> Tabula rasa, people are blank papers when they're born. Our environment form us.
The extreme points of view ("blank slate" and "all in the genes") have been thoroughly discredited by scientific research. We are both a product of our genes and our environment.
May I suggest reading Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" for an intelligent discussion of the subject? The book is worth its money IMO.
Dumbest Moments in e-Business history
on
F'd Companies
·
· Score: 3, Informative
In its prospectus, Buy.com unveils history's most elegant business model: "We sell a substantial portion of our products at very low prices. As a result, we have extremely low and sometimes negative gross margins on our product sales."
Pure genius.
And here you can find "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business", featuring Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer prominently on the first page.
I think there's a reason why SMS spam hasn't taken off yet:
Spamming by email: free for the sender, the receivers pay with their time, bandwidth and disk space.
Spamming by SMS: CHF 0.20 or thereabouts for each SMS.
For example, to get 100 idiots to buy herbal viagra you'd have to pay CHF 20'000.- SMS fees (assuming a 0.1% success rate), which probably doesn't make much business sense.
In fact, the only SMS spam I ever got was by the telcos themselves (mostly welcome messages after roaming), and they can send it free of charge.
> How long until MS's new watches have porn being broadcast straight to your wrist?
Believe it or not, Microsoft apparently looked into entering the pr0n business in the 90s (it's quite a profitable business after all). Quoting from an article by Andrew Schulman, DDJ, October 1994:
The best bet is to find areas where Microsoft doesn't have a product, and where there is a chance of a several-year window of opportunity before it does have a product. On the other hand, the only market I've ever heard of that Microsoft didn't want to get into was pornographic screen savers and related multimedia titles. As one company employee told me, "We looked carefully at adult software, and decided to leave that money on the table".
My theory is that they couldn't agree on a suitable slogan to sell this stuff. "Microsoft - how do you want to jack off today?" somehow doesn't sound quite right.
> I think anyone who ignored such a situation would quickly find bizarre actions like the galvanic corrosion and eventual failure of metal pipes or tubing in the system
Exactly what happened to uber-geek Dan, according to this article.
I'm not planning to go that far, but I'll be buying an Auterra OBD II Scan Tool interface for my Palm. Lots of interesting information about what's going on under the hood.
In my opinion, the problem isn't with moderation, but with metamoderation (M2) as it's implemented today. See my proposal about a new M2 scheme which could remedy some of the problems you mention above here.
Here's a guy who doesn't want a tinfoil hat. Straigt from the "Communicating with aliens for fun and profit" dept.:
According to my local newspaper, Rael's weird hairdo is supposed to enhance communication with the aliens from the Elohim race. Come to think of it, the little stub on his head has more than a passing resemblance to the GSM antenna on my car roof, hmmm....
I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry about this guy and his followers ("sweeping the world with the most politically incorrect and fearlessly individualistic philosophy of non-confirmism").
I found this comment from Ethernet Uber-Guru Donald Becker while browsing eepro100.c (the source code for the Intel EtherExpress Pro100 [Speedo3] chips):
IIIA. General The Speedo3 is very similar to other Intel network chips, that is to say "apparently designed on a different planet".
"Trash. Only nonsensitive, and perhaps already destroyed materials, should be discarded in the trash. It is foolish to spend thousands of dollars on perimeter security guards and equipment just to hand over sensitive information to a waste paper or trash removal company."
"Trash, whether placed in a dumpster or other area for collection or delivered directly to a trash disposal service, is extremely vulnerable to snoops. Trash placed in a public area may be deemed legally abandoned; even if not, as a practical matter it remains accessible to all who may wish to rummage through it. In a noted example, in 1975 former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left five bags of trash on the sidewalk in front of his home. A reporter for a tabloid newspaper seized these bags and sifted through them for information. In the aftermath of the incident it came out that trashpicking was a common journalistic practice."
"In another example, Northwest Reports, a television news magazine, aired a story last August about several Portland, Oregon banks that failed to protect customer information. The story focused on private investigator John Stevens' search for information from the bank's outdoor trash containers. Stevens' search yielded valuable customer and bank information, including credit applications, credit card account numbers and balances, copies of customer's tax returns, safe deposit box information, and bank building information (including floor plans and combinations for locks and alarms)."
