Which is silly. If a person wants an iPod, they should just buy one. I mean, it's not out of the range of the common man...I sold a PDA, a video game system and an extra computer to get mine. I enjoy the iPod more than any of them.
Just because you aren't willing to pay for something doesn't mean it's unfairly priced. Certainly the 2 million people who bought iPods think they're worth the money. Certainly Apple'd be stupid to cut the margin when they can barely cover the demand on the iPod Mini.
There are people on slashdot willing shell out the same money for some piece of shit consumer device just so they can "hack it." Why should a machine that doesn't work be worth more than one that does?
Incidentally, I fit this profile to a T. I won't even go to the local mall without my ipod to assuade my agoraphobia. Listening to a walkman stops solicitors and panhandlers from bothering you as well. Shit, I have a pair of Sennheiser DJ phones that cancel about 32 dB of noise, and I sometimes wear them at work with no sound playing on them at all, just to help keep me concentrated.
In short, by supressing one of my senses I also supress some of my natural uneasiness in uncertain social situations and that's helped make me more confident overall.
Not to mention that the quality is GREAT. I take a lot of digital pictures and love making huge blow ups of the really good shots. I turned a box of photo paper into a really awesome 8/10 gallery for about $50, in ink and paper...with borderless printing (basically just full bleed).
The very fact that you deal with bandwidth in bytes per month instead of bits per second indicates that you're in a very different level of hosting than a dedicated services provider. In fact, you don't even have a dedicated T1...a T1 could move 400 or so gigabytes per month and it wouldn't cost your provider anything more than if you had used a teeny bit of it.
You're also paying way too much, btw...I pay about a fifth of that for the same deal, though I have a MUCH smaller scale co-loc.
The company I used to work with had a deal that was around $50,000 per month. This was not for an amount of bytes per month (a useless metric, in fact when I asked the IT guy about it he laugh at me and said, "multiply our constant throughput by 250, it's that many gig"), but a number of megabits per second. This was important, because when you have 20 or 30 servers getting constant incoming requests, you have to be sure each of them can send data at a good enough rate. 20 servers on a t1 line, most you can serve is 10 kB/s, or about 5 seconds per page per server. So you pay for the per second line, knowing full well that you'll only fill up the pipe during "rush hour." For that price, you also get ridiculously redundant power, hands on, halon systems and all sorts of cool security features that make your shareholders feel good.
If this guy had a similar deal...say, he rented part of a cage, included the sheriff's server in the cage for free, and had everybody else LEAVE the cage, then it's entirely possible that he spent $300,000 hosting it. With my old company's setup, it only would have taken 6 months.
Does this mean that the $300,000 isn't overkill for the sheriff's site? No, of course it is. But it's entirely conceivable that HIS cost to host it was very, very high.
Try taking this approach with the utility company if you stop paying your electricity bill, and see how far you get.
You'd get pretty far in New York. In fact, some people got so far with it that it's actually ILLEGAL to cancel gas or electric service during the winter months. People need their heat to survive, and cutting them off just because they can't pay would be extortion (or so the train of thought goes).
What if the guy thinks to himself, after three years, "this is bull. I have worked on this site for three years and have yet to see any money from the publicity. I can't afford to float it along any more, and these guys keep making demands of me."
So he says to the Sheriffs, "Hey guys -- listen. I've lost about $300,000 of my own money running this site, and I'm going to need you to start paying for it. I'm turning it off, but I'll put it back on when you pay." The figure is an exageration (obviously). Maybe he's expecting a few hundred dollars a month.
And the Sheriffs hear this as, "Guys, I want $300,000 to bring your site back up." That IS extortion. And obviously, since it's not in the budget, they can't pay it. This is government -- you can't wipe your ass if it's not in the budget. That's why everything's budgeted so high.
So maybe the guy exagerates, and maybe the sherriffs hear the exagerated sum before the real one. Nobody thinks, because there's a lot of emotion.
