Precisely. Faxes are printers that connect directly to each other. They use the existing system of phone lines for speed and convenience, and they return immediate error feedback when there's a problem. I'm curious why anyone would think such a technology would suddenly stop being useful just because of the internet. Reliably emailing people 50-page PDFs every day can be problematic, cumbersome, and unreliable.
It's not just signatures. Faxes are more reliable. The documents arrive almost immediately in a printed form on the recipient's end, you immediately get an error if the fax was unsuccessful, and you can reliably send large documents without worrying that the recipient's inbox is full or that it will kick the message to a spam folder. If a network is down, fax machines still work.
Faxes are basically printers that directly connect to each other. Of course that's going to be very useful for things like contracts and other documents that need to get somewhere quickly. It's amusing seeing the posters here try to treat the continued existence of the fax machine as some stupid, superstitious conclusion on the part of clueless users.
... apps tend to be really buggy and never really work as required. Either the feel is slow, you accidentally click somewhere or do something that loses all your work...
just like windows apps...
How do awful posts like this make it to +3? You didn't even bother with capitalization.
Your're batshit insane. You're so conditioned from anti-Microsoft stories on Slashdot that you actually use religious terminology like "evil" and believe that offering general computer training--that was Microsoft's only intent, as stated right in the summary--somehow means Microsoft helped spy on Tunisian citizens.
Think of the ridiculous leap being made here. If Microsoft offers computer training that is subsequently used to do something bad, that means Microsoft is responsible? Was Flight Simulator also responsible for 9/11? Does the fact that the Chinese government uses Linux mean open source is contributing to the oppression of Chinese political dissidents? Is torrent software responsible for the piracy of its users?
I mentioned this earlier. Most reasonable posters left Slashdot for Reddit, Hacker News, and even Digg, leaving behind the really hardcore posters who visit Slashdot solely to find reasons to hate Microsoft, the RIAA, Apple, etc. That is the majority of the readership now. Slashdot today caters to a lowest common denominator demographic, similar to what TechCrunch tries to do, where sensationalism and page views are what's most important.
Look at this submission from a week ago, Only Idiots Don't Give Back To Free Software. Not only was the summary worded to make it look like Jim Zemlin was referring to end-users and not downstream organizations, but the submission itself is from the author of the article being linked--Julie Bort at Network World. So the person who knew exactly what their own article was actually about intentionally phrased the summary in a way that would lead to a different conclusion in order to inflame Slashdot readers and drive page views.
Now, we have a story with a "may" headline. These are as bad as question headlines ("Could So-And-So Be Dangerous To Your Health?"), where something is implied, but because an outright claim isn't being made in the headline, the author believes they're technically not lying.
Seriously, all Microsoft knew was giving them computer training. What about we start writing news on how school chemistry classes allow people to make bombs? Or god forbid, cooking tv shows teach you how to use a knife!
Hell, the Chinese government uses its own Linux distribution. That must mean open source is helping China oppress its citizens!
A celebrity can be any VIP or important person, and I'd say that being a co-founder of Google qualifies. I'd also consider Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be celebrities.
Also worth pointing out that the "endorsement" is less of an endorsement and more of a "explanation as to how he took the picture and mentioning it was a pleasant experience."
Praising the service is an endorsement. If you're going to praise it, you should disclose that you're involved with it.
The first problem with your anti-capitalism rant is that you don't actually explain why there should be encroachment on the free market in this situation. There is already an FTC requirement for disclosure. Beyond that, people are free to fund things, and this submission is just pointing out the links between these companies and the lack of disclosure in some cases.
The second, and bigger, problem is that you do what many anti-capitalists do--go on and on about some perceived "evil" (a religious term) inherent to corporations yet demand a solution involving government regulation. Governments are the biggest, most "evil" corporations of all. Bloated, inefficient, and corrupt, they make the laws and therefore are above them. Even worse, they have no incentive to please the people using their services because, unlike a corporation which must compete for customers in order to survive, you are forced to pay the government at gunpoint. Think that's hyperbole? Try not paying your taxes or showing up to court and see what happens.
