I understand your point, but I still stand by mine, for two reasons.
First of all, words have nuances. "Prostitute" and "whore" mean the same thing, in a mechanical sense - the definition is the same. But one is derrogatory, and the other isn't.
I believe that there are nuances in the word "consumer", that it comes out of a certain corporate mindset.
And second of all, the entire article is about how MSN plans to sell ads on the search engine. People buy ads to sell people stuff. So I think they really are thinking of their users as consumers.
The article talks about where the ads are going to appear on page, how many ads will show up before the first real hit is displayed, and how some ads will be on the top while others will be on the side. It talks about how at least two of the three top ads will be sold directly by MSN, but the third might, or might not be sold by the companies that are selling ads for MSN now. It talks about whether or not those companies will be able to continue to do that, and how their roles will change.
This is a different sort of discussion than the one that surrounded google when it was launched. With google, it was all about PageRank, and about how to make searches more useful. When google talks about their service, the discussion tends to be user-centric. The article we have here is advertiser-centric.
I think it's a real difference in perspective, and I think it's one of the bedrock reasons why Google is better, and will continue to be better, than any MSN search engine.
And I think the MSN corporate wonk's use of the word "consumer" is indicative of that. It's a small thing, and it doesn't prove anything, but it's a sign.
Redetzki said MSN will list three paid listings at the top of every search result, of which at least two will be advertisements sold directly by MSN.
People don't want the search results to come in 4th on the list -- they want it at the top.
Also, I found this quote to be sort of funny:
"We're really close to finding out what really strikes consumers as the most relevant search results," said Karen Redetzki, an MSN product manager.
They don't know, but they're really close to finding out what consumers want. Even the word "consumers" says a lot about their mindset. We're just there to buy stuff.
99/100 of my google searches don't have anything to do with buying stuff. But when I do want to buy something, I use google because it's the engine I'm used to.
MS will probably make a lot of money, because a lot of people don't know any better. I've been installing the google toolbar for people, because it blocks pop-ups, and about half of the people who have gotten it from me say that their searches have improved a lot because they've started to use google.
I had assumed that everyone was already using google, but the comments I've gotten suggest that isn't the case.
But google is the company that's driving the industry. They're the people who worked out the best way for an engine to work. MS isn't bringing anything new to the table, fundamentally, other than an ability to use their software to drive people to their site.
They're saying, basically, let's copy google to a large extent, except for a small number of changes that will make the site worse (ie., putting paid links at the top of the page instead of just over on the side), and use our position as a software vendor to drive traffic to our search engine.
A lot of people have been bashing AOL, and it's true that it's probably not a good choice for most/. readers. But they have a lot of features that are good for some pretty big niche markets (people with small kids, for example).
I have a Time-Warner cable modem. Time-Warner has to let other ISPs use its cable lines, so when you sign up, you can take Time-Warner's Road-Runner, Earthlink, a local company, or AOL as your ISP.
If you walk into the cable company office, you see tons of promotional material for Road Runner. They have cartoon road runners on posters all over the place, terminals in the office so you can see how fast it is, and all the rest.
But there is no sign whatsoever that AOL is available. You have to know about it. I'm not even sure you can sign up for AOL at the office -- you might have to call AOL and get it set up.
Whether or not you like AOL, it's a big brand, and a lot of people do like it. I think that if they had posters for AOL at the office, along side of the Road Runner stuff, they'd sell as many AOL accounts as Road Runner accounts.
They don't, though. Why? Corporate infighting? Not wanting the other guys to look good? I don't know.
The point is that AOL is an asset that Time-Warner, for whatever reasons, doesn't want to maximize. Someone else would do a better job.
Hoagland regularly appears on Coast to Coast AM, an overnight syndicated talk show with something like 12 million listeners.
They get the listeners to email NASA demanding ridiculous things. Another poster pointed out that they got a Mars probe to drop other important work to take more photos of the "face on mars."
When NASA did it, Hoagland went on the radio and accused NASA of faking the photos to hide the evidence. He's a classic delusional type, who sees any evidence that proves him wrong as proof that there's a conspiracy.
A lot of the problem is the radio show, which is irresponsible, in my view. During the whole Y2K scare, one of the hosts hyped the hell out of it, and sold people overpriced bunker food on the side.
I understand the appeal of the show, and I enjoy that sort of thing myself. The argument for it is that it's sort of like pro wrestling -- it's just a show, everyone knows it's just a show, and the few people who don't just make the whole thing that much more entertaining. I can buy all of that.
The problem comes when these guys start scaring people and exploiting them (with the bunker food), or when they create real problems for NASA. NASA has enough troubles now, they don't need this crap.
I'm *NOT* calling for any kind of government action, or any sort of censorship. I don't support what's happening to Howard Stern, and I wouldn't support anyone hassling Coast to Coast AM.
I do think it's appropriate for other people to wake up to how many listeners these guys have, and to try to keep them relavtively honest. These sorts of articles are a great start.
It's hard to get MythTV going, for example, and the technology is genuinely useful, so a company that sold prerolled myth tv boxes, with working remote controls, the ability to send video out to a normal tv, support for a home video lan, and all of that, would probably find a small enthusiast market. I think you could probably charge a little more too -- there's a kind of gadget freak who would buy it and not mind an extra hundred or two for something that was well built, from a company with good support.
I think that trying to sell cheap linux pcs to the general public is probably a losing proposition. I don't know how anyone can stand up to those $500 wal-mart HP Windows boxes.
Don't insurance companies have to have assets to back their policies?
How would you figure out how much money would be necessary to back these policies? If you believe that the risk is zero, and they don't need money, then the business becomes a confidence scheme. If you believe that the risk isn't zero, you need something to back it up.
On top of that, if you insure people against auto accidents, or serious diesease, you can assume that everyone won't get hit at the same time. But if it turned out that running linux exposed you to liability, then all of the policy holders would have to be paid off at once. In other words, there's no way the premiums would be able to cover it.
I'm not an actuary or an insurance expert, so maybe I don't understand what's going on. But it doesn't smell right to me.
