Like other above commentators, I recommend OKCupid. At one point when I was using it I tweaked my profile and filters. The top match didn't have a picture, but upon reading her profile and essays she seemed to be the girl of my dreams. I got very excited, but by the end of the profile alarm bells started going off with respect to how familiar the answers seemed, and I suddenly realized she was my ex-girlfriend. Six months later, we got back together, and are now happily married. So I guess OKCupid was smarter than we were.
However I see it being free as a flaw rather than a benefit. People who aren't paying for a site tend to not take it seriously. I had to set a hard filter restricting the minimum age of my matches to 23. I was 26 at the time, and didn't have any objection to dating 22-year-olds, but it just wasn't worth my time to dig through the profiles of all the college girls who obviously weren't looking for a real relationship.
Am I missing something, or would this method be completely useless if the submarine is moving in the slightest bit? How do you get a submarine to be motionless? There's going to be currents and such moving it. Won't nearby ships moving throw it off as well?
Let me preface this by saying I'm not a computer programmer or IT person, I'm a finance guy. As such, I think I have a different prospective on this issue.
Open source software is great if you're a programmer. You can look at the code, understand what's going wrong, fix it, etc. But non-programmers don't care about that.
What I want in software is ease of use. If I'm installing some normal, closed source software, it's incredibly easy. I stick the CD in the drive, and a screen pops up asking if I want to install it. I click yes, then I click Next a few times, and it's installed. I open up the software, and it's easy to use. Nearly everything I want to do is intuitive. Anything that isn't is clearly explained in the help file. No problems, no fuss.
Now contrast this with open source. I've only installed an open source piece of software once, but it was a nightmare. I went to the site on Sourceforge, and saw dozens of different versions. I didn't know which one I wanted, but assumed the most recent one would be best. So I downloaded it. But I couldn't install it yet, as I needed to make sure I had the right version of a Java compiler. So I opened up a command prompt and typed in what the instructions had told me to type. Nothing happened. Eventually I realized that I didn't have Java at all. So then I had to download that.
I finally succeeded in compiling the code, and opened the program, only to discover that I couldn't use it at all. None of the menu commands did anything, the buttons didn't work, and the software was completely useless to me. I checked the help menu, only to discover that rather than having explanations of how the program worked, it only gave a link to the raw code. I paused to curse my open source advocating friend who had reccomended the software. Then I was complaining about it to another friend who used it, and he told me that he hadn't had any of the same problems I did. I realized after this that I had a bad version of the software. So I downloaded a different one, which worked, although it still involved quite a bit of finessing and difficulty in figuring out how to do what I wanted to do.
Now, I admit that I'm basing my judgement of Open Source on just one experience, but my experience matches what most non-techy people assume OS is like.
Ask yourself a question. How many non-techy people do you know that use Linux? I have lots of techy friends who use it and love it. But I do not know, nor have I ever heard of, a non-tech type person that uses Linux or even has the slightest interest in using Linux. This is not because they are ignorant. It's because ease of use is important, and Microsoft has invested a lot of time, effort, and money in making windows easy to use. I, like most non-techies, am willing to live with having to reboot my computer every couple of weeks because something crashed, rather than dealing with all the complications of Linux.
Another issue is name brand recognition. A lot of you may scoff at this, but it does have a real value. I know that for the things I do in my job, MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will work perfectly. If someone's willing to pay me $50K a year, they're going to be willing to spend $300 on MS Office so that I can do my job effectively. I'm sure that there exist open source programs that do everything these programs do. But I don't know what they are. I wouldn't know where to look for them. I wouldn't know what different software packages do. I wouldn't know which distros to trust. I wouldn't know what patches to take. This is all things I could find out, but any time I spend researching the issue is time I'm not spending working. It's much better to just go with what I know. It doesn't matter how nifty a program is; it's completely useless if the people who need it don't know it exists.
Finally, there's an economic critique of OS. It's a basic fact of economics that market failures arise whenever someone either doesn't bear all the costs of their actions, or doesn't reap all the benefits. The same principle that makes companies pollute too much because they don't have to pay for the damage the pollution causes will make programmers produce too little when they their code can be copied freely. It's a basic problem of externalities and free-riders.
