I always find it amusing when a big spammy hosting provider gets pwned. Companies that ignore their spam problems usually tend to ignore their security problems too.
As a Linode customer, this post was news to me and cause for concern.
But then I saw that Rackspace had 12: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/rackspace.com and I was glad to have left for Linode after Rackspace bought Slicehost.
And saw that others were worse, with Dreamhost at 25: http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/dreamhost.com
If you're someone who spends all their time creating things, spending your life fighting about those things is a soul-sucking, wretched process that takes you away from doing what you love.
I've had work ripped off, sometimes in high-profile ways. But there's a choice to be made: do you keep creating new things and move on, or do you spend your life in litigation, calling people out, and dealing with discussions like what we see here. Being ripped off is bad, but the latter choice is truly awful, and means you're not making newer things and getting better at it.
Sounds like a really good idea, so that Canonical can put actual numbers behind the number of users they have. Also good for the Linux community, so that Canonical can publish those numbers to show more people using at least one major distribution.
On the other hand, the "at least for now" part of "That's all that canonical-census does" is so pathetic. Why is that necessary? Having found nothing nefarious, why still insinuate that Canonical might in the future do something bad? I'm obsessive about privacy too, but you might argue that Canonical has done enough good for the community that they deserve the benefit of the doubt. What's with the community fighting its own?
I run an open source project that reports similar information when checking for updates. It's enormously helpful for us to understand what versions our users are running, and on what platforms. It also helps to have real numbers (rather than "downloads", which are arbitrarily high) when we're trying to make the case for the project, or funding, or whatever.
They review on the order of 10,000 apps a week. This kind of thing is inevitable when you have a limited number of people with that kind of workload...I wish my record of decision making was 1/1000 blown calls.
...or Apple could remove the approval process, and they wouldn't even put themselves in the position of making blown calls.
The reviewers and their 10,000 app workload has nothing to do with it, especially when Apple is charging $100/yr for the privilege of having your work put through this idiotic process.
Thanks, Captain Anecdote, but you've left out even the anecdotal evidence. What's all this exclusive writing you're doing with Ruby? I've been doing all my grocery list work in Ruby too, and it's *totally* fast enough.
I think Ruby is a fantastic language, but then I see comments like this modded up to 5 that are completely nonsensical. This makes Ruby fandom seem more like Java 1999, which makes me think twice about my positive opinion of it.
Apple has strong controls over their OS because they remember what happened the last time they allowed clones. The clones were poorly made and executed the old Mac OS rather poorly. This hurt Apple's overall reputation.
Why is this modded up? I'm sorry, but that's a load of crap. Just because Jobs and his acolytes say things like that doesn't make it true.
I had a fantastic Power Computing machine that was faster, totally stable, and far cheaper than the garbage that Apple was selling at the time. The week they quit selling clones I promptly put my machine up for sale and gave up on Apple hardware for about seven years. I had been a Mac user since the very first 128K Mac.
If Apple doesn't want clones, that's their prerogative. But gimme a break, it had nothing to do with the poor quality of the clones (the market was settling that) outside of Apple (Steve) wanting complete control. And the clones certainly didn't hurt their reputation--System 7.5.x was already doing that for them.
For that sort of thing, try the book "Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science" by Martin Kemp. It's a collection of short articles by Kemp written for the journal Nature, discussing art and how it relates to science.
Except that in this case, the Porsche has a gas tank that requires a screwdriver to open, and you can only see out of half the windshield.
Without an ethernet port to use on the road and in hotels where there's no wireless, and a battery that I can't replace on flights that last longer than a couple of hours, no thanks. It makes little sense to me as someone who travels a lot.
I regularly use spare batteries for my MBP on the road. And I'm not interested in the MacBook since the graphics chipset stinks, but I'd be willing to sacrifice graphics for something smaller and lighter like the MacBook Air.
Yet you've thankfully helped demonstrate that there are no lack of whiners!
How about contributing your completer-finisher skills to this project rather than complaining about it from a distance? That's this nutty "open source" thing, where people contribute their time and get things done...
I work at the Media Lab and have often felt that there's a sort of inverse relationship between the amount of (popular) press that some of the projects receive, and the actual value of the project itself. Things like an interactive kitchen counter are a good example of this, so the really interesting work can easily get lost in that.
For what it's worth, the Wired article, however, is way off, including some parts that are just completely made up and has all sorts of wild speculation from the article's author, much to the amusement of many of the people here. The author came in and was looking for dirt so that Wired could sell magazines (this was extremely successful, as that issue did really well on the newstand). This is not to say there's plenty of critique you could make about the lab, there was a Technology Review article, google cached here, written by a talented writer that made many more valid points by simply hanging a few professors with their own words. It's no longer particularly relevant anymore, but the author could teach the Wired guy a thing or two or seven.
