The guy's heritage with the WELL is not questionable, but I'm going to remain officially skeptical about the idea that commercial enterprises can just follow some guy's advice and build a functioning community.
People don't generally want to participate in a venture whose sole role is to make some other a$$hole wealthy; and hey, that's appropriate. People's own interests have to be taken into account. There has to be an emormously strong draw, a type of community that can't be found elsewhere. The geek community that makes up/., the intelligent nouveau liberals that makes up salon.com's table talk, etc. And even in these two cases, the commercial aspects have largely been focused elsewhere at the time the community started.
Communities have to feel free to post whatever they want, whenever they want, for example, to truly be effective at being communities. Commercial ventures won't withstand that sort of thing. They have to allow endless criticism of themselves, their products, their staff, their management... how many public companies would go for that?
Communities have to feel that they will continue to exist, that their feet won't be pulled out from under them because the last quarter was a bad one or because their favorite moderator was laid off.
There's a reason why I wrote my sig the way I did -- and BTW, I wrote this sig a week ago, so this is not just some self-serving situation. My own community is over ten years old, having survived as a local BBS, a netted BBS, a telnet BBS and now finally (as of a week ago) a web-based community. Some of the people there have been there since the inception. If it successfully makes the transition to web-based community, it will be because the users wanted it, not me. And that's my final point: you simply can't force community into existence!
Way to BRING it man! We're in pretty much a golden era of entertainment choices, at all levels of sensibilities, the total opposite of what TV and its three choices were in the 50s and 60s when TV was pronounced pathetic. There are no longer three channels that have to appeal to a third of the audience. Some channels are happy averaging 25000 viewers through the day. It's a different world.
Penguin Computing, ThinkGeek, and Dotster have gotten my attention and my money via Slashdot.
Now that I know that CmdrTaco et al have no say over the advertising, I'm far less interested in it. At one point it seemed to have more of a connection to the site. Nowadays it looks a little too much like the typical marketing-think -- "Hey the techies are here and we're supposed to sell to the techies!"
Imagine if the advertising were run via the same model that the site is run. Imagine if the ads were selected by the editors, in the same way that stories are selected. Imagine if the ads were moderated in the same way that posts are moderated. (Well, maybe not exactly the same way. There would undoubtedly be trouble with that.)
After a while, even the casual browser would know that these ads were different/special. These ads cried for you not to actively ignore them, but to actively pay attention to them. They would be there for a reason, not just because they fit someone else's idea of a target market.
Editorially, we know that/. and the ads are handled by separate departments. That's where the whole thing breaks down!
It looks like a few select investors and fund managers were hot to get in on the IPO. Not just anyone can buy IPO shares at the initial price, because those shares are restricted. So the investors paid off Credit Suisse, who were in charge of the IPO, by giving Credit Suisse extra commissions... a deal that Credit Suisse negotiated.
In some cases, the investor's commissions were determined by how much the IPO stock rose, aand therefore how much money the investors made on day one. (Note: and you thought BOXING was fixed...)
Even though CS did the dirty work, this involves VA Linux because it's VA Linux who writes the conditions of the IPO deal. And if not as many shares were available as VA Linux said there would be, they "lied" -- and the rest of the shareholders have gotten a raw deal. And due to supply and demand, if not as many shares were available as VA Linux said there would be -- that would have the effect of driving up the share price even higher at its opening.
What philosophy, is it, exactly, that requires everything to be compiled on the fly?
Was it Kant that talked about interpreted code. Now, I believe Descartes hypothesized a proof for God based on the idea that self-modifying programs could not be construed as a perfect model of any single thing. And the Chinese talk about the severing of the mind-body relationship through the long-term contemplation of object orientation. And Adm. Grace Hopper lectured on the idea that through debugging it could be determined that the nature of man can always be proven flawed.
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Before you go off building sites with Flash, please do a litle light reading first.
Read Macromedia's own Top 10 Usability Tips for Flash Web Sites to quickly learn how to make your Flash site at least ten times better than the average Flash website.
Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column Flash: 99% Bad for an expert opinion on how Flash makes websites unusable for the average user.