There are areas where programmers will code for fun, that this won't be a problem. But what about other areas? Oh sure, you might argue that someone who needs the software would hire a programmer to create it, but this only works if there is a single individual willing to pay the entire cost of development.
I'd be willing to pay $150 for an accounting package. There exist closed source companies that are willing to spend millions to develop such a package, becuase they know there are tens of thousands of people like me. These companies hire dozens of programmers to write the code, QA monkeys to test it, tech-writers to explain it, marketers to get it out there, and market researchers to figure out what people actually want. This is simply not an effort I could replicate by paying a contract programmer $150. So I go with the closed source solution.
I found that in my higher level classes, slackers, idiots, and free riders were less of a problem than they were in lower division classes. That's because it was a small enough department that by then we all knew each other. Once we could pick our own groups, all the smart, hard workers would gravitate together. The slackers would end up in groups with other slackers, and turn in crap.
I'm getting a tad sick of the people who whine about businesses that only care about making money. Of course a business only cares about making money. That's what it's supposed to do. A businessman has a moral obligation to make as much money as possible. The executive has been entrusted to put forth all his efforts to do so.
The people who are trusting the executive are not just rich greedy VCs and financiers, but also little old ladies whose pension funds include stock. The executive being a greedy bastard puts food on the table of the wheelchair bound Mrs. Farnsworth.
That's not to say you should be some sort of scumbag. If you treat your customers, employees, and vendors like dirt, they're not going to continue to do business with you. You can usually make more money by being nice to people. But when the situation calls for you to be a ruthless bastard in order to make more money, that's what you have to do. If you don't like it, you shouldn't be in business. Get out of the way and let your investment money go to someone who will actually add value to the world.
If you don't like the way a corporation is behaving, don't whine about them being bad corporate citizens. Figure out some way to hit them in the wallet. You can boycott, pass laws, or (as much as we all hate lawyers) sue. All a corporation is going to do is try to make money, and they'll behave in ways you don't like as long as doing so is profitable. If you make it unprofitable, they'll stop.
Whether or not you agree with me that businessmen have a moral obligation to make as much money as possible, realize that investors *do* believe this. So any executive who does not do everything he can to make a buck, will quickly find himself out of a job.
If you don't want to hurt people, or care more about technology than money, or want to frolic with elves and unicorns and crap like that, fine. Be a hobbyist, write open source code in your spare time, spend time with your family, hike across Europe, do whatever you want that makes you happy. But don't try to run a business. Because when you're running a business, all the investors, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees are trusting their livelihood in you being as ruthless and greedy as you possibly can.
It seems that people on/. want everything free and convenient. It's perfectly fine to want that. But the problem is that everyone seems to assume that they have a moral right for everybody to give them everything.
We want free content, but we don't want people to use ads that make any money. We are offended by intrusive advertising (with popups or sound) but ignore banner ads. We want targeted advertising but complain about the privacy violations of sites collecting information on us.
Whenever there's any discussion of advertising, there are always a ton of people raising the argument that nobody expects click through for TV, billboards, and print. That argument's fine and dandy, except for the fact that it's a big old steaming pile of crap. Click through's are a measure of how many people are noticing the ads. The fact that they've fallen dramatically are showing that less people are *seeing* the ads. We've all trained ourselves to ignore them.
If you're sitting there claiming that banner ads really do work, get over yourself. Who are you to claim you know more about the advertising industry than the people who really work in that industry. If some advertising wonk tried to tell you what coding structures you should use, I don't think you'd take too kindly to that.
Free content sites are dying, because they can't make money from banner ads. They need to pay for their staff, servers, and connectivity, and you can't pay people with eyeballs. If these sites are going to continue to exist, they need to either charge for access, use more intrusive, interruption based ads, or some combination thereof.
I've looked at The Washington Post's website multiple times a day, pretty much every day for the past 5 years. And in all the time, I can't recall a single ad I've ever noticed. I'd bet that most people can't. That's why the bottom has fallen out on the banner ad industry. On the other hand, I used to play online multiplayer jeopardy, which showed interruption ads between rounds. I still remember what the ads are, even though I haven't played in 3 and a half years. Because I was forced to notice them.
So I entirely agree with this article, and hope people do start charging or using more intrusive ads that actually make money. Because otherwise in a few years, there won't be any content left on the internet.
