1. Get an MBA
2. Find a startup
3. Front some money to succesful startup
4. Get on startup's payroll
5. Fire everyone
6. Divide profits generated before your arrival amongst your VC friends
7. Run company into ground, walk away
8. Find a startup...
Most people can't even grok the meaning of a #5.1.1 bounce that says "you have been blocked, contact your ISP". Inevitably, they call their rcpt friend, bitch that rcpt ISP is blocking them, the rcpt friend calls their ISP, and the ISP then has to explain that maybe the mail-from friend should get a fucken clue and call the mail-from ISP, just like it stated in the original message. Idiots.
Add to that the scenario where A sends a message to B, B autoresponds to A to verify the address and A is supposed to confirm, except A calls support or the kid next door to ask what this cryptic message from MAILER-SATAN is about and how to make it go away. A confirms (maybe) and sends to B, if it ever gets that far becasue what if B's autoresponse-for-verification gets auto'd back by A asking for it's own autoresponse. You think the wasted CPU cycles and bandwidth are bad now, this challenge-reponse idea will do more to kill email than any SPAM can.
>I'm still not convinced that evolution answers the question of where we come from...
That's OK. Scientific theory is far from perfect. It is self-correcting though. Theory gives way to empirical data, and things like Bohr's model of the atom give way to de Broglie's model. Science itself evolves. I'm no evolution theory zealot, but I've read some of the Creationist's material, and it is sorely lacking in consistency at the very least.
Evolution is IMHO the best description available for what is observed. Someday it will be usurped, hopefully sooner than later. Sorry bout the entropy rant, I also subscribe to Complexity theory....
Well, it is certainly *not* predetermined. Predictable, maybe, predetermined no. Therefore, in my books, it's random. Hell, predictable is still random. Ask Schrodinger or Heisenberg.
There's no telling what bugs will be introduced or found after a new patch or feature is added. How is that non-random? I intend to eat breakfast in an hour, that doesnt mean all will go as planned. Just because so-and-so plans to add feature X doesnt make it a done-deal. Linus could drop dead tommorrow. Random.
Hmm, it just ocurred to me that a possible solution is to have a small OS running in memory. It listens to the network (environment) then it takes stray arp and broadcast packets and assembles the data into something useful. That takes care of eat and interact, and it if can "ingest" enough, then it can "replicate"
See, protons never degrade (so they say) which means the universe has the advantage of a really long time to let matter interact and do nifty things, like form stars and linux kernels. We dont have those kind of resources to play around with, letting our perpetual motion machine chug away at creating an OS from random cosmic rays coming through eth0. Plus, we may be on the wrong side of a thermodynamic curve, where it is increasingly difficult for systems to organise themselves spontaneously in local systems. Maybe it was entropically (is that a word?) easier to assemble life 600 million years ago or a billion. We mgiht be at the middle-age Bday party of the Universe and not even know it, it' all thermodynamically downhill from here folks...
Well, for one, your hypothetical kernel has no environemental feedback. It doesnt react or respond to its surroundings. Its state is too fixed. On or Off. Optimal or Sub-optimal. Under those conditions, Life is impossible. Your kernel needs room for a state == 'bootable, no usb drivers loaded', and still replicate itself -- compile and infect the next machine on the net. To introduce randomness into the kernel you need a system that functions with a broken kernel.
Wait. Stratch that. The current Linux kernel *is* random. Everytime a new patch goes in, that's a random event taking place with unkown consequnces. And the feedback mechanism is whether it compiles or not. Then it's released after some testing, and it goes up against the environment (the users). If it craps out, we'll wait for the next generation. Who wants to use 2.4.15. Not Me. Looks like the kernel *has* been evolving. The kernel is alwyas broken because its not optimal, and is under pressure to improve, better xyz support, etc.
And don't even get me started on "human intelligence" or any intelligence for that matter. I'll conced to more complex wiring. How many of your waking hours are devoted to the routines of your lizard brain? How many signals from your body never get to the frontal lobe because they get handled at the base of your spine? How many hours devoted to competing with the herd for resources? Wake, defecate, urinate, eat, work (used to be forage for berries), eat, socialise (so they dont kill you in your sleep for food), go home, eat, relax and devote some time to higher brain functions, usually Sports Night or Martha Stewart depending on your bent, sleep, rinse lather repeat.
>Surely it would be genetically better for me to mate with as many girls as possible?
It is, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise;)
For both male and female animals, their biological imperative is to procreate. For females, procreation is a serious long-term investement in time and resources. For males, it's not. In higher mammals and primates (note they are usually animals with complex societies), it is in the best interest of the female to have a male around to protect her and *his* offspring (if it's not his offspring, what the hell does he care?) and provide resources while she raises the babies.
Most males are solitary animals (some travel in small packs) that protect their territory and invest time and energy into being the baddest motherfucker around, just in case any young shithead gets any ideas come breeding season.
Most females travel in groups with immediate and extended family members, and for the most part make a collective effort in the raising of offspring. And they avoid males usually as the males will try to kill offspring they have not sired. In the "less-evolved" species, females tend to be solitary as well. There are exceptions. Bears are highly developed, as are cheetahs, but they do not tend to form social groups -- male or female. Lions form harems, some birds form pairbonds. The point is that generally, males procreate amongst many females and compete against many other males. Females hang out together and generally mate with the "best" males, usually the one who kicked the most ass.
Now the same generally holds true for humans. Except our higher brain functions and learned behaviour can override our urge to hump everything in sight. Society deems it bad to do X, so X is bad. Who/What is society? Why, the Illuminati of course.
Just kidding. Our morals are transient and in flux.
