On "Stephen Fry's America" he visited Jimmy Wales In New York who told him it's 10 people that run it. Deosn't really matter though either way, the point stands.
"Golly, I sure didn't see that coming. What is you superior achievements in life that lend weight to the opinions you express when giving invited lectures at Stanford?"
Cause I can drive to Harvard instead? I hate flying these days. And it's not like Stanford never made a mistake.
"You may not see it as out to serve anyone but it was. Just read a few comment from slashdot about how those kids are indoctrinated into believing all corporations are evil intent on destroying the environment. There are quite a few of those idiots around here and that sort of proves his point."
"They were all mainframe guys at insurance and automotive-related manufacturing companies, white short-sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. In 1978 I'm sure PCs and the Internet were way beyond their imagination."
That's about right. I worked at a PDP-11 shop in 77 for a year and it was there I saw a picture of a 4004 intel processor. The first single chip CPU. That could hardly get out of its own way.
Arguably there wasnt a whole lot of software that needed to be written by then. Everything you could do on an 80 column 12 line VT05 had been done. 24 lines would be a year or so later.
Then I went to the University of Waterloo and found the Unix lab, and began playing with troff. What *I* wanted was a graphics display, but that was 7 years away in the third year of grad school. I said screw that and just took off to LA and as the man said, all you had to do was show up at a computer manufacturor. They hadn't heard of C or Unix.
In the 1980s the onus was on making computers for everybody.
In the 1990s the onus was on making the net work for everybody.
What if we're done with that? Does everybody who wants one have one?
What do I think the next big thing is gonna be? Wireless meshes connecting xboxes via linksys 5 port routers like this: http://www.onlive.com/ 3D will be to graphics displays now what graphic displays were to dumb crts back then
TCP will die, but IP will stay in a modified form, V6 will never take off, DNS will be replaced by DHT. They will also be your set top boxes and these and your phone will largely replace computers as we know it and a thinkpad in 2015 will seem as obsolete as a guy on a glass tty on an old Sun seems today.
Insurance company COBOL code will always need fixing if you're into soul destroying work.
"I'm not sure if I like the idea of handing out a TLD that is basically going to support a groups in a particular cause. In the.eco realm, it seems to me like.org would work just fine, and it's broad enough to be all-encompassing of many points of view. Speaking of which, I think Wikipedia addresses this quite well"
It's interesting to compare the difference between Wikipedia and ICANN, who administer these top level domains.
Wikipedia is 10 poeple in a office, who work in New York and stay there. They rely on donations which they get because poeple find them useful. Wikipedia is their deliverable.
ICANN has 100 staff and burns about $100M a year and flies all over the world putting on five star trade shows for insiders. Their deliverables are... a bunch of reports that they got volunteers to write that don't tell us anything we didn't know in 1996.
"Just how many domains do they think they're going to be selling? At competitive rates you'd have to sell tens of thousands just to keep a single person employed to maintain the TLD, never mind having some money to give away."
Actually you have to sell 100,000 just to cover the filing fees. And that's without paying for any infrastructure or people.
Plus,.green has been more vocal than.eco so far. Look at the Twitter public timeline (if you can).
Back in 1996 when this started and.com was under a million names a bunch of new tlds like Jon Pstel advocated would have taken the steam out of.com. But not that it's at 80M names most poeple who want a domain have one. "need" has not transformed to "want" and in this economy buying a.eco name or a solar AA battery charger becomes the decision of the day.
Newsflash. Africa isn't huts. It's houses, townhouses, stripmalls, condos. It looks like Philadelphia but not as run down.
The age of bare skinned lion hunters and the wild man of Borneo is crap your grandfather read about as a child, even Borneo, still 95% unexplored, has cities, high rise luxury condos, strip malls, condos, and kids in hopped up hondas hanging out by the 7-11 on a friday night trying to out-cool each other.
There are pictures on the net about how other poeple in the world live, and it looks just like north america, except the ground is lateritic soil and looks more like the deep south, but other than that it could be anywhere.
And where is the greatest population of starving children in the world? The US, in Appalachia.
If you try Opera you can actually see what it's waiting on in the status bar. Usually you'll find it's waiting for a response from some lame ass as server - which if you're clever you'll alias to localhost in your hosts file.
Every time I use another browser I feel lost, staring at a blank page going "what is it DOING" as opposed to using Opera and saying "Oh it's stuck on googleanalytics. Again".
