OK, I'm sold. I have all my domains hosted at GoDaddy. I must say I have good experience with them but I haven't actually dealt with them in years, other than the automatic renewal. Based on the stories I'm reading here today, though, I'm ready to move.
Could people please post their experiences with alternative registrars to GoDaddy, including pricing, how long you've been using that registrar, and features available?
The shame of it is that I think my primary domains just got renewed a month or so ago.
I admit (ahem) that I have a MySpace page. I signed up for it with a unique e-mail address "myspace@blahblah." It forwards to a regular address. I get a lot of spam at the regular address but none, zip, zero going to the MySpace address. It may be that you're getting spam *because of* MySpace, but that might be due to something you're doing wrong. MySpace itself, though? I don't see the evidence.
Like Windows XP to Windows 2000, this is largely a GUI re-design.
Did you ever stop to consider that maybe the reason you believe this is because the only information you have about it comes from short demos and articles with lots of screenshots?
InfoWorld ran an short piece on Chris Edge and his use of open source at the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year. It was part of a larger package focusing on a variety of businesses and how they use open source.
What is the next big thing in computing and technology? Would either HP or IBM or even Intel recognize it if they saw it? I doubt it. There is something about becoming a behemoth that prevents a company from seeing fast moving trends or foresee future ones.
These sound like kegger facts to me. Would you care to point out the "next big things" that HP/IBM are missing out on?
IBM is an enterprise IT company, HP is going after consumers.
Margins on consumer technology are razor thin.
Fortunately, HP has created a printer business with huge margins on ink jet cartridges etc.
???
HP Profits, IBM quakes in its boots.
I don't see a lot of "new era for HP" in this story, nor do I see a lot of strategy for success. What I do see is that HP, which was once one of the leaders in technology R&D, has settled into a role where it's fundamentally a printer company.
The scattered 20 trojan drives around the outside and 15 get picked up by their target. Notice how the don't bother saying what happened to the other 5.
According to TFA, of the 20 they planted, 15 were found by employees. I think that pretty much sums it up.
Re:Cheaper isn't everything
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 1
Irrelevant. If the store can only stay in business if customers decide to make a sacrifice, buying from the store even though that's not their best choice (considering overall value), the store will not stay in business and you're just wasting your money.
And who's talking about sacrifices? Not me.
You keep saying "but it's not the lowest price, but it's not the lowest price." And I keep saying "but the lowest price doesn't offer the best value, but the lowest price doesn't offer the best value." And then you say "but if it's not the lowest price then the customer makes a sacrifice." Yes, they do. They sacrifice the lower price for something else. How blind do you have to be not to see this? I am baffled, totally baffled.
Re:Cheaper isn't everything
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 1
Businesses that require this sort of support in order to stay in business have a big problem: they're not viable businesses.
Bullshit. The only reason Amazon is able to offer 34 percent discount on new books is because their business model presupposes nationwide sales. Those economies of scale make lower prices possible but that business model also by necessity excludes any kind of customization for a given market. As in my market. As in me. Amazon tries to "recommend" all kinds of bullshit to me all the time but I'll take a book review from a Stacey's employee any day.
On a slightly different topic, it's a little scary to me how many people on Slashdot advocate low price as the ultimate best arbiter of why they buy something. I sincerely hope all of you are in your early 20s -- because if you're not, and you've been burned by companies as many times as those of us who are a little older than our 20s have been -- then that doesn't bode too well for world economics in general.
Re:Cheaper isn't everything
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You pay more for a book in exchange for having a bookstore is a value add for you?
Just curious, but what service does it provide for you that a local library doesn't?
Not a lot of O'Reilly books in most libraries. Computer books in general are often poor choices for libraries, because the technology changes so frequently. If you donate your computer books to a local library they will most likely sell them off for a couple bucks apiece at a book sale.
If we're specifically talking about the bookstore I shop at (Stacey's), on the other hand, they have a whole section devoted to O'Reilly -- several shelves in fact -- in addition to books from all the other publishers, ranging from 800 page fluff-filed "Bibles" to serious college-level textbooks.
