It sounds to me like someone needs to try and grab more control over that Internet thing. First pedophiles, then terrorists, it seems that you can start whole revolutions (linked in case anyone missed yesterday's news) using it and now THIS? The government must find a way to control it or we're all doomed! AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!
Of course they don't make profits! Those pesky pirates keep cracking their DRM and distributing the games online for free... If it wasn't for them, every single game would become a best-seller and hundreds of millions of people would buy it instantly, because all the games that cost around 25 mil must be really good! It's one of the basic principles of economics: if you want something good, you have to pay the price, so, if we put in a lot of money in a game, it's pretty clear that the more money we push into a game, the better it will sell! It's the same like it is with the banks: more loans lead to a better economy.
These are things that everybody knows about economy!
But the true power of the experiment is in proving that some idea is wrong.
Exactly, just like the idea that global warming is caused / can be stopped by humans. I mean... a Slashdot article today said that California is looking for a ban on black cars, to help prevent global warming. This experiment was very successful at proving that theories can often be very, very wrong and I wonder if anyone ever thought of making an experiment comparing white/black cars CO2 emissions.
We have too much untested theory, it was about time someone started checking how much our model fits with the real world.
Actually, you make an excellent point! How about the guys at Slashdot create some Mirrordot servers that make a copy of all the web pages addressed by links in articles and whatever else is required to view them? This way, you can always review an old article, check what it's sources said and, in case the sources get Slashdotted or are simply disabled, you could check out Mirrordot. I know there's Google cache and there's Internet Archive, but sometimes they miss important URLs that are Slashdotted immediately after the articles reach the Slashdot front page or they're taken down quickly, before the classic web crawlers get to them.
I know you're all fighters of justice and whistle blowing immoral activities happening around you, but why can't you be brave for once and say what you want in the open?
Or are you using anonymity only for hate messages, kiddie porns, and copyright infringements?
Finally, I'd like to say that features like the bat signal should be included in Windows 7, but disabled by default.
AFAIK, all "cool" features are enabled by default. I doubt they'll change their hobbit [sic], because that's what actually boosted their products. You have to admit, Windows looks cool and nobody really cares about what's under the hood. We're not talking about cars here, we're talking about computer operating systems. People understand driving speed, but computing is a bit more difficult to gasp, so, as long as your product's coat is shiny, they will believe your product will also be great. In conclusion, thank Microsoft for not adding more UI features for us to hunt down and disable and for average-joes to be forced to live with.
I like Stallman's idea, it just doesn't seem particularly urgent.
Excellent idea! Let's postpone it until it becomes urgent, then bitch about it on Slashdot and swear at each other because nobody is doing anything. Way to go, team!
OK, OK, 3D Glasses for the Masses, but who will be able to afford them? I wasn't able to find anything related to pricing. Please enlighten me if you know anything related to the price.
If you work for a big company, chances are you are very interested in this article and it doesn't sound retarded at all. I was actually asked by one of my ex-employers for the best method to dispose of a hard-disk so that nobody could retrieve information from it, for good reasons.
That's because, after living in a city for tenths of years, you're just sick of the same things: cars, crowded streets, artificial light, etc. If were to take someone who lived in the jungle and show them pictures of cars, crowded streets and put them in a room with artificial lightning, I bet they'd be very interested in everything and their attention will increase by about 20 percent.
The article is slightly misleading, because it doesn't mention that anything in excess is bad (small doses of alcohol are helpful, but the trouble is that "excess" alcohol means even 100ml of something strong), it just says something along the lines of "the city hurts your brain because it's the city" instead if saying "the city hurts your brain because you've been living in it for too phucking long."
How I see it: there are people with tons of money. Literally, tons. You can't use only money to make more money - no matter what you do with it, it just won't multiply sitting it's ass on the couch all day, watching TV or in a safe somewhere. So what do you need to give that money more value? The answer is simple: information. The only way to make money multiply is if know what to do with it. You can write the best software in the world, the best OS with the best tools ever, but if you don't know how to make it popular, it will never become popular on it's own. The only way to make it popular is to give people as much information about it as possible. Why do we have ads? To send people information about products. Sure, almost every ad is misleading and they give you fake information, but they do tell you something, which you take into account when you make decisions and you are more likely to buy an advertised product instead of an obscure "noname" (I was cheap enough, often enough, to buy "noname" computer-related products and I was amazed at their quality and I wish someone told me they exist so I wouldn't feel so bad and cheap before buying them).
This is the age of communication and nothing is more valuable than information and manipulating that information. How do you manipulate it? To know that, you need another kind of information, which is usually based on statistics on large amounts of data (like Last.FM's database, for example).
