It does look like a neat idea -- instead of having lots of lurkers, everyone has to post, and every post is assigned to another specific participant to read and respond. Picture sitting in a classroom, where the teacher asks a question, and everyone writes their thoughts on their paper. Then the papers are collected, shuffled, and passed out again... and everyone writes a response to what they read, the papers are collected, shuffled, etc..
I can see a lot of value to this approach in an academic setting.
I guess $1M seems awfully expensive to me, too (it looks like it's Apache Struts and JSPs, and I didn't see any tech that would be all that hard to implement), but I haven't really been through the whole thing yet.
You also have to consider that sometimes it takes a lot of work to just come up with the concept, before you can get anywhere near coding.
This was a common confusion, and he addresses this right at the top, before even answering any questions. Sure, 60% of companies who do some Linux development spend more time developing on some other platform.
btw, 'vitriol' has no 'e' (I know, I know... apologies for the offtopic correction)
Most developers have realized this problem (where the great idea dissolves before you code it), and find a good mix of written and verbal communication.
There's a lot to be gained in getting a few people together in a room with a whiteboard to brainstorm -- you can review (and discard) a much greater volume of ideas, because the feedback is almost instantaneous... you can stop explaining as soon as the other people understand the idea, you get non-verbal hints that someone else sees a problem with the first part of your idea, etc..
At the end, you should have a written list of the ideas that seemed to have the most merit, and someone works on the details then emails the rest to review results later that day.
Obviously email can be used to achieve the same results, but it can be a lot more work, partly just because you have to guess how much explanation is necessary to get your idea across (and if you guessed wrong, you either need *more* emails to clear up misunderstandings, or you just wasted a lot of time).
Your lawn dart delivery system reminds me of a similar system that *has* seen a decent amount of use -- the "wrap document around brick and hurl through plate glass window" delivery method...
Anyway, he didn't really build this thing because it's the best way to deliver a document... haven't you ever built anything just for fun, because you could?
I wrote a little text-to-speech converter once entirely in HTML and JavaScript, using the word pronunciations at Merriam-Webster Online. Naturally it was horrible, but very funny to listen to.
When we first got Cisco IP phones at my previous office I wrote a program that used the call manager web interface to initiate an outgoing call from any phone in the building to an external number of your choice (you'd just type in the target extension, destination number, and hit "make the call!").
You make rules -- like "work on this is only allowed between 12 and 1pm" -- because of course there's no real point. Maybe just "because it was there". And possibly to proudly show your little mutant creation to your friends and laugh about how interesting but useless an achievement it is.
Google has clearly arrived *somewhere*... but they need to keep in mind that their place at the top of the mountain is NOT assured.
Xerox isn't dead and gone, but they've had a lot of problems over the past 2 years, especially, in large part because of overconfidence and success hiding the growing corporate bloat... and it's funny how you can hear people say "lemme just xerox this and I'll get it back to you" as they step towards their HP copier.
Well, if you allow subscribers to post against the story while it's still "plastic", you're going to get a lot of silly comments about errors in the story that are fixed by the time is hits the "present" and everyone else sees it.
But if you do let them post, at least make sure they can't post anonymously, please! That will at least keep the quality up (and punish the silly comment generators described above...).
I'm sure that righteous "gotcha" feeling is nice when you tell the non-paying client that they must, after all, pay up. BUT it's much better to deliver a final product, and explain that it will only work until the end of the month, and that the non-time-limited version will be installed when full payment has been received. And then do exactly what you said. And be very friendly about it, and don't charge for the work involved in removing the expiration date.
Everything is so much easier if you're straightforward and forthcoming about it. Not naive... but honest. Now you've gotten the money you wanted, *and* you have one less enemy.
-- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein
There has been much discussion already about how the justice system is pretty skewed in its handing of malicious crackers (in the US, at least... I haven't heard much about crackers in Canada).
There's the Mitnick example, of course, where it really seems like he was not punished commensurate to the damage he actually caused. Basically, a lot of people were scared about the *money* that could have been lost due to his activities.
