Yeah, their intent is a little unclear. If I were them (and I wanted to make a point) I'd sell the shirts and stuff exactly at cost- don't make a dime- and talk about how they were just trying to "facilitate the transfer" of t-shirts. I'm sure you could find some delicious quote somewhere from the napster guys along the "napster doesn't violate copyright, people violate copyright" lines. Put that on the back, and then buy the shirts in small batches from dozens of small t-shirt shops all over the country. (Well, maybe that last part is overly elaborate, but you get my point.) OTOH, if they are really napster supporters, well, Metallica can have my idea for free:) Seriously, I think that prosecuting the technology is the wrong idea. But there are really lots of good PR ideas that the anti-napster folks aren't taking advantage of here. ~luge
Re:It's possible to not make money, you know
on
Iridium Saved?
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· Score: 2
I think had is the operative word. While none of us here can know for sure, wouldn't you have spent some time and effort looking into other options if you knew that your service was going down? I'd think this would be especially true if you were so telephone dependent that you'd already gone the distance and gotten such a phone. Most of those types of customers have probably cut their losses and are probably already very long gone, unfortunately...
"People like CmdrTaco have an inside track..." hello? Of course he has an inside track. It's his site, his idea, his code... If I was the reason/. existed (not to mention head honcho or whatever the !@#$!@# his title is now) I'd post whatever the heck I wanted to too. Jeez... (sorry, that just seemed so ridiculously ignorant that I had to flame away.) ~luge
Insightful? This is not insightful. This is flamebait. Yes, the vast number of distros can get a little bit chaotic. But the competition between them all undeniably improves them, which this guy doesn't seem to understand. None of the BSDs would have a functional desktop if the various Linux distros hadn't been so "chaotic" that they produced Gnome and KDE. Where is that complete newbie friendly installer? Hrm... well, that was the result of competition too- RH and Corel's need to get ahead. Go ahead, call it chaos. I'm sure the uni-cellular creatures in the primary ooze were thinking much the same when some things decided to go multi-cellular. That was chaos too... look where it got us. In conclusion: insightful? Are you on the $3 crack? Or the more expensive kind? ~luge
Given that BSD has the BSD licence, it friendly to the intellectual property concerns of big companies. The GPL is all about getting all source code published, and this does not match the adjenda of most companies with IP concerns.Here's what it boils down to for me (and I'm sure for others): given a choice between a license that is friendly to big companies and a license that is friendly to me, I'll go with option #2. That is the GPL, and that is why Linux is successful and BSD will never be as popular among free development communities. The rest of your trolling about competition? Well... it is a blatant troll, so I really shouldn't respond, but if you don't think that competition (either amongst the Linuxes or between Linux and BSD) improves the breed, then you haven't seen RH's new installer. Or Gnome 1.2 and KDE 2.0. Or any number of other things. Competition works, and Linux is case #1 for why we need Unix #3. And Unix #4 (in the HURD.) And whatever else comes next. Bring 'em on. ~luge
Actually, Coca-Cola still uses an extract of the coca leaf. The Wall Street Journal had a really cool piece several years back on the company that does the processing of the leaf for them. The processing company is the only company in the country with a permit to legally import the leaves, and they do all the processing in a bunker-like facility (in NJ, IIRC) so that none of it gets stolen and turned into cocaine. I seem to recall that they also process the leaves for certain pharmaceutical companies. Different components of the leaf for the meds and the drink, I'd assume, but either the WSJ didn't ask or they weren't telling. ~luge
For every silly, pointless clause like this in UCITA there is another group of angry people, and another way to say "are you kidding me? Free speech? Hello!" It's this kind of violation of our rights that really grabs the attention of people (and lawyers.) The other problems of UCITA are too obscure to find much of an audience- this one, on the other hand, is understandable to the public, blatantly unconstitutional, and will (hopefully) take down a large chunk of the UCITA when it is taken to court. (And it will be taken to court- you don't think this kind of thing makes the ACLU salivate?) I say bring it on... the more flagrant and understandable examples we have of things like this the briefer the amount of time we'll have to put up with crap like UCITA. ~luge
