whoa - I think the parent poster took quite a leap there. At least I read TFA (apologies for actually reading it) as saying:
a) it's impractical/unrealistic that a good argument can be separated from the motivation and credibility of who puts it forth.
b) debunking a falsehood is inherently more complicated than expressing it, especially in the case of arguments being made for and amongst people and groups with limited domain expertise. Or to simplify it: TFA posits, that the truth is too complicated to win an argument.
Quite depressing actually.
And I did not read a conclusion into TFA. But I might come to my own, and it would be quite different than the one suggested by the parent poster: The standard bearers for the truth need to simplify (and thus falsify) their arguments to carry the day in public debate. i.e. in the best case the "right" things end up being done for the "wrong" reasons. And I would further argue that scholars and scientists are actually not the best people to craft and lead that kind of debate. Maybe that would be... marketers and... (gasp!) politicians?
Props to you scudsucker -- looks like you've been around quite a bit longer - although even at my userid, it's been over three years since I got myself an id and became a regular reader. So you are clearly a very patient human being, a noble quality indeed:-)
There's only that slight problem, that one only finds out that a story was lame after one has wasted one's time to read it:-(
While you're right, that a 2.2 release of whatever may not be important or interesting, but at least it's genuine news, which at least for me puts it above a teenage fanboi blog, which isn't even an attempt at a real article but a rather non original routine fan blog. I have an iPod and I like it a lot - but to be honest, that article was hard to take.
This kind of front page post reminded me a lot of digg, where the masses rule - and I'm surmising that/. feels the pressure of digg in the war for clicks and therefore revenue - at least that's how I'm interpreting the ajax makeover currently happening at/. after so many years of staying put in the site design department.
And I clicked on the "read more" link just to post my comment. I'm not sure, if there are better ways to communicate to the editors. And as you probably noted, I didn't go into a raging flame/. post. Yours isn't flaming me either, so that's why I'm responding.
I did offer my sincere understanding of how hard it is to be in this business. But since this story was about Apple, it had struck me that Apple was in a similar predicament with feeling huge pressure from the popular choice MS, and in the early 90s tried to become more like them, allowing 3rd party white box makers, getting CEO's from Pepsi and IBM etc.
So at least to me, this kind of front page article was a step down from previous years. Even the famous Roland P. articles were mostly at least click-thru's to some real news.
So imho, I'm sensing some desperation at/. (I'm surmising it's digg), and I tried to suggest an alternative way of looking at their business problem: don't become like the competition, but keep riding your niche market, do that really well and maybe find another niche where you can re-apply your fundamental business strengths and own that one (like Apple did with the iPod).
But of course, I know, that it's quite silly to think that anyone who matters at/. would ever see my post, or even if they did, find reason to slow down and maybe reconsider what seems to be their strategy.
So this was just an honest heartfelt post by a single non-important reader, who senses that one of his very favorite websites is committing slow business suicide. And that makes me a bit sad.
And yes, I agree with both kinds of moderations I've gotten to this point - this is somewhat offtopic but in some other way it isn't.
This isn't a new observation, but it's the first time that I'm writing about it. Probably because I'm sensing the end of my time here at Slashdot. I have not journaled worth mentioning, and not commented worth mentioning - but I was an avid reader and meta-moderator (and yes, I read many of the articles I meta-modded and their responses, to make sure that I would get non obvious situations right).
The news business, even in it's blog form is a tough business indeed. When the mother of all blogs (i.e Slashdot itself) needs to go trolling for clicks with a front page link to a teenage fanboy's blog related to iPods, it's a sad day indeed.
This article is neither "news for nerds", nor "stuff that matters".
But it's a predictable click gatherer - and it's been promoted to the front page by the Cmdr himself, not a junior apprentice editor.
The Cmdr hasn't lost his marbles - quite the opposite, he has a business to run - and this business is desperately competing with the shrill upstarts with editorial models solely around popularity, rather than quality.
The unwashed masses supply more clicks than even moderately intelligent and critical thinkers.
Populism at work, because populism pays. So now we have editorial control trying to emulate populism. Not the first and not the last time that will happen.
I understand that, but I see a fatal disconnect with Slashdot doing it. Slashdot doesn't do populism best. Slashdot's strength is (was) in quality control (editorial control , followed by discussion with moderation and meta moderation).
However, when the first input (editorial control) to the process isn't even remotely attempting quality control, all other quality control processes are becoming rather irrelevant.
Or to put it more bluntly, if the whole story is a troll, the comments, moderations and meta-moderations can't untroll it.
