Hmm... I may have to rethink my rule about never voting for anyone who posts on Slashdot. Funny that it's never been an issue before now.
I'm curious. If you took the Main Street project, and tried to scale it up to cover the entire city, how much do you figure it would cost? If the cost is low enough, I think I might want to adopt a city block or two. I'm a starving student, though, so it would have to be pretty danged low.
In closing, thank you for XMission. It makes me happy.
Great idea! How about a game where zombies attack you, but they're holding signs with words on them, and you have to say the word in order to kill the zombie. In advanced levels, they could be wearing sandwich boards with entire sentences on them, and in the final level, a series of zombies could attack, each carrying the next paragraph of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Yeah, that would really get kids to enjoy their...
The United States had a much different reaction to World War II than Great Britain. While Britain was mourning its dead*, rebuilding its infrastructure, and thinking deep thoughts about What It All Means in a world where such wasteful death and destruction can occur, The U.S. patted itself on the back for saving the world, then went out on a three decade long economic kegger.
Our GI's went home, got married, copulated like rabbits (sometimes in that order), and started looking for big houses with huge front lawns and wide streets far away from the hustle and bustle and slight garbagy smell of the cities. Vast swaths of land were converted into suburban tract housing. Everyone bought a car so they could live and work and play exactly where they wanted.
As the rich kids moved out to the 'burbs, they took the money and jobs with them, leading to a vicious economic downturn that turned our most populous areas into barren ghettos. Major city centers still had all the problems they had before, but lost the tax base and education base needed to do anything about them. As things got worse, the idea of living in the city became less and less attractive to most people.
Meanwhile, the ugliness of the networking problem came to the forefront: the need to link everything to everything else in our suddenly sprawled-out landscape necessitated the building of ever bigger roads. Eisenhower started the Interstate Highway System, which is a wonderful thing if you want to drive from L.A. to New York without stopping to ask for directions, but it proverbially duct taped America to its automobiles.
Now we're in a situation that I don't think we'll be able to pull ourselves out of unless oil hits $300/barrel (which I expect to occur in June 2007, right in time for Labor Day). Given the area that needs to be covered, no city can convince its taxpayers of the necessity of a really effective mass transit system. It's just too expensive to field the sort of system that car-owners would consider a viable alternative to their own private vehicles. The only people who really use mass transit are those too poor to buy their own cars, and if you're too poor to buy a car, you're certainly too poor to buy a politician.
So instead we field crappy mass transit systems that can get the poor to their exploitative jobs and back, and call it good. In my home town of Salt Lake, buses run every half hour, and most routes shut down after 6PM. So from an arbitrarily chosen departure time, the bus commuter waits fifteen minutes per connection, and has no alternative but to come straight home after work. In order to make the mass transit system something that car owners would consider, I think buses would have to run every ten minutes on most routes, with full service running until 9PM (and buses every half hour until midnight or 1AM). Routes would have to be added, so people on the outskirts wouldn't have to walk seven blocks to the nearest bus stop.
To most people, it sounds like overkill, but overkill is barely enough if the goal is to make mass transit a convenient alternative to private vehicles. Hence, we're never going to wean ourselves from our automobiles. Looking at the hundreds of thousands of cars, hundreds of gas stations and repair shops, thousands of miles of pavement, scores of car dealerships, etc., it seems pretty clear to me that a good mass transit system would be far cheaper than the current solution. But we're too heavily invested in the current solution to give it up without a fight.
I believe that fight is coming soon.
* Yes, the U.S. had casualties. But they had about a fifth the per capita military casualties of Britain, and suffered no losses stateside after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The whole thing was just less traumatizing from our perspective. For the U.S., World War II was a successful military operation. For Great Britain, it was a near-fatal brush with nasty, pointy death. Hitler taught Europe a lot of hard-won lessons about the horrors of war. All he taught us Yanks was, "Being an economic superpower kicks ass!"
Somehow, I think this goes a long way towards explaining Iraq.
Don't use the word "hobbyists". Say that the code will be reviewed by "other IT professionals".
Now, his code can already take advantage of any amount of GPL'ed code that he would like. It's only a legal issue when his company goes to sell the code. So I would refrain from using point #3.
Here is the overall argument I would use: "Mister boss, sir? We use a great deal of GPL'ed code here at XYZ Corp. If it weren't for open source, some of that code might have cost us thousands of dollars in licensing. The rest of it might not be available for any price, so we would have had to implement that functionality on our own and at enormous expense. In short, this company is much more productive and efficient because of the existence of a large library of freely distributed code."
"Now, the code we're suggesting should be GPL'ed is the result of hundreds of hours of labor. Yet it is very unlikely that we could capture that value by selling it. Frankly, we're not in the business of selling code, and it would be more of a hassle than it's worth to get into that business."