Society defines our morals. Society is allowing the Holocaust to happen. Society is the Civil Rights movement. Society is the flavour of the week in essence, as our morals are really just a response to the environmental pressure of today. Those same co-operative alliances (social pacts and norms) that keep you safe at night from burglars and rapists also keep you from climbing in open windows and following women around tasting their urine for days on end ala Discovery Channel. That's why I said that solitary or altruistic evolutionary strategies were both a gamble. Our evolutionary choice to form social groups - an inherently complex model - has caused us to gain advantages in defense and predation at the expense of certain procreative strategies.
Everybody knows that God created the world in six days. YHWH calls it "Release Candidate One". He stayed up for six nights with a pack of RedBull coding this pig and then released it for beta testing. On the seventh day, he let the project languish on sourceforge and hasn't touched it since.
First, the thing to keep in mind is sucess is not being better at anything, success is passing on your genes. If you manage to pass on your genes, you're done. For all intents and purposes, you can drop dead at that point, your job is done. Now it's up to your offspring to procreate. As long as they manage that, the "species" is OK. Just keep poppin' em out faster than they drop dead or get eaten.
Second, nobody said you need to grow a fully formed stomach when there was none before. I've already has this conversation on/. with some guy about the eyeball, I don't want to have it again.
Stop thinking stomach, and start thinking proto-organs, or even single cells that exist symbiotically within another organism. Ameobas don't have stomachs, they have, I dunno, specialised cell groupings that secrete a 'digestive' chemical that extracts nutrients from any external piece of whatever that happens to float by. This is not a "chicken/egg" problem, so stop coming at it from that angle. As for those 999,999 generations of nonworking "stomachs": that took a whole 2 or 3 days of debugging in a pond somewhere to get the right one, way back 600 million yrs ago. After that it was just code tweaking.
What is it with people and evolution, that they can't imagine some slimy chemical mud that has "intent" - in so far as it gravitates toward another chemical gradient (food) - being alive?
Imagine Q or Rod Serling standing next to a small puddle explaining this to you OK? Here we have a pool of chemical x that naturally moves towards chemical y. In a few moments, this chemical soup will undergo a common reaction involving common chemicals. It will become "alive". It will contain a few simple organic compounds that, given some quiet time to themselves, will intermingle and maybe even begin to replicate - the ablity to harvest nearby chemical compounds and assemble them in a *near* mirror image. Hell some of those compunds can be from other "proto-organisms" and we already have predator and prey evolving. Neat huh?
Asking how stomachs and eyeballs formed while imagining them as real functioning eyeballs and assholes is like asking how you get a fully formed modern man equipped with a cell-phone -- from a club-swinging neanderthal. You don't. Because the neanderthal never picked up a club with the express purpose of building a cell-phone. If he did, he would have quickly found that he was without the proper environment to create one, let alone NEED one.
So too, did early life not set out to outfit itself with a stomach, but instead went for the more practical "I just found a new way to eat my food by actively enveloping it instead of passively absorbing it from my environment -- COOL"
what follows sounds like a linux bash but i cant be bothered to clean it up, take what you want. I'm getting tired....
And your comp sci analogy doesnt work either, as building the Linux kernel that way is akin in biological complexity to building a chamaeleon or something from scratch. Try creating a kernel that can "eat", "defend" and "replicate"(sounds like windoze). Your Linux/chaemaleon is wasting time trying to be 10 different species/server tasks. Whereas a flatworm just does what it needs to divide and move on. Maybe you should write the comp sci equiv of a flatworm (haha windoze again), then maybe your flatworm kernel will be able to withstand random mutations?
Co-operation and altruism are - in a bilogical sense - utterly self-serving. How contrary.
It's better to hunt in a pack, or group together in a colony, as I have a better chance of survival in a group. Collective resources, collective defense, etc. More chicks around too.
In the end, we can gamble our life against the Reaper alone, or in a group. Either way, you're still gambling. Everything is amoral in the face of survival.
Paul: Fuck You. You don't know shit. How's the page views today? That's what I thought.
CmdTaco: Stop feeding the trolls. This guy just made $x money because you decided to link to his crappy site. Now everyone is here literally frothing at the mouth. If this was real life someone would've been stoned to death by now or branded a witch. Is/. a tabloid now?
Everyone:
Lies and statistics. August 2001 huh? So the stats were last compiled just after Code Red, but not since Code Red II, not since the UPnP fiasco, not since the most secure Windows OS ever? Nice to see "journalists" grouping distros together on the basis of which *kernel* they use. If you want to assess the security of *linux* then only focus on expoits that compromise the kernel. If it's just another BIND or wuFTP vulnerability, count it just once for "OSes that use that GPL'd kernel*" *note: packages included with each distro are not uniform across platforms. Not all Linux distros are alike.
But that is rational and fair, and we can't have that can we? No. We need to increase page views and banner hits, we need to convince so-and-so in management that *OS-not-right-for-the-job* is the right tool for the job.
Windows on the desktop and *nix in the server room; the Buddha smiled and farted. And God said "It is Good".
My gf just bought a DVD player. The first DVD she bought was Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1. (She's a big fan) I've only now begun to watch this series and am seriously hooked. So we spent a whole weekend watching Buffy Season 1, me asking a million questions trying to catch up, and when we watched all 12 episodes, we wanted MORE. But Buffy Season 2 on DVD doesnt come out until June. Bummer.
But wait. Somewhere, locked and hidden away, some broadcaster has tapes of every Buffy episode to date, or TNG or Voyager. And I have a fast ass net connection. In fact, our cable provider gives us net access AND digital cable. So what's the fucken problem people?!? Why the hell can I not browse through every single recorded song ever (like in the Qwest commercial - ride the light?), or go to buffyslayer.com and get divx's of season 2. It could be a streaming video, a download , or a $0.50 charge to my cable account per episode. Delivered via the net, or via the TV signal. Either way, the *demand* exists.
I'm sure my gf will still get the DVD, so they'd be making money off our buffy-crack addiction today, and tommorrow on the DVD too.
