Contrary to popular belief, "PHBs" aren't
completely stupid. ...
All they're trying to do is make it hard
enough that most people don't bother
If not completely stupid, they would realize
the futility of your stated goal, as well.
It takes only one person to rip it and give it
a home on the net. Once that happens (and it
will happen, usually even before the
official release of the CD), any possible
gain from a DRM system vanishes.
While I agree with the overall idea (we need to
get stable off-planet colonies ASAP), we need more
than just the moon or Mars.
Most of the possible "civilization-ending" events
will actually leave quite a few humans alive,
certainly enough to reestablish civilization over
a few centuries. The "really big" problems
involve our primary, the Sun. If that
stops behaving in a very calm, consistant manner,
we all die, no recovery possible.
At the very least, we need a colony beyond
the asteroid belt. Sadly, no large rocky
planets exist out there (though perhaps one
of Jupiter's big-4 moons would suffice).
Better yet, a truly extrasolar colony, but
that would require information we don't quite
have yet (such as a likely Earth-like planet
around another star).
Your opinion is not the same as the
Tolkien fans I know, who all really liked
the movies.
Well, as another Tolkien fan, I'll add my
voice of dissent - The movies really didn't
come out very good.
Not unwatchably not-very-good... On
its own merits, I thought it made a decent
(not good, decent) set of movies (though #2
dragged quite a bit). But in terms of
supposedly making LotR into a movie? No.
My biggest problem involves having made up
new crap... Making up the whole "Annoying
Multiple-Personality Gollum" that had
only the faintest resemblance to the "real"
Gollum. Making up female roles
for the sake of eye-candy (beyond
Eowyn killing the Nazgul king, and one
scene with Galadriel and Frodo, the original
simply had no women. And Arwen? Hey, I
like looking at Liv Tyler as much as the
next guy, but Arwen existed only as
a plot device for Aragorn in the books).
And what the hell did they have in
mind when scripting Jar-Jar Gimli?
I can forgive needing to chop material out.
I can forgive some rewriting of less
critical scenes to maintain continuity in
light of chopping some material out.
But when you need to chop material out,
don't insult the (real) author and
the audience by adding entirely new material.
It's not like, when a stamp is used to commit
a crime, you can track it back to the photo by
serial number. Unless...
So you didn't make the connection between
the proposed 15 cent increase in first class
postage, and the fact that the cheapest RFID
tags currently hover around 15 cents each?
Tsk. You have nothing to worry about. Just go
about your business, and the Government will let
you know when it wants your opinion.
Have fun being unemployed while non-union
workers, like myself, are hired
Do you really want to scab in a field
where those who would otherwise "only" beat you
up a little, will instead ruin your credit rating
and enroll you on every sex offender list in the
country?
Have fun stealing jobs, until "someone" tips
off the police that you work within a mile
of a school.;-)
if the new applications are worse than
MS, there isnt much value till they get
better.
"Better" also includes factors such as "price"
and "portability" (though portability probably
only matters to geeks, price matters to mose
people).
For a normal desktop user, the available FOSS
apps come close enough to MS's offerings (and
in many cases, such as Mozilla's FB/TB vs
Microsoft's IE/OE, crush MS hands down). Thus,
"Free" vs "$300+$500+???" wins hands-down, with
nothing more than the problem of people who'd
rather pay than learn to use the alternatives.
And for that last reason, FOSS that runs on
Windows just as well as Linux adds up to a
huge win for FOSS, not for Microsoft.
More options = good
Less options = bad
To a limit, yes. The key lies in subtly hiding
the more advanced options from new users, until
they learn enough to want them. Again using
Mozilla as an example, it works out-of-the-box,
the normal "preferences" menus let you tweak
quite a lot more, and for the very advanced
users, "about:config" lets the user adjust
almost every standard behavior available. And
if even that doesn't make you happy, you
can go so far as to tweak the chrome/content
CSS, or even create entire extensions in Java.
