Except for the fact that they don't employ many reporters, generate very little content, and they're wedded to an even less permanent revenue stream than traditional newspapers...They're a nonprofit. They subsist entirely on fees gathered from member newspapers.
Goddamn. You do know that AP stands for "Associated Press," right? All that content that comes out with "AP" stamped on it comes from those papers that are dying. All the AP does is de-localize it, and aggregate it. If they add national quotes, they'll take off the original reports byline, but if you SEE a byline, search the name, and you'll see where the story really came from. Better than 9 of 10 won't be from AP bureaus.
Learn a little about the business before you start opining about which parts of it have actual value, eh?
Dude, their slogan is "Fair and Balanced." I admit they're not trying to be unbiased, but they are definitely trying to pretend like they're unbiased, which is the worst of all worlds.
I'd be interested in how it applied to the whole Op-Ed part of the paper. That stuff isn't remotely factual, and it's very clearly listed as "Opinion" right there in the name. That's where the endorsements come from: the e-board brings in all the candidates (if it can) and interviews them, and then makes a recommendation.
Anyway, the whole idea of bias is impossible to define. Everyone thinks a paper is biased if it doesn't reflect their personal world view. I've seen liberals and conservatives up in arms about the bias against their group on the same day. That's practically the definition of unbiased.
The thing is, if you give up trying to be unbiased, you get Fox News.
Even if it is a mostly unattainable goal, it's better to try and deliver an unbiased product.
I do admit, it'd be nice if a reporter would be open about their bias right from the start. The nice thing about the web (if any papers transitioned to it correctly, which, of course, none have) is that you could make that sort of information available in a reporters bio. Trusting your news source is important; nobody has time to fact check all their news.
Drudge and news should never appear in the same sentence.
The fact that Drudge and the Huffinton post and other piles of shit like them are what passes for Web journalism, is the reason so many people are worried about the demise of the traditional newspaper.
The problem is, the vast majority of newspapers are owned by giant conglomerates. Gannett and McClatchy just going to say, "Oh hey, lets dissolve!"? Don't think the CEO's with their 7 figure salaries are gonna get behind that one.
Anyway, even the papers that are already non-profit are taking it in the ass. Look at St. Pete. The industry has to successfully make a revenue transition from 1 medium to another without going bankrupt in the process, and it doesn't help that the web sucks for revenue. Look at all these huge, popular web 2.0 services that still haven't found a way to make a profit. The Ad revenue pie is the same size, but way too many people want a piece, and you don't get that natural geographic advantage that newspapers have traditionally enjoyed.
That's the whole point! They maintain that they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing illegal on their site...But they're offering a VPN connection so that the people who use it to download Linux distros can do it without evil gov't spying? Come on.
What's the use of it? Slow down your downloads for an extra 7 bucks a month? Sounds like a waste to me, unless you're downloading something that could get you in trouble.
It's like being accused of being a drug dealer because people buy drugs off your site, and, in response, you offer a method for people to make private transactions.
If you say, "hey, look, I just provide a service, I'm not telling people how to use it" then you might be able to get away with being effectively a middleman in an illegal transaction.
But if your response is to provide a way of hiding those illegal transactions from law enforcement, you're much more likely to be nailed as an accomplice, especially when you're making money specifically off those hidden transactions.
Yea, so? If there are no traffic records, all they would know is that those people pay for a service, not that they actually used it to download anything.
It's not illegal to pay someone for a secure connection, and since damages in most cases are attached to download records, they would have nothing to stand on really.
How do you maintain that you're not expressly in the business of circumventing copyright law (as they did in the recent trial) when you offer a paid service that really has no other function?
Thermite is a perfect example. It's easy to make, the ingredients are dirt cheap and unregulated, and it takes no special knowledge to put it together.
Why bleep out the words "Aluminum" and "Iron Oxide"? If someone wants to learn how to make thermite, they can do that without any special help.
The nastiest stuff they use on mythbusters is all commercial. The stuff they make themselves is mostly kitchen sink stuff that anyone could make.