"Searches of abandoned material are legal under Oregon law, according to attorney Dwayne Bosworth of the Portland law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, who was interviewed on the show. Whether material is considered abandoned depends on several factors. These factors include whether the trash is placed in a public area such as a parking lot and whether any precautions are taken to prohibit public access to the containers, such as posting warning signs and placing containers behind a wall or fence."
> I found it a never ending annoyance to not be able to alt-tab between my email and calendar because Outlook is a single program [...]
Right-click on any icon in the "Outlook Shortcuts" bar, choose "Open in new window" from the popup menu, and you can alt-tab between Outlook components all you like.
On the (hopefully not too distant) day our management takes their head out of their collective derrières and replaces Outlook with a better program, I'll open myself a big ol' bottle of champagne to celebrate. More power to Mr. Kapor and his crew.
"Spamradio is serving up delicious helpings of spam each hour of every day to all who are hungry.
Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet."
I sometimes listen to it during coding sprees late at night; eerie but worth a listen.
>The briefcase was Microsofts attempt to conquer to archiving market as well. A competitor for zip-files if I remember correctly.
Briefcase is a file synchronization tool - useful in theory, but a little thorny in practice. Microsoft even includes it in XP, though it lost its prominent placement on the desktop. Details here.
However they didn't seem to bother to force it on users like evrything else. Kinda unusual for Microsoft, I must say!
According to a guy from our support department, users reliably screwed up when they used this feature. And even Microsoft admits that it wasn't very well documented.
I held off the purchase of a network audio player because the devices on the market didn't fit the bill (for example, neither the Audiotron nor the SliMP3 can handle Ogg Vorbis natively, AFAIK).
This could be the box I was looking for: Ethernet, backlit LCD, IR remote, enough oomph for decoding audio streams, and Linux. And PVR functions thrown in to boot.
>People are smarter than you give them credit for when it comes to getting something for free.
Agreed, but I try to argue like this:
1. You can buy (actually, rent is the better word) the software. Good for your legal status, but very bad for you wallet: $199.- (or $ 99.-) for the operating system (XP Home), $ 479.- / $ 239.- for Office Standard, $ 180.- for three games, etc. This money would buy a cool TFT monitor, plus the setup is hard to secure and includes known spyware.
2. You can copy commercial software illegally, which is basically free but takes time to find the warez, may compromise your security (trojans and viruses as a bonus add-on), they may prosecute you for doing it (I know the likelyhood of being caught is low, but nonetheless...), they may remotely disable the programs when you need them most, etc.
3. I can install, say, RedHat 8 - either the free, _legal_ download, or the retail "Personal" version for $ 35.-. You can surf the net comfortably and securely with it, write e-mails and do not have to worry about mail viruses, burn CDs, do word processing, create spreadsheets, edit the images from your digicam, use IM, scan images, and play some pretty cool games. It's very stable given the right hardware, and everything's free. The catch: If you have trouble, it's support by me or by a few college geeks I know, but we're generally happy to help. Some hardware you have right now may not be supported, but this is mostly not a problem today. Commercial software, especially games, may not be available for it.
Most of my aquaintances still use Windows and Office today, mainly because it came "free" with their computers and they know it from the office. I don't even try to convert the gamers and the people with small kids, their software requirements are not covered by Linux yet. But I have won half a dozen converts by now, and I hand out Knoppix CDs to everyone I know who could make use of them. My latest win is the 62-year old father of a friend who got an old PIII/350 as a present, but the harddisk was deleted by the company who gave it to him. He's happily using it to surf, mail and scan and has had no problems so far - and the installation took me less time than installing the equivalent Windows configuration.
> So really, you'll probably see just as many XP disks as you ever saw ME or any other Windows version....
Depends on the demographic you're looking at, IMO. High school and college students will probably find out how to get one of these "warezed" ISOs, but that isn't the case for much of the rest of the population. Granted, most of them get a shiny new XP Home edition with their "Dude, you're getting a Dell" boxen and think it came free with the system, but if one's not keen on playing games, there's no reason why many people couldn't be happy without Windows. I installed RH/Psyche on a PIII/350 the father of a friend got as a present a few weeks ago, and he seems to be happy with it so far. He does mainly web surfing and e-mail and I persuaded him to invest the money in a cable connection rather than into a new PC.