Not saying that's what happened. Just saying that neither group has to necesarily be lying.
"Fountainhead media?" Is this a company run by randroids?!?
In that case, they should have been wary. No Objectivist would ever REALLY be so altruistic as to volunteer to build a website. After all, helping is hurting!
Or better yet, talk to your local press (if you have a local press, and if you don't, you should start one, it isn't hard and can be quite lucrative). The whole reason for freedom of the press was to prevent totalitarianism in local justice.
Example: one of my local PDs was notoriously full of money grubbing racist assholes. Our local paper started trolling through records and LO AND BEHOLD, discovered a number of major improprieties, including overtime pay when people were obviously elsewhere and sexual assault cases against various high ranking officers that had "stalled" in court. Paper started publishing on them, and the guilty officers started disappearing from the force. The remaining guys are sweet as can be, because they know that fucking around with the gray areas will get them canned with no pension.
This is the problem with cops in general, they have the power to act and ruin your life, and ask questions later.
Some would say that's the best thing about cops. After all, if it weren't for the social construct of legislation and justice, EVERYBODY would have the power to act and ruin your life.
You get results if you search on "xfree 86", "x free 86" or "xwindows." If they were REALLY blocking the term "xfree86" (and WHY the fuck would they block THAT when they don't block any other term, like "apache," "linux," or "macintosh"), you'd think they'd block these alternate terms as well.
In fact, "XFree 86" lists xfree86.org as the first link. If they are blocking something, they're sure doing a shitty job of it.
It's more likely that MS instituted a crappy "porn check" into their webcrawler that isn't indexing the term "xfree86" properly in the first place. So it's likely they're not BLOCKING anything. If you don't have the data, there's nothing to block and therefore the problem wouldn't be malice, but stupidity...remember that bromide?
True, true...I frequently play devil's advocate and point out the unpopular counter to the "slashdot" view. And I'm surprised how often I get scores like "50% Insightful, 50% Overrated," due to some Slashdotters trying to suppress facts while others are trying to underscore counterarguments.
End result? More information from more points of view, and that's better for everybody.
Yes they're Linux -- Gentoo, hand rolled by my oh-so-clever partner. You'd be a fool not to use Linux on your front line servers these days...some people swear by BSD, but you just can't beat Linux for the knowledge and support of a massive community. And of course, if I were running Windows I'd need boxes with three times the memory and twice the processor.
I like Linux on my servers for the same reason I like OSX and Windows on my desktops: you don't transport produce in your toyota, and you don't pick up your date in a semi.
I have streamed mp3 in the past, though I didn't do it via a specific streaming server (relied instead on . Send an email or an IM, we'd be willing to set something up for you (we NEED a streaming solution anyway).
Ok. Here's what I've got and it is SO awesome in that I don't have to do hardly any WORK (and I still am too lazy to do it in a timely fashion):
1) Input photos with iPhoto. It is the best, simply for the ease of making albums, searching based on time, etc. The albums it maintains are symlinks in directories...which means you can just upload the albums if you like.
2) Resize and index the photos in my iPhoto Library/Albums directory using a tool called Jalbum. Since I have FAR too many photos for a.MAC account to be useful, I need to use a third party app. JAlbum resizes photos, generates pretty graphics based on programmable templates, and will even upload them all for me. It rocks. And no matter what you may think of Java and its batch processing abilities, it's more than fast enough on my G3-600. It can process 3200 3 meg photos (making html pages, 800x600 "slides," and thumbnails) in about an hour...and I can upload them from within Jalbum WHILE it's working!
Oh, and all of this takes a lot of webspace. You need a provider who has the speed and the size and won't hassle you too much. I couldn't find one, so I made my own. (Cheap plugs are the best kind).
You think you're being funny. I think so, too. But never underestimate the true allure of voyeurism -- and I'm not talking porno. People like to look into other people's lives. Photographs are one the most intimate ways to do that (and for this reason, I found that awkward movie kind of chilling).