If your browser really had all the data it needed, it would render the page. Honest. In fact they render before they finish downloading.
"Since when "JS speed" is synonymous with "browser speed"?"
Since always?
Facebook and slashdot made some rather painful markup/js code changes in the fall of last year and around new year. On large pages this caused the act of simply trying to scroll a page grind to a screaming fucking halt with near-second response times. Upgrading from Opera 9.whatsis to 10 made them instant again on this old laptop of mine.
"It worked for me. I think the title of my email was "I'd like to send you $500"
I got a reply the next day. Within one week he had $500 and I had software with the additional functionality I needed. The functionality was included in the future release of the package and everyone benefits.
There is truth to the saying "Money Talks""
Jesus. And I felt like a whore for sending a pizza to the Internic to actually make an urgent change in less than a week in 1995. (it worked btw, for instant changes you had to send roses to her highness the Dali Lauren)
"Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond."
If you try Opera you can actually see what it's waiting on in the status bar. Usually you'll find it's waiting for a response from some lame ass as server - which if you're clever you'll alias to localhost in your hosts file.
Every time I use another browser I feel lost, staring at a blank page going "what is it DOING" as opposed to using Opera and saying "Oh it's stuck on googleanalytics. Again".
If your browser really had all the data it needed, it would render the page. Honest. In fact they render before they finish downloading.
"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"
How would you know?
For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.
Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".
"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."
And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.
"None of this speed thing matters to anyone but this small enthusiast crowd who actually care about a few nanoseconds of difference. I mean, seriously, have you ever switched to a browser because of it's javascript performance before... y'know, Chrome?"
It's not a few nano seconds, and yes I swiched.
I live in a very rural area. We got broadband *last year* and until then I was on dialup, and 28.8K dialup at that.
Clicking the "back" button in any browser meant I had to wait for the stupid thing to fetch all the stuff from the net. This sometimes meant a couple of minutes. In Opera it was *instant* (if you set the caching parameters right in the Opera control panel).
To this day, if I had to use any other browser to do what I do my work would take me longer. I've tried, honest, I try everything. But nothing comes close to the actual productivity increase that Opera provides.
I've used Opera as my only browser for eight years now. As soon as something better comes along, I'll use that. But I'm not holding my breath.
"Its site may be down, but few people use Twitter through its web site. The service itself has been running for me all day, except for one brief period around 10AM that lasted for about 10 minutes." "
True, messages from Twitter are leaking into facebook. But, the Twitter site is still unreachable here, at least by me, 12 hours later.
I just *know* it's something I said, I just *know* it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Microsoft like SEGA will survive after it's core product ends."
Sure, people still use WordStar.
I don't believe Microsoft will ever die, or that poeple will always hate it.
Keep your eyes on the ball, kids.
Got bone? No, just a woody.
On "Stephen Fry's America" he visited Jimmy Wales In New York who told him it's 10 people that run it. Deosn't really matter though either way, the point stands.
"Golly, I sure didn't see that coming. What is you superior achievements in life that lend weight to the opinions you express when giving invited lectures at Stanford?"
Cause I can drive to Harvard instead? I hate flying these days. And it's not like Stanford never made a mistake.
"You may not see it as out to serve anyone but it was. Just read a few comment from slashdot about how those kids are indoctrinated into believing all corporations are evil intent on destroying the environment. There are quite a few of those idiots around here and that sort of proves his point."
You mean like Bhopal?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiWlvBro9eI
"Well considering his creation - siebel - is one of the biggest steaming piles of crap i've ever seen... why would i listen to him?"
To wit: why doesn't he take a boat to Shanghai and a) walk the walk b) make us glad he's gone.
" They were all mainframe guys at insurance and automotive-related manufacturing companies, white short-sleeve shirts and pocket protectors. In 1978 I'm sure PCs and the Internet were way beyond their imagination."
That's about right. I worked at a PDP-11 shop in 77 for a year and it was there I saw a picture of a 4004 intel processor. The first single chip CPU. That could hardly get out of its own way.
Arguably there wasnt a whole lot of software that needed to be written by then. Everything you could do on an 80 column 12 line VT05 had been done. 24 lines would be a year or so later.
Then I went to the University of Waterloo and found the Unix lab, and began playing with troff. What *I* wanted was a graphics display, but that was 7 years away in the third year of grad school. I said screw that and just took off to LA and as the man said, all you had to do was show up at a computer manufacturor. They hadn't heard of C or Unix.
