Right, I feel the same way. I admire products like Jabber that sit on the bleeding edge and the people that build them, I just don't want to use them until they actually work. If it weren't for bleeding-edge community projects like Jabber, then we would only get innovation from Microsoft, and that's not good for anybody.
Apple and OSX users owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to both the Linux and the Windows communities. It is still important to remember that there is a big difference between appreciating those communities for what they offer and trying to woo users from those communities to OSX.
I am extremely happy with the current situation, where Apple only occupies 5% of the market. That 5% is made up of people that appreciate Apple's highly-managed approach to providing a consistent, compelling, and comfortable user experience.
I sit in front of my Aqua interface and I'm just awed at how beautiful it looks. It even looks beautiful when I have five different terminal windows up, open to different Linux machines. Front-ends should be beautiful, back-ends should be powerful. Apple understands this.
The reason why Apple is cool is because they are NOT competing in the same market as Linux or Windows. Apple computers are intended for people that are very into design and appearance. These are the people that sip lattes in trendy cybercafes and waltz past the velvet rope at the coolest clubs. Linux is for nerds, and Windows is for boring people in brown suits. If everybody drove a Ferrari, then Ferraris wouldn't be cool any more. That's why I'm happy that General Motors still makes cars even though I wouldn't be caught dead driving one, and that's why I'm happy that Microsoft dominates the computer market.
All three markets can coexist, and should coexist. It's perfectly normal for the computer world to divide into different virtual geographies with different personalities, just like the real world. Apple's new vision is to build a line of products that appeal to people that hang out in places like South Beach or Greenwich Village. Linux appeals to people attracted to places like San Jose or Austin. Windows appeals to people that for some unknown reason spend their time in Detroit.
The biggest reason why Apple is so cool is because they know their niche and they cater to it. Opening the flood gates and bringing the bazillion Windows users and developers into the Apple world is the worst thing that could happen to Apple, because without the exclusivity that they have right now, they would be just another OS. The last thing that I want to see on my beautiful OSX system is a bunch of crappy shareware built by 14-year-old teenagers in Hungary with no design sense whatsoever. I don't want the bouncers letting people in jeans and sneakers into the nightclubs that I visit, and I don't want ports of a bunch of ugly Windows applications running on my Aqua system. If Apple's market share rises too high, then the whole mystique will be broken when the exclusive feel of the OS is lost.
The applications available for OSX are mostly designed and built by people that are very into the Apple mystique, and a lot of people like it that way. Applications for other OS's are generally not designed at all, they are just built. I keep an ugly Gateway PC in a side room for running junk like that when I need to, but it's an iMac running OSX that gets to sit in my living room. If I need real power, then I can pop up an X window on my iMac from the Linux server that lives in a closet where nobody sees it.
That's when compared to some other web sites I've seen. Given that and the tremendous amount of problems you must have with chargebacks and low pay for banner ads, I have to wonder if you can actually make *that* much money in porn.
There is an enormous amount of money to be made in adult material online. Even pretty tame softcore sites like mine are doing pretty well. As an example of how recession-proof this business is, I have people in the forums section of my web site talking about how they owe more money than they are worth to the IRS thanks to the alternative minimum tax, yet they still manage to scrape up $10 for my web site. I don't know of a more compelling example than somebody complaining in the paid members section of an adult web site about how they owe $90K in taxes.
Also, does anyone have any firsthand experience knowing how many people actually pay for subscriptions to sites like danni.com or anything like that?
Numbers for Danni's Hard Drive are pretty frequently released in press releases, she reportedly has a solid base of 27,000 users, which generated over 5 million dollars last year, for $1.5 million in profit.
Keep in mind that adult sites are a totally different business than your stereotypical dot-com startup. We have solid revenue streams, we have profit models that work, and we don't squander money on hypotheticals. If sales drop, then we lower our overhead. It's a pretty simple concept that would have saved a lot of dot-coms in the recent crash if they had been paying attention. Adult businesses are looking at the current economic downturn as a minor wrinkle, whereas dot-coms are going out of business forever.