If there was a corporation that forced customers to pay it and had no incentive to improve its products, no doubt you'd be ranting about it as an evil of capitalism. Yet that's government in a nutshell and is why government regulation should always be approached skeptically and with valid justification.
No it's not. Where's the smoking gun? Prove to me the blimp wasn't paid for using legitimate funds.
You're seriously going to ignore all the financial links between these people? All these people who just so happen to be funding each other and praising each other's products, sometimes without disclosure?
Prove to me that google's planes can't be used for scientific purposes.
From the article: "In fact, the Google founders' jets proved impractical for Nasa's science needs; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt bought a fighter jet to fly those missions instead."
Why the anti-google bent anyway? I mean, your signature implies google is hypocritical because they don't release their secrets and allow scummy advertisers to destroy their search engine.
Pointing out that Google's search engine isn't open source gives me anti-Google bent? What my signature implies is that Google is hypocritical for professing to be an openness advocate when their core product is as closed and proprietary as Microsoft Windows. Hiding its secrets out of fear of advertiser exploitation is the same logic used to defend closed source against security hackers. What happened to the philosophy of "many eyes"?
Jealous of their success? Being paid by Mark Zuckerberg? Or did google touch you in your bathing suit area when you were younger? Or did you just forget to post anonymously while trolling?
And here you go completely insane. Sure, anyone criticizing Google is part of a conspiracy by Mark Zuckerberg.
So why isn't BSD used on the stock exchanges? It simply can't pass messages as quickly.
This is 100% false.
In terms of stability, security, and backwards compatibility, the Unix'es may still be better, but in terms of raw performance and the pace of development Linux wins, and has been winning for a long time.
"Linux is unstable, insecure, and breaks compatibility all the time, but it releases new kernel versions all the time!"
I think you're underestimating sites like Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News, which drive enormous amounts of traffic. Slashdot just isn't as relevant anymore. It is fast becoming a sounding board for fanboys and trolls who think and act a certain way, and the accepted news submissions reflect this. There used to be programming links on the front page and discussions of technical issues.
These days, Slashdot's news cycle is: * Google is great * MS/Apple is evil * Piracy is great * Capitalism is evil * Here's a video game or superhero movie review. * Random Linux kernel news due solely to historical tradition.
Part of this is because there seems to be far fewer Slashdot readers than in the past. The stupider ones have moved to Digg, reddit and Hacker News, apparently.
Actually, most of the normal people who want actual discussion left for those sites, leaving hardcore fanboys here who either troll anonymously or post obvious karma whoring posts that just repeat some obvious belief that the community has (Microsoft is evil, Google is great, piracy is awesome, etc.). Finding insightful posts has gotten more difficult than ever before, and the bizarre moderation trends don't help--everyone is using Underrated/Overrated modifiers like crazy, which don't show up in meta-moderation.
Slashdot no longer gets the huge traffic it used to nor the ability to "Slashdot" large sites. Even the numbers of comments posted to most articles is lower than it used to be.
What's new is that Google has found success (initially, at least; people seem to be wising up lately) among the self-proclaimed and self-absorbed digerati crowd that heretofore viewed themselves somehow above the Marketing that always suckered in the mere mortal consumers beneath them. The smug, sniffy, MS-hating, open source espousing, latte-drinking, Starbucks-frequenting hipsters with fifty-dollar haircuts all fell for the warm gooey spin that using Google products made them better people -- which would have been hilarious just-desserts if it hadn't had the unfortunate side-effect of increasing their market share so much.
Your post is getting pulled back and forth by moderators because it tells a hard truth. Google fans have become as annoying as hardcore Apple fans. They bought into "don't be evil"--a bit of tongue-in-cheek engineering humor--and built up a religion around the company. Because Google competed with Microsoft, that endeared them to techies who saw themselves as too smart to be using Microsoft products. Because Google used Linux, that endeared them to "M$"-hating nerds who saw Google as part of the open source movement. Android because the rallying cry for cross-armed, anti-social cynics standing in the corner of the party watching the iPhone users socialize.
