I saw a post above where someone is bashing AOL... He mentions commodity ISP equipment. Now, think about that for a second. Do you really think AOL could run its service off commodity equipment? We are talking about an ISP with over 20 million customers! They had over 35 million during their peak. I'd like to see this bozo run an operation that large with his commodity equipment. Just because you learned the name of some equipment on the tour of your local ISP's server room doesn't mean you'd know how to handle our load;)
I haven't read the post you refer to, but simply mentioning commodity equipment is not what I'd consider insulting or unrealistic. Google runs their farm on commodity equipment, and they have a very heavy load to deal with. I do think that AOL could run it's service off commodity equipment, and if they don't then the stockholders had better hope it's for a better reason than hardware prejudice. There are real cost savings out there to be realized, and truly good hardware is getting cheaper by the minute.
I'm not recommending firewall settings, kernel mods, or something mission critical.... I didn't realize an informal discussion of mp3 players [could call credibility into question].
The only essential ingredient is that there be money at stake.
We live in interesting and turbulent times. In the last five years the internet has become the primary battleground in a war between corporate interests and individual freedom. Many companies - for example, Microsoft - have been caught red-handed during their attempts to feign grass-roots support for initiatives that in fact have little grass roots support (they've even got a great term for this: astroturfing). These companies literally pay people to log onto online services, pose as John Q Public, and post casually worded opinions furthering the companys' interests, often including purposely inserted misspellings, grammatical "mistakes", and disarming colloquialisms. The same is true of website construction; a significant percentage of seemingly casual fan websites dedicated pop stars, electronics, etc are done by professional designers on the take from the monied interests that benefit, and are told to purposefully disregard professional standards of layout, font choice, and color matching to make the sites seem authentic. This isn't a matter of speculation; the companies are on record as having admitted this. The only question mark is precisely how much information is falsely fabricated in this manner.
Given this sea change, ferreting out the truth about anything online has become a process that relies heavily on intuition. One of the few factors that truth-seekers have in their favor is the knowledge that substantive, insightful commentary is expensive to generate; it's much cheaper to churn out stuff that sounds like it's coming from an impulse-buying teen than from a thoughtful, middle-aged citizen who cares about budgets and is aware of the effects of politics in everyday life. So when people look for evidence that a writer is authentic, one of the best ways to do it is to look back on a history of that person's output and see if the person appears to be a generally intelligent and multifaceted person, vs someone who focuses on a narrow range of topics that don't seem realistically sustainable. Real people tend to have diverse interests.
What I marvel at is the forensics employed to "suggest" that I'm being paid to contribute. A well structured post that conveys to the standards of persuasive writing and employs a diction that is not tired.
Truthfully, I liked your writing. But Tygerfish is entirely accurate in pointing out that your style bears distinct similarities to advertising. There are in fact formally accepted definitions of advertising; they are, for example, adhered to strictly on NPR to determine the difference between "underwriting" vs "advertising". Specifically, advertising incorporates an combination of comparatives, superlatives, qualitatives, price information, calls to action. In fact, the only advertising device that you did not use - other than those that a written medium cannot support, such as audibly sung lyrics - was an inducement to buy (such as "buy now to get 50% off"). Other than that, your post really was very well aligned with advertising techniques. To state it objectively, your post would never have been accepted as an underwriting message; it falls squarely into the formal guidelines for advertising.
Still, it was amusing, frusterating, and surreal all at the same time.
I definitely hear you. I've been there myself. I'm glad you've started to post, because I think it's going to reveal things to you about how people think that you'll find more of the same, i.e. amusing, frustrating, and surreal. And enlightening. I find that posts in response to my messages grab me much more than responses to other peoples' messages, even when the initial post is basically what I would have said myself. There's something very personal about having words I wrote myself be responded to. Makes me think.
you may continue to suggest I'm in the employ of Neuros.
