KALX is sometimes very cool, but it's so eclectic that there are times I just can't listen to it for more than ten minutes. College radio is almost always like that. It will fill a niche, and there are definitely some undiscovered gems there, but it's not consistent enough to attract lifetime listeners, except for the few that love the eclectic for its own sake.
I actually listen to KFOG most of the time, and have rarely been disappointed by them or their programming. They put on all kinds of small live shows to replay them on the air ("Live from the archives"), have a good variety of music, their DJs are accessible, nice people both on the phone and in person, one of their shows (10 at 10) is good enough that it's synidcated across the country, and, most importantly:
Susquehanna is a group of only 4 stations, all in the Bay Area, grown out of KFOG and KNBR (an AM talk radio/sports station).
They currently own: KFOG - wide variety of rock KSAN (the Bone) - stupid name, but decent classic rock variety KNBR - talk radio, sports (all the Giants games) KCTC - AM station, don't know anything about it
KFOG was one of the first major stations to stream all their normal broadcasts, and continue to do so.
In my mind, companies like Susquehanna are the kinds of radio we should be asking for. They have the local roots, they have decent programming, a fun staff, do cool community events, etc. But most importantly, they are large enough to have the clout to pay royalties on new music if they want to, but are NOT bland uniform pablum like most of Clear Channel's stations.
Am I the only one who noticed that on the front page of his periodic table description, Theo Gray mentions he generates all his web pages using Mathematica??
Now, I know it's a cool software package and all, but doesn't that fall into the category of functional bloat? When did it go from a math package to a web page authoring tool? Am I missing something obvious here?
If you look at the first few items, you'll see they got quite a bit of funding already. So, they've already got (private) shareholders who are waiting for their return on their investment. Now, if we had nabbed them back when they were just a college project...
I know you already got a lot of comments here, but not a one has backed you up on your support of Code Complete.
It is by far the best generalized programming book I have ever seen, and after almost 10 years writing code, I have gone through two copies of my own and bought it with money out of my own pocket for at least 6 people I have worked with. The best way I have heard it described is as a giant compendium of common sense, none of which anyone pays attention to until it's all laid out in front of them.
If there is anything I wish people on Slashdot would get religious about it would be writing excellent code and understanding what exactly makes their code excellent. If they did, surely Code Complete would be their bible. I know it's mine. Keep preaching, maybe you'll get a convert or ten!
Just because the box office receipts for a given film are lower than the production costs, that doesn't mean the film is taking a bath. There are many, many more avenues to revenue than just domestic box office ticket sales.
I would wager a good amount that Disney makes far, far more money overall from video rentals and sales than they do from ticket sales anyway. Hell, plenty of their movies never even make it to the theater. Add to that the fast food tie-ins, the toys and clothing, blankets, sheets and other merchandise, the international sales both in the theaters and on video, etc.
Disney makes plenty of money off their films. If they didn't, they would be a hell of a lot more careful putting them out, and there wouldn't be a shelf full of stuff at your local video store with titles you've never heard of.
God, I couldn't agree with you more. Local music may lack the radio exposure, the high production values of over-the-top stadium shows, etc., but the one thing it doesn't lack is talent. (not that I'm really missing any of the fluff that the big acts bring)
Within a local music scene, especially a relatively large one like in San Francisco, there exists a huge range of talent, some with their own recordings, some not. Inevitably though, the best (relatively small) local acts tend to also allow taping of their live shows and, for me at least, that's where their talent really shines anyway. High quality tapings of live shows comprises about 1/4 of my large CD library, and about 1/2 of what I listen to regularly.
Anyone who's actually fan of real music (not just "entertainment") will, after seeing a great live show, realize how much talent there really is out there, and how little that talent relates to mainstream success.
Ok, enough violent agreement. I just wish there was more I could do to get people to go out and see live shows in their hometowns... It supports artists directly and is often times better than studio crap anyway!
Overall, your point is basically a good one, and I agree in most cases. Now, since I haven't played NWN yet, I can't vouch for its stability, but as a lot of people here probably know, it has been pushed back many, many times. Hopefully some of those delays have been to fix bugs and design issues with the game so that the initial release is solid. That's BioWare's story at least, and I'd like to believe it.
As to the internet though, I have to disagree with you for the most part. Having quick availability to patches may be giving the game companies an easy out in getting to market on time, but I am gratefull as hell for the fact that I have quick, reliable access to patches as they do get released.
What I remember in the times that "used to be" was that games that had bugs in them definitely existed, but you couldn't get patches for them unless you wrote to the company, and they were nice enough to send you a floppy with a patch on it. If you were down for two weeks, you were lucky - that was quick. Many publishers never made patches because there wasn't any reliable way to distribute them. For that, the internet has been a godsend.
