What I'm left wondering is why someone should need a username and password to comment on a blog post on their sites. Do they have a reputation system? Does it really prevent spam? Or is it just to gather a list of email addresses that they might sell later? There must be a better way to accomplish the little functionality that their login requirement provides. Especially now that they have to deal with the fact that their login system was not secure.
I may be stupid, but I read the entire article and still don't know what the guy is accused of doing. He traded stocks without permission? Can anyone clue me in?
It was probably necessary to make a clear distinction at that early point that when you bought the record, you did not buy the copyright to the recorded sound.
Licenses of some type are pretty common to make clear the fact that you did not buy all rights to something. Your apartment lease declares that just because you paid some money, you don't own the building and you can't tear down walls. With a relatively new technology, it was more important to specify what you had actually purchased. And since it was the seller making those declarations, it was naturally as limited as capitalism would allow.
There are millions of internal combustion engines in use right now and there is no realistic way to replace them all quickly. They should be replaced by other types of engines or just more efficient IC engines. But, it is important that there are alternative fuels for them to use in the meantime. If sugars and corn and other renewable, local, CO2 absorbing plants can be used to power these engines rather than petroleum it will be a great thing. Having more than one available alternative fuel technology is especially important now because we haven't gotten far enough to know which will ultimately yield the best fuel. And one of the issues with plant fuels is their affect on the soil. You can't plant the same crop in the same field for years and years without a lot of fertilizer and soil maintenance. Being able to rotate fuel producing crops would be a major win.
Obviously we should be conserving energy. Obviously we should be creating less CO2. And obviously there isn't going to be one single solution to this mess.
It seems to me it's a lot better to be using and burning something renewable and localizable that actual absorbs CO2 before harvesting rather than something nonrenewable and poisonous that has to be shipped halfway around the world. This research could very well help. Just like conservation helps. Just like solar and wind and wave and other power sources will help.
Personally I'm sick of people ranting that some alternative source of energy (or plastic) or conservation or whatever isn't worthwhile because it's not going to solve every problem all by itself. Be serious! It's going to take work on a lot of different fronts to fix this mess. There will not be one magic solution.
I'm not sure what this says about me, but it occurred to me that Apple has better market share than porn...
Better than mobile phone addiction
on
Hooked On The Web
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
At least internet addicts are usually at home and quiet. Mobile phone junkies are Everywhere! Yapping and yapping and driving cars through red lights and onto sidewalks. They have the same distracted, glassy eyed look as heroin addicts and are just as difficult to communicate with. They're constantly babbling crap that has nothing to do with the conversation you're trying to have with them.
That's a dangerous and often overlooked "addiction" that is causing real harm to other productive non-addicted members of society.
I found my house on this map yesterday and was able to confirm that my house still exists and was probably dry through this whole mess. I am incredibly pleased and fortunate.
An earlier post seems to wonder whether anyone from New Orleans would be in California. Remember that it's been more than a week since those of with cars and somewhere to go got out of the city. I've been to Fort Worth, TX, Richmond, VA, and am in Cleveland tonight. I'm putting a lot of my little remaining money into the oil business to help them get through this crisis. It's not hard to get a long way in a week, even with high gas prices. People are going to wherever they have any family or any hope of getting somewhere to stay for a while.
I haven't asked for anything from any retail stores or anywhere else, but then I'm in a better position than many are. I will, however, shamelessly mention that I lost my job and am looking for temporary work right here on the slashdot...
They said the same thing about Java, right? Which is faster than web apps (even if you think it's slow compared to C) and has more access to the file system and it's resources.
The way to make the Desktop unimportant is to have cross-platform applications become the norm. Word processors especially, but also browsers, mail programs, etc. Only when the apps that average folks use every day can be found on every platform will the platform cease to be so crucial.
Our office changed to VOIP through Covad five weeks ago and it's been a nightmare. Around 10 calls a day are being dropped - in the middle of the call. There have been volume problems. There are echo problems - hearing your own voice a second after you speak. Lots and lots of customers have complained that they can't get through to us when dialing our number. Incoming faxes are mangled or truncated with no error on the sender's side. In fact, the fax situation is so bad that Covad gave up on it and installed 2 land lines yesterday for non-telephone equipment. I think that's pretty telling. Meanwhile, the internet connection is fine.