Anonymous Thief writes: "Well, it was probably only a matter of time, but Reuters reports that some home builders have licensed a "key lock" technology from someone called Master to insert into their home security systems. Boy, I just can't wait until we won't be able to go around randomly stealing from each other any more, this really sucks."
The closest thing to CERT in a government agency that I know of is the FBI's National Infrastructure Protection Agency, or NIPC. They exist primarily to protect critical government infrastructure, but that obviously has a lot to do with private systems as well.
The FBI and NIPC have also started a system called Infraguard, which is designed to be a bridge to the private sector. It's a pretty recent development.
Slashdot uses the same post-it-and-get-it-rated paradigm that AmIHotOrNot does. HotOrNot uses pictures, and judges people based on their physical attributes. Slashdot encourages people to post comments, and then everybody gets to rate whether they are intelligent and interesting.
One of those is more shallow than the other? They are both one-sided representations of people, and both are poor substitutes for actual human interaction. They are simply aimed at different demographics.
I don't see an enormous difference between posting this on Slashdot and then waiting to see how it gets rated, and posting a picture of myself on RankPeople. You're just getting ratings on different aspects of yourself, that's all.
Most of my 'ranking' fell in a bell curve around 7. However there was an outlying spike at 1 or 2.
It's possible that those people that rated you a 1 or a 2 just saw something that they didn't like, and those votes were actually legitimate.
I have posted pictures to a lot of sites like that, and the same thing always happens to me. I have a nice bell curve centered around some score that's relatively high, but there will always be a little cluster of 1's and 2's. I personally think that it's because I'm Asian, that a lot of people see an Asian and just vote down. Of course, a lot of people will see an Asian and automatically vote up too, regardless of whether she's actually attractive.
My point is that perhaps there is something visible in the picture that makes a certain handful of people not like you. Maybe you are wearing a brown shirt and 5% of the population is automatically revolted by a brown shirt. Maybe your computer is visible in the background and 5% of the voters automatically think "Oh, a geek" and vote you a '1'. If you're male, maybe you are getting voted down by straight male goons who are too stupid to configure the site to only show them women, and they automatically vote down any men that they see. It happens...
Wow, I do consider that to be a bad idea. Privacy is a concept that applies to a person's entire life, not just to a person's life when they are behind closed doors.
There are lots of other examples of what happens when you obliterate the concept of personal privacy, like:
Your employer wants to keep track of you, because they want to be warned if your personal life involves anything that might impair your ability to function at work. You show up one day and discover that an H.R. computer has decided that you should be fired because it is a matter of public record that you leave your house and go to a bar to socialize three nights per week, on average.
You meet a girl in a bar. She uses a handy freeware application on her Palm Pilot to snap your picture digitally and run a background check. She finds that you have brought 19 women home from bars in the last six months, never seeing any one of them for more than one night. She also finds that you have been seen entering a reproductive health clinic three times in the last year. She snubs you.
You run for public office, the news media runs a background check by data mining the video information that is public knowledge. They uncover that you used to attend meetings of a gay, lesbian and bisexual student union when you were in college. Your opponent attacks your sex life during the campaign.
Thieves stake out your house simply by accessing public information and learning exactly who lives in your house. They run an automated monitoring system to wait until everybody that lives in your house is gone, and they break into your house while you are gone. They know exactly how much time they have to rob you, because they track you in realtime using public video information.
An organized crime syndicate uses public monitoring information to track the location of law enforcement officers, allowing them to freely conduct crimes.
Law enforcement uses the above example as an excuse to increase the amount of undercover surveillance. Eventually society is governed by a faceless secret police.
