NO ONE who has to maintain Exchange or Outlook likes it. NO ONE. It does crazy stuff. It's way better than it used to be, but it still has hilarious flaws like the 2gig pst limit and crap like that. It needs a lot of maintenance.
But managers with their shared email folders and their shared calendars and their popup meeting requests and reminders and their crackberries LOVE IT. They LOVE that it's all those things AT THE SAME TIME, and when they can't use it, they're like angry water buffaloes looking for something to charge. The ONLY application out there that does the same stuff is Lotus, and Lotus is so slow and clunky Outlook can't help but seem better to an uneducated user.
Whenever you say, "Oh well there are OSS calendars and mail applications", you're completely missing it. Try selling that to someone who has used Exchange, and those same calendars look amatuerish and lame, and the fact that they don't talk to each other is really frustrating. I've been there, I've done this. The only time you can pull it off is when someone either hasn't USED Exchange or they can't afford it.
In a nutshell, yea, Blizzard is great about supporting Linux and Mac. So's ID. That's about it.
My personal use isn't an issue; I have to use this stuff for work, and in that environment, I have never been successful at eliminating Windows. I don't need anything from Linux that I can't use just as well from a terminal session, and the reverse does NOT hold true.
Yea, Mac works straight out of the box. Now try to get it to do something that it doesn't want to do. Now put it back in the box, and send it back to Apple. I can MAKE Windows STFU and listen to me, but Macs tend to break when you start messing with them like that.
But then you're right back to using Windows! I've gone that route, where I have a couple of big ass terminal services machines serving every MS app that people say they have to have, and at the end of the day someone is going to look at the balance sheet and say, "If we need this much microsoft stuff, why don't we just use windows?" and you're left trying to justify the cost savings to a bunch of PHBs whose staff is still pissy that they don't get to use Windows, and is making a stink about every single little flaw.
And Outlook, Jesus. Outlook/Exchange is a fricking deal breaker, you will run up against that wall over and over again, and trying to sell people on OWA or Lotus does not work. Outlook is one of those apps that does not have an OSS equivalent, and if you say "Evolution" you're telling me that you have no idea why people use Outlook.
I use all three, so I'm a better judge than someone who uses only two.
If I didn't use Linux, would I be qualified to throw down on a Linux distro? If I didn't use Macs would I be qualified to throw down on a Mac release? If I dared to even attempt such an amazing sacrilege, I'd have people lining up to rip me a new one.
But it's different with Windows! Everyone is entitled to spout their opinion; they don't need it, so no one else ever will either!
I'm a gamer. Some companies support linux and mac, most don't. I'm a coder. No linux or mac support for Visual Studio anything, and while I wish I didn't have to use it, I don't have the luxury of telling my boss I'm too good to do work on his systems. I have to use Outlook every day and fricking Access every now and then, and there is no WAY to do that without a Windows machine. I need IE to check my web apps, and I need it to use other people's goddamn proprietary.NET crap.
None of it makes me happy, but I'm realistic enough to know that the world doesn't bend around my happiness. A person with an open mind uses the best tool that comes to hand, without a ton of irrational crap (e.g "Windoze") clouding their judgment, without making false claims like "There is a superiour OSS product for every closed source product", and without spouting shit about emulation! What emulation? WINE? The second time I failed to migrate a customer to Linux because WINE utterly FAILED TO DO THE JOB I opened my fricking eyes. Emulators suck; if all you need is an emulator, all you really need is a telnet client because your application is simplistic in the extreme.
I love it when people who've never had to get down and really try and make it work, not for themselves, not for some game or hobby project, but to deploy it in an environment where there are people who are going to raise hell every time something doesn't work the way they think it should, try and tell me how "easy" it is, and how "no one really NEEDS this stuff." When you lose a 250,000 dollar project because you can't get FUCKING FONT SUPPORT FOR A FUCKING LEGACY APP, you can fucking TALK about what people NEED.
Just to pick a nit. When Mac switched to Intel chips, they killed OS 9 support in OS X.
If you need OS 9 on an Intel Mac, you'll have to run an app like Sheepshaver.