I keep all my photos online (I've got about 3200). I only take maybe 100-200 a month and am really bad about posting them.
There are people -- friends I haven't seen in forever, ex-coworkers, and even people who only know me from friggin' slashdot -- who only ever communicate with me to ask when I'm updating the site. People love it. And I lead a pretty boring life! Can you imagine if somebody interesting (like, say, a cop, a rock singer, Linus Torvalds) started posting a massive visual blog of their entire day?
I guarantee you no INTELLIGENT PERSON will buy a car if they can't see the engine.
Fuck man, when my wife test drove her car, she didn't even put the revs above 1000. She did 50 on the freeway. I had to ask her to pull over so I could find out if the thing had any power at all. I pegged it up to 5000.
She later berated me. "What if you'd broke it," she asked, "then we'd have to buy it!"
Serious, this is a woman with a BS in geology. Not an idiot. She didn't care about the engine, as long as it drove the car forward. She (rightly) assumed if she looked under the hood, she wouldn't be able to tell if anything was broken or not anyway, so what's the point?
But she pushed hard for a cheap extended warranty -- one that worked at her favorite shop. Which meant that even if there was a nest full of angry bees driving that car, she could get it fixed for free for the next 50,000 miles...
Probably. The rest of us would be more interested in a portable DVD player, which they have already, and you can actually SEE the screen on. They're getting really cheap too.
Of course, you can also get a 300 MHz 12" ibook for about $400, and you can do whatever you want with that...
1) Take off the tinfoil hat. The performance and reduced maintenance gained by electronic ignition and monitoring systems FAR outweigh the possibility of somebody shooting EMP at you. Anyhow, you can harden electronics against EMP if you want to...the army does.
2) I do all my own maintenance on my cars. I do less maintenance on the Passat than I do the Beetle, because I never once had to tune up the Passat. No tweaking of carburetors, no timing adjustments, no periodic replacement of the points and condensors...no worrying about the mixture or damage from pinging, because an electronic engine will detune itself WELL before a damaging ping goes through.
I mean, it's not like the computer parts are CHEAPER. A new ECM costs about $695. A new top of the line dual Weber carb for the Beetle is about $350, tops. But the carb needs constant maintenance and will eventually break down. The ECM provides better performance and more security with a LONG life span. That's why we use electronics: they're better, safer and last longer.
3) This is a CONCEPT car for WOMEN. I guarantee you no MAN will buy a car if he can't see the engine.
get people to bring their cars back to the dealer for repairs
More like to prevent non specialists from working on non-standard parts. Or to prevent accidents.
For example, I drive a VW Passat. Most of the connectors are simply bolts with either hex, torx or phillips head connectors, very easy to take off and remove. But the rear breaks, and the manual transmission fluid, take specialized tools. Why? Well, the transmission, because it's right next to the oil. They don't want some oil guy accidentally draining the the trans fluid, because you have to load it from the top (which I THINK means dropping the tranny a bit, AND having the tranny fluid available). The rear breaks, on the other hand, take a special tool because they are threaded to prevent lock ups on hills on cold days. You have to push in while twisting to replace the pads.
Now, if somebody didn't know this, and just assumed he could put a C clamp on it, he'd break the caliper. So there's no way to put a C clamp on it (lord knows I tried). The idea is, if you know enough to buy the special tool (which cost me $20 from germanautoparts.com), you know enough to do the repair.
Slashdot Mirror
Which is silly. If a person wants an iPod, they should just buy one. I mean, it's not out of the range of the common man...I sold a PDA, a video game system and an extra computer to get mine. I enjoy the iPod more than any of them.
Just because you aren't willing to pay for something doesn't mean it's unfairly priced. Certainly the 2 million people who bought iPods think they're worth the money. Certainly Apple'd be stupid to cut the margin when they can barely cover the demand on the iPod Mini.
There are people on slashdot willing shell out the same money for some piece of shit consumer device just so they can "hack it." Why should a machine that doesn't work be worth more than one that does?
