Wait a couple of years. There will be another study suggesting that it's biological again. Of course, some of the problem here lies in us starting with the assumption that these things are either nature *or* nurture, instead of entertaining the possibility that it's a complex mix of various factors that are both biological and cultural.
it allows site owners who don't employ these ads to keep their revenue, and it provides a clear alternative for site owners who currently do employ these ads. That's the sort of thing that actually stands a chance of making some change.
Yes, I agree. I've long thought that part of the problem with the whole advertising system on the Internet is that there's no real feedback. Some site puts up obtrusive ads. Some people open the site and immediately close it because of the ads-- the person operating the site has no way of knowing. Another user has an ad-blocker installed and doesn't see the ads, but the site owner probably can't tell. Is the user blocking the ads because he finds the ads on your site obtrusive, or is it because he just has the ad-blocker installed to block other ads? Who can tell?
Since there's no way of telling who is blocking your ads and why, how can advertisers, site owners, and web designers make good choices about what ads are acceptable to their users and which ones aren't? If you want people to change behavior, you have to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior-- but just as important, they need to have a clear signal about which behaviors your punishing and rewarding. If you're punishing them and they don't know they're being punished, or they don't know *why* they're being punished, then you can't expect good results.
So I'd almost like to see something advanced that says, "If a website does X (where X is bad behavior), block all ads on their site and signal to them in some way that I'm blocking ads because of behavior X."
In fact, I wish this weren't optional. There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content.
I'm not sure I agree that blocking ads is "stealing content". First, if it's theft, it's theft of potential ad revenue, not content. I'm not taking the content away from the site, nor am I using the content elsewhere. Second, it's not really theft of potential ad revenue since I'm not getting the ad revenue, I'm not failing to provide the site with ad revenue. Third, I don't think it's remotely reasonable to call it "theft" when all that's happening is "I didn't look at the ads that you wanted me to look at." It's also not "theft" to look at the ads and refuse to click on them, or to click on the ads and refuse to buy anything.
That is different from saying that it owns 90% of the content, and much nearer to saying that a huge proportion of the people will only see what big media shows them.
Well you have a point, but the real problem is that "big media" owns most of the distribution channels, and that's why most people will only see what big media shows them.
Worse, there's no *motivation* to produce anything but dreck. When you have a small number of competitors, then everyone is looking for the lowest common denominator, and nobody is really looking for the niche.
On the other hand, there is some real non-dreck out there. There are shows like "Breaking Bad" and "Louie", which are, in my opinion, amazing. God only knows how "Louie" got on the air.
Whatever the facts about what has happened here, the question has still been raised, "how should revenue be shared between upstream and downstream FLOSS projects?"
So let's just look at it as a hypothetical: CompanyA has a revenue stream from an Amazon affiliate program. CompanyB takes CompanyA's project and includes it in their own product, according to proper licensing terms. Can CompanyB simply change their referral program so that they receive the revenue, or do they have a moral/ethical/legal responsibility to preserve that revenue for the original product? If they have a responsibility to share, on what terms, and how do you work it out?
It only gets hairier when you consider that the problem could be several layers deep. It might be that CompanyA builds a piece of software which gets included in CompanyB's product, which gets altered and distributed by CompanyC, which in turn gets adapted by CompanyD. So if you're CompanyD, what's your responsibility to companies A, B, and C?
I mean, let's say CompanyD in this situation looks at the affiliate code, and it's the affiliate code for CompanyC. Do you just leave it? Let's say they know that CompanyC didn't actually do anything to improve CompanyA's project. Should they instead change the affiliate code back to CompanyA? What if CompanyB made some real improvements to the project?
Yeah, but here's the problem: When HP says, "You must allow the reference build to be installed," what's to stop the manufacturer/carrier from responding, "Ok, then we won't use your OS"? What is their leverage to keep this actually open when Google can't even keep Android open.
If they really make efforts to avoid fragmentation and get get WebOS onto some future phone handsets, they could avoid some of the mistakes that have been made with Android.
Well one of the things that drive Android fragmentation is manufacturer add-ons and locked-down devices, meaning that you're not running the generic stock install and you probably can't install the vanilla version on your phone even if you want to. My understanding is that's not so much Google's fault as it is the carriers' fault and the device manufacturers' fault.