That was exactly my reaction -- I can't believe they'd call it that. You can sort of imagine them sitting around a table, and making a toast "to evil."
I wonder if those guys model themselves on agent smith -- try to look like him, imitate his mannerisms, setc.
You'd think they'd call it something like "children's protection and technological development project" instead.
People like tara reid put a lot of work into developing and maintaining their celebrity. They hire people who work the system, they try to get stories about them in the entertainment "news" outlets, etc.
The game companies put the celebrities on the box because they think it's in their interests to do so -- they think that it will drive sales. If they thought that about the designers and coders, they do it for them, too.
If the geeks were smart, they'd try to emulate what hollywood people do to build their careers -- they'd do what they could to create high profiles, to make their names recognizable. That would give them more juice when they try to negotiate with the companies.
My first internet account was on a unix freenet called Nyx, which was run by a guy named Andrew Burt at Denver University.
When I first started to use my account, I could dial a local university number, and connect to a telnet prompt. There wasn't even any authentication.
Eventually they closed that down, but kept access to the library card catalogue open to the public. You could use the card catalog to get to the gopher tree, and from there I could find a telnet link to Nyx.
I downloaded my first linux distro using kermit through a telnet connection opened via gopher. It was the old MCC distro, which came on a series of floppy disks.
For me, gopher was more of a means than an end in itself. I didn't spend a lot of time reading stuff on gopher. I did search for telnet links to nyx, which were always moving around (or getting shut down).
I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.
The first wave of consumer or hobbyist internet use was focused on shell accounts, many of which were on netcom -- you'd dial in with a terminal program, so you didn't have a tcp/ip stack on the computer you were sitting at, and nothing was graphical. Gopher worked well in that world, because it was something that a terminal program could handle.
I'm sure I'm not saying anything everyone else (including you) isn't thinking, but differences between success rates would drive my decision. Features, bells and whistles, etc., would be secondary considerations.
I don't see how you could get to the bottom of this without depending on a doctor's advice. Like some other people who have posted here, I'm a little puzzled that the doctor would let you make the decision without more guidance, unless it really didn't matter much in terms of success rates.
I really wish your mom the best -- it's amazing what this technology can do when it works, and I hope your mom falls into that category.
--
(I don't think I can tell you anything about this that you don't know, and amateur medical expositions can be annoying or dangerous... I almost deleted the following, but decided to leave it in for others. Please take this disclaimer seriously: I'm not a doctor, and don't know what I'm talking about.)
I think that the big problem people have with these devices is that your brain tends to "unlearn" how to hear when information from your ears stops flowing into the brain. If your hearing is down for too long of a time, it's hard to bring it back.
I think that Limbaugh's spectucular success with his cochlear implant had something to do with how rapidly his hearing loss had come upon him, and how quickly he sought treatment.
But having said that, the extent of the changes and the rate at which they occur in your brain take place varies so much from one person to another that you can't make accurate predictions about what will happen. In particular, you shouldn't be discouraged if more time has passed. You just have to try it and see if it works.
My grandmother has sigificant hearing loss, although it's not the type that people who get cochlear implants have. She tried to avoid hearing aids for as long as she could, didn't like them, and didn't wear them often. Now she really needs them, and they don't work very well. She can function, but it's always hard.
Her ENT told me that the problem is in the brain "circuitry" -- she didn't forget how to hear all together (that's not what happens), but she is much worse at differentiating sounds than she used to be.
Everyone in my family, including me, had assued that her problems were coming from the technology -- that the hearing aids weren't doing a very good job, and that better technology would solve the problem. But the doctor said the problem was with the way her brain processes sounds.
I had assumed (naively, it turns out), that it ought to be possible to substantially improve hearing aids with better signal processing. I asked the doctor if it made sense to have a wireless hearing aid, with a mic and a speaker on it, that would communicate with a real, full blown computer, which could do almost anything you'd need.
He said that it would be possible to realize some improvements, but in general they wouldn't be worth the extra hassle of the external device. The real problems were in the brain's ability to differentiate sounds.
It's easy for geeks to think of your ears as providing a "line in" to the brain, or to think that if that line gets damaged, it ought to be possible to put in a patch cord that bypasses it. That's pretty much the way I thought about it. But it's more complicated than that.
Thanks for the IKVM link. It looks like a pretty cool project, although the blog is a little over my head.
But if I had a job writing software for large banks, or some other very serious group of people (I don't), I'd be afraid of using something like IKVM and Mono -- again, Java's annoyances don't seem annoying enough to push people that far out of the mainstream.
Isn't the primary value of these sorts of projects in the learning?
I mean, in order to follow the IKVM development blog, I'd have to be a much more knowledgable geek than I actually am. I'd be thinking about language syntax, what the compiler is actually doing, and what the VM does in much deeper ways than I do now. Presumably, that would pay big dividends when I regular old java code that would run on the boring old sun jdk.
To me, it seems like knowing this stuff would be a much bigger win than the actual functionality these projects are trying to deliver.
What I'm trying to say is that I have a tremendous amount of admiration for the people who actually build stuff like that, and I wish I was in that league, but I'm not sure that I want to use it.
I've been reading through the various segments of the interview, and I tend to buy most of what Hejlsberg says on various Java vs. C# issues.
But I keep coming back to the idea that the changes (or improvements) aren't enough. If you accept that all of the changes are improvements, that they make things better, they're still not enough to justify getting locked into a single vendor, or in learning new libraries.
C# cleans up some of Java's annoyances, which is great, but the annoyances just aren't big enough to make the shift worthwhile. That's the problem.
I think the libraries problem is huge for Microsoft. The java libraries are just getting to be so big, complex, and rich that it will be very hard to get people to move away from them.
I don't think that anyone says there aren't annoying things in Java, parts of it that wouldn't be done differently if the language could be redesigned from scratch. But those annoyances are liveable -- for the most part, you can deal with them.
Java's has those libraries, though, and one of the reasons the libraries are so rich is that Sun opened up the process to other companies. MS is huge, they have a lot of smart guys, but I just don't think they can compete with Java's comparative openness.