But you raise another question, which is why buy books at all? And the answer to that is that, while I also have a library card, I regularly like to pay for my books, because I want a diverse variety of books to continue to exist and I want to encourage publishers to publish them.
Also, even if you're talking about novels -- which you could argue are totally unnecessary purchases; you're only likely to read them once and they have no reference value -- they're also not really all that expensive. A trade paperback costs about $14 and it will probably take you at least 10-12 hours, total, to read. Compare that to a movie, which costs $10.50 in my city and averages an hour and a half. Even if you never go to the movies and just rent, and a movie rental costs $3, the book still gives you more bang for your buck.
Plus, books make you smarter. Ask any writer. If you want to learn how to communicate better using the written word, you can take all the classes you want, but the absolute best thing to do is to read, read, read. Stephen King put it succinctly in his memoir, On Writing: "If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write. Period."
People really ought to read more, seriously. Any way they can get it. If they've got some money, they should be happy to pay for good books. It's a damn shame that most folks don't.
Re:Spoken like a hacker, rather than a pro
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 1
Now there's a funny image. Touche!
Re:Cheaper isn't everything
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 1
The concept of buying someplace with a higher price to "support them" (as opposed to some other benefit, like service or selection) is no different then charity, so why not just skip the buying step and send the charity directly?
Obviously the reason I want to support them is because of their service and selection, not to mention the fact that they have a physical presence that caters to my community, which chain superstores can't do. Please, you're not that stupid.
Cheaper isn't everything
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
In fact, if you have access to a local, independently-owned bookseller in your area, you should be buying your books there instead of online.
Stacey's Books in San Francisco doesn't give me Amazon's 34 percent discount -- in fact, it gives me 10 percent -- but it is a wonderful resource and not one I'd like to see disappear.
That's not hyperbole either. This year we've seen two classic, quality Bay Area bookstores close their doors: Cody's on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books on Van Ness in San Francisco. These were not holes in the wall; they were spacious, carried a lot of stock and had served their communities well for years. (And believe me, the Bay Area in general buys a lot of books.)
The reality is that the book market is changing. Superstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble have a lot to do with it, and so does Amazon. Another factor is the overall decline in book sales to the American public. People walk into Borders to buy DVDs of Friends and they pick up a paperback of Harry Potter at the same time. That's not the model I want my booksellers to be based around; I want to support local businesses that understand their communities and are dedicated to selling books.
This is not to knock Amazon, or Borders or B&N for that matter; in communities where those are the only option, it's better to have someplace to buy books than no place at all. I still buy plenty of stuff at Amazon. But for books, I vote with my wallet.
Re:Where's the news?
on
The Art of SQL
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· Score: 3, Informative
Could Slashdot not post book reviews to the main section??
Spoken like a hacker, rather than a pro
on
The Art of SQL
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It's great to see a book that tells me SQL can do pretty much anything - but I pretty much already knew that.
This book might be good for THEORY, but for actually getting useful and applicable information, the review leaves me wondering who would be a worthwhile reader.
And yet, if you get out and talk to some of the real-world database consultants who get called in to clean up other people's messes, one of the complaints you hear again and again is that too many so-called DBAs learned their trade on a specific product, rather than understanding why databases work the way they do.
Optimizations that you introduce into your applications to cater to specific products' features (or work around their shortcomings) may be a fact of life, but they make for poor design choices. You should know what you're doing first -- which means a good understanding of database theory -- and layer all that syntactic hot-rod stuff on later.
ask any car salesman. in america, horsepower sells.
So why have all the chip manufacturers quit citing performance specs and begun renaming their product lines around meaningless numbers, rather than processor speed? Not just Intel is doing this.
Their naming convention needs to be more user friendly. The average consumer has no idea what a Pentium D processor is but they could understand that a Pentium 4 was better than a Pentium III. It's all about marketing to the masses in this over-saturated market.
No, the real problem is that Intel is accustomed to a market where you sell specific processor brands direct to consumers, which is crazy. In a world where a $500 PC is going to be able to do 99.9 percent of anything that the average home user wants to do, that home user doesn't give a rat's ass what kind of processor is in there. Pentium M, Celeron M, Core 38 Double-D... who cares? If their friend tells them AMD is a little better, then fine, they're going to buy AMD. Either way, all the same. All the shiny Intel Inside stickers in the world aren't going to make a bit of difference.
