they throw cheese at you then surrender preemptively
Damn that was funny. It was so funny, I showed it to the customer who's server room I'm working in and they understood why I doubled over howling in laughter. This is a significant achievement on your part. If I'm caught laughing while reading Slashdot, I usually have to spend an hour explaining why "all your license are belong to us" or a beowulf cluster of PDAs is funny.
...is, in fact, a strategic bid to gain an advantage over shoppers at a specific place and a specific time.
So I guess the matter at hand is this: the current environment of exchange of information makes this sort of strategy impossible. Rather than adapting to a changing environment, Wal Mart is using the DMCA as an omnibus anti-information sharing legal cannon to attempt to force by legislation what they can no longer accomplish in fact.
You were comparing the price of maintaining Windows vs. the price of maintaining Linux. Your criterion for maintaining windows included upgrading the OS. A meaningful comparison would be to compare maintaining a 1998 vintage Linux system to a 1998 Windows system, but the comparison, as clarified by your last post, is invalid. This is because it is, in fact, impossible to update, in ANY fasion, an installation of a Windows operating system circa 1998. It seems that to you, the possibility of maintaining rh 5.2 obviates the prospect of upgrading it. The fact that you actually can maintain a rh 5.2 system, however difficult that may be, does not make it fair to compare an upgrade path of one system to an endless cycle of patching on another.
Although this is a miniseries, I have been thinking about why shows we like fail and why shows like Just Shoot Me succeed wildly.
I think it basically boils down to one issue - shows we like are not conducive to advertising. The most effective TV show is one where you do not "feel" the difference between the show and the commercials. You sit quietly in alpha state, and slurp up whatever comes out of the TV. Thinking is counterproductive to this effect. Shows like Just Shoot Me or Friends are perfect examples of this phenomenon. It is physically painful to think while watching these shows.
I tend to watch scifi and documentaries. I mercilessly channel surf to avoid even a second of commercial time, and am never "caught" unaware that I am sitting watching commercials.
I think the reality is that television programming is not a matter of entertainment/information in exchange for watching ads, but a matter of producing content just interesting enough for the average person to watch, but not so interesting that they resist the commercials. Quality, therfore, is ancillary to the entire process.
The Internet collapsed? That must make you a figment of my imagination.
Seriously, though. The Internet did not collapse. The get rich quick by getting in on the ground floor of the next Yahoo business model collapsed, but the Internet itself seems to be doing quite well. The business model in question never really produced results, even in The Great Hayday, so confidence was the only driving force in the absurd gold rush of tech prospecting. Mass media advertising is a different beast. Results are what drives it; not confidence. As people's methods of acquiring information and entertainment change, the advertising industry will change with it. The "no free lunch" mantra of the disaffected post 90's venture capitalist trying to force failed business models to work is going to fail as a method to hold the 90's bubble together (this also applies to other failed business models such as 'you need the RIAA to get quality music from artists to consumers'), and certainly is irrelevant to the established advertising industry.
If the market doesn't work the way you want it to, it may be because people don't want to buy what you have. Attributing that to malice on the part of the demand side ignores the reality of the market, which is what Capitalists are supposed to live by, for better or for worse.
Wow. What an informative comment. Thanks for the info on other distros. I use RH pretty much exclusively, but I have played with Debian and Caldera.
I was floored by RH8.0, simply because so many things just worked. I could print to anything, and OpenOffice is amazing. While kicking the tires on Rh8.0, we tried opening up the most complex MS Word document we've ever created (200 pages, 100 styles, massive dynamic content), and were stunned to see it come across with almost no problem (OpenOffice had trouble with the embedded Visio drawings). Rh8 works so well that I've actually been able to use it as a desktop OS in a company which uses MS Everything (tm).
If you are a tweaker, I can see how Linux would take a lot of time, but I personally don't put checking out a distro I've never used before in the same category of time expenditure as having to reinstall Windows again just because it blows up on a regular basis.