So I think Slashdot is losing it's way in this battle and like all good things will slowly fade away.
Reminds me a bit of apple in the early to mid 90s. They tried to emulate the populists of their day in their industry, when that's not what they did best.
Why am I mentioning apple?
Because against all odds, apple found its way again and came back - and found that their original essence could get them back into their highly respected and quite nicely profitable niche and they even could become the number one popular choice in another field.
Here's to hoping that Slashdot can do the same, because I miss Slashdot without its original essence.
I understand it's customary not to RTFA before commenting. However for those amongst us, who do break that rule from time to time, the TFA is actually discussing that very issue in the paragraph "Traffic Mangling":
Once you've got the Wiley hacker attacking your honeypot, the last thing you want to do is let him attack the rest of your network from the honeypot, or worse, attack someone else's network. A good line of defense in this instance is traffic mangling.
Traffic mangling requires an inline box running software like Hogwash....
if you have to support windows boxes, you will probably have to support vista some day. might as well get a headstart and get your hands dirty (best way to learn) even if you don't plan on rolling it out for a long time (a long time after release).
...only if you don't mind wasting a lot of time with issues which will be fixed by Service Pack 2.
try the OpenBook extension. It fixes that problem. And I wouldn't be surprised, if it would be incorporated in the standard Firefox "real soon now"(tm).
What a great idea. Then the spammers can set up high-powered transmitters, and suddenly your wireless earbeans start getting ads like "Do you have a erectile dysfunction? Get cheap Mexican Viagra" or "My name is Daniel Tabooti, and I am the attache of the former Minister of Public Works in Nairobi"
I'm not so sure about that, since
spamming is a very low percentage game, so the spam transmitter would have to:
reach millions of listeners
while staying undetected
while keeping the costs for that transmitter and its operation very low
audio spam would probably have an even lower response rate than email spam where the recipient can just click on links, since in audio spam the listener would have to remember the link the spammer has given her/him and at some later point make an effort to go to that site.
Red Hat 9 is still being updated via the Fedora Legacy project and associated repositories.
So it might be argued, that EOL is an overrated marketing speak concept. Sometimes an EOL product is still rather well supported. Other times I have experienced not yet EOL'd products suffer from very poor to non-existing support, because the software supplier had started to withdraw oxygen by removing all of their better people from supporting that product.
So I have become very weary of EOL marketing speak.
I stopped taking extended warranties quite a while ago, since over time, it averages out, so I've become essentially "self-insured".
Through "self-insuring" I have several advantages:
I keep the extra high margin, the insurance typically means to the provider.
I get to buy something different, if an item fails
* could be newer model
* could be different brand
* could be different store
* could be something totally different
Having lived on both sides of the Antlantic ocean, I have come to the conclusion, that things like highways/freeways, cars and dwellings being generally larger (per person) in North America has a lot to do with the much lower population density / much more space per person.
The lower density generally means land is less expensive. Therefore roads can be bigger, parking spots can be larger. Dwellings can be larger. Larger cars fit nicely onto the larger roads and larger parking spots.
Lower population density makes it less efficient to build and operate public transportation systems, so the car is more important in low density areas of North America. For example in New York City or in Toronto with their obviously high density, public transport is as evolved as anything in Europe, and many people don't even have cars. But in most places in North America, it is really quite unrealistc to live without a car.
Quite possibly related to that, taxation (direct and indirect) of cars and/or gasoline is much lower in the US and Canada, therefore larger cars are not nearly as expensive to operate in North America as they are in most European countries.
And believe me, every European visitor I've had, thoroughly enjoyed my larger car and my larger dwelling, and would love to have a bigger dwelling and car, if it wasn't so expensive and inconvenient (parking etc.)
Finally, I would further dare to submit, that a lot of Japanese people think that many European cars and dwellings and people are rather oversized.
And abundance vs. a shortage of physical space per person makes a huge difference in many every-day life situations, resulting costs and people's attitudes towards "what it normal".
I agree, companies don't usually have and probably shouldn't have ideologies. However, companies should have certain business value systems. A value system makes it possible for a customer, reseller, or investor to make an intelligent longer term investment in product/services and/or shares of said comapny.
Part of a company's value system should probably be to avoid screwing anyone over, like customers, resellers or shareholders. Judging by quite a number of the stories, that I've been reading, they may have done that while they were riding high with the dotcom bubble.