So, in today's society, there are three valuable entities: money (manipulated by information, everyone wants it), information (manipulated by more information, any company's dream) and more information (based on statistics, like the Last.FM database) controlling each other in a cascade. Once you have the source you can easily trace it to see how things are flowing, so you may know how to invest your money.
Repeat after me: "I will not disclose the information I have. Information is more valuable than money. If I own a valuable piece of information and I don't make money off it, I'm stupid."
So you're willing to put 100% faith in your compiler? Let's not forget about the gcc bug that's been around for about 10 years; nobody noticed it and gcc was used to compile at least some Linux kernels. Let's not forget about the Intel fdiv bug... so basically, yeah, there could always be some flaw in your software, either caused by you or others.
The point of this story was that there's always a flaw in everything we do. Why? Because we're human and, philosophically speaking, I'm happy our software has bugs, which means we're more than machines that turn coffee and cigarettes into source code! (technically, I'm horrified by the bugs, but that's another story).
That's browser usage. You can't tell if someone accidentally used Konqueror or Firefox or Safari or Chrome or Opera or IE to open a link or if they've used that particular browser intentionally. There are many people that use multiple browsers (I use Firefox, Chrome and Safari).
I remember, I almost got a job for a company where they said that they're not going to improve their website and they'll keep it working with IE6/7 because that's what most of their visitors use. So I asked, "why not spend a bit of time to make it standards compliant and almost everything will work in FF/Chrome/Opera/Safari?" The answer was "because almost all our visitors are using IE and even most using FF quickly return to our site with IE, you can see their IPs and web clients in the logs" Umm... yeah, so I tried to leave as quickly as I could and never returned. Their website was working fine in IE6/7 but it sucked in any other browser, so people with FF either never came back or came back using IE. They analyzed the logs and forgot to interpret what the figures of people that only had a couple of hits with FF really meant - they didn't think for a second WHY those people weren't interested in their website.
The moral of the story is that interpreting these figures is extremely difficult because there are a lot of variables involved. I'm only telling you what Wikipedia is giving you: the estimated number of users that use a specific browser to surf on pages that are in relations with those statistics companies. Those stats are gathered from only a handful of websites, compared to the greatness of the Internet and it would be extremely difficult to differentiate between two different people and a single person using multiple browsers, which is called an error. You're right, those stats are missing something very important: the error margin.
Religious preferences, or training has nothing at all to do with the ability to program software. So it's not like some big hairy dude getting mad since the strip club won't let him on the pole.
Well.... sometimes it does. I used to work at a place where they hired this guy that would stop working before the sun set on Fridays and would only begin working after the sun rise on Mondays. In this part of the world, the sun sets way before the end of our schedule in winter - we leave at 6 PM and the sun sets shortly after 4 PM. So this guy was getting two hours off every Friday, just because of his religious beliefs and over here, you negotiate your monthly salary, not hourly and even if it was hourly, I always had to work 40 hours a week while this guy got away with a few hours. Even 5 hours a week is still plenty to mess up everything, because we worked as a team and we all had to check in at the same time and work during the same period, so we could coordinate ourselves. Of course, this guy didn't "have" to, because his "religion" forbid him from working after dark on Fridays and before light on Mondays.
I wonder if his god could spare a few moments to talk my god into that.
Furthermore, if you're messy, your code is most likely messy. If you're always careful with what you're doing, your code will probably have less bugs. If you like avoiding work, you'll just hack everything up to make the testcases work and put it into production. Your code is what you are. If you have deep beliefs in your religion and your religion forbids you from looking at what's going on around you, you're probably stubborn and closed to new ideas which means working with you will be a bit difficult. Religion can interfere with the way you (yes, I mean you, the reader) develop software. Let's face it, if you were a convinced christian, you wouldn't support OSS so much, would you? You'd just do what your boss told you and you'd know that Microsoft will one day burn in hell. Amen!
Slashdot Mirror
Is there any good reason for this?
Yup! It's the same reason you chose to install a BETA operating system next to another operating system.
I won't run an OS that I can't repair if I need to.
OTOH, you make an excellent point... just give 7 another chance.
Oh, no! People won't torrent, because they sued 8 file sharers, didn't you read about it on the 'Net? [like anyone would believe that]
It sounds to me like someone needs to try and grab more control over that Internet thing. First pedophiles, then terrorists, it seems that you can start whole revolutions (linked in case anyone missed yesterday's news) using it and now THIS? The government must find a way to control it or we're all doomed! AAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!