The other thing to remember here is that Linux is young. Maybe not in actual years, but in terms of polish sufficient for broad (read - desktop) use, it's just coming into its own. The only problem I really have with Linux right now is that I think too much emphasis is being placed on look and feel. Sure, the BlueCurve desktop is comparitively non-threatening to new Windows converts, but the emotional comfort that results is quickly nullified by finding out that there is no way to consistently cut and paste in X. If we can work together to fix these sorts of problems, rather than engaging in desktop environment holy wars, we'll really start seeing some progress in broad acceptance of Linux.
There's always the option of hiring a trained individual to handle watching bug lists and backporting necessary fixes, but the pricetag on that would make Windows mandatory upgrades cheap in comparison.
OK, I obviously don't get this moderation malarky!
It's very simple. Asking/. what makes good scifi is akin to throwing a molotov cocktail into a munitions plant. The results are likely to be highly entropic.
I also like Herbert's work, but I find that it isn't the classical definition of science fiction, that is, an exploration of who humans are and what humanity is about. If you accept that definition (I'm not sure I do), then you are left with two alternatives, a Roddenberry-esque optimism for humanity, or one of the many post-apocalyptic works that derive from the humanity is ultimately evil camp.
The attraction of Dune is that it is something altogether different; a period piece set in a place and time which exist only in the imagination of the author. And what better period piece than a heroic story, and what better hero than a messianic one? Dark City is comparable in this way.
A work which comes to mind as I think about this is AI. While I don't mean to present the movie as being on the same level of significance as Dune or Star Trek, AI is interesting because it does address the humanity question, and comes up on both sides of the fence, all while rendering a pleasing "period piece" vision of the future.
Given the safety record of some notable, Chinese technology, combined with their well known regard for human life, I'll not be accelerated to 250 mph by anything made in China, thank you.
Re:What the slashdotters will say?!
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 1
My underpants smell as they have not been changed in 2 weeks
You got modded up (fairly - it was funny) for saying that.
Somewhere, millions of trolls cried out in anger, and were suddenly silenced.
I've personally had great success with bayesian filtering. With a training corpus of only about 1500 spams and 6000 good messages, not a single spam has made it through since running it. Fearing false positives, I'm doing all my filtering on the client. All procmail does is append a spamicity score to the message header, and the user can use that for filtering. Use of a spam folder will eliminate a totally blind false positive which would result from server side filtering. I have had a few false positives on order confirmations (which, considering that you would have already written down the order number and/or saved the html order result page, is probably spam anyway), but you're usually expecting these when they come, and can pick them out of the spam folder pretty readily.
All this brings up a very important benefit to this database - training bayesian filters. I only have 1500 spams. Bayesian filters get more accurate with respect to the size of their training corpi, effectively topping out at around 6000 messages, so being able to download a couple thousand spams from this ftp site would greatly help me train my filter.
About who would want to donate their face as much as I would be about who would want to go around with a dead person's face. But then I look at the Micheal Jackson and/or Cher pics, and it suddenly all makes sense.
Build a second parallel network because the network designers didn't know wtf they were doing? How are you going to fail over to this network? STP? (insert obnoxious chortle here)
10 bridged hops = big flat network = they needed layer 3 switching in the first place, ergo, the network was badly designed. The very fact that a root bridge STP reconverge occurred indicates a poorly framed implementation plan and obviously no backout plan.
Find somebody who knows what the hell they are doing and have them do a network audit.
Here's a response I was working on. I would send it, but I have no confidence they would actually read it.
Thank you for your response. I read your FAQ, and have the following questions and comments.
Running a website costs the webmaster behind that site time and money.
While I won't dispute that web sites take time to develop, many thousands of web sites operate non-commercially, and I've run several at no cost. The web is a place to share information. You characterize user preferences as theft, and even implicitly advocate turning that characterization into law:
Legally it is of course not theft to block pop ups (today),...
In essence, therefore, you are attempting to restrict an environment of free exchange of information to support a commercial venture, based upon the fallacious argument that the environment depends on the success of that venture. I find that reprehensible.