There is a difference between stupid and average and above average and genius. I have seen a number of astoundingly smart people who commonly made errors like the ones you mentioned above. Super-smart people are often absent-minded.
You want someone who is clever, but not someone who is brilliant. Brilliance often causes more problems than it solves. I think that was what the OP was talking about.
I personally hate physical media. I think physical media is a scam on an epic scale. So I'm willing to log in to avoid that hassle. Sure, Steam could go down and kill my game. But my kid could frisbee the disks across the room and kill the game.
I'm willing to believe (at this point) that Steam is a robust enough distribution channel that it's at least slightly more disaster resistant than my house.
They kept up the bitching for 6 months, and eventually the management caved and we had to set up a terminal services machine so people could use office.
I've seen bitching, but I've never seen that much of it anywhere else. Mind you, this was about 5 years ago, so OOO wasn't even as good as it is now.
(Bias alert: I fucking hate OOO. I have no use for it in any fashion. The above deployment is one of the reasons, but when it comes right down to it, it doesn't do anything I need really well, and there are other OSS products that perfectly meet my needs.)
Servers are much less of an issue than desktops. You can remake an entire network infrastructure in Linux without having anyone on the Windows side notice anything in particular, and all you really need is a desktop to move stuff to for a smaller shop (if it's a bigger shop they should HAVE hardware lying around).
The only thing you'll run aground on is the dreaded Exchange Server. Might even be worth it to keep a Windows PDC around, in that situation, just to save on headaches.
Where I work right now all the purchasing was done through third party organizations and was so hellishly murky (e.g. crates of licenses with no idea what they applied to) that we just gave up and got site licenses for everything except the server-side stuff. We coupled it with a general upgrade, so it wasn't that bad, financially.
Software companies love it when you lose the documentation and have to buy more licenses to prove you're legal.
Yea, but the resistance you will run against trying to force everyone to use OSS equivalents may end up with an involuntary 3 anyway. Some proprietary software is qualitatively superior, and trying to take away the "better" product and substituting a "worse" product will breed a lot of user anger.
I've been in a lot of situations where it's one way or the other. I worked at a shop where the licenses were really tight, and I installed OO.org for all the people who didn't rate an Office license, and they LOVED me. And when those people moved on, their replacements screamed bloody murder because they wanted Office instead.
I also ran part of a full-blown everything to OSS migration. It was that times about a million, except no-one was happy.
I've had a lot more success converting home users, though there as well there is a lot of pressure to get the semi-legal stuff (I am the keeper of the corporate site licenses, so there is a lot of pressure to slip 'em a key). Once I have conveyed that the "free key" option isn't ever going to be a reality, however, the "free software" thing gains a lot of traction.
In the business world, however, all the employees look at it as "someone else's money."
In a situation where it's this or nothing, anything looks good. If you're taking away what they want to be using, they will make your life a misery, and you're going to have to be ready for that if you push a big OSS replacement.
Yea, I'll second this. Don't be a pussy and cave just because someone says, "The other guy installed it!" The other guy broke the law. Not being willing to break the law doesn't make you less skilled than teh pirate.
It's very tempting to just install the stuff anyway: you look like a can-do guy, with it, always got the stuff we need, a real team player. But if you do get audited they will sell you out so fast your head will spin. And if you get audited after you've fixed the license issue, they will worship you, yea, as unto a god.
Slashdot Mirror
Except for the fact that they don't employ many reporters, generate very little content, and they're wedded to an even less permanent revenue stream than traditional newspapers...They're a nonprofit. They subsist entirely on fees gathered from member newspapers.
Goddamn. You do know that AP stands for "Associated Press," right? All that content that comes out with "AP" stamped on it comes from those papers that are dying. All the AP does is de-localize it, and aggregate it. If they add national quotes, they'll take off the original reports byline, but if you SEE a byline, search the name, and you'll see where the story really came from. Better than 9 of 10 won't be from AP bureaus.
