It seems to me that at the "fringes" of the Linux community you find these kind of "research"-driven development groups that have for a long time been producing technologies and various "cool things" that are ahead of both Windows and Mac - since around the time of the earliest versions of enlightenment. But these things (e.g. Xgl, e17 etc.) never seem to quite be integrated into the "mainstream" somehow - it just seems to be a perpetual "research playground" of sorts for Linux hobbyists.
I think that might be the point - flamewar = lots of pageviews = more ad banner impressions. Intelligent calm discussion = low pageviews = fewer ad banner impressions. Still,/. seems to be increasingly attracting a younger, less intelligent crowd, so the value of those ad banner impressions is questionable. It's not true anymore that most people here want to discuss topics of actual intelligence - it used to be, but now I think we're in the minority.
OK, kill the messenger, fine - it was an extremely lame critique of Windows. But it doesn't change the fact that Windows really is boring, ugly and uninspired:)
I've been using WinXP pro since pre-launch, on multiple computers, with several hardware upgrades, and have never, ever, had a single BSOD
Maybe that's because WinXP's default behaviour is to spontaneously reboot rather than BSOD. It's probably happened a few times to you, and you probably just thought "WTF?" and then went on working after it restarted. I've seen XP boot up with the "... has recovered from a serious error" message many times.
Just who do you think is going to invade China? Or did you mean that they might invade other countries, who will kill the invading men in self-defence? The latter seems like a more likely scenario.
I don't think there is a country at the moment powerful enough to invade China on their own turf, unless nukes are used.
I don't if I would put gun manufacturers in the same boat as ignorant users. If anything, gun manufacturers are the ones creating the botnets
Just to clarify, yes, that's exactly what I meant! The ones who create/run the botnets and sell the services are the 'gun manufacturers' in that analogy.
I don't blame the users whose systems have been compromised at all. Firstly, they're just pawns being used in the whole thing, and it cannot really be their fault, they were just sold defective products without being warned of the defects - they're ultimately victims. Secondly, they really aren't part of the cause of spam in any sense (unless they're buying spammers' products;)... as I said, one should go straight to the source.
From TA: "In the near future, it is certain that securing young and capable manpower will become even more difficult...and the security industry will feel the full brunt of the impact," the company said in a statement.
The unemployment rate in Japan is around 5% and has been rising for years now. Further, unemployment rates are usually highest among the youngest employable members of society. How can they claim that it is going to become harder and harder to find and employ human labor, in a country where unemployment keeps rising? Sounds like they're just trying to justify putting even more people out of work with their product. They've made a product and want to sell it, so now they blab about "protecting the elderly" (not the children? heh) and how there's nobody to hire so you must use robots. Is it a coincidence that a rise in automation over the last few decades has seen a corresponding rise in unemployment in almost all industrialised nations?
This is something false that people think is true because it keeps getting repeated over and over by people on sites like slashdot. The US have the most spammers in the world. Here are the top ten spammers:
United States: 42.11 per cent
South Korea: 13.43 per cent
China (including Hong Kong): 8.44 per cent
Canada: 5.71 per cent
Brazil: 3.34 per cent
Japan: 2.57 per cent
France: 1.37 per cent
Spain: 1.18 per cent
United Kingdom: 1.13 per cent
Germany: 1.03 per cent
Within the US, IIRC, the number one spamming state is Florida.
One reason this falsety spread though is that Chinese server admins used to have very lax attitudes to open relays, which meant that the (mostly American) spammers often used Chinese servers to send their spam. Russia comes in because Russian mafia hacker groups are known to set up botnets - armies of infected zombie XP machines connected to the Net - and they then sell the use of the botnets for doing things like sending spam to (mostly American) spam groups.
IMO blaming the Chinese and Russians in these cases for spam is like blaming the manufacturer of a gun used in a murder, instead of the person who decided to pull the trigger. You don't fix a problem by blocking the symptoms - you go to the source of the problem.
Nowadays, Joe Aviation-lover probably contributes to aviation articles on Wikipedia.
"When the Internet first hit", people created lots of disparate Web sites all over the place, with little bits of information spread all over. It was hard finding and piecing together all this information if you needed to know more about something, because there would be a hundred different websites on a topic, by a hundred different people, all thin on info. Wikipedia was a stroke of genius - they got those hundred people together to instead create one single, central, quality resource on that topic. Now those hundred little websites that used to exist are made redundant - Wikipedia supercedes all of them - so in a sense we don't really need to mourn their loss. Of course it's more impersonal, but blogs have largely replaced "the personal web site" as a mechanism for expressing yourself, and despite all the cynical comments on slashdot, blogs are popular and do serve a purpose (of course Sturgeon's law applies, but it always did before to "personal web sites" too).