People see an Intel commercial on TV and they tune it out. A guy in a weird space suit? OK, whatever.
Gamers still care what kind of chip is in there, but gamers also have the option of consoles. Plus, the CPU matters a lot but the video card is the really sexy component for them. On the other hand, people who run servers might care about CPUs, but those kind of people are going to want to see real-world benchmarks.
Intel needs to get over it... and it is getting over it. Notice how Apple Macs all have Intel chips in them now. Dumb luck? I doubt it. Intel made the kind of deal it needs to keep making to stay on target, deals that are based on a simple old-fashioned idea: You're a component manufacturer. Sell components to manufacturers of consumer goods and let the consumer-goods manufacturers do the selling to consumers. If your product delivers the performance the manufacturer needs with a good integrated suite of products around it (e.g. chipsets, drivers, compilers) at a price point that the manufacturer can afford, then the manufacturer will buy your components.
In a way, the last thing Intel needs is semi-informed consumers starting flamewars over this component vs. that component, Brand X versus Brand Y. A lot of the engineering decisions that get made in the CPU world aren't things that can be easily explained to consumers, so what you end up with is a bunch of FUD and name-calling. Intel's better off receding into the background and letting its engineering do the talking (if it's still got it).
By decreasing/.'s already low signal to noise ratio, you can force/.'s editors to come clean about their ethical lapses, and have a great time doing it!
OK, while I'm all for fucking with Slashdot as much as anyone, have posted trolls in the past and always browse at -1, I just don't understand this statement. How does reposting garbage "force" anyone to do anything? What does your reposting garbage have to do with ethical lapses? Is it ethical to waste time? Is it ethical to bring down somebody else's site just because you don't like it? Honestly -- funny is funny, but the logical lapses of the so-called jihad are baffling.
Slashdot is an amusing way to stay on top of news stories and hear other people's opinions about them. That's it. That's all. Why take it so seriously?
To be fair, TO'R points out that it was CMP, the co-owner of the conference, who registered the service mark and sent out the cease and desist letters, not O'Reilly.
If I'm to apply the same logic to regular mail, well, regular mail is doomed too; it's full of phishing, spam, and spoofing. I guess I'm not sending anything by mail from now on!! Duh!
Seems like a good analogy to me, because... yeah, how often do you actually sit down to write letters to your acquaintances? Communicating by mail was replaced long ago, and not by email but by the telephone. These days I don't even use the postal mail to pay my bills. I haven't bought stamps in a year. Similarly, I haven't written a paper check in as long.
Is something similar going to happen to today's email? Hey, why not?
The description doesn't really do this one justice:
Three hundred years before the Titanic, the Vasa was the biggest sailing vessel of its day. The overloaded ship ruled the seas for all of a mile before she took on water through her too-low gun ports and promptly capsized.
"Overloaded" isn't really the right description. It makes you think the thing was full of too much cargo. That's not really it. If you look at the castle on the stern of the ship, it is literally covered with hundreds of carvings of heraldry, kings, gryphons, and all kinds of what-not. The thing must weigh tons, much of it in this kind of unnecessary adornment. Then, if you examine the hull, its dimensions and overall height, it seems plain that it just wasn't seaworthy. Pretty much one good strong gust of wind capsized it, and to look at it you can easily see why.
I can't quite remember, but I seem to recall that the records are scanty on this point -- it may be that the designers of the ship just didn't have the expertise and understanding of buoyancy of later shipwrights, or it may be that there was some kind of kickbacks or other shenanigans that interfered with the building and compromised the design.
When I say "if you look at the ship," though, I am being literal -- because you can. The really interesting thing about the Vasa is that it sank not far from Stockholm harbor, in waters that had a unique mineral consistency. Unlike other parts of the world, for whatever reason the waters in this area were particularly unfavorable to the shipworm. Normally a wooden ship like the Vasa would be eaten up. The Vasa, however, was merely covered with silt at the bottom of the bay, where it lay for hundreds of years.