I personally have been deeply affected as a customer, when Sun purchased the Java application server company called NetDynamics, and promptly discontinued to properly support it, and when J2EE came along, there was no proper migration path from NetDynamics to a J2EE version of NetDynamics. NetDynamics customers were told to convert to Sun's J2EE server. Since my company had built an entire software product suite on top of NetDynamics, this action by Sun created a significant problem for us, both in terms of wasted time and wasted money to perform a conversion, rather than evolving our software.
Not surprisingly, we migrated to a non Sun J2EE application server.
I suspect we were not alone. And I further suspect that this type of behaviour over the long term loses a lot of customers and revenue.
Maybe, if there was all new company leadership, who would make Sun trustworthy again, there would be a chance of survival. What good is all the best engineering, if you can't trust someone?
Just because something is on a blog doesn't make it bad by itself. There's so much junk on traditional media, too. Isn't that pretty obvious by now?
The source is no guarantee as New York Times readers are painfully aware of. And while the signal to noise ratio on/. may not be particularly high, nonetheless there are some very well reasearched and/or thought out comments amongst all the junk, which in quality easily compete with or surpass anything in the traditional media.
Let's judge each article (news or commentary) by the research it contains and the intelligence of arguments it makes, and leave it at that. Of course, that's more work for the reader or someone who comments - but the truth is always more work...
I can only wonder: MS really is in quite deep trouble with their customers, especially those, who have paid big bucks to have the right to upgrades of their products. Since Longhorn is a long way out, and any upgrades (OS or Office) seem not hugely attractive, why is anyone paying the maintenance fees, which were designed to save you money on product upgrades?
MS has made their staunchest customers (i.e. the executives and managers having talked their companies into spending the extra money on maintenance) look absolutely foolish. So now, they desprately need to give those folks a story to tell their bosses, why they should not get fired for such a wanton waste of their companies' money.
Playing this security card shows an amazing act of desparation by a wounded giant. If even Gartner starts to critisize MS, there is a lot going wrong in the belly of the beast.
This type of action is a bit like a war. Bombing an apparently guilty party may make you feel better, and maybe even act as a deterrent to others.
However, there will be innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. And the author is giving up the moral (and in some jurisdictions the legal) high ground.
I somehow doubt, that this software behaviour will increase his sales - possibly the opposite might happen, i.e. sales will tank, because legitimate users might be afraid to be caught in the crossfire. So while he may be able to re-appear (or have the software re-appear) under a different name, he therefore would lose the goodwill associated with his and the current software name.
It is very understandable that someone reacts harshly to being under attack, but it does not necessarily make it the wisest thing to do, even for oneself.
Slashdot Mirror
did you write this just for this thread? If yes, my hat's off to you. +5 Funny doesn't do it full karma justice.
whoa - I think the parent poster took quite a leap there. At least I read TFA (apologies for actually reading it) as saying:
... marketers and ... (gasp!) politicians?
a) it's impractical/unrealistic that a good argument can be separated from the motivation and credibility of who puts it forth.
b) debunking a falsehood is inherently more complicated than expressing it, especially in the case of arguments being made for and amongst people and groups with limited domain expertise. Or to simplify it: TFA posits, that the truth is too complicated to win an argument.
Quite depressing actually.
And I did not read a conclusion into TFA. But I might come to my own, and it would be quite different than the one suggested by the parent poster: The standard bearers for the truth need to simplify (and thus falsify) their arguments to carry the day in public debate. i.e. in the best case the "right" things end up being done for the "wrong" reasons. And I would further argue that scholars and scientists are actually not the best people to craft and lead that kind of debate. Maybe that would be
Props to you scudsucker -- looks like you've been around quite a bit longer - although even at my userid, it's been over three years since I got myself an id and became a regular reader. So you are clearly a very patient human being, a noble quality indeed :-)
:-(
/. feels the pressure of digg in the war for clicks and therefore revenue - at least that's how I'm interpreting the ajax makeover currently happening at /. after so many years of staying put in the site design department.
/. post. Yours isn't flaming me either, so that's why I'm responding.
/. (I'm surmising it's digg), and I tried to suggest an alternative way of looking at their business problem: don't become like the competition, but keep riding your niche market, do that really well and maybe find another niche where you can re-apply your fundamental business strengths and own that one (like Apple did with the iPod).
/. would ever see my post, or even if they did, find reason to slow down and maybe reconsider what seems to be their strategy.
There's only that slight problem, that one only finds out that a story was lame after one has wasted one's time to read it
While you're right, that a 2.2 release of whatever may not be important or interesting, but at least it's genuine news, which at least for me puts it above a teenage fanboi blog, which isn't even an attempt at a real article but a rather non original routine fan blog. I have an iPod and I like it a lot - but to be honest, that article was hard to take.
