Anyways... yes. The internet is changing, as users are given the ability to share opinions more freely and the average user begins to value those opinions more and more, the internet effectively becomes more human.
Funny. That's what everyone always said the Internet should be about. People freely exchanging ideas and conversations. Now everyone is bitching about all the stupid people and stupid sites. Just can't please anyone...
I think these tree huggers have it all wrong. Bottom line is switching from a regular Honda to a Prius and not using hair spray is not going to have a significant impact on reducing greehouse emissions, saving oil, etc... What's that going to give us, maybe a 20% reduction per person. Not going to help much when you have countries like China just spewing smoke into the air. All it really does is make you feel good about yourself and let you look down your nose at everyone NOT driving a Prius.
The real answer is to use MORE. If we are really at the peak of oil production, every environmentalist should use more oil. Keep your house at 85 degrees in the winter. Run the AC 24/7 in the summer. Buy the biggest SUV you can find and commute 50 miles to work every day. This way the oil reserves will be gone sooner and all the damage that can be done will be done. You can probably only reduce your consumption by 20% or so, but you could increase your consumption by 200 or 300% easily.
Actually it's worse than that. I would gladly talk to a pollster, but since my cell isn't in the phone book, and maybe because it would be illegal, I don't ever get calls for surveys on my cells. What they did was poll a bunch of losers that still have landlines.
Costs like that would bankrupt small organizations, though in today's healthcare market, it's becoming the price of doing business.
I think that's the point of this kind of law. It hits both big and small organizations hard when they screw up. Provides some significant incentive to tighten up security policies. Just like your example, why the heck did someone leave backup tapes in a car unattended? Seems like they weren't taking their security very seriously.
I wonder, when we turn to a life of crime, what's going to happen?
That's an interesting question. I used to have friends in high school that I joked with (and I emphasize JOKED) about how easy it would be to set up drug labs. Hopefully we won't get all the smart introverts involved in the criminal underground. Might be bad for everyone.
If the USPS terminated the bulk rate, they'd have to take all that overhead back on, or simply quit accepting bulk mail (which I'm not sure they'd legally be allowed to do). Either way the cost of first-class delivery would rise.
Perhaps, although this is by no means guaranteed. If bulk-rate was more expensive volume should go down. Reduced volume should result in the need for fewer carriers and reduced overhead. Most mail is sorted by machine anyway. It's difficult to say what the end result would be.
So the best course is to find a use for all that bulk mail (firelighters is a good one -- the inks in the four-color glossy stuff make pretty colors!), and quit complaining since every piece of it you receive means you pay a little bit less for the mail you send.
You are correct there, complaining doesn't help. It's not going to change the system and I can't really opt out. It will be interesting to see what ultimately happens to the USPS. I anticipate, especially as postage rates continue to rise, that eventually even major bulk snail mail advertisers will turn to electronic delivery and the USPS will be in serious trouble.
but I believe that e-mail has contributed to the increasing costs of postal mail.
I'm not sure how this is possible. I don't know where we can get hard data on this, I'm not sure it's publicly available. I have family memebers that work in the post office, and they have never claimed there was diminishing overall volume. Personally I get more mail today than I ever have in my life. The USPS decided many years ago that they would build their business on bulk mail and not on first class, so diminishing first class letters shouldn't have significant impace.
Increasing postal rates has little to do with increasing costs. Obviously fuel and labor have increased significantly over the last few years. Also the postoffice is a quasi government agency (whatever the hell that means) and as such isn't run like a real business. The federal government routinely takes money the post office has made and spends elsewhere, so it's like a tax, but the USPS advertises like a business. Applying real world economics to them is a bit difficult.
This fictional scenario, I think closely (but not perfectly) mirrors the current email system. The whole spam problem should have been forseen.
That is a great analogy but I'm not sure your conclusions are right. As the price has went UP over the last 15 or so years I have noticed that the concentration of legitimate letter mail I get has went down. Bulk advertising or 'Spam' mail has actually increased in percentage. Individuals and companies I actually do business with have started using email rather than pay high postage rates. Many companies offer incentives so you can get your bills deliverd in email format.