Mac isn't the best example for backwards compatibility. When they decide they're going to change, they're done. And since they do both the hardware AND software, it's dead.
It'd be nice. I don't like being locked in to any OS...Doesn't matter which one you use, there are always bad releases.
The guy in TFA pretty much thinks that Vista is worthless and the deathknell for Windows...I've lived through a lot of crappy Windows releases (All of 'em...Ha!), and this one isn't all that different. Just more of the same crap. XP seems like a wonderful OS to us because it followed a bunch of real dogs, and because it's been long enough that we've forgotten all the problems of the early days.
I think that the DRM piece will stay broken, but I don't care all that much, because that's not what I use my PC for. I think the compatibility issues will smooth out and I think that the security policy will be refined to the point where it doesn't make people homicidal. They may even fix the crap with the file copying.
By the time I buy it it'll still be an unpleasant upgrade...But I doubt it'll be as bad as it is today, and I think it'll end up usable in the long run...Probably just in time for the upgrade to whatever fresh hell they're dreaming up in redmond even as we speak.
What don't I like about the laptops? Nothing. Mac laptops are awesome.
As for the rest of it, I like tinkering with my computer. I like switching out motherboards, processors, and crap like that. I've got no desire to get a fancy-looking box that is pretty much OS locked to a big heavy GUI-driven OS.
On the one hand, I'm not touching Vista with a 10 foot pole until service pack one at the earliest. On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows.
Yea, it sucks. Yea, included DRM sucks. Yea, their goddamn "Allow or Deny?" stuff is flat awful. Slow file copy, etc, etc. Hell, I'm not even sure if I like anything about it.
But I'm not going to run out and buy a Mac! I don't like the fricking hardware, frankly, and since you have to buy the hardware to use the OS, screw it, I'm not using the OS. And even if I did, the software is still not there, and don't say "bootcamp" like it means something. We've been able to dual boot in linux forever.
And as for Linux, I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine. So far, that's not happening. I don't see it happening any time soon; WINE is never going to take up the slack, so it's all down to the software manufacturers. Unfortunately for me, one of the software manufacturers I need to start doing Linux versions of software is Microsoft, and that's about as likely as Bush raising taxes.
So no, I'm not happy about the situation. I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys who think that this is going to be the end of Microsoft, completely missing the point that the alternatives are no more attractive today than they were five years ago because the goddamn software is still not available!
Generating the key is work, but encryption is relatively easy...You know the key, so it reduces to simple math. Decryption is the exact same process if you have the key.
Otherwise you have to do that same math with every possible key, which means that every bit that is added to the length of the key doubles the key space, and drastically increases the number of computations a computer would need to try to brute force the key.
In that sense, encryption scales far better than brute force decryption. The question is whether or not a non-quantum computer would be capable of generating a key large enough to make decryption inefficient on a quantum computer. Right now it's really impossible to say; I don't know anyone who has ever bothered with more than a few thousand bit keys, because those are effectively impossible to break with existing technology. We'd have to have a working quantum computer, and run it against arbitrarily large cyphers.
Most encryption is just based on large prime numbers. So if quantum computing lives up to it's promises, it'll be able to eat common 128 and 256 bit keys for breakfast. Is this a problem? Not really.
They'll just increase the key size to the point where it won't be easy for even a quantum computer to decrypt...Since there is no theoretical limit to the size of the key, and the only practical limit is processing power, this is almost trivial.
Hah. That's what I was thinking...No point in calling Hollywood; the movie would end like the last Soprano's episode. "And when we push this button it should..." *Blackness* *Credits begin to roll*
It's not a new idea. When the Germans were making their last big push into Russia near the end of WWII, they brought forward their newest toughest tanks; near indestructable even to the venerable T-34's that were winning the war for the Soviets.
You know how the russian soldiers defeated them? They poured gasoline on them and set them on fire. They didn't have any anti-tank weapons that were effective, but the gas did the trick fine.
It's easy to get sucked in by wanting the "best" but the best is expensive, and expensive is always in short supply. Get functional and available first, before you try the sexy crap.
Ever lifted a military certified laptop? These guys are getting off light.