I'm sorta forecasting I won't. Unless you start issuing coupons.;)
when it comes right down to it, whether you are right or wrong (and you ARE wrong in your assertion)
Keep in mind that *I* never asserted that you were paid to work for the industry... I asserted that your pattern of single-topic posting lent credibility to the assertion. It is a subtle but important distinction. I'm essentially stating that if you are indeed nothing but a happy customer, we still find ourselves in circumstances that prevent anyone from assessing a history of postings that might substantiate your allegiances or secularity. I didn't intend this as an attack on you; I intended it mostly as an explanation to you in case you really are simply a new member who might not have a well-formed notion of how credibility is sometimes assessed on this forum.
it all amounts to nothing more than twaddle in a hill of beans.
Would be nice to have listed which versions were stated to be affected. I have just tested:
Win IE 6.0
Mac IE 1.5
Win Mozilla 1.4.1
Mac Mozilla 1.4
The only one affected was Win IE.
If any Mozilla versions later than 1.4.1 were to be affected, I'm willing to bet the Mozilla release would be patched within a day, whereas Microsoft would take a minimum of two weeks and a max of maybe never.
In case anyone is wondering, this doesn't appear to affect IE on mac. When I click the test exploit link on http://www.zapthedingbat.com/security/ex01/vun1.ht m it simply turns into http://www.microsoft.com%01@zapthedingbat.com/secu rity/ex01/vun2.htm
Confirmed on my machine as well. I just tested Win IE, Mac IE, Win Mozilla, and Mac Mozilla; the only one affected is Win IE.
I posted as AC cause I didn't realize I wasn't logged in.
At the time that I write this your account has only posted 20 or so comments ever... all of them today, all of them on this one topic, all of them pushing the neuros. This doesn't prove that you are affiliated with Neuros, but such single-minded use of your account does lend plausibility to the notion. If your account posts significant numbers of insightful or thoughtful items in the future regarding topics that are not mp3 players, your story will become corresponingly more believable.
IF the authorities deem [sex offenders] fit to be released from custody, then it's because (or should be because) they are no longer a threat. If they are a threat, then keep them incarcerated. Don't let them out and then pretend it's OK to publish their name, address, etc. It's hypocritical.
I can think of three non-hypocritical obstacles to the above proposed system. First, threat assessment is only one component which determines fitness for release; other considerations include how full the prisons are and how overloaded the judicial system is. Second, there is no objective standard at pricing the damage done by sex offenders; if someone gets molested though not killed, what is the amount of damage that has been done, how do you quantify that? Third, tracking rescivitism statistics is a notoriously difficult problem; it is not unlike trying to assess at a party how many of those attending are having a genuinely good time, i.e. how do you know when you've got the correct answer? For all these reasons, trying to decide precisely when someone is a threat and balancing that against the potential cost of what they might do on the outside is far from being precise. It therefore does not surprise me in the least that there is concern regarding former offenders.
And why stop at sex offenders? Say I have no kids, but an expensive car? Shouldn't I be able to know that the guy next door was convicted of stealing cars? I'm not equating car theft with sex offences, but I do believe that the law should treat all people equally.
Stealing cars tends to be a crime born out of a very specific desire to convert the stolen car into cash. As such, stealing cars tends to be a more highly organized activity than molesting children. Car thieves evaluate cars based on either resellability or the useability of their constituent parts; kids who are molested tend to simply be those who wandered into the perpetrator's line of vision enough times to incite whatever fantasies ultimately culminate in the molestation.
I'm glad to have the information. Seems there are some unsympathetic responses, but I agree that living farther from offenders does translate into a higher degree of security. The creepy words from Lecter in SOTL comes to mind: "What do people covet? They covet what they see every day."
The real issue here (which nobody's talking about) is how can Wells Fargo get away with this? Seriously, they left a mess of Real Important confidential customer data unencrypted on a highly mobile computer.
Exactly. So this guy claims he had no idea what was on the machines... what if he was lying? What if the first thing he did upon booting up the machine was burn its contents to a dvd and mail that to his cohort offshore? Nobody's talking about this, and it's the real story here.