If postage and paper was free we might get significantly more advertising, but we also might see more people drop a card in the mail once in a while with a written note. Cost is a significant factor for me in wanting to pay bills online and send email to friends rather than written notes.
The USPS has done exactly what AOL is trying to do. They have catered to big business that can see an ROI on their investment. Everyone else that sends letters 'First Class' and isn't trying to spam postal patrons gets screwed.
And you might be wrong, while we keep hearing on./ that broadband access in the US is lower than in many asian and european nations, somehow they always rank first in total number of users and downloads.
I wouldn't be surprised if when broadband stats are compared between the US and Europe it's on a per capita basis. There is no doubt that there are thousands of people that download movies, write them to a DVD and play them in their MPEG-4 compatible players. In a country of 300 million, like the US where the majority watch movies either in a theatre or on DVD, a few thousand individuals downloading movies is insignificant in terms of overall revenue.
How is Britney an indie artist? Is she not signed to a major label?
I'm not sure what the original poster meant, what kind of criteria do you want to put on any 'indie' movie? I would agree that Star Wars episode 3 doesn't belong on that list, I don't think it should be on ANY top 50 list - it sucked. OTOH, there are many great indie movies on that list. Just because they did well and became classics doesn't discount their origins.
Take Monty Python and the Holy Grail as an example. It was made on a budget, financed by donations, but has become a comedy classic. Strictly speaking an indie movie is one that no studio would back. The creators had to raise the money themselves, thus being independent from a studio. This films range in budget from, El Mariachi which was filmed from $7,000 Robert Rodriguez earned as a medical test subject, to the aforementioned Star Wars episode 3.
There's no rule that a an indie movie has to suck, be filmed by a college student with a videocamera or even have unknown actors and directors. What being an indie means is the directors/producers have raised their own money and have creative control of the project. This control results in a film closer to the director's original intention. It's the common thought that movie studios, like music labels, tend to influence the artists in directions where they think they can make the most money. When an artist, either musical or cinematographic, create an independent project they can let their artistic vision come through more or less unfiltered. Ultimately this has resulted in some of the best written, best directed and best performed films in history.
21st I think. Here in the states (I'm guessing you are not from the US since you priced in EUR) the average Joe that just rents DVDs isn't set up to easily download movies and write them to DVD the way you describe. I'm not disagreeing that downloading is slick, especially the way you describe, but there just isn't consumer domand for it. I believe the percentage of people that will go through the additional steps to download illegal movies and watch them as you appearantly do is very low.
Working in IT, this is a definite flaw I see in most business owner's thinking. Any business should supply their employees with the fastest machines available for a somewhat reasonable price. If dual cores run apps faster then they are absolutely needed. The highest cost in any business is labor. If you are paying someone $50,000 a year you only have to increase their productivity by 24 hours over the course of a year to justify spending an additional $1000 on equipment. That's only about a 1/2 hour a week.
There are, of course, diminishing returns and no point in buying ridiculously expensive hardware. Many businesses, especially smaller companies, try to get much more life out of their hardware than they should. It all depends on your user, their workload and how much they are costing your company, but if productivity is increased, dual-cores are easily justifiable.
Even with browser based apps, it's difficult to say that current technology is excessive. Until my browser and other tools appear INSTANTLY there is room for improvement. Until I can have as many sites open as I can possibly use without noticing any lag on my machine, new hardware is not excessive.
Let's face it, most downloaders aren't in it for the convenience.
Which brings up an interesting point, how big of a problem are illegal downloads of movies. Personally I don't download them, netflix is way more efficient and I can watch on my TV which has a bigger screen, better sound and a nicer chair than my computer. This is nice for people that want to download, but I don't see the masses downloading movies to their computer on a regular basis like they do music. Music downloads are a totally different animal. You can have thousands of songs, put them on shuffle and put them in the background (just like xmms is doing fo me right now). Movies aren't as versatile that way. If I'm going to watch a movie, I'm going to sit down and pay attention to it. There's no point for me having many thousands of movie titles.