So can HP handle that better? I'm not sure how. What leverage do they have over the carriers?
Hell, maybe even do a full body scan of your own body, put it into a computer, and it picks out your size (I know what size shirt I wear depends on the manufacturer) and show you what you will *actually* look like in those clothes. Finally women will be able to tell whether those pants make their ass look fat.
It depends on how much these things cost to manufacture. Considering that they were originally supposed to be around $500, I wouldn't be surprised if they cost more than $150 to manufacture.
Whenever the subject of Touchpads come up, someone starts to argue, "Well they're selling a ton of these now, so they should ramp up production and they'll make tons of money!" It kind of fails to acknowledge, though, that they're selling them really cheaply because they're trying to ditch inventory, and supposedly selling them at a loss. Selling tons of devices at a loss isn't a viable business model.
Although "the cloud" means "I don't care where my servers are", there are in fact actual servers somewhere, and there's an actual person or team of persons responsible for maintaining that server or servers, and they are either good at their job, or they aren't.
However, the question isn't just about whether they're "good at their job", but whether they, and the organization that they work for, can be trusted to handle my data the way I'd like. What are their security procedures, in dealing with both external and internal threats. At the previous poster mentioned, your own employees are a serious security threat. Well, when you use "the cloud", the list of "your employees" that are a security threat suddenly include the employees of the cloud provider.
In addition, there is another possible issue with putting things in "the cloud". When you're hosting data yourself for internal usage, you have the possibility of denying remote access altogether. If I have an internal server that simply doesn't connect to the Internet, then it makes it pretty secure against internet threats. If I have the data hosted on the Internet instead, then it inherently must be accessible from the Internet, which opens you to additional attack vectors.
So while I'd say that hosted services aren't necessarily less secure than internal services, I'd say that all else being equal, they generally are. Now you might still be comfortable with that-- the process of security is not about creating absolute security, but rather about creating a reasonable trade-off between security and convenience/accessibility that is appropriate for the data being secured.
Why do so many Slashdotters always feel like the best answer to a question is "you're doing it wrong"? Sheesh.
There are mainly two reasons.
To some extent, people answer by saying "you're doing it wrong" because the person is doing it wrong. The poster asks, "I'm trying to build a Facebook competitor in my spare time because, although I'm not a programmer, I have a great idea of how to beat Facebook. So I downloaded an RPM file for Apache and I'm trying to install it on my Windows ME box at home so I can use it as a web server over my AOL dialup connection, but the RPM won't install no matter how many times I double-click on it. Any advice?"
Sometimes "you're doing it wrong" is just the right answer.
The other reason, as I'm sure you can guess, is that people want to look smart by giving a clever answer, but they don't actually have a good answer the the question as asked.
Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I really can't imagine how a live copy of someone's hard drive can be considered "art".
Well I can't imagine how a lot of modern art is considered art, but it is. If he really just wants a backup, why not ask? It's not as though we're going to turn him in. And yes, basically hosting companies are dumb enough to fall for it, but it probably won't be a great backup solution.
Maybe. The requirements are unclear, so it's hard to come up with a solution. He mentioned that he wanted it to be a web server, but who knows if that's because it actually needs to be publicly available via http?
Yeah, I don't know... It seems to me that if you had a college with lots of writing courses, and you could take a semester that focused on the nuances of writing for online media, that wouldn't be too unreasonable. It might be interesting to pick apart and think about how blogs posts, as a medium, are different from other kinds of short articles. As someone who has done some different kinds of writing, sometimes professionally, it *is* interesting how different media demand subtly different rules of writing.
However, I have a hard time imaging that studying the writing of blog posts would warrant more than a semester, unless you were at the level of getting a PhD doing research into how the Internet is changing the conventions of writing.
I don't mean to be rude, but it seems like you may be approaching this the wrong way. What are you actually doing and why? Why are you looking a VPS providers? You say, "I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project." What type of project? Define "reliable".
To be more specific, why are you trying to upload the entire contents of your hard drive to a web server? Like, if this is a writing project, do you care about copying your program/system files, and if so, why? Why a web server? Is it going to be accessed by someone else? If so, who needs to access it, and where are those people located relative to you (e.g. are they on the same network?)?