The Web hasn't outlived it's usefulness at all - it's just changed. In fact, with sites like Wikipedia, I'd say it's more useful than ever before - I consult Wikipedia all the time, it's got an incredible wealth of quality information in it, and growing rapidly.
(Yeah I probably sound like a Wikipedia shill or something.)
The two survey different sets of sites, so it's not unexpected to see some differences between the two. It's just "noise".. on the whole they should reveal the same trends. Both reveal a strong and continuing long-term growth of Apache, and both reveal that IIS's share of the market has been more or less stagnant for some years now - seemingly stuck at around 25%, with a few ups and downs here and there, but not going anywhere - in fact declining very slightly.
Because the total number of servers is growing so quickly, IIS can still present the stats in a way that appears to show strong growth, because 25% of a rapidly increasing number is also a rapidly increasing number. It's just that that 25% figure is not really getting higher.
I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't seem that worried about their stagnation in the web server market (in % share not absolute sales numbers). I guess IIS just doesn't offer enough additional 'marginal utility' over Apache to justify the extra cost. However it's interesting to think that Microsoft would most probably gain a huge additional percentage of market share if they dropped their server prices, by, say, 50% - they'd still be making profit just off the existing sales, and they'd be making even more because of the greater economies of scale from simply selling more. And a higher percentage market share is strategically important - so why don't they?
The problem is Microsoft just calculates how much they expect to pay in fines etc. each year, and simply work it into their operating costs and into their pricing. Believe me, Bill Gates is laughing about this, all the way to the bank, because to Microsoft, this is just another cost of doing business on the balance sheet... and like any other operating cost, they just make sure their prices cover it - so he knows it is in fact his own customers that are paying for this in the end. This is actually the worst part, because customers had already paid for the monopolistic practices, now customers must pay the fines too.
Microsoft can go on like this forever, because the very illegal practices they get fined for are what keep them in the position that allows them to charge 'what the market will bear' for their products.
What we need is some kind of 'three strikes' law for companies that operate like this. The tricky part is the remedies should not harm the customers even more - the remedies should undo the harm that customers have incurred. E.g. forcing MS to genuinely open up some of their proprietary file formats, to allow competition into that market.
I know people will argue "but Microsoft helps keep the US economy going by bringing in lots of foreign income". But ultimately it's bad for the US economy if you just keep propping up an inefficient, expensive company - because sooner or later, an efficient, nimble foreign company is going to create "the next big thing", and then the US will have nothing in that market. Rather force your companies to stay on their toes, and stay good, so that the world has a genuine incentive to stay hooked on MS software, i.e. actually want to stay hooked on MS software rather.
Astroturfers are killing slashdot. But people fall for it and believe it, because few people realise astroturfing has become such a commonplace 'guerilla marketing' technique - they still think it's tinfoil hat stuff. That's why it works so well.
Most ad agencies that do work for big corps these days actually have two divisions, an 'above the line' and 'below the line' marketing division. It's standard fare for big companies to place "dual" ad contracts with the two divisions - one for 'traditional' marketing, the other for deceptive marketing like astroturfing, fake web sites, and so on.
Slashdot now reminds me of that old joke about KKK meetings consisting mostly of undercover reporters these days. Here half the discussion is astroturfers. Sometimes I even suspect we're seeing astroturfers working for one company arguing with those from another!
"Stephanie"'s post was an extremely obvious example of a 'paid shill' post - it's totally 'formula', from the textbook. Often these guys even repeat their own posts though, and you can catch them out with a bit of googling.
Not sure how the above is a troll?? Must be astroturf moderators again.
Anyway, MS are not exactly known for being in favour of user privacy. In Media Player for example they added a feature that keeps track of everything you watch / listen to, and sends that information back to Microsoft. They had this feature on by default until it was discovered and there was a small media furore; now the feature is off by default, but it's labelled, I'm not joking, as the "Customer Experience Improvement Program" (sic) - you click a checkbox that is labelled "I want to help make Microsoft software and services even better by sending Player usage data to Microsoft" - who would say no to that??
This post is moderatd as "insightful", but it's really a troll.
Hey astroturfer, why not let the moderators decide for themselves if a post is a troll? They don't need to be "guided" by you.