Finally, whatever you do, remember there's a reason why words and characters are so rarely "animated" in the real world. And please don't forget the "Skip Intro" button.
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The answer to such nonsense is so obvious it's blinding: make the advertising relevant to the content.
Yahoo does this to a degree, but not to the degree they need to. Every single ad has to be relevant to every single piece of content.
I went to Yahoo and searched for "Eminem" and was rewarded with a banner ad for ink jet labels. Now see, that's wrong. About half of the searches I did turned up ads relevant to the content. That's good -- but not good enough. If I were in their shoes, and not beholden to the financial communities that they are surely beholden to, I would GIVE AWAY advertising until every single ad was relevant to the content. I find an asparagus wholesaler and give them ad space for searches for asparagus. It would increase the worth of the rest of Yahoo's ad space by more than double!
Here on/. the ads are the one thing that is not editorially controlled, i.e., the Slashdot community has no say as to what ads appear up there. Now see, that's wrong. Sure we understand the reason for it, and since advertisers here probably desperately want to appeal to the/. community,/. ads are better than 99% of the ads out there. But we are here for the community, and since the ads are not a part of the community, there is a significant disconnect going on.
Furthermore, interstitials and the like are part of the traditional media thinking -- again! -- that the web is like TV. Every single time they think like that, they fall flat on their faces.
Lastly, the value of sponsorship has not been explored. In the olden days of the US, every mom and pop store had a sign that was half theirs, half Coca-cola's. Fifty years later, those signs are almost all gone but they're still a cultural icon. Similarly, Nike should be spending a million bucks to sponsor kids' soccer league web sites. They could give away hosting space and the web tools needed to make such sites look good.
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I'm 37. (US POV here) When I was in college, it was the beginning of widespread computer science degrees. My junior year, we got our first room full of micros to work with. The first Mac entered my senior year. We were doing everything on PDP-11s and we liked it.
A few years after I graduated, a local university made waves by being the first in the nation to demand that every incoming freshman must have a computer. It was considered frighteningly drastic.
It took a few more years for every campus to run to catch the wave and install networking to the dorms.
The 1999 grads were the first out who had the "web" for their entire college experience, and where doing something as sophisticated as downloading digital audio was not just a geeky preoccupation but rather one deeply in the mainstream.
What I'm trying to say here is that the 'net hasn't even really started its peak. The masses out there aren't putting it to its test. The people with the money are still far older than anyone who grew up with the net, and many of 'em are still scared of trying to manage their bookmarks.
Without question, the net will continue to become more ubiquitous, usage will continue to increase, new applications will be found, exciting new appliances will be developed. Think of the boundaries we have yet to cross. A majority of people yet to have email addresses, for example.
A lot of people have to learn to change their behavior in order for a lot of the.com concepts to really take off, and *that* might be fair to examine. I for one would love to have my groceries delivered; but I know that people, in general, are sentimentally attached to the idea of visiting the warehouse and lugging heavy bags of stuff back to their homes.
And when major ecommerce players -- I mean MAJOR major -- still make simple mistakes in usability on their websites, we know they have a lot to learn about how to get people into buying online.
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Regarding the Google Toolbar, does it work? Do you find it useful?
It's unfortunate that we get boggled down first in privacy concerns before discussiong whether the product is a good idea in the first place. I mean, I understand why this has to happen now, it's just unfortunate.
(But I really am interested in people's opinions of the toolbar...) --
From 1992-1994 I worked in high-level Unix tech support for Unisys. during most of that time we supported 7 different architectures and 7*n different version of *nix, both AT&T & BSD flavors.
It was a pretty good group of people, but only half of them were capable enough to debug something "from scratch"; the other half would look up your problem in the database, roughly the ancient equivalent of what every vendor gives you gratis over the net nowadays, and if it wasn't there they would either escalate, dispatch hardware or local support, or wander the cube halls asking the more savvy people what to do.
People were well-supported under these conditions if they had problems that were RTFM, or known bugs, or hand-holding for odd and difficult things like really had fscks or restores from unknown backups.
I'm sure these are the sorts of problems that every Linux vendor can also offer these days. But what if your problem was a real bug that your enterprise depended upon?