It's kind of sad (from the aspect that Hollywood makes lots of crap), but many oscar winners and oscar nominees start out as indie films. There are many more that never make the mainstream distribution channels and are only shown in 'art houses'. Just keep in mind, indie doesn't mean good either. Many of the best written movies are indies, but many of the worst movies I've seen are also independent.
There was a recent episode of "My Name is Earl" where Earl was invited to speak to a college classroom. Every time he said something every student in the clasroom would look down and type on their laptops simultaneously. It was too funny.
I feel that those students who are going to use classtime for recreational persuits should just not bother to show up. Those of us who have trouble concentrating really have a hard time focussing when someone else is doing something more interesting than Biology/Freceh lit./composition/...
Absolutely. This is completely my point. Unfortunately, many college professors have started making attendence a requirement for a passing grade. This has the same effect it has at the highschool level. Students that aren't interested in learning, or can 'breeze through' as you put it end up showing up and being a distraction to the class. University is not public school with a 'no child left behind' attitude. Personally, if I was in a class that I was paying for and wanted to pass and someone was doing distracting things I would take steps to eliminate the distraction. College students are free to change seating, ask the person creating the distraction to stop or even drop the class if needed.
This in turn distracted everyone else around them as they focused on whatever the person on the laptop was screwing around doing instead of on class.
So, did all of those distracted people fail the class because they weren't paying attention? It's been a while since I was in school, but when I was, the classes that were so easy I could play video games through them I stopped coming to. I'd just show up on test day. If a class is so boring and so easy that students can play video games there is something wrong. This is a reflection on the University and our society's current ideas about education, not on the technology.
GIMP is nice for images that stay on the PC, but I've had really terrible luck trying to get GIMP friendly with any sort of high-res work.
Personally I love the GIMP, use it all the time, although I find all of the separate windows annoying. There are is a cmyk plugin out there that supposedly will output good print files.
What troubles have you had using a digi cam on Linux, and when was the last time you tried it?
Those are both good questions. I'm a slackware guy myself, and it's not always the easiest to use distro. I actually have a script I wrote that uses gphoto to read the images from the camera to the hard drive. Works fine for me, but not something your average user is going to do. Also, I set this up about two years ago, so there may be much better utilities.
I guess my comment was more aimed at lack of manufacturer support. Even if there are utilities like digiKam out there that are easy to use, our average user has been trained to use the CD and software that come with the camera. Until you see major manufacturers actually supporting desktop Linux I think many people will shy away, even if the ease of use problems are a myth.
Hey, stop it. Tell everyone that IT is a dead-end career. Don't go into it no matter what. IT's not going to go away, and if no one new comes in those of us already in the industry can make more money!!!
Hold on a minute. Exactly which careers have had steady salary increases in the last 6 years. The auto mechanics I know aren't exactly living it up. Neither are the Dentists, Engineers, Carpenters or Insurance Agents. Real Estate has done well in many parts of the country, and of course the oil industry has had a nice kick in the pants. The rest of us have all felt the effects of the dot-com bust, Y2K, 9/11, war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq and an overall sluggish economy. There are many industries in this country that are struggling, automotive manufacturers, airlines, movie studios.
Poor wage increases in the last few years are not exactly the best reason to base your argument on. The IT industry went through a massive surge prior to 2000 with the big Y2K thing. As a result, after 2000 there was a surplus of expensive US IT people. Jobs were outsourced, or filled by H1B workers. The market has worked to correct itself. College kids now are not interested in IT careers since they don't think they can make money at it. Interestingly enough there seems to be more and more tech jobs available, at least in my area.
My point is, I would tell my kids to pick a career that they are good at and can enjoy. If you are good enough at it you will be able to weather it's ups and downs. If your goal is just to make the most money, go into business. IT is going to be with us forever. It's become ingrained in our society. IT professionals are not going to go away any more than electricians or plumbers or painters.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, just ship with Slackware installed.
Anyways... yes. The internet is changing, as users are given the ability to share opinions more freely and the average user begins to value those opinions more and more, the internet effectively becomes more human.
Funny. That's what everyone always said the Internet should be about. People freely exchanging ideas and conversations. Now everyone is bitching about all the stupid people and stupid sites. Just can't please anyone...