Learn a little about the business before you start opining about which parts of it have actual value, eh?
Dude, their slogan is "Fair and Balanced." I admit they're not trying to be unbiased, but they are definitely trying to pretend like they're unbiased, which is the worst of all worlds.
The problem is, the online news services are all leaching off the traditional media for their content.
I'm actually looking forward with mild amusement to the panic when the flow of content from the big boys ceases.
And the AP is what? You know that 95% of the AP content comes from member newspapers right? Nice circular logic there.
I'm sorry your local rag sucks the pole, but that's not a good basis for condemning the entire industry.
I'd be interested in how it applied to the whole Op-Ed part of the paper. That stuff isn't remotely factual, and it's very clearly listed as "Opinion" right there in the name. That's where the endorsements come from: the e-board brings in all the candidates (if it can) and interviews them, and then makes a recommendation.
Anyway, the whole idea of bias is impossible to define. Everyone thinks a paper is biased if it doesn't reflect their personal world view. I've seen liberals and conservatives up in arms about the bias against their group on the same day. That's practically the definition of unbiased.
The thing is, if you give up trying to be unbiased, you get Fox News.
Even if it is a mostly unattainable goal, it's better to try and deliver an unbiased product.
I do admit, it'd be nice if a reporter would be open about their bias right from the start. The nice thing about the web (if any papers transitioned to it correctly, which, of course, none have) is that you could make that sort of information available in a reporters bio. Trusting your news source is important; nobody has time to fact check all their news.
Drudge and news should never appear in the same sentence.
The fact that Drudge and the Huffinton post and other piles of shit like them are what passes for Web journalism, is the reason so many people are worried about the demise of the traditional newspaper.
The problem is, the vast majority of newspapers are owned by giant conglomerates. Gannett and McClatchy just going to say, "Oh hey, lets dissolve!"? Don't think the CEO's with their 7 figure salaries are gonna get behind that one.
Anyway, even the papers that are already non-profit are taking it in the ass. Look at St. Pete. The industry has to successfully make a revenue transition from 1 medium to another without going bankrupt in the process, and it doesn't help that the web sucks for revenue. Look at all these huge, popular web 2.0 services that still haven't found a way to make a profit. The Ad revenue pie is the same size, but way too many people want a piece, and you don't get that natural geographic advantage that newspapers have traditionally enjoyed.
That's the whole point! They maintain that they're doing nothing wrong and have nothing illegal on their site...But they're offering a VPN connection so that the people who use it to download Linux distros can do it without evil gov't spying? Come on.
What's the use of it? Slow down your downloads for an extra 7 bucks a month? Sounds like a waste to me, unless you're downloading something that could get you in trouble.
Encryption is fine. Encryption + TPB is shady, since the vast majority of traffic from the site is illegal in most countries.
Actually, no, it's nothing like that.
It's like being accused of being a drug dealer because people buy drugs off your site, and, in response, you offer a method for people to make private transactions.
If you say, "hey, look, I just provide a service, I'm not telling people how to use it" then you might be able to get away with being effectively a middleman in an illegal transaction.
But if your response is to provide a way of hiding those illegal transactions from law enforcement, you're much more likely to be nailed as an accomplice, especially when you're making money specifically off those hidden transactions.
Yea, so? If there are no traffic records, all they would know is that those people pay for a service, not that they actually used it to download anything.
It's not illegal to pay someone for a secure connection, and since damages in most cases are attached to download records, they would have nothing to stand on really.
How do you maintain that you're not expressly in the business of circumventing copyright law (as they did in the recent trial) when you offer a paid service that really has no other function?
Seems like a risky strategy.
Thermite is a perfect example. It's easy to make, the ingredients are dirt cheap and unregulated, and it takes no special knowledge to put it together.
Why bleep out the words "Aluminum" and "Iron Oxide"? If someone wants to learn how to make thermite, they can do that without any special help.
The nastiest stuff they use on mythbusters is all commercial. The stuff they make themselves is mostly kitchen sink stuff that anyone could make.