I too wait to hear very good things, but not because I don't like having to patch software, but just because I can't stand the crappy quality of 70% of the recent games I've played.
In fact, now that I think about it, the internet has been great for my gaming not just because I can get patches easier than before, but because I can usually find demo versions of games and try them out before I buy. More than once I have tried out a crappy game and stayed the hell away from it thanks to the demo.
...was not total disagreement, and could hardly be called "the opposition". They were arguing only with half of what Nader was saying, but agreeing with the overall thrust of his actions.
Basically, they agree that the OMB could, and should, weild their budget power to ensure security is maximized and to lower prices, increase interoperability, etc. But where they differ from Nader, and the only real disagreement is whether there should be any mandate on forcing Microsoft to release source, sell source, etc. They're arguing that the OMB should absolutely try to sway Microsoft's behavior, but that it should do so only through well-reasoned business cases, not through pseudo-enforcement of anti-trust violations.
An analogous transaction would be the act of me buying a box of worms from a bait shop. Do you think for one minute that the purchase obligates a fish to bite my hook???
Your "sarcasm" is actually one of the better analogies I have read so far on this thread. It's as ridiculous, yet so parallel it's hard to deny. Even though you may not want the points, I would mod you up if I coul just so more people could get that analogy in their head.
Actually, I would guess that it's less of a concerted effort by the stations agreeing with each other than just that all the shows follow basically the same formula. They're all 22 min for a 1/2 hour show, with X min. breaks after like 7, 15, and 22 min.
I would guess this is a least as much due to the production companies that make the shows and sell them to the networks as it is to the networks themselves.
The net result is pretty much as you describe it though - most stations tend to run commercials at the same time.
So they want these records to be held on to for longer than they are now. Bad as that may be, wouldn't it be simpler to fight the request if the information didn't get logged in huge detail in the first place? Are all of those details really necessary?
The difference here is that highway funds and education funds being withheld are usually clauses explicitly included into legislation and passed by Congress. This would be a totally discretionary move on the OMB's part, and the parent is just pointing out that they don't have the authority to do that kind of enforcement on their own without a mandate from the legislature. It may not seem that different in effect, but the details are pretty fundamentally disparate.
If the OMB could allocate funds arbitrarily without any sort of economic justification, you'd see a whole hell of a lot of weird causes being pushed by unknown bureaucrats. As it stands, it's the job of congress to push the weird causes on us.
True that the OMB is not really supposed to be trying to move the economy one way or another, nor are they supposed to be acting as judge/executioner in the anti-trust action. However, as you yourself pointed out, they do have plenty of legitimate reasons to ask for changes from Microsoft or move away from a single dominant vendor, none of which have to do with punishing the company. In this case, the only difference is in the stated motivation for making the changes.
So long as they can provide justified reasons for the change, if their actions have a side effect of breaking up the monopoly and helping build up the OSS culture and functionality of current free products, so much the better. It will end up being a good thing for the country overall.
The problem is keeping anti-Microsoft rhetoric out of the debate and staying focused on solid reasons for change.
I've recently been a bit suspicious of Nader and the real feasibility of things he has been supporting, but here I've got to say they are raising a very potent idea.
As we've seen, Microsoft or other vendors will weasel their way out of legislation or judgements that try to force them to behave a certain way. Economics, however are another matter.
If you want a company to change, don't try to force it on them through laws, hit 'em where it hurts - on the bottom line. Make it in their financial best interest to change, and you may be surprised at how eager they are to alter their behavior.
That sounds like a comment with some sort of history behind it - care to elaborate on what you think insurance does? Had bad experiences with insurance in the past?
I was talking only from personal experience, not trying to parrot a marketing line from any insurance agency...
I meant to say that the rationale for these scrip kiddies ignoring the target box and attacking the registration machine seems pretty thin. Not that the rationale for securing your infrastructure overall is...
Granted, securing the overall infrastructure is as important as securing a single box when trying to defend against intrusion, but the rationale for doing it seems pretty weak.
"And you have to ask yourself who will have a Web server running with this small amount of services activated? Nobody."
Please. What they're basically complaining about is that the web server they were supposed to be attacking was too secure, and not easy enough to get into. If it serves up web pages, it's a web server, whether or not the admin has opened all the ports you're used to exploiting.
'Course, the fact that there was a honeypot elsewhere on the network seems a bit shifty...
You're absolutely right. I said basically the same thing in a post above, but it's almost scary how much "the big boys" take a different approach to the problem.