Maybe it's fine if you're just calling your grandmother once a week. But from what I've seen, VOIP is not ready for business.
Please forgive me for not answering each of your questions. The line between advertising and content is getting blurrier and blurrier. I consider any element that is paid for (in cash or trade) an advertisement.
But more importantly: Are you arguing against the concept of advertising, or about the obtrusiveness of the presentation?
I am NOT arguing against advertising. My company relies on it. I would like it to be as clearly distinguished from unpaid content as possible, but I know that ain't happening all the time.
I think RSS - specifically RSS - could be hurt by too much advertising too soon. RSS feeds carry links and summaries of content available elsewhere. To be useful and used, it has to have some advantage over just going to the website that the feed links to. Right? It does now - it's quick, easy to scan, you get just the parts of the site you want. Advertising could ( that's "could" not "will") destroy those advantages. Or just degrade them enough to forestall adoption of RSS readers. Without the advantages, there's no reason for people to favor RSS over the web. It won't kill you, but there could come a point where it's just as much of a hassle to scan through the RSS as it is to visit the sites.
That's different than television, because you (or let's say 95% of the country) can't get television anywhere else. Television can get a lot more annoying because you can't just turn on the radio and get the same show.
Maybe a better analogy is the website is television and RSS is the TV Guide channel or similar listing. Here, the TV Guide channel shows ads at the top of the screen and the content - listings - at the bottom. I can tune out the ads. If the ads were inline with the content, a la RSS, I wouldn't be able to tune them out as easily. It would become annoying. And because I could easily find the same information somewhere else, I'd go somewhere else. I hope I'm making sense. The TV Guide channel, and RSS have to be less annoying because they're supposed to be convenient ways to find out about something else. If they're not convenient, there's no longer any point.
I work in the publishing industry and around here, advertising is definitely NOT content. Advertising piggybacks on content (news stories, editorial, etc.) to reach viewers in exchange for money because viewers wouldn't bother with it otherwise.
But what we call it is beside the point. If your RSS feed fills up with stuff you don't want to read, you're going to drop it. And then neither the feed nor the advertiser are going to be successful. Imagine if the ads on your favorite blogs or news sites weren't off to the side, but were right in line with the news. It would be terrible, and that's exactly what RSS ads will look like: exactly the same as the content.
And you can drop an RSS feed easily, without missing content, by going straight to the blog's website. The RSS feed isn't just competing with other content providers, it's competing with the exact same content on the web. If the RSS delivery is harder to use than the web delivery, why wouldn't you just go to the website?
RSS feeds don't have the popularity yet to accommodate much advertising. They will not become popular unless they provide a benefit over the website. Right now, a large part of their benefit is that they don't have ads. Take that away, and you've got little left to convince the public to adopt and learn a new technology.
-- And RSS won't help content publishers (like many bloggers and newspapers) because it circumvents advertising.
RSS does not circumvent advertising, it's easy to drop an ad in an RSS feed. What you meant to say, I think, was that blogging circumvents advertising. Which has nothing to do with RSS as a delivery mechanism and everything to do with the ideology of the "it's my voice and I won't let it appear to be biased" authors.
Actually, what I meant is that RSS is used to circumvent advertising. If you are able to watch 50x more sites with RSS than the web, that's because you're just looking at content. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, cause I only look at a couple of feeds. Right now RSS is a delivery mechanism for content and not advertising. You can scan so much content because you don't have to filter out advertisements, images, differing layouts, etc.
As soon as your RSS feeds get full of advertising, you'll find them much, much less useable. The consistent formatting that's a benefit now will make it that much harder to filter out advertisements. If that happens, you won't find RSS as useful. You'll use it less, dropping feeds with lots of ads. Those content providers will decide they can't make money using RSS and it will die out. Poverty will increase. Riots will break out. The economy as we know it will crumble.
Or what will happen is that smart RSS feeds will just have every link from the feed channelled through one of those full page ads before getting to the content you want to read. That'll be fun too.
With email spam, a business has your email address (think large opt-in companies rather than viagra selling spam worms). They can potentially use your email address to find out more about you - where you live, what you earn, and other demographic information. That lets them target ads to you. You get ads more likely to make you act the way they want you to.