Well, those problems would be escalated to "engineering", the group that did kernel and such support for our versions of Unix. And those problems took *ages* to get anything back. Especially in an age where the company was trying to get rid of the burden ofsupporting the customers with old hardware that had been sold before the merger of Burroughs and Sperry. The BSD customers were largely out of luck. The people reporting problems on modern levels of software that was still being developed were the only really lucky ones, as their problem might get some attention. Otherwise, the level of interest in truly solving a serious problem was very low indeed.
And if a bug was not reproduceable, and didn't come with a ton of information and core dumps and whatnot, forget it.
Linux is different in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, with the source code available, there is a really good chance that you can either fix problems yourself or find/hire someone who can fix problems for you. But secondly, and more importantly, Linux encourages a different attitude towards IT. It invokes the primal call of the hacker. It encourages the involvement of a different sort of employee.
Under old corporate Unixii, sysadmins *had* to call support. It was S.O.P. because support was the only place to turn to for the problem database, for patches (this was pre-Internet and patches weren't made publically available), for finding out whether a problem was previously known.
Now, with the source available, with known problems advertised to the world, with patches mirrored on 30 different servers, with hundreds of places to turn to for help, there are no excuses. The chances are much greater that a sysadmin can locate a solution or workaround. The same code running in the enterprise is also running in 12 million other boxes.
Furthermore, the online communities did not exist in the corportate unixii world, and for the most part they *still* don't exist. Find other people interested in helping you figure out an error message in HP-UX? I wouldn't even know where to turn. Find a weird error message in Linux? Chances are a net search will find it, and in five minutes you'll know whether it's a rare problem or a common one, and if it's common, in five more minutes it'll be fixed.
Bottom line: the "rules" for support have radically changed -- for the better. The quality of support from the teeming masses of Linux users is as high if not higher than the old corporate support. The type of people attracted to running and using Linux is better.
Lastly, in an enterprise situation, and especially in the case of POS terminals, one is unlikely to suddenly run into a problem that will "shut down" the enterprise. POS terminals will run the same code over and over. Enterprises will run systems in advance of putting them into place; new problems will crop up when they run into resource limits, but these are problems that everyone has run into -- things like, what happens when you run out of swap, what happens if you try to configure a file system larger than the last one, etc.
Otherwise, the typical support calls of "What happens if I can't read my backup tape?" and "Why does my system crash when I plug my serial cable into line voltage?" will be handled by the vendors, just as they always have been.
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Find sites that have similar needs to your own, find out who did them, and hirm them to do yours.
I say this as such a service firm. But I think it's true. The problem that you're probably going to face is an information architecture problem. Designing a good AI is as difficult as designing a good UI.
Also, a good web firm will be able to look at the problem from a different angle than the ways you're looking at it, because they'll be approaching it from an outsider's POV... exactly the POV you need.
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Dude, I've been in IT since 1981, a BBS sysop since 1986, an internetted BBS owner/operator since 1990, a web user since 1995, a web developer since 1996, and have owned my own web development firm since 1999. I know about the price engines, it just didn't occur to me to use 'em. And while I'm happy to take my lumps every once in a while, I'll guess that we *all* spend a half-hour in searching hell every week or so.
Getting searching right isn't just something minor, y'know. It's incredibly important. Obviously, with the net, we are awash in information to the point where we regularly drown. But with all that info around, we still don't have instant answers to the questions that we all ask. (For more on this point, see my article on weird questions that people have asked Jeeves.) --
Instead of more search engines that implement slightly different algorithms, we need an entirely new way of looking for things on the net.
For example, tonight I needed a K6-2/500 processor to upgrade an old motherboard I have. I knew these would be for sale somewhere. I spent (er, LOST) about 30 minutes of time before I found a place that would sell me one online.
A lot of searches on popular sites for "K6-2" would turn up systems containing K6-2, on places that wouldn't sell the CPU alone. And then there were sites ABOUT CPUs that don't sell anything.