Actually, I was looking through some articles linked to from their site, and the original claim (from the inventors of the game, I think) was that no actor has a Bacon number > 4. The UVa guys a) disproved for the set of all actors (as I mentioned) and b) actually proved for American actors- i.e., everyone who has a Bacon number > 4 is from IMDB's big foreign film section. BTW, there are actually actors who satisfy the seven degree rule- Christo pher Lee and Anthony Quinn, for example. ~luge(I'm asking the friend who owns oracleofbacon.org what kind of hardware they used... no answer yet)
Actually, computing the Kevin Bacon problem from IMDB info is not that computing intensive. Building a graph is quite straightforward, and traversing it (at least for specified names, as opposed to all names, which I guess might take a while) is also reasonably straightforward. Check out the Oracle of Bacon- when a friend of mine was at UVa, they did the conversion to a graph and set up this web interface to it. In particular, you might be interested to note the Bacon Numbers, which indicate that of the 390,027 actors who can be linked to Kevin Bacon, 390,023 can be linked to in 7 steps or less. The other 4 can be linked to in eight steps. I believe that this was done on a single computer. Pretty sure it wasn't a cluster of 4,000;) ~luge(ahh, the continuing quest to confuse the moderators... is this OT or "interesting?" Only time will tell:)
Really, this should be on top (+5). I can see why this would confuse people who don't regularly browse the mozilla.org FTP site, but it should be made clear that builds have been labeled as M16 since the day after M15. Despite that labeling, it isn't M16 until it is announced by mozilla.org. Of course, that should be within the week, and it isn't a big error on/.s part, but/.rs should still be aware that what they are getting isn't the real thing.
Hmm... lessee... every new version of Word is non-interoperable with the previous one (breaking a defacto industry standard.) There is also the various standards breakages in IE (pick any version)(though Netscape wasjust as guilty). Those are just off the top of my head- I'm sure others can find more. ~luge
Prior to the actual milestone release, Mozilla tends to say that they are adding to "Mx" even though that milestone may not be ready for a while. M16 is supposed to be done by the end of next week, but who knows... ~luge
I had a professor who consulted with Nintendo on the Virtual Boy, and his opinion (though he said he'd never directly talked with anyone there about this) was that they were basically working out the kinks so that when multi-color LEDs were available, they'd be able to really quickly put together a viable 3D system. He had a whole bunch of pre-production units in his office, and we got to poke around in them quite a bit. They were pretty crappy as a platform, but mechanically/electronically they were really, really cool. Mark my words- cheap blue LEDs aren't very far away (they are in limited production already in Japan) and when their cost gets reasonable in a few years, Nintendo will come out with Son of VirtualBoy- and it'll blow us all away. ~luge
Rob... I think you are missing the point. No one wants the "story"- at least not yet. We just want to have some little tidbit, now. It's not just that/. readers are impatient (they are) but to a certain extent they feel that this is a community and they want to know (or at least have some clue) WTF is going on. Oh, and they don't want to get it from wired. Believe me, we sympathize- it's a miracle that this didn't happen a long time ago. But even the slightest little "shit! we're working on it!" would be respectful of the community and the role we play in your success. ~luge
Actually, yes. As I posted elsewhere, a simple "yes, we got DDOS'd" would probably be sufficient. I think we are all accustomed to getting our news about/. from slashdot, and not from wired or news.com. If Taco has the time to do a wired interview, he should have the time to talk to us. Tacohas done it before and that type of openness should continue to be the norm. ~luge
If that is the case (and it certainly could be, though I doubt it- even the old servers could have handled that type of load) then wouldn't it be really, really easy for Rob and Co. to just jump out and say it? Heck, even a simple "BTW, we weren't DDOS'd- it was just a server failure" would have been sufficient for most of us, I suspect. Of course, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd note that such an admission might depress the Andover stock price, which would make it a big problem to post at all... but that'd be crazy, wouldn't it. ~luge(not a conspiracist! I swear!)