What is so hard about referring to things in a new way?
To turn the question around: what is so easy about referring to things in a new way?
Viagra ad featuring Feiss
on
Recycling TV Ads
·
· Score: 4, Funny
I was doing this guy I met, and he was, like, uh uh uh damn oh no. And then, like, half of his equipment was shriveled. And I was, like huh. It disrupted my sex. It was really good sex. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of a...... bummer.
the one thing that unites just about every civilization since Sumeria is a free market. The practice of barter is just about the most ancient one in human history.
Prostitution has a long history but it's not correct to therefore claim that every civilization is united by an appreciation of sexuality. Barter took place in Stalinist Russia, but did not constitute a free market. In addition to producers and consumers, a free market requires barriers to competition that are low; this will virtually never occur in the absence of both government oversight and a liquid monetary system, neither of which is required for barter.
P2P networks were designed to a) distribute files, b) without a central authority that could limit what gets distributed.
So... it is their primary function.
This assumption - that p2p networks were designed to exempt users from central authority - would only be a safe one if p2p networks did not also exhibit other highly useful benefits. One such benefit is the ability to aggregate and distribute access to an ad hoc collection of data, amortizing transfer costs over as many internet connections as there are users. There are many companies developing p2p as a way to cut down on server and bandwidth costs when distributing their business software. Googling for "p2p distribute business software" reveals quite a lot of activity in this realm. The plain fact is that p2p networks are very good at spreading out distribution costs.
"P2P has legitimate uses" would seem an accurate and powerful statement.
Torvalds rightfully revels in not planning. He's counting on the marketplace's judgment of Linux and the wisdom of his disorganized organization as a better strategy.
Wrong. Torvalds is not counting on the marketplace's judegement of anything. In every interview he plainly states that he has no market-driven or competetive goals whatsoever. He simply wants to make Linux improve over time for whoever chooses to use it, whether that is ten people or a billion.
It is my understanding that AE is simply a huge megacorporation like Compaq/HP or IBM promising that they will help you keep on top of whatever trend is coming into play this week and help you achieve your IT and business needs as quickly as possible. Be it hardware, software, manpower, or research, they'll be there to help you grab the juiciest share of business you can when a new fad in the marketplace rolls around.
If this is accurate, this would be fundamentally a service, rather than a specific hardware or software product. But it's odd that HP doesn't confirm or deny that it is a service:
Q: In the broadest definition it just sounds as if this is another form of services business where you want to make money. You're not selling new hardware or software--it's services.
A: We're entering a new decade of computing--whatever it is called.
Moreover, this would be a service that does not address any problem more specific than the need to keep up with "whatever trend is coming". Being non-specific is essentially what the interviewer lambastes the HP rep for. So I'm a bit puzzled at your seeming acknowledgement of the interviewer's assessment of HP's vagueness, while simultaneously you reject the interviewer's criticism that HP is being vague.
I don't know if AE is any good, or if it's what it claims to be, but I do know that marketing speak CAN have a real meaning in a marketing context. When we geeks ridicule the suits for talking gibberish, it's no better than when they ridicule us for our acronyms... If we hope to make any progress in the things that really matter (digital freedom), we need to learn to communicate with these people.
I confess not to know what the term "digital freedom" means in the context of this discussion, but I will comment on your suggestion that there's a burden on engineers to bridge the communication gap with marketers. If engineers are the people who truly know how product X works, and can't comprehend what marketers are saying about X without a substantial effort, then it seems to me that executives at other companies who are trying to understand what X is and why they should buy it don't stand a chance in hell of getting what they think they might be paying for.
You could probably get equally good results with plain hill-climbing.
Hill climbing algorithms are more susceptible to getting trapped in a local minima than genetic algorithms are. GAs tend to avoid this because of the cross-over breeding that occurs.
I'm a big fan of holding people responsible for their own stupidity.