Does all of this really seem like a good idea? Having completely pervasive monitoring of an entire population and then making the information available to the public would radically shift our society to something entirely different than what we are accustomed to. I know that other cultures are different, but I think that most Americans would see this as a nightmare scenario, not as a good thing.
If you do something on the street, it is to be assumed someone is watching you. There is no reason someone would not.
The concern is not just whether you are seen by a camera or not when you are out in public. A big concern is what happens to the data from the camera once it is captured. Where does the data go? Is it a matter of public record? Who has access to it?
Imagine a world with cameras on every street corner, canvassing every public place, combined with high-banwidth data transfer and fast computers. Anybody with access to that camera data could use, say, a facial recognition system to track any given individual. Say you think that your boyfriend is cheating on you, and you have access to the needed camera data. You run a background process that looks for his face. He walks out of a cafe somewhere and your system catches him by recognizing his face, automatically archives the video of him walking around, down the street, around a corner, meeting up with his new girl.
This is a level of intrusion is not possible without hiring a private detective in the 'real world' without the cameras. If we allow the cameras, then this sort of thing will be very easy for anybody with access to the information. If the information is public, then you have just obliterated privacy in your entire society. If the information is guarded and used only by the government, then you have just created a very powerful tool for your government to use for opression.
Mod down my comment if you want, but I think that it's a legitimate concern that this story has such an irritating headline.
The story itself is really interesting, it is well-written, and it has a lot of interesting background information. It is thought-provoking, it provided me with information that actually does happen to be new to me (I missed the first story on this) and it should start some interesting discussion. Then it gets posted with the fifteen thousandth AYBABTU reference in the last week. That totally distracted me from the story itself by sheer irritation level alone.
The whole thing reminds me of the "WHAZZUP!!" commercials. It was funny once. Maybe even twice. Now I can't go into a sushi bar without a bunch of jerks getting drunk on sake and yelling "WASSSABI!!"
The AYBABTU thing is way past old. I almost expect to see it linger on in comments for the next six months, but it really doesn't need to keep coming up in the headlines. Especially not in the headlines of stories that are otherwise really interesting. That just makes it more irritating.
And then they implemented their "we'll look at it for $199" approach, which probably makes sense for all involved IF you accept that Yahoo is the 800-pound gorilla.
As if that isn't bad enough, for certain specific sites Yahoo charges $600 just to look at your site. There is no option to submit a site without paying. What that basically means, is that Yahoo is just a giant paid yellow pages directory now. This policy raises the bar high enough that a lot of webmasters are not going to pay the fee. The whole point of the net was originally that it would level the playing field, right? Policies like Yahoo's encourage success from sites that are well-financed, rather than sites that are actually good.
Google, on the other hand, encourages success from sites that are good, rather than sites that are well-financed. Being well-financed will always help, but Google ultimately places the most weight on sites that get referenced frequently, instead of sites that can afford to take out a $600 yellow page ad. That is the sort of new innovation in web organization that I think will have a big impact on how we find information in the future.
If you're in the right club in South Beach, all of the women there will look like porn sluts.
...then again, if you're in the right club, surrounded by porn sluts, then you don't really qualify as a geek, do you? Your post is self-contradictory.
Geeks tend to believe that they could treat women better, if only they had the chance. This is absurd, the guys that are getting laid are the guys that do know how to treat a woman.
The guys that are actually getting laid value their gender relations skills, and practice them as frequently as possible. They learn from their mistakes, and they gain confidence. Confidence is extremely sexy.
It is ridiculous to believe that a geek is going to treat a woman better simply because he is more intelligent than the attractive lawyer Corvette guy. How can you conduct a smooth, productive and fun relationship if you have no experience in the matter? Being intelligent is far from the most critical component in how you treat a woman.
The most dated attitude portrayed here is the idea that a woman isn't capable of judging a potential mate for herself.
Well, yes, but if I said that Linux is a pain in the neck to deal with right now, and that it has a lot of glitches that people still deal with right now, then I would get 20 different Linux zealots jumping all over me for blaspheming the holy operating system.