Pent- I think I got it through because it was near the top (which any troller will tell you is key) and because I abused my +1 to get it to float to the top and get them to notice it better. You are right, the moderators are fickle, but they are also predictable. Trust me, it'll be back down reasonably soon. (-1, overrated.) ~luge
The problem (at least as reported by wired) is not the new servers- it is that the new servers are getting DDOSd. Like you say, you'd rather hear the news. Well, this used to not be just a news site. There was a sense that there was a community- CT was one of our buds, not just a talking head. If Rob wanted CDs, that's cool- we'd buy from CDNow. If Rob had a shitty day at school, he'd say it and say that's why he hadn't posted stuff. If I just want headlines (which appears to be the desire of most/. readers today, unfortunately) I'd go to wired... since, among other things, they actually seem to report on DDOSs.
Sorry, guys, but it is really pathetic that there has been no news here about the problems you've been suffering. There have been tons of people reporting SQL problems today, we all know the site has been shut down repeatedly over the last couple of days, and wired reported that you had a router die. I hate to make a "in the old days/. was better" but it isn't that hard to look through the archives and find CT saying "oops... our server died/crashed/whatever." That kind of honesty and straightforwardness is what made/. a community first and a news site second. It's sort of sad that this kind of openness (which is much more important than source) is apparently no longer a priority. ~luge
To a great extent, the possibility for that is there already. The backend stuff (Camel) is really well abstracted from the GUI portion, so if you wanted to write a text front end that would support all the cool database-ish functions, you could. That said, I don't think Helix will be doing that anytime soon, since they aren't aiming to reduce the number of pine/mutt users- they are aiming to reduce the number of outlook users. As long as that remains the goal, then GUI and the associated bloat/features (pick whichever suits your POV) will continue to be the focus of Helix's frontend work. ~luge
Actually, the email portion is the most advanced portion of the app. The trick is that all that functionality is in the backend- since the frontend still stinks, it appears that there is very little functionality when in fact there is quite a great deal there that is just not opened up to the user yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, their intent is a little unclear. If I were them (and I wanted to make a point) I'd sell the shirts and stuff exactly at cost- don't make a dime- and talk about how they were just trying to "facilitate the transfer" of t-shirts. I'm sure you could find some delicious quote somewhere from the napster guys along the "napster doesn't violate copyright, people violate copyright" lines. Put that on the back, and then buy the shirts in small batches from dozens of small t-shirt shops all over the country. (Well, maybe that last part is overly elaborate, but you get my point.) OTOH, if they are really napster supporters, well, Metallica can have my idea for free :)
Seriously, I think that prosecuting the technology is the wrong idea. But there are really lots of good PR ideas that the anti-napster folks aren't taking advantage of here.
~luge
I think had is the operative word. While none of us here can know for sure, wouldn't you have spent some time and effort looking into other options if you knew that your service was going down? I'd think this would be especially true if you were so telephone dependent that you'd already gone the distance and gotten such a phone. Most of those types of customers have probably cut their losses and are probably already very long gone, unfortunately...
"People like CmdrTaco have an inside track..." hello? Of course he has an inside track. It's his site, his idea, his code... If I was the reason /. existed (not to mention head honcho or whatever the !@#$!@# his title is now) I'd post whatever the heck I wanted to too. Jeez... (sorry, that just seemed so ridiculously ignorant that I had to flame away.)
~luge
Insightful? This is not insightful. This is flamebait. Yes, the vast number of distros can get a little bit chaotic. But the competition between them all undeniably improves them, which this guy doesn't seem to understand. None of the BSDs would have a functional desktop if the various Linux distros hadn't been so "chaotic" that they produced Gnome and KDE. Where is that complete newbie friendly installer? Hrm... well, that was the result of competition too- RH and Corel's need to get ahead. Go ahead, call it chaos. I'm sure the uni-cellular creatures in the primary ooze were thinking much the same when some things decided to go multi-cellular. That was chaos too... look where it got us.
In conclusion: insightful? Are you on the $3 crack? Or the more expensive kind?