Eventually -- and again, memory fails me but I believe it was sometime around the 1970s -- the location of the Vasa was discovered and work began to bring it to the surface. Today the entire ship is on display in a museum in Stockholm. The museum building was actually built up around the ship itself. A lot of repair and preservation work had to be done, including plastination of the wood, but it is mostly intact except for the original painting. You can't go onboard, but you can walk around it and view the hull from all sides. It is literally the closest you'll ever get to a 17th century wood-hull sailing vessel -- about five meters away. They've also built a facsimile of the interior decks that you can walk through -- if walking is the word. (Let's just say they made people smaller in those days.)
The museum has salvaged all kinds of other goodies from the ship as well, from cannon to tools to even the bodies of some of the original sailors, all of which are on display. If you get the chance you should check it out -- if you're at all into things nautical, it's a one-of-a-kind experience.
The current administration has absolutely nothing to do with this issue.
I agree, which is why I took issue with the statement that being against gambling has something to do with "the current trend of religious fanaticism."
The federal government has nothing to do with this
No? Then what is the National Indian Gaming Commission, the federal body that's empowered to regulate tribally-owned casinos? Why did Congress pass the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act if the federal government has nothing to do with it? You, sir, are misinformed. The states were never empowered to make these sweeping changes.
Legalized gambling has been around for decades.
I agree. In Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Not in every single city in America, the way it seems to be now.
Well, not quite all. Citizens of the USA are paying a stiff price for the rampant religious fanaticism that infects the nation, resulting not only in stupid law about gambling and drugs, but also more important issues such as abortion, education and capital punishment. They'll grow out of it.
That's a narrow view of the issue, I think. Personally, I am not in favor of Indian gaming. I think casinos are tacky, they are magnets for corruption and crime, and I don't want them in my backyard. Gambling was illegal in most areas of this nation for many, many years before the current administration. Now all of a sudden it's everywhere, all due to some apparently loophole in the law. "Indian reservation," my ass -- casinos are now a major feature of downtown Detroit, among other cities. Right there smack dab in the middle of where they used to be completely illegal. I'll vote against it any chance I get.
By the same token, online gambling seems comparatively tame. Yes, you have the age-old problem of seniors gambling their life savings away, but to me that's a lesser problem than having a miniature Atlantic City right in everyone's backyard. I agree with the grandparent: the Indian gaming people lobbied for this law and it serves their interests, no one else's.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, I'm sold. I have all my domains hosted at GoDaddy. I must say I have good experience with them but I haven't actually dealt with them in years, other than the automatic renewal. Based on the stories I'm reading here today, though, I'm ready to move.
Could people please post their experiences with alternative registrars to GoDaddy, including pricing, how long you've been using that registrar, and features available?
The shame of it is that I think my primary domains just got renewed a month or so ago.
I admit (ahem) that I have a MySpace page. I signed up for it with a unique e-mail address "myspace@blahblah." It forwards to a regular address. I get a lot of spam at the regular address but none, zip, zero going to the MySpace address. It may be that you're getting spam *because of* MySpace, but that might be due to something you're doing wrong. MySpace itself, though? I don't see the evidence.
Did you ever stop to consider that maybe the reason you believe this is because the only information you have about it comes from short demos and articles with lots of screenshots?
For those of you who dread the thought of a pile of newspaper accumulating on your doorstep, the Monitor does a Treeless Edition, also.
InfoWorld ran an short piece on Chris Edge and his use of open source at the Christian Science Monitor earlier this year. It was part of a larger package focusing on a variety of businesses and how they use open source.
These sound like kegger facts to me. Would you care to point out the "next big things" that HP/IBM are missing out on?
I don't see a lot of "new era for HP" in this story, nor do I see a lot of strategy for success. What I do see is that HP, which was once one of the leaders in technology R&D, has settled into a role where it's fundamentally a printer company.
Am I missing something?
According to TFA, of the 20 they planted, 15 were found by employees. I think that pretty much sums it up.
And who's talking about sacrifices? Not me.