I am too; stylistically I wouldn't choose to state it as above, but I am a fan of accountability for individuals and corporations alike. If your position were a machievellian one that rationalizes doing something because it's possible to do then I wouldn't agree, but if I understand correctly then perhaps you and I simply have a different threshhold of what we'd consider "stupid" in this particular case. It seems your position that when people don't have an awareness of how search results may be skewed in favor of a given business, then they deserve to be taken advantage of and critics should be silent.
I think there's a component of untruthful advertising to this issue. Microsoft may not actually commit themselves to objectivity by saying "our search results are unbiased with regard to any commercial interests" but it's not an unreasonable expectation of a search engine; after all, google has set the precedent of making money via advertisements, not by covert manipulation of results.
If I drive past a gas station and ask to have my engine checked, the station may well try to bilk me out of money by claiming I need more work done than is the case. There are ways for the station to claim this without technically breaking the law, but I don't regard myself as stupid for not knowing enough about cars to certify the station's results; at least not stupid in a perjorative way. And, I wouldn't regard the station as on uncriticizable moral ground for doing so. This may all come down to my world vision, where I'd like to steer the world towards honest exchanges without people stabbing each other in the back at every opportunity. I realize that not everybody wants to live in such a world.
Slashdot Mirror
"The eating of an orange is a lot like a good marriage." - Hans Moleman
I haven't read the post you refer to, but simply mentioning commodity equipment is not what I'd consider insulting or unrealistic. Google runs their farm on commodity equipment, and they have a very heavy load to deal with. I do think that AOL could run it's service off commodity equipment, and if they don't then the stockholders had better hope it's for a better reason than hardware prejudice. There are real cost savings out there to be realized, and truly good hardware is getting cheaper by the minute.
The only essential ingredient is that there be money at stake.
We live in interesting and turbulent times. In the last five years the internet has become the primary battleground in a war between corporate interests and individual freedom. Many companies - for example, Microsoft - have been caught red-handed during their attempts to feign grass-roots support for initiatives that in fact have little grass roots support (they've even got a great term for this: astroturfing). These companies literally pay people to log onto online services, pose as John Q Public, and post casually worded opinions furthering the companys' interests, often including purposely inserted misspellings, grammatical "mistakes", and disarming colloquialisms. The same is true of website construction; a significant percentage of seemingly casual fan websites dedicated pop stars, electronics, etc are done by professional designers on the take from the monied interests that benefit, and are told to purposefully disregard professional standards of layout, font choice, and color matching to make the sites seem authentic. This isn't a matter of speculation; the companies are on record as having admitted this. The only question mark is precisely how much information is falsely fabricated in this manner.
Given this sea change, ferreting out the truth about anything online has become a process that relies heavily on intuition. One of the few factors that truth-seekers have in their favor is the knowledge that substantive, insightful commentary is expensive to generate; it's much cheaper to churn out stuff that sounds like it's coming from an impulse-buying teen than from a thoughtful, middle-aged citizen who cares about budgets and is aware of the effects of politics in everyday life. So when people look for evidence that a writer is authentic, one of the best ways to do it is to look back on a history of that person's output and see if the person appears to be a generally intelligent and multifaceted person, vs someone who focuses on a narrow range of topics that don't seem realistically sustainable. Real people tend to have diverse interests.
What I marvel at is the forensics employed to "suggest" that I'm being paid to contribute. A well structured post that conveys to the standards of persuasive writing and employs a diction that is not tired.
Truthfully, I liked your writing. But Tygerfish is entirely accurate in pointing out that your style bears distinct similarities to advertising. There are in fact formally accepted definitions of advertising; they are, for example, adhered to strictly on NPR to determine the difference between "underwriting" vs "advertising". Specifically, advertising incorporates an combination of comparatives, superlatives, qualitatives, price information, calls to action. In fact, the only advertising device that you did not use - other than those that a written medium cannot support, such as audibly sung lyrics - was an inducement to buy (such as "buy now to get 50% off"). Other than that, your post really was very well aligned with advertising techniques. To state it objectively, your post would never have been accepted as an underwriting message; it falls squarely into the formal guidelines for advertising.