That's the thing -- you can read about checked exceptions, and agree that it would be nice if java handled things more like C#, but it's not even close to being enough to overcome the value of java's openness vs. Microsoft's closed approach.
In the end, it really comes down to the business model.
(This is a little off topic, but hopefully not too far.)
I've used FlyingJ hotspots on the road, and you don't really need a special antenna -- in general, the reception is fine from inside the car with a normal pcmcia wifi card.
The parking lots are pretty big, and there are places where the reception isn't great, but it's usually pretty easy to drive to another part of the lot to improve your signal. I worked under the theory that the networks were designed to provide the best signals to the truckers, so I tended to park closer to the truck section.
Most of the problems I had seemed to be caused by mistakes on the FlyingJ side of things. I think they had a fairly bloody roll out. In order to user their system, you have to create an account and login.
You do that by pulling up a browser, and letting it detect the proxy server settings automatically. If you haven't logged in, the proxy server redirects you to a page where you can submit your cc or login if you already have an account.
I found that at a lot of locations, things weren't working. My computer couldn't find the proxy server, or whatever. At a couple of locations the system was just open -- there was no login, and it worked fine.
In general, though, it's pretty cool. The FlyingJ's were spaced out so that I could check my email and surf the web a couple of times a day. It's not expensive, and when it works, it works pretty well. I could use ssh and vnc to pull up my home desktop, and it was useable.
I bought the cheapest accounts, 15 minutes at a time. That turned out to be a good plan, mostly because some truck stops didn't have working networks.
It's tempting to look at your route and tell yourself, "I'll be able to hit these two other truck stops in the next 24 hours -- so I'll save money and buy a 24 hour account." The problem is that sometimes the next truck stop didn't work when I got there. It would have sucked to have paid more, expecting to be able to use a wireless net that was down.
I took two road trips, one maybe 8 months ago, and another about 6 months ago, and the FlyingJ system was substantially more reliable the second time around. So I'd expect them to have something reasonably solid now, But I wouldn't pay for a long term account until I *knew* it was solid.
Why don't we expect ISPs to filter email for viruses?
I know it would be expensive, that it would require people to do more work and buy more servers. But I don't see any other way of shutting down these mail virus storms.
This virus doesn't exploit any real holes. It depends on unsophisticated users doing something dumb. I don't think we're ever going to live in a world in which it won't be possible to trick unsophisticated users into doing something dumb. Does that mean we have to suffer through this crap indefinitely?
We can (and should) criticize Microsoft for creating an OS culture in which most people run everything with Administrator privs. But even if they fixed that, I'm not sure that this sort of thing would stop happening. The tricks virus writers use would just have to get better.
If all, or even most, ISPs filtered mail for viruses, they'd be much less of a problem.
I used to run a small ISP. When we started out, everyone had open relay SMTP servers. But gradually over time, the culture changed, and it was recognized that you had to close your relays if you wanted to be a good net citizen. ISPs that didn't had trouble getting other people to take their mail.
I know this isn't the same thing, because closing a relay is a one time config change and doesn't require you to run beefier servers. For large ISPs, filtering mail would cost real money.
I just don't see an alternative, though.
I have a wildcard email forward on my domain, and I'm going to get a couple of hundred copies of this virus today.
I think it's more complicated than that -- I heard a program on Ave Maria Catholic Radio about it (Al Kresta's show), where they tried to figure out what had happened.
My impression (which could obviously be wrong) is that:
A) The Pope saw the film, and liked it. I believe he made the comment that's been attributed to him. *But* -- I think he just spoke, privately, to someone else who was there. He just made a private comment -- he didn't issue a statement.
B) Word about the quote got around. In general, people in the Church are very enthusiastic about the film. The producers were talking to people in the Vatican, and the quote got back to them. They were really pumped up to hear about it, and naturally, they talked about it. More to the point, they talked about it with journalists.
C) News of all of this broke, and a lot of people criticized the Church for endorsing a film. There are consequences that can flow from that sort of thing that are hard to predict -- most obviously, it would probably strain Jewish/Catholic relations. That's when some of the people surrounding the Pope tried to clarify what happened.
The official statement I read said that he saw it, but that it was the Pope's policy not to offer critical judgments of artistic works.
That's what I meant -- as a guy in a screening room, the Pope had an opinion. But as "the Pope", the Bishop of Rome, he didn't express an opinion, not officially. To do so might be seen as inconsistent with his role.
For Linus to be flogging distros, or desktops, or whatever, would probably be inconsistent with his role.
Maybe he has a home rolled system, and doesn't run a distro (although he probably spends a lot of time hassling with desktops if he does).
But if he has a preference about distros or desktops, the linux community would probably be better off not knowing what it is. It would be much better to duke it out in other arenas.
It would be fun to know what distro Linus uses, but we're all better off not knowing.
It almost reminds me a little bit of the furour surrounding the Pope and Mel Gibson's film. On one level, the Pope is a guy watching a movie, and he probably said something after he saw it. But on the other hand, it seems likely that he didn't want to make a public statement. There's a difference beteen the guy acting as the guy, and the guy acting in the context of his office.
Linus almost certainly has his preferences and his opinions, like any other user. But in his capacity as the guy who holds his vague and unnamed office, as the spiritual leader of the linux movement, he chooses not to express a preference.
For a guy who says he wants to stay out of politics, he understands linux politics pretty well. I think that has a lot to do with his success, and the OS's success.
Saudi Arabia has one of the highest rates of executions in the world in both absolute numbers and per capita. Contrary to the UN's call for a progressive reduction in the number of capital crimes, Saudi Arabia has expanded the scope of the death penalty to cover a wide range of offences, including offences without lethal consequences such as apostasy, drug dealing, sodomy and "witchcraft". The scores of people who are executed every year, many for non-violent crimes, are put to death after summary trials that offer them no opportunity to defend themselves and almost no protection against miscarriages of justice.
[...]
Execution is by public beheading for men and, according to reports, by firing squad or beheading for women, sometimes in public
[...]