Ha. But it's not just ivory tower eggheads who've noticed this. Check out the following pair of songs on the subject:
"In my headphones," Axis II by the Paranoid Social Club (also available in a live set on etree.org).
"Walkman music," Always Will be by J-Live.
Incidentally, I fit this profile to a T. I won't even go to the local mall without my ipod to assuade my agoraphobia. Listening to a walkman stops solicitors and panhandlers from bothering you as well. Shit, I have a pair of Sennheiser DJ phones that cancel about 32 dB of noise, and I sometimes wear them at work with no sound playing on them at all, just to help keep me concentrated.
In short, by supressing one of my senses I also supress some of my natural uneasiness in uncertain social situations and that's helped make me more confident overall.
Not to mention that the quality is GREAT. I take a lot of digital pictures and love making huge blow ups of the really good shots. I turned a box of photo paper into a really awesome 8/10 gallery for about $50, in ink and paper...with borderless printing (basically just full bleed).
It's slashdot. A lot of the people who read this site are idealists. Therefore, logic and realism are inflamatory concepts.
:)
Nobody likes waking up, and when somebody shakes you you're liable to deck them.
Doesn't matter to me. My karma is excellent over umpteen posts
It's called "sales." I think it must be new, because nobody on slashdot seems to understand it. Maybe there's a FAQ somewhere.
Of course they're high quality...he's got 4 gig of ram on that camera, he can afford to take all of his shots uncompressed!
The very fact that you deal with bandwidth in bytes per month instead of bits per second indicates that you're in a very different level of hosting than a dedicated services provider. In fact, you don't even have a dedicated T1...a T1 could move 400 or so gigabytes per month and it wouldn't cost your provider anything more than if you had used a teeny bit of it.
You're also paying way too much, btw...I pay about a fifth of that for the same deal, though I have a MUCH smaller scale co-loc.
The company I used to work with had a deal that was around $50,000 per month. This was not for an amount of bytes per month (a useless metric, in fact when I asked the IT guy about it he laugh at me and said, "multiply our constant throughput by 250, it's that many gig"), but a number of megabits per second. This was important, because when you have 20 or 30 servers getting constant incoming requests, you have to be sure each of them can send data at a good enough rate. 20 servers on a t1 line, most you can serve is 10 kB/s, or about 5 seconds per page per server. So you pay for the per second line, knowing full well that you'll only fill up the pipe during "rush hour." For that price, you also get ridiculously redundant power, hands on, halon systems and all sorts of cool security features that make your shareholders feel good.
If this guy had a similar deal...say, he rented part of a cage, included the sheriff's server in the cage for free, and had everybody else LEAVE the cage, then it's entirely possible that he spent $300,000 hosting it. With my old company's setup, it only would have taken 6 months.
Does this mean that the $300,000 isn't overkill for the sheriff's site? No, of course it is. But it's entirely conceivable that HIS cost to host it was very, very high.
Try taking this approach with the utility company if you stop paying your electricity bill, and see how far you get.
You'd get pretty far in New York. In fact, some people got so far with it that it's actually ILLEGAL to cancel gas or electric service during the winter months. People need their heat to survive, and cutting them off just because they can't pay would be extortion (or so the train of thought goes).
Shit, man, where can you get crack for a dime a hit? It's like five bucks a rock around here!
Which is why the only way to preserve democracy is through a series of checks and balances...
I don't see why both can't be true.
What if the guy thinks to himself, after three years, "this is bull. I have worked on this site for three years and have yet to see any money from the publicity. I can't afford to float it along any more, and these guys keep making demands of me."
So he says to the Sheriffs, "Hey guys -- listen. I've lost about $300,000 of my own money running this site, and I'm going to need you to start paying for it. I'm turning it off, but I'll put it back on when you pay." The figure is an exageration (obviously). Maybe he's expecting a few hundred dollars a month.
