So the market model changes and advertising dies. So be it. I for one will welcome it.
According to this
site, a 30 second spot during the Superbowl is $2.2 million dollars. That
gets you approximately 89 million viewers. So, an advertiser is paying
approxiately $0.025 per viewer potentially reached. Assuming 20 minutes of
advertising an hour, that's 40 30-second ads. Total income received per viewer
per hour: $1. So if we get rid of the advertisements the networks will be
doing just fine if they can recoup $1 per viewer/hour. I for one would happily
spend $1 per hour for commercial free television. And that's for the
Superbowl, one of the most expensive time slots each year. I regrettably can't locate the article, but I've seen claims that typical programming would be even cheaper, perhaps by an order of magnitude.
HBO and similar cable networks have shown that you can be profitable without ads. That might be an idea whose day has come. While the loss of free for the taking broadcast television would be unfortunate, it may simply be economically unviable.
As a result, five-year earnings growth for TV station groups could fall from as much as 10 percent to as low as 4 percent, Mr. Marsh said.
Once DVR technology reaches mass-market proportions, five-year TV ad revenue growth will drop to 3.8 percent from 6.5 percent.
Let me get this straight?
The concern is not that they'll be losing money.
No, the concern is that their growth rate isn't quite as large as they'd like.
3. Code that determines which passengers get flagged for pre-flight searches. Armed with this information criminals could fashion profiles that guarantee they will not be probed in-depth.
Actually, this is a stunning example of where security by obscurity provides false security.
The exploit? Take your pool of potential attackers. Send them off on a bunch of flights in and out of your target country. See who gets stopped for searches. See who goes through without a problem. Use the second group for your real attacks.
I could not help but notice that Google, Yahoo, and Slashdot are omitted from their "top 1000" list.
The "top 1,000" list is based on the Fortune 1,000. Google, Yahoo, and Slashdot aren't on the Fortune 1,000. The theory is that the Fortune 1,000 indicates Real Companies, and that this is what Real Companies chose. However, many of these Real Companies are holding companies or target highly specialized audiences (like people needing drilling supplies). Many of these Real Companies are actually running what we would consider toy web sites: almost no content, entirely static pages, very few pages, and almost no visitors. So while this may represent what Real Companies chose, it does not necessarily represent what people with Real Work chose.
They list the 995 sites they include (they're using the Fortune 1,000, and (looking at some of the earlier reports), apparently 5 Fortune 1,000 companies don't have sites. (If they're still Slashdotted, you can download the pages from Google's cache. start here.)
A bit of quick Perl hackery pulls back the following values, roughly in line with what they report. The second column is actual sites found.
That said, I doubt the usefulness of the survey. It's a survey of Fortune 1,000 companies. These are often companies whose web presence is minimal. What does a giant holding company need with a web site? Heck, five of the companies didn't have any site at all! Of those sites that exist, many lack any sort of complexity (say, thousands of pages, or lots of dynamic pages). Simply put, many of these sites would run fine an almost anything, they don't represent Hard Work. I'm a lot more interested in what Google and Yahoo choose to run than in what the Radian Group and the Kiewit run.
Now Netcraft does have the problem they cite: Netcraft weights everyone equally. Perhaps that introduces bias. Perhaps we should select a set of sites that is high bandwidth, typically has at least some dynamic systems in place (say, to handle selling accounts), and is a popular target for hackers? How about porn sites? Porn operators have a hard job, thanks to
Smutcraft you can see what they run.
Second, it looks like they've chosen one site for each company. For Amerco, for example, they chose UHaul.com running IIS. Reasonable enough (UHaul is part of Amerco), but it's interesting that they skipped amerco.com (running Apache). Not a great example, surely (especially since uhaul.com is certainly doing more real work than the very thin amerco.com), but it shows that there is a selection process of some sort, and any selection process risks introducing bias.
I'll ignore for the moment the question of the quality of their data. I'm sure others will endlessly debate it (and I'll probably join in). Let's look at something else: The quality of their presentation.
First, let's take a look at the
most recent Netcraft server survey. Let's see, clean display. The scale grid is subtle and doesn't draw attention to itself, but makes it easy to see exactly where a line falls. There is little wasted pixel data. It's easy to see trends and make comparisons. For the curious the exact numbers for the last two samples is listed (regrettably one two samples are listed).
The graph labels the data it shows ("Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - November 2003") leaving the reader to form his own opinions.
On the down side, the scale confusingly marks 7% increments and the yellow line for Netscape/SunOne almost disappears into the background. Still, a well above average for graph. Definately room to improve, but better than most people expect to see.