The internet has changed the economies of media. Sight, sound, and speech are no longer subject to the laws of scarcity. The only scarcity is that which has not been created. So one of the most lucrative distibution markets in North America is also the one rendered obsolete. I need food and clothing and housing and transportation; those items cannot be delivered over the net.
But my newspaper, music, TV, movies, and p0rn can all be delivered near instantaneously to me over a fast net connection. Except their not. Because the media companies are holding their IP hostage and creating a scarcity of goods where it does not exist.
Either the consumer will be subject to random search and seizure, using only sanctioned software on sanctioned hardware (linux on PS2, or Xbox), or the consumer will get most of their content for such a low cost that freeloading will be pointless and unnecessary. The cost needs to be so low that hunting on IRC or your favourite P2P will be a waste of time. Because once your media is out there, it can and will find its way on the net, and will float around for a really long time. Otherwise the need to control the content will create a society of US vs. THEM, PIRATES vs. CORPORATIONS.
Billboards:
"Hillary says: The Movement needs YOUR help! Just say NO to Piracy!"
Grade 1:
"OK class, today we are going to learn about ethics on the Internet."
Nightly "news":
"TONIGHT! On KING12! The Mayor comments on the week-long police raids on Internet Piracy Operations throughout the city. Call 1 800 IMA SNITCH to help out!"
I see the clothes the girls are wearing haven't changed much;)
Someone should open a nightclub/lounge so we can all (apologies to the orignal) "munch pills in the dark and listen to repetitive beats", and remember the good ol' late seveites and early eighties. This time around we might be able to attract more girls, or one cold always hope.
First, I would like to say that for the most part, being a cynic, I can't help but agree with the points made in the review. I have not read the book, I am simply in agreement with Katz's perspective. On the whole (IMHO), the Web affects few people in dramatic ways.
That said, and now straying Offtopic, the problem with the article, and what makes it difficult to digest and get a sense of it's *direction* is the fact that Katz seems completely unable to think for himself. Most people seem to have a point of view, or set of principles which guide and form their opinions. Of all the Katz articles I have read, he never, ever, has anything to say. In effect, Katz offers the reader no value in the time spent reading his critiques. Perhaps if there was some consistency to his writing that gave us some insight into what *his* opinion was, rather than this flip-flop wishy-washy game of playing devil's advocate. Without a style or foundation to start from, he is simply a parrot, trying on a different persona week to week.
Pick a stance for Christ's sake already and run with it, Jon. Today the net brings us closer, tommorrow you'll be saying that it drives a wedge between the haves and have-nots. Yesterday P2P was revolutionary and the masses were poised to overthrow our corporate taskmasters. Now you say it's all pr0n and chat? Boy, if it wasn't for your savvy compass, I'd be lost. Stop trolling and baiting your readers, switching sides will-nilly. Is this really your opinion, or the is it the one you feel will generate the most discussion? Better to speak your mind, back it up, and take your lumps. Instead you pander to your audience, depriving them of a writer's unique perspective, in exchange for the transitory acceptance of the mob.
I'm not sure if he was taking shots at himself, but this:
Despite the staggering amount of hype everyone has had to endure (and some of us have contributed to)...
is exactly what I'm talking about. Have you had an epiphany? Have you come to realise you are The Hypist?
Another one:
This is bad news for over-heated tech writers... Yes, Jon it certainly is.
I don't know if you have to fill out your articles, or (giving you the benefit of the doubt) you are limited in how much you can write, but perhaps next time try excerpting a chapter or a coherent piece of the book in question, and then critique it. Lambaste the author, agree with him/her or just put a different spin on their writings, even extending it to make it applicable to your audience.
Instead, you snip out a few choice pieces on eBay (eBay! Jeebus!) and then pull a post-modern cynic routine on us. Thanks Jon, you're one of us now. Come on man, at least try.
Drifting back ontopic, I feel that Jon's "opinion" is lucid. The web is an extension of our lives, and it has and will continue to enhance and enrich our lives, but it is not the revolutionary force that was promised. No surprise there, few things are. Radio, TV, Teflon, nuclear power. All these technologies have enchanced our lives and enriched them, but no one technology is revolutionary, only the aspirations of those who wish to benefit and profit from them. The closest thing to a cultural earthquake we have is the *sum* of our achievements over the last century.
I'm sure that with the advent of television many speculations and ventures were born and then died indignant deaths, both culturally and commercially, for better or worse. So it goes for our current baby, The Internet. Basically, (IMHO) I think we all know this, and it doesn't take Katz to tell us this.
So Jon, go home, take a bath, and find a subject you actually have an opinion about, even better - find something you're passionate about, and come back next week with something that this audience can chew on, OK?
Sounds more like a problem with Vietnamese gangs, than cybercafes. Kids who want to beat/kill the f*ck out of each other will gather in lots of places. Arcade halls, shopping malls, theatres, pool halls and cybercafes; the one thing in common is that they are all places where people too young to drink can hang out and socialise.
How many poundings and deaths occur at bars and nightclubs? I used to live above a nightclub in the worst neighbourhood in Vancouver. Every weekend the street below would literally fill up with suburbanite gangstas from Seattle and the little fuckers would brandish pistols and shit all the time. I have no idea how many of my tax dollars were spent on the local police manpower and patrol cars that were charged with watching these jerkoffs *every single weekend* for 3 years.
In fact, this is more an issue of "do you know where your children are and what they are doing?" than anything else.
This is just another "news item" placing the blame on anything but the very people that brought them into the world.
Hrmph. Must be nice in Ohio. Anyways, I really have no idea what these asses get paid. Also I'm in Canada; us igloo people don't get to command the high prices. I know I'd do a memory upgrade for $40/hr tho.
a little story...
I make $12/hr. I had a contracted network consultant accuse my company of having stale or poisoned DNS records for his domain. His domain is down, blah, blah, no mail, etc.