And the Sheriffs hear this as, "Guys, I want $300,000 to bring your site back up." That IS extortion. And obviously, since it's not in the budget, they can't pay it. This is government -- you can't wipe your ass if it's not in the budget. That's why everything's budgeted so high.
So maybe the guy exagerates, and maybe the sherriffs hear the exagerated sum before the real one. Nobody thinks, because there's a lot of emotion.
Not saying that's what happened. Just saying that neither group has to necesarily be lying.
It's coming. I had to get my +1, Interesting first. Flamebait mods read at 4 or 5 ;)
"Fountainhead media?" Is this a company run by randroids?!?
In that case, they should have been wary. No Objectivist would ever REALLY be so altruistic as to volunteer to build a website. After all, helping is hurting!
Or better yet, talk to your local press (if you have a local press, and if you don't, you should start one, it isn't hard and can be quite lucrative). The whole reason for freedom of the press was to prevent totalitarianism in local justice.
Example: one of my local PDs was notoriously full of money grubbing racist assholes. Our local paper started trolling through records and LO AND BEHOLD, discovered a number of major improprieties, including overtime pay when people were obviously elsewhere and sexual assault cases against various high ranking officers that had "stalled" in court. Paper started publishing on them, and the guilty officers started disappearing from the force. The remaining guys are sweet as can be, because they know that fucking around with the gray areas will get them canned with no pension.
This is the problem with cops in general, they have the power to act and ruin your life, and ask questions later.
Some would say that's the best thing about cops. After all, if it weren't for the social construct of legislation and justice, EVERYBODY would have the power to act and ruin your life.
You get results if you search on "xfree 86", "x free 86" or "xwindows." If they were REALLY blocking the term "xfree86" (and WHY the fuck would they block THAT when they don't block any other term, like "apache," "linux," or "macintosh"), you'd think they'd block these alternate terms as well.
In fact, "XFree 86" lists xfree86.org as the first link. If they are blocking something, they're sure doing a shitty job of it.
It's more likely that MS instituted a crappy "porn check" into their webcrawler that isn't indexing the term "xfree86" properly in the first place. So it's likely they're not BLOCKING anything. If you don't have the data, there's nothing to block and therefore the problem wouldn't be malice, but stupidity...remember that bromide?
True, true...I frequently play devil's advocate and point out the unpopular counter to the "slashdot" view. And I'm surprised how often I get scores like "50% Insightful, 50% Overrated," due to some Slashdotters trying to suppress facts while others are trying to underscore counterarguments.
End result? More information from more points of view, and that's better for everybody.
Yes they're Linux -- Gentoo, hand rolled by my oh-so-clever partner. You'd be a fool not to use Linux on your front line servers these days...some people swear by BSD, but you just can't beat Linux for the knowledge and support of a massive community. And of course, if I were running Windows I'd need boxes with three times the memory and twice the processor.
I like Linux on my servers for the same reason I like OSX and Windows on my desktops: you don't transport produce in your toyota, and you don't pick up your date in a semi.
I have streamed mp3 in the past, though I didn't do it via a specific streaming server (relied instead on . Send an email or an IM, we'd be willing to set something up for you (we NEED a streaming solution anyway).
Ok. Here's what I've got and it is SO awesome in that I don't have to do hardly any WORK (and I still am too lazy to do it in a timely fashion):
.MAC account to be useful, I need to use a third party app. JAlbum resizes photos, generates pretty graphics based on programmable templates, and will even upload them all for me. It rocks. And no matter what you may think of Java and its batch processing abilities, it's more than fast enough on my G3-600. It can process 3200 3 meg photos (making html pages, 800x600 "slides," and thumbnails) in about an hour...and I can upload them from within Jalbum WHILE it's working!
1) Input photos with iPhoto. It is the best, simply for the ease of making albums, searching based on time, etc. The albums it maintains are symlinks in directories...which means you can just upload the albums if you like.