The root of the problem is they're trying to do too much. For it to work "as designed" everyone has to wear 15 pounds of gear. The way they're doing it now, the officers are carrying it, but the whole system is compromised because everyone else is wearing nothing. Does it strike no one else that there is probably a happy medium between everything and nothing that would allow the soldiers to get some of the benefits for a fraction of the weight?
And back to the whole ten-ton military gear. Over engineered gear is well and good, as long as you don't have to lug it in combat. Scale this crap down, make the stuff light and semi-disposable, and it'll cost a hell of a lot less, and be more useful. If it's too heavy to carry, it's useless.
If you're denying all empirical evidence, I find it very hard to see how you could avoid falling into solipsisms...If nothing external can be allowed to exist, then you're back to the Cogito.
Science is not about ontology; it is about understanding the world as it appears to be. It is absolutely the case that if all the laws of the universe were to change right now, then all of science would have to be re-written from the ground up. That, so far, has not happened, and science remains the single most astounding invention of the human mind, literally transforming the world. Citing an article that says that peer review is getting sloppy has absolutely no bearing on the overall accomplishments of the discipline.
Denying those accomplishments because they are based on induction rather than trite and impractical deduction is astoundingly pointless.
And phenomenology...Yes, it's quite relevant to everything because everything is reducable to metaphysical beings and essences and experiences...And the fact that everything can be so reduced makes it utterly useless.
If they product was paper they'd be selling bumwad not news. That's like saying a software companies' product is computers, or a cable networks' product is TVs.
Newspapers are a vehicle for information, nothing more. That information is the product, and when a better medium shows up, they'll transition to it.
It's more about the rendering...It's a hell of a lot easier to do a shiny smooth CG ship than it is to do a big chunky one. Pretty much broke the metaphor for me, with everything being way smoother and cleaner than it would ever be if it were "real".
Heh. I think if you push your "sexiness" on people, then you should pay the penalty when *Woops!* they find out you're on some kind of gender bender. I don't care what you do on IRC, but it's just not classy to take that to a game where the point isn't cybersex.
Otherwise, though, what's the big deal? I tend to pick whatever avatar appeals to me at the time, and since, with an MMO, you're going to be dealing with that character until hell freezes over. It's worth it to spend some time getting an appearance that's not going to make you wince every time you log in.
The number of people who don't vote outnumber the number of people who vote for either party. If they united behind a candidate and got up off their asses, they could have it all their own way.
You get these papers who have archives back to the 1800s! Can you imagine the value of that on the internet? All these people looking up their family trees, everyone who's trying to research something that happened more than 15 years ago...This doesn't have the issues of Wikipedia and other internet content in terms of citations, it's a solid primary source. Throw an ad banner on the top of the page, and you're good to go.
Do a full text scan, and use the text to index the pdfs, and you've solved the searchability problem...And we know that's doable, because Google is doing whole libraries at a time.
But we've got a long way to go. I'm still having trouble getting them to keep their goddamn restaurant reviews online...One would think this is exactly the kind of information that would draw readers to your site, and they cite to me goddamn SPACE concerns. SPACE...A year of those reviews might be a megabyte...If you kept the images. It's enough to make you spit blood. Until they get some people who understand that CONTENT is what makes you money online, they are going to continue floundering around like idiots.
Well, IMHO, since I don't have any actual say in this stuff...
1) They're stupid. They whore out to doubleclick, etc, just like everyone else instead of doing quality chosen local ads that they could pitch to their local advertisers for better rates. They're slowly overcoming this problem, and ad revenue is increasing.
2) Most newspapers are still working their way into the whole "web" idea. I mean, print media produces more actual web-friendly content than most industries, and, even better, it has a short shelf life, so they have nothing to lose by putting it on line. Do they take advantage of this? No. they put it up for a few days, then take it down.
This is hilariously frustrating if you know anything about the web, because you know that it's not whats there right now that's valuable, it's whats there in total. Newspapers in particular are sources for immense amounts of detailed information about things in their coverage area, and while it's utility is pretty limited in the usual archival forms (e.g. Microfiche) it would be astoundingly useful if they just left the content up to be indexed by search engines. Couple that glut of content with some advertising, and you've got an archive of data that costs very little to host and will bring in ad revenue every time someone finds something relevant in your coverage area.