"In exchange for saving people those hundreds of hours, we will get their undying gratitude. Occasionally, that gratitude might come back in the form of good publicity, new customers for our products, etc. More frequently, it will come back in the form of improvements to our code base, such as security patches and new features."
"Our competitors? Admittedly, they'll have as much right to use the code as anybody. But remember that 'anybody' includes our customers, suppliers, and distributors, and we stand to gain when those companies become more efficient. Besides, this code isn't part of a process that provides us significant competitive advantages over our competitors."
"Finally, a properly managed GPL project (understand that there will be more to GPL'ing than just throwing a.tgz file up onto an FTP site) can leverage tens or even hundreds of developers. From a business perspective, it's like hiring developers who accept each others code as payment. We know you like paying your developers next to nothing; I just got my paycheck."
"No, sir. I guess it's not funny. Yes, sir, I'll be cleaning out my desk now."
Note to moderators: If it takes three readings of each paragraph to figure out what the hell a poster is talking about, it's probably not worth modding up. I know there's this tendency to think that, if a post is more than three paragraphs long, the poster should be rewarded for all his hard work. But fight it.
If I understand your arguments correctly, you're basically saying the following:
1) Security through obscurity is a great defense. Don't even bother trying to defend this old canard. Security flaws have a way of coming out, code or no code. GPL'ed code almost always gets much more positive, constructive attention from people looking to use the code in their own systems than negative attention from the black hat crowd.
2) If the author's company GPLs this code, and somebody out there gets data stolen because of problems in the code, the author's company will be held legally liable. Please, please, please show me one legal case where a company has been successfully sued for flaws in its code. If this was a legal possibility, it should already have happened to some company that was charging money for their code, rather than giving it away in such a way as to disclaim all liability (as the GPL does).
Since I haven't seen Bill Gates out on the freeway offramp with a cardboard "Will Code for Food" sign, I think it's up to you to back up your assertion that this is a reasonable concern.
3) If the code is worth GPL'ing, all the author needs to do is wait for some "haxxor" to break into his website, recognize how cool the code is, and GPL it for him. Just how big a fool are you? Only the copyright holder is able to GPL a work, and I don't think anyone in the world cracks websites for the purpose of doing code reviews on them.
4) You keep rambling incomprehensibly about how GPL'ing code is nothing more than an exercise in ego gratification. Well, maybe it is. So friggin' what? Sure, it's gratifying when somebody uses my code rather than going and re-implementing basically the same thing. Yeah, it's gratifying when your work saves someone else hundreds of hours of work. That doesn't mean we should withhold it because we're afraid of looking like glory hounds.
In summary: I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
If I were a "viral marketer", I'd look at the results of this. Sure, the game achieved a sort of notoriety from the fake Wikipedia article. But that's certainly countered by the fact that very few Slashdotters are fourteen year old girls (their primary demographic), and those few fourteen year old girls are the next generation of geek chicks, probably not ideal candidates for playing some airheaded game about a fake boy-band.
Meanwhile, they've brought their game to the attention of the Script Kiddie Brigade, and made their presence as a hangout four teenieboppers known to tens of thousands of (occasionally badly socialized) males.
All this might be a fine reaction for some organization that was trying to attract the/. demographic. But in this case, I suspect that it will attract twenty pedophiles, a thousand troublemakers and miscreants, and approximately five people the marketers actually wanted.
I find your comments to be both clever and perspicacious. The way you have taken a complex phenomenon and boiled it down to its bare basics, while still remaining true to that phenomenon, demonstrates a truly remarkable talent.
Have you considered writing a blog? People would read it.
Read the article again. The article said the following things:
1) The patron was caught browsing adult material on library computers. 2) The patron was a registered sex offender. 3) The patron was caught a few days later with kiddie porn on his hard drive.
Nowhere in the article does it explicitly say (or even imply) that the material at the library was kiddie porn.
If you're writing for a general audience, rather than some tech publication whose readers can presumably find interesting content themselves thankyouverymuch, you probably did them a disservice. Hype or no hype, podcasts seem like an ideal way to deliver content over the Internet to computer novices. Before podcasting, the average user had to:
Find some random web page where somebody puts frequently-updated mp3s.
Bookmark the page, or worse, remember how to find it.
Go to the bloody page every time the listener gets curious about the latest episode of the show. (That's probably the hardest step on the list)
Manually move the files over to an audio player (in such a way as to keep the episodes organized) so that the computer novice can listen without being anchored to the bloody computer.
That's a lot to ask of anyone who isn't already tech-obsessed. You could have done your readers a favor by saying, "Ignore the hype, it's not going to take over the world. But here's what it is." Then you could have pointed them to a couple of clients, given them links to a few shows with good quality and mass appeal, and let dear Aunt Tillie have the joy of scaring the bejeezus out of her kids with a bit of tech savvy.