More likely, they used Win ME rather than XP if they did such a thing - Joe Sixpack won't be able to bypass the XP activation procedure. I'm actually rather glad Microsoft introduced it - as long as Windows cost essentially the same as Linux (the price of a blank CD-R), people didn't care, now they may be starting to vote with their wallets.
> Well, the Raid-5 would have worked as it's own backup (sortof) [...]
RAID-5 is _NOT_ a substitute for backups - period. We discovered this early on with the first RAID-5 tower we set up at work: the test data on that expensive beast did not survive the first 24 hours of operation (the controller hardware went south and started writing random bits all across the drives, leading to total data loss). RAID-5 does not protect you from rm -rf/, power surges, failing PSUs, viruses, inept users, and other nasties.
All RAID-5 hardware should have a sticker on it saying "Having RAID is no substitute for backup. If you don't back up the data on your RAID, you either don't care about your data or you're a bleeping fool".
I also have a friend who could tell you about the disadvantages of having RAID-0 as a system drive and not backing it up because "I've got only programs on it, and I can reinstall those". Yes, the system was a bit faster with that setup. But when one of the drives failed, it failed at the worst possible time, and he lost an important customer because he missed a deadline while reconstructing the system.
Re:Too bad...
on
239 MPG Car
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Dear moderators,
If you disagree with what I've written (I have no problem with that), why don't you reply to my post instead of giving a "-1, Overrated" right from the start? Too bad "Overrated" mods are not caught in M2, I consider this to be serious shortcoming of the Slashdot moderation system.
Slashdot Mirror
> Tabula rasa, people are blank papers when they're born. Our environment form us.
The extreme points of view ("blank slate" and "all in the genes") have been thoroughly discredited by scientific research. We are both a product of our genes and our environment.
May I suggest reading Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" for an intelligent discussion of the subject? The book is worth its money IMO.
Example:
Pure genius.
And here you can find "The 101 Dumbest Moments in Business", featuring Steve "Monkeyboy" Ballmer prominently on the first page.
I think there's a reason why SMS spam hasn't taken off yet:
Spamming by email: free for the sender, the receivers pay with their time, bandwidth and disk space.
Spamming by SMS: CHF 0.20 or thereabouts for each SMS.
For example, to get 100 idiots to buy herbal viagra you'd have to pay CHF 20'000.- SMS fees (assuming a 0.1% success rate), which probably doesn't make much business sense.
In fact, the only SMS spam I ever got was by the telcos themselves (mostly welcome messages after roaming), and they can send it free of charge.
> How long until MS's new watches have porn being broadcast straight to your wrist?
Believe it or not, Microsoft apparently looked into entering the pr0n business in the 90s (it's quite a profitable business after all). Quoting from an article by Andrew Schulman, DDJ, October 1994:
The best bet is to find areas where Microsoft doesn't have a product, and where there is a chance of a several-year window of opportunity before it does have a product. On the other hand, the only market I've ever heard of that Microsoft didn't want to get into was pornographic screen savers and related multimedia titles. As one company employee told me, "We looked carefully at adult software, and decided to leave that money on the table".
My theory is that they couldn't agree on a suitable slogan to sell this stuff. "Microsoft - how do you want to jack off today?" somehow doesn't sound quite right.
> I think anyone who ignored such a situation would quickly find bizarre actions like the galvanic corrosion and eventual failure of metal pipes or tubing in the system
Exactly what happened to uber-geek Dan, according to this article.
Carsten "Russ" Meyer, editor at German c't magazine, has a few pages (in English) on hacking his Chevy Camaro Z28:
Tuning the PROM
Diagnosing the ALDL
Cool.
I'm not planning to go that far, but I'll be buying an Auterra OBD II Scan Tool interface for my Palm. Lots of interesting information about what's going on under the hood.
In my opinion, the problem isn't with moderation, but with metamoderation (M2) as it's implemented today. See my proposal about a new M2 scheme which could remedy some of the problems you mention above here.
