I'm trying to discover... ...how or why this is a bad thing. You know - I don't think anyone actually said it WAS a bad thing. It's interesting. It touches on something we know; interesting tech that tends to draw a lot of debate. That makes it news. But I'm not seeing anything that says there's something to be upset about.
I suppose it's the nature of these things. Slashdot covers so many negative things that its gotten to the point one almost expects it. It almost goes against conditioning to see and article as anything but interesting.
Unless, of course, your hobby involves manufacturing controversy. There are plenty of individuals around Slashdot who do. So they will. But I suspect they'll be largely ignored as there's not really much to debate about here. Just go "huh - interesting" and move on (or feel free to swap stories about military life and security).
Only on Slashdot would an article ask if Windows can compete with Linux. Funny. Although, that article? It's from guardian.co.uk. Not Slashdot. And no - they're not the first place other than Slashdot to ask the question. In fact, that very question has been asked by all kinds of sources. It's no longer 1998 - you'd know that if you came out from that basement once in awhile.
According to Wikipedia, this guy is a total douchebag! *edit* *edit* I have also read that he is personally responsible for the tripling of elephant populations in the past six months.
This is what a PARENT should be doing. PARENTS should be telling their children what they can and can not see. Not the government, not some company, not anyone else. It's the parents job to raise their children, teach them what's right and wrong, and to allow the to see what they can and can't see. Nobody elses. While I agree with what you're saying, the sentiment misses a really important point. That is, what these folks are proposing will not work as advertised.
The counter-argument to your point would be that the ISPs are providing a service that parents volunteer to select in the name of raising their children responsibly. The government is simply providing some expertise in flagging what ISPs are providing that service so parents can choose accordingly. But again - the problem is that it won't work as advertised.
The underlying issue is that filtering is an extremely difficult problem. The mechanics of the Internet offer little with which to base filtering. So what we end up with is a large portion of the undesired content filtered with an even larger unknown amount of content just waiting to be discovered. The flip side is overly aggressive filtering techniques that end up filtering out content that is perfectly fine (and that's not even counting filter technology providers who mis-categorize content based on some political or personal bias). Parents who put their faith and "good parenting" stock in these schemes will ultimately find that the system has failed them.
And that's the big problem. The government may be meaning well, but it will ultimately be wasting tax payer's money on a program that does not deliver what it promises. And parents who have every intention of being responsible parents may find themselves buying in to a system that has betrayed that responsibility.
The issue seems to come from the apparent weakness of the prosecution's case. The most damning part of the case seems to be that Reiser acted strangely; did odd things, said odd things, behaved in unexpected ways. That kind of thing works well to tie together strong evidence to show motives and behaviors that link the evidence to the suspect. But lacking that, the case becomes little more than "he sure SEEMS guilty." And that is, as the article mentioned one judge noting, a very thin case indeed.
So this is what the defense has to rally against. They have a client who is his own worse enemy. They have to remove the focus on irrational, unexpected behavior and shift it back to the strength of the real evidence presented by the prosecution's case. In short, they have to defeat a strategy that may give circumstantial evidence more weight than it would otherwise be given by people who don't share the same sensibilities as the defendant.
I've known plenty of technical folks (engineers, coders, sysadmins, screwdriver slingers, etc.) who are just odd birds. I've got a whole host of weird stories based on experiences working with and around these folks. Many of these stories could (and sometimes are) taken out of context to imply a lot more about the individual than they really should. I'm not at all surprised that such an issue might rear its ugly head in the aggressive atmosphere of a court of law.
In my opinion, there are very few times when a company's main goal isn't to help themselves. Oddly enough, IBM is able to contribute to the general IT community without the same kinds of shennanigans Microsoft is trying to pull here. And IBM is probably doing it because it helps themselves.
Sure, a lot of these may be Open Source, but I know of a lot of companies that have Open Source software installed by commercial vendors (e.g. Red Hat or even IBM). Isn't The Fine Article saying exactly the opposite?
Now, this may not necessarily be a bad thing, but I don't see how this is markedly different from, say, paying Microsoft.