WHOIS reveals 2 namehosts with some other hosting company. Nothing to do with us at all. No MX is configured. Then he tells me (lol!) that he thought it was setup that their webhost would handle DNS only for the website, and the webhost would "forward" DNS queries to one of those free dynamic IP DNS services, who would then point to his Exchange server, running on an ADSL line without a static IP. Idiot didn't understand the first damn thing about DNS. I must've asked him a dozen times "is there anyone senior to you?"
What an ass. Like I said, I have no idea how much these clowns make, but I see this kind of crap all the time. Seeing these PnP net appliances pisses me off even more, it means more calls that involve gems like "well, there is a box in the corner, but our IT fellow told us never to touch it. What are you doing to fix our internet?"
Just what the world needs more of.
Contract "IT consultants" setting these things up in small offices everywhere. When the boxen hiccup, nobody bothers to call the "IT" assh*le that set them up. Instead, call your ISP and piggyback their support policy to avoid a $40/hr support charge from your "consultant".
"Mrs./Mr. [RealEstate Agent|Travel Agent|Secretary|Accountant|Legal Assitant|Temp] your mail server is not working. I'm sorry, it is not our problem. Please call your contractor."
If you want to hack around on a desktop system, go with 2.4. If you want to set up a server and rely upon it, stick with the late 2.2 series.
Go with Slack, Debian, or RedHat on the server, and Mandrake on the desktop. Personally, I don't like Debian's apt-get, I prefer source and you can break Debian by mixing the two (or should I say, I broke it), and I never mess with rpm on Redhat, I hate rpms too. Like I said, I deal with source 95% of the time. Which is why my hacking and development boxen are Linux, but my servers are FreeBSD. Way more cool nifty shit is ported to Linux, whereas I see BSD as my workhorse.
Hmm, I'm running XP on a P2 with 650MB RAM. No complaints here. 'Tis a bit slow due to the eyecandy, but still a workhorse.
And...ZoneAlarm???
Frankly, ZoneAlarm is a steaming pile. Maybe you should consider W2K doing R&R+NAT, I can testify to that being far more stable, although the filtering rules are limited. Still better than a consumer Win OS doing internet connection sharing, that's jsut asking for a headache.
What a fucking crock of shit. Whoever modded this as a troll is FUCKIN IDIOT. Fuck you.
Troll = Tacosnotting FAQ/pagefilling post/some comment about Katz and boys and Cowboy Neil.
It's ok for Mr.Man to say he has great DSL service, but it's a troll for someone in the friggin industry to relate his experience? FUCK YOU.
I watched as all the/. sheep complained about cable for the longest time, and about how great DSL was. Well, the opinions changed pretty fast. Canada has far better broadband prices and reliability than in the US. That's not a troll, its a godamn fact. Our providers arent going tits up left and right. My cable company had the forsight to get the hell outta business with Excite last year before the shit hit the fan, did yours?
BTW, I don't work for either of those comapnies I mentioned you close-minded twit, go fuck yourself. I have 46 Karma, do your worst you little punk, I post enough good comments to actually contribute, and I say what I want, when I want. I always mod up, never down, and any offtopic or flamebait mods will get metamodded as unfair.
This was supposed to be a response to this, but I feel that it applies to the aarticle as a whole as well. Here goes...
Oh man, you sure want it all dont you? And for only $4.95/month!?!
As someone who has been running a small, non-profit (illegal) streaming audio service, and is now offline:
Do you really think that it is possible/feasible to host an all-you-can-eat, $5/month, 200KB/sec filesharing service that offers files that are encoded at avg. 128kbps and are approx 10-15MB in size, in a non-proprietary format, with no DRM?
Let me see, you college kids with "faster than God" connections go to class all day after queuing up (conservative estimate) 50 songs @ 10MB apiece. You pay $5/month. You do this only once a day, everyday for 30 days each month. So, not counting the bandwidth lost to control frames, dead tranfers, and lost packets, lets say you use 50*10MB*30 days=15000MB or 15GB of bandwidth. Now, lets say I find a *really* good provider that will give me 1 managed server with a single burstable 100Mb line and 100GB of traffic/month at a cost of $300/month. Extra bandwidth is $5/GB.
I have 100GB of traffic at a cost of $300, avg user eats up 15GB for a fee of $5/month...
I just lost $266.65. Any traffic on top of that is charged at $5/GB. Lets say I have only ONE more user who uses only 10GB/month. 10GB*$5/GB=$50 and they only paid $5, so add another $45 to my bill, and then add sales tax and whatever and I'm broke. And then you go and share all your downloads on Kazaa/Morpheus, and nobody needs to go use my service. Yay. And this is a single, non-redundant server on a single, non-redundant line. Factors such as overhead for the website, license fees, will eat up more money.
This just happened to me, I was running a streaming service, no fees, no downloads, no sign-ups, just music. I had one popular month and I'm $800 lighter in the wallet, and the site is bye-bye. I didn't charge because it's not my music, and I didn't allow downloads because the songs are only on vinyl and I wanted the entertainment value of my site to remain. Not a great business model on my part, but the bandwidth issue will affect anyone, including/.
I want to see more online music, and I want to see artists get paid too. The problem is, despite the low production/reproduction costs of digital media, the *distribution* costs remain high. Only the big boys can play, whcih means no indie bands, private radio stations, eclectic websites or whatever.
I was actually referring to MS commandeering technology and featurism in general. Let's not start a flame war about the origin of the GUI shall we? The first GUI was the breast;)
Slashdot Mirror
Copyright. Kills innovation dead.©
Like any journalist hack worth his ego, Katz manages to tie any major socio-political event to the most trivial of topics.
