Instead of shopping at big box stores, you shop at your local retailer that actually has to worry about their reputation. I have a great local store (that is a Gamestop franchise) where I know that the salespeople will always give me a straight answer. I keep going back because of that.
It's kind of ridiculous that they still have such a huge bug at this point, but does anybody know if Firefox's memory leak(s) is(are) fixed yet? I'm really tired of leaving up a browser up overnight, and coming in in the morning to find my machine all jammed up because Firefox is sitting on 200+ Meg of memory for a single web page. It makes me not able to commit my company completely to Firefox (that, and a glaring lack of ActiveX).
As long as it doesn't have terrible memory leaks like Firefox, I don't care how big the footprint is. Big is much better than infinitely big over time. I've never understood why the guys at Firefox can't (or won't?) fix something as simple and serious as memory leaks.
Uuum... who cares? It's a web server. Unless you're Amazon.com or Google.com, a web server isn't a praticularly important piece of anybody's infrastructure.
Well, an excellent way for them to make a comeback is if they did a complete overhaul and focused on providing a heavily filtered version of the Internet in all forms, in an attempt to make it as safe from crime, viruses, and nasty content as possible. With the total and complete mess that the Net is in these days (flooded with spam, crime, and malware), I would think that at this point in time, some people would be falling all over themselves to use a service like that. I would even use a service like that for my business!
Exactly. Replacing a motherboard isn't the same as swapping a failed drive out of a RAID array. It's fairly major surgery that generally isn't done on the fly. The only hardware changes that I would ever expect to be done "on the fly" to an important machine would be to swap out a hard drive out of a RAID array, which of course, wouldn't be effected. I'll get you a cookie if you can even unplug the motherboard in less time than it takes to call to get an activation code.
So you're saying... somebody gets arrested for a crime. They show an ID that is your name and your SS#. They claim to be you. Right? What about fingerprints and DNA? Isn't that all standard these days? Hell, the FBI has my prints on file due to a stupid temp job at the USPS years ago, even. Can stealing a SS# really cause anything other than a credit headache?
Hang on... this is about doing activation when you install a new OS. If you're having to install a new OS on a machine, you're already having to spend a lot of time setting it up. This is an extra minute or two on the phone. This is irrelevant. If you have a server that is down because some software on it went haywire, and you need to fix it, activation doesn't come into play. So, I'd say that this is a completely moot point in the situation you're talking about.
No, I don't. Who fucking cares if somebody gets my credit card info? Sure, it's a PITA to deal with, but a credit score just an imaginary number. It's just the grown-up world's version of "your permanent record". Big deal. If you think that your credit and money is your "identity", then you need to maybe step back and reconsider your priorities. Living in a cabin is a nice idea, but I wouldn't do it over something as trivial as my financial records. It's just money. They print more every day. My identity has nothing to do with banking. If my credit gets ruined, I'll just use cash. It's no big deal, unless you're caught up in the consumerist rat race. I consider that to be a very sick and twisted version of reality, though.
Well, it looks like they're good if you want to make Little Kid Blinding Devices, as evidenced by the pictures of his son STARING into the camera, and a close up of the laser casing that says don't STARE at the laser or you'll go friggin blind.
My point is that the Net can't keep going like this. Something has to change. The first thing is we as developers and admins need to stop accepting rampant crime as a given. It's just not acceptable. Whether it's an international police group that goes after these bastards, or it's groups of techo-vigilantes (with guns) hunting these people down, I don't know. Right now, any of us online have to just accept the constant attacks, knowing that if we, law-abiding people, try to fight back, we'll be thrown in jail, while these fuckers won't ever be touched.
Maybe it's time to form a security company that actually physically tracks these people down and takes care of the problem outside of the law.