You keep saying "but it's not the lowest price, but it's not the lowest price." And I keep saying "but the lowest price doesn't offer the best value, but the lowest price doesn't offer the best value." And then you say "but if it's not the lowest price then the customer makes a sacrifice." Yes, they do. They sacrifice the lower price for something else. How blind do you have to be not to see this? I am baffled, totally baffled.
Bullshit. The only reason Amazon is able to offer 34 percent discount on new books is because their business model presupposes nationwide sales. Those economies of scale make lower prices possible but that business model also by necessity excludes any kind of customization for a given market. As in my market. As in me. Amazon tries to "recommend" all kinds of bullshit to me all the time but I'll take a book review from a Stacey's employee any day.
On a slightly different topic, it's a little scary to me how many people on Slashdot advocate low price as the ultimate best arbiter of why they buy something. I sincerely hope all of you are in your early 20s -- because if you're not, and you've been burned by companies as many times as those of us who are a little older than our 20s have been -- then that doesn't bode too well for world economics in general.
Not a lot of O'Reilly books in most libraries. Computer books in general are often poor choices for libraries, because the technology changes so frequently. If you donate your computer books to a local library they will most likely sell them off for a couple bucks apiece at a book sale.
If we're specifically talking about the bookstore I shop at (Stacey's), on the other hand, they have a whole section devoted to O'Reilly -- several shelves in fact -- in addition to books from all the other publishers, ranging from 800 page fluff-filed "Bibles" to serious college-level textbooks.
But you raise another question, which is why buy books at all? And the answer to that is that, while I also have a library card, I regularly like to pay for my books, because I want a diverse variety of books to continue to exist and I want to encourage publishers to publish them.
Also, even if you're talking about novels -- which you could argue are totally unnecessary purchases; you're only likely to read them once and they have no reference value -- they're also not really all that expensive. A trade paperback costs about $14 and it will probably take you at least 10-12 hours, total, to read. Compare that to a movie, which costs $10.50 in my city and averages an hour and a half. Even if you never go to the movies and just rent, and a movie rental costs $3, the book still gives you more bang for your buck.
Plus, books make you smarter. Ask any writer. If you want to learn how to communicate better using the written word, you can take all the classes you want, but the absolute best thing to do is to read, read, read. Stephen King put it succinctly in his memoir, On Writing: "If you don't have time to read, you don't have time to write. Period."
People really ought to read more, seriously. Any way they can get it. If they've got some money, they should be happy to pay for good books. It's a damn shame that most folks don't.
Now there's a funny image. Touche!
Obviously the reason I want to support them is because of their service and selection, not to mention the fact that they have a physical presence that caters to my community, which chain superstores can't do. Please, you're not that stupid.
In fact, if you have access to a local, independently-owned bookseller in your area, you should be buying your books there instead of online.
Stacey's Books in San Francisco doesn't give me Amazon's 34 percent discount -- in fact, it gives me 10 percent -- but it is a wonderful resource and not one I'd like to see disappear.
That's not hyperbole either. This year we've seen two classic, quality Bay Area bookstores close their doors: Cody's on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place for Books on Van Ness in San Francisco. These were not holes in the wall; they were spacious, carried a lot of stock and had served their communities well for years. (And believe me, the Bay Area in general buys a lot of books.)
The reality is that the book market is changing. Superstores like Borders and Barnes and Noble have a lot to do with it, and so does Amazon. Another factor is the overall decline in book sales to the American public. People walk into Borders to buy DVDs of Friends and they pick up a paperback of Harry Potter at the same time. That's not the model I want my booksellers to be based around; I want to support local businesses that understand their communities and are dedicated to selling books.
This is not to knock Amazon, or Borders or B&N for that matter; in communities where those are the only option, it's better to have someplace to buy books than no place at all. I still buy plenty of stuff at Amazon. But for books, I vote with my wallet.
I like book reviews.
Homepage preferences are your friends.
And yet, if you get out and talk to some of the real-world database consultants who get called in to clean up other people's messes, one of the complaints you hear again and again is that too many so-called DBAs learned their trade on a specific product, rather than understanding why databases work the way they do.