Next week: Anthrax as a new P2P platform in the wake of Columbine. First in a series.
or "Slash 'n Burn your way to financial success©"
1. Get an MBA
2. Find a startup
3. Front some money to succesful startup
4. Get on startup's payroll
5. Fire everyone
6. Divide profits generated before your arrival amongst your VC friends
7. Run company into ground, walk away
8. Find a startup...
Most people can't even grok the meaning of a #5.1.1 bounce that says "you have been blocked, contact your ISP". Inevitably, they call their rcpt friend, bitch that rcpt ISP is blocking them, the rcpt friend calls their ISP, and the ISP then has to explain that maybe the mail-from friend should get a fucken clue and call the mail-from ISP, just like it stated in the original message. Idiots.
Add to that the scenario where A sends a message to B, B autoresponds to A to verify the address and A is supposed to confirm, except A calls support or the kid next door to ask what this cryptic message from MAILER-SATAN is about and how to make it go away. A confirms (maybe) and sends to B, if it ever gets that far becasue what if B's autoresponse-for-verification gets auto'd back by A asking for it's own autoresponse. You think the wasted CPU cycles and bandwidth are bad now, this challenge-reponse idea will do more to kill email than any SPAM can.
>I'm still not convinced that evolution answers the question of where we come from...
That's OK. Scientific theory is far from perfect. It is self-correcting though. Theory gives way to empirical data, and things like Bohr's model of the atom give way to de Broglie's model. Science itself evolves. I'm no evolution theory zealot, but I've read some of the Creationist's material, and it is sorely lacking in consistency at the very least.
Evolution is IMHO the best description available for what is observed. Someday it will be usurped, hopefully sooner than later. Sorry bout the entropy rant, I also subscribe to Complexity theory....
Well, it is certainly *not* predetermined. Predictable, maybe, predetermined no. Therefore, in my books, it's random. Hell, predictable is still random. Ask Schrodinger or Heisenberg.
There's no telling what bugs will be introduced or found after a new patch or feature is added. How is that non-random? I intend to eat breakfast in an hour, that doesnt mean all will go as planned. Just because so-and-so plans to add feature X doesnt make it a done-deal. Linus could drop dead tommorrow. Random.
Hmm, it just ocurred to me that a possible solution is to have a small OS running in memory. It listens to the network (environment) then it takes stray arp and broadcast packets and assembles the data into something useful. That takes care of eat and interact, and it if can "ingest" enough, then it can "replicate"
See, protons never degrade (so they say) which means the universe has the advantage of a really long time to let matter interact and do nifty things, like form stars and linux kernels. We dont have those kind of resources to play around with, letting our perpetual motion machine chug away at creating an OS from random cosmic rays coming through eth0. Plus, we may be on the wrong side of a thermodynamic curve, where it is increasingly difficult for systems to organise themselves spontaneously in local systems. Maybe it was entropically (is that a word?) easier to assemble life 600 million years ago or a billion. We mgiht be at the middle-age Bday party of the Universe and not even know it, it' all thermodynamically downhill from here folks...
Just thinking(farting?) out loud.
Well, for one, your hypothetical kernel has no environemental feedback. It doesnt react or respond to its surroundings. Its state is too fixed. On or Off. Optimal or Sub-optimal. Under those conditions, Life is impossible. Your kernel needs room for a state == 'bootable, no usb drivers loaded', and still replicate itself -- compile and infect the next machine on the net. To introduce randomness into the kernel you need a system that functions with a broken kernel.
Wait. Stratch that. The current Linux kernel *is* random. Everytime a new patch goes in, that's a random event taking place with unkown consequnces. And the feedback mechanism is whether it compiles or not. Then it's released after some testing, and it goes up against the environment (the users). If it craps out, we'll wait for the next generation. Who wants to use 2.4.15. Not Me. Looks like the kernel *has* been evolving. The kernel is alwyas broken because its not optimal, and is under pressure to improve, better xyz support, etc.
And don't even get me started on "human intelligence" or any intelligence for that matter. I'll conced to more complex wiring. How many of your waking hours are devoted to the routines of your lizard brain? How many signals from your body never get to the frontal lobe because they get handled at the base of your spine? How many hours devoted to competing with the herd for resources? Wake, defecate, urinate, eat, work (used to be forage for berries), eat, socialise (so they dont kill you in your sleep for food), go home, eat, relax and devote some time to higher brain functions, usually Sports Night or Martha Stewart depending on your bent, sleep, rinse lather repeat.
>Surely it would be genetically better for me to mate with as many girls as possible?
;)
It is, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise
For both male and female animals, their biological imperative is to procreate. For females, procreation is a serious long-term investement in time and resources. For males, it's not. In higher mammals and primates (note they are usually animals with complex societies), it is in the best interest of the female to have a male around to protect her and *his* offspring (if it's not his offspring, what the hell does he care?) and provide resources while she raises the babies.
Most males are solitary animals (some travel in small packs) that protect their territory and invest time and energy into being the baddest motherfucker around, just in case any young shithead gets any ideas come breeding season.
Most females travel in groups with immediate and extended family members, and for the most part make a collective effort in the raising of offspring. And they avoid males usually as the males will try to kill offspring they have not sired. In the "less-evolved" species, females tend to be solitary as well. There are exceptions. Bears are highly developed, as are cheetahs, but they do not tend to form social groups -- male or female. Lions form harems, some birds form pairbonds. The point is that generally, males procreate amongst many females and compete against many other males. Females hang out together and generally mate with the "best" males, usually the one who kicked the most ass.
Now the same generally holds true for humans. Except our higher brain functions and learned behaviour can override our urge to hump everything in sight. Society deems it bad to do X, so X is bad. Who/What is society? Why, the Illuminati of course.
Just kidding. Our morals are transient and in flux.
