Yeah, it's stupid, but it's easy to see why people try to sell stoopiddomain.com on eBay:
People are both greedy and stupid. Some are dumb enough to fall for Make Money Fast chain letters. Others believe that doing everything their Amway sponsor tells them to do will make them rich.
There have been specific examples of lots of money being paid for domains. Unfortunately for some, it actually takes an IQ above 80 to figure out why some names have value and others don't.
Network Solutions' payment system with its grace period and eBay's listing policy and new user credit mean that you can put in a claim on a name and attempt to auction it without having to shell out a dime. A programmer with a little time on his hands could probably put together some scripts to automate trolling the whois database for random combinations of dictionary words, creating new eBay accounts, and posting auctions. No expenditures required, and the slight possibility that a greater fool will come along and actually buy a domain and put a few dollars in your pocket.
Where in the QNX "Communique" does it claim that this is an Amiga OS/GUI at all? Other slahsdot posters have speculated that all it really has is in common with the old Amiga is the nameplate, but after finally getting through to their web site, I'm not even sure they even have the nameplate. Rather, it seems like a pitch to remaining Amiga developers to develop for their QNX OS and Photon GUI in addition to, or perhaps instead of, the Amiga platform (if that still exists at all). In fact, you could do a global search-and-replace of Amiga with Mac, BeBox, NeXT, TOS, etc. without really changing a thing. Similarly, RedHat could slap together a similar pitch to entice Amiga developers to come over to Linux and Gnome, but that doesn't make them the "new Amiga" either.
The trouble with ALT is that in common usage it's not used for text with the intention of being shown instead of the image, but for tooltip-like mouse-overs for breathless ad copy like "Click here for the greatest e-deals on books and music!!!"
The LinuxWorld banner at the top of this SlashDot page has an ALT of "Join the Wave!" Good luck figuring out what the "wave" is if you're not loading images.
I am absolutely sick of hearing about how C/C++ causes bloat because of the size of "Hello, world" programs. Use the right tool for the job. If you want to write "Hello, world" use a shell script or Perl.
AltaVista has 475 employees. What could they possibly all be doing? Does it really take that many people to run a search engine, or is it now 10 people handling the search engine, and 465 people responsible for putting shopping, auctions, email, stock quotes, and other junk on their pages to turn them into Yet Another Portal?
They had revenues of $40 million, but that wouldn't even pay everyone's salary.
A lot of the spam I already get contains some meaningless language about "not being intended for residents of Washington State." The problem is that the spammers don't know or care whether I receive my email in WA or anywhere else; that's just a feeble attempt to cover themselves. Are they just going to tack on "and North Carolina" and leave everything the same?
My hypothesis, supported by nothing more than anecdotes and opinion, is that the excessive advocacy element associated with an OS or platform is more or less constant, regardless of the market share of technical merits of the platform. There is probably about the same volume of advocacy for Linux, Windows, OS/2, Amiga, Commodore 64, etc. Fortunately, when a platform is still fresh enough to attract a lot of genuine interest from people who have something constructive to contribute (as in Linux today or Amiga in 1986) the advocacy element is ignorable. For Windows, there are probably just as many rabid advocates out there, but they're so overwhelmed by the massive user base that they aren't a factor. For platforms which have passed their prime, sadly, the advocates are all who remain.
If there's any truth to this, the greatest "defense" against misplaced Linux advocacy is to keep the platform fresh and keep more well-reasoned people interested.
The problem with picking apart the benchmark results, and particularly with the line of argument that says "with all the bandwidth we have today, you don't need to go any faster," is that it sounds too much like "you'll never need more than 640K of RAM" or "32M is big enough for a partition." Sure, today a Linux server may be fine for almost all needs, but let's not use that as an excuse to let the status quo stay unchanged.
In the Wired article, Woz says he may have the original Apple I breadboard! Now there's a unique piece of history -- that should go to the Smithsonian. I doubt that any single comparable prototype exists for an Altair because they were motherboard systems. Even if you could find an original Altair CPU breadboard, you'd need the rest of the system, and I doubt that all of it still exists, or even that it ever existed as a single prototype. Most likely some boards were designed and produced before others, so there would be no single prototype system. (The one pictured on Radio Electronics was a mockup, I believe.)
Forget the results for a second, and note the significance of this series of comparisons. In one corner, you have the flagship product of the richest, most successful corporation on earth; in the other corner is a hobby project started by an undergrad in Finland. You don't see Road & Track doing comparos of the Mercedes SL600 vs. something a local car club built out of spare parts.