(brainstorming) Maybe the next generation of search engines should take context into account. If I want to buy something, I want to look only at sites that sell things. If I want unbiased information, I want to look only at sites that don't sell things. And a lot of the problem with the net is that it can identify where things are, but not where things AREN'T.
All the search engines have their own algorithms. None of them, AFAIK, will allow me to implement my own algorithms. Maybe I WANT Google's approach mixed with a little extra, like the addition of META tags. Maybe just the first three META tags. Maybe leave out META tags but only show me content from sites where the keyword appears on other subpages of the site.
My company does outsourced internet development work for non-profits constantly, and they come away pleased because we aren't a bunch of stinking corporate whores with our eye on the latest insider quickie six-figure job we can weasel our way into through martini lunches, meaningless buzzword biz-speak, and blue-suit-wearing secret handkshakes. (Oh, I'm sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe that's my five months of big-5 consulting hell coming out.)
If you can find a similarly-oriented outsourcer in your area, they may be a real find for you. What's more, in many cases you can get a reasonable estimate for jobs up front, and determine whether they're cost-effective before signing anything.
We like non-profits; they partner well, honestly care about the work and the results, pay on time, and they aren't a bunch of stinking... I'm sorry, I won't start again.
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So, to sum up, your opinion is that since the western approach has brought about wealth by raping and pillaging, that westerners should not try to tell starving countries that they're wrong for adopting dictatorial communism and systematically starving their own citizenry, but that we SHOULD, like, give them stuff they don't have, because that's charitable, dammit.
The original rape is wrong, but since we're doing it anyway, let the Africans have sloppy seconds!
Oh, and ancient cultures were "happy". For their average expected lifespan of 35 years, threatened with serfdom, barbariansm, random pestilence and death due to diseases they didn't understand... but I suppose nobody can say they weren't content, since history doesn't really record that sort of thing.
And look man, I dunno if you've noticed, but using Slashdot for anti-technology rants is about as dumb as banging your head with a rock. If you don't believe in the promise -- and the past -- of technology, the first thing you should do is fuck off this particular web site (if not all other web sites as well). And I'm not saying that to be rude... honest... it's just kinda obvious!
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Increases in technology mean increases in productivity: by definition, doing more with less. Increases in productivity over time is the creation of true wealth, i.e., not more little pieces of paper, but the maximization of human activity.
Were it not for the technological improvements over the last century, there would BE no wealth for us to discuss the charitable redistribution of.
There is absolutely no question that technology has improved and saved millions upon millions of lives directly, and that it has done much more good than harm. The possible increases in productivity from cheap flat LCD screens is unclear today, but by 2050 their applications may be critical.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, it took 50% of the population of "modern" societies to work in agriculture in order to feed people. Today it takes less than 2%. Along with those changes have come massive decreases in poverty and massive increases in lifespan. Technological advances and the accompanying increases in productivity are the reason why.
The only reason why many nations starve is that they haven't enacted a political/economic system that maximizes human activity. The famine that LiveAid was created to help alleviate was preceded by the Ethiopian nationalization of agriculture. Starving nation's politics/infrastructure is often so screwed up that the aid never gets to the people in need. These are the *real* problems that we have to think about and they make charitable options a little less clear-cut.
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Make it company policy to respect the individual. And I mean respect, not just some empty buzzword of the day that gets thrown around in meetings. It has to be a mind-set in order to work -- you have to believe it.
This doesn't mean that individuals are allowed to disrupt work or disrupt teams. That's poison. But it does mean that if Jim doesn't want to fly on Sundays, it doesn't mean that Jim is your new Problem Child. Good employees will go the extra mile -- maybe they just won't go YOUR extra mile.
And so, if someone is good, your focus should first be on what you can do to enable them to do their good work on their terms. And if someone is not so good, your focus should be on what you can do to make them good. If they aren't good and can't be made good only THEN are they the Problem Child.
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Remember, people do leave. There's nothing you can do about it, once someone has made up her mind. That's what exit interviews are for. If somebody leaves and tells you on the way out "Damnit I've been asking you for 9 months for a refrigerator for the developers", then you get an idea of how important those perks are.
This is a pet peeve, so I'm going to rant here.