Still, it was amusing, frusterating, and surreal all at the same time.
I definitely hear you. I've been there myself. I'm glad you've started to post, because I think it's going to reveal things to you about how people think that you'll find more of the same, i.e. amusing, frustrating, and surreal. And enlightening. I find that posts in response to my messages grab me much more than responses to other peoples' messages, even when the initial post is basically what I would have said myself. There's something very personal about having words I wrote myself be responded to. Makes me think.
you may continue to suggest I'm in the employ of Neuros.
I'm sorta forecasting I won't. Unless you start issuing coupons. ;)
Best.
Keep in mind that *I* never asserted that you were paid to work for the industry... I asserted that your pattern of single-topic posting lent credibility to the assertion. It is a subtle but important distinction. I'm essentially stating that if you are indeed nothing but a happy customer, we still find ourselves in circumstances that prevent anyone from assessing a history of postings that might substantiate your allegiances or secularity. I didn't intend this as an attack on you; I intended it mostly as an explanation to you in case you really are simply a new member who might not have a well-formed notion of how credibility is sometimes assessed on this forum.
it all amounts to nothing more than twaddle in a hill of beans.
Yummy, yummy beans. :)
(replying to own post) The version of Mac IE that I tested was 5.1, not 1.5. -Sacrilicious
- Win IE 6.0
- Mac IE 1.5
- Win Mozilla 1.4.1
- Mac Mozilla 1.4
The only one affected was Win IE.If any Mozilla versions later than 1.4.1 were to be affected, I'm willing to bet the Mozilla release would be patched within a day, whereas Microsoft would take a minimum of two weeks and a max of maybe never.
Confirmed on my machine as well. I just tested Win IE, Mac IE, Win Mozilla, and Mac Mozilla; the only one affected is Win IE.
At the time that I write this your account has only posted 20 or so comments ever... all of them today, all of them on this one topic, all of them pushing the neuros. This doesn't prove that you are affiliated with Neuros, but such single-minded use of your account does lend plausibility to the notion. If your account posts significant numbers of insightful or thoughtful items in the future regarding topics that are not mp3 players, your story will become corresponingly more believable.
I think I remember reading recently that Belkin routers do this for you. :)
Now we have a new acronym: _W_TFA.
I can think of three non-hypocritical obstacles to the above proposed system. First, threat assessment is only one component which determines fitness for release; other considerations include how full the prisons are and how overloaded the judicial system is. Second, there is no objective standard at pricing the damage done by sex offenders; if someone gets molested though not killed, what is the amount of damage that has been done, how do you quantify that? Third, tracking rescivitism statistics is a notoriously difficult problem; it is not unlike trying to assess at a party how many of those attending are having a genuinely good time, i.e. how do you know when you've got the correct answer? For all these reasons, trying to decide precisely when someone is a threat and balancing that against the potential cost of what they might do on the outside is far from being precise. It therefore does not surprise me in the least that there is concern regarding former offenders.
And why stop at sex offenders? Say I have no kids, but an expensive car? Shouldn't I be able to know that the guy next door was convicted of stealing cars? I'm not equating car theft with sex offences, but I do believe that the law should treat all people equally.
Stealing cars tends to be a crime born out of a very specific desire to convert the stolen car into cash. As such, stealing cars tends to be a more highly organized activity than molesting children. Car thieves evaluate cars based on either resellability or the useability of their constituent parts; kids who are molested tend to simply be those who wandered into the perpetrator's line of vision enough times to incite whatever fantasies ultimately culminate in the molestation.
I'm glad to have the information. Seems there are some unsympathetic responses, but I agree that living farther from offenders does translate into a higher degree of security. The creepy words from Lecter in SOTL comes to mind: "What do people covet? They covet what they see every day."
Exactly. So this guy claims he had no idea what was on the machines... what if he was lying? What if the first thing he did upon booting up the machine was burn its contents to a dvd and mail that to his cohort offshore? Nobody's talking about this, and it's the real story here.