I figured that I would be diplomatic by referring to problems from few years ago, which only the most deluded zealots will deny.
Does anybody remember the early days of Linux?
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I think that it's funny to see this story on a site that is so heavily populated by people that use and love Linux. Anybody that used Linux a few years ago spent the first month doing nothing but sweating over this configuration file or that, this libc version or that, why the hell won't X initialize, why can't I get LILO working, what is wrong with this broken operating system...
Now the same people point to a problem with a very complex new technology and start jumping up and down about how it will never work because it has problems?
The significance is exactly what you mentioned, saving money. NASA's mantra lately is 'cheaper, faster, better', trying to do things quickly using off-the-shelf equipment. Now that the world in general has reached a certain level of doesn't have to invent proprietary equipment themselves for everything that they do. They used to build computers and operating systems from scratch, now they just sent OS9 to Mars.
Now we are seeing an extension of that same concept into communications. NASA has been using off-the-shelf components for communications components for a long time, but up until now most in-flight communications have come in via the TDRSS satellites. Taking a step toward using a commercial infrastructure instead is a pretty big deal.
When you are in a commercial airplane, you are in a pressurized cabin. You aren't really at a 'high altitude', your body just thinks that you are at sea level. If you want to look at the effects of high altitudes on your body with regard to drinking, then go to a ski lodge halfway up a mountain somewhere and break out some congac. Being on a ski vacation amplifies the alchohol, I don't know that the altitude does.
My personal opinion is that the disturbance of being on a plane, the stress of shuffling around your baggage and swapping time zones, and maybe the stress of motion might all contribute to you getting a little drunker on a commercial flight. I don't think that it can be attributed to alchol because you're in a pressurized cabin.
See, I thought that I was a geek. Then I read your post. Now I realize that I'm definitely missing some critical component of geek-ness, because that little scenario is about as attractive to me as a DB-25 connector.
I guess I'll just have to settle for being a nerd.
Microsoft is one of the only companies that ever really bothers to sign their software modules anyway, so this kind of makes it glaringly obvious that the whole concept is broken. Most other companies don't bother to sign, and then they provide help on how to click past the Windows 'this driver is not signed' warnings.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple and OSX users owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to both the Linux and the Windows communities. It is still important to remember that there is a big difference between appreciating those communities for what they offer and trying to woo users from those communities to OSX.
I am extremely happy with the current situation, where Apple only occupies 5% of the market. That 5% is made up of people that appreciate Apple's highly-managed approach to providing a consistent, compelling, and comfortable user experience.
I sit in front of my Aqua interface and I'm just awed at how beautiful it looks. It even looks beautiful when I have five different terminal windows up, open to different Linux machines. Front-ends should be beautiful, back-ends should be powerful. Apple understands this.
All three markets can coexist, and should coexist. It's perfectly normal for the computer world to divide into different virtual geographies with different personalities, just like the real world. Apple's new vision is to build a line of products that appeal to people that hang out in places like South Beach or Greenwich Village. Linux appeals to people attracted to places like San Jose or Austin. Windows appeals to people that for some unknown reason spend their time in Detroit.
The biggest reason why Apple is so cool is because they know their niche and they cater to it. Opening the flood gates and bringing the bazillion Windows users and developers into the Apple world is the worst thing that could happen to Apple, because without the exclusivity that they have right now, they would be just another OS. The last thing that I want to see on my beautiful OSX system is a bunch of crappy shareware built by 14-year-old teenagers in Hungary with no design sense whatsoever. I don't want the bouncers letting people in jeans and sneakers into the nightclubs that I visit, and I don't want ports of a bunch of ugly Windows applications running on my Aqua system. If Apple's market share rises too high, then the whole mystique will be broken when the exclusive feel of the OS is lost.