Here's a guy who doesn't want a tinfoil hat. Straigt from the "Communicating with aliens for fun and profit" dept.:
According to my local newspaper, Rael's weird hairdo is supposed to enhance communication with the aliens from the Elohim race. Come to think of it, the little stub on his head has more than a passing resemblance to the GSM antenna on my car roof, hmmm....
I'm still not sure if I'm supposed to laugh or cry about this guy and his followers ("sweeping the world with the most politically incorrect and fearlessly individualistic philosophy of non-confirmism").
Quoting from this 1996 article:
"Trash. Only nonsensitive, and perhaps already destroyed materials, should be discarded in the trash. It is foolish to spend thousands of dollars on perimeter security guards and equipment just to hand over sensitive information to a waste paper or trash removal company."
"Trash, whether placed in a dumpster or other area for collection or delivered directly to a trash disposal service, is extremely vulnerable to snoops. Trash placed in a public area may be deemed legally abandoned; even if not, as a practical matter it remains accessible to all who may wish to rummage through it. In a noted example, in 1975 former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger left five bags of trash on the sidewalk in front of his home. A reporter for a tabloid newspaper seized these bags and sifted through them for information. In the aftermath of the incident it came out that trashpicking was a common journalistic practice."
"In another example, Northwest Reports, a television news magazine, aired a story last August about several Portland, Oregon banks that failed to protect customer information. The story focused on private investigator John Stevens' search for information from the bank's outdoor trash containers. Stevens' search yielded valuable customer and bank information, including credit applications, credit card account numbers and balances, copies of customer's tax returns, safe deposit box information, and bank building information (including floor plans and combinations for locks and alarms)."
"Searches of abandoned material are legal under Oregon law, according to attorney Dwayne Bosworth of the Portland law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, who was interviewed on the show. Whether material is considered abandoned depends on several factors. These factors include whether the trash is placed in a public area such as a parking lot and whether any precautions are taken to prohibit public access to the containers, such as posting warning signs and placing containers behind a wall or fence."
> Tell the damned user to look at their STATUS BAR.
Assuming, of course, that there is a status bar in the first place. You're right, maybe they should get a better browser.
> I found it a never ending annoyance to not be able to alt-tab between my email and calendar because Outlook is a single program [...]
Right-click on any icon in the "Outlook Shortcuts" bar, choose "Open in new window" from the popup menu, and you can alt-tab between Outlook components all you like.
On the (hopefully not too distant) day our management takes their head out of their collective derrières and replaces Outlook with a better program, I'll open myself a big ol' bottle of champagne to celebrate. More power to Mr. Kapor and his crew.
Here's an alternative: Spamradio.
Quoting from their site:
"Spamradio is serving up delicious helpings of spam each hour of every day to all who are hungry.
Using a complex arrangement of pipes and funnels we turn the junk mail that we receive into a streaming audio broadcast that can be enjoyed from anywhere on the Internet."
I sometimes listen to it during coding sprees late at night; eerie but worth a listen.
> Remember Zeosync made that huge fuss claiming 100:1 compression on random data?
I bet that they probably achieved an even better compression ratio than 100:1 on their venture capital.
>The briefcase was Microsofts attempt to conquer to archiving market as well. A competitor for zip-files if I remember correctly.
Briefcase is a file synchronization tool - useful in theory, but a little thorny in practice. Microsoft even includes it in XP, though it lost its prominent placement on the desktop. Details here.
However they didn't seem to bother to force it on users like evrything else. Kinda unusual for Microsoft, I must say!
According to a guy from our support department, users reliably screwed up when they used this feature. And even Microsoft admits that it wasn't very well documented.
> Could you please suggest a speed reading course that would allow me to read an 800 page book as fast as the /. book reviewers do?
... It's about some Russians." :)
Let me quote Woody Allen on that subject:
"I went on a speed reading course last week - and it worked! Yesterday I read War and Peace in an hour
I held off the purchase of a network audio player because the devices on the market didn't fit the bill (for example, neither the Audiotron nor the SliMP3 can handle Ogg Vorbis natively, AFAIK).
This could be the box I was looking for: Ethernet, backlit LCD, IR remote, enough oomph for decoding audio streams, and Linux. And PVR functions thrown in to boot.
We need file verification, too! Probably more so with some of the Windows/IE vulnerabilities.