Married people convicted of adultery may be executed by stoning to death. In what are deemed by the authorities as very serious criminal cases involving violence, the person executed may be crucified afterwards. Such cases include one reported in 1990, where the decapitated body of a man executed for murder and other crimes was crucified.
[...]
Amnesty International recorded 1,160 executions in Saudi Arabia between 1980 and December 1999, but the real number may well be much higher. The main reasons why so many people are executed is the wide scope of the death penalty, the vague laws that are used to impose it, and the defective criminal justice system which allows courts to impose such sentences with few procedural safeguards.
--
I would strongly urge any Westerner who has any interest in the Middle East to check out http://www.memri.org, which offers translations, from Arabic into English, of Middle Eastern media.
BACKGROUND INFORMATION Saudi Arabia applies the death penalty for a wide range of offences which, in addition to violent crimes, include some with no lethal consequences, such as sorcery, certain sexual offences, drug-related offences and apostasy (converting from Islam to another religion). Sentencing occurs after trials which fall short of internationally agreed standards - trials are held behind closed doors and defendants do not have the right to formal representation by a lawyer. In many cases defendants and their families are not informed of the progress of legal proceedings against them. Defendants may also be convicted solely on the basis of confessions obtained under duress, torture or deception. At least 40 people have been executed since the beginning of 2003.
The last thing I want to see is an Islamic country with a large fundamentalist population picking up expertise in missle technology.
The fight against nuclear proliferation is being lost, but at least we (Americans, I guess I should say) have some protection from the difficulties associated with targeting long range missles.
Saudi Arabia is an ally, and I don't want to run them down. But they're an ally that doesn't have a lot of ability to control its technology and funds. Pakistan is in the same category. These countries are allies, but there are people with high positions in the militaries and intelligence services of both countries that are very hostile to the US.
The standard geek way of looking at space technology is either naive or deliberately ignores some basic facts. It's military technology.
The space race with Russia was not undertaken to beam cool pictures of guys walking on the moon to the folks at home. It was because we felt we had to be better at building ICBMs and cruise missles than the Russians.
Our skill with satellites gives us intelligence and the ability to coordinate our forces on the ground, and to target our weapons much more precisely.
That's what this stuff is really for. Bush knows it, the Saudis know it, the Pakistanis know it, the Russians know it, and the EU knows it.
The HST is amazingly cool. The mars rover is incredible. They do spend some money on pure science. I'm glad they do.
But if you look at space technology purely as geeky goodness, and not as (at the very least) dual-use military technology, then you aren't looking at the space program in a realistic way.
And for the record, under Saudi law RobLimo could have been decapitated for pulling up that porn while he was on Saudi soil. The government looks the other way when Westerners do stuff like that, but it is the law.
The fact that he pulled up the porn under those circumstances, to check the filter, makes me wonder about how well he understands the people he was covering.
It's hard to write code that is robust enough to not need rewrites. The ability to do that is what separates the really good programmers from amateurs like myself. It's the difference between being a piker (like myself) and an engineer.
I'm not a great programmer, and don't do it regularly, but when I have written fairly big projects, I find that the need for rewrites came out of poor design choices that I had made.
I typically start out with something small, that can handle the core functionality expected from the project. Then I try to add features and fix bugs.
Eventually, the code becomes very difficult to maintain, and ultimately, you get to the point where the ad-hoc architecture simply won't support a new feature.
To the user, everything looks fine, everything runs reliably, but under the hood, there are real problems.
My worst experience was with a web app. I started out with script based pages in ASP (not my call), and kept writing new pages to do different things. It got to the point where I had a about three hundred script pages and lots of redundant code.
When it would become necessary to change the db table structures for another app hitting the same data, I'd have a lot of trouble keeping up, fixing my code quickly in a reliable way.
The problem was that it just wasn't possible to stand still. I couldn't go to my boss and say, "I need a three month feature freeze, to rewrite this stuff."
Writing a new version in parallel was hard because maintaining the crummy but functional code was taking more and more time. It was a real problem, and caused me a fair amount of pain, and suffering.
After digging myself into that hole, I stepped back and tried to figure out how other people did it. I would have been a lot better off building on top of something like struts.
The lesson I took from this is that it's important to study design patterns, and to use tested frameworks whenever possible. You have to think like an engineer, and not someone who codes by the seat of his pants. I'm not an engineer, so it's not easy for me to do that.
I'm not saying that the people who run the projects mentioned are in the same boat that I was. As programmers, they're in a different league.
But they're often working on problems that aren't well understood. Patterns and frameworks are ways to leverage other people's experiences. But if that experience doesn't exist, you have to guess on certain design decisions, and see how it comes out.
Top notch programmers are obviously going to guess a lot better than someone like me will. But they're still going to make mistakes. When enough of those mistakes pile up, you're going to need to do a rewrite.
You could make a point that's opposite of the one that the article makes by looking at the java libraries.
They made choices with their original AWT gui tools that were just wrong. They weren't dumb people -- they just didn't know, the experience necessary to make the right choice simply didn't exist. Once they tried it, they realized it wasn't working, and they came back with Swing.
Rewrites are always going to be necessary for new sorts of projects, because you can't just sit in your armchair and predict how complex systems will work in the real world. You have to build them and see what happens.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand your point, but I still stand by mine, for two reasons.
First of all, words have nuances. "Prostitute" and "whore" mean the same thing, in a mechanical sense - the definition is the same. But one is derrogatory, and the other isn't.
I believe that there are nuances in the word "consumer", that it comes out of a certain corporate mindset.
And second of all, the entire article is about how MSN plans to sell ads on the search engine. People buy ads to sell people stuff. So I think they really are thinking of their users as consumers.
The article talks about where the ads are going to appear on page, how many ads will show up before the first real hit is displayed, and how some ads will be on the top while others will be on the side. It talks about how at least two of the three top ads will be sold directly by MSN, but the third might, or might not be sold by the companies that are selling ads for MSN now. It talks about whether or not those companies will be able to continue to do that, and how their roles will change.