At some point the big media companies (Gannett, McClatchy, Media General, etc) are going to realize that they're sitting on an informational goldmine and start actively leveraging that information to draw people to their sites. Right now it's all the aggregators (like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, etc) who are picking up the burden of providing the relevant information to the interested parties, because print is stuck in the whole, "Barf up a bunch of content and people will come" mentality. That will eventually change.
3) They still think in the back of their minds that if they put together a really good online component, they'll kill their bread and butter print product. This is, at heart, stupid. People thought television would kill print too. We still don't have a good portable disposable medium that will take up the slack, and moreover, there are a lot of people who are just wedded to the idea of the physical paper. That's going to be the case for decades to come, and that's a conservative estimate.
This means that they don't put enough real resources into online. I could give you numbers that would make you laugh your ass off, I mean seriously embarrassing. The people who are doing it are reporters, but not the good reporters...You get Peter Principle crap, so the reporters that end up doing it are people who can be spared to do it, and they have no special training, and no technical competence, and all too often, no fricking IDEA of what they should be doing...Just a very limited idea of what the hell the web is about.
Again it's just incompetence, and industrial blindness. Random example. You pay a professional photographer a daily wage. You send him out to cover a fire, a little league game, and a miss toddler usa pageant. He takes (conservatively) 500 photos. Of those 500 photos, maybe 4 make it into the paper, some probably in black and white. The rest are discarded. On the off chance that any picture will be used in the paper, the photojournalist has secured (in advance) the names of the people in it.
Can you imagine the kind of photo galleries you could create with that sort of information? Cheap to host, simple to index, throw some ads on it...Profit!
Print will die, but the content will live on. They need to transition that content to a digital forum, and then show the world what they really collect. The sheer volume of information has to be trimmed down to fit in the available space...What if there was no space limitation? Take every newspaper website, and, instead of making some ephemeral short term shallow content, make it like the tip of an iceberg, provide what you pay to collect already, and let people dig through it.
Sigh.
This is obviously and old and polished rant. You can guess how seriously they take my opinions...I'm just a techie after all...What do I know about newspapers? =P
Why does this need to be included by default? Am I the only one who finds the anti-phishing stuff to be annoying? Fine, some people want it, make a plugin or an extension, but stop adding tangential stuff to the codebase! Adding a piece of "functionality" to a web browser that does a name check on every website you load is bound to add a huge chunk of overhead.
Am I the only one who remembers The Kitchen Sink? Adding stuff like this into a pure vanilla install is ridiculous. I don't care if they want to make a "secure" version with plugins already installed and enabled, but don't make it a part of the
Seeing as I'm currently in charge of the financial systems for a medium sized newspaper who puts all their content online as well, I think I'm in a better position to say how much money comes from what.
We get dick from online. I mean, it's like joke money. Maybe a hundred thousand a month...more on a good month. Retail ads are 20 times that, and classified more still. Actual circulation revenue, including single copy which is pretty expensive compared to a subscription, is well into the millions and that is money that comes in every month, like clockwork. Sure, on Thanksgiving you're pulling in enough ads to double your circulation money, and Christmas too, but then there's the rest of the year.
The problem with newspapers is that the actual process of creating and delivering the paper is a huge time and money sink. Despite that we're still running a solid profit, though as many people point out, it's shrinking. Online is obviously the answer to a prayer...we could afford a HUGE drop in ad revenue and still make a profit if we could close down the print product. But as it stands with online advertising, it's still not profitable enough to think about that.
Slashdot Mirror
Bah, see, no one gets it.
NO ONE who has to maintain Exchange or Outlook likes it. NO ONE. It does crazy stuff. It's way better than it used to be, but it still has hilarious flaws like the 2gig pst limit and crap like that. It needs a lot of maintenance.
But managers with their shared email folders and their shared calendars and their popup meeting requests and reminders and their crackberries LOVE IT. They LOVE that it's all those things AT THE SAME TIME, and when they can't use it, they're like angry water buffaloes looking for something to charge. The ONLY application out there that does the same stuff is Lotus, and Lotus is so slow and clunky Outlook can't help but seem better to an uneducated user.