Have you ever tried to harden an Internet server of any kind? It's not just installing a lock on your door. It's installing locks on every door and window. It's adding a wall and a moat around your house. It's adding a sniper's nest and an electrified fence. It's really insane the lengths that anyone has to go to just to put any kind of server on the Net these days. At what point does the admin's responsiblity end? Realistically, it takes a security team to continually patch and configure each and every server constantly just to maintain any kind of protection. SQL injection may be relatively simple to fix, but my point is why is 100% of the burden still on admins? Why do we not have teams of either law enforcement or individuals tracking down all of these fuckers and beating the holy hell out of them? (Actually, I know one guy who did track down a hacker... he flew out to his town, and showed up at his door with a baseball bat. I'll let you imagine the rest)
Hello? Has the Net gotten so crime-ridden that instead of blaming criminals for doing illegal things, that we're now blaming developers? I mean, sure developers need to do all they can, but at what point do we, as a society say, "Hey, let's prosecute some of these assholes that are making life online a royal pain in the ass?" It's pretty absurd that today, you can still do whatever you'd like online (hack sites, networks, steal information), and there are really no repurcussions. We see what, one person getting jail time every 6 months? That's fucking insane. It's time for our government's law enforcement to step up to the plate, learn what the fuck a mouse is, and start prosecuting some of these people. Email is already useless. The web is getting there pretty quickly. SQL injection, firewalls, blah, blah blah.
If I have somebody who is constantly trying to break into my house, to the extent that I have to pay a security professional just to keep them bastards out, I'd be down at the police station talking to the police chief, angry as hell. As is, people have come to accept that there's almost more crime than legitimate traffic on the Net these days. That's insane. Something has to be done about this mess before the entire Net is just useless.
In a perfect world, you're right. Build a good product, and people will come running. Well, let me just begin the list of good software with bad marketing that have failed due to the lack of marketing: OS/2 Word Perfect Lotus...
He should take a look at a company called Microsoft. Creating a no-competition environment seems to have worked out well for them.
You're missing the point. There was a lot of competition when they started. There's little to no competition in some of their markets now because they were so successful at doing what they did.
Two words: iPod and iTunes..... I'm not saying they are easy to find one but there are a few lucrative market niches that have been left completely unexploited and the funny part is that most of them are so bloody obvious that most people manage to overlook them.
You actually have no idea whether they're lucrative. Apple doesn't disclose that kind of info. For all we know, they're losing info.
how many businesses out there actually offer you something that is truly useful on a daily basis without you having to pay a cent for it? Google does.
No offense buddy, but you've proven yourself 100% right. You're not a capitalist. What you don't understand is that the money to pay for Google is coming from somewhere. Companies aren't taking it out of their own pockets. You're still paying for it. Do you honestly think that companies don't take into account advertising costs when pricing their products? You giving somebody some cash for an end product or service is really just the tip of the iceberg. You can't really talk about a company like Google and how they do business without understanding how the whole system works.
Seems like very few people in the real world have any concept of open standards etc.
Are you kidding me? Are you just now realizing this? What would make you think that people in the real world even know what open standards are, in the first place?
It's the same reason many US states actually run their own liquor stores... money. It's not about being fair or passing good laws, it's about making sure that every shit-eating corrupt politician gets their piece of the pie. No surprise here.
It's a profitable, debt-free high end pet supplies business. Not a boutique (those aren't doing so hot). Kind of like Whole Foods® for animals. 4 years old. No debt. Profitable. Happy employees, all with health insurance. Loyal customer base. It's all good. The web site is being completely re-vamped right now due to some technical nastiness, but only about 10% of our business is online (hence my lack of concern that the web site is down).
So yeah, it pisses me off that I could start a business with $20K, and 4 years later, it's a multi-million dollar business that keeps growing, but VC's are only interested in crap like YouTube. It's very frustrating. Not that I NEED any investment, but it would help me open more stores a lot quicker than I can do now.
Sucks having morals. I could never live with myself for being some schmuch in a suit who danced in front of VC's and walked away with a golden parachute for doing practically nothing other than working up some Powerpoint presentations.
Very true. The founders have already made their money. They couldn't care less what happens to the business at this point.