For them, it's a business risk, with business consequences, and it has a number of business-related solutions. Only one of those solutions is a technological way of securing the data where it resides. The others run the gamut from simply hardening the machine and the network but ignoring the data storage, to just accepting the risk all the way around and acknowledging/paying for the damage when it happens.
In essence, that's all insurance is - a way of paying to shift the risk to another willing party who will cover you when and if things happen instead of you paying for those things yourself. As much as my inner geek cringes when I see these kinds of things unsecured, I can't usually argue with them from a business point of view.
When it comes down to money (as all business does), sometimes more security is not the right decision.
I can tell you from personal experience working with three major US financial firms that if you're doing anything to encrypt your data on the actual source machine where it's stored, you're doing more than most.
Scary as it may be, the IT infrastructures of many major corporations rely on keeping people out of the house more than securing things inside. They'll encrypt it on its way out so nobody can sniff it, they'll scramble it in reports if needed, but in it's main storage location, it's just there, waiting to be had.
If you were to gain access to their infrastructure, and then subsequently got access to their databases, you'd find that the sensitive info like CC#s are probably plain-text. At most, those may be encrypted, but if you think any major corporation encrypts names and addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, etc., you're dreaming. For most companies, contact info is in no way considered sensitive, and as a main asset of the company, is shared as widely as possible to make sure that the "one customer, one view" kind of thing works. They care far more about having only one copy of that data in order to keep it up to date than they do about securing it from intruders.
Strive for the best, sure, but you should rest somewhat secure in the knowledge that you're already a good number of steps ahead of many of the big boys.
Sun also has its own word processing and office suite, called Star Office, which it has begun selling, instead of it giving away, in a sign of maturity for the Microsoft Office rival.
After reading Slashdot for the last couple years, I've always been told it was more mature to embrace free software and accept it as inevitable than try and actually sell something you've built.:)
In all seriousness though, this means that people's workspaces change pretty dramatically, having no personalization. Also, management becomes a bit different when you don't really know where your employees are sitting on any given day. No longer is "management by walking around" a possibility.
I don't think the return of the mainframe/fat server model is necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't need to go hand in hand with a hotel/no permanent desk model.
I'd bet that within a few months, they will abandon the no real desk policy, but the dumb terminal thing may work well for them.
Doesn't the RIAA represent the recording companies? If so, they most likely don't have rights to anything other than the recordings. From what I understand, the rights to the songs themselves (chord progressions, lyrics, etc), are usually owned by the songwriters, and enforced by any of a number of groups, with ASCAP being the most popular.
So, if they have an illegal jukebox playing CD's, the RIAA would care. If they have a live band doing a cover, the RIAA wouldn't have jurisdiction, but ASCAP would.
You're definitely right there - statistics are, well, statistics.
> Downloading files of the internet doesn't appreciably harm sales of CDs/DVDs/Movie tickets/..., but it also doesn't help
Don't underestimate the "buzz" factor in mass media. Up to a certain limit, copying and distributing works as free advertising. Songs are allowed to be played on the radio for free (or even semi-indirectly subsidized) precisely because it works to sell more in the long run. Movies often have free pre-screenings to get people talking about it. It's probably so difficult to measure that whatever numbers you have seen for it are surely made up, but it works well enough and is well known enough that the studios and record labels are doing it voluntarily.
Granted, they do it in limited amounts, and the internet probably exceeds that threshold, but it may still act as a net positive for record and movie sales...
Well, that and in many cases the licenses forbid you from selling the software you buy. Especially OEM versions of software. Even if I delete it from my machine, and give you all the discs I've ever had it on, with all the docs, it's still "illegal" (provided the EULA stood up in court) because it's not a product per se, but a license to use it on that particular physical piece of hardware. And they blame the auction sites for letting me sell it to you.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually listen to KFOG most of the time, and have rarely been disappointed by them or their programming. They put on all kinds of small live shows to replay them on the air ("Live from the archives"), have a good variety of music, their DJs are accessible, nice people both on the phone and in person, one of their shows (10 at 10) is good enough that it's synidcated across the country, and, most importantly:
Susquehanna is a group of only 4 stations, all in the Bay Area, grown out of KFOG and KNBR (an AM talk radio/sports station).
They currently own:
KFOG - wide variety of rock
KSAN (the Bone) - stupid name, but decent classic rock variety
KNBR - talk radio, sports (all the Giants games)
KCTC - AM station, don't know anything about it
KFOG was one of the first major stations to stream all their normal broadcasts, and continue to do so.