However, Google is a multinational huge company with an enourmous(sic) sale(sic) force and budget.
Actually, according to this: http://www.google.com/press/investors.html, Google is privately funded, owned by a small consortium of U.S. IT business leaders. And despite having actually used Google's advertising services, I have not been contacted by any member of their vast sales force. I have received not even a single piece of spam. I point this out because Google's business success has come from their attitude toward their intended customers. People want unbiased, accurate, ad-free search results. Google is successful because they have found a way to give people what they want and a way to make money on it, rather than trying to force an outdated business philosophy to the Internet, and screaming epithets such as "thief!" when it doesn't work.
Mr. Williams actually did say to the extent 'its sales circulars consist of a "compilation of prices" and that the data contained therein "is very much copyrightable"
Okay. I hereby copyright all funds I spend shopping at Wal-Mart and license their use to the explicit and sole purpose of sending me checks for shopping there. After all, they're only compilations of prices.
I'm a company, I've made some content and I only want people who are "members" and "customers" of my company to see this contaent..why cant I do this?
Well, I'm certainly no fan of CNN, and wouldn't mind a bit if its web presence evaporated as a result of this foolishness. That having been said...
As a company, you can do whatever you want under the law. If you start a company under the pretense that you are providing "free" (cnn.com had a ton of ads the last time I went there) news content on the Internet, develop a huge readership, and then start charging for the service (through AOL membership or otherwise), nothing is legally wrong with that.
However, don't be surprised if the rest of the world thinks you are a flaming scumbag for doing so. The last time I checked, my right to think that, say that, and gather a group together to discuss it were constitutionally protected.
Due to the enormous respons to the Anti-Theft campaign we can't unfortunately answer all the e-mails we have received lately. Instead we have added a FAQ to the campaign page. Please go to http://www.anti-leech.com/index.php?option=at_camp aign for answers.
Regards, Johan Wennberg Anti-Leech.com ----- Original Message ----- From: stinky wizzleteats To: general@anti-leech.com Cc: johan.wennberg@swipnet.se Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 2:31 AM Subject: theft tools
> I visited your site after seeing a story on slashdot describing how you > characterize pop-up blocking as "theft". I found this quite surprising, > and to be quite honest, I fully expected to find that this was an > extreme exaggeration of who you were and what you are really about. > > The reality is that your site, and your company, are so clearly evil > that I wonder if you can actually be real. > > You actually do characterize pop-up blocking as theft, and you actually > do sell a service (despite the silliness of the technology involved) to > force web site visitors to see pop-up ads. How unimaginably vile of > you. What right do you have to determine how my computer is going to > behave? How dare you presume to force me to view ads I have neither the > time, processor power, nor memory for? What kind of arrogant > neo-railroad tycoon do you think you are? > > I am very pleased that your technical acumen is as poor as it is. > Client side "web site security" is pitiably easy to overcome, and I'm > sure that every non-Microsoft web browser in existence will soon have > javascript munging features to render your service inert, and return to > me the same control over web browsing that I have with my television > with its channel, volume, and power buttons. > > I sincerely hope you enjoy absolutely no success with your nefarious > venture. I will certainly do everything possible to ensure that > everyone knows your organization for the pack of weasels that it is. >
You've never had your email address harvested by a spammer, have you?
Agreed. Run snort on your company's Internet connection, tail -f the alert file, and then tell us how security is nothing more than a marketing initiative.
Homeland security secretary Ridge today ordered thousands of law enforcement officers to scour the grounds of Central Park looking for a warez web server believed to be operating from a remote control car.
Beer seems to be 'saraba' (I can't find a hindi-english translator), so the Indians either have more useful words to describe freedom, or a different way of expressing the idea idiomatically.
I rather hope the latter, otherwise our idiom (speech not beer) is probably funny as hell.