Whenever you say, "Oh well there are OSS calendars and mail applications", you're completely missing it. Try selling that to someone who has used Exchange, and those same calendars look amatuerish and lame, and the fact that they don't talk to each other is really frustrating. I've been there, I've done this. The only time you can pull it off is when someone either hasn't USED Exchange or they can't afford it.
Oy vey.
In a nutshell, yea, Blizzard is great about supporting Linux and Mac. So's ID. That's about it.
My personal use isn't an issue; I have to use this stuff for work, and in that environment, I have never been successful at eliminating Windows. I don't need anything from Linux that I can't use just as well from a terminal session, and the reverse does NOT hold true.
Yea, Mac works straight out of the box. Now try to get it to do something that it doesn't want to do. Now put it back in the box, and send it back to Apple. I can MAKE Windows STFU and listen to me, but Macs tend to break when you start messing with them like that.
I have. Right now it's cheaper to me to have my existing setup rather than pick up a machine with enough horsepower to run both.
Anyway, I'm less concerned about my personal use; I can make the stuff work for ME. The real issue is business use, and there you have more issues.
But then you're right back to using Windows! I've gone that route, where I have a couple of big ass terminal services machines serving every MS app that people say they have to have, and at the end of the day someone is going to look at the balance sheet and say, "If we need this much microsoft stuff, why don't we just use windows?" and you're left trying to justify the cost savings to a bunch of PHBs whose staff is still pissy that they don't get to use Windows, and is making a stink about every single little flaw.
And Outlook, Jesus. Outlook/Exchange is a fricking deal breaker, you will run up against that wall over and over again, and trying to sell people on OWA or Lotus does not work. Outlook is one of those apps that does not have an OSS equivalent, and if you say "Evolution" you're telling me that you have no idea why people use Outlook.
I use all three, so I'm a better judge than someone who uses only two.
.NET crap.
If I didn't use Linux, would I be qualified to throw down on a Linux distro? If I didn't use Macs would I be qualified to throw down on a Mac release? If I dared to even attempt such an amazing sacrilege, I'd have people lining up to rip me a new one.
But it's different with Windows! Everyone is entitled to spout their opinion; they don't need it, so no one else ever will either!
I'm a gamer. Some companies support linux and mac, most don't. I'm a coder. No linux or mac support for Visual Studio anything, and while I wish I didn't have to use it, I don't have the luxury of telling my boss I'm too good to do work on his systems. I have to use Outlook every day and fricking Access every now and then, and there is no WAY to do that without a Windows machine. I need IE to check my web apps, and I need it to use other people's goddamn proprietary
None of it makes me happy, but I'm realistic enough to know that the world doesn't bend around my happiness. A person with an open mind uses the best tool that comes to hand, without a ton of irrational crap (e.g "Windoze") clouding their judgment, without making false claims like "There is a superiour OSS product for every closed source product", and without spouting shit about emulation! What emulation? WINE? The second time I failed to migrate a customer to Linux because WINE utterly FAILED TO DO THE JOB I opened my fricking eyes. Emulators suck; if all you need is an emulator, all you really need is a telnet client because your application is simplistic in the extreme.
I love it when people who've never had to get down and really try and make it work, not for themselves, not for some game or hobby project, but to deploy it in an environment where there are people who are going to raise hell every time something doesn't work the way they think it should, try and tell me how "easy" it is, and how "no one really NEEDS this stuff." When you lose a 250,000 dollar project because you can't get FUCKING FONT SUPPORT FOR A FUCKING LEGACY APP, you can fucking TALK about what people NEED.
Nah, it's a piece of crap. No denying it, and I'm sure as hell not going to be using it any time soon.
But abandon it altogether? Come on, be sensible. It's the same as always: they're forcing us to beta test it for 'em and pay 'em for the privilege.
Just to pick a nit. When Mac switched to Intel chips, they killed OS 9 support in OS X.
If you need OS 9 on an Intel Mac, you'll have to run an app like Sheepshaver.
