I just want to mention one more thing I forgot: entertaining is almost as good as useful and complements it well. If you have to choose between the two, go for useful, but it's far better to be both.
> If your site isn't coming up in google the keywords you want and it's losing you $500,000 then you > should probably buy some ads from google to get yourself back in there. It's sort of an obvious solution.
Obvious, maybe, but it's not a good long-term solution. Short-term, maybe.
If Google is your main source of customers, then I would say categorically that your site is *significantly* over-ranked in Google, and you seriously need to look at other forms of advertising.
Yes, you do want people to be able to find you in the major search engines, *especially* if they are specifically looking for you (e.g., punching in the actual name of your business -- if your business has a fairly unique name, you'd like to come up in the top three for that, ideally number one).
But if coming up high on Google for keywords related to what you're selling are the main way you've been getting customers, there are a lot of other things that you should be a lot *more* worried about. Why is nobody hearing about you from their friends, on the radio, finding you in the yellow pages, reading about you in the local paper, or seeing your signs around town? You are obscure. Nobody knows you exist. Google by itself cannot be expected to solve this for you -- indeed, if Google is working the way it ought to work, you will not come up very high in the results (for things other than your actual name), because you are too obscure.
So buy some advertising on Google, sure, but for crying out loud, don't stop there! If obscurity is costing you $500,000 then you should be spending at least 10% of that on some good old fashioned get-the-word-out advertising. Put some coupons in the newspaper. Write up a dorky little twenty-second skit about someone who has a need that can be met by your business, record it, and buy some radio slots. Get your URL painted on the sides of your company vehicles, if you have any. Put up some billboards, for crying out loud. For that kind of money, you ought to be able to even get some (local) television ads. Sponsor some community events or a little league team, something.
And let me tell you a secret about how to get ranked well in search engines: make a lot of people like your site. I know that sounds simple, but I promise, it works WAY better than playing wonky SEO games. There are a variety of ways to get people to like your site, but the main way is to publish some useful content on there, preferably on a somewhat regular basis. The details are going to depend on your business (you want the content to be as related as possible to what it is you do, of course), but maybe you can get someone in your business to write up a weekly "tips" column or something, and publish it on your site -- on your site which you advertise, on your business cards, on the sides of your vans, on signage at your checkout counter, and so on and so forth. If the content is useful enough, people will link to it, and after enough of that the search engines won't be the only way new customers find your site anymore.
Furthermore, when your site is no longer obscure and useless, but a well-known and widely linked source of useful information, the search engines will be happy to rank it higher, automatically. You won't *need* to optimize much for them (apart from making sure they can actually read it, e.g., by using suitable alt attributes for images and so on, the same stuff you should be doing anyway for accessibility reasons). If you have the kind of site people that are trying to find, the search engines will go out of their way to crawl your site frequently, index it thoroughly, and rank it highly.
On the other hand, if your site is a dead-end "buy here buy now" site with no useful information, selling the same junk fifty bazillion other sites are selling, belonging to a business nobody has ever heard of, so that your potential customers don't care one iota whether they find you or one of your competitors, well, then that's a horse of a different color. If the people
> A pity SCO can't manage to gag themselves. That would keep just about everyone happy!
Eh. SCO's rantings are so transparently inane that they are relatively easy to ignore.
There are a number of people within the open-source community who spend so much time blathering loudly and publicly about stuff that doesn't actually matter, it would be nice if they would just shut up. I'm not going to name any names here, but if you spend more time talking and writing about licensing issues than you spend writing actual software, I'm probably talking about you.
> The main source of vitamin D in humans is through exposure to sunlight.
I'm pretty sure that's not true in my case. In the first place, I drink a lot of milk, which is most likely fortified with vitamin D, and in the second place, my skin is roughly the same color as milk, because I spend 165+ hours a week indoors.
Actually, virtually an traditional metal is cost-effective to recycle, _especially_ if your scrap is pretty well homogenous i.e., all the same kind of metal. (By "traditional metal" here I mean something that is commonly seen in metallic form outside of chem labs, as opposed to periodic-table metals like potassium that spend most of their time in compounds with nonmetallic elements.) There might be exceptions, of course. At first guess I'd posit high-melting-point metals like tungsten might be nearly as expensive to melt down as to refine from ore, but I don't actually know, and it's largely moot anyway unless you know how to collect scrap tungsten in anything resembling quantity.
Aluminum is more worthwhile to recycle than inexpensive metals like iron, less so (economically, at least) than precious ones like gold and platinum. Copper is presumably more lucrative to recycle than aluminum, as well. Then again, you'd have a hard time getting people to just turn in scrap copper (much less gold or silver) for recycling, because it's *perceived* as valuable; whereas, scrap aluminum mostly is not viewed that way by the general public, who happily toss their used cans in the recycle bin next to the pop machine without expecting to receive anything in return, provided it's convenient.
Some people do also save up aluminum cans and take them in bulk to the recycle center in exchange for money, but if I try to imagine people at a party asking the host whether they recycle used copper items or just throw them away, I come up blank. It just doesn't seem likely, with copper -- much less silver or gold. Yet that happens all the time with aluminum cans, because many neighborhoods don't have pickup and many people don't want to bother to save it and take it in. The closest I can think of to this with copper is the "penny dish" next to the cash register at some shops, and those generally have to be subsidized by the shop keepers because more people want to take a penny than want to leave one -- and virtually nobody ever leaves more than three pennies at a time in one of those dishes.
So, if by "most cost-effective to recycle" you mean most cost-effective out of materials that people would otherwise casually throw away on a regular basis, then yeah, aluminum is near the high end of that category. Nobody tosses scrap titanium in the garbage day after day just because the recycle center won't come pick it up. I guess you could call that the difference between "recycling" versus "salvage", or somesuch.
