Hell, this applies for just about all "designer" wear. Are Levis really that much better? Are Tommy Hilfiger shirts so much better than non-Tommy's? Of course not.
The prices of designer clothing: a tax on the wealthy and stupid (which often equates to the same thing...)
If I were to start a website, here's the rate card I would use:
Basic text-ad: $2.50/1000 impressions
Ad with JavaScript: $5.00/1000 impressions
Ad with image/other media (advertiser hosted): $5.00/1000 impressions
Ad with image/other media (site hosted): $5.00/1000 impressions, plus $5.00/10000 (KB*impressions)
Ad that pops-up a new window: $20.00/1000 impressions [incl. JavaScript fee[
Ad with Flash: $10.00/1000 impressions (in addition to any other charges that may apply)
If an advertiser thus wants me to host his 100KB Flash ad which will appear in a spawned pop-up, the charge is (per thousand impressions)
Pop-up: $20.00
Hosted File: $5.00 + $50.00
Flash surcharge: $10.00
So the advertiser ends up paying $85/1000 impressions. So they'd better get 34 times the business out of this ad than out of a text-ad (which is not as annoying and costs only $2.50). In short, I doubt many advertisers would use Flash or pop-ups. I would also have a requirement that if an ad adversely affects the site (hijacks browsers, etc.), the ad is removed and the advertiser forfeits any refund that might be due.
The point about Ballmer is, I think, correct. My reading is like this: Microsoft had years of stellar growth while Gates was at the helm. Ballmer, I think, needs to keep the growth going (otherwise he'll be considered as not as good as Bill). So he makes idiotic pushes like XP's product activation, et al.
Am I the only one who wonders what Bill thinks of XP's activation system? He's not going to bad mouth it in public, but I imagine that he's not too pleased with it.
I think that the biggest mistake that Microsoft made was making Ballmer, as opposed to an actual technical person, the CEO. I think that a tech company should have a dual-exec structure. The CEO should be a visionary, someone with a technical background. The second-in-command should be a good businessperson, someone with a sales/marketing/financial bent. This, I think, is the cause of many downfalls in the tech world.
Here at UMass, there's a course on Java (CS121, but that's mainly for CS majors with little to no programming experience). In addition, last year a semester-long seminar-type course was offered in "C++ for Java Programmers". The programming language gurus here (Professors Wileden and Moll) have each said at various times, whenever students ask about a particular language, "knowledge of any suffieciently advanced programming language allows you to quickly learn any other language that has a similar level of advancement. The languages that you learn here will probably be worthless by the time you graduate," or words to that effect.
I think this attitude towards programming languages is what separates good CS schools from not-good CS schools.
As I was taught: First world are the capital nations of the world, such as the USA, Britain, Germany, etc. Second world are nations such as Canada, Australia... While not world leaders in their own right, are still listened to by the world and heeded. The third world are 'developing' and war-torn nations.
A Euro-American bloc of states with political and economic ties came to be called the First World. Japan was later added to this monopoly of power. The term Second World distinguished the First World from the other geopolitical bloc: the communist-socialist states including the Soviet Union China, North Korea, North Vietnam and until recently, Eastern Europe. The states not aligned with either bloc of geopolitical power were regarded as the "Third World." These newly decolonized states were also the economically disadvantaged ones having just emerged from centuries of colonialism. Their situation of economic dependency on the First and Second Worlds (neo-colonialism and debt-burdens) is today the more commonplace connotation for the term Third World
Getting offtopic here, but what would qualify as the Second World?
IIRC, the terms First, Second, and Third World can be traced back to French intellectuals c.1950. They defined the First World as the (primarily) Western Capitalist Nations (though Japan and others also qualify). The Second World was the Communist Nations. The Third World was "other". So, would, say, Russia or the Czech Republic qualify as First World now that they're developed, sort of Capitalist, and sort of democratic? Are the only Second World nations left China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam?
In Texas, there was once the Sam Houston Institute for Teaching. They changed the name when somebody came out with a T-shirt that had the acronym and the seal of the school...
This is a cool idea, but, if you do this, doesn't it make your machine the source of the request to www.microsoft.com?