Mac isn't the best example for backwards compatibility. When they decide they're going to change, they're done. And since they do both the hardware AND software, it's dead.
It'd be nice. I don't like being locked in to any OS...Doesn't matter which one you use, there are always bad releases.
The guy in TFA pretty much thinks that Vista is worthless and the deathknell for Windows...I've lived through a lot of crappy Windows releases (All of 'em...Ha!), and this one isn't all that different. Just more of the same crap. XP seems like a wonderful OS to us because it followed a bunch of real dogs, and because it's been long enough that we've forgotten all the problems of the early days.
I think that the DRM piece will stay broken, but I don't care all that much, because that's not what I use my PC for. I think the compatibility issues will smooth out and I think that the security policy will be refined to the point where it doesn't make people homicidal. They may even fix the crap with the file copying.
By the time I buy it it'll still be an unpleasant upgrade...But I doubt it'll be as bad as it is today, and I think it'll end up usable in the long run...Probably just in time for the upgrade to whatever fresh hell they're dreaming up in redmond even as we speak.
What don't I like about the laptops? Nothing. Mac laptops are awesome.
As for the rest of it, I like tinkering with my computer. I like switching out motherboards, processors, and crap like that. I've got no desire to get a fancy-looking box that is pretty much OS locked to a big heavy GUI-driven OS.
Hello inflamatory headline.
On the one hand, I'm not touching Vista with a 10 foot pole until service pack one at the earliest. On the other hand, any self-professed Ubuntu/Mac guy is not who I look to for advice about Windows.
Yea, it sucks. Yea, included DRM sucks. Yea, their goddamn "Allow or Deny?" stuff is flat awful. Slow file copy, etc, etc. Hell, I'm not even sure if I like anything about it.
But I'm not going to run out and buy a Mac! I don't like the fricking hardware, frankly, and since you have to buy the hardware to use the OS, screw it, I'm not using the OS. And even if I did, the software is still not there, and don't say "bootcamp" like it means something. We've been able to dual boot in linux forever.
And as for Linux, I already USE Linux. If I could use it to run all the software I need to run, I'd toss my Windows machine. So far, that's not happening. I don't see it happening any time soon; WINE is never going to take up the slack, so it's all down to the software manufacturers. Unfortunately for me, one of the software manufacturers I need to start doing Linux versions of software is Microsoft, and that's about as likely as Bush raising taxes.
So no, I'm not happy about the situation. I don't think ANYONE is happy about the situation except irrational fanboys who think that this is going to be the end of Microsoft, completely missing the point that the alternatives are no more attractive today than they were five years ago because the goddamn software is still not available!
Generating the key is work, but encryption is relatively easy...You know the key, so it reduces to simple math. Decryption is the exact same process if you have the key.
Otherwise you have to do that same math with every possible key, which means that every bit that is added to the length of the key doubles the key space, and drastically increases the number of computations a computer would need to try to brute force the key.
In that sense, encryption scales far better than brute force decryption. The question is whether or not a non-quantum computer would be capable of generating a key large enough to make decryption inefficient on a quantum computer. Right now it's really impossible to say; I don't know anyone who has ever bothered with more than a few thousand bit keys, because those are effectively impossible to break with existing technology. We'd have to have a working quantum computer, and run it against arbitrarily large cyphers.
Most encryption is just based on large prime numbers. So if quantum computing lives up to it's promises, it'll be able to eat common 128 and 256 bit keys for breakfast. Is this a problem? Not really.
They'll just increase the key size to the point where it won't be easy for even a quantum computer to decrypt...Since there is no theoretical limit to the size of the key, and the only practical limit is processing power, this is almost trivial.
Hah. That's what I was thinking...No point in calling Hollywood; the movie would end like the last Soprano's episode. "And when we push this button it should..." *Blackness* *Credits begin to roll*
No. It's "Having something that works poorly is better than having nothing at all."
It's not a choice between good and bad. It's a choice between having a weapon, and having no weapon at all.
It's not a new idea. When the Germans were making their last big push into Russia near the end of WWII, they brought forward their newest toughest tanks; near indestructable even to the venerable T-34's that were winning the war for the Soviets.