With RSS feeds, they know nothing about you (except an IP address at best). They can't target you. They don't know who they are. If you don't come back to the feed because you drop your subscription, they don't know why... Actually, they don't even know that. They don't know what the turnover is. They have no way of gauging the effectiveness of the feed. They can tell how often it's accessed, but there's little to no accurate way they can tell what drives sales.
You can do that with email, just as you can with physical mail. You send one version to half of your accounts, and another version to the other half. Watch your sales and see who buys more.
Does anyone think big business will buy in to a model with no feedback for the long term?
So, the author (who sells RSS software) suggests that companies create PR/advertising feeds and that people will sign up for them? Interesting. Not very different from email lists except that customers could actually unsubscribe. Great for the customers, and legit opt-in businesses stop looking like spammers. I don't think I'll be signing up for them, but I'm sure someone will want to subscribe to Best Buy's marketing list.
But that's totally different than most blogs. Blogs are about self-publishing for people that don't create full websites. They're not for advertising a business unless the business can't afford a cheap webmaster.
Blogs as content sources and RSS as advertising feeds have totally different purposes. One won't replace the other, because they don't do the same thing.
And RSS won't help content publishers (like many bloggers and newspapers) because it circumvents advertising. Great for the customer, bad for the revenue stream. Unless you build so much trust and traffic through RSS that you get more traffic to your website. But how do you advertise the RSS feed to people that don't visit your website?
Personally, I don't see RSS being that revolutionary. But then I'm not selling it.
I would be surprised if there wasn't a hidden serial number in the OS on each PC they distributed. I bet Apple, and their lawyers, will know exactly who leaked this very soon.
You're not going to see anything but small, incremental improvements from the battery companies. Nokia or Toshiba might produce a breakthrough, but Duracell and Energizer have absolutely no incentive to do it first. They have a great market right now, and to keep it, batteries will need to be replaced - often.
I assume leaking would only be an issue for the lead-acid batteries that are usually in UPSes? Because it doesn't seem to be an issue for the millions of laptop batteries Apple has shipped.
This article, and the laptop I'm typing this on, are evidence that space concerns are not a big deal.
A high quality APC UPS runs at least $500 and will shut down a single server without spending more for networking. It also takes up rack space unless you're going to leave them laying around on the floor, which is worse.
And it's the software that would make it worth another few hundred bucks. They could tie it into launchd (I'm guessing, since I haven't looked at it yet) and easily run scripts or react based on the hooks I was talking about.
I've often wondered why there aren't servers with batteries built in for a few minutes of power after the UPS goes down.
Apple could get especially good results from doing this because of their hardware-software integration. Imagine an xserve with ten minutes of battery power built in. Can't you see the interface where you have the computer run a script that emails you after it's been on battery power for two minutes? Imagine hooks for when battery power starts to be used, and when a clean, painless shutdown begins, or when power is restored before the battery runs out.
This would be of great value to me anyway. I know some UPS software offers this (though I'm not sure what the state of Mac-compatibility is), but Apple could surely do a better, more thorough job.
Well, Hibernate isn't an SQL writer. It's for translating between RDBMS and Objects. It's very good at persisting objects and getting objects from a database. It's very good at pulling large graphs of associated objects, which is a pain in the ass to do manually and difficult to do well (for me anyway).
Although it's possible to do summaries, it's not what it's for primarily. I think you'd be better off polishing up your SQL rather than learn Hibernate if that's what you're doing. Not that it would be any worse than what you're doing now (you could run the same SQL through it), it just seems like you could get bigger improvements from the time you'd spend learning it.
I don't know if this book would satisfy it, but personally, I'm tired of finding regex references that don't provide (or don't claim to provide) complete, working expressions. It seems like a pretty common occurrence to want to check that an entered email address could actually be an email address, but every regex tutorial/reference I have wimps out. They all say that their example is 'just for learning' or 'needs to be checked' or some such.
A cookbook approach to Regexs seems great to me. Look up the one you want if you're in a hurry, stop and study it if you want to really understand it.
If you know of a similar online reference, I'd love to know. It seems like there should be one out there.