Finally, people have begun to wake up to the fact that Google is not what they perceived it to be. Their refusal to implement Do Not Track in Chrome, which would negatively impact their core business of web ads, is one example. Another is the fact that they claim to be all about openness yet withhold the source to Android from non-privileged partners, as well as ship Flash and AAC/MP3 playback in Chrome. They're even using Android compatibility requirements as a way to obstruct phone vendors that choose not to use Google services. And the Street View scandal is interesting because many don't seem to realize they were "accidentally" collecting that data for four years before finally revealing it under pressure from German investigators (Google fans seem to believe that Google stepped forward and admitted it on their own as a gesture of good will).
However, for so many years, mentioning any of this on tech sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News, and so on would get you voted down relentlessly by obsessive fans who could not accept any criticism of their hero. Google's purpose in appealing to those crowds--and I wouldn't be surprised if Google employees secretly post here and at other sites to help in this--is to win the support of techie communities, who will then defend them and give them a pass for things that companies like Microsoft could never get away with. It's free advertising.
The biggest success story, in my opinion, is convincing techies that they are an open source company and making them forget that their core business is built on a closed source search engine. Google are the gatekeepers of the web, a global megacorp that single-handedly regulates web traffic which makes it enormous profits. It doesn't seem to occur to the open source crowd that the web is tied up behind a closed source product that is as closed and proprietary as Windows. You don't have access to the source; you can't view it and see the algorithms it's using; you can't examine how it's using your personal data. For a crowd that's always so vigilant in attacking other companies for being closed, their acceptance of Google is incredible.
Is this really new to anyone who hasn't lived in the cage for the last 80 years?
It's probably new to a lot of people on Slashdot since they've been conditioned for the last 10 years to believe that Google is a benevolent force trying to better mankind through technology rather than a company selling personal data and advertising space.
That Gawker link is pretty interesting. Apparently, Brin isn't afraid of spreading the wealth to privileged friends, who then go on to publicly support Google and Google's products in the media as well as talk about how Google should be "allowed to regulate itself." Even NASA is involved, letting Google's founders park their party jets at Moffett Field "for scientific missions" even though those jets are impractical for such flights.
For crying out loud, you're bashing Apple for going back on a promise they made 30 years ago. "Music industry" back then meant selling vinyl records. How is that lying anyway? 30 years passed before they decided to start producing MP3 playback devices in a totally different music and technology landscape.
Lest you forget, MS kept Apple alive with a huge cash infusion when they were about to go under. They need each other. They're best frenemies.
After all these years, most people still don't know what the reasons were for the buying of non-voting stock. First of all, Apple wasn't "about to go under." Everyone makes the same mistake in repeating this myth that Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Second, the reason Microsoft bought the stock and continued Office was part of an agreement over the theft of Quicktime source code and its use in Video For Windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Practically every legitimate business ever. You might be shocked to learn that TCP/IP and computing in general is "ancient" too.
Those are general scanning problems. None of them are specific to fax machines.
Precisely. Faxes are printers that connect directly to each other. They use the existing system of phone lines for speed and convenience, and they return immediate error feedback when there's a problem. I'm curious why anyone would think such a technology would suddenly stop being useful just because of the internet. Reliably emailing people 50-page PDFs every day can be problematic, cumbersome, and unreliable.
It's not just signatures. Faxes are more reliable. The documents arrive almost immediately in a printed form on the recipient's end, you immediately get an error if the fax was unsuccessful, and you can reliably send large documents without worrying that the recipient's inbox is full or that it will kick the message to a spam folder. If a network is down, fax machines still work.
Faxes are basically printers that directly connect to each other. Of course that's going to be very useful for things like contracts and other documents that need to get somewhere quickly. It's amusing seeing the posters here try to treat the continued existence of the fax machine as some stupid, superstitious conclusion on the part of clueless users.
That's just how the trademark lawyers feel.
... apps tend to be really buggy and never really work as required. Either the feel is slow, you accidentally click somewhere or do something that loses all your work ...
just like windows apps...
How do awful posts like this make it to +3? You didn't even bother with capitalization.
Your're batshit insane. You're so conditioned from anti-Microsoft stories on Slashdot that you actually use religious terminology like "evil" and believe that offering general computer training--that was Microsoft's only intent, as stated right in the summary--somehow means Microsoft helped spy on Tunisian citizens.