In my mind, companies like Susquehanna are the kinds of radio we should be asking for. They have the local roots, they have decent programming, a fun staff, do cool community events, etc. But most importantly, they are large enough to have the clout to pay royalties on new music if they want to, but are NOT bland uniform pablum like most of Clear Channel's stations.
Now, I know it's a cool software package and all, but doesn't that fall into the category of functional bloat? When did it go from a math package to a web page authoring tool? Am I missing something obvious here?
Venture capitalists
If you look at the first few items, you'll see they got quite a bit of funding already. So, they've already got (private) shareholders who are waiting for their return on their investment. Now, if we had nabbed them back when they were just a college project...
It is by far the best generalized programming book I have ever seen, and after almost 10 years writing code, I have gone through two copies of my own and bought it with money out of my own pocket for at least 6 people I have worked with. The best way I have heard it described is as a giant compendium of common sense, none of which anyone pays attention to until it's all laid out in front of them.
If there is anything I wish people on Slashdot would get religious about it would be writing excellent code and understanding what exactly makes their code excellent. If they did, surely Code Complete would be their bible. I know it's mine. Keep preaching, maybe you'll get a convert or ten!
Disney is NOT losing money on its movies!
Just because the box office receipts for a given film are lower than the production costs, that doesn't mean the film is taking a bath. There are many, many more avenues to revenue than just domestic box office ticket sales.
I would wager a good amount that Disney makes far, far more money overall from video rentals and sales than they do from ticket sales anyway. Hell, plenty of their movies never even make it to the theater. Add to that the fast food tie-ins, the toys and clothing, blankets, sheets and other merchandise, the international sales both in the theaters and on video, etc.
Disney makes plenty of money off their films. If they didn't, they would be a hell of a lot more careful putting them out, and there wouldn't be a shelf full of stuff at your local video store with titles you've never heard of.
Within a local music scene, especially a relatively large one like in San Francisco, there exists a huge range of talent, some with their own recordings, some not. Inevitably though, the best (relatively small) local acts tend to also allow taping of their live shows and, for me at least, that's where their talent really shines anyway. High quality tapings of live shows comprises about 1/4 of my large CD library, and about 1/2 of what I listen to regularly.
Anyone who's actually fan of real music (not just "entertainment") will, after seeing a great live show, realize how much talent there really is out there, and how little that talent relates to mainstream success.
Ok, enough violent agreement. I just wish there was more I could do to get people to go out and see live shows in their hometowns... It supports artists directly and is often times better than studio crap anyway!
As to the internet though, I have to disagree with you for the most part. Having quick availability to patches may be giving the game companies an easy out in getting to market on time, but I am gratefull as hell for the fact that I have quick, reliable access to patches as they do get released.
What I remember in the times that "used to be" was that games that had bugs in them definitely existed, but you couldn't get patches for them unless you wrote to the company, and they were nice enough to send you a floppy with a patch on it. If you were down for two weeks, you were lucky - that was quick. Many publishers never made patches because there wasn't any reliable way to distribute them. For that, the internet has been a godsend.
I too wait to hear very good things, but not because I don't like having to patch software, but just because I can't stand the crappy quality of 70% of the recent games I've played.
In fact, now that I think about it, the internet has been great for my gaming not just because I can get patches easier than before, but because I can usually find demo versions of games and try them out before I buy. More than once I have tried out a crappy game and stayed the hell away from it thanks to the demo.
Penguins, anyone?
Are they making a none-too-subtle statement about the awesome power of linux?
Basically, they agree that the OMB could, and should, weild their budget power to ensure security is maximized and to lower prices, increase interoperability, etc. But where they differ from Nader, and the only real disagreement is whether there should be any mandate on forcing Microsoft to release source, sell source, etc. They're arguing that the OMB should absolutely try to sway Microsoft's behavior, but that it should do so only through well-reasoned business cases, not through pseudo-enforcement of anti-trust violations.
Your "sarcasm" is actually one of the better analogies I have read so far on this thread. It's as ridiculous, yet so parallel it's hard to deny. Even though you may not want the points, I would mod you up if I coul just so more people could get that analogy in their head.
I would guess this is a least as much due to the production companies that make the shows and sell them to the networks as it is to the networks themselves.
The net result is pretty much as you describe it though - most stations tend to run commercials at the same time.
If the OMB could allocate funds arbitrarily without any sort of economic justification, you'd see a whole hell of a lot of weird causes being pushed by unknown bureaucrats. As it stands, it's the job of congress to push the weird causes on us.
So long as they can provide justified reasons for the change, if their actions have a side effect of breaking up the monopoly and helping build up the OSS culture and functionality of current free products, so much the better. It will end up being a good thing for the country overall.