~luge
Given that BSD has the BSD licence, it friendly to the intellectual property concerns of big companies. The GPL is all about getting all source code published, and this does not match the adjenda of most companies with IP concerns.Here's what it boils down to for me (and I'm sure for others): given a choice between a license that is friendly to big companies and a license that is friendly to me, I'll go with option #2. That is the GPL, and that is why Linux is successful and BSD will never be as popular among free development communities.
The rest of your trolling about competition? Well... it is a blatant troll, so I really shouldn't respond, but if you don't think that competition (either amongst the Linuxes or between Linux and BSD) improves the breed, then you haven't seen RH's new installer. Or Gnome 1.2 and KDE 2.0. Or any number of other things. Competition works, and Linux is case #1 for why we need Unix #3. And Unix #4 (in the HURD.) And whatever else comes next. Bring 'em on.
~luge
Actually, Coca-Cola still uses an extract of the coca leaf. The Wall Street Journal had a really cool piece several years back on the company that does the processing of the leaf for them. The processing company is the only company in the country with a permit to legally import the leaves, and they do all the processing in a bunker-like facility (in NJ, IIRC) so that none of it gets stolen and turned into cocaine. I seem to recall that they also process the leaves for certain pharmaceutical companies. Different components of the leaf for the meds and the drink, I'd assume, but either the WSJ didn't ask or they weren't telling.
~luge
For every silly, pointless clause like this in UCITA there is another group of angry people, and another way to say "are you kidding me? Free speech? Hello!" It's this kind of violation of our rights that really grabs the attention of people (and lawyers.) The other problems of UCITA are too obscure to find much of an audience- this one, on the other hand, is understandable to the public, blatantly unconstitutional, and will (hopefully) take down a large chunk of the UCITA when it is taken to court. (And it will be taken to court- you don't think this kind of thing makes the ACLU salivate?) I say bring it on... the more flagrant and understandable examples we have of things like this the briefer the amount of time we'll have to put up with crap like UCITA.
~luge
Actually, I was looking through some articles linked to from their site, and the original claim (from the inventors of the game, I think) was that no actor has a Bacon number > 4. The UVa guys a) disproved for the set of all actors (as I mentioned) and b) actually proved for American actors- i.e., everyone who has a Bacon number > 4 is from IMDB's big foreign film section. BTW, there are actually actors who satisfy the seven degree rule- Christo pher Lee and Anthony Quinn, for example.
~luge(I'm asking the friend who owns oracleofbacon.org what kind of hardware they used... no answer yet)
Actually, computing the Kevin Bacon problem from IMDB info is not that computing intensive. Building a graph is quite straightforward, and traversing it (at least for specified names, as opposed to all names, which I guess might take a while) is also reasonably straightforward. Check out the Oracle of Bacon- when a friend of mine was at UVa, they did the conversion to a graph and set up this web interface to it. In particular, you might be interested to note the Bacon Numbers, which indicate that of the 390,027 actors who can be linked to Kevin Bacon, 390,023 can be linked to in 7 steps or less. The other 4 can be linked to in eight steps. I believe that this was done on a single computer. Pretty sure it wasn't a cluster of 4,000 ;) ~luge(ahh, the continuing quest to confuse the moderators... is this OT or "interesting?" Only time will tell :)
Works perfectly under Linux... you should file a Bugzilla bug if you can reproduce this on Win32.
Really, this should be on top (+5). I can see why this would confuse people who don't regularly browse the mozilla.org FTP site, but it should be made clear that builds have been labeled as M16 since the day after M15. Despite that labeling, it isn't M16 until it is announced by mozilla.org. Of course, that should be within the week, and it isn't a big error on /.s part, but /.rs should still be aware that what they are getting isn't the real thing.
Hmm... lessee... every new version of Word is non-interoperable with the previous one (breaking a defacto industry standard.) There is also the various standards breakages in IE (pick any version)(though Netscape wasjust as guilty). Those are just off the top of my head- I'm sure others can find more.
~luge
Prior to the actual milestone release, Mozilla tends to say that they are adding to "Mx" even though that milestone may not be ready for a while. M16 is supposed to be done by the end of next week, but who knows...