This is a different sort of discussion than the one that surrounded google when it was launched. With google, it was all about PageRank, and about how to make searches more useful. When google talks about their service, the discussion tends to be user-centric. The article we have here is advertiser-centric.
I think it's a real difference in perspective, and I think it's one of the bedrock reasons why Google is better, and will continue to be better, than any MSN search engine.
And I think the MSN corporate wonk's use of the word "consumer" is indicative of that. It's a small thing, and it doesn't prove anything, but it's a sign.
This alone will sink it:
Redetzki said MSN will list three paid listings at the top of every search result, of which at least two will be advertisements sold directly by MSN.
People don't want the search results to come in 4th on the list -- they want it at the top.
Also, I found this quote to be sort of funny:
"We're really close to finding out what really strikes consumers as the most relevant search results," said Karen Redetzki, an MSN product manager.
They don't know, but they're really close to finding out what consumers want. Even the word "consumers" says a lot about their mindset. We're just there to buy stuff.
99/100 of my google searches don't have anything to do with buying stuff. But when I do want to buy something, I use google because it's the engine I'm used to.
MS will probably make a lot of money, because a lot of people don't know any better. I've been installing the google toolbar for people, because it blocks pop-ups, and about half of the people who have gotten it from me say that their searches have improved a lot because they've started to use google.
I had assumed that everyone was already using google, but the comments I've gotten suggest that isn't the case.
But google is the company that's driving the industry. They're the people who worked out the best way for an engine to work. MS isn't bringing anything new to the table, fundamentally, other than an ability to use their software to drive people to their site.
They're saying, basically, let's copy google to a large extent, except for a small number of changes that will make the site worse (ie., putting paid links at the top of the page instead of just over on the side), and use our position as a software vendor to drive traffic to our search engine.
A lot of people have been bashing AOL, and it's true that it's probably not a good choice for most /. readers. But they have a lot of features that are good for some pretty big niche markets (people with small kids, for example).
I have a Time-Warner cable modem. Time-Warner has to let other ISPs use its cable lines, so when you sign up, you can take Time-Warner's Road-Runner, Earthlink, a local company, or AOL as your ISP.
If you walk into the cable company office, you see tons of promotional material for Road Runner. They have cartoon road runners on posters all over the place, terminals in the office so you can see how fast it is, and all the rest.
But there is no sign whatsoever that AOL is available. You have to know about it. I'm not even sure you can sign up for AOL at the office -- you might have to call AOL and get it set up.
Whether or not you like AOL, it's a big brand, and a lot of people do like it. I think that if they had posters for AOL at the office, along side of the Road Runner stuff, they'd sell as many AOL accounts as Road Runner accounts.
They don't, though. Why? Corporate infighting? Not wanting the other guys to look good? I don't know.
The point is that AOL is an asset that Time-Warner, for whatever reasons, doesn't want to maximize. Someone else would do a better job.
Hoagland regularly appears on Coast to Coast AM, an overnight syndicated talk show with something like 12 million listeners.
They get the listeners to email NASA demanding ridiculous things. Another poster pointed out that they got a Mars probe to drop other important work to take more photos of the "face on mars."
When NASA did it, Hoagland went on the radio and accused NASA of faking the photos to hide the evidence. He's a classic delusional type, who sees any evidence that proves him wrong as proof that there's a conspiracy.
A lot of the problem is the radio show, which is irresponsible, in my view. During the whole Y2K scare, one of the hosts hyped the hell out of it, and sold people overpriced bunker food on the side.
I understand the appeal of the show, and I enjoy that sort of thing myself. The argument for it is that it's sort of like pro wrestling -- it's just a show, everyone knows it's just a show, and the few people who don't just make the whole thing that much more entertaining. I can buy all of that.
The problem comes when these guys start scaring people and exploiting them (with the bunker food), or when they create real problems for NASA. NASA has enough troubles now, they don't need this crap.
I'm *NOT* calling for any kind of government action, or any sort of censorship. I don't support what's happening to Howard Stern, and I wouldn't support anyone hassling Coast to Coast AM.
I do think it's appropriate for other people to wake up to how many listeners these guys have, and to try to keep them relavtively honest. These sorts of articles are a great start.
I'd look for a niche.
It's hard to get MythTV going, for example, and the technology is genuinely useful, so a company that sold prerolled myth tv boxes, with working remote controls, the ability to send video out to a normal tv, support for a home video lan, and all of that, would probably find a small enthusiast market. I think you could probably charge a little more too -- there's a kind of gadget freak who would buy it and not mind an extra hundred or two for something that was well built, from a company with good support.
I think that trying to sell cheap linux pcs to the general public is probably a losing proposition. I don't know how anyone can stand up to those $500 wal-mart HP Windows boxes.
Don't insurance companies have to have assets to back their policies?
How would you figure out how much money would be necessary to back these policies? If you believe that the risk is zero, and they don't need money, then the business becomes a confidence scheme. If you believe that the risk isn't zero, you need something to back it up.
On top of that, if you insure people against auto accidents, or serious diesease, you can assume that everyone won't get hit at the same time. But if it turned out that running linux exposed you to liability, then all of the policy holders would have to be paid off at once. In other words, there's no way the premiums would be able to cover it.
I'm not an actuary or an insurance expert, so maybe I don't understand what's going on. But it doesn't smell right to me.
That was exactly my reaction -- I can't believe they'd call it that. You can sort of imagine them sitting around a table, and making a toast "to evil."
I wonder if those guys model themselves on agent smith -- try to look like him, imitate his mannerisms, setc.
You'd think they'd call it something like "children's protection and technological development project" instead.
People like tara reid put a lot of work into developing and maintaining their celebrity. They hire people who work the system, they try to get stories about them in the entertainment "news" outlets, etc.
The game companies put the celebrities on the box because they think it's in their interests to do so -- they think that it will drive sales. If they thought that about the designers and coders, they do it for them, too.
If the geeks were smart, they'd try to emulate what hollywood people do to build their careers -- they'd do what they could to create high profiles, to make their names recognizable. That would give them more juice when they try to negotiate with the companies.