And even the results are significant. Using the car analogy again: "The Mercedes has a top speed of 160, while the Linuxmobile could only reach 120 (after we connected all of the spark plug wires which were inadvertently missed in our test in the last issue), but both had excellent slalom times and, in everyday driving, nobody goes 160 anyway."
I wouldn't expect Linux to come out on top anyway. The bottom line is that on the same hardware, one program is going to significantly outperform the other only if one OS does something stupid to get in the way. Now I wouldn't be totally shocked at any future stupidity in Windows. I'm convinced now that MS product development is no longer driven by end user needs (was it ever?), but by competitive tactics. If a future version decides to fork a new copy of IE every time you open a file, or won't connect to the internet without going through some "value-added" MSN portal, or won't install software that hasn't been signed by Microsoft, then we have an opportunity to pass them.
Even now, you can probably find enough MS stupidity to concoct a set of benchmarks that Linux will surely win. (I'm sure that MS funded the original Mindcraft tests only when it was pretty confident it had removed most of the stupidity in IIS.) How about benchmarking some desktop functions against an Active Desktop-hobbled Win98 box?
What everyone posting here seems to think (including me in an earlier post) is that Phoenix is selling ads that are displayed while the BIOS is going through POST and the boot process.
That's what the headline of the ZDNET news article implies, but after reading between all the marketing-speak in the "ebetween" press release, I think we may have all jumped to the wrong conclusion.
The press release doesn't talk about bootup ads at all. Instead it touts how this will allow ISP's to "virtually" bundle their signup kits with new PC's without entering into any agreements with Microsoft. This could be done by treating the extra BIOS ROM space as a small ROM disk containing a few programs that bootstrap connections to online services. The BIOS would present this device to Windows, which would mount it, and voila, there's your "bundled" Snap/Excite/Lycos/etc. Since all of this happens after boot, rather than during boot, Phoenix has no incentive to slow down the boot process, which was my earlier objection. Also, it seems no more intrusive than getting software preloaded onto your hard disk, assuming that there's an option to ignore it.
If what they're really doing is just putting a lot of marketing spin on a ROM disk, then Phoenix/ebetween needs to get out a clarification in technical, not marketing, terms, before every technophile writes them off.
The goal of a BIOS is to get the damn computer booted and get out of the way as soon as possible. The goal of Phoenix and any other BIOS maker should be to streamline the "boot process" until it is no longer noticeable as a separate process at all. Now their incentive is to do exactly the opposite and make the boot take as long as people will stand, to maximize ad revenue. In my book, that will be a big strike against the Phoenix BIOS in any future PC purchase I make.
eBay's outages have a bigger impact than they should because their auction format favors real-time last minute "sniping" over their proxy bidding system. If they would tweak things to encourage less sniping then unavoidable outages (and there will always be some, regardless of how much redundancy they build into their infrastructure) won't have such a devastating impact on their business.
As it stands now, eBay's auctions are so time-critical that they're in the same league as online brokerages. And speaking of brokerages...
Fidelity is running TV ads (plastered all over Pirates of Silicon Valley last night) touting the speed of their systems and how seconds count, with a quick disclaimer at the end of the ad that response time depends on network conditions. This is a pet peeve of mine: ads with disclaimers which make the rest of the ad meaningless. Example: "99c Big Macs! That's right, 99 cents! Only 99 cents! Prices may vary." But the point is that they're promoting the idea that the internet is suitable for real-time transactions, even though they recognize that it isn't quite there.
It's a Countach. That is, if it's not a replica. Hard to tell without looking closely or listening to the engine. (It's kinda hard to fake the sound of 12 cylinders.)
Re:Why are they so fat?!
on
Linus @BALUG
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· Score: 1
Aside from all of the other reasons Americans are so fat, we (especially Californians) don't smoke as much as Europeans, so we don't have all that nicotine driving our metabolism. We may be fat, but we don't smell like ashtrays. So there.
There is (still?) an Apple I on display at the Fry's Electronics in Sunnyvale, CA.
BTW, I dispute the claim somebody made in the news article that Apples are the most sought after vintage computers. Altairs, even pieces of them, are going for ridiculous amounts on eBay.
There would be some issues to sort out before the idea of a generic distributed client could fly.