Now imagine if lives are on the line. Never mind sales lost, imagine lives that could be lost due to DDOS, or even a security hole in the servers managing the surgery (imagine someone poking their way through a system they stumbled across with all *kinds* of interesting, unfamiliar stuff on it... and suddenly the laser scalpel starts heading north).
I tend to agree that enforcement is generally impractical (and there have been lots of discussions around what may really be needed).
However, new laws can be *quite* helpful, especially if they get a lot of press. After all, spam works because people believe the claims, click the link, and give the spammers money.
The more people understand what "spam" is, and the fly-by-night operations that these really are, the less likely they'll be to cough up the cash, no matter how sadly underdeveloped their genitalia may be, or how willing they are to help a kind Nigerian gentleman.
Recognizing that you have received an *illegal* email makes it a little harder to get sucked into the promises.
Well, don't trivialize the dangers of the surface environment on Europa, though -- some scientists on record believe life can't go on without a decent cup of coffee in the morning, and none of our deep sea explorations have uncovered anything that even looks like it *might* be a suitable place to plug in a coffee bean grinder at the bottom of Earth's oceans (volcanic vents notwithstanding). What makes you think the situation will be any different at the bottom of Europa's oceans?
Oh, the vent thing - yeah, they're very hot at the source, but there's always the option of moving out just a tad so your pseudopods or cilia or what-have-you don't get charred off. There's usually a dead area immediately around the vent, then a little circle of life fighting it out a little further away, then more dead space where the water gets really cold.
Well, say your email server handles 300 users. It's better to use a solution that handles it on the server if at all possible, because it'll take forever to get each of those 300 users set up, but you can probably set up your server in 1 hr.
On the other hand, it is worth investigating any idea that will inflict *some* cost on the spammer, since it all adds up.
It's hard to outweigh the pretty dramatic income potentials of bulk email; they make enough money that it's worth it to purchase -- for example -- sophisticated tarpit-detection software if necessary.
Personally, I liked Larry Lessig's bounty idea: sending spam w/o a [ADV) header means, legally, that the first person who can prove you did it gets a $10K bounty out of your pocket)... but so far no one in govt has had any luck getting anything effective through.
I should add that I think it's very important for children to learn to be comfortable in their bodies. Self-confidence and happiness get a nice boost when you are healthy. It seems strange, but mental balance can be improved by developing good physical balance. We can also lead better lives if we are tuned into the needs of our bodies (like realizing that I'm about to insult someone simply because I'm starving hungry).
Too many kids never learn to jump, climb, walk safely on ice, balance on one foot, etc. etc. and they become adverse to risks in other areas of their lives as well, and/or constantly distracted by shame about their awkwardness and maladroitness.
If someone is too clumbsy to catch or throw properly
I like that, "clumbsy" -- part lumbering, part clumsy!
Anyway, I would agree that sports *can* be a good thing, but not in many cases...
I was an athletic kid. I ran track through high school and college, plus the occasional game of ultimate frisbee. I do get a high out of adrenaline and competition at an abstract level.
But I hated the organized contact sports, and still don't think that kind of thing adds a useful element to a kid's psyche. You end up with adults who can only think about the world comfortably in terms of "us and them", and "the home team vs. the enemy"... especially because of the way some parents get involved. You know how many fights *between dads* have broken out at little league games? It's scary.
The comradery is a good thing, but it shouldn't be "our hatred of the other team bonds us!" And it's always easy to define a group according to who's NOT in it.
Pickup basketball games with your friends are a completely different thing from the state championship where it *seems* like something huge is on the line.
Losing a large amount of important data can be like having a house fire, but possibly *worse* because of how relatively simple it is to make a backup. That's the real salt in the wound -- in the end, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Every time (for however long it takes) that you sit down to re-do some of the work that you lost -- or to consider the photos or audio that was lost -- you have to think again about how much of an idiot you were to have not taken the proper precautions.