To turn the question around: what is so easy about referring to things in a new way?
I was doing this guy I met, and he was, like, uh uh uh damn oh no. And then, like, half of his equipment was shriveled. And I was, like huh. It disrupted my sex. It was really good sex. And then I had to do it again and I had to do it fast so it wasn't as good. It's kind of a... ... bummer.
Prostitution has a long history but it's not correct to therefore claim that every civilization is united by an appreciation of sexuality. Barter took place in Stalinist Russia, but did not constitute a free market. In addition to producers and consumers, a free market requires barriers to competition that are low; this will virtually never occur in the absence of both government oversight and a liquid monetary system, neither of which is required for barter.
But why would they lie? What would they have to gain?
(this is a Milhouse reference)
This assumption - that p2p networks were designed to exempt users from central authority - would only be a safe one if p2p networks did not also exhibit other highly useful benefits. One such benefit is the ability to aggregate and distribute access to an ad hoc collection of data, amortizing transfer costs over as many internet connections as there are users. There are many companies developing p2p as a way to cut down on server and bandwidth costs when distributing their business software. Googling for "p2p distribute business software" reveals quite a lot of activity in this realm. The plain fact is that p2p networks are very good at spreading out distribution costs.
"P2P has legitimate uses" would seem an accurate and powerful statement.
Whoops, I missed the fact that the original parent post was from a different person. Sorry 'bout that. :)
Wrong. Torvalds is not counting on the marketplace's judegement of anything. In every interview he plainly states that he has no market-driven or competetive goals whatsoever. He simply wants to make Linux improve over time for whoever chooses to use it, whether that is ten people or a billion.
If this is accurate, this would be fundamentally a service, rather than a specific hardware or software product. But it's odd that HP doesn't confirm or deny that it is a service:
Moreover, this would be a service that does not address any problem more specific than the need to keep up with "whatever trend is coming". Being non-specific is essentially what the interviewer lambastes the HP rep for. So I'm a bit puzzled at your seeming acknowledgement of the interviewer's assessment of HP's vagueness, while simultaneously you reject the interviewer's criticism that HP is being vague.I confess not to know what the term "digital freedom" means in the context of this discussion, but I will comment on your suggestion that there's a burden on engineers to bridge the communication gap with marketers. If engineers are the people who truly know how product X works, and can't comprehend what marketers are saying about X without a substantial effort, then it seems to me that executives at other companies who are trying to understand what X is and why they should buy it don't stand a chance in hell of getting what they think they might be paying for.
Hill climbing algorithms are more susceptible to getting trapped in a local minima than genetic algorithms are. GAs tend to avoid this because of the cross-over breeding that occurs.
Though as pointed out at snopes, even if untrue this anecdote serves an illustrative purpose.
I am too; stylistically I wouldn't choose to state it as above, but I am a fan of accountability for individuals and corporations alike. If your position were a machievellian one that rationalizes doing something because it's possible to do then I wouldn't agree, but if I understand correctly then perhaps you and I simply have a different threshhold of what we'd consider "stupid" in this particular case. It seems your position that when people don't have an awareness of how search results may be skewed in favor of a given business, then they deserve to be taken advantage of and critics should be silent.
I think there's a component of untruthful advertising to this issue. Microsoft may not actually commit themselves to objectivity by saying "our search results are unbiased with regard to any commercial interests" but it's not an unreasonable expectation of a search engine; after all, google has set the precedent of making money via advertisements, not by covert manipulation of results.
If I drive past a gas station and ask to have my engine checked, the station may well try to bilk me out of money by claiming I need more work done than is the case. There are ways for the station to claim this without technically breaking the law, but I don't regard myself as stupid for not knowing enough about cars to certify the station's results; at least not stupid in a perjorative way. And, I wouldn't regard the station as on uncriticizable moral ground for doing so. This may all come down to my world vision, where I'd like to steer the world towards honest exchanges without people stabbing each other in the back at every opportunity. I realize that not everybody wants to live in such a world.