays, who only understand things like grandma can't e-mail her granddaughter happy birthday. What's that mean? Selective entries on ORBS will start being ignored and once you start down that slippery slope, you may as well wave bye-bye to any sort of influence that list may have.
What needs to happen is a bunch of ISPs need to get together and file a lawsuit against AOL for allowing so much spam through their systems. A groundbreaking case for responsible management of systems on the Internet would serve our fair network well.
It may not be over for Mattel. Yes, they reign in control over the product that decrypts their site list, but that site list has already been made public several times and it shows some questionable decisions on the part of Mattel. Several CyberPatrol customers could easily get together and file a class-action lawsuit for, at the least, false advertising since sites that did not fit the particular descriptions were blocked. Sites themselves may still have a case for libel (representing knowingly that something false about another person is true) for those sites that were blocked inaccurately (and indeed, on purpose). If people still want to, they can attack Mattel (as opposed to defending themselves from them).
It's only over if you give in.
How come no one ever reads the Bible anymore? If Judaism taught us one thing, it's 'an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.' This guy needs to quit his bawling and setup a student review web site. I can only imagine what professors must say about their students behind closed doors. Well, get some of that out into the open and make these kids eat their words. Let's get this brawl started, baby!
I can only imagine what they'd say about me:
This little bastard came in and told me how to do my job. The little prick. I made one stinkin' mistake on the blackboard and he had to point it out in a 'it is obvious that you made a mistake but I'll let you find it' question. That's right after waking up from a 45-minute nap which he pulled off in the front row! Pray to God you never get this kid.
I bet he has fun with little boys down on Polk Street.
Sheesh, honestly folks, if people are going to act childish, well, make sure they do it right, dammit.
Cisco is a monopoly as huge as Microsoft. Fewer people are aware, because it involves the 'invisible' part of computer usage that most of us take for granted. But because of their market share, Cisco can and does gleefully break interoperability. Their machines don't need to work with anyone else's machines. But if you aren't Cisco, your machines had damn well better work with Cisco's, or you won't have any customers.
It's not uncommon for monopolies to exist in infrastructure environments (take the phone company, the electric company, the water system, the cable company, the list goes on, at least in the US). This is because those organizations tend to deal in a highly standardized environment where it pays if everyone's working on the same sheet. I would honestly hate to have more than one or two companies managing the power grid in my city. The possibilities for some sort of mishap increase, as does the cost as each company has to maintain its own network.
With that said, Cisco happens to have a good grip on the hardware implementation of one of these infrastructures and what's keeping them there is a) an excellent product, b) good marketing and c) interrelated systems. However, Cisco would have a hard time locking people out of the router business with changes in their product. They're still dealing in standard protocols when communicating between machines. Cisco routers will work just fine with 3Com Total Control units and hubs because nothing special is happening with the data. When the machines work in parallel, yes you want them to be the same and intercommunicate, but Cisco doesn't need to do anything to lock people out because you generally don't want many different setups doing the same task anyway (look at the pain in the ass handling both K56 and x2 was). The fact that Cisco makes a superior product is primarily what keeps it in control. You can bet, though, that if their work started becoming shoddy, ISPs would jump ship to the next best alternative, and they can because of those common protocols.
I don't think people understand exactly how much control Cisco has over the Internet. Not only do they make routers, they also make dial-in equipment as well as the OS which runs all this equipment. What's so great about that, you might ask? Well, it's completely possible (and in fact, it's a reality) that an ISP can have 85% of their network infrastructure be Cisco products. It's something they've been able to do very quietly because a) they don't interact with the common consumer the way that MS does and b) they have a reputation for both making solid products and backing them up with solid service. They have certification programs that are very similar to Microsoft certification programs and they maintain a pretty constant flow of OS revisions for their routers. They're not without their problems, though, one of which is to have nasty bugs (when they do have bugs) that are hard to track down. Still, they are a solid company (worth almost $600 billion, I dunno about).