I haven't had any catastrophes since high school (well, it seemed like a catastrophe at the time... I lost 10 pages or a research paper when my little sister tripped on the power strip), but even that comparatively small loss still twinges when I think about it.
I'm still a little dubious on the whole concept of this gaping divide between coders/scripters (like a lot of you), but let's leave that alone for a sec.
If your coders have no idea about the capabilities of the scripting crew, and visa versa, projects will often be mismatched to technologies. At a bare minimum, you need to have a tech lead or head developer who fully understands the scope (and future scope) of the project, who can match it with the most suitable language and/or environment. They work with management (who will know if, for example, you have 4 coders who'll be on the bench in a week) to make the final decision.
Choosing the technology should never be a purely mgmt decision, though, nor decided by someone who only understands one path to the solution!
If there's an oversimplification in management thinking (i.e., big project == Java/C++), it's the responsibility of the people who know better to straighten them out.
-- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Einstein
The real target audience of spam is NOT the developer who has downloaded special filtering software so that he won't be troubled by spam. It's not even the casual Outlook Express user who carefully flags each spam message to his built-in high-tech filter can learn what he wants to see (yes I'm looking ahead to ward off the obvious counter-arguments).
All of these people ALREADY KNOW that these messages are spam. They aren't the ones targetted. Filters are doomed to failure unless the underlying technology of email changes. And no, you can't just distribute a "base" filter for everyone - how does that help the guy who's auditioning for a bit part in a porno and that's all he talks about? How does it help the 2 women who like emailing each other jokes about penis size? Or the Nigerian who's trying to arrange sending $10,000 to his son in college in the US?
Clearly, if spam were no longer an effective means of marketing, it would largely stop. But that doesn't imply anything about what should be done to remove that incentive. It's like saying, "for our business to succeed, we need to increase our revenue/costs ratio".
We can make it excessively costly to use spam marketing techniques -- e.g., kill all the spammers, or really crack down on them legally (though assuming that spammers will accurately estimate their risk is questionable). Or we can reduce their returns, by trying to educate users, blocking spam (at the ISP level and/or at the user level).
I would like to get Barry Shein's insights as to what he would identify as the best leverage point in a complex system.
Personally, I think it would be a huge effort to educate the users. There's a sucker discovering the internet every minute, many of whom have sadly stunted genitalia and/or would really like to help that Nigerian fellow out of his bind.
Honestly, 200K/month on rent could be much worse based on where they are. I worked for a startup that had a rent that was likewise ridiculous (plus we paid astronomical amounts for *leasing* the furniture... friggin' purple chairs!). It finally ended a painful circling of the plughole at the end of last year.
Here's the clincher. You think we were in sunny California? Nope, upstate NY.
BTW, I signed up for Salon, anyway... I'm in a generous mood tonight. I'll feel like an idiot later if they go down in a month and all I did was fund 1/10 of a for-old-times-sake scooter, but I don't mind feeling like an idiot now and again.
I should put in a plug for Harpers, too - my wife worked there for a summer as an intern when we were still in school, researching the Harpers Index and reading submissions, books requesting reviews, etc... we got to read a few excellent books before they were published, she had all *kinds* of interesting stuff to talk about for the whole summer, plus now she gets Harpers for free for life! Anyway, it's dead-tree, but I find some really excellent tidbits in every issue. I don't always agree, but it provides good food for thought.
Well, we all tend to turn into our parents in some way or another. You seem to have made that leap... now guess what? The kid will just roll his eyes without even looking up and say "yeah, whatever, Dad".
Funny, he didn't even look up to see who it was...
Ah, think about it, anyway. If you just obeyed your parents, sure, you'd endure less pain, but who the hell wants to live a sterile life like that (think bell jar)? Personally, I don't want to lead a life where nothing ever goes wrong. Pain defines pleasure, etc..
I guess we're all shaped by our screw-ups and mistakes. Hopefully we don't end up too... um... misshapen.
Maybe they have a good idea here... I have no idea because they don't explain it. Here are the in-depth details of how payments work:
Browse the Web and download items you wish to purchase. (The Web site will indicate what content you can buy with Peppercoin). To pay for items, launch the PepperPanel viewer and sign in with your user name and password.