You know how the russian soldiers defeated them? They poured gasoline on them and set them on fire. They didn't have any anti-tank weapons that were effective, but the gas did the trick fine.
It's easy to get sucked in by wanting the "best" but the best is expensive, and expensive is always in short supply. Get functional and available first, before you try the sexy crap.
Ever lifted a military certified laptop? These guys are getting off light.
The root of the problem is they're trying to do too much. For it to work "as designed" everyone has to wear 15 pounds of gear. The way they're doing it now, the officers are carrying it, but the whole system is compromised because everyone else is wearing nothing. Does it strike no one else that there is probably a happy medium between everything and nothing that would allow the soldiers to get some of the benefits for a fraction of the weight?
And back to the whole ten-ton military gear. Over engineered gear is well and good, as long as you don't have to lug it in combat. Scale this crap down, make the stuff light and semi-disposable, and it'll cost a hell of a lot less, and be more useful. If it's too heavy to carry, it's useless.
If you're denying all empirical evidence, I find it very hard to see how you could avoid falling into solipsisms...If nothing external can be allowed to exist, then you're back to the Cogito.
Science is not about ontology; it is about understanding the world as it appears to be. It is absolutely the case that if all the laws of the universe were to change right now, then all of science would have to be re-written from the ground up. That, so far, has not happened, and science remains the single most astounding invention of the human mind, literally transforming the world. Citing an article that says that peer review is getting sloppy has absolutely no bearing on the overall accomplishments of the discipline.
Denying those accomplishments because they are based on induction rather than trite and impractical deduction is astoundingly pointless.
And phenomenology...Yes, it's quite relevant to everything because everything is reducable to metaphysical beings and essences and experiences...And the fact that everything can be so reduced makes it utterly useless.
If they product was paper they'd be selling bumwad not news. That's like saying a software companies' product is computers, or a cable networks' product is TVs.
Newspapers are a vehicle for information, nothing more. That information is the product, and when a better medium shows up, they'll transition to it.
It's more about the rendering...It's a hell of a lot easier to do a shiny smooth CG ship than it is to do a big chunky one. Pretty much broke the metaphor for me, with everything being way smoother and cleaner than it would ever be if it were "real".
Heh. I think if you push your "sexiness" on people, then you should pay the penalty when *Woops!* they find out you're on some kind of gender bender. I don't care what you do on IRC, but it's just not classy to take that to a game where the point isn't cybersex.
Otherwise, though, what's the big deal? I tend to pick whatever avatar appeals to me at the time, and since, with an MMO, you're going to be dealing with that character until hell freezes over. It's worth it to spend some time getting an appearance that's not going to make you wince every time you log in.
The number of people who don't vote outnumber the number of people who vote for either party. If they united behind a candidate and got up off their asses, they could have it all their own way.
You get these papers who have archives back to the 1800s! Can you imagine the value of that on the internet? All these people looking up their family trees, everyone who's trying to research something that happened more than 15 years ago...This doesn't have the issues of Wikipedia and other internet content in terms of citations, it's a solid primary source. Throw an ad banner on the top of the page, and you're good to go.
Do a full text scan, and use the text to index the pdfs, and you've solved the searchability problem...And we know that's doable, because Google is doing whole libraries at a time.
But we've got a long way to go. I'm still having trouble getting them to keep their goddamn restaurant reviews online...One would think this is exactly the kind of information that would draw readers to your site, and they cite to me goddamn SPACE concerns. SPACE...A year of those reviews might be a megabyte...If you kept the images. It's enough to make you spit blood. Until they get some people who understand that CONTENT is what makes you money online, they are going to continue floundering around like idiots.
Well, IMHO, since I don't have any actual say in this stuff...
1) They're stupid. They whore out to doubleclick, etc, just like everyone else instead of doing quality chosen local ads that they could pitch to their local advertisers for better rates. They're slowly overcoming this problem, and ad revenue is increasing.
2) Most newspapers are still working their way into the whole "web" idea. I mean, print media produces more actual web-friendly content than most industries, and, even better, it has a short shelf life, so they have nothing to lose by putting it on line. Do they take advantage of this? No. they put it up for a few days, then take it down.