Of course they don't make profits! Those pesky pirates keep cracking their DRM and distributing the games online for free... If it wasn't for them, every single game would become a best-seller and hundreds of millions of people would buy it instantly, because all the games that cost around 25 mil must be really good! It's one of the basic principles of economics: if you want something good, you have to pay the price, so, if we put in a lot of money in a game, it's pretty clear that the more money we push into a game, the better it will sell! It's the same like it is with the banks: more loans lead to a better economy.
These are things that everybody knows about economy!
But the true power of the experiment is in proving that some idea is wrong.
Exactly, just like the idea that global warming is caused / can be stopped by humans. I mean ... a Slashdot article today said that California is looking for a ban on black cars, to help prevent global warming. This experiment was very successful at proving that theories can often be very, very wrong and I wonder if anyone ever thought of making an experiment comparing white/black cars CO2 emissions.
We have too much untested theory, it was about time someone started checking how much our model fits with the real world.
Actually, you make an excellent point! How about the guys at Slashdot create some Mirrordot servers that make a copy of all the web pages addressed by links in articles and whatever else is required to view them? This way, you can always review an old article, check what it's sources said and, in case the sources get Slashdotted or are simply disabled, you could check out Mirrordot. I know there's Google cache and there's Internet Archive, but sometimes they miss important URLs that are Slashdotted immediately after the articles reach the Slashdot front page or they're taken down quickly, before the classic web crawlers get to them.
Free speech? (Score:0)
by Anonymous Coward on Wed March 25, 20:47 (#27333363)
I know you're all fighters of justice and whistle blowing immoral activities happening around you, but why can't you be brave for once and say what you want in the open? Or are you using anonymity only for hate messages, kiddie porns, and copyright infringements?
Reply to This
Finally, I'd like to say that features like the bat signal should be included in Windows 7, but disabled by default.
AFAIK, all "cool" features are enabled by default. I doubt they'll change their hobbit [sic], because that's what actually boosted their products. You have to admit, Windows looks cool and nobody really cares about what's under the hood. We're not talking about cars here, we're talking about computer operating systems. People understand driving speed, but computing is a bit more difficult to gasp, so, as long as your product's coat is shiny, they will believe your product will also be great. In conclusion, thank Microsoft for not adding more UI features for us to hunt down and disable and for average-joes to be forced to live with.
I like Stallman's idea, it just doesn't seem particularly urgent.
Excellent idea! Let's postpone it until it becomes urgent, then bitch about it on Slashdot and swear at each other because nobody is doing anything. Way to go, team!
OK, OK, 3D Glasses for the Masses, but who will be able to afford them? I wasn't able to find anything related to pricing. Please enlighten me if you know anything related to the price.
If you work for a big company, chances are you are very interested in this article and it doesn't sound retarded at all. I was actually asked by one of my ex-employers for the best method to dispose of a hard-disk so that nobody could retrieve information from it, for good reasons.
He did not say it's better to live in the 'wild', rather, it's better to be in a more natural environments, small city's, village's ... etc.
The plural for "city" is "cities" and the plural for "village" is "villages." No grammar nazism here, just helping a fellow.
That's because, after living in a city for tenths of years, you're just sick of the same things: cars, crowded streets, artificial light, etc. If were to take someone who lived in the jungle and show them pictures of cars, crowded streets and put them in a room with artificial lightning, I bet they'd be very interested in everything and their attention will increase by about 20 percent.
The article is slightly misleading, because it doesn't mention that anything in excess is bad (small doses of alcohol are helpful, but the trouble is that "excess" alcohol means even 100ml of something strong), it just says something along the lines of "the city hurts your brain because it's the city" instead if saying "the city hurts your brain because you've been living in it for too phucking long."
1
(risking my karma)
Excellent point. Think of the impact this could have on psychology!
;) Tinfoil hats for sale! Get your tinfoil hats here!
To get you into the right mood, think of the impact it could have on mind manipulation
How I see it: there are people with tons of money. Literally, tons. You can't use only money to make more money - no matter what you do with it, it just won't multiply sitting it's ass on the couch all day, watching TV or in a safe somewhere. So what do you need to give that money more value? The answer is simple: information. The only way to make money multiply is if know what to do with it. You can write the best software in the world, the best OS with the best tools ever, but if you don't know how to make it popular, it will never become popular on it's own. The only way to make it popular is to give people as much information about it as possible. Why do we have ads? To send people information about products. Sure, almost every ad is misleading and they give you fake information, but they do tell you something, which you take into account when you make decisions and you are more likely to buy an advertised product instead of an obscure "noname" (I was cheap enough, often enough, to buy "noname" computer-related products and I was amazed at their quality and I wish someone told me they exist so I wouldn't feel so bad and cheap before buying them).