The PepperPanel will display price and other information about the content. You will be given the choice to Open or Save the file. Either option will generate payment to the content owner.
You will be billed for purchases by Peppercoin to the payment instrument used in establishing your account.
Notice how they leave out everything we'd want to actually *know*. And, uh, save or open the *file*? What's this file? Obviously, I want to know WHEN I will be billed. Prepay vs. Postpay? Is that not a freq. asked question, somehow?
I'm also missing the point of the randomness, except for skimming purposes. Where's the extra work in keep track of an exact balance? One number in the database per customer and per merchant, and settle each account at the end of each month. There's no reason they'd have to be whole numbers; that's not what the cc companies care about.
-- Einstein: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
When I was 5 or 6 I asked my parents if we could go to the Gobi desert for summer vacation, because I read they'd found dinosaur eggs there in my dinosaur books.
By the time I got through middle school, though, I'd learned what paleontology, etc. was really about, and knew I didn't want to go there. How did I learn? Videos in school, more books, etc.. The adults around me knew, when I asked for more info.
It's not that incredible that a lot of college-aged kids today don't understand what the people who work on computers, the internet, etc. really do.
Their parents don't understand, either. Most of their teachers are struggling to learn AOL.
By the time current elementary schoolers are having their own kids (and/or teaching them, and writing books that they read, etc.), this problem will be long gone.
-- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Einstein (Albert, not Alfred)
Notice how these comments are getting horrible ratings? Well, it makes sense; they're almost all worthless.
Why? Well, what interesting/insightful/funny comment can be made on this subject, especially on slashdot?
This is a discussion forum with a general tradition of *avoiding* usage of given names. Right off the bat, this causes abortive comments like, "I have a really interesting name, kinda like this other name, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, because my boss might be googling me."
And what insight can a techie offer about given names? Yeah, some of us have the same name. Some don't. They serve a useful purpose, but not one really worth talking about.
I guess some names are sorta funny, and some naming stories are funny, but nothing that's going to make you wet your pants. I know of a guy whose parents wanted to give him an English name but didn't know any English themselves, so they grabbed a book for inspiration... and named him "Oxford University Press".
See? Ok, but who would moderate that up past a 2?
New discussion: how can we help our slashdot editors to select better discussion topics?
I remember they used a very similar trick on the hell.com site -- they explained to you that the contents of your computer had been uploaded to their server while you were browsing, and "proved" it with an HTML fileupload (whose browse button was labelled "View Files on Server" or something like that).
The "tree" idea won't really catch on simply because most of the alternate branches tend to be mistakes, deadends, etc..
I think most of the time when you hit a link, back out, and go somewhere else, it's because you didn't find what you wanted. Obviously this isn't always true, but even if it's only true 90% of the time, all of those stumpy little branches on the tree are just extra, unwanted info that will confuse the user.
I'm curious to see if research would agree with me.... maybe the tree view would be useful if it only saved alternate branches more than 1 link long.
-- Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein
I would agree with this only to a degree -- personally, if I immediately turn my mind to something engaging (like some/. discussions), it doesn't help me with the problem I'm working on. I need to take breaks and just go for a walk to think. Avoiding structured thought for a while helps much more than intense thought on a different (non work-related) problem will... especially if I get really interested and suddenly find I've wasted 4 hours, which I seem to be prone to if I'm not careful.
THAT SAID, I find it highly demoralizing when a company prevents me from reading theonion.com once a week (which my current employer does). I also have to give a detailed reason and wait a week if I want to make anything other than a port 80 connection to any server outside the firewall, even just FTP or SSH.
I think it should be more an issue of self-discipline, like anything else. There are people where I work who stand around chatting for 3-4 hours a day... I don't see the company locking them in their cubicles to prevent this!! They'll just be fired if their work is seriously impacted.