Your post sounds more like an excuse to be bitter, even though it doesn't really have much to do with the person in question, or the story. You raise a really good point, but it's not particularly relevant here.
It's awfully cynical to suggest that "good of humanity" and the slightest wiff of "capitalism" be so diametrically opposed. Abusive capitalism can always be a problem, but as it exists here, there's nothing to suggest that it's the least bit abusive. The business venture side of this project (http://www.lowcosteyeglasses.net/) is in the business of helping a lot of people correct their vision who had no chance of getting glasses in the past.
Think about it, he's developed a method for low-cost eyeglasses, and is targeting developing nations with it. Why try for a few pennies off of poor people when he could instead make his "assload of money" off of lots of the other ideas/abilities he has (as mentioned in the article). This is something that actually has good intentions, don't be so shocked!
re: the parent comment.. the audiopad is also done by james patten. so it was him that "already explored" it.
the reason this work looks like the table in minority report is because john underkoffler, a former member of the same group at the media lab, was science & technology advisor for minority report and designed/spec'd/envisioned/whatever some of the devices used in the film. some of john's research on which that table was based: http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/Lum inous_Ro om/Luminous_Room.html john was also behind some of the other interfaces in the movie like the gloves and the way in which the holographic video worked.
Work on improving your ability to deliver decent code even when it's the quick and dirty solution. There will always be a need to get things done quickly, and it is the rare occcurence on a project that you actually have time to do things "right", so don't wait for it, expect it, or be wistful about it. It doesn't exist.
I like to think of it as you're only as good as what you can put out on average. It doesn't matter if you "can" be a great coder, it's only how you execute from day-to-day.
they don't have to differ at all. at least in the u.s., it's not possible to copyright the design of a font. as such, one can take the drawing of a typeface, reproduce the curves for it, then make and sell that font. this is where the libraries of "1000s OF FREE FONTS!" come from. (stealing the name of the font will likely run afoul of trademark or copyright laws, but not the design..)
this is at least part of the reason that fonts are *programs*, meaning that their instruction sets (moveto, lineto, and all the complex hinting commands) cannot simply be copied, as that would be analogous to piracy of a software program.
while that's true in many situations, this is one where the inventors of the palm went against this common sense (and the sort of ui "gospel" you're regurgitating from a first semester ui class or some don norman book) and they were quite right.
my understanding is that part of the reason that the palm won out is because of graffiti. it was simpler to use than training something like a newton to use your own writing. recognition requires lots of cycles, and with graffiti working well on the palm, why change?
some might argue it's also much faster for entry, though i don't have a reference to back that up, so save that discussion for boring papers at ui conferences.
i think it's dangerous to say "this = that" especially for something as young a field as ui design.
i'm completely disturbed by the posts that have been modded +5 on this one.
this is your family. help them out. grow up. this is what people do for one another.
you can't help your dad with his ridiculously old machine? how long has he put up with you and perhaps even encouraged whatever led you to being this computer savvy, to then have you turn around and claim your too busy or can't be bothered? give me a break.
be thankful that all that crap in your head that you learned while pissing away hours to get something to work can be used to help someone else. how about some return on your own investment of all that time--now you can do something useful with it, where "useful" doesn't necessarily mean self-serving.
say you have an uncle who's a mechanic. chances are, you're going to ask him if you want to know about something wrong with your car (you'd be stupid not to, unless you know more than he does already). the joke about "50 mhz processor, 4 mb ram, etc." and trying to install the sims? sure it's modded as funny, but it's just like you trying to get that uncle to repair your piece of crap that you drive. get over it. help them understand what's wrong with what they're trying to do. teach them something.
and even if you'd never go to this hypothetical uncle, it works in all occasions, whether its their background or just about anything you might ask of anyone else (i need help moving! could someone drop me of at...). don't kid yourself and think that you're an island and never need any help. the connection is still valid, because hopefully in your all-knowing little world, you can use some of that omnipotence to understand some of these other situations. that you're not the only persecuted soul who has to/ought to use some of their background to (gasp) help people.
my brother is a builder, and does construction. if i want to get something built, or need to have it done, am i going to consult him? of course. if he can't get his 14.4 modem to work with his crappy old mac, is he going to call me? of course.
welcome to the world, folks. you don't live in a vacuum. drop the self-importance and start interacting with people. be useful for a change. and i say for a change *only* because from the sounds of the majority of what's been modded up, there are a few too many people who live in this vacuum.
think about the hell you've gone through with your machine, even when *you* supposedly know what you're doing. now imagine how much worse it is for the people asking for help, when they don't even know the first thing about what's going on with their $2500 desk ornament.
Slashdot Mirror
I always find it amusing when a big spammy hosting provider gets pwned. Companies that ignore their spam problems usually tend to ignore their security problems too.
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/li...