Firstly, exit interviews are useless as data. To the employee who is leaving for a specific cause, chances are better than 50-50 they aren't going to tell you what that cause was. The wisdom on the street is to lie in your exit interview so that you don't burn any bridges.
Secondly, and more importantly, the exit interview is FAR TOO LATE to address the problem! By the time an exit interview happens, that employee has been disgruntled for between three months to a year (depending on their tolerance and the job market). If somebody leaves for reasons you could have fixed, that means you haven't been listening all along. To suddenly start listening on their last day is ironic and hypocritical.
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From where I sit it looks like the Browne total will be about half what it was in 1996. His second 5th-place showing in a row has nothing to do with AZ's refusal to put him on the ballot; L. Neil Smith's 5000 votes won't be the difference.
Carla Howell's "possible second-place finish" in MA didn't happen, but she did achieve double-digit results, a remarkable thing.
Other than that, it looks like the numbers are generally down from past years. The official excuses can now be released from National. Be sure to swallow them hard. Not taking the LP News seriously is grounds for party dismissal.
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Slashdot Mirror
That's right. Unless your name is Archibald Buttle, you've got nothing to worry about.
People don't generally want to participate in a venture whose sole role is to make some other a$$hole wealthy; and hey, that's appropriate. People's own interests have to be taken into account. There has to be an emormously strong draw, a type of community that can't be found elsewhere. The geek community that makes up /., the intelligent nouveau liberals that makes up salon.com's table talk, etc. And even in these two cases, the commercial aspects have largely been focused elsewhere at the time the community started.
Communities have to feel free to post whatever they want, whenever they want, for example, to truly be effective at being communities. Commercial ventures won't withstand that sort of thing. They have to allow endless criticism of themselves, their products, their staff, their management... how many public companies would go for that?
Communities have to feel that they will continue to exist, that their feet won't be pulled out from under them because the last quarter was a bad one or because their favorite moderator was laid off.
Take a look at this list of mostly-successful communities running vBulletin and see how many are commercial in nature. There's a reason for that!
There's a reason why I wrote my sig the way I did -- and BTW, I wrote this sig a week ago, so this is not just some self-serving situation. My own community is over ten years old, having survived as a local BBS, a netted BBS, a telnet BBS and now finally (as of a week ago) a web-based community. Some of the people there have been there since the inception. If it successfully makes the transition to web-based community, it will be because the users wanted it, not me. And that's my final point: you simply can't force community into existence!
Way to BRING it man! We're in pretty much a golden era of entertainment choices, at all levels of sensibilities, the total opposite of what TV and its three choices were in the 50s and 60s when TV was pronounced pathetic. There are no longer three channels that have to appeal to a third of the audience. Some channels are happy averaging 25000 viewers through the day. It's a different world.
Now that I know that CmdrTaco et al have no say over the advertising, I'm far less interested in it. At one point it seemed to have more of a connection to the site. Nowadays it looks a little too much like the typical marketing-think -- "Hey the techies are here and we're supposed to sell to the techies!"
Imagine if the advertising were run via the same model that the site is run. Imagine if the ads were selected by the editors, in the same way that stories are selected. Imagine if the ads were moderated in the same way that posts are moderated. (Well, maybe not exactly the same way. There would undoubtedly be trouble with that.)
After a while, even the casual browser would know that these ads were different/special. These ads cried for you not to actively ignore them, but to actively pay attention to them. They would be there for a reason, not just because they fit someone else's idea of a target market.
Editorially, we know that /. and the ads are handled by separate departments. That's where the whole thing breaks down!
It looks like a few select investors and fund managers were hot to get in on the IPO. Not just anyone can buy IPO shares at the initial price, because those shares are restricted. So the investors paid off Credit Suisse, who were in charge of the IPO, by giving Credit Suisse extra commissions... a deal that Credit Suisse negotiated.
In some cases, the investor's commissions were determined by how much the IPO stock rose, aand therefore how much money the investors made on day one. (Note: and you thought BOXING was fixed...)