There is a difference between stupid and average and above average and genius. I have seen a number of astoundingly smart people who commonly made errors like the ones you mentioned above. Super-smart people are often absent-minded.
You want someone who is clever, but not someone who is brilliant. Brilliance often causes more problems than it solves. I think that was what the OP was talking about.
Well, there you have it.
I run linux everywhere. I even have a linux desktop at home. I use it for web browsing and email, and that's about it.
Now the same machine also runs my proxies and file/ftp server, etc. But I configure all that from the command line, and mostly use SSH for that.
So what's the real benefit of the desktop? It's hard as hell to make it your only desktop; you'll spend all your time wrangling with WINE. Why bother?
I personally hate physical media. I think physical media is a scam on an epic scale. So I'm willing to log in to avoid that hassle. Sure, Steam could go down and kill my game. But my kid could frisbee the disks across the room and kill the game.
I'm willing to believe (at this point) that Steam is a robust enough distribution channel that it's at least slightly more disaster resistant than my house.
Since the one real benefit of Steam is that all your games are attached to your login, not your computer, I don't think that will be a real issue.
I loan people my Steam id so they can try out games. It'd be nice if they (games) were transferable, but they're certainly portable between machines.
They kept up the bitching for 6 months, and eventually the management caved and we had to set up a terminal services machine so people could use office.
I've seen bitching, but I've never seen that much of it anywhere else. Mind you, this was about 5 years ago, so OOO wasn't even as good as it is now.
(Bias alert: I fucking hate OOO. I have no use for it in any fashion. The above deployment is one of the reasons, but when it comes right down to it, it doesn't do anything I need really well, and there are other OSS products that perfectly meet my needs.)
Servers are much less of an issue than desktops. You can remake an entire network infrastructure in Linux without having anyone on the Windows side notice anything in particular, and all you really need is a desktop to move stuff to for a smaller shop (if it's a bigger shop they should HAVE hardware lying around).
The only thing you'll run aground on is the dreaded Exchange Server. Might even be worth it to keep a Windows PDC around, in that situation, just to save on headaches.
Where I work right now all the purchasing was done through third party organizations and was so hellishly murky (e.g. crates of licenses with no idea what they applied to) that we just gave up and got site licenses for everything except the server-side stuff. We coupled it with a general upgrade, so it wasn't that bad, financially.
Software companies love it when you lose the documentation and have to buy more licenses to prove you're legal.
Yea, but the resistance you will run against trying to force everyone to use OSS equivalents may end up with an involuntary 3 anyway. Some proprietary software is qualitatively superior, and trying to take away the "better" product and substituting a "worse" product will breed a lot of user anger.
I've been in a lot of situations where it's one way or the other. I worked at a shop where the licenses were really tight, and I installed OO.org for all the people who didn't rate an Office license, and they LOVED me. And when those people moved on, their replacements screamed bloody murder because they wanted Office instead.
I also ran part of a full-blown everything to OSS migration. It was that times about a million, except no-one was happy.
I've had a lot more success converting home users, though there as well there is a lot of pressure to get the semi-legal stuff (I am the keeper of the corporate site licenses, so there is a lot of pressure to slip 'em a key). Once I have conveyed that the "free key" option isn't ever going to be a reality, however, the "free software" thing gains a lot of traction.
In the business world, however, all the employees look at it as "someone else's money."
In a situation where it's this or nothing, anything looks good. If you're taking away what they want to be using, they will make your life a misery, and you're going to have to be ready for that if you push a big OSS replacement.
Yea, I'll second this. Don't be a pussy and cave just because someone says, "The other guy installed it!" The other guy broke the law. Not being willing to break the law doesn't make you less skilled than teh pirate.
It's very tempting to just install the stuff anyway: you look like a can-do guy, with it, always got the stuff we need, a real team player. But if you do get audited they will sell you out so fast your head will spin. And if you get audited after you've fixed the license issue, they will worship you, yea, as unto a god.