As a Linode customer, this post was news to me and cause for concern.
But then I saw that Rackspace had 12:
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/rackspace.com
and I was glad to have left for Linode after Rackspace bought Slicehost.
And saw that others were worse, with Dreamhost at 25:
http://www.spamhaus.org/sbl/listings/dreamhost.com
If you're someone who spends all their time creating things, spending your life fighting about those things is a soul-sucking, wretched process that takes you away from doing what you love.
I've had work ripped off, sometimes in high-profile ways. But there's a choice to be made: do you keep creating new things and move on, or do you spend your life in litigation, calling people out, and dealing with discussions like what we see here. Being ripped off is bad, but the latter choice is truly awful, and means you're not making newer things and getting better at it.
Sounds like a really good idea, so that Canonical can put actual numbers behind the number of users they have. Also good for the Linux community, so that Canonical can publish those numbers to show more people using at least one major distribution.
On the other hand, the "at least for now" part of "That's all that canonical-census does" is so pathetic. Why is that necessary? Having found nothing nefarious, why still insinuate that Canonical might in the future do something bad? I'm obsessive about privacy too, but you might argue that Canonical has done enough good for the community that they deserve the benefit of the doubt. What's with the community fighting its own?
I run an open source project that reports similar information when checking for updates. It's enormously helpful for us to understand what versions our users are running, and on what platforms. It also helps to have real numbers (rather than "downloads", which are arbitrarily high) when we're trying to make the case for the project, or funding, or whatever.
They review on the order of 10,000 apps a week. This kind of thing is inevitable when you have a limited number of people with that kind of workload...I wish my record of decision making was 1/1000 blown calls.
...or Apple could remove the approval process, and they wouldn't even put themselves in the position of making blown calls.
The reviewers and their 10,000 app workload has nothing to do with it, especially when Apple is charging $100/yr for the privilege of having your work put through this idiotic process.
Just imagine how the Internet would be if Adobe controlled your image file format too.
You mean like PDF? And TIFF?
Thanks, Captain Anecdote, but you've left out even the anecdotal evidence. What's all this exclusive writing you're doing with Ruby? I've been doing all my grocery list work in Ruby too, and it's *totally* fast enough.
I think Ruby is a fantastic language, but then I see comments like this modded up to 5 that are completely nonsensical. This makes Ruby fandom seem more like Java 1999, which makes me think twice about my positive opinion of it.
Nader, is that you? Dude, the election is *over*...
Apple has strong controls over their OS because they remember what happened the last time they allowed clones. The clones were poorly made and executed the old Mac OS rather poorly. This hurt Apple's overall reputation.
Why is this modded up? I'm sorry, but that's a load of crap. Just because Jobs and his acolytes say things like that doesn't make it true.
I had a fantastic Power Computing machine that was faster, totally stable, and far cheaper than the garbage that Apple was selling at the time. The week they quit selling clones I promptly put my machine up for sale and gave up on Apple hardware for about seven years. I had been a Mac user since the very first 128K Mac.
If Apple doesn't want clones, that's their prerogative. But gimme a break, it had nothing to do with the poor quality of the clones (the market was settling that) outside of Apple (Steve) wanting complete control. And the clones certainly didn't hurt their reputation--System 7.5.x was already doing that for them.
For that sort of thing, try the book "Visualizations: The Nature Book of Art and Science" by Martin Kemp. It's a collection of short articles by Kemp written for the journal Nature, discussing art and how it relates to science.
Except that in this case, the Porsche has a gas tank that requires a screwdriver to open, and you can only see out of half the windshield.
Without an ethernet port to use on the road and in hotels where there's no wireless, and a battery that I can't replace on flights that last longer than a couple of hours, no thanks. It makes little sense to me as someone who travels a lot.
I regularly use spare batteries for my MBP on the road. And I'm not interested in the MacBook since the graphics chipset stinks, but I'd be willing to sacrifice graphics for something smaller and lighter like the MacBook Air.
Yet you've thankfully helped demonstrate that there are no lack of whiners!
How about contributing your completer-finisher skills to this project rather than complaining about it from a distance? That's this nutty "open source" thing, where people contribute their time and get things done...
I work at the Media Lab and have often felt that there's a sort of inverse relationship between the amount of (popular) press that some of the projects receive, and the actual value of the project itself. Things like an interactive kitchen counter are a good example of this, so the really interesting work can easily get lost in that.
For what it's worth, the Wired article, however, is way off, including some parts that are just completely made up and has all sorts of wild speculation from the article's author, much to the amusement of many of the people here. The author came in and was looking for dirt so that Wired could sell magazines (this was extremely successful, as that issue did really well on the newstand). This is not to say there's plenty of critique you could make about the lab, there was a Technology Review article, google cached here, written by a talented writer that made many more valid points by simply hanging a few professors with their own words. It's no longer particularly relevant anymore, but the author could teach the Wired guy a thing or two or seven.