'I'm not allowing Skype because I don't know what it does.'
My mortgage was recently sold to ABN. Based on their website and online payment functionality, this comment doesn't surprise me.
I think these tree huggers have it all wrong. Bottom line is switching from a regular Honda to a Prius and not using hair spray is not going to have a significant impact on reducing greehouse emissions, saving oil, etc... What's that going to give us, maybe a 20% reduction per person. Not going to help much when you have countries like China just spewing smoke into the air. All it really does is make you feel good about yourself and let you look down your nose at everyone NOT driving a Prius.
The real answer is to use MORE. If we are really at the peak of oil production, every environmentalist should use more oil. Keep your house at 85 degrees in the winter. Run the AC 24/7 in the summer. Buy the biggest SUV you can find and commute 50 miles to work every day. This way the oil reserves will be gone sooner and all the damage that can be done will be done. You can probably only reduce your consumption by 20% or so, but you could increase your consumption by 200 or 300% easily.
Actually it's worse than that. I would gladly talk to a pollster, but since my cell isn't in the phone book, and maybe because it would be illegal, I don't ever get calls for surveys on my cells. What they did was poll a bunch of losers that still have landlines.
Costs like that would bankrupt small organizations, though in today's healthcare market, it's becoming the price of doing business.
I think that's the point of this kind of law. It hits both big and small organizations hard when they screw up. Provides some significant incentive to tighten up security policies. Just like your example, why the heck did someone leave backup tapes in a car unattended? Seems like they weren't taking their security very seriously.
I wonder, when we turn to a life of crime, what's going to happen?
That's an interesting question. I used to have friends in high school that I joked with (and I emphasize JOKED) about how easy it would be to set up drug labs. Hopefully we won't get all the smart introverts involved in the criminal underground. Might be bad for everyone.
If the USPS terminated the bulk rate, they'd have to take all that overhead back on, or simply quit accepting bulk mail (which I'm not sure they'd legally be allowed to do). Either way the cost of first-class delivery would rise.
Perhaps, although this is by no means guaranteed. If bulk-rate was more expensive volume should go down. Reduced volume should result in the need for fewer carriers and reduced overhead. Most mail is sorted by machine anyway. It's difficult to say what the end result would be.
So the best course is to find a use for all that bulk mail (firelighters is a good one -- the inks in the four-color glossy stuff make pretty colors!), and quit complaining since every piece of it you receive means you pay a little bit less for the mail you send.
You are correct there, complaining doesn't help. It's not going to change the system and I can't really opt out. It will be interesting to see what ultimately happens to the USPS. I anticipate, especially as postage rates continue to rise, that eventually even major bulk snail mail advertisers will turn to electronic delivery and the USPS will be in serious trouble.
but I believe that e-mail has contributed to the increasing costs of postal mail.
I'm not sure how this is possible. I don't know where we can get hard data on this, I'm not sure it's publicly available. I have family memebers that work in the post office, and they have never claimed there was diminishing overall volume. Personally I get more mail today than I ever have in my life. The USPS decided many years ago that they would build their business on bulk mail and not on first class, so diminishing first class letters shouldn't have significant impace.
Increasing postal rates has little to do with increasing costs. Obviously fuel and labor have increased significantly over the last few years. Also the postoffice is a quasi government agency (whatever the hell that means) and as such isn't run like a real business. The federal government routinely takes money the post office has made and spends elsewhere, so it's like a tax, but the USPS advertises like a business. Applying real world economics to them is a bit difficult.
This fictional scenario, I think closely (but not perfectly) mirrors the current email system. The whole spam problem should have been forseen.
That is a great analogy but I'm not sure your conclusions are right. As the price has went UP over the last 15 or so years I have noticed that the concentration of legitimate letter mail I get has went down. Bulk advertising or 'Spam' mail has actually increased in percentage. Individuals and companies I actually do business with have started using email rather than pay high postage rates. Many companies offer incentives so you can get your bills deliverd in email format.
If postage and paper was free we might get significantly more advertising, but we also might see more people drop a card in the mail once in a while with a written note. Cost is a significant factor for me in wanting to pay bills online and send email to friends rather than written notes.