No matter how pervasive the internet
becomes, walking into a store, picking
up an item, walking to the paydesk and
paying for the item will not involve the
customer using the internet.
You make the assumption that physical stores
themselves won't go the way of the dodo.
Now, I don't think that will happen "within
a few years", but it seems like a very real
trend. Perhaps within a few decades, the
only brick-and-mortar stores around will have
hideous prices and only exist to cater to
wealthy retro-luddites.
Using myself as an example, 10 years ago, I
did all my holiday shopping by hitting the
malls two days before christmas. This year,
I have already finished my shopping, and
never even left the house to do it (well,
not entirely true - I had to follow up
on one order from work, but that still
didn't involve going to a physical retail
location).
I really think that, once more people realize
that they literally can buy anything
they wany over the internet, the traditional
idea of a store will become a quaint throwback
to an older time.
More relevantly, though...
I think the GP didn't so much mean to argue
what I describe above, but rather, the problem
of how to avoid the internet, which you
touch on...
Sure, the back-end may be entirly network
based, but the CUSTOMER is not using that
backend.
How long do we have before the majority of
phone calls travel over some portion of the
internet? And when talking about signals
running over fiber between two locations,
where do you draw the line between "phone"
and "internet"? At L1, often L2 (and with
VoiP, even L3), they look identical.
When you drive through an intersections...
Does the light/camera/sensor/whatever report
home via the internet? Does it make a
difference if it uses a private TCP/IP
network? And does either of those count as
"using" the "internet" involved?
Even something as simple as watching TV...
If you use a TiVo, does that count as using
the internet? How about (assuming it legally
survives in some form) sharing recorded
programs between friends? How about Video
on Demand? Does it count as "internet" if you
watch it on a computer, but "not internet" if
you watch it on a TV via a standalone set-top
box, even if the content comes from the same
place and over the same wires via the same
protocols?
The line has already grown fuzzy, and will
only continue to blur. You can't really argue
otherwise without deliberately playing dumb.
The word "ubiquitous" applies very literally
here. Short of going into the woods and
totally disconnecting from society, people
simply will not have the ability to avoid
using the internet. A court may as well order
someone not to use oxygen.
Obligated to refrain from taking
antocompetitive measures in a market in which
they are the dominant supplier, that's another
question.
Speaking of them as the "dominant supplier"...
A while back, Apple claimed they made basically
no profit on iTMS, and only kept it going to
boost sales of iPods.
Having Real support the iPod would only
increase sales thereof, while the
possibility of decreasing sales at no profit
via iTMS should not matter at all ("We lose
a penny per sale, but we make it up in
volume!").
So, the question...
Did Steve Jobs... How to put this... "Tell a
deliberate untruth" to all his loyal fans?
Goodness. I don't feel all warm and fuzzy
anymore.
But, to summarize, "virii" works as a valid English
plural just as well as "viruses". However, not
because it reflects some mythical Latinate form.
if we want a proper Latinate plural, "virus"
would take the form "vira" in the neuter third
declension.
However, it certainly can't hurt to start
with a non-deliberately-broken AV scanner. And,
although DNS spoofing may not take too
much effort, AntiVir's parent company has no
motivation whatsoever to cooperate by digitally
signing a fake update to their program.
The biggest problem here involves trust - Once
a company that we, by necessity, choose to
trust to keep our computers virus-free, decides
to go to the dark side and cooperate with a
given government - Well, why not just have
them go all the way and push out the spyware
as an update?
I think you touched on that idea, but as a
hack of the legit service rather than as the
"legit" service itself gone bad.
Someone please tell me... that having software
that (knowingly or unknowingly) blocks or removes
this spyware isn't a crime...
Well, of course it would count as a crime!
Probably as simple as "tampering with evidence", but
it wouldn't surprise me if they invented a special
category of crime, over which we have no control, to
deal with (for example) AdAware detecting and removing
such software.