Your post sounds more like an excuse to be bitter, even though it doesn't really have much to do with the person in question, or the story. You raise a really good point, but it's not particularly relevant here.
It's awfully cynical to suggest that "good of humanity" and the slightest wiff of "capitalism" be so diametrically opposed. Abusive capitalism can always be a problem, but as it exists here, there's nothing to suggest that it's the least bit abusive. The business venture side of this project (http://www.lowcosteyeglasses.net/) is in the business of helping a lot of people correct their vision who had no chance of getting glasses in the past.
Think about it, he's developed a method for low-cost eyeglasses, and is targeting developing nations with it. Why try for a few pennies off of poor people when he could instead make his "assload of money" off of lots of the other ideas/abilities he has (as mentioned in the article). This is something that actually has good intentions, don't be so shocked!
re: the parent comment.. the audiopad is also done by james patten. so it was him that "already explored" it.
m inous_Ro om/Luminous_Room.html
the reason this work looks like the table in minority report is because john underkoffler, a former member of the same group at the media lab, was science & technology advisor for minority report and designed/spec'd/envisioned/whatever some of the devices used in the film. some of john's research on which that table was based:
http://tangible.media.mit.edu/projects/Lu
john was also behind some of the other interfaces in the movie like the gloves and the way in which the holographic video worked.
Work on improving your ability to deliver decent code even when it's the quick and dirty solution. There will always be a need to get things done quickly, and it is the rare occcurence on a project that you actually have time to do things "right", so don't wait for it, expect it, or be wistful about it. It doesn't exist.
I like to think of it as you're only as good as what you can put out on average. It doesn't matter if you "can" be a great coder, it's only how you execute from day-to-day.
they don't have to differ at all. at least in the u.s., it's not possible to copyright the design of a font. as such, one can take the drawing of a typeface, reproduce the curves for it, then make and sell that font. this is where the libraries of "1000s OF FREE FONTS!" come from. (stealing the name of the font will likely run afoul of trademark or copyright laws, but not the design..)
this is at least part of the reason that fonts are *programs*, meaning that their instruction sets (moveto, lineto, and all the complex hinting commands) cannot simply be copied, as that would be analogous to piracy of a software program.
while that's true in many situations, this is one where the inventors of the palm went against this common sense (and the sort of ui "gospel" you're regurgitating from a first semester ui class or some don norman book) and they were quite right.
my understanding is that part of the reason that the palm won out is because of graffiti. it was simpler to use than training something like a newton to use your own writing. recognition requires lots of cycles, and with graffiti working well on the palm, why change?
some might argue it's also much faster for entry, though i don't have a reference to back that up, so save that discussion for boring papers at ui conferences.
i think it's dangerous to say "this = that" especially for something as young a field as ui design.
i'm completely disturbed by the posts that have been modded +5 on this one.
...). don't kid yourself and think that you're an island and never need any help. the connection is still valid, because hopefully in your all-knowing little world, you can use some of that omnipotence to understand some of these other situations. that you're not the only persecuted soul who has to/ought to use some of their background to (gasp) help people.
this is your family. help them out. grow up. this is what people do for one another.
you can't help your dad with his ridiculously old machine? how long has he put up with you and perhaps even encouraged whatever led you to being this computer savvy, to then have you turn around and claim your too busy or can't be bothered? give me a break.
be thankful that all that crap in your head that you learned while pissing away hours to get something to work can be used to help someone else. how about some return on your own investment of all that time--now you can do something useful with it, where "useful" doesn't necessarily mean self-serving.
say you have an uncle who's a mechanic. chances are, you're going to ask him if you want to know about something wrong with your car (you'd be stupid not to, unless you know more than he does already). the joke about "50 mhz processor, 4 mb ram, etc." and trying to install the sims? sure it's modded as funny, but it's just like you trying to get that uncle to repair your piece of crap that you drive. get over it. help them understand what's wrong with what they're trying to do. teach them something.
and even if you'd never go to this hypothetical uncle, it works in all occasions, whether its their background or just about anything you might ask of anyone else (i need help moving! could someone drop me of at
my brother is a builder, and does construction. if i want to get something built, or need to have it done, am i going to consult him? of course. if he can't get his 14.4 modem to work with his crappy old mac, is he going to call me? of course.
welcome to the world, folks. you don't live in a vacuum. drop the self-importance and start interacting with people. be useful for a change. and i say for a change *only* because from the sounds of the majority of what's been modded up, there are a few too many people who live in this vacuum.
think about the hell you've gone through with your machine, even when *you* supposedly know what you're doing. now imagine how much worse it is for the people asking for help, when they don't even know the first thing about what's going on with their $2500 desk ornament.