If tampering is possible, even if it's unlikely, there will always be an out for people who don't want to believe evidence.
In practice, the rejection of valid evidence will probably be a bigger problem than the creation of invalid evidence.
My first internet account was on a unix freenet called Nyx, which was run by a guy named Andrew Burt at Denver University.
When I first started to use my account, I could dial a local university number, and connect to a telnet prompt. There wasn't even any authentication.
Eventually they closed that down, but kept access to the library card catalogue open to the public. You could use the card catalog to get to the gopher tree, and from there I could find a telnet link to Nyx.
I downloaded my first linux distro using kermit through a telnet connection opened via gopher. It was the old MCC distro, which came on a series of floppy disks.
For me, gopher was more of a means than an end in itself. I didn't spend a lot of time reading stuff on gopher. I did search for telnet links to nyx, which were always moving around (or getting shut down).
I don't miss gopher at all, because you can think of a gopher menu as a special case of a web page. Every gopher menu can be expressed as a web page, and of course web pages can do lots of stuff that gopher menus can't.
The first wave of consumer or hobbyist internet use was focused on shell accounts, many of which were on netcom -- you'd dial in with a terminal program, so you didn't have a tcp/ip stack on the computer you were sitting at, and nothing was graphical. Gopher worked well in that world, because it was something that a terminal program could handle.
I'm sure I'm not saying anything everyone else (including you) isn't thinking, but differences between success rates would drive my decision. Features, bells and whistles, etc., would be secondary considerations.
I don't see how you could get to the bottom of this without depending on a doctor's advice. Like some other people who have posted here, I'm a little puzzled that the doctor would let you make the decision without more guidance, unless it really didn't matter much in terms of success rates.
I really wish your mom the best -- it's amazing what this technology can do when it works, and I hope your mom falls into that category.
--
(I don't think I can tell you anything about this that you don't know, and amateur medical expositions can be annoying or dangerous... I almost deleted the following, but decided to leave it in for others. Please take this disclaimer seriously: I'm not a doctor, and don't know what I'm talking about.)
I think that the big problem people have with these devices is that your brain tends to "unlearn" how to hear when information from your ears stops flowing into the brain. If your hearing is down for too long of a time, it's hard to bring it back.
I think that Limbaugh's spectucular success with his cochlear implant had something to do with how rapidly his hearing loss had come upon him, and how quickly he sought treatment.
But having said that, the extent of the changes and the rate at which they occur in your brain take place varies so much from one person to another that you can't make accurate predictions about what will happen. In particular, you shouldn't be discouraged if more time has passed. You just have to try it and see if it works.
My grandmother has sigificant hearing loss, although it's not the type that people who get cochlear implants have. She tried to avoid hearing aids for as long as she could, didn't like them, and didn't wear them often. Now she really needs them, and they don't work very well. She can function, but it's always hard.
Her ENT told me that the problem is in the brain "circuitry" -- she didn't forget how to hear all together (that's not what happens), but she is much worse at differentiating sounds than she used to be.
Everyone in my family, including me, had assued that her problems were coming from the technology -- that the hearing aids weren't doing a very good job, and that better technology would solve the problem. But the doctor said the problem was with the way her brain processes sounds.
I had assumed (naively, it turns out), that it ought to be possible to substantially improve hearing aids with better signal processing. I asked the doctor if it made sense to have a wireless hearing aid, with a mic and a speaker on it, that would communicate with a real, full blown computer, which could do almost anything you'd need.
He said that it would be possible to realize some improvements, but in general they wouldn't be worth the extra hassle of the external device. The real problems were in the brain's ability to differentiate sounds.
It's easy for geeks to think of your ears as providing a "line in" to the brain, or to think that if that line gets damaged, it ought to be possible to put in a patch cord that bypasses it. That's pretty much the way I thought about it. But it's more complicated than that.
Thanks for the link -- I didn't know Jobs had a weblog. It's cool how the text fades in when you go to the page.
Netcraft says the site is hosted on FreeBSD.
Thanks for the IKVM link. It looks like a pretty cool project, although the blog is a little over my head.
But if I had a job writing software for large banks, or some other very serious group of people (I don't), I'd be afraid of using something like IKVM and Mono -- again, Java's annoyances don't seem annoying enough to push people that far out of the mainstream.
Isn't the primary value of these sorts of projects in the learning?
I mean, in order to follow the IKVM development blog, I'd have to be a much more knowledgable geek than I actually am. I'd be thinking about language syntax, what the compiler is actually doing, and what the VM does in much deeper ways than I do now. Presumably, that would pay big dividends when I regular old java code that would run on the boring old sun jdk.
To me, it seems like knowing this stuff would be a much bigger win than the actual functionality these projects are trying to deliver.
What I'm trying to say is that I have a tremendous amount of admiration for the people who actually build stuff like that, and I wish I was in that league, but I'm not sure that I want to use it.
I've been reading through the various segments of the interview, and I tend to buy most of what Hejlsberg says on various Java vs. C# issues.
But I keep coming back to the idea that the changes (or improvements) aren't enough. If you accept that all of the changes are improvements, that they make things better, they're still not enough to justify getting locked into a single vendor, or in learning new libraries.
C# cleans up some of Java's annoyances, which is great, but the annoyances just aren't big enough to make the shift worthwhile. That's the problem.
I think the libraries problem is huge for Microsoft. The java libraries are just getting to be so big, complex, and rich that it will be very hard to get people to move away from them.
I don't think that anyone says there aren't annoying things in Java, parts of it that wouldn't be done differently if the language could be redesigned from scratch. But those annoyances are liveable -- for the most part, you can deal with them.
Java's has those libraries, though, and one of the reasons the libraries are so rich is that Sun opened up the process to other companies. MS is huge, they have a lot of smart guys, but I just don't think they can compete with Java's comparative openness.
That's the thing -- you can read about checked exceptions, and agree that it would be nice if java handled things more like C#, but it's not even close to being enough to overcome the value of java's openness vs. Microsoft's closed approach.