But... Why on Earth would you want to remove it?
Just fake it out, and you have carte blanche
to commit whatever crimes you want, with the state's
own "evidence" of your whereabouts to clear you at
any given time...
"And how do you suppose my client committed this
crime, when your own activity logs show him
viewing... Um... homoerotic goat porn??? at
the time of the crime?"
As an aside relating back to my first paragraph, I
personally run AntiVir for precisely that reason...
As a German company, they treat a US government
sponsored virus (such as the FBI's Magic Lantern)
the same as any other virus - Namely, they detect
it, quarrantine it, and kill it. Unlike both
Norton and Mcafee, which have publically stated
that they will not detect any virii such as ML.
Your arrogant condesention is evil; the
attitude that they're merely boring people
with meaningless lives
You'd call me arrogant for that view?
I don't post the details of my daily
dietary habits for the world to read.
And I also don't have to read them from
others. Another big difference there - I don't
consider bloggers a nuissance, since I can
readily pretend they don't exist.
But it seems that every single response to my
initial comment missed the point. Regardless
of the entertainment value of blogs,
I merely asserted that they do not, in the vast
majority, count as even remotely resembling
"news". And so far, not one response to me
has done the least to argue an alternative
stance - Just personal attacks, irrelevant
commentary, and apparently defensive
misinterpretations of my words.
It may not be news, but the people at the other
end are real people living out lives that may be
very important to them and those around them.
You just described my entire point, yet missed
it completely! If you blog, good for you. If
you read blogs because, for some reason, you
find them entertaining, good for you. I don't
grudge you either of those points. BUT, if you
read a blog by someone who has no more access
to information on newsworthy events than
you or I do, and take that person's opinion
as "news", well, I'll call you on that one.
"It may not be news". Nothing more.
the people at the other end are real people
living out lives that may be very important to
them and those around them.
Well, good for them and their lives and their
friends/readers. But do you see that the extent
of such "importance" doesn't extend beyond
their immediate friends and family? Sure, my
mother might want to know that I had a healthy
breakfast. Do you care that I had a
healthy breakfast? Do you care that I
can beat the original Metroid in something that
must come close to a time record? Do you
care that we got a teensy bit of snow here ("here"
not any place of particular interest at the moment)
last night, not enough to play in but enough to
make going to work a pain? No, you don't. Because
it has absolutely no relevance to you or your life,
nor does it to the vast majority of people (even
my own close friends would find it, at most, a
curious diversion to read, certainly not useful
information). "Wow, pla had cold pizza for
breakfast? Has this gone out over Reuters
yet??? Stop the presses!"
And therein lies the difference. My dietary habits
do not count as news. Your dietary habits do not
count as news. The dietary habits of some poor
bastard trapped in Fallujah with no food or running
water SITUATIONALLY might count as news. The
fact that the Red Crescent has petitioned the US Military
to restore running water and start supplying food to
those left alive, THAT counts as news (but not
my mention of it - See the difference?) - Which
you would get that news from a real source, not from
an angsty teen in Peoria, not from Me, not even from
the person trapped in Fallujah (though he/she may have
heard about it, you could get it from a more direct
source).
Finally, as for my posting here on Slashdot (which for
a reason I do not quite understant, most respondants to
me seem to take as some sort of evidence of hypocrisy on
this subject)... I post here for the same reason I would
chat with someone at the office or in the library or in
line at the grocery store - Just something to do, pass
the time, "shoot the shit". I don't consider my Slashdot
posts as a form of news, nor do I consider them as having
some mythical literary merit, nor do I expect most people
to even care about them. If someone finds my words
informative or entertaining, cool; but I have to
expectation of that, and don't really care if people
find my words utterly boring.
You should probably learn what that word
means before trying to use it again.
I never claimed my (very few... 2?) Slashdot
journal entries (which, in fairness, you could
call a sort of blog) count as "news".
Note the key difference there.