You're still paying for support and stability -- just that you have a little more flexibility and control over your software, which usually does not matter all that much in enterprise production applications. I mean, just often do you recompile your kernel or add a new feature on your platform handling millions of transactions a day for a critical client? I didn't think so. In fact, in my environment, we have done exactly this. We've said "Hey [HARDWARE VENDOR] and [LINUX DISTRO VENDOR], we implemented [KERNEL HACKER]'s patch which has solved the stabilitly issue on [SERVER PRODUCT] - you guys should talk about getting this included in your next release." We've also said "Hey [SOLUTION VENDOR], we've made these code additions to [OSS PROJECT] you provided and its given us some functionality needed to solve some problems we've had - you should consider it in your next release." Granted - I don't see it every day. But it does come up.
But that's all a bit of a red herring. It's not so important that we can make code changes but that other people can. People who aren't all beholden to the same decision makers. This gives us some leeway with our environment and vendor choices. We currently deploy a lot of RHEL. But if RedHat fails us as a vendor, we can move to Canonical or even Novell with relatively minimal fuss. We've put off major vendor and architecture changes like this before because the shift from one proprietary architecture to another was so dramatic that we were willing to put up with substandard vendor support for years. If that particular example was based on an OSS architecture, the shift would have been far, far simpler (albiet still somewhat involved I'm sure).
To a lesser extent, licensing is still a plus. We have RHEL entitlements for our lab, but never enough to cover all the projects popping up. Most of the time we can simply stand up a CentOS instance and work with that until the point where one "needs" a full RHEL install. We really don't need the full support of RedHat for those projects. And it's nice to not worry about where the licensing is coming from.
Do we still pay for Open Source Software? Sure do.... a fair amount. Of course, at our level, licensing is supposed to be a minor issue. I'd believe that more if we didn't keep running in to issues about where other OS installs are getting licenses or how many CALs a project needs.
And you know what? IBM used to be right evil buggers, and it cost them their lead in a big way, too much time spent hurting the competition, not enough time minding the shop. Now everyone loves them, 'ooh, but they love open source' is trotted out in defence against any slight. They were real gits back a few decades ago. IBM lost control of the market because they over-valued their mainframe business, lost their R&D focus, and fumbled the microcomputer market. Their evil ways? It was all about keeping their dominance with mainframes. Meanwhile the microcomputer sprang from hobbiest device to must-have decentralized business tool. IBM lost control of their attempt to capture this surprise market (one that they had largely ignored) and, ultimately, set the stage for their own downfall; the rise of inexpensive, commodity computers. Having a bag of "evil" tricks in business is very much like carrying a loaded gun. It doesn't matter that you possess it. You still have to point at and hit the right targets.
So what about IBM and OSS fanboyism? Fair enough point. People should remember that there's no guarantee the IBM of today will be the IBM of tomorrow. We should remember that it isn't too long since the IBM of the past. But there's an important point that critics who bring up this "IBM used to be evil" meme don't mention or don't understand. IBM's contributions to OSS right now is under OSS licensing. They can't take it back. Even if the IBM of old rears its ugly head once more.
What kind of frustrates me there is that I wasn't saying anything bad about Linux. I only wanted to point out that the Ubuntu desktop I'm using right now gets kernel updates from time to time, and I can't see why that's good for me but bad for Windows users. Maybe I wasn't overly critical enough of Microsoft to satisfy the mod? If I were to guess - I'd say trying to turn this in to a "Windows vs. Linux" thing was the first issue for negative moderation.;) But now that you're hell bent on this path...
I'm not sure this is even an issue. As you noted, it's not a bad thing. But it does kind of highlight some of the cultural differences between Windows and Linux (or Microsoft and Ubuntu / Canonical in this case). Finding a kernal update in Windows takes sleuthing. A kernel update for your Linux distro is normal business. What you take away from all this is up to you.
'As few as 5 percent of our customers use 50 percent of the network,' Time-Warner complains... So does that mean only 5 percent of their customers are making good use of what they paid for?
That's the problem with these things. The big names get all the credit. Proper recognition should be given to the CIA trainers who spent countless hours training and outfitting the fleet of herring that did all the actual grunt work. Heck - you think training squirrels is hard... you should try herring.
Yes, but the/. crowd also can get kind of agitated when it comes to license issues and GPL violations. Yes, yes. Ignore all that "copyleft" stuff. I'm sure they're just hypocritical big fans of the current copyright system just like you imply.