> So, from an economical perspective, glass recycling is "easy". The question would be if it was > cheaper to make new or recycle old.
It's way cheaper to recycle old glass, because you can melt down old glass at a MUCH lower temperature than it takes to make new glass out of sand. It's a matter of heating the furnace to hundreds of degrees instead of thousands of degrees.
> Glass? Could you explain why? It's not like we're going to run out of silica any time soon...
It's not the raw materials, but the process. It is inefficient and expensive. The technology to make glass out of silicate rock or sand has been around since antiquity and has not improved much since then.
Recycling glass is easy: just melt and reshape. You can reshape ordinary glass tubing over a bunsen burner in a high school chem lab, so you know it's not very hard to achieve. Heat-resistant glass requires a somewhat higher temperature, but it's still quite reasonable. Melting rock (or sand) requires a *MUCH* hotter furnace and therefore expends a much larger amount of energy. Have you ever tried to melt rock or sand over a bunsen burner? There's a reason sand is used to extinguish magnesium fires: it can take the heat. Melting it down to make glass takes a *serious* heat source. Recycling glass saves a LOT of energy.
Recycling paper actually costs more energy than making it new out of fast-growth trees.
In my Introduction to the Internet course, I tell people that the internet is basically made out of phone lines.
The purpose of a phone line is to carry information from point A to point B, and that's what the internet does. Furthermore, the internet uses largely the *same set* of phone lines that is also used when you make a phone call.
It's not all the same kind of residential phone line that you use at your house, of course. The phone companies have various types of lines, some of which can carry a lot more information that the basic line you use for one phone. They aren't all copper, either: there are fibre optic lines, satellite links, and so forth. And there's a lot of switching and routing equipment involved, connecting the various lines together.
But in principle it's pretty much phone lines.
Of course, when we call it "the internet" instead of just saying "phone lines", we usually mean that _computers_ are using the lines to exchange information. What's special about computers? They're flexible. A telephone can use the lines to send and receive one kind of information in exactly one way -- a phone call. A fax machine too can use the same lines to send and receive one kind of information in exactly one way -- a black and white image of a piece of paper with stuff on it. Computers, however, are general-purpose devices. Rather than having their one thing they can do hardwired into them, they are designed to read and follow sets of instructions (which we call "software"). Thus, by using different software, you can get the computer to do different things, so it can use the internet in different ways, to exchange different kinds of information.
(Then I talk about how email is like a letter or a phone call, in that it's person-to-person (generally); whereas, the web is more like a book or a newspaper or a magazine, in that someone publishes the content and then anyone can read it. Then most of the rest of the course is spent on the web.)
Get the terms of the agreement in writing before you pay anything. Duh.
Verbal agreements, basic quotes, and general practice are one thing if you're talking about off-the-shelf stuff, but when somebody's doing custom work for you -- of any kind, whether it's software dev or landscaping or advertising or business consulting or whatever -- you want everything spelled out in black and white before you pay them a dime. Things you want spelled out include, but are not limited to, the following:
* exactly how much you are going to pay them up front (hint: no more than half the total)
* exactly how much you are going to pay them on completion
* exactly what they are going to do for you and provide you with
* exactly when they have to have it completed, and what happens if they don't
* what the secondary deadline is when they owe you back even the up-front money if it's not done
* exactly what it means for them to have the job "completed"
* the terms under which it is decided whether there will be an ongoing relationship
(e.g., maintenance contract)
* what you have to do to back out of the deal at any given stage, and what they
have to do to back out of it, and what happens if either of you do back out
* what kind of warrantee you have from them, and for how long
If you pay large amounts of money for custom work without getting in writing what you're paying for and when it must be delivered and so forth, you've been had. If you have a good lawyer you *might* be able to get some of what you wanted ex post facto, but then again you might not, and in any case your lawyer's time is worth money too, and going after them after the deal is done is not an efficient use of that time, compared with getting things in writing up front.
> Not overprovitioning is a lot like building roads as if everyone who owns a car would be driving it 24/7/365.
You know, I could swear we keep getting closer and closer to that all the time. Not the part about the roads, I mean, but about everyone driving everywhere constantly. They don't stop driving and go home to eat anymore, or to make phone calls. Vehicles are coming with televisions in them now, so people don't have to go home to watch drivel. I've heard horror stories of people using their laptops and/or reading books while driving. Maybe before too long people won't even pull over to sleep.
> Versions have been implemented in C, Java, XUL/JavaScript, and even NewtonScript.
Not to mention lisp, various assembly languages, and who knows what else. I don't think there's a complete list anywhere, but it's easily the second most frequently implemented virtual machine (after the generalized Turing machine). ISTR that Andrew Plotkin once threatened to do one in PostScript.
> I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests
Hardwoods for the most part can be sold as lumber and are more valuable in that form than as paper, even in the poorest countries. Making paper out of oak and maple is financially the equivalent to melting down dimes and reforming them in the shape of nickels. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is not the norm. Paper is generally made from fast-growth wood that doesn't make very valuable lumber, typically pine or other conifers.
What's really interesting is that it requires less total financial outlay, and less energy (discounting solar radiation that would otherwise not be harnessed), to maintain fast-growth pine plantations and make paper from those, versus recycling paper. Of all the things that you can recycle, paper is substantially the least worthwhile, both environmentally and economically. (The most worthwhile is probably glass, but just about any metal is quite worth recycling too. Plastics vary.)
> Are people going to trust google, yahoo, or hotmail with their private key? Do they even know what this means?
Couldn't they just generate a keypair specifically for that webmail account?