Even though CS did the dirty work, this involves VA Linux because it's VA Linux who writes the conditions of the IPO deal. And if not as many shares were available as VA Linux said there would be, they "lied" -- and the rest of the shareholders have gotten a raw deal. And due to supply and demand, if not as many shares were available as VA Linux said there would be -- that would have the effect of driving up the share price even higher at its opening.
Apparently we're all in the charge of this dude , a BT "Futurologist". The life he describes is incredibly bad, however...
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Was it Kant that talked about interpreted code. Now, I believe Descartes hypothesized a proof for God based on the idea that self-modifying programs could not be construed as a perfect model of any single thing. And the Chinese talk about the severing of the mind-body relationship through the long-term contemplation of object orientation. And Adm. Grace Hopper lectured on the idea that through debugging it could be determined that the nature of man can always be proven flawed.
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- Read Macromedia's own Top 10 Usability Tips for Flash Web Sites to quickly learn how to make your Flash site at least ten times better than the average Flash website.
- Read WebWord's Flash Usability Challenge , co-sponsored by myself, in which a ransom is offered to find a Flash site that is suitable enough for e-commerce to actually make money.
- Read Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox column Flash: 99% Bad for an expert opinion on how Flash makes websites unusable for the average user.
Finally, whatever you do, remember there's a reason why words and characters are so rarely "animated" in the real world. And please don't forget the "Skip Intro" button.--
Yahoo does this to a degree, but not to the degree they need to. Every single ad has to be relevant to every single piece of content.
I went to Yahoo and searched for "Eminem" and was rewarded with a banner ad for ink jet labels. Now see, that's wrong. About half of the searches I did turned up ads relevant to the content. That's good -- but not good enough. If I were in their shoes, and not beholden to the financial communities that they are surely beholden to, I would GIVE AWAY advertising until every single ad was relevant to the content. I find an asparagus wholesaler and give them ad space for searches for asparagus. It would increase the worth of the rest of Yahoo's ad space by more than double!
Here on /. the ads are the one thing that is not editorially controlled, i.e., the Slashdot community has no say as to what ads appear up there. Now see, that's wrong. Sure we understand the reason for it, and since advertisers here probably desperately want to appeal to the /. community, /. ads are better than 99% of the ads out there. But we are here for the community, and since the ads are not a part of the community, there is a significant disconnect going on.
Furthermore, interstitials and the like are part of the traditional media thinking -- again! -- that the web is like TV. Every single time they think like that, they fall flat on their faces.
Lastly, the value of sponsorship has not been explored. In the olden days of the US, every mom and pop store had a sign that was half theirs, half Coca-cola's. Fifty years later, those signs are almost all gone but they're still a cultural icon. Similarly, Nike should be spending a million bucks to sponsor kids' soccer league web sites. They could give away hosting space and the web tools needed to make such sites look good.
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A few years after I graduated, a local university made waves by being the first in the nation to demand that every incoming freshman must have a computer. It was considered frighteningly drastic.
It took a few more years for every campus to run to catch the wave and install networking to the dorms.
The 1999 grads were the first out who had the "web" for their entire college experience, and where doing something as sophisticated as downloading digital audio was not just a geeky preoccupation but rather one deeply in the mainstream.
What I'm trying to say here is that the 'net hasn't even really started its peak. The masses out there aren't putting it to its test. The people with the money are still far older than anyone who grew up with the net, and many of 'em are still scared of trying to manage their bookmarks.
Without question, the net will continue to become more ubiquitous, usage will continue to increase, new applications will be found, exciting new appliances will be developed. Think of the boundaries we have yet to cross. A majority of people yet to have email addresses, for example.
A lot of people have to learn to change their behavior in order for a lot of the .com concepts to really take off, and *that* might be fair to examine. I for one would love to have my groceries delivered; but I know that people, in general, are sentimentally attached to the idea of visiting the warehouse and lugging heavy bags of stuff back to their homes.
And when major ecommerce players -- I mean MAJOR major -- still make simple mistakes in usability on their websites, we know they have a lot to learn about how to get people into buying online.
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It's unfortunate that we get boggled down first in privacy concerns before discussiong whether the product is a good idea in the first place. I mean, I understand why this has to happen now, it's just unfortunate.