The point's NOT really the score vs. other OS platforms so much, as it is for securing yourself + learning HOW to, vs. yourself really & your original OS setup. Showing it is a multiplatform test is NOT for Windows users only, but also for Linux users (especially SeLinux bearing distro users such as the Ubuntu/Kubuntu enjoy - you CAN be far more secured on those too, above & beyond the default policy given you on them). I would also note that getting a particular score even on a single platform really misses the point. This isn't a race for a high score. Pushing for that final number (which you do seem to mention a lot) could leave you with an unusable system. Or worse yet, encourage work-arounds that subvert the restrictions placed by CIS benchmarking and in turn leaving the end user with a false sense of security.
I agree that you can lock down a *Nix box from the default install. Exactly what that means depends - the Devil's in the details. I've applied CIS benchmarks to Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. It's been... interesting (in the form of considerable sanity checking - and I'm inclined to favor security). That hasn't made me suddenly shocked at the default state of either OS.
I have to admit I haven't tried applying CIS benchmarks to a SELinux-enabled Linux system. I should try it out some time. Although I would note that just because a Linux distro offers SELinux, it doesn't mean it has the feature enabled. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "SeLinux bearing distro."
It looks like you've put a lot of effort in to that document. I haven't gone through it in detail, but I generally think that kind of effort is a Good Thing.
Having said that, I don't think it applies very well as an argument. Yeah - you can secure Windows to a point. There's even been real progress on that realm since the old NT3.51 days. But that doesn't mean Amit Yoran was wrong.
As an aside, you put a lot of value on arbitrary scores. I'm not sure I'd compare CIS benchmark scores from one platform to another. The benchmarks do very different things; and they tend to break systems in interestingly different ways if an admin doesn't pay attention (not that they aren't a darned good starting point).
If you are not sure about whether or not there are games equal to books yet, then you're an idiot and should stay out of the argument. That's not the point. The act of reading itself has considerable educational value; the storyline is just the hook. After all, we're talking kids here. "Elmo Goes to the Zoo" (or even "Harry Potter and the Next Sequel") aren't exactly Great Literature.
That a mother recognizes this does not make her an "idiot" and it certainly doesn't disqualify her from comment. Although it also doesn't disqualify the idea that some games can promote other skills.
2) Connected to your consumer-options-a-plenty TV.
3) Has a remote - possibly even simpler than your TV remote (nevermind how you conveniently gloss over the complexity of channel options and other silliness that shows up on TV directory interfaces these days)
4) Turns off and on easily
5) Designed to make copies of TV content - no lawsuits pending as of yet
6) Is a computer and has been commercially successful
The real issue here is where Tivo gets it's feed. Early adopters have already created their own Tivo-like homebrew hybrids that take TV feeds as well as web-based RSS and torrents and make them seamlessly clicky-clicky easy to watch. Rough edges might make these impractical for mass audiences. But are we really that far from smoothing those edges and making the jump to consumer devices with network access as a mainstream feature?
Over-compression, digital artifacts, unreliable transmission and reception - I could be talking about DirecTV or YouTube./Google Video. You could also be talking about cable. I've had the same issues with my cable provider. Having said that... it's not like analog TV is always that great. Reception issues can cause plenty of the same issues.
TV in its early infancy was a far cry from where things are now. This lack of quality certainly didn't stop TV from becoming more than a fad as many predicted at the time. The only difference now is that we have an existing infrastructure to compare "web TV" to. But I'd be careful about getting too wrapped up with "quality" being the sole indicator how well something will do. History has often shown that while quality is definitely something people can appreciate, it doesn't always drive success.
There's a new advertising campaign in the works here. Register "dellshocker.com". Run some commercials along the lines of the Burger King "freakout" idiocy. ????. Profit.
(I'm not sure how the "freakout" campaign is supposed to work selling burgers either - but someone at BK bought in to the idea... why not Dell?)
So it's an accurate economy, but not a good one for a game. OK. Fair point. Accuracy doesn't always make for fun.
They need to let you craft things of real use, and build demand into the game.
In theory, not every being in the game world is going to be running around killing monsters, they'll be gardening and such. This unseen majority should be a far bigger force in the game economy than players, or the world would have already shifted to not value the crap PCs used to make and they'd be making something else.
In other words, if the players really are such a big part of the economy, then it should be very unstable. Craft 50 things and ruin the market for them. Your example of crafting 50 items is actually dead on. That's the problem. A single [Gauntlet of Wonder] might be valuable because it has exactly the stats any, say, Warrior wants. When 50 people put them on the market, all trying to undercut the previous guy, then the market plummets. When the [Gauntlet of Wonder] is a beginner's crafting exercise, the market bottoms out. It doesn't matter that its what every Warrior wants - every Warrior already has one or can get one for cheap because they're so plentiful.