Now let's example the
Port80 server survey. Wow, what a difference. The grid is a much more dominant element. The 3d effect means that bars further in the back appear taller (by up to 15 pixels, or about 7%) and makes it hard to compare a specific data point against the scale. The complexity of the 3d bars complicates things, the "top" of the bar is actually larger than the month to month shift in the numbers. The "area" of the bars implies size (intellectually you know it isn't, but your gut says otherwise), this means that the largely obscured middle bars (Netscape and Apache) seem smaller. Ultimately bars are the wrong choice, we're examining points over time (suggesting a line chart), not clusters of data.
The chart is labeled with a conclusion ("Microsoft IIS Maintains Dominance
Of the Corporate Web Server Market"), suggesting interpretations to the reader. On the up side, they provide heavily broken up information for the most recent sample point (regrettably it's a graphic). They include a worthless pie chart. If you want to show market share a line chart showing historical data would be much more enlightening.
Conclusion? Port80's graphs suck. Hard. It's a stunning example of how not to create high quality graphs.
The creators need to be beaten with copies of
Tufte's information display books until they get it. This is the sort of amateur crap I expect on PowerPoint slides from people more interested in being cool than being useful, or perhaps from the graphics department at USA Today. As an engineer I'm disappointed.
That's a cop-out and you know it (or you don't know it and are a fool). "You are not wise enough to understand," is the defense of shysters and mad-man.
"There is some book or set of books, somewhere, that will make my point." If you have a point, make it yourself. You can cite a book or other reference works to support your claims, but the existance of the book is not a claim in and of itself. If you are going to reference other works, you should specify which particular works, and why you are referencing them.
I'm still not entirely clear on what your claim is. Unless, perhaps, it's "everyone should learn more about this particular elements of history, it's interesting." While that may be true, it seems just a tad off-topic.
The idea was that people might benefit more from a little research and critical thought than by simply parroting a minister who was quite atypical in his views and actions.
And what will this research show? How is it relevant? Does it invalidate the sentiment expressed in the quotation? Does the fact that the minister might be atypical mean that the statement is meaningless?
Your original post smells suspiciously like an attack on the quote, and I fail to see any reason for such an attack. Niemoeller's quote was an eloquent on the dangers of apathy. To take the extreme case, even if Niemoeller didn't mean it (which I don't believe to be true...), it still captures for many people an important sentiment. For many people it more clearly expresses their beliefs than they could themselves.
Ultimately quoting the minister was a statement of opinion. The original source is nearly irrelevant. A bit of historical context can help with the understanding, but that the quote came from a Luthern minister as opposed to say, a Jew, or a trade unionist, is irrelevant.
So go read up on Niemoeller, Martin Luther, global anti-semitism in the 1930s, and the genesis of violent Zionism. You might learn something apropos to the current global political situation.
Fascinating, I'm sure. What it has to do with either the specific issues in the article (expansion of FBI powers) or the comment you specifically responded to (I'm guessing a statement of the author's beliefs, but I can't be sure) is completely beyond me.
Too many times have 20 of the top 30 links taken you two one site, but camafloged to google somehow as to look seperate. I experieced this painfully while looking for ringtones for my cellphone.
Most of the time I get great results, but as you not, for some searches the spammers win.
Fortunately you can use Google's
Report a Spam Result page to complain. Hopefully as more and more people report a particular spammer Google will move to purge the spammer.
I've seen where the producer will release either the first DVD (too many titles to name) or the last DVD (FLCL) in a box designed to hold all of the DVD's in the series.
How about releasing the DVDs actually filled with content instead of shipping DVDs with 50 minutes of video so I need to store piles of them.
God, that irritates me. FLCL is a great series, but it's only 2 hours, 30 minutes long. It fits on a single DVD with space to spare. Why is FLCL spread out over three DVDs? Okay, so the publisher wants to be greedy and justify the $65 I'm going to have to spend on it ("Oooooh, look, I get three pieces of $0.50 plastic instead of just one"). Just gouge me the $65 and give me a single, easy to store DVD. You've got a government granted monopoly in the form of copyright, your customers are relatively price tolerant.
I seem to recall Pastor Niemoeller was a Lutheran minister... and that Martin Luther was a noted anti-semite? Didn't many Lutheran clergymen applaud Kristallnacht?
What is your point? It's not terribly clear, and it almost looks like you're saying that we should disregard the famous Niemoeller quote because he's Lutheran. If so, that's one of the stupidest things I've heard in a long while.
Perhaps some Lutheran's supported the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi's. Perhaps even most were. I have no idea.
So what?
It's quite clear from Niemoeller's quote that he was expressing remorse for failing to stand up for, among others, the Jewish people! Whatever else had happened, he personally was saying that this was wrong.
Network connections at university do not come from a horn of plenty. They cost money.
This has nothing to do with the cost of bandwidth. Never did.
If it did, effective solutions would have been put into place. Traffic
shaping to reduce the bandwidth to acceptable levels. Maybe the acceptable
level is zero, so you block access entirely. Or (a bit more extremely) hosting
a local service to keep the bandwidth internal and cheap. These are all reasonable ideas.