And relating back to my initial point... The word
you wanted? If I claimed my/. journal
as newsworthy, you could use "hypocrisy". But I
didn't, so... Feel free to go pound sand.
BTW, you should probably look at a calendar.
What day did 12/08 fall on, this year? When
did it last fall on a Sunday?
Journalism entails the publishing of facts
and opinions to a wide audience. Blogging does
the same thing.
Er, no.
SOME blogging - A very tiny
minority, counts as "news" (Darh Jamail, for
example). A bit more common (but still rare,
in the grand scheme of things), due mostly
to physical location or just plain luck,
count as "almost news" (Raed/Salam Pax, for
example - Not really news, but his location
made even his daily observations relevant to
the rest of the world).
But the vast majority of it? Absolute, useless
drivel. Angsty teens writing about how unfair
the world seems, or bad poetry, or banal
commentary on meaningless daily minutiae,
or even all of the above. I'd rather watch
Fox than such crap.
And of course, we can't forget the gamer
blogs. "I beat my old high score", "I hate
cheaters in online games", "Some meany called
me a nigger in a game chat". Whatever. Just
play the game and STFU. The rest of the world
doesn't care. Yeah, I enjoy video games...
They let me empty my mind after a long day at
work. But if it starts pissing me off, rather
than relaxing me - Hey, look, a power button!
NOT news. Drivel. No matter how you spin it,
someone talking about their daily events (short
of near-miraculous luck) simply does not matter.
One more boring person living through a
typical day in their meaningless life.
Okay, now all you blogger mods can send this
post to karma-hell. Have fun.
Not true! I personally had a good ol'
PII/504. Of course, Intel didn't
call it that (they probably just "forgot"
to market a 112MHz FSB PII line), but I
had one, none-the-less.
Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on
firefox, including some flash/dhtml combos
and some dhtml ads.
Might I suggest that you use every bit of
influence you have to push for a total switch
to Active X based advertisements?
Just think of the power it will give your
company... And you can use this recent study
to support the switch ("Firefox users don't
click, anyway, so we can ignore them").
And most importantly, your ads won't even
show up in any "real" browsers. So
everybody wins.
Oh, and by the way, a dialog saying, "This action
cannot be undone. OK Cancel," is not a suitable
substitute for a Revert facility for anything at
any time.
No problem. You can undo anything. At any time.
We (the programmers of the world) can give that
to you.
As long as YOU (the idiots of the world that
need an undo history stretching back to 4004BCE)
don't complain that your 27k text-only document
now takes three DVDs to back up.
No, the correct way to write a date is
2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts
correctly!;-)
Ah, someone else that agrees with me on that!
The US style of writing dates (and I live in the
US) drive me completely batty. MM/DD/YY? No!
That makes no sense. YYYY-MM-DD makes
the meaning far more clear, and you can
even extend it arbitrarily... YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-uu.
As an aside, how often do you have secretaries
and public clerk type people (ie, the DMV) freak
out on you because you write dates like that?
I often get "How long did you serve", since
apparently the military (only some branches?
no clue, just speculation) encourages that
date format.
I have learned that any answer involving
the phrase "lexical order" will only result
in blank stares.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Contrary to popular belief, "PHBs" aren't completely stupid.
...
All they're trying to do is make it hard enough that most people don't bother
If not completely stupid, they would realize the futility of your stated goal, as well.
It takes only one person to rip it and give it a home on the net. Once that happens (and it will happen, usually even before the official release of the CD), any possible gain from a DRM system vanishes.
Umm... Judging by the time this has taken to load...
Did we manage to Slashdot Slashdot?
Freaky!
While I agree with the overall idea (we need to get stable off-planet colonies ASAP), we need more than just the moon or Mars.
Most of the possible "civilization-ending" events will actually leave quite a few humans alive, certainly enough to reestablish civilization over a few centuries. The "really big" problems involve our primary, the Sun. If that stops behaving in a very calm, consistant manner, we all die, no recovery possible.