This kind of front page post reminded me a lot of digg, where the masses rule - and I'm surmising that
And I clicked on the "read more" link just to post my comment. I'm not sure, if there are better ways to communicate to the editors. And as you probably noted, I didn't go into a raging flame
I did offer my sincere understanding of how hard it is to be in this business. But since this story was about Apple, it had struck me that Apple was in a similar predicament with feeling huge pressure from the popular choice MS, and in the early 90s tried to become more like them, allowing 3rd party white box makers, getting CEO's from Pepsi and IBM etc.
So at least to me, this kind of front page article was a step down from previous years. Even the famous Roland P. articles were mostly at least click-thru's to some real news.
So imho, I'm sensing some desperation at
But of course, I know, that it's quite silly to think that anyone who matters at
So this was just an honest heartfelt post by a single non-important reader, who senses that one of his very favorite websites is committing slow business suicide. And that makes me a bit sad.
And yes, I agree with both kinds of moderations I've gotten to this point - this is somewhat offtopic but in some other way it isn't.
This isn't a new observation, but it's the first time that I'm writing about it. Probably because I'm sensing the end of my time here at Slashdot. I have not journaled worth mentioning, and not commented worth mentioning - but I was an avid reader and meta-moderator (and yes, I read many of the articles I meta-modded and their responses, to make sure that I would get non obvious situations right).
The news business, even in it's blog form is a tough business indeed. When the mother of all blogs (i.e Slashdot itself) needs to go trolling for clicks with a front page link to a teenage fanboy's blog related to iPods, it's a sad day indeed.
This article is neither "news for nerds", nor "stuff that matters".
But it's a predictable click gatherer - and it's been promoted to the front page by the Cmdr himself, not a junior apprentice editor.
The Cmdr hasn't lost his marbles - quite the opposite, he has a business to run - and this business is desperately competing with the shrill upstarts with editorial models solely around popularity, rather than quality.
The unwashed masses supply more clicks than even moderately intelligent and critical thinkers.
Populism at work, because populism pays. So now we have editorial control trying to emulate populism. Not the first and not the last time that will happen.
I understand that, but I see a fatal disconnect with Slashdot doing it. Slashdot doesn't do populism best. Slashdot's strength is (was) in quality control (editorial control , followed by discussion with moderation and meta moderation).
However, when the first input (editorial control) to the process isn't even remotely attempting quality control, all other quality control processes are becoming rather irrelevant.
Or to put it more bluntly, if the whole story is a troll, the comments, moderations and meta-moderations can't untroll it.
So I think Slashdot is losing it's way in this battle and like all good things will slowly fade away.
Reminds me a bit of apple in the early to mid 90s. They tried to emulate the populists of their day in their industry, when that's not what they did best.
Why am I mentioning apple?
Because against all odds, apple found its way again and came back - and found that their original essence could get them back into their highly respected and quite nicely profitable niche and they even could become the number one popular choice in another field.
Here's to hoping that Slashdot can do the same, because I miss Slashdot without its original essence.
you may still not be impressed, but but he does explain his reasoning for the absence of graphics.
underemployed programmers with talent, or
software companies wanting to break into a difficult market, or
closed source suppliers abusing their customers
sorry :(
have you tried to return it to the store?
via the way back machine
try the OpenBook extension. It fixes that problem. And I wouldn't be surprised, if it would be incorporated in the standard Firefox "real soon now"(tm).
I'm not so sure about that, since
- spamming is a very low percentage game, so the spam transmitter would have to:
- reach millions of listeners
- while staying undetected
- while keeping the costs for that transmitter and its operation very low
- audio spam would probably have an even lower response rate than email spam where the recipient can just click on links, since in audio spam the listener would have to remember the link the spammer has given her/him and at some later point make an effort to go to that site.
But I thought the parent post was funny.Red Hat 9 is still being updated via the Fedora Legacy project and associated repositories.
So it might be argued, that EOL is an overrated marketing speak concept. Sometimes an EOL product is still rather well supported. Other times I have experienced not yet EOL'd products suffer from very poor to non-existing support, because the software supplier had started to withdraw oxygen by removing all of their better people from supporting that product.
So I have become very weary of EOL marketing speak.
Through "self-insuring" I have several advantages:
* could be newer model
* could be different brand
* could be different store
* could be something totally different
I'm assuming you're not trolling, so would you mind elaborating a bit?