Slashdot Mirror
It does look like a neat idea -- instead of having lots of lurkers, everyone has to post, and every post is assigned to another specific participant to read and respond. Picture sitting in a classroom, where the teacher asks a question, and everyone writes their thoughts on their paper. Then the papers are collected, shuffled, and passed out again... and everyone writes a response to what they read, the papers are collected, shuffled, etc..
I can see a lot of value to this approach in an academic setting.
I guess $1M seems awfully expensive to me, too (it looks like it's Apache Struts and JSPs, and I didn't see any tech that would be all that hard to implement), but I haven't really been through the whole thing yet.
You also have to consider that sometimes it takes a lot of work to just come up with the concept, before you can get anywhere near coding.
This was a common confusion, and he addresses this right at the top, before even answering any questions. Sure, 60% of companies who do some Linux development spend more time developing on some other platform.
btw, 'vitriol' has no 'e' (I know, I know... apologies for the offtopic correction)
Most developers have realized this problem (where the great idea dissolves before you code it), and find a good mix of written and verbal communication.
There's a lot to be gained in getting a few people together in a room with a whiteboard to brainstorm -- you can review (and discard) a much greater volume of ideas, because the feedback is almost instantaneous... you can stop explaining as soon as the other people understand the idea, you get non-verbal hints that someone else sees a problem with the first part of your idea, etc..
At the end, you should have a written list of the ideas that seemed to have the most merit, and someone works on the details then emails the rest to review results later that day.
Obviously email can be used to achieve the same results, but it can be a lot more work, partly just because you have to guess how much explanation is necessary to get your idea across (and if you guessed wrong, you either need *more* emails to clear up misunderstandings, or you just wasted a lot of time).
Your lawn dart delivery system reminds me of a similar system that *has* seen a decent amount of use -- the "wrap document around brick and hurl through plate glass window" delivery method...
Anyway, he didn't really build this thing because it's the best way to deliver a document... haven't you ever built anything just for fun, because you could?
I wrote a little text-to-speech converter once entirely in HTML and JavaScript, using the word pronunciations at Merriam-Webster Online. Naturally it was horrible, but very funny to listen to.
When we first got Cisco IP phones at my previous office I wrote a program that used the call manager web interface to initiate an outgoing call from any phone in the building to an external number of your choice (you'd just type in the target extension, destination number, and hit "make the call!").
You make rules -- like "work on this is only allowed between 12 and 1pm" -- because of course there's no real point. Maybe just "because it was there". And possibly to proudly show your little mutant creation to your friends and laugh about how interesting but useless an achievement it is.
Google has clearly arrived *somewhere*... but they need to keep in mind that their place at the top of the mountain is NOT assured.
Xerox isn't dead and gone, but they've had a lot of problems over the past 2 years, especially, in large part because of overconfidence and success hiding the growing corporate bloat... and it's funny how you can hear people say "lemme just xerox this and I'll get it back to you" as they step towards their HP copier.
Well, if you allow subscribers to post against the story while it's still "plastic", you're going to get a lot of silly comments about errors in the story that are fixed by the time is hits the "present" and everyone else sees it.
But if you do let them post, at least make sure they can't post anonymously, please! That will at least keep the quality up (and punish the silly comment generators described above...).
Right, right, right!
I'm sure that righteous "gotcha" feeling is nice when you tell the non-paying client that they must, after all, pay up. BUT it's much better to deliver a final product, and explain that it will only work until the end of the month, and that the non-time-limited version will be installed when full payment has been received. And then do exactly what you said. And be very friendly about it, and don't charge for the work involved in removing the expiration date.
Everything is so much easier if you're straightforward and forthcoming about it. Not naive... but honest. Now you've gotten the money you wanted, *and* you have one less enemy.
--
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. Albert Einstein
There has been much discussion already about how the justice system is pretty skewed in its handing of malicious crackers (in the US, at least... I haven't heard much about crackers in Canada).
There's the Mitnick example, of course, where it really seems like he was not punished commensurate to the damage he actually caused. Basically, a lot of people were scared about the *money* that could have been lost due to his activities.