At the very least, we need a colony beyond the asteroid belt. Sadly, no large rocky planets exist out there (though perhaps one of Jupiter's big-4 moons would suffice). Better yet, a truly extrasolar colony, but that would require information we don't quite have yet (such as a likely Earth-like planet around another star).
Kwhqv ozxrx Nud Lpbjq gkt, kmoaute ly yoc dar Cobc!
Heh... Those wild-n'-crazy guys at the GCHQ. What kidders. What will they come up with next? And an off-color joke in a "family" contest? Tsk.
Your opinion is not the same as the Tolkien fans I know, who all really liked the movies.
Well, as another Tolkien fan, I'll add my voice of dissent - The movies really didn't come out very good.
Not unwatchably not-very-good... On its own merits, I thought it made a decent (not good, decent) set of movies (though #2 dragged quite a bit). But in terms of supposedly making LotR into a movie? No.
My biggest problem involves having made up new crap... Making up the whole "Annoying Multiple-Personality Gollum" that had only the faintest resemblance to the "real" Gollum. Making up female roles for the sake of eye-candy (beyond Eowyn killing the Nazgul king, and one scene with Galadriel and Frodo, the original simply had no women. And Arwen? Hey, I like looking at Liv Tyler as much as the next guy, but Arwen existed only as a plot device for Aragorn in the books). And what the hell did they have in mind when scripting Jar-Jar Gimli?
I can forgive needing to chop material out. I can forgive some rewriting of less critical scenes to maintain continuity in light of chopping some material out. But when you need to chop material out, don't insult the (real) author and the audience by adding entirely new material.
Finding an appropriate learning environment seems to be harder than I expected.
Now, I want you to really stop and consider this for a moment...
You can't find work as slave labor in your chosen field, and you think you'll do a whole lot better once you graduate?
Switch to a business or marketing major now. If you can handle IT, a quick lobotomy aught to get you through such a degree in no time at all.
It's not like, when a stamp is used to commit a crime, you can track it back to the photo by serial number. Unless...
So you didn't make the connection between the proposed 15 cent increase in first class postage, and the fact that the cheapest RFID tags currently hover around 15 cents each?
Tsk. You have nothing to worry about. Just go about your business, and the Government will let you know when it wants your opinion.
That's good, or else a whole lot of grandmothers and others with physical disabilites would be prevented from withdrawing money.
I consider that good because, otherwise, I couldn't withdraw money.
Funny how I have this "disability" where my wallet always preceeds my body in front of any sort of automated camera.
But hey, if they want to collect pictures of a blank canvas surface, why should I mind? Honest canvas wouldn't object to such measures for our safety!
Have fun being unemployed while non-union workers, like myself, are hired
;-)
Do you really want to scab in a field where those who would otherwise "only" beat you up a little, will instead ruin your credit rating and enroll you on every sex offender list in the country?
Have fun stealing jobs, until "someone" tips off the police that you work within a mile of a school.
if the new applications are worse than MS, there isnt much value till they get better.
"Better" also includes factors such as "price" and "portability" (though portability probably only matters to geeks, price matters to mose people).
For a normal desktop user, the available FOSS apps come close enough to MS's offerings (and in many cases, such as Mozilla's FB/TB vs Microsoft's IE/OE, crush MS hands down). Thus, "Free" vs "$300+$500+???" wins hands-down, with nothing more than the problem of people who'd rather pay than learn to use the alternatives. And for that last reason, FOSS that runs on Windows just as well as Linux adds up to a huge win for FOSS, not for Microsoft.
More options = good
Less options = bad
To a limit, yes. The key lies in subtly hiding the more advanced options from new users, until they learn enough to want them. Again using Mozilla as an example, it works out-of-the-box, the normal "preferences" menus let you tweak quite a lot more, and for the very advanced users, "about:config" lets the user adjust almost every standard behavior available. And if even that doesn't make you happy, you can go so far as to tweak the chrome/content CSS, or even create entire extensions in Java.