Instead, you decided that the best thing to do was to heap scorn upon an overly-popular buzzword, in the hopes that the underlying phenomenon would go away. You stupid tech snob. Don't you understand that, for 90% of the population, "AUTOMATICALLY!!!!!!1111!!1" makes all the difference in the world? If you can't get your brain around that, you shouldn't be let within a mile of a tech story.
I always find it satisfying to end a debate by gratuitously sniping at my opponent's competence in his chosen profession, don't you? It's a long and storied Slashdot tradition.
Re:Podcasting is right up there with blog...
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I would say the ratio is closer to 40/1. However, in any medium you're going to get a lot of crap, and the very nature of this particular medium means that there are going to be a lot of niche shows that will only appeal to a very narrow slice of the potential audience (say, the podcaster and her five closest friends).
The lack of quality control isn't a huge problem, because people will go around recommending the shows that get them excited. If you don't want to go slogging through hours and hours of crap by no-talent hacks (soccergirl, I want fifteen minutes of my life back), not to worry. Selection mechanisms are already at work saving you from the worst of it, and as time goes on those selection mechanisms will only get more powerful.
Re:I could tell it was lame
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That's it, I'm subscribing.
No, really. It sounds exactly like what I would do if I had a podcast. So if I listen to it, maybe I can spare the world more of the same.
Re:To buy or not to buy, the reviewer doesn't know
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Pedantry is annoying. Misguided pedantry is a hundred times worse.
"The book is clearly not intended to be one of those PHP + MySQL combo books" : The book does not have a heavy focus on MySQL.
"For simple database needs, the material in that chapter might be sufficient. Yet for more extensive MySQL usage, including installation and administration, other resources will need to be consulted." : The book covers MySQL, but not in too much depth.
"...the book does not adequately explain how to use PHP with the various available database systems, only covering MySQL..." : The book does not cover databases other than MySQL.
While the reviewer might be faulted for his writing style, you can't get an actual contradiction out of his statements unless you grossly misinterpret him.
Finally, there's the whole matter of you judging the quality of a book on the basis of the presentation of the reviewer. If you find the reviewer so confusing and incoherent, shouldn't that just mean that you don't allow the review to inform your opinion?
I think the problem is that you're evaluating it as a video player. The "we play video" feature is the least interesting aspect of this software. The goal, as far as I can tell, is to provide a new network where anyone can publish their video online. So the success of the software should be evaluated based on how easy it is to find interesting content, and find interested viewers for your own content.
In short, we might have to wait years before rendering a final verdict.
Another annoyance: Plugging error messages into a search engine. Invariably, you get links to a dozen forums where the web page says, "I keep getting error message X", which is usually followed immediately by "Never mind, I figured it out" or "To see the solution, sign up for our online forums!" (You suck, expertexchange.com!) Occasionally one of the forums leads you in the right direction, but I just know there are pages out there with good, general-purpose information, but they're obscured by metric tons of crap.
Simple: if every guy who wants to find out whether or not a girl at a club is single, the simple act of answering the question will comprise the bulk of her evening. If there was a technomagical way for a woman to advertise exactly what she was looking for, then people who were looking for something completely different could discover that, and move on to somebody of a like mindset, without the woman in question even knowing anything had happened. This saves the woman an annoying come-on, and saves the guy an embarrassing rejection.
Imagine how different the bar scene would be if everyone had a bubble floating over their head. You look around and see some woman who intrigues you. But you check the bubble, and it says, "lesbian". Now, you don't know whether this is true, or if she's lying in order to get guys to leave her alone. But you can be pretty sure that asking her out will get you rejected. No harm, no foul, move on.
The next woman's bubble indicates that she expects to be treated lavishly: she wants to be taken to the best restaurants, she expects expensive gifts, she'll want flowers twice a week (and not the cheap ten dollar bouquets either). If that sort of thing is a turn-off, you don't have to waste four dates and several hundred dollars finding out. On the other hand, if you're poor but hit on her anyways, at least you had fair warning.
The information being published by a good service would be exactly the information you wanted published, and no more. As for "stalkers" who consider "single" to be a code word for "keep asking me out until I say yes", they'll get the angry, near-violent rejections they deserve.
First, because of the joys of backwards compatability, the equipment installed early will probably be useful for fifteen years, not just three.
Second, because now is the time to start developing the apps that "total connectivity" will enable. When WiMax is ready, the demand for anytime, anywhere Internet will already be primed.
Most of the apps that spark my imagination involve some level of GPS awareness. Imagine you're wandering downtown, looking for a bite to eat. Now, if you were smart and bored and anal, you would have researched your restauranting decisions prior to leaving the house. But now you're out of the house and unconnected.
Life would be different if you could easily query some sort of service and ask, "Where can I get a good turkey club for under $5.00?" The service might come back with several suggestions within a four block radius, along with links to menus, restaurant reviews, maps, etc.
Or say you subscribe to a dating/social service which would inform you when you were within a block of someone else who subscribed to the service, and suggest the two of you meet. When you both agree, it tells you both where the other person is. For additional safety, you could choose to automatically tell someone where you've decided to go, who you're meeting, and how long you expect to be.