Society defines our morals. Society is allowing the Holocaust to happen. Society is the Civil Rights movement. Society is the flavour of the week in essence, as our morals are really just a response to the environmental pressure of today. Those same co-operative alliances (social pacts and norms) that keep you safe at night from burglars and rapists also keep you from climbing in open windows and following women around tasting their urine for days on end ala Discovery Channel. That's why I said that solitary or altruistic evolutionary strategies were both a gamble. Our evolutionary choice to form social groups - an inherently complex model - has caused us to gain advantages in defense and predation at the expense of certain procreative strategies.
Ha. You Heathens. Go to Hell.
Everybody knows that God created the world in six days. YHWH calls it "Release Candidate One". He stayed up for six nights with a pack of RedBull coding this pig and then released it for beta testing. On the seventh day, he let the project languish on sourceforge and hasn't touched it since.
First, the thing to keep in mind is sucess is not being better at anything, success is passing on your genes. If you manage to pass on your genes, you're done. For all intents and purposes, you can drop dead at that point, your job is done. Now it's up to your offspring to procreate. As long as they manage that, the "species" is OK. Just keep poppin' em out faster than they drop dead or get eaten.
/. with some guy about the eyeball, I don't want to have it again.
Second, nobody said you need to grow a fully formed stomach when there was none before. I've already has this conversation on
Stop thinking stomach, and start thinking proto-organs, or even single cells that exist symbiotically within another organism. Ameobas don't have stomachs, they have, I dunno, specialised cell groupings that secrete a 'digestive' chemical that extracts nutrients from any external piece of whatever that happens to float by. This is not a "chicken/egg" problem, so stop coming at it from that angle. As for those 999,999 generations of nonworking "stomachs": that took a whole 2 or 3 days of debugging in a pond somewhere to get the right one, way back 600 million yrs ago. After that it was just code tweaking.
What is it with people and evolution, that they can't imagine some slimy chemical mud that has "intent" - in so far as it gravitates toward another chemical gradient (food) - being alive?
Imagine Q or Rod Serling standing next to a small puddle explaining this to you OK? Here we have a pool of chemical x that naturally moves towards chemical y. In a few moments, this chemical soup will undergo a common reaction involving common chemicals. It will become "alive". It will contain a few simple organic compounds that, given some quiet time to themselves, will intermingle and maybe even begin to replicate - the ablity to harvest nearby chemical compounds and assemble them in a *near* mirror image. Hell some of those compunds can be from other "proto-organisms" and we already have predator and prey evolving. Neat huh?
Asking how stomachs and eyeballs formed while imagining them as real functioning eyeballs and assholes is like asking how you get a fully formed modern man equipped with a cell-phone -- from a club-swinging neanderthal. You don't. Because the neanderthal never picked up a club with the express purpose of building a cell-phone. If he did, he would have quickly found that he was without the proper environment to create one, let alone NEED one.
So too, did early life not set out to outfit itself with a stomach, but instead went for the more practical "I just found a new way to eat my food by actively enveloping it instead of passively absorbing it from my environment -- COOL"
what follows sounds like a linux bash but i cant be bothered to clean it up, take what you want. I'm getting tired....
And your comp sci analogy doesnt work either, as building the Linux kernel that way is akin in biological complexity to building a chamaeleon or something from scratch. Try creating a kernel that can "eat", "defend" and "replicate"(sounds like windoze). Your Linux/chaemaleon is wasting time trying to be 10 different species/server tasks. Whereas a flatworm just does what it needs to divide and move on. Maybe you should write the comp sci equiv of a flatworm (haha windoze again), then maybe your flatworm kernel will be able to withstand random mutations?
Co-operation and altruism are - in a bilogical sense - utterly self-serving. How contrary.
It's better to hunt in a pack, or group together in a colony, as I have a better chance of survival in a group. Collective resources, collective defense, etc. More chicks around too.
In the end, we can gamble our life against the Reaper alone, or in a group. Either way, you're still gambling. Everything is amoral in the face of survival.
Just to cut throught the FUD on both sides here:
/. a tabloid now?
Paul: Fuck You. You don't know shit. How's the page views today? That's what I thought.
CmdTaco: Stop feeding the trolls. This guy just made $x money because you decided to link to his crappy site. Now everyone is here literally frothing at the mouth. If this was real life someone would've been stoned to death by now or branded a witch. Is
Everyone:
Lies and statistics. August 2001 huh? So the stats were last compiled just after Code Red, but not since Code Red II, not since the UPnP fiasco, not since the most secure Windows OS ever? Nice to see "journalists" grouping distros together on the basis of which *kernel* they use. If you want to assess the security of *linux* then only focus on expoits that compromise the kernel. If it's just another BIND or wuFTP vulnerability, count it just once for "OSes that use that GPL'd kernel*" *note: packages included with each distro are not uniform across platforms. Not all Linux distros are alike.
But that is rational and fair, and we can't have that can we? No. We need to increase page views and banner hits, we need to convince so-and-so in management that *OS-not-right-for-the-job* is the right tool for the job.
Windows on the desktop and *nix in the server room; the Buddha smiled and farted. And God said "It is Good".
My gf just bought a DVD player. The first DVD she bought was Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 1. (She's a big fan) I've only now begun to watch this series and am seriously hooked. So we spent a whole weekend watching Buffy Season 1, me asking a million questions trying to catch up, and when we watched all 12 episodes, we wanted MORE. But Buffy Season 2 on DVD doesnt come out until June. Bummer.
But wait. Somewhere, locked and hidden away, some broadcaster has tapes of every Buffy episode to date, or TNG or Voyager. And I have a fast ass net connection. In fact, our cable provider gives us net access AND digital cable. So what's the fucken problem people?!? Why the hell can I not browse through every single recorded song ever (like in the Qwest commercial - ride the light?), or go to buffyslayer.com and get divx's of season 2. It could be a streaming video, a download , or a $0.50 charge to my cable account per episode. Delivered via the net, or via the TV signal. Either way, the *demand* exists.
I'm sure my gf will still get the DVD, so they'd be making money off our buffy-crack addiction today, and tommorrow on the DVD too.