If you just need 500 GB of web space, there are lots of shared hosting companies that will provide that much space for less than $10 per month. It will be reliable enough for a lot of purposes. However, not knowing what you're trying to do, I don't know if you're doing something completely silly.
The mistakes I'm referring to are not the actions of the CEOs and Wall Street people, but of the investors, directors, and customers of these banks and companies for continuing to put up with this crap. And the government officials and voters who get cowed into supporting the people who are screwing us all over.
And this distinction is noteworthy because you can measuring what happens in practice, find where it doesn't meet the theory, and revise your theory. This is how science gets done.
All good points. To add on to and modify the last point, the sort of "learning project management" stuff I mention isn't going to be too helpful if you just want to write scripts and fix computers. Do that stuff and learn how to do it well if you'd like to get into management. If you prefer to work on intense tech stuff, don't try to be a manager. Instead, find a job where you do the intense tech stuff and your manager handles everything else.
As far as the problem where "the idiot architect or manager who gets paid 50% more than they do for less work," that may or may not be accurate. I know I've worked as a manager and had people who worked under me think that I had it easy because I sat at a desk and pushed papers. They didn't understand the work I put in, and often that work made their jobs easier.
Ah... so you haven't actually worked in IT then. Yes, people will rent printers and pay by the page. Now, we're not talking about a $100 laser printer; we're talking about a big $10k printer/copier. So you might lease the printer for 3 years, and that contract includes all maintenance and repair. There's usually a fee just for leasing the printer, but an additional charge per page in order to quantify the wear and tear you're putting on the printer. The per-page charge may also cover toner, which is sometimes included in the whole thing.
In many cases, this is still cheaper than buying a new printer every however-many years and paying for maintenance and repair.
The death of the 10" laptop may be a problem for you, but it won't be a general/widespread problem. My point is that it might be a problem for *some* other people, but if it would be a problem for a lot of other people, that would mean these devices are in demand. If they're in demand and selling well, they won't be discontinued.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait a couple of years. There will be another study suggesting that it's biological again. Of course, some of the problem here lies in us starting with the assumption that these things are either nature *or* nurture, instead of entertaining the possibility that it's a complex mix of various factors that are both biological and cultural.
it allows site owners who don't employ these ads to keep their revenue, and it provides a clear alternative for site owners who currently do employ these ads. That's the sort of thing that actually stands a chance of making some change.
Yes, I agree. I've long thought that part of the problem with the whole advertising system on the Internet is that there's no real feedback. Some site puts up obtrusive ads. Some people open the site and immediately close it because of the ads-- the person operating the site has no way of knowing. Another user has an ad-blocker installed and doesn't see the ads, but the site owner probably can't tell. Is the user blocking the ads because he finds the ads on your site obtrusive, or is it because he just has the ad-blocker installed to block other ads? Who can tell?
Since there's no way of telling who is blocking your ads and why, how can advertisers, site owners, and web designers make good choices about what ads are acceptable to their users and which ones aren't? If you want people to change behavior, you have to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior-- but just as important, they need to have a clear signal about which behaviors your punishing and rewarding. If you're punishing them and they don't know they're being punished, or they don't know *why* they're being punished, then you can't expect good results.
So I'd almost like to see something advanced that says, "If a website does X (where X is bad behavior), block all ads on their site and signal to them in some way that I'm blocking ads because of behavior X."
In fact, I wish this weren't optional. There's a difference between protesting against certain odious forms of advertising and simply stealing content.
I'm not sure I agree that blocking ads is "stealing content". First, if it's theft, it's theft of potential ad revenue, not content. I'm not taking the content away from the site, nor am I using the content elsewhere. Second, it's not really theft of potential ad revenue since I'm not getting the ad revenue, I'm not failing to provide the site with ad revenue. Third, I don't think it's remotely reasonable to call it "theft" when all that's happening is "I didn't look at the ads that you wanted me to look at." It's also not "theft" to look at the ads and refuse to click on them, or to click on the ads and refuse to buy anything.
That is different from saying that it owns 90% of the content, and much nearer to saying that a huge proportion of the people will only see what big media shows them.
Well you have a point, but the real problem is that "big media" owns most of the distribution channels, and that's why most people will only see what big media shows them.
there's no need to produce anything BUT dreck.