Sure, it doesn't prove "I'm the same guy as has this _other_ email account", but it _can_ demonstrate that you're the same loser9843894@yahoo.com as you were last week, i.e., that some random third party didn't just get your address and start using it in From: fields.
However, I can't see the major webmail services (with the _possible_ exception of Google) adding such a feature until a much larger percentage of users become aware of the fact that the From: field is untrustworthy. One would think, with all the phishing scams out there, that this would be starting to sink in, but all the evidence I have seen so far indicates the contrary.
Okay, so far all they know about it is its approximate mass and distance from its primary, and the length of its year (which is very much shorter than Earth's). The latter is approximately in the zone that would allow for temperatures such that water, if there is any, could be liquid, and suddenly it's Earth-like?
There are a lot of variables that go into determining whether a planet would actually be habitable at all, much less Earth-like. How much atmosphere has it got? What's the composition of the atmosphere? *Does* it have any significant amount of water (liquid or otherwise)? How long is its "day" (i.e., rotational period)? (Does it even have a day/night cycle, or is it tidally locked?) How massive is its moon, and what's its orbital period? Does it even _have_ a moon?
I'd expect suitable answers to these and many other questions before I'd be willing to call it "Earth-like".
> I don't remember Microsoft gouing back and start licensing 98 > again after they released XP and discontinued 98.
Nonetheless, new PCs with Windows 98 SE preinstalled remained available for some while after XP was released. They became a smaller and smaller minority of available new systems, but you could still get them for several years. For the *first* six months or so, new systems with 98SE were just as common on the market as ones with XP, and afterward they were phased out pretty gradually. Microsoft tried to market the new version to consumers, and encouraged OEMs to push it with hype, but not everyone wanted to change over right away, and it took time.
This time they actually tried to get the OEMs to stop selling the old version right away so that the new version would be the only going concern, but that didn't fly. Home users may happily buy whatever the OEMs sell them, but in office environments (which I suppose account for something like a third of the PCs sold) the network administrators want to see a little history behind the new version and, by preference, some service packs, before they turn it loose on their networks. That hasn't changed, and it's unlikely to change much in the forseeable future.
> I'm finding that XP works better than fine, it works great. It gives me a sense that there is some value > to a mature operating system that's had bugs worked out and service packs and enough time for the rest > of us to figure out how to make it do what we want.
Ah, so you're the sort of person who sees the merits of Debian stable over something like Feisty Fawn.
But yes, even within the Microsoft world, you're right. XP was terrible at first, but as the patches and service packs came out (especially SP2), it started getting rather a lot better. I don't even want to experiment with Vista, much less actually try to maintain a deployment of it, until at least 2010, preferably more like 2012. Right now if Microsoft offered me a free copy of Vista Ultimate I wouldn't even be tempted to install it.
> I thought New Coke was to get more people to buy Pepsi.
No, actually, the opposite: they were trying to take back some of the market share they had lost to Pepsi in North America. In retrospect this was unnecessary, as they had lost already most of what they were going to lose, but at the time they didn't know that. So the New Coke was made sweeter and with a softer flavor -- more like Pepsi, in other words. (Not _exactly_ like Pepsi, but a lot closer.) The problem with that should have been obvious before they even tried it: if people wanted Pepsi, they could just buy Pepsi, but a lot of people genuinely preferred Coke as it had been.
So when the New Coke came out, consumer reaction was predictably not what the company was hoping for. So they backpedaled and re-introduced the old recipe as Coca-Cola Classic. This basically killed the market for the New Coke, as practically everyone that preferred Coke over Pepsi also preferred Coca-Cola Classic over the new Coke. So the new Coke became a fringe product, and Coca-Cola Classic eventually went back to just being the standard Coca-Cola and the whole thing became a learning experience for the company executives. I don't know whether anybody lost a job over the whole debacle, but it wouldn't surprise me much.
The New Coke, BTW, is still available under the name Coke II, but most stores are not terribly interested in selling it, because most consumers either prefer the classic recipe, or else just buy Pepsi.
And no, I'm not a big Coke fan myself. I consider cola in general to be a very boring flavor.
I take issue with the inclusion of pizza in that list. We have in America some of the finest pizza anywhere.
We of course also have chintzy prefab frozen pizza, but that's because American businesses have determined that at least 10% of the world's population has no ability to discern quality and will happily accept Hormel products or anything if it's convenient and not too expensive. These products should not be confused with the real food that they are designed immitate. Just because we have Velveeta and Kraft Singles does not mean you can't buy something much more like real cheese. (I don't intend to argue that we have the best cheese in the world, and we certainly don't have the widest selection of it, but that's not my point. My point is that you can't judge all the cheese in the nation based on the chintziest products available.)
However, you can easily get very good pizza in the US. Practically every city in North America has a good pizza place or two. There are usually also several that make greasy nasty pizza, of course, or dead flat stuff, so you do have to be a bit selective. But the good pizza is easy enough to find if you know what you are looking for.
You can also buy decent chocolate, but it's a lot harder. You have to go looking in the US to find actual chocolate at all (i.e., chocolate that hasn't had the cocoa butter removed and replaced with milkfat), and finding *good* chocolate is even harder. It does exist, but you can go through half a dozen groceries and as many candy stores and never see it, and when you do find it you can't afford to buy very much.
> opening a locally stored QuickTime.MOV causes instant bluescreen
"Doctor, I get terrible heartburn every time I eat dried habanero peppers!"
So don't do that. Duh.
Does anyone even still *use* QuickTime format? I thought practically everyone that just couldn't stand to use MPEG (presumably because it's too widely supported and therefore the format of hoi polloi) had gone over to either WMV or Ogg Theora, or Flash. I haven't seen anything in QuickTime format for over a decade, I think. I didn't even know they were still making the software for it.