Instead they're randomly scanning for users. Those users are then warned about copyright infringement. Not bandwidth use, but copyright infringement.
I respect efforts to control use of limited bandwidth. As soon as Florida starts doing that I'll support their efforts. For now they're acting unpaid enforcers for the RIAA. Why are the tax dollars of the state of Florida and the tuitions of their students being used to pseudo-law-enforcement entity that largely does the bidding of a private industry consortium and lacks the checks and balances of our existing legal infrastructure?
Copyright law is an important issue, worthy of debate. But it's damn hard
to have a debate when people are making fundamental mistakes. These mistakes (be they actual confusion on your part or willful sloppiness) are propogated by other people, gradually convincing people of theories that are completely unsupported by actual copyright law and intent.
There is nothing illegal about downloading works protected by copyright. It
is perfectly legal.
For example, let's visit our old friend Google. See that at the bottom? "(C)2003
Google". Google claims copyright on that web page. By visiting the page you
have downloaded a work protected by copyright. Have you broken any laws? Of
course not. Google wants you to download their page. Similarlly I visit CNN and download their copyright protected works
all the time. No copyright infringement.
It's illegal to make an unauthorized copy of a work protected by
copyright. If the copyright holder authorizes the copy it's all legal and good.
Even old Napster had legal uses. Quote one band I happen to like (and whose
album I purchased after discovering them on Napster, "We gained a lot by having
our mp3s on Napster, it better not go away." (June 30th,
2000 news for The Minibosses).
Sigh. It's not X Windows. Never has been, never will be. It's a window system called X, or it's X11R6, or X11, or X, or The X Window System.
Chill. It's a sign of affection and familiarity that people have gotten sloppy with the name. When you complain about it you sound like the easily offended Mac fans who object to "TiBook" for the metal cased PowerBooks. Some of the people you're bitching at are the system's biggest fans. "X Windows" manages to uniquely identify the system, it's widely accepted in the appropriate circles.
Even if you truly believe in selection/middle-mouse, you have to admit that it should at least be *possible* to configure X to use a universal Alt-C/Alt-P.
Universally? You mean like on Windows? (Erm, Mac, I guess, I have no idea where Alt-C/Alt-P work...)
Turns out that it isn't even universal on Windows. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V are simply common standards. Programs are free to ignore it. Some (for good reasons, like terminal emulators) do. In early days of Windows all sorts of software came up with all sorts of stupid ideas. Things stabilized.
There was no magical central point in Windows to configure, and there is no magical central point in X.
You'll be happy to know that the two dominant toolkits (Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt) converged on Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V some time ago. You can pretty much assume Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V will work just fine in them. I use them all the time. It's just a matter of time for the older apps to join up. But the good news is that you can get alot of work done (web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheet generation, writing and displaying presentations, and the like) using only software that will happily do what you expect with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.
Personal websites are at a disadvantage under Google's Pagerank system.
Not really.
Take me, for example. Ever heard of me before? No? I'm not particularlly interesting. But I put up some pages on topics I happen to know something about. I tried to make them useful for other people. Then I waited.
For a long time I help the top spot for nerf wildfire (a type of Nerf toy), only recently being bumped out by Amazon. Interest's in Microsoft's source control system
SourceSafe? My little page claims the seventh spot, pretty good personal little rant. Want to know how your driver's license number is calculated? Hit number one.
Create interesting concent worth visiting. Post relevant links to it in appropriate forums. (If you're really relevant you should be following the appropriate forums anyway, so you should have a good sense of how to do so politely). That's it. It might not get you lots and lots of Google loving, but you'll get your audience. To pick one of my pages, my SourceSafe page pulls well over 100 visitors a day, mostly from Google.
Just to make a simple but reasonblly respectable* site would need two years of university education if you never done it before.
Poppycock.
When desktop publishing was new, everyone rushed to make the most complicated newsletters possible. Soon it seemed like you needed years of experience to generate a simple newsletter.
But it was all a farce. If you looked at the professional work, it had never gotten gaudy. Well, okay, some did, but the old respectable sources kept with the simple and elegant. That simple elegance has proven timeless.
The same goes for web sites. If you just use some bare bones formatting you'll end up with simple elegance.
By way of example, check out a random article from useit.com. It looks good to me. 99% basic HTML. In fact the simplicity reinforces the seriousness of the page.
"Our 8 year nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over" -GWBush
Without a doubt,
"Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'" is one of The Onion's most prophetic articles. It was originally printed in January of 2001 (wish I'd saved my paper copy), it predicted, "...that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years," and a number of other things. It didn't come 100% true, obviously, but for a humor article it was inspired.
I really wish we could abolish "Left", "Right", "Liberal", and
"Conservative" from political language. They've become no more than
insults.