Worse, there's no *motivation* to produce anything but dreck. When you have a small number of competitors, then everyone is looking for the lowest common denominator, and nobody is really looking for the niche.
On the other hand, there is some real non-dreck out there. There are shows like "Breaking Bad" and "Louie", which are, in my opinion, amazing. God only knows how "Louie" got on the air.
Whatever the facts about what has happened here, the question has still been raised, "how should revenue be shared between upstream and downstream FLOSS projects?"
So let's just look at it as a hypothetical: CompanyA has a revenue stream from an Amazon affiliate program. CompanyB takes CompanyA's project and includes it in their own product, according to proper licensing terms. Can CompanyB simply change their referral program so that they receive the revenue, or do they have a moral/ethical/legal responsibility to preserve that revenue for the original product? If they have a responsibility to share, on what terms, and how do you work it out?
It only gets hairier when you consider that the problem could be several layers deep. It might be that CompanyA builds a piece of software which gets included in CompanyB's product, which gets altered and distributed by CompanyC, which in turn gets adapted by CompanyD. So if you're CompanyD, what's your responsibility to companies A, B, and C?
I mean, let's say CompanyD in this situation looks at the affiliate code, and it's the affiliate code for CompanyC. Do you just leave it? Let's say they know that CompanyC didn't actually do anything to improve CompanyA's project. Should they instead change the affiliate code back to CompanyA? What if CompanyB made some real improvements to the project?
Yeah, but here's the problem: When HP says, "You must allow the reference build to be installed," what's to stop the manufacturer/carrier from responding, "Ok, then we won't use your OS"? What is their leverage to keep this actually open when Google can't even keep Android open.
If they really make efforts to avoid fragmentation and get get WebOS onto some future phone handsets, they could avoid some of the mistakes that have been made with Android.
Well one of the things that drive Android fragmentation is manufacturer add-ons and locked-down devices, meaning that you're not running the generic stock install and you probably can't install the vanilla version on your phone even if you want to. My understanding is that's not so much Google's fault as it is the carriers' fault and the device manufacturers' fault.
So can HP handle that better? I'm not sure how. What leverage do they have over the carriers?
Hell, maybe even do a full body scan of your own body, put it into a computer, and it picks out your size (I know what size shirt I wear depends on the manufacturer) and show you what you will *actually* look like in those clothes. Finally women will be able to tell whether those pants make their ass look fat.
It depends on how much these things cost to manufacture. Considering that they were originally supposed to be around $500, I wouldn't be surprised if they cost more than $150 to manufacture.
Whenever the subject of Touchpads come up, someone starts to argue, "Well they're selling a ton of these now, so they should ramp up production and they'll make tons of money!" It kind of fails to acknowledge, though, that they're selling them really cheaply because they're trying to ditch inventory, and supposedly selling them at a loss. Selling tons of devices at a loss isn't a viable business model.
Although "the cloud" means "I don't care where my servers are", there are in fact actual servers somewhere, and there's an actual person or team of persons responsible for maintaining that server or servers, and they are either good at their job, or they aren't.
However, the question isn't just about whether they're "good at their job", but whether they, and the organization that they work for, can be trusted to handle my data the way I'd like. What are their security procedures, in dealing with both external and internal threats. At the previous poster mentioned, your own employees are a serious security threat. Well, when you use "the cloud", the list of "your employees" that are a security threat suddenly include the employees of the cloud provider.
In addition, there is another possible issue with putting things in "the cloud". When you're hosting data yourself for internal usage, you have the possibility of denying remote access altogether. If I have an internal server that simply doesn't connect to the Internet, then it makes it pretty secure against internet threats. If I have the data hosted on the Internet instead, then it inherently must be accessible from the Internet, which opens you to additional attack vectors.
So while I'd say that hosted services aren't necessarily less secure than internal services, I'd say that all else being equal, they generally are. Now you might still be comfortable with that-- the process of security is not about creating absolute security, but rather about creating a reasonable trade-off between security and convenience/accessibility that is appropriate for the data being secured.
Not just a hard drive. It could be a whole server in a different building.
Why do so many Slashdotters always feel like the best answer to a question is "you're doing it wrong"? Sheesh.
There are mainly two reasons.