Slashdot Mirror
they throw cheese at you then surrender preemptively
Damn that was funny. It was so funny, I showed it to the customer who's server room I'm working in and they understood why I doubled over howling in laughter. This is a significant achievement on your part. If I'm caught laughing while reading Slashdot, I usually have to spend an hour explaining why "all your license are belong to us" or a beowulf cluster of PDAs is funny.
So I guess the matter at hand is this: the current environment of exchange of information makes this sort of strategy impossible. Rather than adapting to a changing environment, Wal Mart is using the DMCA as an omnibus anti-information sharing legal cannon to attempt to force by legislation what they can no longer accomplish in fact.
Damn. That was classic. Bravo.
Because, intelligent geeks must like only intellectually engaging and meaningful shows, like Jackass, the Simpsons, Monty Python, and South Park. :)
You were comparing the price of maintaining Windows vs. the price of maintaining Linux. Your criterion for maintaining windows included upgrading the OS. A meaningful comparison would be to compare maintaining a 1998 vintage Linux system to a 1998 Windows system, but the comparison, as clarified by your last post, is invalid. This is because it is, in fact, impossible to update, in ANY fasion, an installation of a Windows operating system circa 1998. It seems that to you, the possibility of maintaining rh 5.2 obviates the prospect of upgrading it. The fact that you actually can maintain a rh 5.2 system, however difficult that may be, does not make it fair to compare an upgrade path of one system to an endless cycle of patching on another.
Although this is a miniseries, I have been thinking about why shows we like fail and why shows like Just Shoot Me succeed wildly.
I think it basically boils down to one issue - shows we like are not conducive to advertising. The most effective TV show is one where you do not "feel" the difference between the show and the commercials. You sit quietly in alpha state, and slurp up whatever comes out of the TV. Thinking is counterproductive to this effect. Shows like Just Shoot Me or Friends are perfect examples of this phenomenon. It is physically painful to think while watching these shows.
I tend to watch scifi and documentaries. I mercilessly channel surf to avoid even a second of commercial time, and am never "caught" unaware that I am sitting watching commercials.
I think the reality is that television programming is not a matter of entertainment/information in exchange for watching ads, but a matter of producing content just interesting enough for the average person to watch, but not so interesting that they resist the commercials. Quality, therfore, is ancillary to the entire process.
The Internet collapsed? That must make you a figment of my imagination.
Seriously, though. The Internet did not collapse. The get rich quick by getting in on the ground floor of the next Yahoo business model collapsed, but the Internet itself seems to be doing quite well. The business model in question never really produced results, even in The Great Hayday, so confidence was the only driving force in the absurd gold rush of tech prospecting. Mass media advertising is a different beast. Results are what drives it; not confidence. As people's methods of acquiring information and entertainment change, the advertising industry will change with it. The "no free lunch" mantra of the disaffected post 90's venture capitalist trying to force failed business models to work is going to fail as a method to hold the 90's bubble together (this also applies to other failed business models such as 'you need the RIAA to get quality music from artists to consumers'), and certainly is irrelevant to the established advertising industry.
If the market doesn't work the way you want it to, it may be because people don't want to buy what you have. Attributing that to malice on the part of the demand side ignores the reality of the market, which is what Capitalists are supposed to live by, for better or for worse.
Wow. What an informative comment. Thanks for the info on other distros. I use RH pretty much exclusively, but I have played with Debian and Caldera.
I was floored by RH8.0, simply because so many things just worked. I could print to anything, and OpenOffice is amazing. While kicking the tires on Rh8.0, we tried opening up the most complex MS Word document we've ever created (200 pages, 100 styles, massive dynamic content), and were stunned to see it come across with almost no problem (OpenOffice had trouble with the embedded Visio drawings). Rh8 works so well that I've actually been able to use it as a desktop OS in a company which uses MS Everything (tm).
If you are a tweaker, I can see how Linux would take a lot of time, but I personally don't put checking out a distro I've never used before in the same category of time expenditure as having to reinstall Windows again just because it blows up on a regular basis.