The point is clear... MS is always behind, but always playing the game of "hey the next version will be really amazing", and people keep falling for it. Sure some of their recent product offerings have caught up...... to 1996, that's the whole point. It's the "two birds in a bush are better than one in the hand" marketing trick, except they don't sell two birds in the end, they sell one.
There was no "genocide" - the people were illegally moved off their land by the Botswana government, so the government could sell the diamond-rich land to De Beers (sounds a little familiar considering the recent US 'eminent domain' ruling, doesn't it?). Not quite as bad as genocide, but still completely despicable - wholesale theft.
Yes, GP is misinformed, DeBeers was barred from doing business in the US since just after WWII and until this year, due to a price-fixing case. De Beers pled guilty (paying something like $10 million IIRC) in exchange for being allowed to business in the US again.
I know you were joking, but someone modded you insightful: The GDP of Russia is $1.4 trillion; Norway's is "only" $138 billion, there is no question this was a promotion.
Anyone can grow tomatoes in their backyard too, yet the large commercial tomato farmers still make a lot of money. What's the difference? It's always more convenient to buy something in the store than to grow it yourself.
Microsoft pulled this "don't switch to alternatives just yet, the next version of Office will have an open format" trick the last two versions of Office. And you're falling for it a third time? Don't you people learn from repetition? I think Bush said it best, or tried to: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"
There is no doubt that there will be something "non-open" about the formats when Office 12 arrives. Microsoft are playing this game of "we're moving the direction of moving open formats", the catch is that they will forever just be "moving in that direction" - they'll never "arrive".
I suspect that in a few years you'll be posting on slashdot again with "don't bother switching to OpenOffice 3, Office 13 is going to have an open format".
Microsoft will give up their proprietary formats when you pry them from Bill Gate's cold, dead fingers --- the core of their entire business model is that nobody else is compatible with Office.
taking the whole cover off so you can see the drive platters
Uh, the idea is that you actually plug this into your computer and use the hard drive. How long do you expect it to last with the platters exposed? The "art" part of this thing is the actual idea of integrating a live hard disk into a painting - if you just stick a dead hard disk to a painting, then there's nothing.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that at the "fringes" of the Linux community you find these kind of "research"-driven development groups that have for a long time been producing technologies and various "cool things" that are ahead of both Windows and Mac - since around the time of the earliest versions of enlightenment. But these things (e.g. Xgl, e17 etc.) never seem to quite be integrated into the "mainstream" somehow - it just seems to be a perpetual "research playground" of sorts for Linux hobbyists.
This sounds exactly like programmers in the commercial world too .. :)
I think that might be the point - flamewar = lots of pageviews = more ad banner impressions. Intelligent calm discussion = low pageviews = fewer ad banner impressions. Still, /. seems to be increasingly attracting a younger, less intelligent crowd, so the value of those ad banner impressions is questionable. It's not true anymore that most people here want to discuss topics of actual intelligence - it used to be, but now I think we're in the minority.
OK, kill the messenger, fine - it was an extremely lame critique of Windows. But it doesn't change the fact that Windows really is boring, ugly and uninspired :)
I've been using WinXP pro since pre-launch, on multiple computers, with several hardware upgrades, and have never, ever, had a single BSOD
Maybe that's because WinXP's default behaviour is to spontaneously reboot rather than BSOD. It's probably happened a few times to you, and you probably just thought "WTF?" and then went on working after it restarted. I've seen XP boot up with the "... has recovered from a serious error" message many times.
Just who do you think is going to invade China? Or did you mean that they might invade other countries, who will kill the invading men in self-defence? The latter seems like a more likely scenario.
I don't think there is a country at the moment powerful enough to invade China on their own turf, unless nukes are used.
Because there isn't a "-1 Fscking stupid"?
I don't if I would put gun manufacturers in the same boat as ignorant users. If anything, gun manufacturers are the ones creating the botnets
Just to clarify, yes, that's exactly what I meant! The ones who create/run the botnets and sell the services are the 'gun manufacturers' in that analogy.
I don't blame the users whose systems have been compromised at all. Firstly, they're just pawns being used in the whole thing, and it cannot really be their fault, they were just sold defective products without being warned of the defects - they're ultimately victims. Secondly, they really aren't part of the cause of spam in any sense (unless they're buying spammers' products ;) ... as I said, one should go straight to the source.
From TA: "In the near future, it is certain that securing young and capable manpower will become even more difficult...and the security industry will feel the full brunt of the impact," the company said in a statement.