I agree, some of these artists have already been this reliable for a long, long time. Hopefully the money will be put in an interest bearing account rather than in a jar that will get lost somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
What I'm left wondering is why someone should need a username and password to comment on a blog post on their sites. Do they have a reputation system? Does it really prevent spam? Or is it just to gather a list of email addresses that they might sell later? There must be a better way to accomplish the little functionality that their login requirement provides. Especially now that they have to deal with the fact that their login system was not secure.
I may be stupid, but I read the entire article and still don't know what the guy is accused of doing. He traded stocks without permission? Can anyone clue me in?
It was probably necessary to make a clear distinction at that early point that when you bought the record, you did not buy the copyright to the recorded sound.
Licenses of some type are pretty common to make clear the fact that you did not buy all rights to something. Your apartment lease declares that just because you paid some money, you don't own the building and you can't tear down walls. With a relatively new technology, it was more important to specify what you had actually purchased. And since it was the seller making those declarations, it was naturally as limited as capitalism would allow.
There are millions of internal combustion engines in use right now and there is no realistic way to replace them all quickly. They should be replaced by other types of engines or just more efficient IC engines. But, it is important that there are alternative fuels for them to use in the meantime. If sugars and corn and other renewable, local, CO2 absorbing plants can be used to power these engines rather than petroleum it will be a great thing. Having more than one available alternative fuel technology is especially important now because we haven't gotten far enough to know which will ultimately yield the best fuel. And one of the issues with plant fuels is their affect on the soil. You can't plant the same crop in the same field for years and years without a lot of fertilizer and soil maintenance. Being able to rotate fuel producing crops would be a major win.
Obviously we should be conserving energy.
Obviously we should be creating less CO2.
And obviously there isn't going to be one single solution to this mess.
It seems to me it's a lot better to be using and burning something renewable and localizable that actual absorbs CO2 before harvesting rather than something nonrenewable and poisonous that has to be shipped halfway around the world. This research could very well help. Just like conservation helps. Just like solar and wind and wave and other power sources will help.
Personally I'm sick of people ranting that some alternative source of energy (or plastic) or conservation or whatever isn't worthwhile because it's not going to solve every problem all by itself. Be serious! It's going to take work on a lot of different fronts to fix this mess. There will not be one magic solution.
I'm not sure what this says about me, but it occurred to me that Apple has better market share than porn...
At least internet addicts are usually at home and quiet. Mobile phone junkies are Everywhere! Yapping and yapping and driving cars through red lights and onto sidewalks. They have the same distracted, glassy eyed look as heroin addicts and are just as difficult to communicate with. They're constantly babbling crap that has nothing to do with the conversation you're trying to have with them.
That's a dangerous and often overlooked "addiction" that is causing real harm to other productive non-addicted members of society.
I found my house on this map yesterday and was able to confirm that my house still exists and was probably dry through this whole mess. I am incredibly pleased and fortunate.
An earlier post seems to wonder whether anyone from New Orleans would be in California. Remember that it's been more than a week since those of with cars and somewhere to go got out of the city. I've been to Fort Worth, TX, Richmond, VA, and am in Cleveland tonight. I'm putting a lot of my little remaining money into the oil business to help them get through this crisis. It's not hard to get a long way in a week, even with high gas prices. People are going to wherever they have any family or any hope of getting somewhere to stay for a while.
I haven't asked for anything from any retail stores or anywhere else, but then I'm in a better position than many are. I will, however, shamelessly mention that I lost my job and am looking for temporary work right here on the slashdot...
They said the same thing about Java, right? Which is faster than web apps (even if you think it's slow compared to C) and has more access to the file system and it's resources.
The way to make the Desktop unimportant is to have cross-platform applications become the norm. Word processors especially, but also browsers, mail programs, etc. Only when the apps that average folks use every day can be found on every platform will the platform cease to be so crucial.
Our office changed to VOIP through Covad five weeks ago and it's been a nightmare. Around 10 calls a day are being dropped - in the middle of the call. There have been volume problems. There are echo problems - hearing your own voice a second after you speak. Lots and lots of customers have complained that they can't get through to us when dialing our number. Incoming faxes are mangled or truncated with no error on the sender's side. In fact, the fax situation is so bad that Covad gave up on it and installed 2 land lines yesterday for non-telephone equipment. I think that's pretty telling. Meanwhile, the internet connection is fine.
Maybe it's fine if you're just calling your grandmother once a week. But from what I've seen, VOIP is not ready for business.