(But I really am interested in people's opinions of the toolbar...)
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It was a pretty good group of people, but only half of them were capable enough to debug something "from scratch"; the other half would look up your problem in the database, roughly the ancient equivalent of what every vendor gives you gratis over the net nowadays, and if it wasn't there they would either escalate, dispatch hardware or local support, or wander the cube halls asking the more savvy people what to do.
People were well-supported under these conditions if they had problems that were RTFM, or known bugs, or hand-holding for odd and difficult things like really had fscks or restores from unknown backups.
I'm sure these are the sorts of problems that every Linux vendor can also offer these days. But what if your problem was a real bug that your enterprise depended upon?
Well, those problems would be escalated to "engineering", the group that did kernel and such support for our versions of Unix. And those problems took *ages* to get anything back. Especially in an age where the company was trying to get rid of the burden ofsupporting the customers with old hardware that had been sold before the merger of Burroughs and Sperry. The BSD customers were largely out of luck. The people reporting problems on modern levels of software that was still being developed were the only really lucky ones, as their problem might get some attention. Otherwise, the level of interest in truly solving a serious problem was very low indeed.
And if a bug was not reproduceable, and didn't come with a ton of information and core dumps and whatnot, forget it.
Linux is different in two ways. Firstly, and most obviously, with the source code available, there is a really good chance that you can either fix problems yourself or find/hire someone who can fix problems for you. But secondly, and more importantly, Linux encourages a different attitude towards IT. It invokes the primal call of the hacker. It encourages the involvement of a different sort of employee.
Under old corporate Unixii, sysadmins *had* to call support. It was S.O.P. because support was the only place to turn to for the problem database, for patches (this was pre-Internet and patches weren't made publically available), for finding out whether a problem was previously known.
Now, with the source available, with known problems advertised to the world, with patches mirrored on 30 different servers, with hundreds of places to turn to for help, there are no excuses. The chances are much greater that a sysadmin can locate a solution or workaround. The same code running in the enterprise is also running in 12 million other boxes.
Furthermore, the online communities did not exist in the corportate unixii world, and for the most part they *still* don't exist. Find other people interested in helping you figure out an error message in HP-UX? I wouldn't even know where to turn. Find a weird error message in Linux? Chances are a net search will find it, and in five minutes you'll know whether it's a rare problem or a common one, and if it's common, in five more minutes it'll be fixed.
Bottom line: the "rules" for support have radically changed -- for the better. The quality of support from the teeming masses of Linux users is as high if not higher than the old corporate support. The type of people attracted to running and using Linux is better.
Lastly, in an enterprise situation, and especially in the case of POS terminals, one is unlikely to suddenly run into a problem that will "shut down" the enterprise. POS terminals will run the same code over and over. Enterprises will run systems in advance of putting them into place; new problems will crop up when they run into resource limits, but these are problems that everyone has run into -- things like, what happens when you run out of swap, what happens if you try to configure a file system larger than the last one, etc.
Otherwise, the typical support calls of "What happens if I can't read my backup tape?" and "Why does my system crash when I plug my serial cable into line voltage?" will be handled by the vendors, just as they always have been.
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I say this as such a service firm. But I think it's true. The problem that you're probably going to face is an information architecture problem. Designing a good AI is as difficult as designing a good UI.
Also, a good web firm will be able to look at the problem from a different angle than the ways you're looking at it, because they'll be approaching it from an outsider's POV... exactly the POV you need.
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Getting searching right isn't just something minor, y'know. It's incredibly important. Obviously, with the net, we are awash in information to the point where we regularly drown. But with all that info around, we still don't have instant answers to the questions that we all ask. (For more on this point, see my article on weird questions that people have asked Jeeves .)
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For example, tonight I needed a K6-2/500 processor to upgrade an old motherboard I have. I knew these would be for sale somewhere. I spent (er, LOST) about 30 minutes of time before I found a place that would sell me one online.
A lot of searches on popular sites for "K6-2" would turn up systems containing K6-2, on places that wouldn't sell the CPU alone. And then there were sites ABOUT CPUs that don't sell anything.