Self-guided walking tours suddenly become very easy. Finding the nearest store that has the book you just remembered you wanted becomes very easy. Finding the cheapest gas within a mile becomes very easy. In order to get into this mindset, while you're out some evening, just start imagining what it would be very cool to know right this instant. "How long would it take me to ride the bus back to my apartment?" "Is that girl over there single?" "I wonder where that one band is playing tonight."
This is just the logical next step in the way we get and use information. Being able to access customized information anytime, anywhere, will be a Very Big Thing. I don't know precisely how it will change the way we do everything, but I'm pretty convinced that the examples I gave are just the simplest, most obvious applications. The less obvious ones will require experimentation, and that experimentation should be moving forward as quickly as possible, using whatever connectivity technology we can get our hands on.
Speaking of which, I really *hate* when people shorten "the Internet" to "the Net". It positively reeks of faux-hip. And why do people use "googling" when they really mean "looking something up on Google". Don't they know it makes it sound dirty?
Don't have a cow, man.* "Indie" is not a problem, and it conserves two syllables every time it's used. You wouldn't badmouth somebody for driving a Prius, would you?**
"Podcasting" seems like an acceptable word to use to describe publishing content in such a way that people can listen to it on their portable devices (many of which are iPods). Admittedly, the balance of evidence points to the term being coined by Apple's marketing department. But I'm sure that as it goes on, and the trend moves forward, it will lose that air of self-conscious trendiness. The people who used "googling" looked silly at first, too. It just takes a while for your ears to adjust.
* -1, Didn't check expiration date on catchphrase prior to usage.
It simply doesn't matter if 19 of the top 20--or even 99 of the top 100--shows are the product of "big media". The point isn't that podcasting provides an alternative to big media. It's that it provides alternatives, full stop. If your neighbor wants to do a show wherein he spends an hour each week just talking about his dog, Fifi, he can do it, and reach just about anyone in the world who wants to tune in.
Ten years ago, nobody could choose the Fifi Variety Hour. It isn't surprising that big media can garner the name recognition, advertising clout, market research, and (let's face it) talent to keep a large majority of people choosing their product. Podcasting is still a great leveller, because now they have to compete with every no-name garage DJ on the basis of product quality, rather than on the basis of "I have a radio station and you don't."
If some people only want to use podcasting as a convenient way to listen to radio programming, who cares? It doesn't detract from your ability to produce your own show, or my ability to listen to it. As the systems for matching people to interesting content improve (and boy will they ever), big media is either going to have to expand its offerings to cover a wide variety of new niches, or watch their audience reject them in favor of content that more precisely reflects their own interests.
You seriously didn't have time to read the article, did you? The part about working from home was just one part of a much larger solution, and without bringing the rest of it along, working at home just takes you from a bad face-to-face relationship to a bad long-distance relationship.
The problem is, you have a job where you're doing things you wouldn't do unless you were paid for it. Because of this, employers try to make you efficient by setting up your workplace so as to make it unconducive for anything enjoyable. People hold meetings so that they can look busy. Productivity plummets.
Yes, it's unhealthy when work starts creeping into non-work time. But that's because most people consider their jobs to be soul-sucking drudgery. If you really enjoy what you do, you don't have to draw a sharp, 40 hour line in the sand, or consider a few extra hours to be time deducted from your real life.
Anyways, the point is that the article isn't just suggesting "working from home", but is suggesting a wide variety of options for reworking the currently wasteful and sterile employer/employee relationship into something both more productive and fulfilling for both.
Work is a huge part of life. If you choose to see your employment as something you have to suffer through so that you can have the money to do the things you *really* want, then that's a third of your waking life flushed down the loo. Probably more if you have a long commute.
Now, for some people in some jobs, there is no alternative. Not everyone can have an exciting, fulfilling job surrounded by wonderful people, or do work that brings them the sort of pride and meaning that makes them feel like they're doing more than slaving for the check. If you're in that situation, it's fine that you zone out, compartmentalize your life... whatever you have to do to keep yourself sane. But you should also be thinking about why the job isn't more than just a job, and how you can get yourself into a situation where you can feel good enough about your work that you can welcome it into the rest of your life, instead of clocking out at the end of the day and trying like hell to block out Ned from Accounting.
If nothing else, it seems to me that if you're in a place where you only associate with people you wouldn't associate with for free, then it's high time you moved on.
All I'm getting at is what I think the gp was getting at: If your work isn't satisfying enough to let into your life, you owe it to yourself to find work that is.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm... I may have to rethink my rule about never voting for anyone who posts on Slashdot. Funny that it's never been an issue before now.
I'm curious. If you took the Main Street project, and tried to scale it up to cover the entire city, how much do you figure it would cost? If the cost is low enough, I think I might want to adopt a city block or two. I'm a starving student, though, so it would have to be pretty danged low.