In the 1980s the onus was on making computers for everybody.
In the 1990s the onus was on making the net work for everybody.
What if we're done with that? Does everybody who wants one have one?
What do I think the next big thing is gonna be? Wireless meshes connecting xboxes via linksys 5 port routers like this: http://www.onlive.com/ 3D will be to graphics displays now what graphic displays were to dumb crts back then
TCP will die, but IP will stay in a modified form, V6 will never take off, DNS will be replaced by DHT. They will also be your set top boxes and these and your phone will largely replace computers as we know it and a thinkpad in 2015 will seem as obsolete as a guy on a glass tty on an old Sun seems today.
Insurance company COBOL code will always need fixing if you're into soul destroying work.
" I'm not sure if I like the idea of handing out a TLD that is basically going to support a groups in a particular cause. In the .eco realm, it seems to me like .org would work just fine, and it's broad enough to be all-encompassing of many points of view. Speaking of which, I think Wikipedia addresses this quite well"
It's interesting to compare the difference between Wikipedia and ICANN, who administer these top level domains.
Wikipedia is 10 poeple in a office, who work in New York and stay there. They rely on donations which they get because poeple find them useful. Wikipedia is their deliverable.
ICANN has 100 staff and burns about $100M a year and flies all over the world putting on five star trade shows for insiders. Their deliverables are... a bunch of reports that they got volunteers to write that don't tell us anything we didn't know in 1996.
Imagine ICANN running Wikipedia. Or the reverse.
" If that show wanted to really get things done, it would have vilified the real culprits in ruining the planet. "
Like the US government?
http://www.freep.com/article/20090807/BUSINESS01/908070382
"Just how many domains do they think they're going to be selling? At competitive rates you'd have to sell tens of thousands just to keep a single person employed to maintain the TLD, never mind having some money to give away."
Actually you have to sell 100,000 just to cover the filing fees. And that's without paying for any infrastructure or people.
Here's how the other new tlds have fared so far:
http://idashboard.icann.org/idashboards/engine.swf?dashID=159&serverURL=http://idashboard.icann.org/idashboards&guest=icannguest ( http://is.gd/28LvZ )
(Warning, slow and a cpu eater)
Plus, .green has been more vocal than .eco so far. Look at the Twitter public timeline (if you can).
Back in 1996 when this started and .com was under a million names a bunch of new tlds like Jon Pstel advocated would have taken the steam out of .com. But not that it's at 80M names most poeple who want a domain have one. "need" has not transformed to "want" and in this economy buying a .eco name or a solar AA battery charger becomes the decision of the day.
Here's some more numbers:
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/dotcom/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/tlds/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/icann/IAF/
http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/internet/domains/eyestar/iana/idn/
As for "Rival Green Groups Bid To Snatch .eco Domain" I hate to say it but .snatch would probably at least break even.
"Dude probably owns a village or two by now."
Newsflash. Africa isn't huts. It's houses, townhouses, stripmalls, condos. It looks like Philadelphia but not as run down.
The age of bare skinned lion hunters and the wild man of Borneo is crap your grandfather read about as a child, even Borneo, still 95% unexplored, has cities, high rise luxury condos, strip malls, condos, and kids in hopped up hondas hanging out by the 7-11 on a friday night trying to out-cool each other.
There are pictures on the net about how other poeple in the world live, and it looks just like north america, except the ground is lateritic soil and looks more like the deep south, but other than that it could be anywhere.
And where is the greatest population of starving children in the world? The US, in Appalachia.
The anti-419 movement is bigger than you'd think or know and they don't talk.
"Personally, I hope Opera doesn't gain any further market share, because it is not open source. It is becoming less and less relevant."
And there you have it. Open source has now been elevated from a cult to a full blown religion.
"I don't care if it's the best, it doesn't mesh with my personal belief system, and must die".
Choices are good. I'd choose Opera even if I had to pay for it. It's good that poeple have choices.
http://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer.html
"Am I the only one ..."
If you try Opera you can actually see what it's waiting on in the status bar. Usually you'll find it's waiting for a response from some lame ass as server - which if you're clever you'll alias to localhost in your hosts file.
Every time I use another browser I feel lost, staring at a blank page going "what is it DOING" as opposed to using Opera and saying "Oh it's stuck on googleanalytics. Again".
If your browser really had all the data it needed, it would render the page. Honest. In fact they render before they finish downloading.