In the end, it really comes down to the business model.
(This is a little off topic, but hopefully not too far.)
I've used FlyingJ hotspots on the road, and you don't really need a special antenna -- in general, the reception is fine from inside the car with a normal pcmcia wifi card.
The parking lots are pretty big, and there are places where the reception isn't great, but it's usually pretty easy to drive to another part of the lot to improve your signal. I worked under the theory that the networks were designed to provide the best signals to the truckers, so I tended to park closer to the truck section.
Most of the problems I had seemed to be caused by mistakes on the FlyingJ side of things. I think they had a fairly bloody roll out. In order to user their system, you have to create an account and login.
You do that by pulling up a browser, and letting it detect the proxy server settings automatically. If you haven't logged in, the proxy server redirects you to a page where you can submit your cc or login if you already have an account.
I found that at a lot of locations, things weren't working. My computer couldn't find the proxy server, or whatever. At a couple of locations the system was just open -- there was no login, and it worked fine.
In general, though, it's pretty cool. The FlyingJ's were spaced out so that I could check my email and surf the web a couple of times a day. It's not expensive, and when it works, it works pretty well. I could use ssh and vnc to pull up my home desktop, and it was useable.
I bought the cheapest accounts, 15 minutes at a time. That turned out to be a good plan, mostly because some truck stops didn't have working networks.
It's tempting to look at your route and tell yourself, "I'll be able to hit these two other truck stops in the next 24 hours -- so I'll save money and buy a 24 hour account." The problem is that sometimes the next truck stop didn't work when I got there. It would have sucked to have paid more, expecting to be able to use a wireless net that was down.
I took two road trips, one maybe 8 months ago, and another about 6 months ago, and the FlyingJ system was substantially more reliable the second time around. So I'd expect them to have something reasonably solid now, But I wouldn't pay for a long term account until I *knew* it was solid.
Why don't we expect ISPs to filter email for viruses?
I know it would be expensive, that it would require people to do more work and buy more servers. But I don't see any other way of shutting down these mail virus storms.
This virus doesn't exploit any real holes. It depends on unsophisticated users doing something dumb. I don't think we're ever going to live in a world in which it won't be possible to trick unsophisticated users into doing something dumb. Does that mean we have to suffer through this crap indefinitely?
We can (and should) criticize Microsoft for creating an OS culture in which most people run everything with Administrator privs. But even if they fixed that, I'm not sure that this sort of thing would stop happening. The tricks virus writers use would just have to get better.
If all, or even most, ISPs filtered mail for viruses, they'd be much less of a problem.
I used to run a small ISP. When we started out, everyone had open relay SMTP servers. But gradually over time, the culture changed, and it was recognized that you had to close your relays if you wanted to be a good net citizen. ISPs that didn't had trouble getting other people to take their mail.
I know this isn't the same thing, because closing a relay is a one time config change and doesn't require you to run beefier servers. For large ISPs, filtering mail would cost real money.
I just don't see an alternative, though.
I have a wildcard email forward on my domain, and I'm going to get a couple of hundred copies of this virus today.
I think it's more complicated than that -- I heard a program on Ave Maria Catholic Radio about it (Al Kresta's show), where they tried to figure out what had happened.
i d= 47798
My impression (which could obviously be wrong) is that:
A) The Pope saw the film, and liked it. I believe he made the comment that's been attributed to him. *But* -- I think he just spoke, privately, to someone else who was there. He just made a private comment -- he didn't issue a statement.
B) Word about the quote got around. In general, people in the Church are very enthusiastic about the film. The producers were talking to people in the Vatican, and the quote got back to them. They were really pumped up to hear about it, and naturally, they talked about it. More to the point, they talked about it with journalists.
C) News of all of this broke, and a lot of people criticized the Church for endorsing a film. There are consequences that can flow from that sort of thing that are hard to predict -- most obviously, it would probably strain Jewish/Catholic relations. That's when some of the people surrounding the Pope tried to clarify what happened.
The official statement I read said that he saw it, but that it was the Pope's policy not to offer critical judgments of artistic works.
http://www.zenit.org/english/visualizza.phtml?s
That's what I meant -- as a guy in a screening room, the Pope had an opinion. But as "the Pope", the Bishop of Rome, he didn't express an opinion, not officially. To do so might be seen as inconsistent with his role.
For Linus to be flogging distros, or desktops, or whatever, would probably be inconsistent with his role.
Maybe he has a home rolled system, and doesn't run a distro (although he probably spends a lot of time hassling with desktops if he does).
But if he has a preference about distros or desktops, the linux community would probably be better off not knowing what it is. It would be much better to duke it out in other arenas.
It would be fun to know what distro Linus uses, but we're all better off not knowing.
It almost reminds me a little bit of the furour surrounding the Pope and Mel Gibson's film. On one level, the Pope is a guy watching a movie, and he probably said something after he saw it. But on the other hand, it seems likely that he didn't want to make a public statement. There's a difference beteen the guy acting as the guy, and the guy acting in the context of his office.
Linus almost certainly has his preferences and his opinions, like any other user. But in his capacity as the guy who holds his vague and unnamed office, as the spiritual leader of the linux movement, he chooses not to express a preference.
For a guy who says he wants to stay out of politics, he understands linux politics pretty well. I think that has a lot to do with his success, and the OS's success.
This is a good article, from Amnesty International:
a /c ampaign2000/report/death_penalty.html
http://www.amnestyusa.org/countries/saudi_arabi
Some quotes:
Saudi Arabia has one of the highest rates of executions in the world in both absolute numbers and per capita. Contrary to the UN's call for a progressive reduction in the number of capital crimes, Saudi Arabia has expanded the scope of the death penalty to cover a wide range of offences, including offences without lethal consequences such as apostasy, drug dealing, sodomy and "witchcraft". The scores of people who are executed every year, many for non-violent crimes, are put to death after summary trials that offer them no opportunity to defend themselves and almost no protection against miscarriages of justice.
[...]