> The Gnome implementation of a registry consists of a tree of XML files.
Under the hood, yes. The Windows registry is stored in files too, although the format is rather ickier than XML. For that matter, MySQL and Postgres and Oracle and MS SQL Server also all store their data, ultimately, in files.
However, applications don't treat it that way when they access it. They go through the API. So although there are flat files behind the scenes, it's not a flat-file API.
This is in contrast to most configuration data on *nix systems. In most cases, the applications treat the config files *as* files, reading and parsing them (possibly using a parser library) in much the same way that they would a document (again, possibly using a parser library), only for a different purpose, namely, configuration.
> What is a "binary-package distro"? And could you please give an example of one of these?
A "binary-package" distro is any distribution based around binary packages, i.e., packages that contain precompiled binaries. As opposed to a source-based distro.
Distributions that use either rpm or apt are usually binary-package distributions, but there are also ones that do not use those package formats, but something else. These are the ones I was talking about. One example is Slackware, which uses a package format based on gzipped tarballs, with a particular directory structure inside.
The reason the packaging mechanims is so important is because of the "borrowing" that goes in within families of distributions. (There is borrowing across the family lines too, of course, but less.) For instance, most apt-based distributions consider Debian an upstream source of packages, so there are fewer differences between them than there would be between one of them and an rpm-based distribution. Most rpm-based distributions either do now or at one time did consider RedHat (or Fedora) an upstream source of packages, so they inherit a lot of the way RH does things, and that makes them different in some significant ways from Debian. And so on. Slackware has its own history, so it is yet different from either Debian or Fedora. And then there are the source-based distributions, like Gentoo. (Finally, there's LFS, if you want to go totally hardcore. I never have. Instead I started messing around with BSD, which is different in another whole set of ways from all of the above.)
One thing I've found useful is to expose myself to a variety of different distributions. A lot of the stuff you want to know for system administration is subtly different from one distro to another, and so switching distributions will call your attention to it. Startup and daemon-control scripts, for instance, are not quite the same on any two distributions, but after you've used about twelve different ones, you'll get a feel for the things that *are* the same about them through all the different systems.
I'd recommend making sure you've used at least one rpm-based distro, at least one apt-based distro, at least one binary-package distro that doesn't use rpm or apt, and at least one source-based distro. Oh, and also, run off a live CD for a month or so sometime.
Also, use it for a variety of things. Each couple of months, make yourself a little "project" for learning to do some new thing with it -- set up a web server, a file server, a firewall, a print server,... when you are starting to feel comfortable with that, then you can move on to a new project.
Finally, get yourself a copy of Programming Perl and an account on perlmonks. It is really amazing how useful Perl can be for system administration.
Flat files, definitely. The whole "system registry" thing never really caught on in the *nix world. Well, okay, there's Gnome, but apart from that, most things in the *nix world use flat files. As far as Linux is concerned, a file is just n random octets in a defined order. Interpretation is up to the application reading the file.
> Isn't some ridiculous amount like 90% using gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail/aol mail/etc?
Reliable figures are difficult to obtain with any detail, but I can tell you for certain that the market share for email clients is very well and thoroughly split, and this has always been the case. The top spots are _probably_ held by hotmail, yahoo, and Outlook, but it's hard to be certain, and I sure wouldn't want to try to guess at the order, and there are lots of others with a sizeable share.
This is partly because most people don't realize they have a choice. They usually expect that they have to use whatever comes bundled with their internet service. (Most Road Runner customers, for instance, use Road Runner webmail, unaware that they have any other option.) So it's mostly ISPs making the decision for people, and system administrators, and to a lesser extent OEMs and the computer-savvy friends and relatives people get to set things up for them.
I suspect most dialup customers (which for the time being is still most home users in the US) use one POP3 client or another, because that's what dialup ISPs usually encourage. AOL and Earthlink are the only really _big_ dialup ISPs that I'm aware of, but they have a small minority market share, with most users using one or another smaller (often regional) ISP. Each of which makes its own decisions what email software to bundle in their connection kit.
Broadband is less fragmented, split in any given region between two or three of the major providers. I think there are, in the US, not more than a dozen of these altogether, maybe not that many. But of course they still each make their own choice what email client to push. Time Warner, as mentioned, has their own, and it's web-based. POP3 works fine, of course, but most users just use what the connection kit's glossy flier talks about. I'm sure it's the same with the others: they choose one thing and put instructions for that all over the new-user kit, and the overwhelming majority of their customers use that one. Some of them use a customized version of some POP3 client or another, that's been tweaked with their own logo and, in some cases, an installation script that automatically fills in most or all of the configuration details. Others just include a stock copy of something and instructions for setting it up. And some just push the webmail. (Almost all ISPs *have* webmail, because if 1% of your users want to be able to get their mail on vacation it's worth setting it up. In this area Road Runner is the only one to my knowledge that pushes the webmail, but I'm sure that varies from place to place. As noted previously, dialup ISPs are less likely to push web mail than broadband ISPs.)
There are a lot of different email clients out there with something on the order of 0.25% market share each, give or take an order of magnitude or so. There are dozens of them. Thunderbird is probably a tier up from that, in the 1% - 5% range, alongside the likes of Eudora and Mail.app and Gmail. Yahoo and Hotmail and Outlook are all probably a tier further up from those, but even then I doubt if they sport more than 20% market share each or so, at least among home users.
Outlook's market share is higher in office space, but that's probably mostly at the expense of Yahoo and Hotmail. Thunderbird's share is probably also higher in office space than among home users, although, as I said, hard figures are difficult to come by.
Slashdot Mirror
I just want to mention one more thing I forgot: entertaining is almost as good as useful and complements it well. If you have to choose between the two, go for useful, but it's far better to be both.