The unemployment rate in Japan is around 5% and has been rising for years now. Further, unemployment rates are usually highest among the youngest employable members of society. How can they claim that it is going to become harder and harder to find and employ human labor, in a country where unemployment keeps rising? Sounds like they're just trying to justify putting even more people out of work with their product. They've made a product and want to sell it, so now they blab about "protecting the elderly" (not the children? heh) and how there's nobody to hire so you must use robots. Is it a coincidence that a rise in automation over the last few decades has seen a corresponding rise in unemployment in almost all industrialised nations?
This is something false that people think is true because it keeps getting repeated over and over by people on sites like slashdot. The US have the most spammers in the world. Here are the top ten spammers:
United States: 42.11 per cent
South Korea: 13.43 per cent
China (including Hong Kong): 8.44 per cent
Canada: 5.71 per cent
Brazil: 3.34 per cent
Japan: 2.57 per cent
France: 1.37 per cent
Spain: 1.18 per cent
United Kingdom: 1.13 per cent
Germany: 1.03 per cent
Within the US, IIRC, the number one spamming state is Florida.
One reason this falsety spread though is that Chinese server admins used to have very lax attitudes to open relays, which meant that the (mostly American) spammers often used Chinese servers to send their spam. Russia comes in because Russian mafia hacker groups are known to set up botnets - armies of infected zombie XP machines connected to the Net - and they then sell the use of the botnets for doing things like sending spam to (mostly American) spam groups.
IMO blaming the Chinese and Russians in these cases for spam is like blaming the manufacturer of a gun used in a murder, instead of the person who decided to pull the trigger. You don't fix a problem by blocking the symptoms - you go to the source of the problem.
Nowadays, Joe Aviation-lover probably contributes to aviation articles on Wikipedia.
"When the Internet first hit", people created lots of disparate Web sites all over the place, with little bits of information spread all over. It was hard finding and piecing together all this information if you needed to know more about something, because there would be a hundred different websites on a topic, by a hundred different people, all thin on info. Wikipedia was a stroke of genius - they got those hundred people together to instead create one single, central, quality resource on that topic. Now those hundred little websites that used to exist are made redundant - Wikipedia supercedes all of them - so in a sense we don't really need to mourn their loss. Of course it's more impersonal, but blogs have largely replaced "the personal web site" as a mechanism for expressing yourself, and despite all the cynical comments on slashdot, blogs are popular and do serve a purpose (of course Sturgeon's law applies, but it always did before to "personal web sites" too).
The Web hasn't outlived it's usefulness at all - it's just changed. In fact, with sites like Wikipedia, I'd say it's more useful than ever before - I consult Wikipedia all the time, it's got an incredible wealth of quality information in it, and growing rapidly.
(Yeah I probably sound like a Wikipedia shill or something.)
The two survey different sets of sites, so it's not unexpected to see some differences between the two. It's just "noise" .. on the whole they should reveal the same trends. Both reveal a strong and continuing long-term growth of Apache, and both reveal that IIS's share of the market has been more or less stagnant for some years now - seemingly stuck at around 25%, with a few ups and downs here and there, but not going anywhere - in fact declining very slightly.
Because the total number of servers is growing so quickly, IIS can still present the stats in a way that appears to show strong growth, because 25% of a rapidly increasing number is also a rapidly increasing number. It's just that that 25% figure is not really getting higher.
I'm surprised Microsoft doesn't seem that worried about their stagnation in the web server market (in % share not absolute sales numbers). I guess IIS just doesn't offer enough additional 'marginal utility' over Apache to justify the extra cost. However it's interesting to think that Microsoft would most probably gain a huge additional percentage of market share if they dropped their server prices, by, say, 50% - they'd still be making profit just off the existing sales, and they'd be making even more because of the greater economies of scale from simply selling more. And a higher percentage market share is strategically important - so why don't they?
The problem is Microsoft just calculates how much they expect to pay in fines etc. each year, and simply work it into their operating costs and into their pricing. Believe me, Bill Gates is laughing about this, all the way to the bank, because to Microsoft, this is just another cost of doing business on the balance sheet ... and like any other operating cost, they just make sure their prices cover it - so he knows it is in fact his own customers that are paying for this in the end. This is actually the worst part, because customers had already paid for the monopolistic practices, now customers must pay the fines too.
Microsoft can go on like this forever, because the very illegal practices they get fined for are what keep them in the position that allows them to charge 'what the market will bear' for their products.