One is the issue of trusting the source of the client. We're all pretty sure that the 11000 CPU-years of time contributed to SETI@home has been to process radio telescope data (even if it's repeated), not cracking someone's password file, but with the potential for many people to put out distributed clients, the issue of trust becomes more relevant.
Another issue is whether the task has some commercial viability. I would be a lot less inclined to run a client on my PC, whether at home or at work, if it was furthering research which could ultimately be competitive with my employer, resulting in my being out of a job. As long as the tasks are purely in the public interest and/or are pure research and mathematics, that's not an issue, but if, for example, Microsoft put out a client that would do super optimization on work units of Windows 2000 code, would anybody be happy with running that on their Linux box?
RIAA take notice: Silver fees refundable
on
DIVX is dead
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· Score: 1
According to the press release, consumers who paid to upgrade their disks to quasi-unlimited viewing ("Silver") will receive a full refund of the cost of the conversion, if they request it.
I hope this doesn't go unnoticed by the RIAA and everyone trying to ram encrypted, controlled-playback audio formats down the consumers' throats. If you 'sell' material in a controlled format, then pull the plug on it later, you're going to have to refund what you collected from everybody or be prepared for a class action.
No, it depends on the type of extension. If the extension is "here's another, nonstandard way to do X, which happens to work better in Windows," that's bad. If the extension is "we didn't implement the whole spec, but here's a nonstandard way to do what we left out," that's bad. If the extension is "here's how to do something completely new, which doesn't conflict with any existing standards," that's ok.
At first, it seems that the simple answer is to raise the bar so that video games and commodity PC's are no longer classified as supercomputers.
However, if we accept that the original reason for the supercomputer export restrictions is to make it difficult for some countries to solve certain problems like simulating nuclear blasts, raising the bar defeats this purpose. These problems aren't getting any harder (and don't forget that the US managed to solve these problems in the days of pencil and paper, adding machines, and the occasional vacuum tube). If all that the regulations are doing is keeping the latest generation of hardware out of China's hands for a few months until it, too, becomes embedded in something you can buy at Toys 'R Us, is there any value remaining in the restrictions at all?
We might as well give in and abandon the restrictions. In fact, putting millions of Internet-connected Pentiums into the hands of the Chinese population is probably the Chinese government's worst nightmare.
eBay has had outages all over the place, and every time they do, it seems that their stock just goes UP another dozen points or so. Maybe somebody might actually figure out that even though the company is worth $billions on paper, their infrastructure still seems as unreliable as a garage operation. (Apologies to all the well-run garage operations out there.)
It's funny that MS holds up Dell as an example of a reliable, scalable NT-based site. At least their WebBoard support area is frequently inaccessible, and always incredibly slow.
MS also touts 99.9% uptime guarantees from Compaq, etc., but fails to mention that Sun claims 99.95% for the Enterprise 10000.
Nonetheless, my intuition (totally unsupported by any concrete info, other than their poor response to the eBayla exploit) is that eBay is a mickey mouse operation that got really lucky and rich, but does not have the technical expertise commensurate with a multi-billion dollar company. I wouldn't blame any of their vendors, MS or otherwise, for their troubles.
If the raw data is outstripped by the clients' compute power by 3:1 or even more, I don't consider that a problem -- the redundancy can be used to sift out erroneous or spoofed results. If 500,000 users are analyzing a from a pool of few hundred work units without knowing it, that's another matter.
The real problem is that we're all just guessing at how many unique work units are out there, because seti@home won't bother to tell us what the true numbers are.
So far it appears that the total communication from SETI@home to their half million volunteers, since the official launch on May 17th, has been 17 lines of text on their main web page. That's what has turned off some people, including me.
Given the big snafu with repeated data (is it still busted?) and their subsequent brushoff of the volunteer base, not to mention the tone in the Wired article which seems to blame the users for their own administration problems and faulty statistics, I don't think I'll be re-joining the SETI@home project until their lines of communication are much more open.
One thing I think about now is whether the data distribution, once the pipe starts flowing properly, will be truly random, or whether potentially interesting bits of the sky will be cherry-picked for their own analysis, while the masses of volunteers get the parts of the sky deemed less interesting. That's not to say that I wouldn't still participate if that were the case, but I'd like to know that up front. So far the masses have been treated like second-class citizens, otherwise this issue wouldn't have occurred to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet Another Misleading Slashdot Headline perhaps?