> If your site isn't coming up in google the keywords you want and it's losing you $500,000 then you
> should probably buy some ads from google to get yourself back in there. It's sort of an obvious solution.
Obvious, maybe, but it's not a good long-term solution. Short-term, maybe.
If Google is your main source of customers, then I would say categorically that your site is *significantly* over-ranked in Google, and you seriously need to look at other forms of advertising.
Yes, you do want people to be able to find you in the major search engines, *especially* if they are specifically looking for you (e.g., punching in the actual name of your business -- if your business has a fairly unique name, you'd like to come up in the top three for that, ideally number one).
But if coming up high on Google for keywords related to what you're selling are the main way you've been getting customers, there are a lot of other things that you should be a lot *more* worried about. Why is nobody hearing about you from their friends, on the radio, finding you in the yellow pages, reading about you in the local paper, or seeing your signs around town? You are obscure. Nobody knows you exist. Google by itself cannot be expected to solve this for you -- indeed, if Google is working the way it ought to work, you will not come up very high in the results (for things other than your actual name), because you are too obscure.
So buy some advertising on Google, sure, but for crying out loud, don't stop there! If obscurity is costing you $500,000 then you should be spending at least 10% of that on some good old fashioned get-the-word-out advertising. Put some coupons in the newspaper. Write up a dorky little twenty-second skit about someone who has a need that can be met by your business, record it, and buy some radio slots. Get your URL painted on the sides of your company vehicles, if you have any. Put up some billboards, for crying out loud. For that kind of money, you ought to be able to even get some (local) television ads. Sponsor some community events or a little league team, something.
And let me tell you a secret about how to get ranked well in search engines: make a lot of people like your site. I know that sounds simple, but I promise, it works WAY better than playing wonky SEO games. There are a variety of ways to get people to like your site, but the main way is to publish some useful content on there, preferably on a somewhat regular basis. The details are going to depend on your business (you want the content to be as related as possible to what it is you do, of course), but maybe you can get someone in your business to write up a weekly "tips" column or something, and publish it on your site -- on your site which you advertise, on your business cards, on the sides of your vans, on signage at your checkout counter, and so on and so forth. If the content is useful enough, people will link to it, and after enough of that the search engines won't be the only way new customers find your site anymore.
Furthermore, when your site is no longer obscure and useless, but a well-known and widely linked source of useful information, the search engines will be happy to rank it higher, automatically. You won't *need* to optimize much for them (apart from making sure they can actually read it, e.g., by using suitable alt attributes for images and so on, the same stuff you should be doing anyway for accessibility reasons). If you have the kind of site people that are trying to find, the search engines will go out of their way to crawl your site frequently, index it thoroughly, and rank it highly.
On the other hand, if your site is a dead-end "buy here buy now" site with no useful information, selling the same junk fifty bazillion other sites are selling, belonging to a business nobody has ever heard of, so that your potential customers don't care one iota whether they find you or one of your competitors, well, then that's a horse of a different color. If the people
> A pity SCO can't manage to gag themselves. That would keep just about everyone happy!
Eh. SCO's rantings are so transparently inane that they are relatively easy to ignore.
There are a number of people within the open-source community who spend so much time blathering loudly and publicly about stuff that doesn't actually matter, it would be nice if they would just shut up. I'm not going to name any names here, but if you spend more time talking and writing about licensing issues than you spend writing actual software, I'm probably talking about you.
> The main source of vitamin D in humans is through exposure to sunlight.
I'm pretty sure that's not true in my case. In the first place, I drink a lot of milk, which is most likely fortified with vitamin D, and in the second place, my skin is roughly the same color as milk, because I spend 165+ hours a week indoors.
Granted, aluminum is very much worth recycling.
Actually, virtually an traditional metal is cost-effective to recycle, _especially_ if your scrap is pretty well homogenous i.e., all the same kind of metal. (By "traditional metal" here I mean something that is commonly seen in metallic form outside of chem labs, as opposed to periodic-table metals like potassium that spend most of their time in compounds with nonmetallic elements.) There might be exceptions, of course. At first guess I'd posit high-melting-point metals like tungsten might be nearly as expensive to melt down as to refine from ore, but I don't actually know, and it's largely moot anyway unless you know how to collect scrap tungsten in anything resembling quantity.
Aluminum is more worthwhile to recycle than inexpensive metals like iron, less so (economically, at least) than precious ones like gold and platinum. Copper is presumably more lucrative to recycle than aluminum, as well. Then again, you'd have a hard time getting people to just turn in scrap copper (much less gold or silver) for recycling, because it's *perceived* as valuable; whereas, scrap aluminum mostly is not viewed that way by the general public, who happily toss their used cans in the recycle bin next to the pop machine without expecting to receive anything in return, provided it's convenient.
Some people do also save up aluminum cans and take them in bulk to the recycle center in exchange for money, but if I try to imagine people at a party asking the host whether they recycle used copper items or just throw them away, I come up blank. It just doesn't seem likely, with copper -- much less silver or gold. Yet that happens all the time with aluminum cans, because many neighborhoods don't have pickup and many people don't want to bother to save it and take it in. The closest I can think of to this with copper is the "penny dish" next to the cash register at some shops, and those generally have to be subsidized by the shop keepers because more people want to take a penny than want to leave one -- and virtually nobody ever leaves more than three pennies at a time in one of those dishes.
So, if by "most cost-effective to recycle" you mean most cost-effective out of materials that people would otherwise casually throw away on a regular basis, then yeah, aluminum is near the high end of that category. Nobody tosses scrap titanium in the garbage day after day just because the recycle center won't come pick it up. I guess you could call that the difference between "recycling" versus "salvage", or somesuch.