Do Unsubscribe Links Stop Spam?
If by "Unsubscribe" you mean "trade one source of crap for a hundred others"...
By "Links" you mean "deliberately mangled URLs often either hidden in the page source or only appearing in white text on a white background"...
And by "stop spam" you mean "accomplish nothing more than waste time and speed your journey to a RSI"...
Then yes. Absolutely. Click away, Merrill, click away!"
.mob is reserved for organized crime circuits.
What, they wanted more than just ".gov"? Greedy bastards!
Oh, you must have meant the corporate organized crime folks, unhappy with the progressive dilution of ".com".
Okay, gotcha, I see the idea now.
No matter how pervasive the internet becomes, walking into a store, picking up an item, walking to the paydesk and paying for the item will not involve the customer using the internet.
You make the assumption that physical stores themselves won't go the way of the dodo.
Now, I don't think that will happen "within a few years", but it seems like a very real trend. Perhaps within a few decades, the only brick-and-mortar stores around will have hideous prices and only exist to cater to wealthy retro-luddites.
Using myself as an example, 10 years ago, I did all my holiday shopping by hitting the malls two days before christmas. This year, I have already finished my shopping, and never even left the house to do it (well, not entirely true - I had to follow up on one order from work, but that still didn't involve going to a physical retail location).
I really think that, once more people realize that they literally can buy anything they wany over the internet, the traditional idea of a store will become a quaint throwback to an older time.
More relevantly, though...
I think the GP didn't so much mean to argue what I describe above, but rather, the problem of how to avoid the internet, which you touch on...
Sure, the back-end may be entirly network based, but the CUSTOMER is not using that backend.
How long do we have before the majority of phone calls travel over some portion of the internet? And when talking about signals running over fiber between two locations, where do you draw the line between "phone" and "internet"? At L1, often L2 (and with VoiP, even L3), they look identical.
When you drive through an intersections... Does the light/camera/sensor/whatever report home via the internet? Does it make a difference if it uses a private TCP/IP network? And does either of those count as "using" the "internet" involved?
Even something as simple as watching TV... If you use a TiVo, does that count as using the internet? How about (assuming it legally survives in some form) sharing recorded programs between friends? How about Video on Demand? Does it count as "internet" if you watch it on a computer, but "not internet" if you watch it on a TV via a standalone set-top box, even if the content comes from the same place and over the same wires via the same protocols?
The line has already grown fuzzy, and will only continue to blur. You can't really argue otherwise without deliberately playing dumb. The word "ubiquitous" applies very literally here. Short of going into the woods and totally disconnecting from society, people simply will not have the ability to avoid using the internet. A court may as well order someone not to use oxygen.
Obligated to refrain from taking antocompetitive measures in a market in which they are the dominant supplier, that's another question.
Speaking of them as the "dominant supplier"...
A while back, Apple claimed they made basically no profit on iTMS, and only kept it going to boost sales of iPods.
Having Real support the iPod would only increase sales thereof, while the possibility of decreasing sales at no profit via iTMS should not matter at all ("We lose a penny per sale, but we make it up in volume!").
So, the question...
Did Steve Jobs... How to put this... "Tell a deliberate untruth" to all his loyal fans?
Goodness. I don't feel all warm and fuzzy anymore.
you might be interested in hosting it on one of my servers here in Russia.
You know, I think you just posted the most on-topic ad of all time.
And even in a topic whose introduction begain with a rant against advertising.
I don't know how you'll do in moderation, but +5 for chutzpah.
The plural of virus is not "virii". As cool as it sounds, the correct plural is simply "viruses".
See my old Slashdot post on this topic.
But, to summarize, "virii" works as a valid English plural just as well as "viruses". However, not because it reflects some mythical Latinate form. if we want a proper Latinate plural, "virus" would take the form "vira" in the neuter third declension.