Execution is by public beheading for men and, according to reports, by firing squad or beheading for women, sometimes in public
[...]
Married people convicted of adultery may be executed by stoning to death. In what are deemed by the authorities as very serious criminal cases involving violence, the person executed may be crucified afterwards. Such cases include one reported in 1990, where the decapitated body of a man executed for murder and other crimes was crucified.
[...]
Amnesty International recorded 1,160 executions in Saudi Arabia between 1980 and December 1999, but the real number may well be much higher. The main reasons why so many people are executed is the wide scope of the death penalty, the vague laws that are used to impose it, and the defective criminal justice system which allows courts to impose such sentences with few procedural safeguards.
--
I would strongly urge any Westerner who has any interest in the Middle East to check out http://www.memri.org, which offers translations, from Arabic into English, of Middle Eastern media.
I think I was wrong -- they won't behead you for pulling up porn. They will probably just toss you in jail and torture you for that.
u di news17.htm
They will behead you for being gay:
http://www.sodomylaws.org/world/saudi_arabia/sa
I can't find a direct link (yet -- still looking), but this is from Amnesty International:
7 20 03?open&of=ENG-SAU
http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGMDE2300
BACKGROUND INFORMATION
Saudi Arabia applies the death penalty for a wide range of offences which, in
addition to violent crimes, include some with no lethal consequences, such as
sorcery, certain sexual offences, drug-related offences and apostasy
(converting from Islam to another religion). Sentencing occurs after trials
which fall short of internationally agreed standards - trials are held behind
closed doors and defendants do not have the right to formal representation by a
lawyer. In many cases defendants and their families are not informed of the
progress of legal proceedings against them. Defendants may also be convicted
solely on the basis of confessions obtained under duress, torture or deception.
At least 40 people have been executed since the beginning of 2003.
It's not blocked websites, it's porn.
Tell it to the guys who got blown up for selling booze in the British compound.
I guess I'll be blowing some karma on this one.
The last thing I want to see is an Islamic country with a large fundamentalist population picking up expertise in missle technology.
The fight against nuclear proliferation is being lost, but at least we (Americans, I guess I should say) have some protection from the difficulties associated with targeting long range missles.
Saudi Arabia is an ally, and I don't want to run them down. But they're an ally that doesn't have a lot of ability to control its technology and funds. Pakistan is in the same category. These countries are allies, but there are people with high positions in the militaries and intelligence services of both countries that are very hostile to the US.
The standard geek way of looking at space technology is either naive or deliberately ignores some basic facts. It's military technology.
The space race with Russia was not undertaken to beam cool pictures of guys walking on the moon to the folks at home. It was because we felt we had to be better at building ICBMs and cruise missles than the Russians.
Our skill with satellites gives us intelligence and the ability to coordinate our forces on the ground, and to target our weapons much more precisely.
That's what this stuff is really for. Bush knows it, the Saudis know it, the Pakistanis know it, the Russians know it, and the EU knows it.
The HST is amazingly cool. The mars rover is incredible. They do spend some money on pure science. I'm glad they do.
But if you look at space technology purely as geeky goodness, and not as (at the very least) dual-use military technology, then you aren't looking at the space program in a realistic way.
And for the record, under Saudi law RobLimo could have been decapitated for pulling up that porn while he was on Saudi soil. The government looks the other way when Westerners do stuff like that, but it is the law.
The fact that he pulled up the porn under those circumstances, to check the filter, makes me wonder about how well he understands the people he was covering.
It's hard to write code that is robust enough to not need rewrites. The ability to do that is what separates the really good programmers from amateurs like myself. It's the difference between being a piker (like myself) and an engineer.
I'm not a great programmer, and don't do it regularly, but when I have written fairly big projects, I find that the need for rewrites came out of poor design choices that I had made.
I typically start out with something small, that can handle the core functionality expected from the project. Then I try to add features and fix bugs.
Eventually, the code becomes very difficult to maintain, and ultimately, you get to the point where the ad-hoc architecture simply won't support a new feature.
To the user, everything looks fine, everything runs reliably, but under the hood, there are real problems.
My worst experience was with a web app. I started out with script based pages in ASP (not my call), and kept writing new pages to do different things. It got to the point where I had a about three hundred script pages and lots of redundant code.
When it would become necessary to change the db table structures for another app hitting the same data, I'd have a lot of trouble keeping up, fixing my code quickly in a reliable way.
The problem was that it just wasn't possible to stand still. I couldn't go to my boss and say, "I need a three month feature freeze, to rewrite this stuff."
Writing a new version in parallel was hard because maintaining the crummy but functional code was taking more and more time. It was a real problem, and caused me a fair amount of pain, and suffering.
After digging myself into that hole, I stepped back and tried to figure out how other people did it. I would have been a lot better off building on top of something like struts.
The lesson I took from this is that it's important to study design patterns, and to use tested frameworks whenever possible. You have to think like an engineer, and not someone who codes by the seat of his pants. I'm not an engineer, so it's not easy for me to do that.
I'm not saying that the people who run the projects mentioned are in the same boat that I was. As programmers, they're in a different league.
But they're often working on problems that aren't well understood. Patterns and frameworks are ways to leverage other people's experiences. But if that experience doesn't exist, you have to guess on certain design decisions, and see how it comes out.
Top notch programmers are obviously going to guess a lot better than someone like me will. But they're still going to make mistakes. When enough of those mistakes pile up, you're going to need to do a rewrite.
You could make a point that's opposite of the one that the article makes by looking at the java libraries.
They made choices with their original AWT gui tools that were just wrong. They weren't dumb people -- they just didn't know, the experience necessary to make the right choice simply didn't exist. Once they tried it, they realized it wasn't working, and they came back with Swing.
Rewrites are always going to be necessary for new sorts of projects, because you can't just sit in your armchair and predict how complex systems will work in the real world. You have to build them and see what happens.
A lot of mail clients let you pass on large emails -- you can set a size limit in the client's configuration.
That would let you pop your mail off in a timely fashion.
To get the attachments, you could use the ISP's webmail interface.