> So, from an economical perspective, glass recycling is "easy". The question would be if it was
> cheaper to make new or recycle old.
It's way cheaper to recycle old glass, because you can melt down old glass at a MUCH lower temperature than it takes to make new glass out of sand. It's a matter of heating the furnace to hundreds of degrees instead of thousands of degrees.
> Glass? Could you explain why? It's not like we're going to run out of silica any time soon...
It's not the raw materials, but the process. It is inefficient and expensive. The technology to make glass out of silicate rock or sand has been around since antiquity and has not improved much since then.
Recycling glass is easy: just melt and reshape. You can reshape ordinary glass tubing over a bunsen burner in a high school chem lab, so you know it's not very hard to achieve. Heat-resistant glass requires a somewhat higher temperature, but it's still quite reasonable. Melting rock (or sand) requires a *MUCH* hotter furnace and therefore expends a much larger amount of energy. Have you ever tried to melt rock or sand over a bunsen burner? There's a reason sand is used to extinguish magnesium fires: it can take the heat. Melting it down to make glass takes a *serious* heat source. Recycling glass saves a LOT of energy.
Recycling paper actually costs more energy than making it new out of fast-growth trees.
In my Introduction to the Internet course, I tell people that the internet is basically made out of phone lines.
The purpose of a phone line is to carry information from point A to point B, and that's what the internet does. Furthermore, the internet uses largely the *same set* of phone lines that is also used when you make a phone call.
It's not all the same kind of residential phone line that you use at your house, of course. The phone companies have various types of lines, some of which can carry a lot more information that the basic line you use for one phone. They aren't all copper, either: there are fibre optic lines, satellite links, and so forth. And there's a lot of switching and routing equipment involved, connecting the various lines together.
But in principle it's pretty much phone lines.
Of course, when we call it "the internet" instead of just saying "phone lines", we usually mean that _computers_ are using the lines to exchange information. What's special about computers? They're flexible. A telephone can use the lines to send and receive one kind of information in exactly one way -- a phone call. A fax machine too can use the same lines to send and receive one kind of information in exactly one way -- a black and white image of a piece of paper with stuff on it. Computers, however, are general-purpose devices. Rather than having their one thing they can do hardwired into them, they are designed to read and follow sets of instructions (which we call "software"). Thus, by using different software, you can get the computer to do different things, so it can use the internet in different ways, to exchange different kinds of information.
(Then I talk about how email is like a letter or a phone call, in that it's person-to-person (generally); whereas, the web is more like a book or a newspaper or a magazine, in that someone publishes the content and then anyone can read it. Then most of the rest of the course is spent on the web.)
Get the terms of the agreement in writing before you pay anything. Duh.
Verbal agreements, basic quotes, and general practice are one thing if you're talking about off-the-shelf stuff, but when somebody's doing custom work for you -- of any kind, whether it's software dev or landscaping or advertising or business consulting or whatever -- you want everything spelled out in black and white before you pay them a dime. Things you want spelled out include, but are not limited to, the following:
* exactly how much you are going to pay them up front (hint: no more than half the total)
* exactly how much you are going to pay them on completion
* exactly what they are going to do for you and provide you with
* exactly when they have to have it completed, and what happens if they don't
* what the secondary deadline is when they owe you back even the up-front money if it's not done
* exactly what it means for them to have the job "completed"
* the terms under which it is decided whether there will be an ongoing relationship
(e.g., maintenance contract)
* what you have to do to back out of the deal at any given stage, and what they
have to do to back out of it, and what happens if either of you do back out
* what kind of warrantee you have from them, and for how long
If you pay large amounts of money for custom work without getting in writing what you're paying for and when it must be delivered and so forth, you've been had. If you have a good lawyer you *might* be able to get some of what you wanted ex post facto, but then again you might not, and in any case your lawyer's time is worth money too, and going after them after the deal is done is not an efficient use of that time, compared with getting things in writing up front.
Don't be stoopid. Get it in writing.
> Not overprovitioning is a lot like building roads as if everyone who owns a car would be driving it 24/7/365.
You know, I could swear we keep getting closer and closer to that all the time. Not the part about the roads, I mean, but about everyone driving everywhere constantly. They don't stop driving and go home to eat anymore, or to make phone calls. Vehicles are coming with televisions in them now, so people don't have to go home to watch drivel. I've heard horror stories of people using their laptops and/or reading books while driving. Maybe before too long people won't even pull over to sleep.
> Versions have been implemented in C, Java, XUL/JavaScript, and even NewtonScript.
Not to mention lisp, various assembly languages, and who knows what else. I don't think there's a complete list anywhere, but it's easily the second most frequently implemented virtual machine (after the generalized Turing machine). ISTR that Andrew Plotkin once threatened to do one in PostScript.
> I think you will find most paper pulp comes from native hardwood forests
Hardwoods for the most part can be sold as lumber and are more valuable in that form than as paper, even in the poorest countries. Making paper out of oak and maple is financially the equivalent to melting down dimes and reforming them in the shape of nickels. I'm not saying it never happens, but it is not the norm. Paper is generally made from fast-growth wood that doesn't make very valuable lumber, typically pine or other conifers.
What's really interesting is that it requires less total financial outlay, and less energy (discounting solar radiation that would otherwise not be harnessed), to maintain fast-growth pine plantations and make paper from those, versus recycling paper. Of all the things that you can recycle, paper is substantially the least worthwhile, both environmentally and economically. (The most worthwhile is probably glass, but just about any metal is quite worth recycling too. Plastics vary.)
> Are people going to trust google, yahoo, or hotmail with their private key? Do they even know what this means?
Couldn't they just generate a keypair specifically for that webmail account?