The USPS has done exactly what AOL is trying to do. They have catered to big business that can see an ROI on their investment. Everyone else that sends letters 'First Class' and isn't trying to spam postal patrons gets screwed.
If you can't drink $20k of beer in a year, there is something wrong with you.
Apple's iTunes has such a large presence on Windows Machines.
Umm... that was the whole point. The gp said:
If you have a product that you want to sell but Microsoft bundles a similar product into its monopoly product it will kill your product.
Microsoft doesn't have a product competitive to iTunes yet, when they do they can use their monopolistic advantage to promote it.
We'll be huddling in our homes fearing the new SS here soon.
Maybe you will. I shoot back.
And you might be wrong, while we keep hearing on ./ that broadband access in the US is lower than in many asian and european nations, somehow they always rank first in total number of users and downloads.
I wouldn't be surprised if when broadband stats are compared between the US and Europe it's on a per capita basis. There is no doubt that there are thousands of people that download movies, write them to a DVD and play them in their MPEG-4 compatible players. In a country of 300 million, like the US where the majority watch movies either in a theatre or on DVD, a few thousand individuals downloading movies is insignificant in terms of overall revenue.
How is Britney an indie artist? Is she not signed to a major label?
I'm not sure what the original poster meant, what kind of criteria do you want to put on any 'indie' movie? I would agree that Star Wars episode 3 doesn't belong on that list, I don't think it should be on ANY top 50 list - it sucked. OTOH, there are many great indie movies on that list. Just because they did well and became classics doesn't discount their origins.
Take Monty Python and the Holy Grail as an example. It was made on a budget, financed by donations, but has become a comedy classic. Strictly speaking an indie movie is one that no studio would back. The creators had to raise the money themselves, thus being independent from a studio. This films range in budget from, El Mariachi which was filmed from $7,000 Robert Rodriguez earned as a medical test subject, to the aforementioned Star Wars episode 3.
There's no rule that a an indie movie has to suck, be filmed by a college student with a videocamera or even have unknown actors and directors. What being an indie means is the directors/producers have raised their own money and have creative control of the project. This control results in a film closer to the director's original intention. It's the common thought that movie studios, like music labels, tend to influence the artists in directions where they think they can make the most money. When an artist, either musical or cinematographic, create an independent project they can let their artistic vision come through more or less unfiltered. Ultimately this has resulted in some of the best written, best directed and best performed films in history.
In what century are you living?
21st I think. Here in the states (I'm guessing you are not from the US since you priced in EUR) the average Joe that just rents DVDs isn't set up to easily download movies and write them to DVD the way you describe. I'm not disagreeing that downloading is slick, especially the way you describe, but there just isn't consumer domand for it. I believe the percentage of people that will go through the additional steps to download illegal movies and watch them as you appearantly do is very low.
Working in IT, this is a definite flaw I see in most business owner's thinking. Any business should supply their employees with the fastest machines available for a somewhat reasonable price. If dual cores run apps faster then they are absolutely needed. The highest cost in any business is labor. If you are paying someone $50,000 a year you only have to increase their productivity by 24 hours over the course of a year to justify spending an additional $1000 on equipment. That's only about a 1/2 hour a week.
There are, of course, diminishing returns and no point in buying ridiculously expensive hardware. Many businesses, especially smaller companies, try to get much more life out of their hardware than they should. It all depends on your user, their workload and how much they are costing your company, but if productivity is increased, dual-cores are easily justifiable.
Even with browser based apps, it's difficult to say that current technology is excessive. Until my browser and other tools appear INSTANTLY there is room for improvement. Until I can have as many sites open as I can possibly use without noticing any lag on my machine, new hardware is not excessive.
Let's face it, most downloaders aren't in it for the convenience.
Which brings up an interesting point, how big of a problem are illegal downloads of movies. Personally I don't download them, netflix is way more efficient and I can watch on my TV which has a bigger screen, better sound and a nicer chair than my computer. This is nice for people that want to download, but I don't see the masses downloading movies to their computer on a regular basis like they do music. Music downloads are a totally different animal. You can have thousands of songs, put them on shuffle and put them in the background (just like xmms is doing fo me right now). Movies aren't as versatile that way. If I'm going to watch a movie, I'm going to sit down and pay attention to it. There's no point for me having many thousands of movie titles.