Having lived on both sides of the Antlantic ocean, I have come to the conclusion, that things like highways/freeways, cars and dwellings being generally larger (per person) in North America has a lot to do with the much lower population density / much more space per person.
The lower density generally means land is less expensive. Therefore roads can be bigger, parking spots can be larger. Dwellings can be larger. Larger cars fit nicely onto the larger roads and larger parking spots.
Lower population density makes it less efficient to build and operate public transportation systems, so the car is more important in low density areas of North America. For example in New York City or in Toronto with their obviously high density, public transport is as evolved as anything in Europe, and many people don't even have cars. But in most places in North America, it is really quite unrealistc to live without a car.
Quite possibly related to that, taxation (direct and indirect) of cars and/or gasoline is much lower in the US and Canada, therefore larger cars are not nearly as expensive to operate in North America as they are in most European countries.
And believe me, every European visitor I've had, thoroughly enjoyed my larger car and my larger dwelling, and would love to have a bigger dwelling and car, if it wasn't so expensive and inconvenient (parking etc.)
Finally, I would further dare to submit, that a lot of Japanese people think that many European cars and dwellings and people are rather oversized.
And abundance vs. a shortage of physical space per person makes a huge difference in many every-day life situations, resulting costs and people's attitudes towards "what it normal".
I agree, companies don't usually have and probably shouldn't have ideologies. However, companies should have certain business value systems. A value system makes it possible for a customer, reseller, or investor to make an intelligent longer term investment in product/services and/or shares of said comapny.
Part of a company's value system should probably be to avoid screwing anyone over, like customers, resellers or shareholders. Judging by quite a number of the stories, that I've been reading, they may have done that while they were riding high with the dotcom bubble.
I personally have been deeply affected as a customer, when Sun purchased the Java application server company called NetDynamics, and promptly discontinued to properly support it, and when J2EE came along, there was no proper migration path from NetDynamics to a J2EE version of NetDynamics. NetDynamics customers were told to convert to Sun's J2EE server. Since my company had built an entire software product suite on top of NetDynamics, this action by Sun created a significant problem for us, both in terms of wasted time and wasted money to perform a conversion, rather than evolving our software.
Not surprisingly, we migrated to a non Sun J2EE application server.
I suspect we were not alone. And I further suspect that this type of behaviour over the long term loses a lot of customers and revenue.
Maybe, if there was all new company leadership, who would make Sun trustworthy again, there would be a chance of survival. What good is all the best engineering, if you can't trust someone?
I thought the P means any or all of the P language: PHP, Python, Perl
Just because something is on a blog doesn't make it bad by itself. There's so much junk on traditional media, too. Isn't that pretty obvious by now?
/. may not be particularly high, nonetheless there are some very well reasearched and/or thought out comments amongst all the junk, which in quality easily compete with or surpass anything in the traditional media.
The source is no guarantee as New York Times readers are painfully aware of. And while the signal to noise ratio on
Let's judge each article (news or commentary) by the research it contains and the intelligence of arguments it makes, and leave it at that. Of course, that's more work for the reader or someone who comments - but the truth is always more work...
I can only wonder: MS really is in quite deep trouble with their customers, especially those, who have paid big bucks to have the right to upgrades of their products. Since Longhorn is a long way out, and any upgrades (OS or Office) seem not hugely attractive, why is anyone paying the maintenance fees, which were designed to save you money on product upgrades?
MS has made their staunchest customers (i.e. the executives and managers having talked their companies into spending the extra money on maintenance) look absolutely foolish. So now, they desprately need to give those folks a story to tell their bosses, why they should not get fired for such a wanton waste of their companies' money.
Playing this security card shows an amazing act of desparation by a wounded giant. If even Gartner starts to critisize MS, there is a lot going wrong in the belly of the beast.
This type of action is a bit like a war. Bombing an apparently guilty party may make you feel better, and maybe even act as a deterrent to others.
However, there will be innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. And the author is giving up the moral (and in some jurisdictions the legal) high ground.
I somehow doubt, that this software behaviour will increase his sales - possibly the opposite might happen, i.e. sales will tank, because legitimate users might be afraid to be caught in the crossfire. So while he may be able to re-appear (or have the software re-appear) under a different name, he therefore would lose the goodwill associated with his and the current software name.
It is very understandable that someone reacts harshly to being under attack, but it does not necessarily make it the wisest thing to do, even for oneself.
http://slashdot.org/~Seth%20Finklestein
How does a complaint about running SETI@home on Linux relate to this thread about Mozilla????