No, it sends an HTTP 302 redirection to www.microsoft.com. The question is whether Code Red and/or Nimda actually follow the redirect. If they did, and I adjusted it to try and Code Red Microsoft's servers, that might actually solve the problem, as Microsoft could have a list of affected boxen.
In truth, this is probably pointless, but it gets some steam off...
Yeah, Kuro5hin has been planning to do exactly what Slashdot is doing. See this page for more info, but they've gone live with a subscription system.
I actually have no problem with the buy-moderation scheme. Say Slashdot sells 50 posts with an additional +1 for $5, prepaid. So some schmuck gets to post crap at an initial value of +2 (+3 if he's already go the +1 for karma). Guess what, initial scorings are not static. If it's crap at +2, moderators will knock it down to a level where it belongs. And if someone wants to buy a +2 on everything, they can pay $15 for 50 posts at either +3/+4.
One other idea that I could see working, in a similar vein, is elimination of the karma cap for paying subscribers. At 75 karma, you'd qualify to post at 3. At 175 points, you'd qualify for 4. And at 375 karma points, you could place your own posts at 5 to start (but be moderated down and lose karma for overbidding... that's why I rarely use my post at 2 priveleges).
Maybe as another tack, the user prefs could be adjusted to ignore these automatic moderations (including the +1 bonus).
If your main use for the web is email and web browsing, the speed-up is almost guaranteed not to be worth it. Think about it: when browsing the web, how much time is spent waiting for downloads as opposed to reading content?
Let's say the average pattern is: 10 seconds download on a modem, 10 seconds reading before the next link is clicked. Speed is: 3 pages/minute. With broadband, figure 10x improvement in download speed (which is more optimistic than your idea). You get 1 second downloading, but 10 seconds reading content, still. New rate: 5.5 pages/minute, which is not even a speed-doubling. Granted, look ahead caching is an option, but that, afaict, will not be a cure-all, especially what with the quantities of non-static content on the web that comes from forms.
This all changes if you're transferring large files in a non-interactive manner (ftp, p2p, etc.). There, the bandwidth is well worth it.
The better buyer of Napster would have been either AOL, AT&T, or some other large ISP. Think about it: if AT&T bought them, they could do things like sell a premium media package that included their own Napster proxies to run faster searches. They could even play some games at the router level to make paying an extra $15/month for better Napster performance more of an option for their customers. They'd also have the cash to go toe to toe with the RIAA and muddy the waters.
These senators are on the Commerce Committee, which is where the SSSCA currently has hearings. If we can nip it in committee, then that's really good!
Ernest Hollings
Daniel Inouye
John D Rockefeller, IV
John Kerry
John Breaulx
Byron Dorgan
Ron Wyden
Max Cleland
Barbara Boxer
John Edwards
Jean Carnahan
Bill Nelson
John McCain
Ted Stevens
Conrad Burns
Trent Lott
Kay Bailey Hutchinson
Olympia Snowe
Sam Brownback
Gordon Smith
Peter Fitzgerald
John Ensign
George Allen
If you live in Oregon, I notice that it's absolutely critical that you get in on this: both of your senators are on the committee!
Also, Barbara Boxer is critical. The interests in Hollywood will try to convince her. If you live in the Valley, send her mail! If she sees large numbers of voters from the Bay Area pushing against this, she'll at least abstain.
I'm going to add this line because of the incompetent lameness filter.... People at slashcode should be working on this. I'd help, but I don't know Perl, just PHP.
Guess the lyric: "Hate the way you act, and I hate the way you smell. Hate the way you look, girl, 'cause you just look like hell. You make me sick! You really stink, girl."
Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page). Jesus Christ, still not enough characters per line. People will think that I'm sort of page-widening troll or something. Moderators, this is just to counteract an incompetency in the Slashcode. I hope that you don't hold this against me. Your comment has too few characters per line (currently 20.7). Apparently 21.4 characters isn't enough. Nor is 21.8. CmdrTaco, Krow, and anybody else involved in the lameness filter, please accept this as an example of why the lameness filter is broken. I mean, I've had to double the length of this post with filler material because that's the only way that a post which I think is genuinely informative, insightful, or both (and I hope the moderators agree with me on this). I'll be filing this in a bugreport to Slashcode. If you are reading this and have editorial priveleges, you might want to consider editing this crap out of the post, starting with "I'm going to add this line to". My God, 28.1 characters/line is not enough for you people. I'm beginning to think that some sort of black mark has been placed next to my name. The lameness filter ends up adding lameness... maybe it should be cleaned once in a while. In da CD player right now is "I Think I Lost My Headache", by Queens of the Stone Age, off of their album Rated R. After some connection issues from UMass to Cable and Wireless, I'm back here, with a 31.8 character/line post and just utter crap dominating this post. I don't give a fuck what Slashcode says, I'm posting this bad boy. Now it's 34.1 characters/line and Apocalyptica's rendition of "Refuse-Resist", off of the album
Inquisition Symphony is playing. I highly recommend this CD, along with the other two Apocalyptica CDs. Now, at 36.3 charcters per line, Queen's "Another One Bites the Dust" is playing. Did you know that Freddie Mercury died from AIDS over a decade ago? Now coming up is a song from an artist I don't know the name of, but it's titled "I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper", off of the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange, an amazing film by Stanley Kubrick. You know, another amazing film which spawned a great video game was Goldeneye, and we've got a great jazz bit inspired by the game. I'ts Goldeneye - Controlled Jazz, by Scott Peeples. I'm sure lots of peoples out there will be tapping their toes to this. If you have any requests or dedications, you can just post a reply, and I'll try to get them. Goatsex trolls not accepted.
If that is what the poster was looking for then AOL is not the ISP to join. Neither is MS.net or whatever M$ calls itself. Mindspring still has news.mindspring.com, but I think it is ONLY for mindspring users. I am accessing it NOW. Also some other ISP have news group access, but most are denying these services. Not sure why. I think they are not as accessed as they used to be.
As has been pointed out in other posts, most ISPs have dropped at least the binaries because of the bandwidth that Usenet generates.
In the two cases where Microsoft is cited as taking over a market (Office and IE) through the OS, I answer that it's because the competition took so long to reach feature parity that they became also-rans. Current Mozilla builds are just now getting to IE5 functionality. IE5 is what, two years old. Opera has just about reached feature parity, and adds some more to IE6. But they were fairly late to begin with. In the case of Office, has anybody used WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows? Or the first release of 1-2-3 for Windows? It took WordPerfect/Novell at least 4 years to match up with MS. It took Lotus about the same amount of time to match up with Excel.
The poster was looking for public news servers. That means he probably has a newsreader and is looking for a server he can at the very least read messages from (but since you can read posts @ groups.google.com, I think posting access is what he's looking for).
But again, this has a strong battle in the Senate, and Hollings was very loud-spoken in stating that this bill won't get through the Senate in a form close to the House version, and he's the one right now with the most power on the Senate treatment of the bill.
My joke post (though the moderators apparently didn't see it as such...) has proven to be more accurate than I thought...
Continuing my string of (very imperfect and possibly confusing;) ) analogies, if you trade with England today you are a businessman. If you traded with England in 1778 you might get your house burned by angry neighbors who felt their way of life threatened, and justly.
Your analogy falls apart. The bankroller of the American Revolution was John Hancock (who was all set to be the first president... he was promised the job for getting Massachusetts to ratify the Constitution). He was also the biggest trader with the British before, during, and after the war.
The inescapable fact is that the GPL is the less free of the two licenses. The definition of freedom is (according to m-w.com): the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. BSD license: no restrictions on user; no restrictions on programmer. GPL: no restrictions on user; some restrictions on programmer. The GPL has more restrictions. Ergo it is less free than the BSD license. The GPL is free in the same sense that the old DDR (that is the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) was a Democratic Republic.
With all that said, I use the GPL for my work! The BSD license is the utopian license. In a perfect world, the only license would be the BSD license and Stallman would have shut up long ago. But the world isn't perfect. The GPL may be a step towards the BSD license. Maybe thirty years from now, we'll look back and laugh at our use of the GPL, before we used the BSD license for everything.
Slashdot Mirror
The prices of designer clothing: a tax on the wealthy and stupid (which often equates to the same thing...)
The parent post was referring to a perl script that will "click the banners"
OSDN has started selling ads that can be restricted to certain countries, based on originating IP...