While it's true that they are often used as insults and inaccurate labels,
they have a place. If the words didn't exist we'd invent some. If you have
groups of things, be they people, animals, or even concepts, they'll get
labelled. It's true even if the groups are fuzzy. While the labels can be
harmful, they can prove useful tools to identify people with similar
viewpoints.
Part of what your complaining about is simply groupthink and mindless
obedience to a cause or organization. All of this can lead to highly divise
politics where none of the sides are listening to each other. Getting rid of
the labels won't get rid of the negative behavior.
And while there is some about of groupthink there, part of the reason for
the disagreement isn't groupthink, but differing opinions on the issue;
opinions that often happen to roughly align across these labels. This might point to groupthink, but it might point to a good set of labels that accurately divide common points of view.
For example, you cite the differing reactions to Clinton's lies about sexual
behavior and the Bush administration's misleading behavior regarding Iraq's
weapons of mass destruction. That the two sides appear to flip-flop on the
topic of lying isn't necessarily hypocritical, it could point to the two issues being different in their minds.
It's a bit crude, but "World's Smallest Political
Quiz" is an interesting way of sorting out the labels. It actually divides
people into five labels Left/Liberal, Right/Conservative, Libertarian,
Centrist, and Authoritarian. Using their guidelines a key distinction is how
much government should meddle in ones private lives or economic lives. A
liberal by thier definition would be someone who wants government involved
economically, but not personally. A conversative by their definition would be
the opposite.
By that definition to a liberal Clinton's deception is not a big detail
because it's part of his private life while the misleading about Iraq's WMD is
a big detail because ultimately war is about economics. The opposite would be true for a Conservative.
Now the Quiz's definition isn't perfect, but few definitions are. And in
practice these crude definitions work fine. While someone identifies
themselves as liberal, I know I'm more likely to share similar views on
controversial issues than I am with a conservative. However, I'm certainly a
free individual and I hold some opinions that are not traditionally liberal. There are some conservatives who views really resonate with me. But in general liberal summarizes, if a bit crudely, my views.
If my kid can do it with next to no training aside from a basic understanding of how to use a GUI based operating system, I have a hard time believing adults who have been working with computers for several years or more would have trouble with it.
You overestimate the average adult and underestimate the average kid.
90% of being computer literate is not being afraid. Your kid isn't afraid, she's perfectly willing to mess around. Sometimes it means that she accidentally hoses something, but she's willing to live with it. The result is that it seems easy.
Many adults (not sure how many, but too many), are positively afraid of their computers. They're afraid to experiment, any change throws them off. This is why they often practice strange rituals ("I have to save it twice to make sure it worked"), they failed to understand some behavior and took the wrong lesson away. Of course this means that shifting from Windows 98 to Windows XP is also jarring (and in my experience does scare some people).
Fortunately I think this problem will naturally go away over time. Much like any new technology the generation born after it is created will be much more willing to push it hard and without fear.
Using the 99 US cents that Apple's iTunes service charges for songs, the 1000 songs on the computer had a commercial value of around $990. If the students had stolen a car worth $990 would the DPP be recommending jail time?
Okay, I do agree that five years is probably overmuch punishment, and I'm part of the "don't use piracy or theft, it's the wrong word" crowd. But claiming $990 is damages is silly.
This isn't theft. In fact, part of the reason that theft is a bad word is that there is no evidence of theft based on the article. The crime in illegal reproduction (copyright infringement). The damage isn't that someone lost their physical property, the damage is that the copyright holder might have lost profits for legal sales.
The crime isn't similar to stealing CDs, the crime is similar to duplicating the CDs and selling them. Or giving them away, as it were.
All the more reason to avoid terming copyright infringment "theft", it's confusing and leads to erroneous conclusions.
"everything as a stream of bytes approach"...Can someone explain whats so great about this?
Because ultimately everything in a computer is a stream of bytes. A file on disk is just a stream of bytes, the disk as a while is just a stream of bytes, your HTTP request and its response is just a stream of bytes.
The stream of bytes is the bare minimum you. From it you can build larger, more complex systems. However, if you start from a large, complex system you end up needing to provide the stream of bytes interface anyway (either that or you fail to provide it and eventually someone gets frustrated that you didn't provide an interface that they need).
Abstractions can be useful, but sometimes you need to get down to the raw level. Build your abstractions on top of the low level, not instead of the low level.
This is similar to the problem with attaching lots of meta data to a file. MacOS fans often point to the metadata a file has as a feature. All hail the metadata indicating which program created it and which programs can open it. However there is a hole in the system: any non-MacOS system. Suddenly you need to deal with files lacking the metadata. And once you're prepared to live without the metadata, why bother carrying it around?
...Tufte with his "man, these things suck compared to paper" defeatism.
Probably a fair assessment.