Now imagine if lives are on the line. Never mind sales lost, imagine lives that could be lost due to DDOS, or even a security hole in the servers managing the surgery (imagine someone poking their way through a system they stumbled across with all *kinds* of interesting, unfamiliar stuff on it... and suddenly the laser scalpel starts heading north).
I tend to agree that enforcement is generally impractical (and there have been lots of discussions around what may really be needed).
However, new laws can be *quite* helpful, especially if they get a lot of press. After all, spam works because people believe the claims, click the link, and give the spammers money.
The more people understand what "spam" is, and the fly-by-night operations that these really are, the less likely they'll be to cough up the cash, no matter how sadly underdeveloped their genitalia may be, or how willing they are to help a kind Nigerian gentleman.
Recognizing that you have received an *illegal* email makes it a little harder to get sucked into the promises.
Well, don't trivialize the dangers of the surface environment on Europa, though -- some scientists on record believe life can't go on without a decent cup of coffee in the morning, and none of our deep sea explorations have uncovered anything that even looks like it *might* be a suitable place to plug in a coffee bean grinder at the bottom of Earth's oceans (volcanic vents notwithstanding). What makes you think the situation will be any different at the bottom of Europa's oceans?
Oh, the vent thing - yeah, they're very hot at the source, but there's always the option of moving out just a tad so your pseudopods or cilia or what-have-you don't get charred off. There's usually a dead area immediately around the vent, then a little circle of life fighting it out a little further away, then more dead space where the water gets really cold.
Well, say your email server handles 300 users. It's better to use a solution that handles it on the server if at all possible, because it'll take forever to get each of those 300 users set up, but you can probably set up your server in 1 hr.
On the other hand, it is worth investigating any idea that will inflict *some* cost on the spammer, since it all adds up.
It's hard to outweigh the pretty dramatic income potentials of bulk email; they make enough money that it's worth it to purchase -- for example -- sophisticated tarpit-detection software if necessary.
Personally, I liked Larry Lessig's bounty idea: sending spam w/o a [ADV) header means, legally, that the first person who can prove you did it gets a $10K bounty out of your pocket)... but so far no one in govt has had any luck getting anything effective through.
I should add that I think it's very important for children to learn to be comfortable in their bodies. Self-confidence and happiness get a nice boost when you are healthy. It seems strange, but mental balance can be improved by developing good physical balance. We can also lead better lives if we are tuned into the needs of our bodies (like realizing that I'm about to insult someone simply because I'm starving hungry).
Too many kids never learn to jump, climb, walk safely on ice, balance on one foot, etc. etc. and they become adverse to risks in other areas of their lives as well, and/or constantly distracted by shame about their awkwardness and maladroitness.
If someone is too clumbsy to catch or throw properly
I like that, "clumbsy" -- part lumbering, part clumsy!
Anyway, I would agree that sports *can* be a good thing, but not in many cases...
I was an athletic kid. I ran track through high school and college, plus the occasional game of ultimate frisbee. I do get a high out of adrenaline and competition at an abstract level.
But I hated the organized contact sports, and still don't think that kind of thing adds a useful element to a kid's psyche. You end up with adults who can only think about the world comfortably in terms of "us and them", and "the home team vs. the enemy"... especially because of the way some parents get involved. You know how many fights *between dads* have broken out at little league games? It's scary.
The comradery is a good thing, but it shouldn't be "our hatred of the other team bonds us!" And it's always easy to define a group according to who's NOT in it.
Pickup basketball games with your friends are a completely different thing from the state championship where it *seems* like something huge is on the line.
Right! I think this is a perfectly valid job.
Losing a large amount of important data can be like having a house fire, but possibly *worse* because of how relatively simple it is to make a backup. That's the real salt in the wound -- in the end, you have no one to blame but yourself.
Every time (for however long it takes) that you sit down to re-do some of the work that you lost -- or to consider the photos or audio that was lost -- you have to think again about how much of an idiot you were to have not taken the proper precautions.