In closing, thank you for XMission. It makes me happy.
Thank you for reminding me once again that it's time to flee for Europe. Ciao!
Great idea! How about a game where zombies attack you, but they're holding signs with words on them, and you have to say the word in order to kill the zombie. In advanced levels, they could be wearing sandwich boards with entire sentences on them, and in the final level, a series of zombies could attack, each carrying the next paragraph of William Golding's Lord of the Flies. Yeah, that would really get kids to enjoy their...
Er, that's not what you had in mind?
Here is how things went down.
The United States had a much different reaction to World War II than Great Britain. While Britain was mourning its dead*, rebuilding its infrastructure, and thinking deep thoughts about What It All Means in a world where such wasteful death and destruction can occur, The U.S. patted itself on the back for saving the world, then went out on a three decade long economic kegger.
Our GI's went home, got married, copulated like rabbits (sometimes in that order), and started looking for big houses with huge front lawns and wide streets far away from the hustle and bustle and slight garbagy smell of the cities. Vast swaths of land were converted into suburban tract housing. Everyone bought a car so they could live and work and play exactly where they wanted.
As the rich kids moved out to the 'burbs, they took the money and jobs with them, leading to a vicious economic downturn that turned our most populous areas into barren ghettos. Major city centers still had all the problems they had before, but lost the tax base and education base needed to do anything about them. As things got worse, the idea of living in the city became less and less attractive to most people.
Meanwhile, the ugliness of the networking problem came to the forefront: the need to link everything to everything else in our suddenly sprawled-out landscape necessitated the building of ever bigger roads. Eisenhower started the Interstate Highway System, which is a wonderful thing if you want to drive from L.A. to New York without stopping to ask for directions, but it proverbially duct taped America to its automobiles.
Now we're in a situation that I don't think we'll be able to pull ourselves out of unless oil hits $300/barrel (which I expect to occur in June 2007, right in time for Labor Day). Given the area that needs to be covered, no city can convince its taxpayers of the necessity of a really effective mass transit system. It's just too expensive to field the sort of system that car-owners would consider a viable alternative to their own private vehicles. The only people who really use mass transit are those too poor to buy their own cars, and if you're too poor to buy a car, you're certainly too poor to buy a politician.
So instead we field crappy mass transit systems that can get the poor to their exploitative jobs and back, and call it good. In my home town of Salt Lake, buses run every half hour, and most routes shut down after 6PM. So from an arbitrarily chosen departure time, the bus commuter waits fifteen minutes per connection, and has no alternative but to come straight home after work. In order to make the mass transit system something that car owners would consider, I think buses would have to run every ten minutes on most routes, with full service running until 9PM (and buses every half hour until midnight or 1AM). Routes would have to be added, so people on the outskirts wouldn't have to walk seven blocks to the nearest bus stop.
To most people, it sounds like overkill, but overkill is barely enough if the goal is to make mass transit a convenient alternative to private vehicles. Hence, we're never going to wean ourselves from our automobiles. Looking at the hundreds of thousands of cars, hundreds of gas stations and repair shops, thousands of miles of pavement, scores of car dealerships, etc., it seems pretty clear to me that a good mass transit system would be far cheaper than the current solution. But we're too heavily invested in the current solution to give it up without a fight.
I believe that fight is coming soon.
* Yes, the U.S. had casualties. But they had about a fifth the per capita military casualties of Britain, and suffered no losses stateside after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The whole thing was just less traumatizing from our perspective. For the U.S., World War II was a successful military operation. For Great Britain, it was a near-fatal brush with nasty, pointy death. Hitler taught Europe a lot of hard-won lessons about the horrors of war. All he taught us Yanks was, "Being an economic superpower kicks ass!"
Somehow, I think this goes a long way towards explaining Iraq.
Don't use the word "hobbyists". Say that the code will be reviewed by "other IT professionals".
.tgz file up onto an FTP site) can leverage tens or even hundreds of developers. From a business perspective, it's like hiring developers who accept each others code as payment. We know you like paying your developers next to nothing; I just got my paycheck."
Now, his code can already take advantage of any amount of GPL'ed code that he would like. It's only a legal issue when his company goes to sell the code. So I would refrain from using point #3.
Here is the overall argument I would use: "Mister boss, sir? We use a great deal of GPL'ed code here at XYZ Corp. If it weren't for open source, some of that code might have cost us thousands of dollars in licensing. The rest of it might not be available for any price, so we would have had to implement that functionality on our own and at enormous expense. In short, this company is much more productive and efficient because of the existence of a large library of freely distributed code."
"Now, the code we're suggesting should be GPL'ed is the result of hundreds of hours of labor. Yet it is very unlikely that we could capture that value by selling it. Frankly, we're not in the business of selling code, and it would be more of a hassle than it's worth to get into that business."