Think of the ridiculous leap being made here. If Microsoft offers computer training that is subsequently used to do something bad, that means Microsoft is responsible? Was Flight Simulator also responsible for 9/11? Does the fact that the Chinese government uses Linux mean open source is contributing to the oppression of Chinese political dissidents? Is torrent software responsible for the piracy of its users?
I mentioned this earlier. Most reasonable posters left Slashdot for Reddit, Hacker News, and even Digg, leaving behind the really hardcore posters who visit Slashdot solely to find reasons to hate Microsoft, the RIAA, Apple, etc. That is the majority of the readership now. Slashdot today caters to a lowest common denominator demographic, similar to what TechCrunch tries to do, where sensationalism and page views are what's most important.
Look at this submission from a week ago, Only Idiots Don't Give Back To Free Software. Not only was the summary worded to make it look like Jim Zemlin was referring to end-users and not downstream organizations, but the submission itself is from the author of the article being linked--Julie Bort at Network World. So the person who knew exactly what their own article was actually about intentionally phrased the summary in a way that would lead to a different conclusion in order to inflame Slashdot readers and drive page views.
Now, we have a story with a "may" headline. These are as bad as question headlines ("Could So-And-So Be Dangerous To Your Health?"), where something is implied, but because an outright claim isn't being made in the headline, the author believes they're technically not lying.
Hell, the Chinese government uses its own Linux distribution. That must mean open source is helping China oppress its citizens!
A celebrity can be any VIP or important person, and I'd say that being a co-founder of Google qualifies. I'd also consider Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to be celebrities.
Praising the service is an endorsement. If you're going to praise it, you should disclose that you're involved with it.
The first problem with your anti-capitalism rant is that you don't actually explain why there should be encroachment on the free market in this situation. There is already an FTC requirement for disclosure. Beyond that, people are free to fund things, and this submission is just pointing out the links between these companies and the lack of disclosure in some cases.
The second, and bigger, problem is that you do what many anti-capitalists do--go on and on about some perceived "evil" (a religious term) inherent to corporations yet demand a solution involving government regulation. Governments are the biggest, most "evil" corporations of all. Bloated, inefficient, and corrupt, they make the laws and therefore are above them. Even worse, they have no incentive to please the people using their services because, unlike a corporation which must compete for customers in order to survive, you are forced to pay the government at gunpoint. Think that's hyperbole? Try not paying your taxes or showing up to court and see what happens.
If there was a corporation that forced customers to pay it and had no incentive to improve its products, no doubt you'd be ranting about it as an evil of capitalism. Yet that's government in a nutshell and is why government regulation should always be approached skeptically and with valid justification.
You're seriously going to ignore all the financial links between these people? All these people who just so happen to be funding each other and praising each other's products, sometimes without disclosure?
From the article: "In fact, the Google founders' jets proved impractical for Nasa's science needs; Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Eric Schmidt bought a fighter jet to fly those missions instead."
Pointing out that Google's search engine isn't open source gives me anti-Google bent? What my signature implies is that Google is hypocritical for professing to be an openness advocate when their core product is as closed and proprietary as Microsoft Windows. Hiding its secrets out of fear of advertiser exploitation is the same logic used to defend closed source against security hackers. What happened to the philosophy of "many eyes"?
And here you go completely insane. Sure, anyone criticizing Google is part of a conspiracy by Mark Zuckerberg.
This is 100% false.
"Linux is unstable, insecure, and breaks compatibility all the time, but it releases new kernel versions all the time!"
Um, yes.
It's also really weird how you associate FreeBSD with "commercial unix."
I think you're underestimating sites like Digg, Reddit, and Hacker News, which drive enormous amounts of traffic. Slashdot just isn't as relevant anymore. It is fast becoming a sounding board for fanboys and trolls who think and act a certain way, and the accepted news submissions reflect this. There used to be programming links on the front page and discussions of technical issues.
These days, Slashdot's news cycle is:
* Google is great
* MS/Apple is evil
* Piracy is great
* Capitalism is evil
* Here's a video game or superhero movie review.
* Random Linux kernel news due solely to historical tradition.