~luge
I had a professor who consulted with Nintendo on the Virtual Boy, and his opinion (though he said he'd never directly talked with anyone there about this) was that they were basically working out the kinks so that when multi-color LEDs were available, they'd be able to really quickly put together a viable 3D system. He had a whole bunch of pre-production units in his office, and we got to poke around in them quite a bit. They were pretty crappy as a platform, but mechanically/electronically they were really, really cool. Mark my words- cheap blue LEDs aren't very far away (they are in limited production already in Japan) and when their cost gets reasonable in a few years, Nintendo will come out with Son of VirtualBoy- and it'll blow us all away.
~luge
not through utilizing the force of government in the form of a patent
Hmm... by force of government, do you mean copyright? Oh, wait...
~luge
Rob... I think you are missing the point. No one wants the "story"- at least not yet. We just want to have some little tidbit, now. It's not just that /. readers are impatient (they are) but to a certain extent they feel that this is a community and they want to know (or at least have some clue) WTF is going on. Oh, and they don't want to get it from wired. Believe me, we sympathize- it's a miracle that this didn't happen a long time ago. But even the slightest little "shit! we're working on it!" would be respectful of the community and the role we play in your success.
~luge
Or do you really want us to state the obvious?
/. from slashdot, and not from wired or news.com. If Taco has the time to do a wired interview, he should have the time to talk to us. Taco has done it before and that type of openness should continue to be the norm.
Actually, yes. As I posted elsewhere, a simple "yes, we got DDOS'd" would probably be sufficient. I think we are all accustomed to getting our news about
~luge
Can I call it or can I call it?
~luge
If that is the case (and it certainly could be, though I doubt it- even the old servers could have handled that type of load) then wouldn't it be really, really easy for Rob and Co. to just jump out and say it? Heck, even a simple "BTW, we weren't DDOS'd- it was just a server failure" would have been sufficient for most of us, I suspect. Of course, if I were a conspiracy theorist, I'd note that such an admission might depress the Andover stock price, which would make it a big problem to post at all... but that'd be crazy, wouldn't it.
~luge(not a conspiracist! I swear!)
Pent- I think I got it through because it was near the top (which any troller will tell you is key) and because I abused my +1 to get it to float to the top and get them to notice it better. You are right, the moderators are fickle, but they are also predictable. Trust me, it'll be back down reasonably soon. (-1, overrated.)
~luge
The problem (at least as reported by wired) is not the new servers- it is that the new servers are getting DDOSd. Like you say, you'd rather hear the news. Well, this used to not be just a news site. There was a sense that there was a community- CT was one of our buds, not just a talking head. If Rob wanted CDs, that's cool- we'd buy from CDNow. If Rob had a shitty day at school, he'd say it and say that's why he hadn't posted stuff. If I just want headlines (which appears to be the desire of most /. readers today, unfortunately) I'd go to wired... since, among other things, they actually seem to report on DDOSs.
Sorry, guys, but it is really pathetic that there has been no news here about the problems you've been suffering. There have been tons of people reporting SQL problems today, we all know the site has been shut down repeatedly over the last couple of days, and wired reported that you had a router die. I hate to make a "in the old days /. was better" but it isn't that hard to look through the archives and find CT saying "oops... our server died/crashed/whatever." That kind of honesty and straightforwardness is what made /. a community first and a news site second. It's sort of sad that this kind of openness (which is much more important than source) is apparently no longer a priority.
~luge
oops...
To a great extent, the possibility for that is there already. The backend stuff (Camel) is really well abstracted from the GUI portion, so if you wanted to write a text front end that would support all the cool database-ish functions, you could.
That said, I don't think Helix will be doing that anytime soon, since they aren't aiming to reduce the number of pine/mutt users- they are aiming to reduce the number of outlook users. As long as that remains the goal, then GUI and the associated bloat/features (pick whichever suits your POV) will continue to be the focus of Helix's frontend work.
~luge
Actually, the email portion is the most advanced portion of the app. The trick is that all that functionality is in the backend- since the frontend still stinks, it appears that there is very little functionality when in fact there is quite a great deal there that is just not opened up to the user yet.