What we need is some kind of 'three strikes' law for companies that operate like this. The tricky part is the remedies should not harm the customers even more - the remedies should undo the harm that customers have incurred. E.g. forcing MS to genuinely open up some of their proprietary file formats, to allow competition into that market.
I know people will argue "but Microsoft helps keep the US economy going by bringing in lots of foreign income". But ultimately it's bad for the US economy if you just keep propping up an inefficient, expensive company - because sooner or later, an efficient, nimble foreign company is going to create "the next big thing", and then the US will have nothing in that market. Rather force your companies to stay on their toes, and stay good, so that the world has a genuine incentive to stay hooked on MS software, i.e. actually want to stay hooked on MS software rather.
Astroturfers are killing slashdot. But people fall for it and believe it, because few people realise astroturfing has become such a commonplace 'guerilla marketing' technique - they still think it's tinfoil hat stuff. That's why it works so well.
Most ad agencies that do work for big corps these days actually have two divisions, an 'above the line' and 'below the line' marketing division. It's standard fare for big companies to place "dual" ad contracts with the two divisions - one for 'traditional' marketing, the other for deceptive marketing like astroturfing, fake web sites, and so on.
Slashdot now reminds me of that old joke about KKK meetings consisting mostly of undercover reporters these days. Here half the discussion is astroturfers. Sometimes I even suspect we're seeing astroturfers working for one company arguing with those from another!
"Stephanie"'s post was an extremely obvious example of a 'paid shill' post - it's totally 'formula', from the textbook. Often these guys even repeat their own posts though, and you can catch them out with a bit of googling.
Not sure how the above is a troll?? Must be astroturf moderators again.
Anyway, MS are not exactly known for being in favour of user privacy. In Media Player for example they added a feature that keeps track of everything you watch / listen to, and sends that information back to Microsoft. They had this feature on by default until it was discovered and there was a small media furore; now the feature is off by default, but it's labelled, I'm not joking, as the "Customer Experience Improvement Program" (sic) - you click a checkbox that is labelled "I want to help make Microsoft software and services even better by sending Player usage data to Microsoft" - who would say no to that??
Heh - just when I was about to reply 'this isn't the movies, noone would ever do that!'
This post is moderatd as "insightful", but it's really a troll.
Hey astroturfer, why not let the moderators decide for themselves if a post is a troll? They don't need to be "guided" by you.
The point is clear ... MS is always behind, but always playing the game of "hey the next version will be really amazing", and people keep falling for it. Sure some of their recent product offerings have caught up ...... to 1996, that's the whole point. It's the "two birds in a bush are better than one in the hand" marketing trick, except they don't sell two birds in the end, they sell one.
There was no "genocide" - the people were illegally moved off their land by the Botswana government, so the government could sell the diamond-rich land to De Beers (sounds a little familiar considering the recent US 'eminent domain' ruling, doesn't it?). Not quite as bad as genocide, but still completely despicable - wholesale theft.
Yes, GP is misinformed, DeBeers was barred from doing business in the US since just after WWII and until this year, due to a price-fixing case. De Beers pled guilty (paying something like $10 million IIRC) in exchange for being allowed to business in the US again.
I know you were joking, but someone modded you insightful: The GDP of Russia is $1.4 trillion; Norway's is "only" $138 billion, there is no question this was a promotion.
"said it" != "coined", numbnuts
Anyone can grow tomatoes in their backyard too, yet the large commercial tomato farmers still make a lot of money. What's the difference? It's always more convenient to buy something in the store than to grow it yourself.
Microsoft pulled this "don't switch to alternatives just yet, the next version of Office will have an open format" trick the last two versions of Office. And you're falling for it a third time? Don't you people learn from repetition? I think Bush said it best, or tried to: "fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me"
There is no doubt that there will be something "non-open" about the formats when Office 12 arrives. Microsoft are playing this game of "we're moving the direction of moving open formats", the catch is that they will forever just be "moving in that direction" - they'll never "arrive".
I suspect that in a few years you'll be posting on slashdot again with "don't bother switching to OpenOffice 3, Office 13 is going to have an open format".
Microsoft will give up their proprietary formats when you pry them from Bill Gate's cold, dead fingers --- the core of their entire business model is that nobody else is compatible with Office.
taking the whole cover off so you can see the drive platters
Uh, the idea is that you actually plug this into your computer and use the hard drive. How long do you expect it to last with the platters exposed? The "art" part of this thing is the actual idea of integrating a live hard disk into a painting - if you just stick a dead hard disk to a painting, then there's nothing.
Five in a row? Might there not be something else wrong with your system, that is causing the drives to blow?