Don't worry, you'll have that soon. It's called Palladium.
As my grandmother used to say: "Be careful about what you wish for, because your wishes might come true". Wise woman.
It's a book, not an online article. Recommended. Google also gives quite a number of hits on the topic.
>People are smarter than you give them credit for when it comes to getting something for free.
Agreed, but I try to argue like this:
1. You can buy (actually, rent is the better word) the software. Good for your legal status, but very bad for you wallet: $199.- (or $ 99.-) for the operating system (XP Home), $ 479.- / $ 239.- for Office Standard, $ 180.- for three games, etc. This money would buy a cool TFT monitor, plus the setup is hard to secure and includes known spyware.
2. You can copy commercial software illegally, which is basically free but takes time to find the warez, may compromise your security (trojans and viruses as a bonus add-on), they may prosecute you for doing it (I know the likelyhood of being caught is low, but nonetheless...), they may remotely disable the programs when you need them most, etc.
3. I can install, say, RedHat 8 - either the free, _legal_ download, or the retail "Personal" version for $ 35.-. You can surf the net comfortably and securely with it, write e-mails and do not have to worry about mail viruses, burn CDs, do word processing, create spreadsheets, edit the images from your digicam, use IM, scan images, and play some pretty cool games. It's very stable given the right hardware, and everything's free. The catch: If you have trouble, it's support by me or by a few college geeks I know, but we're generally happy to help. Some hardware you have right now may not be supported, but this is mostly not a problem today. Commercial software, especially games, may not be available for it.
Most of my aquaintances still use Windows and Office today, mainly because it came "free" with their computers and they know it from the office. I don't even try to convert the gamers and the people with small kids, their software requirements are not covered by Linux yet. But I have won half a dozen converts by now, and I hand out Knoppix CDs to everyone I know who could make use of them. My latest win is the 62-year old father of a friend who got an old PIII/350 as a present, but the harddisk was deleted by the company who gave it to him. He's happily using it to surf, mail and scan and has had no problems so far - and the installation took me less time than installing the equivalent Windows configuration.
> So really, you'll probably see just as many XP disks as you ever saw ME or any other Windows version....
Depends on the demographic you're looking at, IMO. High school and college students will probably find out how to get one of these "warezed" ISOs, but that isn't the case for much of the rest of the population. Granted, most of them get a shiny new XP Home edition with their "Dude, you're getting a Dell" boxen and think it came free with the system, but if one's not keen on playing games, there's no reason why many people couldn't be happy without Windows. I installed RH/Psyche on a PIII/350 the father of a friend got as a present a few weeks ago, and he seems to be happy with it so far. He does mainly web surfing and e-mail and I persuaded him to invest the money in a cable connection rather than into a new PC.
More likely, they used Win ME rather than XP if they did such a thing - Joe Sixpack won't be able to bypass the XP activation procedure. I'm actually rather glad Microsoft introduced it - as long as Windows cost essentially the same as Linux (the price of a blank CD-R), people didn't care, now they may be starting to vote with their wallets.
> Well, the Raid-5 would have worked as it's own backup (sortof) [...]
/, power surges, failing PSUs, viruses, inept users, and other nasties.
RAID-5 is _NOT_ a substitute for backups - period. We discovered this early on with the first RAID-5 tower we set up at work: the test data on that expensive beast did not survive the first 24 hours of operation (the controller hardware went south and started writing random bits all across the drives, leading to total data loss). RAID-5 does not protect you from rm -rf
All RAID-5 hardware should have a sticker on it saying "Having RAID is no substitute for backup. If you don't back up the data on your RAID, you either don't care about your data or you're a bleeping fool".
I also have a friend who could tell you about the disadvantages of having RAID-0 as a system drive and not backing it up because "I've got only programs on it, and I can reinstall those". Yes, the system was a bit faster with that setup. But when one of the drives failed, it failed at the worst possible time, and he lost an important customer because he missed a deadline while reconstructing the system.
Dear moderators,
If you disagree with what I've written (I have no problem with that), why don't you reply to my post instead of giving a "-1, Overrated" right from the start? Too bad "Overrated" mods are not caught in M2, I consider this to be serious shortcoming of the Slashdot moderation system.