The problem here is that the economy is really player focused. It has no real interaction with the fantasy world in which the players are running around (other than providing targets that drop things to sell to each other). NPCs will buy items - but at rates that are entirely out of touch with the player economy. Having said that - there ARE a few examples where vendors can be a good source of income. One of my first characters was a skinner / leather worker. I was able to pay for my first mount largely with funds made from selling crafted headbands to vendors. Although a large part of that success was due to a quest area that yielded a constant source of the right grade of leather. Would it ease the pain if more of these opportunities were built in to the NPC vendor economy? I seem to remember UO did more to encourage this sort of thing but my memory is hazy on how effective it was.
One corollary to my previous advice... if you're going to craft something for coin, pick a profession that produces consumable items. Crafting swords and armor is all nice - but those are single-purchase items and a rough market to get involved in. However, things like potions are constantly being used by the tweak-thirsty public. The guy who buys 5 healing potions will need another 5 much sooner than he needs another sword. You'll still be facing stiff competition from the throng of other consumables peddlers out there - but you'll all be feeding a much greater demand and are much more likely to get a decent price for your efforts.
I'd recommend against using enchanting as a "gathering" skill, though. The main reason is that while herbalism, mining, and skinning all take something that otherwise has no value (herb nodes, mining nodes, and beast corpses respectively), enchanting takes something that already has value (green, blue or purple drops) and turns them into something that may or may not actually be more valuable. While it's great for melting a bind-on-pickup instance drop or useless (and low vendor value) quest reward, all those BoE greens you find can be sold on the AH for around as much as the typical enchanting reagent. Excellent point! Enchanting is tricky and probably not the right choice for the new player (as I implied). The trick to disenchanting being profitable is understanding the value of the whole item vs. the average value of it's components. And then getting lucky and receiving the higher value components from the disenchant.
It is possible. I often buy higher-quality (green) items from other players at the Auction House, disenchant them, and then sell the components at a profit. But that's because the player put the item up at a low enough price and I already have a pretty good idea of what the item will produce and the subsequent component worth. That's not information a new player is likely to have.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose it's the nature of these things. Slashdot covers so many negative things that its gotten to the point one almost expects it. It almost goes against conditioning to see and article as anything but interesting.
Unless, of course, your hobby involves manufacturing controversy. There are plenty of individuals around Slashdot who do. So they will. But I suspect they'll be largely ignored as there's not really much to debate about here. Just go "huh - interesting" and move on (or feel free to swap stories about military life and security).
Great job! Except for the niggling fact that they did, in fact, catch him.
PARENTS should be telling their children what they can and can not see. Not the government, not some company, not anyone else. It's the parents job to raise their children, teach them what's right and wrong, and to allow the to see what they can and can't see. Nobody elses. While I agree with what you're saying, the sentiment misses a really important point. That is, what these folks are proposing will not work as advertised.
The counter-argument to your point would be that the ISPs are providing a service that parents volunteer to select in the name of raising their children responsibly. The government is simply providing some expertise in flagging what ISPs are providing that service so parents can choose accordingly. But again - the problem is that it won't work as advertised.
The underlying issue is that filtering is an extremely difficult problem. The mechanics of the Internet offer little with which to base filtering. So what we end up with is a large portion of the undesired content filtered with an even larger unknown amount of content just waiting to be discovered. The flip side is overly aggressive filtering techniques that end up filtering out content that is perfectly fine (and that's not even counting filter technology providers who mis-categorize content based on some political or personal bias). Parents who put their faith and "good parenting" stock in these schemes will ultimately find that the system has failed them.
And that's the big problem. The government may be meaning well, but it will ultimately be wasting tax payer's money on a program that does not deliver what it promises. And parents who have every intention of being responsible parents may find themselves buying in to a system that has betrayed that responsibility.
The First Law of 'Bots: "do not talk about being a bot."
(the other two laws shouldn't even be referred to much less talked about)
The issue seems to come from the apparent weakness of the prosecution's case. The most damning part of the case seems to be that Reiser acted strangely; did odd things, said odd things, behaved in unexpected ways. That kind of thing works well to tie together strong evidence to show motives and behaviors that link the evidence to the suspect. But lacking that, the case becomes little more than "he sure SEEMS guilty." And that is, as the article mentioned one judge noting, a very thin case indeed.