(brainstorming) Maybe the next generation of search engines should take context into account. If I want to buy something, I want to look only at sites that sell things. If I want unbiased information, I want to look only at sites that don't sell things. And a lot of the problem with the net is that it can identify where things are, but not where things AREN'T.
All the search engines have their own algorithms. None of them, AFAIK, will allow me to implement my own algorithms. Maybe I WANT Google's approach mixed with a little extra, like the addition of META tags. Maybe just the first three META tags. Maybe leave out META tags but only show me content from sites where the keyword appears on other subpages of the site.
I don't know, but something oughta be done!
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If you can find a similarly-oriented outsourcer in your area, they may be a real find for you. What's more, in many cases you can get a reasonable estimate for jobs up front, and determine whether they're cost-effective before signing anything.
We like non-profits; they partner well, honestly care about the work and the results, pay on time, and they aren't a bunch of stinking... I'm sorry, I won't start again.
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The original rape is wrong, but since we're doing it anyway, let the Africans have sloppy seconds!
Oh, and ancient cultures were "happy". For their average expected lifespan of 35 years, threatened with serfdom, barbariansm, random pestilence and death due to diseases they didn't understand... but I suppose nobody can say they weren't content, since history doesn't really record that sort of thing.
And look man, I dunno if you've noticed, but using Slashdot for anti-technology rants is about as dumb as banging your head with a rock. If you don't believe in the promise -- and the past -- of technology, the first thing you should do is fuck off this particular web site (if not all other web sites as well). And I'm not saying that to be rude... honest... it's just kinda obvious!
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Were it not for the technological improvements over the last century, there would BE no wealth for us to discuss the charitable redistribution of.
There is absolutely no question that technology has improved and saved millions upon millions of lives directly, and that it has done much more good than harm. The possible increases in productivity from cheap flat LCD screens is unclear today, but by 2050 their applications may be critical.
At the beginning of the 20th Century, it took 50% of the population of "modern" societies to work in agriculture in order to feed people. Today it takes less than 2%. Along with those changes have come massive decreases in poverty and massive increases in lifespan. Technological advances and the accompanying increases in productivity are the reason why.
The only reason why many nations starve is that they haven't enacted a political/economic system that maximizes human activity. The famine that LiveAid was created to help alleviate was preceded by the Ethiopian nationalization of agriculture. Starving nation's politics/infrastructure is often so screwed up that the aid never gets to the people in need. These are the *real* problems that we have to think about and they make charitable options a little less clear-cut.
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This doesn't mean that individuals are allowed to disrupt work or disrupt teams. That's poison. But it does mean that if Jim doesn't want to fly on Sundays, it doesn't mean that Jim is your new Problem Child. Good employees will go the extra mile -- maybe they just won't go YOUR extra mile.
And so, if someone is good, your focus should first be on what you can do to enable them to do their good work on their terms. And if someone is not so good, your focus should be on what you can do to make them good. If they aren't good and can't be made good only THEN are they the Problem Child.
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This is a pet peeve, so I'm going to rant here.
Firstly, exit interviews are useless as data. To the employee who is leaving for a specific cause, chances are better than 50-50 they aren't going to tell you what that cause was. The wisdom on the street is to lie in your exit interview so that you don't burn any bridges.
Secondly, and more importantly, the exit interview is FAR TOO LATE to address the problem! By the time an exit interview happens, that employee has been disgruntled for between three months to a year (depending on their tolerance and the job market). If somebody leaves for reasons you could have fixed, that means you haven't been listening all along. To suddenly start listening on their last day is ironic and hypocritical.
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That's how I read it too, except my mind went directly to "WHO let the dogs out -- WHO! WHO! WHO! WHO!"
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A: Using the same standards as the US Supreme Court, the software doesn't define it, but it knows it when it sees it.
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Any mousepad is easily converted to be mouseless.
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Carla Howell's "possible second-place finish" in MA didn't happen, but she did achieve double-digit results, a remarkable thing.
Other than that, it looks like the numbers are generally down from past years. The official excuses can now be released from National. Be sure to swallow them hard. Not taking the LP News seriously is grounds for party dismissal.
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