2) Resize and index the photos in my iPhoto Library/Albums directory using a tool called Jalbum. Since I have FAR too many photos for a
Oh, and all of this takes a lot of webspace. You need a provider who has the speed and the size and won't hassle you too much. I couldn't find one, so I made my own. (Cheap plugs are the best kind).
You think you're being funny. I think so, too. But never underestimate the true allure of voyeurism -- and I'm not talking porno. People like to look into other people's lives. Photographs are one the most intimate ways to do that (and for this reason, I found that awkward movie kind of chilling).
I keep all my photos online (I've got about 3200). I only take maybe 100-200 a month and am really bad about posting them.
There are people -- friends I haven't seen in forever, ex-coworkers, and even people who only know me from friggin' slashdot -- who only ever communicate with me to ask when I'm updating the site. People love it. And I lead a pretty boring life! Can you imagine if somebody interesting (like, say, a cop, a rock singer, Linus Torvalds) started posting a massive visual blog of their entire day?
I guarantee you no INTELLIGENT PERSON will buy a car if they can't see the engine.
Fuck man, when my wife test drove her car, she didn't even put the revs above 1000. She did 50 on the freeway. I had to ask her to pull over so I could find out if the thing had any power at all. I pegged it up to 5000.
She later berated me. "What if you'd broke it," she asked, "then we'd have to buy it!"
Serious, this is a woman with a BS in geology. Not an idiot. She didn't care about the engine, as long as it drove the car forward. She (rightly) assumed if she looked under the hood, she wouldn't be able to tell if anything was broken or not anyway, so what's the point?
But she pushed hard for a cheap extended warranty -- one that worked at her favorite shop. Which meant that even if there was a nest full of angry bees driving that car, she could get it fixed for free for the next 50,000 miles...
Am I the only one who would be interested in it?
Probably. The rest of us would be more interested in a portable DVD player, which they have already, and you can actually SEE the screen on. They're getting really cheap too.
Of course, you can also get a 300 MHz 12" ibook for about $400, and you can do whatever you want with that...
1) Take off the tinfoil hat. The performance and reduced maintenance gained by electronic ignition and monitoring systems FAR outweigh the possibility of somebody shooting EMP at you. Anyhow, you can harden electronics against EMP if you want to...the army does.
2) I do all my own maintenance on my cars. I do less maintenance on the Passat than I do the Beetle, because I never once had to tune up the Passat. No tweaking of carburetors, no timing adjustments, no periodic replacement of the points and condensors...no worrying about the mixture or damage from pinging, because an electronic engine will detune itself WELL before a damaging ping goes through.
I mean, it's not like the computer parts are CHEAPER. A new ECM costs about $695. A new top of the line dual Weber carb for the Beetle is about $350, tops. But the carb needs constant maintenance and will eventually break down. The ECM provides better performance and more security with a LONG life span. That's why we use electronics: they're better, safer and last longer.
3) This is a CONCEPT car for WOMEN. I guarantee you no MAN will buy a car if he can't see the engine.
get people to bring their cars back to the dealer for repairs
More like to prevent non specialists from working on non-standard parts. Or to prevent accidents.
For example, I drive a VW Passat. Most of the connectors are simply bolts with either hex, torx or phillips head connectors, very easy to take off and remove. But the rear breaks, and the manual transmission fluid, take specialized tools. Why? Well, the transmission, because it's right next to the oil. They don't want some oil guy accidentally draining the the trans fluid, because you have to load it from the top (which I THINK means dropping the tranny a bit, AND having the tranny fluid available). The rear breaks, on the other hand, take a special tool because they are threaded to prevent lock ups on hills on cold days. You have to push in while twisting to replace the pads.
Now, if somebody didn't know this, and just assumed he could put a C clamp on it, he'd break the caliper. So there's no way to put a C clamp on it (lord knows I tried). The idea is, if you know enough to buy the special tool (which cost me $20 from germanautoparts.com), you know enough to do the repair.
Well, that's all thanks to chief Volvo designer, Georgia O'Keefe...