The LinuxWorld banner at the top of this SlashDot page has an ALT of "Join the Wave!" Good luck figuring out what the "wave" is if you're not loading images.
I am absolutely sick of hearing about how C/C++ causes bloat because of the size of "Hello, world" programs. Use the right tool for the job. If you want to write "Hello, world" use a shell script or Perl.
They had revenues of $40 million, but that wouldn't even pay everyone's salary.
A lot of the spam I already get contains some meaningless language about "not being intended for residents of Washington State." The problem is that the spammers don't know or care whether I receive my email in WA or anywhere else; that's just a feeble attempt to cover themselves. Are they just going to tack on "and North Carolina" and leave everything the same?
If there's any truth to this, the greatest "defense" against misplaced Linux advocacy is to keep the platform fresh and keep more well-reasoned people interested.
The problem with picking apart the benchmark results, and particularly with the line of argument that says "with all the bandwidth we have today, you don't need to go any faster," is that it sounds too much like "you'll never need more than 640K of RAM" or "32M is big enough for a partition." Sure, today a Linux server may be fine for almost all needs, but let's not use that as an excuse to let the status quo stay unchanged.
In the Wired article, Woz says he may have the original Apple I breadboard! Now there's a unique piece of history -- that should go to the Smithsonian. I doubt that any single comparable prototype exists for an Altair because they were motherboard systems. Even if you could find an original Altair CPU breadboard, you'd need the rest of the system, and I doubt that all of it still exists, or even that it ever existed as a single prototype. Most likely some boards were designed and produced before others, so there would be no single prototype system. (The one pictured on Radio Electronics was a mockup, I believe.)
And even the results are significant. Using the car analogy again: "The Mercedes has a top speed of 160, while the Linuxmobile could only reach 120 (after we connected all of the spark plug wires which were inadvertently missed in our test in the last issue), but both had excellent slalom times and, in everyday driving, nobody goes 160 anyway."
I wouldn't expect Linux to come out on top anyway. The bottom line is that on the same hardware, one program is going to significantly outperform the other only if one OS does something stupid to get in the way. Now I wouldn't be totally shocked at any future stupidity in Windows. I'm convinced now that MS product development is no longer driven by end user needs (was it ever?), but by competitive tactics. If a future version decides to fork a new copy of IE every time you open a file, or won't connect to the internet without going through some "value-added" MSN portal, or won't install software that hasn't been signed by Microsoft, then we have an opportunity to pass them.
Even now, you can probably find enough MS stupidity to concoct a set of benchmarks that Linux will surely win. (I'm sure that MS funded the original Mindcraft tests only when it was pretty confident it had removed most of the stupidity in IIS.) How about benchmarking some desktop functions against an Active Desktop-hobbled Win98 box?
That's what the headline of the ZDNET news article implies, but after reading between all the marketing-speak in the "ebetween" press release, I think we may have all jumped to the wrong conclusion.
The press release doesn't talk about bootup ads at all. Instead it touts how this will allow ISP's to "virtually" bundle their signup kits with new PC's without entering into any agreements with Microsoft. This could be done by treating the extra BIOS ROM space as a small ROM disk containing a few programs that bootstrap connections to online services. The BIOS would present this device to Windows, which would mount it, and voila, there's your "bundled" Snap/Excite/Lycos/etc. Since all of this happens after boot, rather than during boot, Phoenix has no incentive to slow down the boot process, which was my earlier objection. Also, it seems no more intrusive than getting software preloaded onto your hard disk, assuming that there's an option to ignore it.
If what they're really doing is just putting a lot of marketing spin on a ROM disk, then Phoenix/ebetween needs to get out a clarification in technical, not marketing, terms, before every technophile writes them off.
The goal of a BIOS is to get the damn computer booted and get out of the way as soon as possible. The goal of Phoenix and any other BIOS maker should be to streamline the "boot process" until it is no longer noticeable as a separate process at all. Now their incentive is to do exactly the opposite and make the boot take as long as people will stand, to maximize ad revenue. In my book, that will be a big strike against the Phoenix BIOS in any future PC purchase I make.
As it stands now, eBay's auctions are so time-critical that they're in the same league as online brokerages. And speaking of brokerages...
Fidelity is running TV ads (plastered all over Pirates of Silicon Valley last night) touting the speed of their systems and how seconds count, with a quick disclaimer at the end of the ad that response time depends on network conditions. This is a pet peeve of mine: ads with disclaimers which make the rest of the ad meaningless. Example: "99c Big Macs! That's right, 99 cents! Only 99 cents! Prices may vary." But the point is that they're promoting the idea that the internet is suitable for real-time transactions, even though they recognize that it isn't quite there.