The internet has changed the economies of media. Sight, sound, and speech are no longer subject to the laws of scarcity. The only scarcity is that which has not been created. So one of the most lucrative distibution markets in North America is also the one rendered obsolete. I need food and clothing and housing and transportation; those items cannot be delivered over the net.
But my newspaper, music, TV, movies, and p0rn can all be delivered near instantaneously to me over a fast net connection. Except their not. Because the media companies are holding their IP hostage and creating a scarcity of goods where it does not exist.
Either the consumer will be subject to random search and seizure, using only sanctioned software on sanctioned hardware (linux on PS2, or Xbox), or the consumer will get most of their content for such a low cost that freeloading will be pointless and unnecessary. The cost needs to be so low that hunting on IRC or your favourite P2P will be a waste of time. Because once your media is out there, it can and will find its way on the net, and will float around for a really long time. Otherwise the need to control the content will create a society of US vs. THEM, PIRATES vs. CORPORATIONS.
Billboards:
"Hillary says: The Movement needs YOUR help! Just say NO to Piracy!"
Grade 1:
"OK class, today we are going to learn about ethics on the Internet."
Nightly "news":
"TONIGHT! On KING12! The Mayor comments on the week-long police raids on Internet Piracy Operations throughout the city. Call 1 800 IMA SNITCH to help out!"
arrgh, I meant "so we can all much pills etc while playing on classic arcade machines
;)
me so stupid. Musta been the seventies girls distracting me
I see the clothes the girls are wearing haven't changed much ;)
Someone should open a nightclub/lounge so we can all (apologies to the orignal) "munch pills in the dark and listen to repetitive beats", and remember the good ol' late seveites and early eighties. This time around we might be able to attract more girls, or one cold always hope.
First, I would like to say that for the most part, being a cynic, I can't help but agree with the points made in the review. I have not read the book, I am simply in agreement with Katz's perspective. On the whole (IMHO), the Web affects few people in dramatic ways.
That said, and now straying Offtopic, the problem with the article, and what makes it difficult to digest and get a sense of it's *direction* is the fact that Katz seems completely unable to think for himself. Most people seem to have a point of view, or set of principles which guide and form their opinions. Of all the Katz articles I have read, he never, ever, has anything to say. In effect, Katz offers the reader no value in the time spent reading his critiques. Perhaps if there was some consistency to his writing that gave us some insight into what *his* opinion was, rather than this flip-flop wishy-washy game of playing devil's advocate. Without a style or foundation to start from, he is simply a parrot, trying on a different persona week to week.
Pick a stance for Christ's sake already and run with it, Jon. Today the net brings us closer, tommorrow you'll be saying that it drives a wedge between the haves and have-nots. Yesterday P2P was revolutionary and the masses were poised to overthrow our corporate taskmasters. Now you say it's all pr0n and chat? Boy, if it wasn't for your savvy compass, I'd be lost. Stop trolling and baiting your readers, switching sides will-nilly. Is this really your opinion, or the is it the one you feel will generate the most discussion? Better to speak your mind, back it up, and take your lumps. Instead you pander to your audience, depriving them of a writer's unique perspective, in exchange for the transitory acceptance of the mob.
I'm not sure if he was taking shots at himself, but this:
Despite the staggering amount of hype everyone has had to endure (and some of us have contributed to)...
is exactly what I'm talking about. Have you had an epiphany? Have you come to realise you are The Hypist?
Another one:
This is bad news for over-heated tech writers...
Yes, Jon it certainly is.
I don't know if you have to fill out your articles, or (giving you the benefit of the doubt) you are limited in how much you can write, but perhaps next time try excerpting a chapter or a coherent piece of the book in question, and then critique it. Lambaste the author, agree with him/her or just put a different spin on their writings, even extending it to make it applicable to your audience.
Instead, you snip out a few choice pieces on eBay (eBay! Jeebus!) and then pull a post-modern cynic routine on us. Thanks Jon, you're one of us now. Come on man, at least try.
Drifting back ontopic, I feel that Jon's "opinion" is lucid. The web is an extension of our lives, and it has and will continue to enhance and enrich our lives, but it is not the revolutionary force that was promised. No surprise there, few things are. Radio, TV, Teflon, nuclear power. All these technologies have enchanced our lives and enriched them, but no one technology is revolutionary, only the aspirations of those who wish to benefit and profit from them. The closest thing to a cultural earthquake we have is the *sum* of our achievements over the last century.
I'm sure that with the advent of television many speculations and ventures were born and then died indignant deaths, both culturally and commercially, for better or worse. So it goes for our current baby, The Internet. Basically, (IMHO) I think we all know this, and it doesn't take Katz to tell us this.
So Jon, go home, take a bath, and find a subject you actually have an opinion about, even better - find something you're passionate about, and come back next week with something that this audience can chew on, OK?
Sounds more like a problem with Vietnamese gangs, than cybercafes. Kids who want to beat/kill the f*ck out of each other will gather in lots of places. Arcade halls, shopping malls, theatres, pool halls and cybercafes; the one thing in common is that they are all places where people too young to drink can hang out and socialise.
How many poundings and deaths occur at bars and nightclubs? I used to live above a nightclub in the worst neighbourhood in Vancouver. Every weekend the street below would literally fill up with suburbanite gangstas from Seattle and the little fuckers would brandish pistols and shit all the time. I have no idea how many of my tax dollars were spent on the local police manpower and patrol cars that were charged with watching these jerkoffs *every single weekend* for 3 years.
In fact, this is more an issue of "do you know where your children are and what they are doing?" than anything else.
This is just another "news item" placing the blame on anything but the very people that brought them into the world.
Hrmph. Must be nice in Ohio. Anyways, I really have no idea what these asses get paid. Also I'm in Canada; us igloo people don't get to command the high prices. I know I'd do a memory upgrade for $40/hr tho.
a little story...