Sure, it doesn't prove "I'm the same guy as has this _other_ email account", but it _can_ demonstrate that you're the same loser9843894@yahoo.com as you were last week, i.e., that some random third party didn't just get your address and start using it in From: fields.
However, I can't see the major webmail services (with the _possible_ exception of Google) adding such a feature until a much larger percentage of users become aware of the fact that the From: field is untrustworthy. One would think, with all the phishing scams out there, that this would be starting to sink in, but all the evidence I have seen so far indicates the contrary.
Arbitrary, then.
Okay, so far all they know about it is its approximate mass and distance from its primary, and the length of its year (which is very much shorter than Earth's). The latter is approximately in the zone that would allow for temperatures such that water, if there is any, could be liquid, and suddenly it's Earth-like?
There are a lot of variables that go into determining whether a planet would actually be habitable at all, much less Earth-like. How much atmosphere has it got? What's the composition of the atmosphere? *Does* it have any significant amount of water (liquid or otherwise)? How long is its "day" (i.e., rotational period)? (Does it even have a day/night cycle, or is it tidally locked?) How massive is its moon, and what's its orbital period? Does it even _have_ a moon?
I'd expect suitable answers to these and many other questions before I'd be willing to call it "Earth-like".
> I don't remember Microsoft gouing back and start licensing 98
> again after they released XP and discontinued 98.
Nonetheless, new PCs with Windows 98 SE preinstalled remained available for some while after XP was released. They became a smaller and smaller minority of available new systems, but you could still get them for several years. For the *first* six months or so, new systems with 98SE were just as common on the market as ones with XP, and afterward they were phased out pretty gradually. Microsoft tried to market the new version to consumers, and encouraged OEMs to push it with hype, but not everyone wanted to change over right away, and it took time.
This time they actually tried to get the OEMs to stop selling the old version right away so that the new version would be the only going concern, but that didn't fly. Home users may happily buy whatever the OEMs sell them, but in office environments (which I suppose account for something like a third of the PCs sold) the network administrators want to see a little history behind the new version and, by preference, some service packs, before they turn it loose on their networks. That hasn't changed, and it's unlikely to change much in the forseeable future.
> I'm finding that XP works better than fine, it works great. It gives me a sense that there is some value
> to a mature operating system that's had bugs worked out and service packs and enough time for the rest
> of us to figure out how to make it do what we want.
Ah, so you're the sort of person who sees the merits of Debian stable over something like Feisty Fawn.
But yes, even within the Microsoft world, you're right. XP was terrible at first, but as the patches and service packs came out (especially SP2), it started getting rather a lot better. I don't even want to experiment with Vista, much less actually try to maintain a deployment of it, until at least 2010, preferably more like 2012. Right now if Microsoft offered me a free copy of Vista Ultimate I wouldn't even be tempted to install it.
> I thought New Coke was to get more people to buy Pepsi.
No, actually, the opposite: they were trying to take back some of the market share they had lost to Pepsi in North America. In retrospect this was unnecessary, as they had lost already most of what they were going to lose, but at the time they didn't know that. So the New Coke was made sweeter and with a softer flavor -- more like Pepsi, in other words. (Not _exactly_ like Pepsi, but a lot closer.) The problem with that should have been obvious before they even tried it: if people wanted Pepsi, they could just buy Pepsi, but a lot of people genuinely preferred Coke as it had been.
So when the New Coke came out, consumer reaction was predictably not what the company was hoping for. So they backpedaled and re-introduced the old recipe as Coca-Cola Classic. This basically killed the market for the New Coke, as practically everyone that preferred Coke over Pepsi also preferred Coca-Cola Classic over the new Coke. So the new Coke became a fringe product, and Coca-Cola Classic eventually went back to just being the standard Coca-Cola and the whole thing became a learning experience for the company executives. I don't know whether anybody lost a job over the whole debacle, but it wouldn't surprise me much.
The New Coke, BTW, is still available under the name Coke II, but most stores are not terribly interested in selling it, because most consumers either prefer the classic recipe, or else just buy Pepsi.
And no, I'm not a big Coke fan myself. I consider cola in general to be a very boring flavor.
I take issue with the inclusion of pizza in that list. We have in America some of the finest pizza anywhere.
We of course also have chintzy prefab frozen pizza, but that's because American businesses have determined that at least 10% of the world's population has no ability to discern quality and will happily accept Hormel products or anything if it's convenient and not too expensive. These products should not be confused with the real food that they are designed immitate. Just because we have Velveeta and Kraft Singles does not mean you can't buy something much more like real cheese. (I don't intend to argue that we have the best cheese in the world, and we certainly don't have the widest selection of it, but that's not my point. My point is that you can't judge all the cheese in the nation based on the chintziest products available.)
However, you can easily get very good pizza in the US. Practically every city in North America has a good pizza place or two. There are usually also several that make greasy nasty pizza, of course, or dead flat stuff, so you do have to be a bit selective. But the good pizza is easy enough to find if you know what you are looking for.
You can also buy decent chocolate, but it's a lot harder. You have to go looking in the US to find actual chocolate at all (i.e., chocolate that hasn't had the cocoa butter removed and replaced with milkfat), and finding *good* chocolate is even harder. It does exist, but you can go through half a dozen groceries and as many candy stores and never see it, and when you do find it you can't afford to buy very much.
> opening a locally stored QuickTime .MOV causes instant bluescreen
"Doctor, I get terrible heartburn every time I eat dried habanero peppers!"
So don't do that. Duh.
Does anyone even still *use* QuickTime format? I thought practically everyone that just couldn't stand to use MPEG (presumably because it's too widely supported and therefore the format of hoi polloi) had gone over to either WMV or Ogg Theora, or Flash. I haven't seen anything in QuickTime format for over a decade, I think. I didn't even know they were still making the software for it.