So this is what the defense has to rally against. They have a client who is his own worse enemy. They have to remove the focus on irrational, unexpected behavior and shift it back to the strength of the real evidence presented by the prosecution's case. In short, they have to defeat a strategy that may give circumstantial evidence more weight than it would otherwise be given by people who don't share the same sensibilities as the defendant.
I've known plenty of technical folks (engineers, coders, sysadmins, screwdriver slingers, etc.) who are just odd birds. I've got a whole host of weird stories based on experiences working with and around these folks. Many of these stories could (and sometimes are) taken out of context to imply a lot more about the individual than they really should. I'm not at all surprised that such an issue might rear its ugly head in the aggressive atmosphere of a court of law.
You're still paying for support and stability -- just that you have a little more flexibility and control over your software, which usually does not matter all that much in enterprise production applications. I mean, just often do you recompile your kernel or add a new feature on your platform handling millions of transactions a day for a critical client? I didn't think so. In fact, in my environment, we have done exactly this. We've said "Hey [HARDWARE VENDOR] and [LINUX DISTRO VENDOR], we implemented [KERNEL HACKER]'s patch which has solved the stabilitly issue on [SERVER PRODUCT] - you guys should talk about getting this included in your next release." We've also said "Hey [SOLUTION VENDOR], we've made these code additions to [OSS PROJECT] you provided and its given us some functionality needed to solve some problems we've had - you should consider it in your next release." Granted - I don't see it every day. But it does come up.
But that's all a bit of a red herring. It's not so important that we can make code changes but that other people can. People who aren't all beholden to the same decision makers. This gives us some leeway with our environment and vendor choices. We currently deploy a lot of RHEL. But if RedHat fails us as a vendor, we can move to Canonical or even Novell with relatively minimal fuss. We've put off major vendor and architecture changes like this before because the shift from one proprietary architecture to another was so dramatic that we were willing to put up with substandard vendor support for years. If that particular example was based on an OSS architecture, the shift would have been far, far simpler (albiet still somewhat involved I'm sure).
To a lesser extent, licensing is still a plus. We have RHEL entitlements for our lab, but never enough to cover all the projects popping up. Most of the time we can simply stand up a CentOS instance and work with that until the point where one "needs" a full RHEL install. We really don't need the full support of RedHat for those projects. And it's nice to not worry about where the licensing is coming from.
Do we still pay for Open Source Software? Sure do.... a fair amount. Of course, at our level, licensing is supposed to be a minor issue. I'd believe that more if we didn't keep running in to issues about where other OS installs are getting licenses or how many CALs a project needs.
So what about IBM and OSS fanboyism? Fair enough point. People should remember that there's no guarantee the IBM of today will be the IBM of tomorrow. We should remember that it isn't too long since the IBM of the past. But there's an important point that critics who bring up this "IBM used to be evil" meme don't mention or don't understand. IBM's contributions to OSS right now is under OSS licensing. They can't take it back. Even if the IBM of old rears its ugly head once more.
I'm not sure this is even an issue. As you noted, it's not a bad thing. But it does kind of highlight some of the cultural differences between Windows and Linux (or Microsoft and Ubuntu / Canonical in this case). Finding a kernal update in Windows takes sleuthing. A kernel update for your Linux distro is normal business. What you take away from all this is up to you.
That's the problem with these things. The big names get all the credit. Proper recognition should be given to the CIA trainers who spent countless hours training and outfitting the fleet of herring that did all the actual grunt work. Heck - you think training squirrels is hard... you should try herring.
I agree that you can lock down a *Nix box from the default install. Exactly what that means depends - the Devil's in the details. I've applied CIS benchmarks to Solaris and Red Hat Enterprise Linux systems. It's been... interesting (in the form of considerable sanity checking - and I'm inclined to favor security). That hasn't made me suddenly shocked at the default state of either OS.
I have to admit I haven't tried applying CIS benchmarks to a SELinux-enabled Linux system. I should try it out some time. Although I would note that just because a Linux distro offers SELinux, it doesn't mean it has the feature enabled. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by "SeLinux bearing distro."
It looks like you've put a lot of effort in to that document. I haven't gone through it in detail, but I generally think that kind of effort is a Good Thing.