It just pisses me off to no end (on a personal level) that I busted my ass to make a real, profitable, debt-free, brick-and-mortar business, and no investors are interested. If I had some flaky, money-losing idea, then they'd be knocking down my doors.
Funny... I thought that only a moron would buy Youtube because they can't possibly be making money by paying for gobs of bandwidth and hardware and taking in pennies at a time from Google ads. But hey...
I agree 100% that there's a ripple effect. Many of us will download a quick and dirty copy of the latest blockbuster movie, see that it's absolute shit, and in turn, not go see it at the theaters or buy the DVD. Previously, millions of people were duped into paying hard earned money to see absolute and total garbage. I agree 100% that there's a ripple effect. I hope the ripples get bigger.
I agree. I think that you're right. This is where the masses will go to in the very near future. Personally, I don't have cable at all. I prefer my local indy video rental shop where I can get wierd shit. But I think that you're right. Most people will do the on-demand cable thing. It's cheap and simple.
I'm just saying, that as an impulse buy, I don't see too many people being interested. If the impulse is "I want to see movie X", most people aren't going to want to sit down in front of a computer, and deal with streaming issues, etc. Hell, I'm in front of a computer 16 hours a day, and even I wouldn't be interested in that. I'll slap a $3 rented movie in my PS2 or gf's XBox, and watch it on a $50 TV. There's really no reason to watch movies streaming over the Net with technology the way it is. It's expensive, complicated, and the quality is much much worse than using a $25 DVD player from the grocery store.
I know you can do it. That doesn't mean that it's enjoyable or preferable to the current low-tech methods. Sure, some people will do it, but I don't see it taking off any time in the next 5 years.
A 4.5 gig Movie shrunk down to 300 MB? No thanks. You can keep it. If I wanted that kind of quality, I'd attach some rabbit ears and aluminum foil to my TV. A 300 MB streaming file that you have to watch on your computer is not in any way a substitute for a DVD.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of shopping at big box stores, you shop at your local retailer that actually has to worry about their reputation. I have a great local store (that is a Gamestop franchise) where I know that the salespeople will always give me a straight answer. I keep going back because of that.
It's kind of ridiculous that they still have such a huge bug at this point, but does anybody know if Firefox's memory leak(s) is(are) fixed yet? I'm really tired of leaving up a browser up overnight, and coming in in the morning to find my machine all jammed up because Firefox is sitting on 200+ Meg of memory for a single web page. It makes me not able to commit my company completely to Firefox (that, and a glaring lack of ActiveX).
As long as it doesn't have terrible memory leaks like Firefox, I don't care how big the footprint is. Big is much better than infinitely big over time. I've never understood why the guys at Firefox can't (or won't?) fix something as simple and serious as memory leaks.
Uuum... who cares? It's a web server. Unless you're Amazon.com or Google.com, a web server isn't a praticularly important piece of anybody's infrastructure.
Well, an excellent way for them to make a comeback is if they did a complete overhaul and focused on providing a heavily filtered version of the Internet in all forms, in an attempt to make it as safe from crime, viruses, and nasty content as possible. With the total and complete mess that the Net is in these days (flooded with spam, crime, and malware), I would think that at this point in time, some people would be falling all over themselves to use a service like that. I would even use a service like that for my business!
Exactly. Replacing a motherboard isn't the same as swapping a failed drive out of a RAID array. It's fairly major surgery that generally isn't done on the fly. The only hardware changes that I would ever expect to be done "on the fly" to an important machine would be to swap out a hard drive out of a RAID array, which of course, wouldn't be effected. I'll get you a cookie if you can even unplug the motherboard in less time than it takes to call to get an activation code.
So you're saying... somebody gets arrested for a crime. They show an ID that is your name and your SS#. They claim to be you. Right? What about fingerprints and DNA? Isn't that all standard these days? Hell, the FBI has my prints on file due to a stupid temp job at the USPS years ago, even. Can stealing a SS# really cause anything other than a credit headache?