Improbable? Sure. But not impossible.
True. Possible.
However, it certainly can't hurt to start with a non-deliberately-broken AV scanner. And, although DNS spoofing may not take too much effort, AntiVir's parent company has no motivation whatsoever to cooperate by digitally signing a fake update to their program.
The biggest problem here involves trust - Once a company that we, by necessity, choose to trust to keep our computers virus-free, decides to go to the dark side and cooperate with a given government - Well, why not just have them go all the way and push out the spyware as an update?
I think you touched on that idea, but as a hack of the legit service rather than as the "legit" service itself gone bad.
Someone please tell me ... that having software
that (knowingly or unknowingly) blocks or removes
this spyware isn't a crime...
Well, of course it would count as a crime! Probably as simple as "tampering with evidence", but it wouldn't surprise me if they invented a special category of crime, over which we have no control, to deal with (for example) AdAware detecting and removing such software.
But... Why on Earth would you want to remove it?
Just fake it out, and you have carte blanche to commit whatever crimes you want, with the state's own "evidence" of your whereabouts to clear you at any given time...
"And how do you suppose my client committed this crime, when your own activity logs show him viewing... Um... homoerotic goat porn??? at the time of the crime?"
As an aside relating back to my first paragraph, I personally run AntiVir for precisely that reason... As a German company, they treat a US government sponsored virus (such as the FBI's Magic Lantern) the same as any other virus - Namely, they detect it, quarrantine it, and kill it. Unlike both Norton and Mcafee, which have publically stated that they will not detect any virii such as ML.
Your arrogant condesention is evil; the attitude that they're merely boring people with meaningless lives
You'd call me arrogant for that view? I don't post the details of my daily dietary habits for the world to read.
And I also don't have to read them from others. Another big difference there - I don't consider bloggers a nuissance, since I can readily pretend they don't exist.
But it seems that every single response to my initial comment missed the point. Regardless of the entertainment value of blogs, I merely asserted that they do not, in the vast majority, count as even remotely resembling "news". And so far, not one response to me has done the least to argue an alternative stance - Just personal attacks, irrelevant commentary, and apparently defensive misinterpretations of my words.
It may not be news, but the people at the other end are real people living out lives that may be very important to them and those around them.
You just described my entire point, yet missed it completely! If you blog, good for you. If you read blogs because, for some reason, you find them entertaining, good for you. I don't grudge you either of those points. BUT, if you read a blog by someone who has no more access to information on newsworthy events than you or I do, and take that person's opinion as "news", well, I'll call you on that one. "It may not be news". Nothing more.
the people at the other end are real people living out lives that may be very important to them and those around them.
Well, good for them and their lives and their friends/readers. But do you see that the extent of such "importance" doesn't extend beyond their immediate friends and family? Sure, my mother might want to know that I had a healthy breakfast. Do you care that I had a healthy breakfast? Do you care that I can beat the original Metroid in something that must come close to a time record? Do you care that we got a teensy bit of snow here ("here" not any place of particular interest at the moment) last night, not enough to play in but enough to make going to work a pain? No, you don't. Because it has absolutely no relevance to you or your life, nor does it to the vast majority of people (even my own close friends would find it, at most, a curious diversion to read, certainly not useful information). "Wow, pla had cold pizza for breakfast? Has this gone out over Reuters yet??? Stop the presses!"
And therein lies the difference. My dietary habits do not count as news. Your dietary habits do not count as news. The dietary habits of some poor bastard trapped in Fallujah with no food or running water SITUATIONALLY might count as news. The fact that the Red Crescent has petitioned the US Military to restore running water and start supplying food to those left alive, THAT counts as news (but not my mention of it - See the difference?) - Which you would get that news from a real source, not from an angsty teen in Peoria, not from Me, not even from the person trapped in Fallujah (though he/she may have heard about it, you could get it from a more direct source).