Actually, most of the normal people who want actual discussion left for those sites, leaving hardcore fanboys here who either troll anonymously or post obvious karma whoring posts that just repeat some obvious belief that the community has (Microsoft is evil, Google is great, piracy is awesome, etc.). Finding insightful posts has gotten more difficult than ever before, and the bizarre moderation trends don't help--everyone is using Underrated/Overrated modifiers like crazy, which don't show up in meta-moderation.
Slashdot no longer gets the huge traffic it used to nor the ability to "Slashdot" large sites. Even the numbers of comments posted to most articles is lower than it used to be.
Your post is getting pulled back and forth by moderators because it tells a hard truth. Google fans have become as annoying as hardcore Apple fans. They bought into "don't be evil"--a bit of tongue-in-cheek engineering humor--and built up a religion around the company. Because Google competed with Microsoft, that endeared them to techies who saw themselves as too smart to be using Microsoft products. Because Google used Linux, that endeared them to "M$"-hating nerds who saw Google as part of the open source movement. Android because the rallying cry for cross-armed, anti-social cynics standing in the corner of the party watching the iPhone users socialize.
Finally, people have begun to wake up to the fact that Google is not what they perceived it to be. Their refusal to implement Do Not Track in Chrome, which would negatively impact their core business of web ads, is one example. Another is the fact that they claim to be all about openness yet withhold the source to Android from non-privileged partners, as well as ship Flash and AAC/MP3 playback in Chrome. They're even using Android compatibility requirements as a way to obstruct phone vendors that choose not to use Google services. And the Street View scandal is interesting because many don't seem to realize they were "accidentally" collecting that data for four years before finally revealing it under pressure from German investigators (Google fans seem to believe that Google stepped forward and admitted it on their own as a gesture of good will).
However, for so many years, mentioning any of this on tech sites like Slashdot, Reddit, Hacker News, and so on would get you voted down relentlessly by obsessive fans who could not accept any criticism of their hero. Google's purpose in appealing to those crowds--and I wouldn't be surprised if Google employees secretly post here and at other sites to help in this--is to win the support of techie communities, who will then defend them and give them a pass for things that companies like Microsoft could never get away with. It's free advertising.
The biggest success story, in my opinion, is convincing techies that they are an open source company and making them forget that their core business is built on a closed source search engine. Google are the gatekeepers of the web, a global megacorp that single-handedly regulates web traffic which makes it enormous profits. It doesn't seem to occur to the open source crowd that the web is tied up behind a closed source product that is as closed and proprietary as Windows. You don't have access to the source; you can't view it and see the algorithms it's using; you can't examine how it's using your personal data. For a crowd that's always so vigilant in attacking other companies for being closed, their acceptance of Google is incredible.
You already do every time you use the Google search engine.
It's probably new to a lot of people on Slashdot since they've been conditioned for the last 10 years to believe that Google is a benevolent force trying to better mankind through technology rather than a company selling personal data and advertising space.
That Gawker link is pretty interesting. Apparently, Brin isn't afraid of spreading the wealth to privileged friends, who then go on to publicly support Google and Google's products in the media as well as talk about how Google should be "allowed to regulate itself." Even NASA is involved, letting Google's founders park their party jets at Moffett Field "for scientific missions" even though those jets are impractical for such flights.
Android devices before and after the iPhone/iPad
To deny the obvious design cloning is to reach an extreme level of Apple-hating that even I can't understand.
For crying out loud, you're bashing Apple for going back on a promise they made 30 years ago . "Music industry" back then meant selling vinyl records. How is that lying anyway? 30 years passed before they decided to start producing MP3 playback devices in a totally different music and technology landscape.
You're totally wrong about goto statements.
Why do some people call it "OS/X"? Where are you getting the slash from? This isn't OS/2 Warp.
After all these years, most people still don't know what the reasons were for the buying of non-voting stock. First of all, Apple wasn't "about to go under." Everyone makes the same mistake in repeating this myth that Apple was on the verge of bankruptcy. Second, the reason Microsoft bought the stock and continued Office was part of an agreement over the theft of Quicktime source code and its use in Video For Windows.