The other thing to remember here is that Linux is young. Maybe not in actual years, but in terms of polish sufficient for broad (read - desktop) use, it's just coming into its own. The only problem I really have with Linux right now is that I think too much emphasis is being placed on look and feel. Sure, the BlueCurve desktop is comparitively non-threatening to new Windows converts, but the emotional comfort that results is quickly nullified by finding out that there is no way to consistently cut and paste in X. If we can work together to fix these sorts of problems, rather than engaging in desktop environment holy wars, we'll really start seeing some progress in broad acceptance of Linux.
There's always the option of hiring a trained individual to handle watching bug lists and backporting necessary fixes, but the pricetag on that would make Windows mandatory upgrades cheap in comparison.
Or you could just use RHN/up2date and spend $50.
"Hey, how do I use the stove?"
"RTFM, fscking noob!"
BOOM!
OK, I obviously don't get this moderation malarky!
It's very simple. Asking /. what makes good scifi is akin to throwing a molotov cocktail into a munitions plant. The results are likely to be highly entropic.
I also like Herbert's work, but I find that it isn't the classical definition of science fiction, that is, an exploration of who humans are and what humanity is about. If you accept that definition (I'm not sure I do), then you are left with two alternatives, a Roddenberry-esque optimism for humanity, or one of the many post-apocalyptic works that derive from the humanity is ultimately evil camp.
The attraction of Dune is that it is something altogether different; a period piece set in a place and time which exist only in the imagination of the author. And what better period piece than a heroic story, and what better hero than a messianic one? Dark City is comparable in this way.
A work which comes to mind as I think about this is AI. While I don't mean to present the movie as being on the same level of significance as Dune or Star Trek, AI is interesting because it does address the humanity question, and comes up on both sides of the fence, all while rendering a pleasing "period piece" vision of the future.
Given the safety record of some notable, Chinese technology, combined with their well known regard for human life, I'll not be accelerated to 250 mph by anything made in China, thank you.
My underpants smell as they have not been changed in 2 weeks
You got modded up (fairly - it was funny) for saying that.
Somewhere, millions of trolls cried out in anger, and were suddenly silenced.
I've personally had great success with bayesian filtering. With a training corpus of only about 1500 spams and 6000 good messages, not a single spam has made it through since running it. Fearing false positives, I'm doing all my filtering on the client. All procmail does is append a spamicity score to the message header, and the user can use that for filtering. Use of a spam folder will eliminate a totally blind false positive which would result from server side filtering. I have had a few false positives on order confirmations (which, considering that you would have already written down the order number and/or saved the html order result page, is probably spam anyway), but you're usually expecting these when they come, and can pick them out of the spam folder pretty readily.
All this brings up a very important benefit to this database - training bayesian filters. I only have 1500 spams. Bayesian filters get more accurate with respect to the size of their training corpi, effectively topping out at around 6000 messages, so being able to download a couple thousand spams from this ftp site would greatly help me train my filter.
About who would want to donate their face as much as I would be about who would want to go around with a dead person's face. But then I look at the Micheal Jackson and/or Cher pics, and it suddenly all makes sense.
Cisco Systems, the hospital's network provider...
Build a second parallel network because the network designers didn't know wtf they were doing? How are you going to fail over to this network? STP? (insert obnoxious chortle here)
10 bridged hops = big flat network = they needed layer 3 switching in the first place, ergo, the network was badly designed. The very fact that a root bridge STP reconverge occurred indicates a poorly framed implementation plan and obviously no backout plan.
Find somebody who knows what the hell they are doing and have them do a network audit.
Here's a response I was working on. I would send it, but I have no confidence they would actually read it.
Thank you for your response. I read your FAQ, and have the following questions and comments.
While I won't dispute that web sites take time to develop, many thousands of web sites operate non-commercially, and I've run several at no cost. The web is a place to share information. You characterize user preferences as theft, and even implicitly advocate turning that characterization into law:
In essence, therefore, you are attempting to restrict an environment of free exchange of information to support a commercial venture, based upon the fallacious argument that the environment depends on the success of that venture. I find that reprehensible.