"In exchange for saving people those hundreds of hours, we will get their undying gratitude. Occasionally, that gratitude might come back in the form of good publicity, new customers for our products, etc. More frequently, it will come back in the form of improvements to our code base, such as security patches and new features."
"Our competitors? Admittedly, they'll have as much right to use the code as anybody. But remember that 'anybody' includes our customers, suppliers, and distributors, and we stand to gain when those companies become more efficient. Besides, this code isn't part of a process that provides us significant competitive advantages over our competitors."
"Finally, a properly managed GPL project (understand that there will be more to GPL'ing than just throwing a
"No, sir. I guess it's not funny. Yes, sir, I'll be cleaning out my desk now."
All I can say is, "Huh?" And further, "Huh?"
Note to moderators: If it takes three readings of each paragraph to figure out what the hell a poster is talking about, it's probably not worth modding up. I know there's this tendency to think that, if a post is more than three paragraphs long, the poster should be rewarded for all his hard work. But fight it.
If I understand your arguments correctly, you're basically saying the following:
1) Security through obscurity is a great defense. Don't even bother trying to defend this old canard. Security flaws have a way of coming out, code or no code. GPL'ed code almost always gets much more positive, constructive attention from people looking to use the code in their own systems than negative attention from the black hat crowd.
2) If the author's company GPLs this code, and somebody out there gets data stolen because of problems in the code, the author's company will be held legally liable. Please, please, please show me one legal case where a company has been successfully sued for flaws in its code. If this was a legal possibility, it should already have happened to some company that was charging money for their code, rather than giving it away in such a way as to disclaim all liability (as the GPL does).
Since I haven't seen Bill Gates out on the freeway offramp with a cardboard "Will Code for Food" sign, I think it's up to you to back up your assertion that this is a reasonable concern.
3) If the code is worth GPL'ing, all the author needs to do is wait for some "haxxor" to break into his website, recognize how cool the code is, and GPL it for him. Just how big a fool are you? Only the copyright holder is able to GPL a work, and I don't think anyone in the world cracks websites for the purpose of doing code reviews on them.
4) You keep rambling incomprehensibly about how GPL'ing code is nothing more than an exercise in ego gratification. Well, maybe it is. So friggin' what? Sure, it's gratifying when somebody uses my code rather than going and re-implementing basically the same thing. Yeah, it's gratifying when your work saves someone else hundreds of hours of work. That doesn't mean we should withhold it because we're afraid of looking like glory hounds.
In summary: I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
If I were a "viral marketer", I'd look at the results of this. Sure, the game achieved a sort of notoriety from the fake Wikipedia article. But that's certainly countered by the fact that very few Slashdotters are fourteen year old girls (their primary demographic), and those few fourteen year old girls are the next generation of geek chicks, probably not ideal candidates for playing some airheaded game about a fake boy-band.
/. demographic. But in this case, I suspect that it will attract twenty pedophiles, a thousand troublemakers and miscreants, and approximately five people the marketers actually wanted.
Meanwhile, they've brought their game to the attention of the Script Kiddie Brigade, and made their presence as a hangout four teenieboppers known to tens of thousands of (occasionally badly socialized) males.
All this might be a fine reaction for some organization that was trying to attract the
I find your comments to be both clever and perspicacious. The way you have taken a complex phenomenon and boiled it down to its bare basics, while still remaining true to that phenomenon, demonstrates a truly remarkable talent.
Have you considered writing a blog? People would read it.
Read the article again. The article said the following things:
1) The patron was caught browsing adult material on library computers.
2) The patron was a registered sex offender.
3) The patron was caught a few days later with kiddie porn on his hard drive.
Nowhere in the article does it explicitly say (or even imply) that the material at the library was kiddie porn.
That's a lot to ask of anyone who isn't already tech-obsessed. You could have done your readers a favor by saying, "Ignore the hype, it's not going to take over the world. But here's what it is." Then you could have pointed them to a couple of clients, given them links to a few shows with good quality and mass appeal, and let dear Aunt Tillie have the joy of scaring the bejeezus out of her kids with a bit of tech savvy.
Instead, you decided that the best thing to do was to heap scorn upon an overly-popular buzzword, in the hopes that the underlying phenomenon would go away. You stupid tech snob. Don't you understand that, for 90% of the population, "AUTOMATICALLY!!!!!!1111!!1" makes all the difference in the world? If you can't get your brain around that, you shouldn't be let within a mile of a tech story.
I always find it satisfying to end a debate by gratuitously sniping at my opponent's competence in his chosen profession, don't you? It's a long and storied Slashdot tradition.
I would say the ratio is closer to 40/1. However, in any medium you're going to get a lot of crap, and the very nature of this particular medium means that there are going to be a lot of niche shows that will only appeal to a very narrow slice of the potential audience (say, the podcaster and her five closest friends).