The applications available for OSX are mostly designed and built by people that are very into the Apple mystique, and a lot of people like it that way. Applications for other OS's are generally not designed at all, they are just built. I keep an ugly Gateway PC in a side room for running junk like that when I need to, but it's an iMac running OSX that gets to sit in my living room. If I need real power, then I can pop up an X window on my iMac from the Linux server that lives in a closet where nobody sees it.
Keep in mind that adult sites are a totally different business than your stereotypical dot-com startup. We have solid revenue streams, we have profit models that work, and we don't squander money on hypotheticals. If sales drop, then we lower our overhead. It's a pretty simple concept that would have saved a lot of dot-coms in the recent crash if they had been paying attention. Adult businesses are looking at the current economic downturn as a minor wrinkle, whereas dot-coms are going out of business forever.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Anonymous Thief writes: "Well, it was probably only a matter of time, but Reuters reports that some home builders have licensed a "key lock" technology from someone called Master to insert into their home security systems. Boy, I just can't wait until we won't be able to go around randomly stealing from each other any more, this really sucks."
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
The FBI and NIPC have also started a system called Infraguard, which is designed to be a bridge to the private sector. It's a pretty recent development.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
One of those is more shallow than the other? They are both one-sided representations of people, and both are poor substitutes for actual human interaction. They are simply aimed at different demographics.
I don't see an enormous difference between posting this on Slashdot and then waiting to see how it gets rated, and posting a picture of myself on RankPeople. You're just getting ratings on different aspects of yourself, that's all.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
I have posted pictures to a lot of sites like that, and the same thing always happens to me. I have a nice bell curve centered around some score that's relatively high, but there will always be a little cluster of 1's and 2's. I personally think that it's because I'm Asian, that a lot of people see an Asian and just vote down. Of course, a lot of people will see an Asian and automatically vote up too, regardless of whether she's actually attractive.
My point is that perhaps there is something visible in the picture that makes a certain handful of people not like you. Maybe you are wearing a brown shirt and 5% of the population is automatically revolted by a brown shirt. Maybe your computer is visible in the background and 5% of the voters automatically think "Oh, a geek" and vote you a '1'. If you're male, maybe you are getting voted down by straight male goons who are too stupid to configure the site to only show them women, and they automatically vote down any men that they see. It happens...
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
There are lots of other examples of what happens when you obliterate the concept of personal privacy, like:
- Your employer wants to keep track of you, because they want to be warned if your personal life involves anything that might impair your ability to function at work. You show up one day and discover that an H.R. computer has decided that you should be fired because it is a matter of public record that you leave your house and go to a bar to socialize three nights per week, on average.
- You meet a girl in a bar. She uses a handy freeware application on her Palm Pilot to snap your picture digitally and run a background check. She finds that you have brought 19 women home from bars in the last six months, never seeing any one of them for more than one night. She also finds that you have been seen entering a reproductive health clinic three times in the last year. She snubs you.
- You run for public office, the news media runs a background check by data mining the video information that is public knowledge. They uncover that you used to attend meetings of a gay, lesbian and bisexual student union when you were in college. Your opponent attacks your sex life during the campaign.
- Thieves stake out your house simply by accessing public information and learning exactly who lives in your house. They run an automated monitoring system to wait until everybody that lives in your house is gone, and they break into your house while you are gone. They know exactly how much time they have to rob you, because they track you in realtime using public video information.
- An organized crime syndicate uses public monitoring information to track the location of law enforcement officers, allowing them to freely conduct crimes.
- Law enforcement uses the above example as an excuse to increase the amount of undercover surveillance. Eventually society is governed by a faceless secret police.