I've been thinking of opening a site similar to Slashdot, but maybe a little closer to Kuro5hin.
If I were to start a website, here's the rate card I would use:
If an advertiser thus wants me to host his 100KB Flash ad which will appear in a spawned pop-up, the charge is (per thousand impressions)
- Pop-up: $20.00
- Hosted File: $5.00 + $50.00
- Flash surcharge: $10.00
So the advertiser ends up paying $85/1000 impressions. So they'd better get 34 times the business out of this ad than out of a text-ad (which is not as annoying and costs only $2.50). In short, I doubt many advertisers would use Flash or pop-ups. I would also have a requirement that if an ad adversely affects the site (hijacks browsers, etc.), the ad is removed and the advertiser forfeits any refund that might be due.The point about Ballmer is, I think, correct. My reading is like this: Microsoft had years of stellar growth while Gates was at the helm. Ballmer, I think, needs to keep the growth going (otherwise he'll be considered as not as good as Bill). So he makes idiotic pushes like XP's product activation, et al.
Am I the only one who wonders what Bill thinks of XP's activation system? He's not going to bad mouth it in public, but I imagine that he's not too pleased with it.
I think that the biggest mistake that Microsoft made was making Ballmer, as opposed to an actual technical person, the CEO. I think that a tech company should have a dual-exec structure. The CEO should be a visionary, someone with a technical background. The second-in-command should be a good businessperson, someone with a sales/marketing/financial bent. This, I think, is the cause of many downfalls in the tech world.
Here at UMass, there's a course on Java (CS121, but that's mainly for CS majors with little to no programming experience). In addition, last year a semester-long seminar-type course was offered in "C++ for Java Programmers". The programming language gurus here (Professors Wileden and Moll) have each said at various times, whenever students ask about a particular language, "knowledge of any suffieciently advanced programming language allows you to quickly learn any other language that has a similar level of advancement. The languages that you learn here will probably be worthless by the time you graduate," or words to that effect.
I think this attitude towards programming languages is what separates good CS schools from not-good CS schools.
I think you were taught incorrectly. According to this page:
Getting offtopic here, but what would qualify as the Second World?
IIRC, the terms First, Second, and Third World can be traced back to French intellectuals c.1950. They defined the First World as the (primarily) Western Capitalist Nations (though Japan and others also qualify). The Second World was the Communist Nations. The Third World was "other". So, would, say, Russia or the Czech Republic qualify as First World now that they're developed, sort of Capitalist, and sort of democratic? Are the only Second World nations left China, Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam?
I guess I just had to ask that question...
In Texas, there was once the Sam Houston Institute for Teaching. They changed the name when somebody came out with a T-shirt that had the acronym and the seal of the school...
No, it sends an HTTP 302 redirection to www.microsoft.com. The question is whether Code Red and/or Nimda actually follow the redirect. If they did, and I adjusted it to try and Code Red Microsoft's servers, that might actually solve the problem, as Microsoft could have a list of affected boxen.
In truth, this is probably pointless, but it gets some steam off...
Read the article.
SuSE contacted Sa Voix Magazine's hosting company in the US. I would expect a US hosting company to use English.
Also, send emails to enquiries@savoixmagazine.com ... if we slashdot their mail servers, they might just decide to get a clue...
Yeah, Kuro5hin has been planning to do exactly what Slashdot is doing. See this page for more info, but they've gone live with a subscription system.
I actually have no problem with the buy-moderation scheme. Say Slashdot sells 50 posts with an additional +1 for $5, prepaid. So some schmuck gets to post crap at an initial value of +2 (+3 if he's already go the +1 for karma). Guess what, initial scorings are not static. If it's crap at +2, moderators will knock it down to a level where it belongs. And if someone wants to buy a +2 on everything, they can pay $15 for 50 posts at either +3/+4.
One other idea that I could see working, in a similar vein, is elimination of the karma cap for paying subscribers. At 75 karma, you'd qualify to post at 3. At 175 points, you'd qualify for 4. And at 375 karma points, you could place your own posts at 5 to start (but be moderated down and lose karma for overbidding... that's why I rarely use my post at 2 priveleges).
Maybe as another tack, the user prefs could be adjusted to ignore these automatic moderations (including the +1 bonus).
You've bought the hype, hook, line, and sinker.