Finally, as for my posting here on Slashdot (which for a reason I do not quite understant, most respondants to me seem to take as some sort of evidence of hypocrisy on this subject)... I post here for the same reason I would chat with someone at the office or in the library or in line at the grocery store - Just something to do, pass the time, "shoot the shit". I don't consider my Slashdot posts as a form of news, nor do I consider them as having some mythical literary merit, nor do I expect most people to even care about them. If someone finds my words informative or entertaining, cool; but I have to expectation of that, and don't really care if people find my words utterly boring.
Oh, the irony.
/. journal
as newsworthy, you could use "hypocrisy". But I
didn't, so... Feel free to go pound sand.
You should probably learn what that word means before trying to use it again.
I never claimed my (very few... 2?) Slashdot journal entries (which, in fairness, you could call a sort of blog) count as "news".
Note the key difference there.
And relating back to my initial point... The word you wanted? If I claimed my
BTW, you should probably look at a calendar. What day did 12/08 fall on, this year? When did it last fall on a Sunday?
Journalism entails the publishing of facts and opinions to a wide audience. Blogging does the same thing.
Er, no.
SOME blogging - A very tiny minority, counts as "news" (Darh Jamail, for example). A bit more common (but still rare, in the grand scheme of things), due mostly to physical location or just plain luck, count as "almost news" (Raed/Salam Pax, for example - Not really news, but his location made even his daily observations relevant to the rest of the world).
But the vast majority of it? Absolute, useless drivel. Angsty teens writing about how unfair the world seems, or bad poetry, or banal commentary on meaningless daily minutiae, or even all of the above. I'd rather watch Fox than such crap.
And of course, we can't forget the gamer blogs. "I beat my old high score", "I hate cheaters in online games", "Some meany called me a nigger in a game chat". Whatever. Just play the game and STFU. The rest of the world doesn't care. Yeah, I enjoy video games... They let me empty my mind after a long day at work. But if it starts pissing me off, rather than relaxing me - Hey, look, a power button!
NOT news. Drivel. No matter how you spin it, someone talking about their daily events (short of near-miraculous luck) simply does not matter. One more boring person living through a typical day in their meaningless life.
Okay, now all you blogger mods can send this post to karma-hell. Have fun.
fastest P2 ever was 450Mhz
Not true! I personally had a good ol' PII/504. Of course, Intel didn't call it that (they probably just "forgot" to market a 112MHz FSB PII line), but I had one, none-the-less.
I work for an internet advertising company.
Say 57 Hail Marys and 204 Our Fathers.
Many adverts aren't rendering correctly on firefox, including some flash/dhtml combos and some dhtml ads.
Might I suggest that you use every bit of influence you have to push for a total switch to Active X based advertisements?
Just think of the power it will give your company... And you can use this recent study to support the switch ("Firefox users don't click, anyway, so we can ignore them").
And most importantly, your ads won't even show up in any "real" browsers. So everybody wins.
Oh, and by the way, a dialog saying, "This action cannot be undone. OK Cancel," is not a suitable substitute for a Revert facility for anything at any time.
No problem. You can undo anything. At any time. We (the programmers of the world) can give that to you.
As long as YOU (the idiots of the world that need an undo history stretching back to 4004BCE) don't complain that your 27k text-only document now takes three DVDs to back up.
Deal?
No, the correct way to write a date is 2004-11-29, what's the problem. That sorts correctly! ;-)
;-)
Ah, someone else that agrees with me on that!
The US style of writing dates (and I live in the US) drive me completely batty. MM/DD/YY? No! That makes no sense. YYYY-MM-DD makes the meaning far more clear, and you can even extend it arbitrarily... YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS-uu.
As an aside, how often do you have secretaries and public clerk type people (ie, the DMV) freak out on you because you write dates like that?
I often get "How long did you serve", since apparently the military (only some branches? no clue, just speculation) encourages that date format.
I have learned that any answer involving the phrase "lexical order" will only result in blank stares.