It's a Countach. That is, if it's not a replica. Hard to tell without looking closely or listening to the engine. (It's kinda hard to fake the sound of 12 cylinders.)
Aside from all of the other reasons Americans are so fat, we (especially Californians) don't smoke as much as Europeans, so we don't have all that nicotine driving our metabolism. We may be fat, but we don't smell like ashtrays. So there.
BTW, I dispute the claim somebody made in the news article that Apples are the most sought after vintage computers. Altairs, even pieces of them, are going for ridiculous amounts on eBay.
One is the issue of trusting the source of the client. We're all pretty sure that the 11000 CPU-years of time contributed to SETI@home has been to process radio telescope data (even if it's repeated), not cracking someone's password file, but with the potential for many people to put out distributed clients, the issue of trust becomes more relevant.
Another issue is whether the task has some commercial viability. I would be a lot less inclined to run a client on my PC, whether at home or at work, if it was furthering research which could ultimately be competitive with my employer, resulting in my being out of a job. As long as the tasks are purely in the public interest and/or are pure research and mathematics, that's not an issue, but if, for example, Microsoft put out a client that would do super optimization on work units of Windows 2000 code, would anybody be happy with running that on their Linux box?
I hope this doesn't go unnoticed by the RIAA and everyone trying to ram encrypted, controlled-playback audio formats down the consumers' throats. If you 'sell' material in a controlled format, then pull the plug on it later, you're going to have to refund what you collected from everybody or be prepared for a class action.
No, it depends on the type of extension. If the extension is "here's another, nonstandard way to do X, which happens to work better in Windows," that's bad. If the extension is "we didn't implement the whole spec, but here's a nonstandard way to do what we left out," that's bad. If the extension is "here's how to do something completely new, which doesn't conflict with any existing standards," that's ok.
However, if we accept that the original reason for the supercomputer export restrictions is to make it difficult for some countries to solve certain problems like simulating nuclear blasts, raising the bar defeats this purpose. These problems aren't getting any harder (and don't forget that the US managed to solve these problems in the days of pencil and paper, adding machines, and the occasional vacuum tube). If all that the regulations are doing is keeping the latest generation of hardware out of China's hands for a few months until it, too, becomes embedded in something you can buy at Toys 'R Us, is there any value remaining in the restrictions at all?
We might as well give in and abandon the restrictions. In fact, putting millions of Internet-connected Pentiums into the hands of the Chinese population is probably the Chinese government's worst nightmare.
More like...
It's about time that there's some media coverage.
eBay has had outages all over the place, and every time they do, it seems that their stock just goes UP another dozen points or so. Maybe somebody might actually figure out that even though the company is worth $billions on paper, their infrastructure still seems as unreliable as a garage operation. (Apologies to all the well-run garage operations out there.)
It's funny that MS holds up Dell as an example of a reliable, scalable NT-based site. At least their WebBoard support area is frequently inaccessible, and always incredibly slow.
MS also touts 99.9% uptime guarantees from Compaq, etc., but fails to mention that Sun claims 99.95% for the Enterprise 10000.
Nonetheless, my intuition (totally unsupported by any concrete info, other than their poor response to the eBayla exploit) is that eBay is a mickey mouse operation that got really lucky and rich, but does not have the technical expertise commensurate with a multi-billion dollar company. I wouldn't blame any of their vendors, MS or otherwise, for their troubles.
Without slots, is it still a motherboard, or just a board?
The real problem is that we're all just guessing at how many unique work units are out there, because seti@home won't bother to tell us what the true numbers are.
Given the big snafu with repeated data (is it still busted?) and their subsequent brushoff of the volunteer base, not to mention the tone in the Wired article which seems to blame the users for their own administration problems and faulty statistics, I don't think I'll be re-joining the SETI@home project until their lines of communication are much more open.
One thing I think about now is whether the data distribution, once the pipe starts flowing properly, will be truly random, or whether potentially interesting bits of the sky will be cherry-picked for their own analysis, while the masses of volunteers get the parts of the sky deemed less interesting. That's not to say that I wouldn't still participate if that were the case, but I'd like to know that up front. So far the masses have been treated like second-class citizens, otherwise this issue wouldn't have occurred to me.