I make $12/hr. I had a contracted network consultant accuse my company of having stale or poisoned DNS records for his domain. His domain is down, blah, blah, no mail, etc.
WHOIS reveals 2 namehosts with some other hosting company. Nothing to do with us at all. No MX is configured. Then he tells me (lol!) that he thought it was setup that their webhost would handle DNS only for the website, and the webhost would "forward" DNS queries to one of those free dynamic IP DNS services, who would then point to his Exchange server, running on an ADSL line without a static IP. Idiot didn't understand the first damn thing about DNS. I must've asked him a dozen times "is there anyone senior to you?"
What an ass. Like I said, I have no idea how much these clowns make, but I see this kind of crap all the time. Seeing these PnP net appliances pisses me off even more, it means more calls that involve gems like "well, there is a box in the corner, but our IT fellow told us never to touch it. What are you doing to fix our internet?"
Just what the world needs more of.
Contract "IT consultants" setting these things up in small offices everywhere. When the boxen hiccup, nobody bothers to call the "IT" assh*le that set them up. Instead, call your ISP and piggyback their support policy to avoid a $40/hr support charge from your "consultant".
"Mrs./Mr. [RealEstate Agent|Travel Agent|Secretary|Accountant|Legal Assitant|Temp] your mail server is not working. I'm sorry, it is not our problem. Please call your contractor."
Repeat for 45 mins. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
If you want to hack around on a desktop system, go with 2.4. If you want to set up a server and rely upon it, stick with the late 2.2 series.
Go with Slack, Debian, or RedHat on the server, and Mandrake on the desktop. Personally, I don't like Debian's apt-get, I prefer source and you can break Debian by mixing the two (or should I say, I broke it), and I never mess with rpm on Redhat, I hate rpms too. Like I said, I deal with source 95% of the time. Which is why my hacking and development boxen are Linux, but my servers are FreeBSD. Way more cool nifty shit is ported to Linux, whereas I see BSD as my workhorse.
Hmm, I'm running XP on a P2 with 650MB RAM. No complaints here. 'Tis a bit slow due to the eyecandy, but still a workhorse.
And...ZoneAlarm???
Frankly, ZoneAlarm is a steaming pile. Maybe you should consider W2K doing R&R+NAT, I can testify to that being far more stable, although the filtering rules are limited. Still better than a consumer Win OS doing internet connection sharing, that's jsut asking for a headache.
What a fucking crock of shit. Whoever modded this as a troll is FUCKIN IDIOT. Fuck you.
/. sheep complained about cable for the longest time, and about how great DSL was. Well, the opinions changed pretty fast. Canada has far better broadband prices and reliability than in the US. That's not a troll, its a godamn fact. Our providers arent going tits up left and right. My cable company had the forsight to get the hell outta business with Excite last year before the shit hit the fan, did yours?
Troll = Tacosnotting FAQ/pagefilling post/some comment about Katz and boys and Cowboy Neil.
It's ok for Mr.Man to say he has great DSL service, but it's a troll for someone in the friggin industry to relate his experience? FUCK YOU.
I watched as all the
BTW, I don't work for either of those comapnies I mentioned you close-minded twit, go fuck yourself. I have 46 Karma, do your worst you little punk, I post enough good comments to actually contribute, and I say what I want, when I want. I always mod up, never down, and any offtopic or flamebait mods will get metamodded as unfair.
+2 because I fucking CAN.
This was supposed to be a response to this, but I feel that it applies to the aarticle as a whole as well. Here goes...
/.
Oh man, you sure want it all dont you? And for only $4.95/month!?!
As someone who has been running a small, non-profit (illegal) streaming audio service, and is now offline:
Do you really think that it is possible/feasible to host an all-you-can-eat, $5/month, 200KB/sec filesharing service that offers files that are encoded at avg. 128kbps and are approx 10-15MB in size, in a non-proprietary format, with no DRM?
Let me see, you college kids with "faster than God" connections go to class all day after queuing up (conservative estimate) 50 songs @ 10MB apiece. You pay $5/month. You do this only once a day, everyday for 30 days each month. So, not counting the bandwidth lost to control frames, dead tranfers, and lost packets, lets say you use 50*10MB*30 days=15000MB or 15GB of bandwidth. Now, lets say I find a *really* good provider that will give me 1 managed server with a single burstable 100Mb line and 100GB of traffic/month at a cost of $300/month. Extra bandwidth is $5/GB.
I have 100GB of traffic at a cost of $300, avg user eats up 15GB for a fee of $5/month...
100GB / 15GB = 6.67 users * $5 = $33.35 - $300 = -$266.65
I just lost $266.65. Any traffic on top of that is charged at $5/GB. Lets say I have only ONE more user who uses only 10GB/month. 10GB*$5/GB=$50 and they only paid $5, so add another $45 to my bill, and then add sales tax and whatever and I'm broke. And then you go and share all your downloads on Kazaa/Morpheus, and nobody needs to go use my service. Yay. And this is a single, non-redundant server on a single, non-redundant line. Factors such as overhead for the website, license fees, will eat up more money.
This just happened to me, I was running a streaming service, no fees, no downloads, no sign-ups, just music. I had one popular month and I'm $800 lighter in the wallet, and the site is bye-bye. I didn't charge because it's not my music, and I didn't allow downloads because the songs are only on vinyl and I wanted the entertainment value of my site to remain. Not a great business model on my part, but the bandwidth issue will affect anyone, including
I want to see more online music, and I want to see artists get paid too. The problem is, despite the low production/reproduction costs of digital media, the *distribution* costs remain high. Only the big boys can play, whcih means no indie bands, private radio stations, eclectic websites or whatever.
I was actually referring to MS commandeering technology and featurism in general. Let's not start a flame war about the origin of the GUI shall we? The first GUI was the breast ;)