It's kind of sad (from the aspect that Hollywood makes lots of crap), but many oscar winners and oscar nominees start out as indie films. There are many more that never make the mainstream distribution channels and are only shown in 'art houses'. Just keep in mind, indie doesn't mean good either. Many of the best written movies are indies, but many of the worst movies I've seen are also independent.
I belive that's a scene from Real Genius.
There was a recent episode of "My Name is Earl" where Earl was invited to speak to a college classroom. Every time he said something every student in the clasroom would look down and type on their laptops simultaneously. It was too funny.
I feel that those students who are going to use classtime for recreational persuits should just not bother to show up. Those of us who have trouble concentrating really have a hard time focussing when someone else is doing something more interesting than Biology/Freceh lit./composition/...
Absolutely. This is completely my point. Unfortunately, many college professors have started making attendence a requirement for a passing grade. This has the same effect it has at the highschool level. Students that aren't interested in learning, or can 'breeze through' as you put it end up showing up and being a distraction to the class. University is not public school with a 'no child left behind' attitude. Personally, if I was in a class that I was paying for and wanted to pass and someone was doing distracting things I would take steps to eliminate the distraction. College students are free to change seating, ask the person creating the distraction to stop or even drop the class if needed.
This in turn distracted everyone else around them as they focused on whatever the person on the laptop was screwing around doing instead of on class.
So, did all of those distracted people fail the class because they weren't paying attention? It's been a while since I was in school, but when I was, the classes that were so easy I could play video games through them I stopped coming to. I'd just show up on test day. If a class is so boring and so easy that students can play video games there is something wrong. This is a reflection on the University and our society's current ideas about education, not on the technology.
GIMP is nice for images that stay on the PC, but I've had really terrible luck trying to get GIMP friendly with any sort of high-res work.
Personally I love the GIMP, use it all the time, although I find all of the separate windows annoying. There are is a cmyk plugin out there that supposedly will output good print files.
What troubles have you had using a digi cam on Linux, and when was the last time you tried it?
Those are both good questions. I'm a slackware guy myself, and it's not always the easiest to use distro. I actually have a script I wrote that uses gphoto to read the images from the camera to the hard drive. Works fine for me, but not something your average user is going to do. Also, I set this up about two years ago, so there may be much better utilities.
I guess my comment was more aimed at lack of manufacturer support. Even if there are utilities like digiKam out there that are easy to use, our average user has been trained to use the CD and software that come with the camera. Until you see major manufacturers actually supporting desktop Linux I think many people will shy away, even if the ease of use problems are a myth.
Hey, stop it. Tell everyone that IT is a dead-end career. Don't go into it no matter what. IT's not going to go away, and if no one new comes in those of us already in the industry can make more money!!!
Hold on a minute. Exactly which careers have had steady salary increases in the last 6 years. The auto mechanics I know aren't exactly living it up. Neither are the Dentists, Engineers, Carpenters or Insurance Agents. Real Estate has done well in many parts of the country, and of course the oil industry has had a nice kick in the pants. The rest of us have all felt the effects of the dot-com bust, Y2K, 9/11, war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq and an overall sluggish economy. There are many industries in this country that are struggling, automotive manufacturers, airlines, movie studios.
Poor wage increases in the last few years are not exactly the best reason to base your argument on. The IT industry went through a massive surge prior to 2000 with the big Y2K thing. As a result, after 2000 there was a surplus of expensive US IT people. Jobs were outsourced, or filled by H1B workers. The market has worked to correct itself. College kids now are not interested in IT careers since they don't think they can make money at it. Interestingly enough there seems to be more and more tech jobs available, at least in my area.
My point is, I would tell my kids to pick a career that they are good at and can enjoy. If you are good enough at it you will be able to weather it's ups and downs. If your goal is just to make the most money, go into business. IT is going to be with us forever. It's become ingrained in our society. IT professionals are not going to go away any more than electricians or plumbers or painters.