But more importantly:
Are you arguing against the concept of advertising, or about the obtrusiveness of the presentation?
I am NOT arguing against advertising. My company relies on it. I would like it to be as clearly distinguished from unpaid content as possible, but I know that ain't happening all the time.
I think RSS - specifically RSS - could be hurt by too much advertising too soon. RSS feeds carry links and summaries of content available elsewhere. To be useful and used, it has to have some advantage over just going to the website that the feed links to. Right? It does now - it's quick, easy to scan, you get just the parts of the site you want. Advertising could ( that's "could" not "will") destroy those advantages. Or just degrade them enough to forestall adoption of RSS readers. Without the advantages, there's no reason for people to favor RSS over the web. It won't kill you, but there could come a point where it's just as much of a hassle to scan through the RSS as it is to visit the sites.
That's different than television, because you (or let's say 95% of the country) can't get television anywhere else. Television can get a lot more annoying because you can't just turn on the radio and get the same show.
Maybe a better analogy is the website is television and RSS is the TV Guide channel or similar listing. Here, the TV Guide channel shows ads at the top of the screen and the content - listings - at the bottom. I can tune out the ads. If the ads were inline with the content, a la RSS, I wouldn't be able to tune them out as easily. It would become annoying. And because I could easily find the same information somewhere else, I'd go somewhere else. I hope I'm making sense. The TV Guide channel, and RSS have to be less annoying because they're supposed to be convenient ways to find out about something else. If they're not convenient, there's no longer any point.
Am I making more sense? Maybe not.
I work in the publishing industry and around here, advertising is definitely NOT content. Advertising piggybacks on content (news stories, editorial, etc.) to reach viewers in exchange for money because viewers wouldn't bother with it otherwise.
But what we call it is beside the point. If your RSS feed fills up with stuff you don't want to read, you're going to drop it. And then neither the feed nor the advertiser are going to be successful. Imagine if the ads on your favorite blogs or news sites weren't off to the side, but were right in line with the news. It would be terrible, and that's exactly what RSS ads will look like: exactly the same as the content.
And you can drop an RSS feed easily, without missing content, by going straight to the blog's website. The RSS feed isn't just competing with other content providers, it's competing with the exact same content on the web. If the RSS delivery is harder to use than the web delivery, why wouldn't you just go to the website?
RSS feeds don't have the popularity yet to accommodate much advertising. They will not become popular unless they provide a benefit over the website. Right now, a large part of their benefit is that they don't have ads. Take that away, and you've got little left to convince the public to adopt and learn a new technology.
RSS does not circumvent advertising, it's easy to drop an ad in an RSS feed. What you meant to say, I think, was that blogging circumvents advertising. Which has nothing to do with RSS as a delivery mechanism and everything to do with the ideology of the "it's my voice and I won't let it appear to be biased" authors.
Actually, what I meant is that RSS is used to circumvent advertising. If you are able to watch 50x more sites with RSS than the web, that's because you're just looking at content. Correct me if I'm wrong, please, cause I only look at a couple of feeds. Right now RSS is a delivery mechanism for content and not advertising. You can scan so much content because you don't have to filter out advertisements, images, differing layouts, etc.
As soon as your RSS feeds get full of advertising, you'll find them much, much less useable. The consistent formatting that's a benefit now will make it that much harder to filter out advertisements. If that happens, you won't find RSS as useful. You'll use it less, dropping feeds with lots of ads. Those content providers will decide they can't make money using RSS and it will die out. Poverty will increase. Riots will break out. The economy as we know it will crumble.
Or what will happen is that smart RSS feeds will just have every link from the feed channelled through one of those full page ads before getting to the content you want to read. That'll be fun too.
I agree. But it won't last.
With email spam, a business has your email address (think large opt-in companies rather than viagra selling spam worms). They can potentially use your email address to find out more about you - where you live, what you earn, and other demographic information. That lets them target ads to you. You get ads more likely to make you act the way they want you to.
With RSS feeds, they know nothing about you (except an IP address at best). They can't target you. They don't know who they are. If you don't come back to the feed because you drop your subscription, they don't know why... Actually, they don't even know that. They don't know what the turnover is. They have no way of gauging the effectiveness of the feed. They can tell how often it's accessed, but there's little to no accurate way they can tell what drives sales.