This is the age of communication and nothing is more valuable than information and manipulating that information. How do you manipulate it? To know that, you need another kind of information, which is usually based on statistics on large amounts of data (like Last.FM's database, for example).
So, in today's society, there are three valuable entities: money (manipulated by information, everyone wants it), information (manipulated by more information, any company's dream) and more information (based on statistics, like the Last.FM database) controlling each other in a cascade. Once you have the source you can easily trace it to see how things are flowing, so you may know how to invest your money.
Repeat after me: "I will not disclose the information I have. Information is more valuable than money. If I own a valuable piece of information and I don't make money off it, I'm stupid."
You do realize you've used the word 'Annal' three times in one post, right?
So you're willing to put 100% faith in your compiler? Let's not forget about the gcc bug that's been around for about 10 years; nobody noticed it and gcc was used to compile at least some Linux kernels. Let's not forget about the Intel fdiv bug... so basically, yeah, there could always be some flaw in your software, either caused by you or others.
The point of this story was that there's always a flaw in everything we do. Why? Because we're human and, philosophically speaking, I'm happy our software has bugs, which means we're more than machines that turn coffee and cigarettes into source code! (technically, I'm horrified by the bugs, but that's another story).
That would be enough music to listen to for 110,000 years.
(approximated at just over 1 mbyte/minute)
That's browser usage. You can't tell if someone accidentally used Konqueror or Firefox or Safari or Chrome or Opera or IE to open a link or if they've used that particular browser intentionally. There are many people that use multiple browsers (I use Firefox, Chrome and Safari).
I remember, I almost got a job for a company where they said that they're not going to improve their website and they'll keep it working with IE6/7 because that's what most of their visitors use. So I asked, "why not spend a bit of time to make it standards compliant and almost everything will work in FF/Chrome/Opera/Safari?" The answer was "because almost all our visitors are using IE and even most using FF quickly return to our site with IE, you can see their IPs and web clients in the logs" Umm... yeah, so I tried to leave as quickly as I could and never returned. Their website was working fine in IE6/7 but it sucked in any other browser, so people with FF either never came back or came back using IE. They analyzed the logs and forgot to interpret what the figures of people that only had a couple of hits with FF really meant - they didn't think for a second WHY those people weren't interested in their website.
The moral of the story is that interpreting these figures is extremely difficult because there are a lot of variables involved. I'm only telling you what Wikipedia is giving you: the estimated number of users that use a specific browser to surf on pages that are in relations with those statistics companies. Those stats are gathered from only a handful of websites, compared to the greatness of the Internet and it would be extremely difficult to differentiate between two different people and a single person using multiple browsers, which is called an error. You're right, those stats are missing something very important: the error margin.
I'd love to see some information as to what browser current Chrome users transitioned away from.
Here you go!
I, for one, welcome our new... oh, forget it!
Nothing changes behaviour like the loss of sales.
Let's just hope they won't change their behavior and join the other companies in the fight against piracy, which caused their sales to drop.
Religious preferences, or training has nothing at all to do with the ability to program software. So it's not like some big hairy dude getting mad since the strip club won't let him on the pole.
Well.... sometimes it does. I used to work at a place where they hired this guy that would stop working before the sun set on Fridays and would only begin working after the sun rise on Mondays. In this part of the world, the sun sets way before the end of our schedule in winter - we leave at 6 PM and the sun sets shortly after 4 PM. So this guy was getting two hours off every Friday, just because of his religious beliefs and over here, you negotiate your monthly salary, not hourly and even if it was hourly, I always had to work 40 hours a week while this guy got away with a few hours. Even 5 hours a week is still plenty to mess up everything, because we worked as a team and we all had to check in at the same time and work during the same period, so we could coordinate ourselves. Of course, this guy didn't "have" to, because his "religion" forbid him from working after dark on Fridays and before light on Mondays.
I wonder if his god could spare a few moments to talk my god into that.
Furthermore, if you're messy, your code is most likely messy. If you're always careful with what you're doing, your code will probably have less bugs. If you like avoiding work, you'll just hack everything up to make the testcases work and put it into production. Your code is what you are. If you have deep beliefs in your religion and your religion forbids you from looking at what's going on around you, you're probably stubborn and closed to new ideas which means working with you will be a bit difficult. Religion can interfere with the way you (yes, I mean you, the reader) develop software. Let's face it, if you were a convinced christian, you wouldn't support OSS so much, would you? You'd just do what your boss told you and you'd know that Microsoft will one day burn in hell. Amen!
There's one product I won't be buying anymore.
And I won't pirate it any more, either!