I haven't had any catastrophes since high school (well, it seemed like a catastrophe at the time... I lost 10 pages or a research paper when my little sister tripped on the power strip), but even that comparatively small loss still twinges when I think about it.
Some good points in the parent post...
I'm still a little dubious on the whole concept of this gaping divide between coders/scripters (like a lot of you), but let's leave that alone for a sec.
If your coders have no idea about the capabilities of the scripting crew, and visa versa, projects will often be mismatched to technologies. At a bare minimum, you need to have a tech lead or head developer who fully understands the scope (and future scope) of the project, who can match it with the most suitable language and/or environment. They work with management (who will know if, for example, you have 4 coders who'll be on the bench in a week) to make the final decision.
Choosing the technology should never be a purely mgmt decision, though, nor decided by someone who only understands one path to the solution!
If there's an oversimplification in management thinking (i.e., big project == Java/C++), it's the responsibility of the people who know better to straighten them out.
--
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Einstein
The real target audience of spam is NOT the developer who has downloaded special filtering software so that he won't be troubled by spam. It's not even the casual Outlook Express user who carefully flags each spam message to his built-in high-tech filter can learn what he wants to see (yes I'm looking ahead to ward off the obvious counter-arguments).
All of these people ALREADY KNOW that these messages are spam. They aren't the ones targetted. Filters are doomed to failure unless the underlying technology of email changes. And no, you can't just distribute a "base" filter for everyone - how does that help the guy who's auditioning for a bit part in a porno and that's all he talks about? How does it help the 2 women who like emailing each other jokes about penis size? Or the Nigerian who's trying to arrange sending $10,000 to his son in college in the US?
Clearly, if spam were no longer an effective means of marketing, it would largely stop. But that doesn't imply anything about what should be done to remove that incentive. It's like saying, "for our business to succeed, we need to increase our revenue/costs ratio".
We can make it excessively costly to use spam marketing techniques -- e.g., kill all the spammers, or really crack down on them legally (though assuming that spammers will accurately estimate their risk is questionable). Or we can reduce their returns, by trying to educate users, blocking spam (at the ISP level and/or at the user level).
I would like to get Barry Shein's insights as to what he would identify as the best leverage point in a complex system.
Personally, I think it would be a huge effort to educate the users. There's a sucker discovering the internet every minute, many of whom have sadly stunted genitalia and/or would really like to help that Nigerian fellow out of his bind.
Honestly, 200K/month on rent could be much worse based on where they are. I worked for a startup that had a rent that was likewise ridiculous (plus we paid astronomical amounts for *leasing* the furniture... friggin' purple chairs!). It finally ended a painful circling of the plughole at the end of last year.
Here's the clincher. You think we were in sunny California? Nope, upstate NY.
BTW, I signed up for Salon, anyway... I'm in a generous mood tonight. I'll feel like an idiot later if they go down in a month and all I did was fund 1/10 of a for-old-times-sake scooter, but I don't mind feeling like an idiot now and again.
I should put in a plug for Harpers, too - my wife worked there for a summer as an intern when we were still in school, researching the Harpers Index and reading submissions, books requesting reviews, etc... we got to read a few excellent books before they were published, she had all *kinds* of interesting stuff to talk about for the whole summer, plus now she gets Harpers for free for life! Anyway, it's dead-tree, but I find some really excellent tidbits in every issue. I don't always agree, but it provides good food for thought.
Well, we all tend to turn into our parents in some way or another. You seem to have made that leap... now guess what? The kid will just roll his eyes without even looking up and say "yeah, whatever, Dad".
Funny, he didn't even look up to see who it was...
Ah, think about it, anyway. If you just obeyed your parents, sure, you'd endure less pain, but who the hell wants to live a sterile life like that (think bell jar)? Personally, I don't want to lead a life where nothing ever goes wrong. Pain defines pleasure, etc..
I guess we're all shaped by our screw-ups and mistakes. Hopefully we don't end up too... um... misshapen.