> The Gnome implementation of a registry consists of a tree of XML files.
Under the hood, yes. The Windows registry is stored in files too, although the format is rather ickier than XML. For that matter, MySQL and Postgres and Oracle and MS SQL Server also all store their data, ultimately, in files.
However, applications don't treat it that way when they access it. They go through the API. So although there are flat files behind the scenes, it's not a flat-file API.
This is in contrast to most configuration data on *nix systems. In most cases, the applications treat the config files *as* files, reading and parsing them (possibly using a parser library) in much the same way that they would a document (again, possibly using a parser library), only for a different purpose, namely, configuration.
> What is a "binary-package distro"? And could you please give an example of one of these?
A "binary-package" distro is any distribution based around binary packages, i.e., packages that contain precompiled binaries. As opposed to a source-based distro.
Distributions that use either rpm or apt are usually binary-package distributions, but there are also ones that do not use those package formats, but something else. These are the ones I was talking about. One example is Slackware, which uses a package format based on gzipped tarballs, with a particular directory structure inside.
The reason the packaging mechanims is so important is because of the "borrowing" that goes in within families of distributions. (There is borrowing across the family lines too, of course, but less.) For instance, most apt-based distributions consider Debian an upstream source of packages, so there are fewer differences between them than there would be between one of them and an rpm-based distribution. Most rpm-based distributions either do now or at one time did consider RedHat (or Fedora) an upstream source of packages, so they inherit a lot of the way RH does things, and that makes them different in some significant ways from Debian. And so on. Slackware has its own history, so it is yet different from either Debian or Fedora. And then there are the source-based distributions, like Gentoo. (Finally, there's LFS, if you want to go totally hardcore. I never have. Instead I started messing around with BSD, which is different in another whole set of ways from all of the above.)
One thing I've found useful is to expose myself to a variety of different distributions. A lot of the stuff you want to know for system administration is subtly different from one distro to another, and so switching distributions will call your attention to it. Startup and daemon-control scripts, for instance, are not quite the same on any two distributions, but after you've used about twelve different ones, you'll get a feel for the things that *are* the same about them through all the different systems.
... when you are starting to feel comfortable with that, then you can move on to a new project.
I'd recommend making sure you've used at least one rpm-based distro, at least one apt-based distro, at least one binary-package distro that doesn't use rpm or apt, and at least one source-based distro. Oh, and also, run off a live CD for a month or so sometime.
Also, use it for a variety of things. Each couple of months, make yourself a little "project" for learning to do some new thing with it -- set up a web server, a file server, a firewall, a print server,
Finally, get yourself a copy of Programming Perl and an account on perlmonks. It is really amazing how useful Perl can be for system administration.
> Double cut flat files? Nail files? Diamond files? Needle files? Machine files?
Flat files, definitely. The whole "system registry" thing never really caught on in the *nix world. Well, okay, there's Gnome, but apart from that, most things in the *nix world use flat files. As far as Linux is concerned, a file is just n random octets in a defined order. Interpretation is up to the application reading the file.
> Isn't some ridiculous amount like 90% using gmail/hotmail/yahoo mail/aol mail/etc?
Reliable figures are difficult to obtain with any detail, but I can tell you for certain that the market share for email clients is very well and thoroughly split, and this has always been the case. The top spots are _probably_ held by hotmail, yahoo, and Outlook, but it's hard to be certain, and I sure wouldn't want to try to guess at the order, and there are lots of others with a sizeable share.
This is partly because most people don't realize they have a choice. They usually expect that they have to use whatever comes bundled with their internet service. (Most Road Runner customers, for instance, use Road Runner webmail, unaware that they have any other option.) So it's mostly ISPs making the decision for people, and system administrators, and to a lesser extent OEMs and the computer-savvy friends and relatives people get to set things up for them.
I suspect most dialup customers (which for the time being is still most home users in the US) use one POP3 client or another, because that's what dialup ISPs usually encourage. AOL and Earthlink are the only really _big_ dialup ISPs that I'm aware of, but they have a small minority market share, with most users using one or another smaller (often regional) ISP. Each of which makes its own decisions what email software to bundle in their connection kit.
Broadband is less fragmented, split in any given region between two or three of the major providers. I think there are, in the US, not more than a dozen of these altogether, maybe not that many. But of course they still each make their own choice what email client to push. Time Warner, as mentioned, has their own, and it's web-based. POP3 works fine, of course, but most users just use what the connection kit's glossy flier talks about. I'm sure it's the same with the others: they choose one thing and put instructions for that all over the new-user kit, and the overwhelming majority of their customers use that one. Some of them use a customized version of some POP3 client or another, that's been tweaked with their own logo and, in some cases, an installation script that automatically fills in most or all of the configuration details. Others just include a stock copy of something and instructions for setting it up. And some just push the webmail. (Almost all ISPs *have* webmail, because if 1% of your users want to be able to get their mail on vacation it's worth setting it up. In this area Road Runner is the only one to my knowledge that pushes the webmail, but I'm sure that varies from place to place. As noted previously, dialup ISPs are less likely to push web mail than broadband ISPs.)
There are a lot of different email clients out there with something on the order of 0.25% market share each, give or take an order of magnitude or so. There are dozens of them. Thunderbird is probably a tier up from that, in the 1% - 5% range, alongside the likes of Eudora and Mail.app and Gmail. Yahoo and Hotmail and Outlook are all probably a tier further up from those, but even then I doubt if they sport more than 20% market share each or so, at least among home users.
Outlook's market share is higher in office space, but that's probably mostly at the expense of Yahoo and Hotmail. Thunderbird's share is probably also higher in office space than among home users, although, as I said, hard figures are difficult to come by.