End Rant
Slashdot Mirror
Like other above commentators, I recommend OKCupid. At one point when I was using it I tweaked my profile and filters. The top match didn't have a picture, but upon reading her profile and essays she seemed to be the girl of my dreams. I got very excited, but by the end of the profile alarm bells started going off with respect to how familiar the answers seemed, and I suddenly realized she was my ex-girlfriend. Six months later, we got back together, and are now happily married. So I guess OKCupid was smarter than we were.
However I see it being free as a flaw rather than a benefit. People who aren't paying for a site tend to not take it seriously. I had to set a hard filter restricting the minimum age of my matches to 23. I was 26 at the time, and didn't have any objection to dating 22-year-olds, but it just wasn't worth my time to dig through the profiles of all the college girls who obviously weren't looking for a real relationship.
Am I missing something, or would this method be completely useless if the submarine is moving in the slightest bit? How do you get a submarine to be motionless? There's going to be currents and such moving it. Won't nearby ships moving throw it off as well?
Open source software is great if you're a programmer. You can look at the code, understand what's going wrong, fix it, etc. But non-programmers don't care about that.
What I want in software is ease of use. If I'm installing some normal, closed source software, it's incredibly easy. I stick the CD in the drive, and a screen pops up asking if I want to install it. I click yes, then I click Next a few times, and it's installed. I open up the software, and it's easy to use. Nearly everything I want to do is intuitive. Anything that isn't is clearly explained in the help file. No problems, no fuss.
Now contrast this with open source. I've only installed an open source piece of software once, but it was a nightmare. I went to the site on Sourceforge, and saw dozens of different versions. I didn't know which one I wanted, but assumed the most recent one would be best. So I downloaded it. But I couldn't install it yet, as I needed to make sure I had the right version of a Java compiler. So I opened up a command prompt and typed in what the instructions had told me to type. Nothing happened. Eventually I realized that I didn't have Java at all. So then I had to download that.
I finally succeeded in compiling the code, and opened the program, only to discover that I couldn't use it at all. None of the menu commands did anything, the buttons didn't work, and the software was completely useless to me. I checked the help menu, only to discover that rather than having explanations of how the program worked, it only gave a link to the raw code. I paused to curse my open source advocating friend who had reccomended the software. Then I was complaining about it to another friend who used it, and he told me that he hadn't had any of the same problems I did. I realized after this that I had a bad version of the software. So I downloaded a different one, which worked, although it still involved quite a bit of finessing and difficulty in figuring out how to do what I wanted to do.
Now, I admit that I'm basing my judgement of Open Source on just one experience, but my experience matches what most non-techy people assume OS is like.
Ask yourself a question. How many non-techy people do you know that use Linux? I have lots of techy friends who use it and love it. But I do not know, nor have I ever heard of, a non-tech type person that uses Linux or even has the slightest interest in using Linux. This is not because they are ignorant. It's because ease of use is important, and Microsoft has invested a lot of time, effort, and money in making windows easy to use. I, like most non-techies, am willing to live with having to reboot my computer every couple of weeks because something crashed, rather than dealing with all the complications of Linux.
Another issue is name brand recognition. A lot of you may scoff at this, but it does have a real value. I know that for the things I do in my job, MS Word, PowerPoint, and Excel will work perfectly. If someone's willing to pay me $50K a year, they're going to be willing to spend $300 on MS Office so that I can do my job effectively. I'm sure that there exist open source programs that do everything these programs do. But I don't know what they are. I wouldn't know where to look for them. I wouldn't know what different software packages do. I wouldn't know which distros to trust. I wouldn't know what patches to take. This is all things I could find out, but any time I spend researching the issue is time I'm not spending working. It's much better to just go with what I know. It doesn't matter how nifty a program is; it's completely useless if the people who need it don't know it exists.
Finally, there's an economic critique of OS. It's a basic fact of economics that market failures arise whenever someone either doesn't bear all the costs of their actions, or doesn't reap all the benefits. The same principle that makes companies pollute too much because they don't have to pay for the damage the pollution causes will make programmers produce too little when they their code can be copied freely. It's a basic problem of externalities and free-riders.