Does all of this really seem like a good idea? Having completely pervasive monitoring of an entire population and then making the information available to the public would radically shift our society to something entirely different than what we are accustomed to. I know that other cultures are different, but I think that most Americans would see this as a nightmare scenario, not as a good thing.-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Imagine a world with cameras on every street corner, canvassing every public place, combined with high-banwidth data transfer and fast computers. Anybody with access to that camera data could use, say, a facial recognition system to track any given individual. Say you think that your boyfriend is cheating on you, and you have access to the needed camera data. You run a background process that looks for his face. He walks out of a cafe somewhere and your system catches him by recognizing his face, automatically archives the video of him walking around, down the street, around a corner, meeting up with his new girl.
This is a level of intrusion is not possible without hiring a private detective in the 'real world' without the cameras. If we allow the cameras, then this sort of thing will be very easy for anybody with access to the information. If the information is public, then you have just obliterated privacy in your entire society. If the information is guarded and used only by the government, then you have just created a very powerful tool for your government to use for opression.
Didn't anybody read "1984"?
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
The story itself is really interesting, it is well-written, and it has a lot of interesting background information. It is thought-provoking, it provided me with information that actually does happen to be new to me (I missed the first story on this) and it should start some interesting discussion. Then it gets posted with the fifteen thousandth AYBABTU reference in the last week. That totally distracted me from the story itself by sheer irritation level alone.
The whole thing reminds me of the "WHAZZUP!!" commercials. It was funny once. Maybe even twice. Now I can't go into a sushi bar without a bunch of jerks getting drunk on sake and yelling "WASSSABI!!"
The AYBABTU thing is way past old. I almost expect to see it linger on in comments for the next six months, but it really doesn't need to keep coming up in the headlines. Especially not in the headlines of stories that are otherwise really interesting. That just makes it more irritating.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
I can see why they would be so concerned with bestiality issues.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Google, on the other hand, encourages success from sites that are good, rather than sites that are well-financed. Being well-financed will always help, but Google ultimately places the most weight on sites that get referenced frequently, instead of sites that can afford to take out a $600 yellow page ad. That is the sort of new innovation in web organization that I think will have a big impact on how we find information in the future.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
YOU!! Yes, you! GET OUT!!
You obviously don't belong around here.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
The guys that are actually getting laid value their gender relations skills, and practice them as frequently as possible. They learn from their mistakes, and they gain confidence. Confidence is extremely sexy.
It is ridiculous to believe that a geek is going to treat a woman better simply because he is more intelligent than the attractive lawyer Corvette guy. How can you conduct a smooth, productive and fun relationship if you have no experience in the matter? Being intelligent is far from the most critical component in how you treat a woman.
The most dated attitude portrayed here is the idea that a woman isn't capable of judging a potential mate for herself.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
I figured that I would be diplomatic by referring to problems from few years ago, which only the most deluded zealots will deny.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Now the same people point to a problem with a very complex new technology and start jumping up and down about how it will never work because it has problems?
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Now we are seeing an extension of that same concept into communications. NASA has been using off-the-shelf components for communications components for a long time, but up until now most in-flight communications have come in via the TDRSS satellites. Taking a step toward using a commercial infrastructure instead is a pretty big deal.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
My personal opinion is that the disturbance of being on a plane, the stress of shuffling around your baggage and swapping time zones, and maybe the stress of motion might all contribute to you getting a little drunker on a commercial flight. I don't think that it can be attributed to alchol because you're in a pressurized cabin.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
I guess I'll just have to settle for being a nerd.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Oops, now some people around here have foot in mouth disease...
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
One way for a geek guy to not leave his girlfriend out of his sight is if it's his girlfriend that he is fragging. That's what my boyfriend does.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Microsoft is one of the only companies that ever really bothers to sign their software modules anyway, so this kind of makes it glaringly obvious that the whole concept is broken. Most other companies don't bother to sign, and then they provide help on how to click past the Windows 'this driver is not signed' warnings.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
I just want my free taco out of this whole thing. That's all I need.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl
Err, hey now, some of us that enjoy a good LAN party every once in a while do get laid whenever we want to.
-Keslin, the naked nerd girl