Optimizations that you introduce into your applications to cater to specific products' features (or work around their shortcomings) may be a fact of life, but they make for poor design choices. You should know what you're doing first -- which means a good understanding of database theory -- and layer all that syntactic hot-rod stuff on later.
No, the real problem is that Intel is accustomed to a market where you sell specific processor brands direct to consumers, which is crazy. In a world where a $500 PC is going to be able to do 99.9 percent of anything that the average home user wants to do, that home user doesn't give a rat's ass what kind of processor is in there. Pentium M, Celeron M, Core 38 Double-D ... who cares? If their friend tells them AMD is a little better, then fine, they're going to buy AMD. Either way, all the same. All the shiny Intel Inside stickers in the world aren't going to make a bit of difference.
People see an Intel commercial on TV and they tune it out. A guy in a weird space suit? OK, whatever.
Gamers still care what kind of chip is in there, but gamers also have the option of consoles. Plus, the CPU matters a lot but the video card is the really sexy component for them. On the other hand, people who run servers might care about CPUs, but those kind of people are going to want to see real-world benchmarks.
Intel needs to get over it ... and it is getting over it. Notice how Apple Macs all have Intel chips in them now. Dumb luck? I doubt it. Intel made the kind of deal it needs to keep making to stay on target, deals that are based on a simple old-fashioned idea: You're a component manufacturer. Sell components to manufacturers of consumer goods and let the consumer-goods manufacturers do the selling to consumers. If your product delivers the performance the manufacturer needs with a good integrated suite of products around it (e.g. chipsets, drivers, compilers) at a price point that the manufacturer can afford, then the manufacturer will buy your components.
In a way, the last thing Intel needs is semi-informed consumers starting flamewars over this component vs. that component, Brand X versus Brand Y. A lot of the engineering decisions that get made in the CPU world aren't things that can be easily explained to consumers, so what you end up with is a bunch of FUD and name-calling. Intel's better off receding into the background and letting its engineering do the talking (if it's still got it).
Slashdot is an amusing way to stay on top of news stories and hear other people's opinions about them. That's it. That's all. Why take it so seriously?
To be fair, TO'R points out that it was CMP, the co-owner of the conference, who registered the service mark and sent out the cease and desist letters, not O'Reilly.
Is something similar going to happen to today's email? Hey, why not?
I can't quite remember, but I seem to recall that the records are scanty on this point -- it may be that the designers of the ship just didn't have the expertise and understanding of buoyancy of later shipwrights, or it may be that there was some kind of kickbacks or other shenanigans that interfered with the building and compromised the design.
When I say "if you look at the ship," though, I am being literal -- because you can. The really interesting thing about the Vasa is that it sank not far from Stockholm harbor, in waters that had a unique mineral consistency. Unlike other parts of the world, for whatever reason the waters in this area were particularly unfavorable to the shipworm. Normally a wooden ship like the Vasa would be eaten up. The Vasa, however, was merely covered with silt at the bottom of the bay, where it lay for hundreds of years.
Eventually -- and again, memory fails me but I believe it was sometime around the 1970s -- the location of the Vasa was discovered and work began to bring it to the surface. Today the entire ship is on display in a museum in Stockholm. The museum building was actually built up around the ship itself. A lot of repair and preservation work had to be done, including plastination of the wood, but it is mostly intact except for the original painting. You can't go onboard, but you can walk around it and view the hull from all sides. It is literally the closest you'll ever get to a 17th century wood-hull sailing vessel -- about five meters away. They've also built a facsimile of the interior decks that you can walk through -- if walking is the word. (Let's just say they made people smaller in those days.)
The museum has salvaged all kinds of other goodies from the ship as well, from cannon to tools to even the bodies of some of the original sailors, all of which are on display. If you get the chance you should check it out -- if you're at all into things nautical, it's a one-of-a-kind experience.
By the same token, online gambling seems comparatively tame. Yes, you have the age-old problem of seniors gambling their life savings away, but to me that's a lesser problem than having a miniature Atlantic City right in everyone's backyard. I agree with the grandparent: the Indian gaming people lobbied for this law and it serves their interests, no one else's.