"Since when "JS speed" is synonymous with "browser speed"?"
Since always?
Facebook and slashdot made some rather painful markup/js code changes in the fall of last year and around new year. On large pages this caused the act of simply trying to scroll a page grind to a screaming fucking halt with near-second response times. Upgrading from Opera 9.whatsis to 10 made them instant again on this old laptop of mine.
Cnet is not overrated. It's a great way to see if you know what you should have learned 5 years ago.
Cnet is the short bus of tech sites. This serves most people perfectly well.
"What happens if SourceForge goes under?"
Archive.org?
"It worked for me. I think the title of my email was "I'd like to send you $500"
I got a reply the next day. Within one week he had $500 and I had software with the additional functionality I needed. The functionality was included in the future release of the package and everyone benefits.
There is truth to the saying "Money Talks""
Jesus. And I felt like a whore for sending a pizza to the Internic to actually make an urgent change in less than a week in 1995. (it worked btw, for instant changes you had to send roses to her highness the Dali Lauren)
I donated money once and all of a sudden my three week old question about a brokenness was answered with a workaround.
Looks like OSS, acts like Microsoft. But 3X as expensive.
But hey, who uses SSL anyway?
"Am I the only one who finds that 99%+ of my time is spent waiting on DNS and data transfer and shit? I'm never actually sitting there, data downloaded, waiting for my browser to respond."
If you try Opera you can actually see what it's waiting on in the status bar. Usually you'll find it's waiting for a response from some lame ass as server - which if you're clever you'll alias to localhost in your hosts file.
Every time I use another browser I feel lost, staring at a blank page going "what is it DOING" as opposed to using Opera and saying "Oh it's stuck on googleanalytics. Again".
If your browser really had all the data it needed, it would render the page. Honest. In fact they render before they finish downloading.
"It's full featured and well established browser and quality is unsurpassed, and it's in widespread use on other devices like cellphones, PDAs, gaming systems (Nintendo DSi), etc. The only problem Opera has is that no body is using it on the PC"
How would you know?
For a fairly long time Microsoft would detect Opera and throw junk at it so it didn't work as well as IE. So for a while Opera identified itself as IE. That's why those geniuses at CNET don't think Opera ever hits their site, and why their, and eveyrones, IE numbers are wrong - they're artificially high.
Out of the box, for many years, Opera didn't identify itself as Opera. Veteran Opera users know thwe first thing you do with a new release is make sure it identifies itself as IE if it isn't still set that way from "the factory".
http://www.opera.com/support/kb/view/843/
http://sillydog.org/forum/sdt_3373.php
http://news.cnet.com/The-Acid2-challenge-to-Microsoft/2010-1032_3-5618723.html
"Microsoft's own Web servers are configured to send different versions of Web pages to disparate browsers. For example, the servers sniff out the Opera browser and send it different style sheets from the ones they send to Microsoft's own Internet Explorer. As a result, Opera renders pages differently."
And by differently, they meant "largely unreadable" but were being polite to their advertisor.
"None of this speed thing matters to anyone but this small enthusiast crowd who actually care about a few nanoseconds of difference. I mean, seriously, have you ever switched to a browser because of it's javascript performance before... y'know, Chrome?"
It's not a few nano seconds, and yes I swiched.
I live in a very rural area. We got broadband *last year* and until then I was on dialup, and 28.8K dialup at that.
Clicking the "back" button in any browser meant I had to wait for the stupid thing to fetch all the stuff from the net. This sometimes meant a couple of minutes. In Opera it was *instant* (if you set the caching parameters right in the Opera control panel).
To this day, if I had to use any other browser to do what I do my work would take me longer. I've tried, honest, I try everything. But nothing comes close to the actual productivity increase that Opera provides.
I've used Opera as my only browser for eight years now. As soon as something better comes along, I'll use that. But I'm not holding my breath.
"I'd rather rag on the shlob of code for being a complete mess."
So far that hasn't worked. Plan B?
"Its site may be down, but few people use Twitter through its web site. The service itself has been running for me all day, except for one brief period around 10AM that lasted for about 10 minutes." "
True, messages from Twitter are leaking into facebook. But, the Twitter site is still unreachable here, at least by me, 12 hours later.
I just *know* it's something I said, I just *know* it.
My favorite so far: "DDoS? So it's like a terrorist attack on the Internet???""
That's right muffy, a bomb went off at Internet headquarters.