The lack of quality control isn't a huge problem, because people will go around recommending the shows that get them excited. If you don't want to go slogging through hours and hours of crap by no-talent hacks (soccergirl, I want fifteen minutes of my life back), not to worry. Selection mechanisms are already at work saving you from the worst of it, and as time goes on those selection mechanisms will only get more powerful.
That's it, I'm subscribing.
No, really. It sounds exactly like what I would do if I had a podcast. So if I listen to it, maybe I can spare the world more of the same.
Pedantry is annoying. Misguided pedantry is a hundred times worse.
"The book is clearly not intended to be one of those PHP + MySQL combo books" : The book does not have a heavy focus on MySQL.
"For simple database needs, the material in that chapter might be sufficient. Yet for more extensive MySQL usage, including installation and administration, other resources will need to be consulted." : The book covers MySQL, but not in too much depth.
"...the book does not adequately explain how to use PHP with the various available database systems, only covering MySQL..." : The book does not cover databases other than MySQL.
While the reviewer might be faulted for his writing style, you can't get an actual contradiction out of his statements unless you grossly misinterpret him.
Finally, there's the whole matter of you judging the quality of a book on the basis of the presentation of the reviewer. If you find the reviewer so confusing and incoherent, shouldn't that just mean that you don't allow the review to inform your opinion?
No way in hell am I going to recompile the OS every time I boot up. Do I look like I have that kind of time in my life? /me checks posting history.
Never mind. Carry on.
I think the problem is that you're evaluating it as a video player. The "we play video" feature is the least interesting aspect of this software. The goal, as far as I can tell, is to provide a new network where anyone can publish their video online. So the success of the software should be evaluated based on how easy it is to find interesting content, and find interested viewers for your own content.
In short, we might have to wait years before rendering a final verdict.
Another annoyance: Plugging error messages into a search engine. Invariably, you get links to a dozen forums where the web page says, "I keep getting error message X", which is usually followed immediately by "Never mind, I figured it out" or "To see the solution, sign up for our online forums!" (You suck, expertexchange.com!) Occasionally one of the forums leads you in the right direction, but I just know there are pages out there with good, general-purpose information, but they're obscured by metric tons of crap.
Simple: if every guy who wants to find out whether or not a girl at a club is single, the simple act of answering the question will comprise the bulk of her evening. If there was a technomagical way for a woman to advertise exactly what she was looking for, then people who were looking for something completely different could discover that, and move on to somebody of a like mindset, without the woman in question even knowing anything had happened. This saves the woman an annoying come-on, and saves the guy an embarrassing rejection.
Imagine how different the bar scene would be if everyone had a bubble floating over their head. You look around and see some woman who intrigues you. But you check the bubble, and it says, "lesbian". Now, you don't know whether this is true, or if she's lying in order to get guys to leave her alone. But you can be pretty sure that asking her out will get you rejected. No harm, no foul, move on.
The next woman's bubble indicates that she expects to be treated lavishly: she wants to be taken to the best restaurants, she expects expensive gifts, she'll want flowers twice a week (and not the cheap ten dollar bouquets either). If that sort of thing is a turn-off, you don't have to waste four dates and several hundred dollars finding out. On the other hand, if you're poor but hit on her anyways, at least you had fair warning.
The information being published by a good service would be exactly the information you wanted published, and no more. As for "stalkers" who consider "single" to be a code word for "keep asking me out until I say yes", they'll get the angry, near-violent rejections they deserve.
First, because of the joys of backwards compatability, the equipment installed early will probably be useful for fifteen years, not just three.
Second, because now is the time to start developing the apps that "total connectivity" will enable. When WiMax is ready, the demand for anytime, anywhere Internet will already be primed.
Most of the apps that spark my imagination involve some level of GPS awareness. Imagine you're wandering downtown, looking for a bite to eat. Now, if you were smart and bored and anal, you would have researched your restauranting decisions prior to leaving the house. But now you're out of the house and unconnected.
Life would be different if you could easily query some sort of service and ask, "Where can I get a good turkey club for under $5.00?" The service might come back with several suggestions within a four block radius, along with links to menus, restaurant reviews, maps, etc.
Or say you subscribe to a dating/social service which would inform you when you were within a block of someone else who subscribed to the service, and suggest the two of you meet. When you both agree, it tells you both where the other person is. For additional safety, you could choose to automatically tell someone where you've decided to go, who you're meeting, and how long you expect to be.
Self-guided walking tours suddenly become very easy. Finding the nearest store that has the book you just remembered you wanted becomes very easy. Finding the cheapest gas within a mile becomes very easy. In order to get into this mindset, while you're out some evening, just start imagining what it would be very cool to know right this instant. "How long would it take me to ride the bus back to my apartment?" "Is that girl over there single?" "I wonder where that one band is playing tonight."