You can do that with email, just as you can with physical mail. You send one version to half of your accounts, and another version to the other half. Watch your sales and see who buys more.
Does anyone think big business will buy in to a model with no feedback for the long term?
So, the author (who sells RSS software) suggests that companies create PR/advertising feeds and that people will sign up for them? Interesting. Not very different from email lists except that customers could actually unsubscribe. Great for the customers, and legit opt-in businesses stop looking like spammers. I don't think I'll be signing up for them, but I'm sure someone will want to subscribe to Best Buy's marketing list.
But that's totally different than most blogs. Blogs are about self-publishing for people that don't create full websites. They're not for advertising a business unless the business can't afford a cheap webmaster.
Blogs as content sources and RSS as advertising feeds have totally different purposes. One won't replace the other, because they don't do the same thing.
And RSS won't help content publishers (like many bloggers and newspapers) because it circumvents advertising. Great for the customer, bad for the revenue stream. Unless you build so much trust and traffic through RSS that you get more traffic to your website. But how do you advertise the RSS feed to people that don't visit your website?
Personally, I don't see RSS being that revolutionary. But then I'm not selling it.
End rambling.
I think this is the first time I've been modded as a troll, actually.
Doesn't feel as good as you might expect just looking at how often others do it...
I won't deploy it either, but then, I don't use Windows at all.
I would be surprised if there wasn't a hidden serial number in the OS on each PC they distributed. I bet Apple, and their lawyers, will know exactly who leaked this very soon.
You're not going to see anything but small, incremental improvements from the battery companies. Nokia or Toshiba might produce a breakthrough, but Duracell and Energizer have absolutely no incentive to do it first. They have a great market right now, and to keep it, batteries will need to be replaced - often.
I assume leaking would only be an issue for the lead-acid batteries that are usually in UPSes? Because it doesn't seem to be an issue for the millions of laptop batteries Apple has shipped.
This article, and the laptop I'm typing this on, are evidence that space concerns are not a big deal.
A high quality APC UPS runs at least $500 and will shut down a single server without spending more for networking. It also takes up rack space unless you're going to leave them laying around on the floor, which is worse.
And it's the software that would make it worth another few hundred bucks. They could tie it into launchd (I'm guessing, since I haven't looked at it yet) and easily run scripts or react based on the hooks I was talking about.
I've often wondered why there aren't servers with batteries built in for a few minutes of power after the UPS goes down.
Apple could get especially good results from doing this because of their hardware-software integration. Imagine an xserve with ten minutes of battery power built in. Can't you see the interface where you have the computer run a script that emails you after it's been on battery power for two minutes? Imagine hooks for when battery power starts to be used, and when a clean, painless shutdown begins, or when power is restored before the battery runs out.
This would be of great value to me anyway. I know some UPS software offers this (though I'm not sure what the state of Mac-compatibility is), but Apple could surely do a better, more thorough job.
Tell your DB guys that the word from above is that your database vendor will be changing. Be vague enough that they worry...
Well, Hibernate isn't an SQL writer. It's for translating between RDBMS and Objects. It's very good at persisting objects and getting objects from a database. It's very good at pulling large graphs of associated objects, which is a pain in the ass to do manually and difficult to do well (for me anyway).
Although it's possible to do summaries, it's not what it's for primarily. I think you'd be better off polishing up your SQL rather than learn Hibernate if that's what you're doing. Not that it would be any worse than what you're doing now (you could run the same SQL through it), it just seems like you could get bigger improvements from the time you'd spend learning it.
I don't know if this book would satisfy it, but personally, I'm tired of finding regex references that don't provide (or don't claim to provide) complete, working expressions. It seems like a pretty common occurrence to want to check that an entered email address could actually be an email address, but every regex tutorial/reference I have wimps out. They all say that their example is 'just for learning' or 'needs to be checked' or some such.
A cookbook approach to Regexs seems great to me. Look up the one you want if you're in a hurry, stop and study it if you want to really understand it.
If you know of a similar online reference, I'd love to know. It seems like there should be one out there.
I agree, some of these artists have already been this reliable for a long, long time. Hopefully the money will be put in an interest bearing account rather than in a jar that will get lost somewhere.