I was struck by the fact that his Anti-PowerPoint book didn't really discuss what you should do, it mostly harped on what not to do. After a bit it dawned on me what I should be doing (That is, the exact things my high-school public speaking teacher was saying), but the lack of any real direction on how to move forward was surprising. All the more surprising given that he is widely praised as an excellent speaker. He does come across as a bit defeatist. Fair enough. Still, his work is strong enough that it's a valuable read for everyone, and defeatist attitudes aside, much of what he says applies to computer screens as well.
Just because you can do something doesn't make it right or legal.
In a town of ten or twenty thousand people with, say, 30 lights, you want the town to give up a teacher or ten because you've got some high and mighty belief that if people CAN do something they SHOULD?
You're thinking about this backward.
A secure signal changing system will stop abusers who are already determined to break the law. I'd rather not have bank robbers, terrorists, or who knows else using these systems. Once you've decided to, say, rob a bank, the additional crime of installing an illegal signal changer is relatively minor. That is also stops the selfish assholes who abuse the public trust so that they can get to their destination a bit faster is just a nice side effect.
Arguing that making it illegal should be good enough would be like outlawing guns, then refusing to give cops bulletproof vests because no one should have guns to shoot at them with.
Slashdot Mirror
So the market model changes and advertising dies. So be it. I for one will welcome it.
According to this site, a 30 second spot during the Superbowl is $2.2 million dollars. That gets you approximately 89 million viewers. So, an advertiser is paying approxiately $0.025 per viewer potentially reached. Assuming 20 minutes of advertising an hour, that's 40 30-second ads. Total income received per viewer per hour: $1. So if we get rid of the advertisements the networks will be doing just fine if they can recoup $1 per viewer/hour. I for one would happily spend $1 per hour for commercial free television. And that's for the Superbowl, one of the most expensive time slots each year. I regrettably can't locate the article, but I've seen claims that typical programming would be even cheaper, perhaps by an order of magnitude.
HBO and similar cable networks have shown that you can be profitable without ads. That might be an idea whose day has come. While the loss of free for the taking broadcast television would be unfortunate, it may simply be economically unviable.
Let me get this straight?
The concern is not that they'll be losing money. No, the concern is that their growth rate isn't quite as large as they'd like.
Boo freaking hoo.
One would hope so, but the evidence isn't as promising.
Actually, this is a stunning example of where security by obscurity provides false security.
The exploit? Take your pool of potential attackers. Send them off on a bunch of flights in and out of your target country. See who gets stopped for searches. See who goes through without a problem. Use the second group for your real attacks.
The "top 1,000" list is based on the Fortune 1,000. Google, Yahoo, and Slashdot aren't on the Fortune 1,000. The theory is that the Fortune 1,000 indicates Real Companies, and that this is what Real Companies chose. However, many of these Real Companies are holding companies or target highly specialized audiences (like people needing drilling supplies). Many of these Real Companies are actually running what we would consider toy web sites: almost no content, entirely static pages, very few pages, and almost no visitors. So while this may represent what Real Companies chose, it does not necessarily represent what people with Real Work chose.
They list the 995 sites they include (they're using the Fortune 1,000, and (looking at some of the earlier reports), apparently 5 Fortune 1,000 companies don't have sites. (If they're still Slashdotted, you can download the pages from Google's cache. start here.)
A bit of quick Perl hackery pulls back the following values, roughly in line with what they report. The second column is actual sites found.
That said, I doubt the usefulness of the survey. It's a survey of Fortune 1,000 companies. These are often companies whose web presence is minimal. What does a giant holding company need with a web site? Heck, five of the companies didn't have any site at all! Of those sites that exist, many lack any sort of complexity (say, thousands of pages, or lots of dynamic pages). Simply put, many of these sites would run fine an almost anything, they don't represent Hard Work. I'm a lot more interested in what Google and Yahoo choose to run than in what the Radian Group and the Kiewit run.
Now Netcraft does have the problem they cite: Netcraft weights everyone equally. Perhaps that introduces bias. Perhaps we should select a set of sites that is high bandwidth, typically has at least some dynamic systems in place (say, to handle selling accounts), and is a popular target for hackers? How about porn sites? Porn operators have a hard job, thanks to Smutcraft you can see what they run.
Second, it looks like they've chosen one site for each company. For Amerco, for example, they chose UHaul.com running IIS. Reasonable enough (UHaul is part of Amerco), but it's interesting that they skipped amerco.com (running Apache). Not a great example, surely (especially since uhaul.com is certainly doing more real work than the very thin amerco.com), but it shows that there is a selection process of some sort, and any selection process risks introducing bias.
I'll ignore for the moment the question of the quality of their data. I'm sure others will endlessly debate it (and I'll probably join in). Let's look at something else: The quality of their presentation.