This is just the logical next step in the way we get and use information. Being able to access customized information anytime, anywhere, will be a Very Big Thing. I don't know precisely how it will change the way we do everything, but I'm pretty convinced that the examples I gave are just the simplest, most obvious applications. The less obvious ones will require experimentation, and that experimentation should be moving forward as quickly as possible, using whatever connectivity technology we can get our hands on.
Speaking of which, I really *hate* when people shorten "the Internet" to "the Net". It positively reeks of faux-hip. And why do people use "googling" when they really mean "looking something up on Google". Don't they know it makes it sound dirty?
Don't have a cow, man.* "Indie" is not a problem, and it conserves two syllables every time it's used. You wouldn't badmouth somebody for driving a Prius, would you?**
"Podcasting" seems like an acceptable word to use to describe publishing content in such a way that people can listen to it on their portable devices (many of which are iPods). Admittedly, the balance of evidence points to the term being coined by Apple's marketing department. But I'm sure that as it goes on, and the trend moves forward, it will lose that air of self-conscious trendiness. The people who used "googling" looked silly at first, too. It just takes a while for your ears to adjust.
* -1, Didn't check expiration date on catchphrase prior to usage.
** -1, Total Friggin Non-Sequitur.
It simply doesn't matter if 19 of the top 20--or even 99 of the top 100--shows are the product of "big media". The point isn't that podcasting provides an alternative to big media. It's that it provides alternatives, full stop. If your neighbor wants to do a show wherein he spends an hour each week just talking about his dog, Fifi, he can do it, and reach just about anyone in the world who wants to tune in.
Ten years ago, nobody could choose the Fifi Variety Hour. It isn't surprising that big media can garner the name recognition, advertising clout, market research, and (let's face it) talent to keep a large majority of people choosing their product. Podcasting is still a great leveller, because now they have to compete with every no-name garage DJ on the basis of product quality, rather than on the basis of "I have a radio station and you don't."
If some people only want to use podcasting as a convenient way to listen to radio programming, who cares? It doesn't detract from your ability to produce your own show, or my ability to listen to it. As the systems for matching people to interesting content improve (and boy will they ever), big media is either going to have to expand its offerings to cover a wide variety of new niches, or watch their audience reject them in favor of content that more precisely reflects their own interests.
You're not *nearly* paranoid enough. Here's his real goal:
<paranoia_mode style="paranoia-height: 150%">
1) Get the story linked to slashdot.
2) Hope that somebody cut-n-pastes his article into the comments in a cheap bid for karma.
3) Sue Slashdot into oblivion for 100,000+ instances of copyright infringement.
3.5) Profit.
4) Watch the entire Open Source movement wilt like lettuce on a hot day.
5) Get kickback from Microsoft, Rob Enderle, and some guy Linus used to tease in third grade.
6) Profit, profit, profit!
7) Go down in the annals of geekdom as the greatest troll EVAR!!!!!
</paranoia_mode>
You seriously didn't have time to read the article, did you? The part about working from home was just one part of a much larger solution, and without bringing the rest of it along, working at home just takes you from a bad face-to-face relationship to a bad long-distance relationship.
The problem is, you have a job where you're doing things you wouldn't do unless you were paid for it. Because of this, employers try to make you efficient by setting up your workplace so as to make it unconducive for anything enjoyable. People hold meetings so that they can look busy. Productivity plummets.
Yes, it's unhealthy when work starts creeping into non-work time. But that's because most people consider their jobs to be soul-sucking drudgery. If you really enjoy what you do, you don't have to draw a sharp, 40 hour line in the sand, or consider a few extra hours to be time deducted from your real life.
Anyways, the point is that the article isn't just suggesting "working from home", but is suggesting a wide variety of options for reworking the currently wasteful and sterile employer/employee relationship into something both more productive and fulfilling for both.
Speak for yourself, Mr. Ego. Me, I looked at the story summary and saw my entire short career crashing down around me.
Just pack my job up and move it to India now. Apparently, I won't be needing it.
I think it's very relevant to your comment.
Work is a huge part of life. If you choose to see your employment as something you have to suffer through so that you can have the money to do the things you *really* want, then that's a third of your waking life flushed down the loo. Probably more if you have a long commute.
Now, for some people in some jobs, there is no alternative. Not everyone can have an exciting, fulfilling job surrounded by wonderful people, or do work that brings them the sort of pride and meaning that makes them feel like they're doing more than slaving for the check. If you're in that situation, it's fine that you zone out, compartmentalize your life... whatever you have to do to keep yourself sane. But you should also be thinking about why the job isn't more than just a job, and how you can get yourself into a situation where you can feel good enough about your work that you can welcome it into the rest of your life, instead of clocking out at the end of the day and trying like hell to block out Ned from Accounting.
If nothing else, it seems to me that if you're in a place where you only associate with people you wouldn't associate with for free, then it's high time you moved on.
All I'm getting at is what I think the gp was getting at: If your work isn't satisfying enough to let into your life, you owe it to yourself to find work that is.