Hang on... this is about doing activation when you install a new OS. If you're having to install a new OS on a machine, you're already having to spend a lot of time setting it up. This is an extra minute or two on the phone. This is irrelevant. If you have a server that is down because some software on it went haywire, and you need to fix it, activation doesn't come into play. So, I'd say that this is a completely moot point in the situation you're talking about.
No, I don't. Who fucking cares if somebody gets my credit card info? Sure, it's a PITA to deal with, but a credit score just an imaginary number. It's just the grown-up world's version of "your permanent record". Big deal. If you think that your credit and money is your "identity", then you need to maybe step back and reconsider your priorities. Living in a cabin is a nice idea, but I wouldn't do it over something as trivial as my financial records. It's just money. They print more every day. My identity has nothing to do with banking. If my credit gets ruined, I'll just use cash. It's no big deal, unless you're caught up in the consumerist rat race. I consider that to be a very sick and twisted version of reality, though.
Well, it looks like they're good if you want to make Little Kid Blinding Devices, as evidenced by the pictures of his son STARING into the camera, and a close up of the laser casing that says don't STARE at the laser or you'll go friggin blind.
My point is that the Net can't keep going like this. Something has to change. The first thing is we as developers and admins need to stop accepting rampant crime as a given. It's just not acceptable. Whether it's an international police group that goes after these bastards, or it's groups of techo-vigilantes (with guns) hunting these people down, I don't know. Right now, any of us online have to just accept the constant attacks, knowing that if we, law-abiding people, try to fight back, we'll be thrown in jail, while these fuckers won't ever be touched.
Maybe it's time to form a security company that actually physically tracks these people down and takes care of the problem outside of the law.
Have you ever tried to harden an Internet server of any kind? It's not just installing a lock on your door. It's installing locks on every door and window. It's adding a wall and a moat around your house. It's adding a sniper's nest and an electrified fence. It's really insane the lengths that anyone has to go to just to put any kind of server on the Net these days. At what point does the admin's responsiblity end? Realistically, it takes a security team to continually patch and configure each and every server constantly just to maintain any kind of protection. SQL injection may be relatively simple to fix, but my point is why is 100% of the burden still on admins? Why do we not have teams of either law enforcement or individuals tracking down all of these fuckers and beating the holy hell out of them? (Actually, I know one guy who did track down a hacker... he flew out to his town, and showed up at his door with a baseball bat. I'll let you imagine the rest)
Hello? Has the Net gotten so crime-ridden that instead of blaming criminals for doing illegal things, that we're now blaming developers? I mean, sure developers need to do all they can, but at what point do we, as a society say, "Hey, let's prosecute some of these assholes that are making life online a royal pain in the ass?" It's pretty absurd that today, you can still do whatever you'd like online (hack sites, networks, steal information), and there are really no repurcussions. We see what, one person getting jail time every 6 months? That's fucking insane. It's time for our government's law enforcement to step up to the plate, learn what the fuck a mouse is, and start prosecuting some of these people. Email is already useless. The web is getting there pretty quickly. SQL injection, firewalls, blah, blah blah.
If I have somebody who is constantly trying to break into my house, to the extent that I have to pay a security professional just to keep them bastards out, I'd be down at the police station talking to the police chief, angry as hell. As is, people have come to accept that there's almost more crime than legitimate traffic on the Net these days. That's insane. Something has to be done about this mess before the entire Net is just useless.
In a perfect world, you're right. Build a good product, and people will come running. Well, let me just begin the list of good software with bad marketing that have failed due to the lack of marketing: ...
OS/2
Word Perfect
Lotus
He should take a look at a company called Microsoft. Creating a no-competition environment seems to have worked out well for them.
..... I'm not saying they are easy to find one but there are a few lucrative market niches that have been left completely unexploited and the funny part is that most of them are so bloody obvious that most people manage to overlook them.
You're missing the point. There was a lot of competition when they started. There's little to no competition in some of their markets now because they were so successful at doing what they did.