First, let's take a look at the most recent Netcraft server survey. Let's see, clean display. The scale grid is subtle and doesn't draw attention to itself, but makes it easy to see exactly where a line falls. There is little wasted pixel data. It's easy to see trends and make comparisons. For the curious the exact numbers for the last two samples is listed (regrettably one two samples are listed). The graph labels the data it shows ("Market Share for Top Servers Across All Domains August 1995 - November 2003") leaving the reader to form his own opinions. On the down side, the scale confusingly marks 7% increments and the yellow line for Netscape/SunOne almost disappears into the background. Still, a well above average for graph. Definately room to improve, but better than most people expect to see.
Now let's example the Port80 server survey. Wow, what a difference. The grid is a much more dominant element. The 3d effect means that bars further in the back appear taller (by up to 15 pixels, or about 7%) and makes it hard to compare a specific data point against the scale. The complexity of the 3d bars complicates things, the "top" of the bar is actually larger than the month to month shift in the numbers. The "area" of the bars implies size (intellectually you know it isn't, but your gut says otherwise), this means that the largely obscured middle bars (Netscape and Apache) seem smaller. Ultimately bars are the wrong choice, we're examining points over time (suggesting a line chart), not clusters of data. The chart is labeled with a conclusion ("Microsoft IIS Maintains Dominance Of the Corporate Web Server Market"), suggesting interpretations to the reader. On the up side, they provide heavily broken up information for the most recent sample point (regrettably it's a graphic). They include a worthless pie chart. If you want to show market share a line chart showing historical data would be much more enlightening.
Conclusion? Port80's graphs suck. Hard. It's a stunning example of how not to create high quality graphs. The creators need to be beaten with copies of Tufte's information display books until they get it. This is the sort of amateur crap I expect on PowerPoint slides from people more interested in being cool than being useful, or perhaps from the graphics department at USA Today. As an engineer I'm disappointed.
That's a cop-out and you know it (or you don't know it and are a fool). "You are not wise enough to understand," is the defense of shysters and mad-man.
"There is some book or set of books, somewhere, that will make my point." If you have a point, make it yourself. You can cite a book or other reference works to support your claims, but the existance of the book is not a claim in and of itself. If you are going to reference other works, you should specify which particular works, and why you are referencing them.
I'm still not entirely clear on what your claim is. Unless, perhaps, it's "everyone should learn more about this particular elements of history, it's interesting." While that may be true, it seems just a tad off-topic.
And what will this research show? How is it relevant? Does it invalidate the sentiment expressed in the quotation? Does the fact that the minister might be atypical mean that the statement is meaningless?
Your original post smells suspiciously like an attack on the quote, and I fail to see any reason for such an attack. Niemoeller's quote was an eloquent on the dangers of apathy. To take the extreme case, even if Niemoeller didn't mean it (which I don't believe to be true...), it still captures for many people an important sentiment. For many people it more clearly expresses their beliefs than they could themselves.
Ultimately quoting the minister was a statement of opinion. The original source is nearly irrelevant. A bit of historical context can help with the understanding, but that the quote came from a Luthern minister as opposed to say, a Jew, or a trade unionist, is irrelevant.
Fascinating, I'm sure. What it has to do with either the specific issues in the article (expansion of FBI powers) or the comment you specifically responded to (I'm guessing a statement of the author's beliefs, but I can't be sure) is completely beyond me.
Most of the time I get great results, but as you not, for some searches the spammers win.
Fortunately you can use Google's Report a Spam Result page to complain. Hopefully as more and more people report a particular spammer Google will move to purge the spammer.
How about releasing the DVDs actually filled with content instead of shipping DVDs with 50 minutes of video so I need to store piles of them.
God, that irritates me. FLCL is a great series, but it's only 2 hours, 30 minutes long. It fits on a single DVD with space to spare. Why is FLCL spread out over three DVDs? Okay, so the publisher wants to be greedy and justify the $65 I'm going to have to spend on it ("Oooooh, look, I get three pieces of $0.50 plastic instead of just one"). Just gouge me the $65 and give me a single, easy to store DVD. You've got a government granted monopoly in the form of copyright, your customers are relatively price tolerant.
Greedy, customer hating, fscking publishers.
What is your point? It's not terribly clear, and it almost looks like you're saying that we should disregard the famous Niemoeller quote because he's Lutheran. If so, that's one of the stupidest things I've heard in a long while.
Perhaps some Lutheran's supported the crimes against humanity committed by the Nazi's. Perhaps even most were. I have no idea.
So what?
It's quite clear from Niemoeller's quote that he was expressing remorse for failing to stand up for, among others, the Jewish people! Whatever else had happened, he personally was saying that this was wrong.
This has nothing to do with the cost of bandwidth. Never did.