Actually, according to this: http://www.google.com/press/investors.html, Google is privately funded, owned by a small consortium of U.S. IT business leaders. And despite having actually used Google's advertising services, I have not been contacted by any member of their vast sales force. I have received not even a single piece of spam. I point this out because Google's business success has come from their attitude toward their intended customers. People want unbiased, accurate, ad-free search results. Google is successful because they have found a way to give people what they want and a way to make money on it, rather than trying to force an outdated business philosophy to the Internet, and screaming epithets such as "thief!" when it doesn't work.
Mr. Williams actually did say to the extent 'its sales circulars consist of a "compilation of prices" and that the data contained therein "is very much copyrightable"
Okay. I hereby copyright all funds I spend shopping at Wal-Mart and license their use to the explicit and sole purpose of sending me checks for shopping there. After all, they're only compilations of prices.
I'm a company, I've made some content and I only want people who are "members" and "customers" of my company to see this contaent..why cant I do this?
Well, I'm certainly no fan of CNN, and wouldn't mind a bit if its web presence evaporated as a result of this foolishness. That having been said...
As a company, you can do whatever you want under the law. If you start a company under the pretense that you are providing "free" (cnn.com had a ton of ads the last time I went there) news content on the Internet, develop a huge readership, and then start charging for the service (through AOL membership or otherwise), nothing is legally wrong with that.
However, don't be surprised if the rest of the world thinks you are a flaming scumbag for doing so. The last time I checked, my right to think that, say that, and gather a group together to discuss it were constitutionally protected.
Hello,
p aign for answers.
Due to the enormous respons to the Anti-Theft campaign we can't unfortunately answer all the e-mails we have received lately. Instead we have added a FAQ to the campaign page. Please go to http://www.anti-leech.com/index.php?option=at_cam
Regards,
Johan Wennberg
Anti-Leech.com
----- Original Message -----
From: stinky wizzleteats
To: general@anti-leech.com
Cc: johan.wennberg@swipnet.se
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2002 2:31 AM
Subject: theft tools
> I visited your site after seeing a story on slashdot describing how you
> characterize pop-up blocking as "theft". I found this quite surprising,
> and to be quite honest, I fully expected to find that this was an
> extreme exaggeration of who you were and what you are really about.
>
> The reality is that your site, and your company, are so clearly evil
> that I wonder if you can actually be real.
>
> You actually do characterize pop-up blocking as theft, and you actually
> do sell a service (despite the silliness of the technology involved) to
> force web site visitors to see pop-up ads. How unimaginably vile of
> you. What right do you have to determine how my computer is going to
> behave? How dare you presume to force me to view ads I have neither the
> time, processor power, nor memory for? What kind of arrogant
> neo-railroad tycoon do you think you are?
>
> I am very pleased that your technical acumen is as poor as it is.
> Client side "web site security" is pitiably easy to overcome, and I'm
> sure that every non-Microsoft web browser in existence will soon have
> javascript munging features to render your service inert, and return to
> me the same control over web browsing that I have with my television
> with its channel, volume, and power buttons.
>
> I sincerely hope you enjoy absolutely no success with your nefarious
> venture. I will certainly do everything possible to ensure that
> everyone knows your organization for the pack of weasels that it is.
>
You've never had your email address harvested by a spammer, have you?
Agreed. Run snort on your company's Internet connection, tail -f the alert file, and then tell us how security is nothing more than a marketing initiative.
Homeland security secretary Ridge today ordered thousands of law enforcement officers to scour the grounds of Central Park looking for a warez web server believed to be operating from a remote control car.
Hey cool, I've got a new OSS slogan:
free as in 'swatantryam' - not 'soujanyam'
Beer seems to be 'saraba' (I can't find a hindi-english translator), so the Indians either have more useful words to describe freedom, or a different way of expressing the idea idiomatically.
I rather hope the latter, otherwise our idiom (speech not beer) is probably funny as hell.