Maybe they have a good idea here... I have no idea because they don't explain it. Here are the in-depth details of how payments work:
Browse the Web and download items you wish to purchase. (The Web site will indicate what content you can buy with Peppercoin). To pay for items, launch the PepperPanel viewer and sign in with your user name and password.
The PepperPanel will display price and other information about the content. You will be given the choice to Open or Save the file. Either option will generate payment to the content owner.
You will be billed for purchases by Peppercoin to the payment instrument used in establishing your account.
Notice how they leave out everything we'd want to actually *know*. And, uh, save or open the *file*? What's this file? Obviously, I want to know WHEN I will be billed. Prepay vs. Postpay? Is that not a freq. asked question, somehow?
I'm also missing the point of the randomness, except for skimming purposes. Where's the extra work in keep track of an exact balance? One number in the database per customer and per merchant, and settle each account at the end of each month. There's no reason they'd have to be whole numbers; that's not what the cc companies care about.
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Einstein: Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
When I was 5 or 6 I asked my parents if we could go to the Gobi desert for summer vacation, because I read they'd found dinosaur eggs there in my dinosaur books.
By the time I got through middle school, though, I'd learned what paleontology, etc. was really about, and knew I didn't want to go there. How did I learn? Videos in school, more books, etc.. The adults around me knew, when I asked for more info.
It's not that incredible that a lot of college-aged kids today don't understand what the people who work on computers, the internet, etc. really do.
Their parents don't understand, either. Most of their teachers are struggling to learn AOL.
By the time current elementary schoolers are having their own kids (and/or teaching them, and writing books that they read, etc.), this problem will be long gone.
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Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler. -Einstein (Albert, not Alfred)
Notice how these comments are getting horrible ratings? Well, it makes sense; they're almost all worthless.
Why? Well, what interesting/insightful/funny comment can be made on this subject, especially on slashdot?
This is a discussion forum with a general tradition of *avoiding* usage of given names. Right off the bat, this causes abortive comments like, "I have a really interesting name, kinda like this other name, but I'm not going to tell you what it is, because my boss might be googling me."
And what insight can a techie offer about given names? Yeah, some of us have the same name. Some don't. They serve a useful purpose, but not one really worth talking about.
I guess some names are sorta funny, and some naming stories are funny, but nothing that's going to make you wet your pants. I know of a guy whose parents wanted to give him an English name but didn't know any English themselves, so they grabbed a book for inspiration... and named him "Oxford University Press".
See? Ok, but who would moderate that up past a 2?
New discussion: how can we help our slashdot editors to select better discussion topics?
I remember they used a very similar trick on the hell.com site -- they explained to you that the contents of your computer had been uploaded to their server while you were browsing, and "proved" it with an HTML fileupload (whose browse button was labelled "View Files on Server" or something like that).
I'll bet they scared a lot of people...
The "tree" idea won't really catch on simply because most of the alternate branches tend to be mistakes, deadends, etc..
I think most of the time when you hit a link, back out, and go somewhere else, it's because you didn't find what you wanted. Obviously this isn't always true, but even if it's only true 90% of the time, all of those stumpy little branches on the tree are just extra, unwanted info that will confuse the user.
I'm curious to see if research would agree with me.... maybe the tree view would be useful if it only saved alternate branches more than 1 link long.
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Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
I would agree with this only to a degree -- personally, if I immediately turn my mind to something engaging (like some /. discussions), it doesn't help me with the problem I'm working on. I need to take breaks and just go for a walk to think. Avoiding structured thought for a while helps much more than intense thought on a different (non work-related) problem will... especially if I get really interested and suddenly find I've wasted 4 hours, which I seem to be prone to if I'm not careful.
THAT SAID, I find it highly demoralizing when a company prevents me from reading theonion.com once a week (which my current employer does). I also have to give a detailed reason and wait a week if I want to make anything other than a port 80 connection to any server outside the firewall, even just FTP or SSH.
I think it should be more an issue of self-discipline, like anything else. There are people where I work who stand around chatting for 3-4 hours a day... I don't see the company locking them in their cubicles to prevent this!! They'll just be fired if their work is seriously impacted.