This is hilariously frustrating if you know anything about the web, because you know that it's not whats there right now that's valuable, it's whats there in total. Newspapers in particular are sources for immense amounts of detailed information about things in their coverage area, and while it's utility is pretty limited in the usual archival forms (e.g. Microfiche) it would be astoundingly useful if they just left the content up to be indexed by search engines. Couple that glut of content with some advertising, and you've got an archive of data that costs very little to host and will bring in ad revenue every time someone finds something relevant in your coverage area.
At some point the big media companies (Gannett, McClatchy, Media General, etc) are going to realize that they're sitting on an informational goldmine and start actively leveraging that information to draw people to their sites. Right now it's all the aggregators (like Slashdot, Digg, Fark, etc) who are picking up the burden of providing the relevant information to the interested parties, because print is stuck in the whole, "Barf up a bunch of content and people will come" mentality. That will eventually change.
3) They still think in the back of their minds that if they put together a really good online component, they'll kill their bread and butter print product. This is, at heart, stupid. People thought television would kill print too. We still don't have a good portable disposable medium that will take up the slack, and moreover, there are a lot of people who are just wedded to the idea of the physical paper. That's going to be the case for decades to come, and that's a conservative estimate.
This means that they don't put enough real resources into online. I could give you numbers that would make you laugh your ass off, I mean seriously embarrassing. The people who are doing it are reporters, but not the good reporters...You get Peter Principle crap, so the reporters that end up doing it are people who can be spared to do it, and they have no special training, and no technical competence, and all too often, no fricking IDEA of what they should be doing...Just a very limited idea of what the hell the web is about.
Again it's just incompetence, and industrial blindness. Random example. You pay a professional photographer a daily wage. You send him out to cover a fire, a little league game, and a miss toddler usa pageant. He takes (conservatively) 500 photos. Of those 500 photos, maybe 4 make it into the paper, some probably in black and white. The rest are discarded. On the off chance that any picture will be used in the paper, the photojournalist has secured (in advance) the names of the people in it.
Can you imagine the kind of photo galleries you could create with that sort of information? Cheap to host, simple to index, throw some ads on it...Profit!
Print will die, but the content will live on. They need to transition that content to a digital forum, and then show the world what they really collect. The sheer volume of information has to be trimmed down to fit in the available space...What if there was no space limitation? Take every newspaper website, and, instead of making some ephemeral short term shallow content, make it like the tip of an iceberg, provide what you pay to collect already, and let people dig through it.
Sigh.
This is obviously and old and polished rant. You can guess how seriously they take my opinions...I'm just a techie after all...What do I know about newspapers? =P
Why does this need to be included by default? Am I the only one who finds the anti-phishing stuff to be annoying? Fine, some people want it, make a plugin or an extension, but stop adding tangential stuff to the codebase! Adding a piece of "functionality" to a web browser that does a name check on every website you load is bound to add a huge chunk of overhead.
Am I the only one who remembers The Kitchen Sink? Adding stuff like this into a pure vanilla install is ridiculous. I don't care if they want to make a "secure" version with plugins already installed and enabled, but don't make it a part of the
Seeing as I'm currently in charge of the financial systems for a medium sized newspaper who puts all their content online as well, I think I'm in a better position to say how much money comes from what.
We get dick from online. I mean, it's like joke money. Maybe a hundred thousand a month...more on a good month. Retail ads are 20 times that, and classified more still. Actual circulation revenue, including single copy which is pretty expensive compared to a subscription, is well into the millions and that is money that comes in every month, like clockwork. Sure, on Thanksgiving you're pulling in enough ads to double your circulation money, and Christmas too, but then there's the rest of the year.
The problem with newspapers is that the actual process of creating and delivering the paper is a huge time and money sink. Despite that we're still running a solid profit, though as many people point out, it's shrinking. Online is obviously the answer to a prayer...we could afford a HUGE drop in ad revenue and still make a profit if we could close down the print product. But as it stands with online advertising, it's still not profitable enough to think about that.