If it did, effective solutions would have been put into place. Traffic shaping to reduce the bandwidth to acceptable levels. Maybe the acceptable level is zero, so you block access entirely. Or (a bit more extremely) hosting a local service to keep the bandwidth internal and cheap. These are all reasonable ideas.
Instead they're randomly scanning for users. Those users are then warned about copyright infringement. Not bandwidth use, but copyright infringement.
I respect efforts to control use of limited bandwidth. As soon as Florida starts doing that I'll support their efforts. For now they're acting unpaid enforcers for the RIAA. Why are the tax dollars of the state of Florida and the tuitions of their students being used to pseudo-law-enforcement entity that largely does the bidding of a private industry consortium and lacks the checks and balances of our existing legal infrastructure?
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.
Copyright law is an important issue, worthy of debate. But it's damn hard to have a debate when people are making fundamental mistakes. These mistakes (be they actual confusion on your part or willful sloppiness) are propogated by other people, gradually convincing people of theories that are completely unsupported by actual copyright law and intent.
There is nothing illegal about downloading works protected by copyright. It is perfectly legal.
For example, let's visit our old friend Google. See that at the bottom? "(C)2003 Google". Google claims copyright on that web page. By visiting the page you have downloaded a work protected by copyright. Have you broken any laws? Of course not. Google wants you to download their page. Similarlly I visit CNN and download their copyright protected works all the time. No copyright infringement.
It's illegal to make an unauthorized copy of a work protected by copyright. If the copyright holder authorizes the copy it's all legal and good.
Even old Napster had legal uses. Quote one band I happen to like (and whose album I purchased after discovering them on Napster, "We gained a lot by having our mp3s on Napster, it better not go away." (June 30th, 2000 news for The Minibosses).
Chill. It's a sign of affection and familiarity that people have gotten sloppy with the name. When you complain about it you sound like the easily offended Mac fans who object to "TiBook" for the metal cased PowerBooks. Some of the people you're bitching at are the system's biggest fans. "X Windows" manages to uniquely identify the system, it's widely accepted in the appropriate circles.
Universally? You mean like on Windows? (Erm, Mac, I guess, I have no idea where Alt-C/Alt-P work...)
Turns out that it isn't even universal on Windows. Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V are simply common standards. Programs are free to ignore it. Some (for good reasons, like terminal emulators) do. In early days of Windows all sorts of software came up with all sorts of stupid ideas. Things stabilized.
There was no magical central point in Windows to configure, and there is no magical central point in X.
You'll be happy to know that the two dominant toolkits (Gnome/GTK and KDE/Qt) converged on Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V some time ago. You can pretty much assume Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V will work just fine in them. I use them all the time. It's just a matter of time for the older apps to join up. But the good news is that you can get alot of work done (web browsing, email, word processing, spreadsheet generation, writing and displaying presentations, and the like) using only software that will happily do what you expect with Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V.
Not really.
Take me, for example. Ever heard of me before? No? I'm not particularlly interesting. But I put up some pages on topics I happen to know something about. I tried to make them useful for other people. Then I waited.
For a long time I help the top spot for nerf wildfire (a type of Nerf toy), only recently being bumped out by Amazon. Interest's in Microsoft's source control system SourceSafe? My little page claims the seventh spot, pretty good personal little rant. Want to know how your driver's license number is calculated? Hit number one.
Create interesting concent worth visiting. Post relevant links to it in appropriate forums. (If you're really relevant you should be following the appropriate forums anyway, so you should have a good sense of how to do so politely). That's it. It might not get you lots and lots of Google loving, but you'll get your audience. To pick one of my pages, my SourceSafe page pulls well over 100 visitors a day, mostly from Google.
Poppycock.
When desktop publishing was new, everyone rushed to make the most complicated newsletters possible. Soon it seemed like you needed years of experience to generate a simple newsletter.
But it was all a farce. If you looked at the professional work, it had never gotten gaudy. Well, okay, some did, but the old respectable sources kept with the simple and elegant. That simple elegance has proven timeless.
The same goes for web sites. If you just use some bare bones formatting you'll end up with simple elegance. By way of example, check out a random article from useit.com. It looks good to me. 99% basic HTML. In fact the simplicity reinforces the seriousness of the page.
Without a doubt, "Bush: 'Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over'" is one of The Onion 's most prophetic articles. It was originally printed in January of 2001 (wish I'd saved my paper copy), it predicted, "...that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years," and a number of other things. It didn't come 100% true, obviously, but for a humor article it was inspired.
While it's true that they are often used as insults and inaccurate labels, they have a place. If the words didn't exist we'd invent some. If you have groups of things, be they people, animals, or even concepts, they'll get labelled. It's true even if the groups are fuzzy. While the labels can be harmful, they can prove useful tools to identify people with similar viewpoints.