A couple of years ago, my dad, who's a stock market junkie in his retirement, asked me which stocks were the best to buy. He was thinking of stocks like Yahoo, Amazon, etc. and I steered him towards more product driven companies, especially those involved with the infrastructure of the Internet, those that are less visible in the news. It's paid off. Luckily, he manages my portfolio as well. Stocks of companies that provide primarily services (Yahoo, Netpliance, Redhat) are traditionally more volatile than their product counterparts. I think anyone who's made an investment in such companies has generally done pretty well and had a much better chance for growth. This is, of course, long-term advice, not short-term advice. Yes, if you were in on Redhat in the initial period, you made a lot of money, but I wouldn't want to be my kids' future on companies that produce very little tangible product.
And to those worried about Cisco's OS, don't worry, Linux isn't going to be challenged anytime soon. The OS is made for administering routers, not for running games and what-not. It's very specific to its task and not exactly something you play around with.
That's right. Some dude went out into a field, found a whole bunch of rocks, and started selling them. All of the suddent, he had the number one selling novelty/toy on the market. Of course, now you get laughed at if you have a pet rock.
That's right, Goddard was laughed at, but when he showed that you could launch anything with highly explosive fuel and not hurt yourself, governments started taking notice and now we have rockets everywhere.
People used to think that NASCAR was a joke, something that a bunch of hillbillies watched when grandma wasn't showing them how well she could hit squirrels with pine cones, but then they actually counted the number of hillbillies watching NASCAR and saw that it was way more than the number that was watching NBA basketball and realized it was The Next Big Thing(tm). Now we have Jeff Gordon losing to the Pepsi girl and drivers going to Hardee's in their racecars.
Hell, no one thought you could make a living selling computers out of your garage, but then everyone realized that it was cheaper and hipper to buy them from hicks than from corporate moneymen and now they have multi-gazillion dollar companies. Who woulda thunkit?
From humble a humble start as 'Chips N Dips' (or something), people started noticing Slashdot when they reported on things other than Microsoft. Now all of the sudden, Slashdot comments are quoted as insider comments ("Mr. Coward wrote in reply to the judge's findings, 'First post!'") and Slashdot is getting bought out by every major Linux company that exists.
Everyone thought they were a wannabe country, a bunch of freedom fighters who were being brats about paying their taxes, but whoa, they started noticing when America would walk into other countries, pick fights and, holy cow, win! Now everyone recognizes that no matter how small others may think you are, all you have to do is speak softly and carry a big stick and you can put a McDonald's wherever you damn well please.
People thought these Christian Jews were wackos until they started converting everything under the sun. The world took notice when the largest empire in the world adopted Christianity through its emperor and the rest, well, it's in the Bible somewhere.
Come on people, we can make useless analogies all day long. Linux is a phenomena, and you can compare it to a lot of other phenomena. Trying to say it's like something else, though, takes away a little bit from the true magic of what happened in this specific instance and begins a group down the road of trying to develop in a manner similar to some other reference, which takes away from the spontaneity of what may happen and may serve to derail the power of the change.
The development of Linux is like the development of Linux. Enjoy the ride; don't analyze it.
Everything big once started out small
You know, this idea of the celebrity death that didn't really happen isn't a new one. Sure, we have examples of Elvis or Jim Morrison or even Anastasia. But the practice goes back much much further. The Emperor Nero, who some have called one of the most hated emperors of ancient Rome, had a notable cult following after his death and there were many 'false Neros' in the fifty or so years after his (supposed) death. Jesus Christ's resurrection is assumed by many scholars to be a manifestation of this tendency for humans to not accept the death of people they deem important (coupled with a grave-robbing, a practice which was prevalent at the time, prevalent enough that they emperor issued a decree outlawing it). The reasons why people assume that such people aren't dead is unclear, but most of the times, it's just disbelief that the person could be dead. Look at our own Propaganda. JFK is alive and well and leading the charge against Redmond, fighting for the democratic ideals he must have died for (nevermind that he got us into Vietnam, supported the whole Bay of Pigs fiasco, and manipulated government to his own personal whims).
Should we disprove these ideas? I say no. Elvis fans happen to like thinking that Elvis is alive. It gives them comfort and solace which the real world can't give them. Some people will never accept the truth, and trying to rub it in their face will only exacerbate the problem.
As someone famous once said, "Let it go cause man, they're gone." I think it was Stuart Smalley referring to keys lost in a river of molten lava.