The problem is keeping anti-Microsoft rhetoric out of the debate and staying focused on solid reasons for change.
As we've seen, Microsoft or other vendors will weasel their way out of legislation or judgements that try to force them to behave a certain way. Economics, however are another matter.
If you want a company to change, don't try to force it on them through laws, hit 'em where it hurts - on the bottom line. Make it in their financial best interest to change, and you may be surprised at how eager they are to alter their behavior.
I was talking only from personal experience, not trying to parrot a marketing line from any insurance agency...
I meant to say that the rationale for these scrip kiddies ignoring the target box and attacking the registration machine seems pretty thin. Not that the rationale for securing your infrastructure overall is...
"And you have to ask yourself who will have a Web server running with this small amount of services activated? Nobody."
Please. What they're basically complaining about is that the web server they were supposed to be attacking was too secure, and not easy enough to get into. If it serves up web pages, it's a web server, whether or not the admin has opened all the ports you're used to exploiting.
'Course, the fact that there was a honeypot elsewhere on the network seems a bit shifty...
For them, it's a business risk, with business consequences, and it has a number of business-related solutions. Only one of those solutions is a technological way of securing the data where it resides. The others run the gamut from simply hardening the machine and the network but ignoring the data storage, to just accepting the risk all the way around and acknowledging/paying for the damage when it happens.
In essence, that's all insurance is - a way of paying to shift the risk to another willing party who will cover you when and if things happen instead of you paying for those things yourself. As much as my inner geek cringes when I see these kinds of things unsecured, I can't usually argue with them from a business point of view.
When it comes down to money (as all business does), sometimes more security is not the right decision.
(cringe, I can't believe I just said that)
Scary as it may be, the IT infrastructures of many major corporations rely on keeping people out of the house more than securing things inside. They'll encrypt it on its way out so nobody can sniff it, they'll scramble it in reports if needed, but in it's main storage location, it's just there, waiting to be had.
If you were to gain access to their infrastructure, and then subsequently got access to their databases, you'd find that the sensitive info like CC#s are probably plain-text. At most, those may be encrypted, but if you think any major corporation encrypts names and addresses, phone numbers, SSNs, etc., you're dreaming. For most companies, contact info is in no way considered sensitive, and as a main asset of the company, is shared as widely as possible to make sure that the "one customer, one view" kind of thing works. They care far more about having only one copy of that data in order to keep it up to date than they do about securing it from intruders.
Strive for the best, sure, but you should rest somewhat secure in the knowledge that you're already a good number of steps ahead of many of the big boys.
After reading Slashdot for the last couple years, I've always been told it was more mature to embrace free software and accept it as inevitable than try and actually sell something you've built. :)
In all seriousness though, this means that people's workspaces change pretty dramatically, having no personalization. Also, management becomes a bit different when you don't really know where your employees are sitting on any given day. No longer is "management by walking around" a possibility.
I don't think the return of the mainframe/fat server model is necessarily a bad thing, but it doesn't need to go hand in hand with a hotel/no permanent desk model.
I'd bet that within a few months, they will abandon the no real desk policy, but the dumb terminal thing may work well for them.
So, if they have an illegal jukebox playing CD's, the RIAA would care. If they have a live band doing a cover, the RIAA wouldn't have jurisdiction, but ASCAP would.
Or so I've been told.
You're definitely right there - statistics are, well, statistics.
> Downloading files of the internet doesn't appreciably harm sales of CDs/DVDs/Movie tickets/..., but it also doesn't help
Don't underestimate the "buzz" factor in mass media. Up to a certain limit, copying and distributing works as free advertising. Songs are allowed to be played on the radio for free (or even semi-indirectly subsidized) precisely because it works to sell more in the long run. Movies often have free pre-screenings to get people talking about it. It's probably so difficult to measure that whatever numbers you have seen for it are surely made up, but it works well enough and is well known enough that the studios and record labels are doing it voluntarily.
Granted, they do it in limited amounts, and the internet probably exceeds that threshold, but it may still act as a net positive for record and movie sales...
Well, that and in many cases the licenses forbid you from selling the software you buy. Especially OEM versions of software. Even if I delete it from my machine, and give you all the discs I've ever had it on, with all the docs, it's still "illegal" (provided the EULA stood up in court) because it's not a product per se, but a license to use it on that particular physical piece of hardware. And they blame the auction sites for letting me sell it to you.
Still feeling secure about downloading that latest single?
Yeah, sure. Sharing it on the other hand may not be so anonymous. Who says it doesn't pay to be a leech?