If your main use for the web is email and web browsing, the speed-up is almost guaranteed not to be worth it. Think about it: when browsing the web, how much time is spent waiting for downloads as opposed to reading content?
Let's say the average pattern is: 10 seconds download on a modem, 10 seconds reading before the next link is clicked. Speed is: 3 pages/minute. With broadband, figure 10x improvement in download speed (which is more optimistic than your idea). You get 1 second downloading, but 10 seconds reading content, still. New rate: 5.5 pages/minute, which is not even a speed-doubling. Granted, look ahead caching is an option, but that, afaict, will not be a cure-all, especially what with the quantities of non-static content on the web that comes from forms.
This all changes if you're transferring large files in a non-interactive manner (ftp, p2p, etc.). There, the bandwidth is well worth it.
The better buyer of Napster would have been either AOL, AT&T, or some other large ISP. Think about it: if AT&T bought them, they could do things like sell a premium media package that included their own Napster proxies to run faster searches. They could even play some games at the router level to make paying an extra $15/month for better Napster performance more of an option for their customers. They'd also have the cash to go toe to toe with the RIAA and muddy the waters.
These senators are on the Commerce Committee, which is where the SSSCA currently has hearings. If we can nip it in committee, then that's really good!
If you live in Oregon, I notice that it's absolutely critical that you get in on this: both of your senators are on the committee!
Also, Barbara Boxer is critical. The interests in Hollywood will try to convince her. If you live in the Valley, send her mail! If she sees large numbers of voters from the Bay Area pushing against this, she'll at least abstain.
I'm going to add this line because of the incompetent lameness filter.... People at slashcode should be working on this. I'd help, but I don't know Perl, just PHP.
Guess the lyric: "Hate the way you act, and I hate the way you smell. Hate the way you look, girl, 'cause you just look like hell. You make me sick! You really stink, girl."
As has been pointed out in other posts, most ISPs have dropped at least the binaries because of the bandwidth that Usenet generates.
The 2.4's netfilter can firewall IPv6
All I can say is, Amen, brother!
In the two cases where Microsoft is cited as taking over a market (Office and IE) through the OS, I answer that it's because the competition took so long to reach feature parity that they became also-rans. Current Mozilla builds are just now getting to IE5 functionality. IE5 is what, two years old. Opera has just about reached feature parity, and adds some more to IE6. But they were fairly late to begin with. In the case of Office, has anybody used WordPerfect 5.1 for Windows? Or the first release of 1-2-3 for Windows? It took WordPerfect/Novell at least 4 years to match up with MS. It took Lotus about the same amount of time to match up with Excel.
The poster was looking for public news servers. That means he probably has a newsreader and is looking for a server he can at the very least read messages from (but since you can read posts @ groups.google.com, I think posting access is what he's looking for).
All I can say is, RTFP!
... to finally make washing a cat easier.
What? You didn't mean that kind of soap, or that kind of cat?
I guess I'll go now...
My joke post (though the moderators apparently didn't see it as such...) has proven to be more accurate than I thought...
Considering that it cost him about $250 in materials, I don't think so.
The article says:
But, according to this page, the vote was 421-7. By the way, the seven who are firmly in the Bell's pockets are:
... they're too with the SSSCA to bother with Tauzin-Dingell.
Your analogy falls apart. The bankroller of the American Revolution was John Hancock (who was all set to be the first president... he was promised the job for getting Massachusetts to ratify the Constitution). He was also the biggest trader with the British before, during, and after the war.
The inescapable fact is that the GPL is the less free of the two licenses. The definition of freedom is (according to m-w.com): the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action. BSD license: no restrictions on user; no restrictions on programmer. GPL: no restrictions on user; some restrictions on programmer. The GPL has more restrictions. Ergo it is less free than the BSD license. The GPL is free in the same sense that the old DDR (that is the Deutsche Demokratische Republik) was a Democratic Republic.
With all that said, I use the GPL for my work! The BSD license is the utopian license. In a perfect world, the only license would be the BSD license and Stallman would have shut up long ago. But the world isn't perfect. The GPL may be a step towards the BSD license. Maybe thirty years from now, we'll look back and laugh at our use of the GPL, before we used the BSD license for everything.