Part of what your complaining about is simply groupthink and mindless obedience to a cause or organization. All of this can lead to highly divise politics where none of the sides are listening to each other. Getting rid of the labels won't get rid of the negative behavior.
And while there is some about of groupthink there, part of the reason for the disagreement isn't groupthink, but differing opinions on the issue; opinions that often happen to roughly align across these labels. This might point to groupthink, but it might point to a good set of labels that accurately divide common points of view.
For example, you cite the differing reactions to Clinton's lies about sexual behavior and the Bush administration's misleading behavior regarding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. That the two sides appear to flip-flop on the topic of lying isn't necessarily hypocritical, it could point to the two issues being different in their minds.
It's a bit crude, but "World's Smallest Political Quiz" is an interesting way of sorting out the labels. It actually divides people into five labels Left/Liberal, Right/Conservative, Libertarian, Centrist, and Authoritarian. Using their guidelines a key distinction is how much government should meddle in ones private lives or economic lives. A liberal by thier definition would be someone who wants government involved economically, but not personally. A conversative by their definition would be the opposite.
By that definition to a liberal Clinton's deception is not a big detail because it's part of his private life while the misleading about Iraq's WMD is a big detail because ultimately war is about economics. The opposite would be true for a Conservative.
Now the Quiz's definition isn't perfect, but few definitions are. And in practice these crude definitions work fine. While someone identifies themselves as liberal, I know I'm more likely to share similar views on controversial issues than I am with a conservative. However, I'm certainly a free individual and I hold some opinions that are not traditionally liberal. There are some conservatives who views really resonate with me. But in general liberal summarizes, if a bit crudely, my views.
You overestimate the average adult and underestimate the average kid.
90% of being computer literate is not being afraid. Your kid isn't afraid, she's perfectly willing to mess around. Sometimes it means that she accidentally hoses something, but she's willing to live with it. The result is that it seems easy.
Many adults (not sure how many, but too many), are positively afraid of their computers. They're afraid to experiment, any change throws them off. This is why they often practice strange rituals ("I have to save it twice to make sure it worked"), they failed to understand some behavior and took the wrong lesson away. Of course this means that shifting from Windows 98 to Windows XP is also jarring (and in my experience does scare some people).
Fortunately I think this problem will naturally go away over time. Much like any new technology the generation born after it is created will be much more willing to push it hard and without fear.
Okay, I do agree that five years is probably overmuch punishment, and I'm part of the "don't use piracy or theft, it's the wrong word" crowd. But claiming $990 is damages is silly.
This isn't theft. In fact, part of the reason that theft is a bad word is that there is no evidence of theft based on the article. The crime in illegal reproduction (copyright infringement). The damage isn't that someone lost their physical property, the damage is that the copyright holder might have lost profits for legal sales.
The crime isn't similar to stealing CDs, the crime is similar to duplicating the CDs and selling them. Or giving them away, as it were.
All the more reason to avoid terming copyright infringment "theft", it's confusing and leads to erroneous conclusions.
Because ultimately everything in a computer is a stream of bytes. A file on disk is just a stream of bytes, the disk as a while is just a stream of bytes, your HTTP request and its response is just a stream of bytes.
The stream of bytes is the bare minimum you. From it you can build larger, more complex systems. However, if you start from a large, complex system you end up needing to provide the stream of bytes interface anyway (either that or you fail to provide it and eventually someone gets frustrated that you didn't provide an interface that they need).
Abstractions can be useful, but sometimes you need to get down to the raw level. Build your abstractions on top of the low level, not instead of the low level.
This is similar to the problem with attaching lots of meta data to a file. MacOS fans often point to the metadata a file has as a feature. All hail the metadata indicating which program created it and which programs can open it. However there is a hole in the system: any non-MacOS system. Suddenly you need to deal with files lacking the metadata. And once you're prepared to live without the metadata, why bother carrying it around?
Probably a fair assessment.
I was struck by the fact that his Anti-PowerPoint book didn't really discuss what you should do, it mostly harped on what not to do. After a bit it dawned on me what I should be doing (That is, the exact things my high-school public speaking teacher was saying), but the lack of any real direction on how to move forward was surprising. All the more surprising given that he is widely praised as an excellent speaker. He does come across as a bit defeatist. Fair enough. Still, his work is strong enough that it's a valuable read for everyone, and defeatist attitudes aside, much of what he says applies to computer screens as well.
You're thinking about this backward. A secure signal changing system will stop abusers who are already determined to break the law. I'd rather not have bank robbers, terrorists, or who knows else using these systems. Once you've decided to, say, rob a bank, the additional crime of installing an illegal signal changer is relatively minor. That is also stops the selfish assholes who abuse the public trust so that they can get to their destination a bit faster is just a nice side effect.
Arguing that making it illegal should be good enough would be like outlawing guns, then refusing to give cops bulletproof vests because no one should have guns to shoot at them with.