There are areas where programmers will code for fun, that this won't be a problem. But what about other areas? Oh sure, you might argue that someone who needs the software would hire a programmer to create it, but this only works if there is a single individual willing to pay the entire cost of development.
I'd be willing to pay $150 for an accounting package. There exist closed source companies that are willing to spend millions to develop such a package, becuase they know there are tens of thousands of people like me. These companies hire dozens of programmers to write the code, QA monkeys to test it, tech-writers to explain it, marketers to get it out there, and market researchers to figure out what people actually want. This is simply not an effort I could replicate by paying a contract programmer $150. So I go with the closed source solution.
I found that in my higher level classes, slackers, idiots, and free riders were less of a problem than they were in lower division classes. That's because it was a small enough department that by then we all knew each other. Once we could pick our own groups, all the smart, hard workers would gravitate together. The slackers would end up in groups with other slackers, and turn in crap.
The people who are trusting the executive are not just rich greedy VCs and financiers, but also little old ladies whose pension funds include stock. The executive being a greedy bastard puts food on the table of the wheelchair bound Mrs. Farnsworth.
That's not to say you should be some sort of scumbag. If you treat your customers, employees, and vendors like dirt, they're not going to continue to do business with you. You can usually make more money by being nice to people. But when the situation calls for you to be a ruthless bastard in order to make more money, that's what you have to do. If you don't like it, you shouldn't be in business. Get out of the way and let your investment money go to someone who will actually add value to the world.
If you don't like the way a corporation is behaving, don't whine about them being bad corporate citizens. Figure out some way to hit them in the wallet. You can boycott, pass laws, or (as much as we all hate lawyers) sue. All a corporation is going to do is try to make money, and they'll behave in ways you don't like as long as doing so is profitable. If you make it unprofitable, they'll stop.
Whether or not you agree with me that businessmen have a moral obligation to make as much money as possible, realize that investors *do* believe this. So any executive who does not do everything he can to make a buck, will quickly find himself out of a job.
If you don't want to hurt people, or care more about technology than money, or want to frolic with elves and unicorns and crap like that, fine. Be a hobbyist, write open source code in your spare time, spend time with your family, hike across Europe, do whatever you want that makes you happy. But don't try to run a business. Because when you're running a business, all the investors, customers, partners, suppliers, and employees are trusting their livelihood in you being as ruthless and greedy as you possibly can.
It seems that people on /. want everything free and convenient. It's perfectly fine to want that. But the problem is that everyone seems to assume that they have a moral right for everybody to give them everything.
We want free content, but we don't want people to use ads that make any money. We are offended by intrusive advertising (with popups or sound) but ignore banner ads. We want targeted advertising but complain about the privacy violations of sites collecting information on us.
Whenever there's any discussion of advertising, there are always a ton of people raising the argument that nobody expects click through for TV, billboards, and print. That argument's fine and dandy, except for the fact that it's a big old steaming pile of crap. Click through's are a measure of how many people are noticing the ads. The fact that they've fallen dramatically are showing that less people are *seeing* the ads. We've all trained ourselves to ignore them.
If you're sitting there claiming that banner ads really do work, get over yourself. Who are you to claim you know more about the advertising industry than the people who really work in that industry. If some advertising wonk tried to tell you what coding structures you should use, I don't think you'd take too kindly to that.
Free content sites are dying, because they can't make money from banner ads. They need to pay for their staff, servers, and connectivity, and you can't pay people with eyeballs. If these sites are going to continue to exist, they need to either charge for access, use more intrusive, interruption based ads, or some combination thereof.
I've looked at The Washington Post's website multiple times a day, pretty much every day for the past 5 years. And in all the time, I can't recall a single ad I've ever noticed. I'd bet that most people can't. That's why the bottom has fallen out on the banner ad industry. On the other hand, I used to play online multiplayer jeopardy, which showed interruption ads between rounds. I still remember what the ads are, even though I haven't played in 3 and a half years. Because I was forced to notice them.
So I entirely agree with this article, and hope people do start charging or using more intrusive ads that actually make money. Because otherwise in a few years, there won't be any content left on the internet.
End Rant
Referring to your song "What makes the sun shine," are you aware that the sun is not in fact a mass of incadescent gas, but is actually plasma?