Having said that, I don't think it applies very well as an argument. Yeah - you can secure Windows to a point. There's even been real progress on that realm since the old NT3.51 days. But that doesn't mean Amit Yoran was wrong.
As an aside, you put a lot of value on arbitrary scores. I'm not sure I'd compare CIS benchmark scores from one platform to another. The benchmarks do very different things; and they tend to break systems in interestingly different ways if an admin doesn't pay attention (not that they aren't a darned good starting point).
That a mother recognizes this does not make her an "idiot" and it certainly doesn't disqualify her from comment. Although it also doesn't disqualify the idea that some games can promote other skills.
Great list! One niggling issue though... Tivo.
1) Connected to your "Bigness" TV.
2) Connected to your consumer-options-a-plenty TV.
3) Has a remote - possibly even simpler than your TV remote (nevermind how you conveniently gloss over the complexity of channel options and other silliness that shows up on TV directory interfaces these days)
4) Turns off and on easily
5) Designed to make copies of TV content - no lawsuits pending as of yet
6) Is a computer and has been commercially successful
The real issue here is where Tivo gets it's feed. Early adopters have already created their own Tivo-like homebrew hybrids that take TV feeds as well as web-based RSS and torrents and make them seamlessly clicky-clicky easy to watch. Rough edges might make these impractical for mass audiences. But are we really that far from smoothing those edges and making the jump to consumer devices with network access as a mainstream feature?
TV in its early infancy was a far cry from where things are now. This lack of quality certainly didn't stop TV from becoming more than a fad as many predicted at the time. The only difference now is that we have an existing infrastructure to compare "web TV" to. But I'd be careful about getting too wrapped up with "quality" being the sole indicator how well something will do. History has often shown that while quality is definitely something people can appreciate, it doesn't always drive success.
Yes, indeed. Let us fear monger. Gawd knows we don't get enough from the current administration. We need random wonks picking up the slack.
And no, I don't believe the Government has a secret fleet of unicorns.
There's a new advertising campaign in the works here. Register "dellshocker.com". Run some commercials along the lines of the Burger King "freakout" idiocy. ????. Profit.
(I'm not sure how the "freakout" campaign is supposed to work selling burgers either - but someone at BK bought in to the idea... why not Dell?)
In theory, not every being in the game world is going to be running around killing monsters, they'll be gardening and such. This unseen majority should be a far bigger force in the game economy than players, or the world would have already shifted to not value the crap PCs used to make and they'd be making something else.
In other words, if the players really are such a big part of the economy, then it should be very unstable. Craft 50 things and ruin the market for them. Your example of crafting 50 items is actually dead on. That's the problem. A single [Gauntlet of Wonder] might be valuable because it has exactly the stats any, say, Warrior wants. When 50 people put them on the market, all trying to undercut the previous guy, then the market plummets. When the [Gauntlet of Wonder] is a beginner's crafting exercise, the market bottoms out. It doesn't matter that its what every Warrior wants - every Warrior already has one or can get one for cheap because they're so plentiful.
The problem here is that the economy is really player focused. It has no real interaction with the fantasy world in which the players are running around (other than providing targets that drop things to sell to each other). NPCs will buy items - but at rates that are entirely out of touch with the player economy. Having said that - there ARE a few examples where vendors can be a good source of income. One of my first characters was a skinner / leather worker. I was able to pay for my first mount largely with funds made from selling crafted headbands to vendors. Although a large part of that success was due to a quest area that yielded a constant source of the right grade of leather. Would it ease the pain if more of these opportunities were built in to the NPC vendor economy? I seem to remember UO did more to encourage this sort of thing but my memory is hazy on how effective it was.
One corollary to my previous advice... if you're going to craft something for coin, pick a profession that produces consumable items. Crafting swords and armor is all nice - but those are single-purchase items and a rough market to get involved in. However, things like potions are constantly being used by the tweak-thirsty public. The guy who buys 5 healing potions will need another 5 much sooner than he needs another sword. You'll still be facing stiff competition from the throng of other consumables peddlers out there - but you'll all be feeding a much greater demand and are much more likely to get a decent price for your efforts.
It is possible. I often buy higher-quality (green) items from other players at the Auction House, disenchant them, and then sell the components at a profit. But that's because the player put the item up at a low enough price and I already have a pretty good idea of what the item will produce and the subsequent component worth. That's not information a new player is likely to have.