Two words: iPod and iTunes
You actually have no idea whether they're lucrative. Apple doesn't disclose that kind of info. For all we know, they're losing info.
. I'm not really capitalist,
how many businesses out there actually offer you something that is truly useful on a daily basis without you having to pay a cent for it? Google does.
No offense buddy, but you've proven yourself 100% right. You're not a capitalist. What you don't understand is that the money to pay for Google is coming from somewhere. Companies aren't taking it out of their own pockets. You're still paying for it. Do you honestly think that companies don't take into account advertising costs when pricing their products? You giving somebody some cash for an end product or service is really just the tip of the iceberg. You can't really talk about a company like Google and how they do business without understanding how the whole system works.
Seems like very few people in the real world have any concept of open standards etc.
Are you kidding me? Are you just now realizing this? What would make you think that people in the real world even know what open standards are, in the first place?
It's the same reason many US states actually run their own liquor stores... money. It's not about being fair or passing good laws, it's about making sure that every shit-eating corrupt politician gets their piece of the pie. No surprise here.
It's a profitable, debt-free high end pet supplies business. Not a boutique (those aren't doing so hot). Kind of like Whole Foods® for animals. 4 years old. No debt. Profitable. Happy employees, all with health insurance. Loyal customer base. It's all good. The web site is being completely re-vamped right now due to some technical nastiness, but only about 10% of our business is online (hence my lack of concern that the web site is down).
So yeah, it pisses me off that I could start a business with $20K, and 4 years later, it's a multi-million dollar business that keeps growing, but VC's are only interested in crap like YouTube. It's very frustrating. Not that I NEED any investment, but it would help me open more stores a lot quicker than I can do now.
Sucks having morals. I could never live with myself for being some schmuch in a suit who danced in front of VC's and walked away with a golden parachute for doing practically nothing other than working up some Powerpoint presentations.
Ah well. Fuck it.
Very true. The founders have already made their money. They couldn't care less what happens to the business at this point.
It just pisses me off to no end (on a personal level) that I busted my ass to make a real, profitable, debt-free, brick-and-mortar business, and no investors are interested. If I had some flaky, money-losing idea, then they'd be knocking down my doors.
Fuckers.
Funny... I thought that only a moron would buy Youtube because they can't possibly be making money by paying for gobs of bandwidth and hardware and taking in pennies at a time from Google ads. But hey...
1. Come up with an idea.
2. Find stupid VC's
3. ????
4. Profit!
I agree 100% that there's a ripple effect. Many of us will download a quick and dirty copy of the latest blockbuster movie, see that it's absolute shit, and in turn, not go see it at the theaters or buy the DVD. Previously, millions of people were duped into paying hard earned money to see absolute and total garbage. I agree 100% that there's a ripple effect. I hope the ripples get bigger.
I agree. I think that you're right. This is where the masses will go to in the very near future. Personally, I don't have cable at all. I prefer my local indy video rental shop where I can get wierd shit. But I think that you're right. Most people will do the on-demand cable thing. It's cheap and simple.
I'm just saying, that as an impulse buy, I don't see too many people being interested. If the impulse is "I want to see movie X", most people aren't going to want to sit down in front of a computer, and deal with streaming issues, etc. Hell, I'm in front of a computer 16 hours a day, and even I wouldn't be interested in that. I'll slap a $3 rented movie in my PS2 or gf's XBox, and watch it on a $50 TV. There's really no reason to watch movies streaming over the Net with technology the way it is. It's expensive, complicated, and the quality is much much worse than using a $25 DVD player from the grocery store.
I know you can do it. That doesn't mean that it's enjoyable or preferable to the current low-tech methods. Sure, some people will do it, but I don't see it taking off any time in the next 5 years.
A 4.5 gig Movie shrunk down to 300 MB? No thanks. You can keep it. If I wanted that kind of quality, I'd attach some rabbit ears and aluminum foil to my TV. A 300 MB streaming file that you have to watch on your computer is not in any way a substitute for a DVD.