To some extent, people answer by saying "you're doing it wrong" because the person is doing it wrong. The poster asks, "I'm trying to build a Facebook competitor in my spare time because, although I'm not a programmer, I have a great idea of how to beat Facebook. So I downloaded an RPM file for Apache and I'm trying to install it on my Windows ME box at home so I can use it as a web server over my AOL dialup connection, but the RPM won't install no matter how many times I double-click on it. Any advice?"
Sometimes "you're doing it wrong" is just the right answer.
The other reason, as I'm sure you can guess, is that people want to look smart by giving a clever answer, but they don't actually have a good answer the the question as asked.
It seems likely that people who are careless also lose things more often.
Maybe I'm just a philistine, but I really can't imagine how a live copy of someone's hard drive can be considered "art".
Well I can't imagine how a lot of modern art is considered art, but it is. If he really just wants a backup, why not ask? It's not as though we're going to turn him in. And yes, basically hosting companies are dumb enough to fall for it, but it probably won't be a great backup solution.
Maybe. The requirements are unclear, so it's hard to come up with a solution. He mentioned that he wanted it to be a web server, but who knows if that's because it actually needs to be publicly available via http?
Yes, but at the same time, it's not an isolated issue. when a CEO screws up, and then gets hired to another sweet job at a high-profile company.
Yeah, I don't know... It seems to me that if you had a college with lots of writing courses, and you could take a semester that focused on the nuances of writing for online media, that wouldn't be too unreasonable. It might be interesting to pick apart and think about how blogs posts, as a medium, are different from other kinds of short articles. As someone who has done some different kinds of writing, sometimes professionally, it *is* interesting how different media demand subtly different rules of writing.
However, I have a hard time imaging that studying the writing of blog posts would warrant more than a semester, unless you were at the level of getting a PhD doing research into how the Internet is changing the conventions of writing.
But does he need a dedicated server? Even $80/month seems a little steep if all he needs is 500GB of web space to rsync some files to.
I don't mean to be rude, but it seems like you may be approaching this the wrong way. What are you actually doing and why? Why are you looking a VPS providers? You say, "I was hoping Slashdot could suggest a reliable hosting service for that type of project." What type of project? Define "reliable".
To be more specific, why are you trying to upload the entire contents of your hard drive to a web server? Like, if this is a writing project, do you care about copying your program/system files, and if so, why? Why a web server? Is it going to be accessed by someone else? If so, who needs to access it, and where are those people located relative to you (e.g. are they on the same network?)?
If you just need 500 GB of web space, there are lots of shared hosting companies that will provide that much space for less than $10 per month. It will be reliable enough for a lot of purposes. However, not knowing what you're trying to do, I don't know if you're doing something completely silly.
The mistakes I'm referring to are not the actions of the CEOs and Wall Street people, but of the investors, directors, and customers of these banks and companies for continuing to put up with this crap. And the government officials and voters who get cowed into supporting the people who are screwing us all over.
And this distinction is noteworthy because you can measuring what happens in practice, find where it doesn't meet the theory, and revise your theory. This is how science gets done.
With a few exceptions, that's what it seems to mean to be a CEO: Get paid millions and millions of dollars to screw things up.
All good points. To add on to and modify the last point, the sort of "learning project management" stuff I mention isn't going to be too helpful if you just want to write scripts and fix computers. Do that stuff and learn how to do it well if you'd like to get into management. If you prefer to work on intense tech stuff, don't try to be a manager. Instead, find a job where you do the intense tech stuff and your manager handles everything else.
As far as the problem where "the idiot architect or manager who gets paid 50% more than they do for less work," that may or may not be accurate. I know I've worked as a manager and had people who worked under me think that I had it easy because I sat at a desk and pushed papers. They didn't understand the work I put in, and often that work made their jobs easier.
Ah... so you haven't actually worked in IT then. Yes, people will rent printers and pay by the page. Now, we're not talking about a $100 laser printer; we're talking about a big $10k printer/copier. So you might lease the printer for 3 years, and that contract includes all maintenance and repair. There's usually a fee just for leasing the printer, but an additional charge per page in order to quantify the wear and tear you're putting on the printer. The per-page charge may also cover toner, which is sometimes included in the whole thing.
In many cases, this is still cheaper than buying a new printer every however-many years and paying for maintenance and repair.
The death of the 10" laptop may be a problem for you, but it won't be a general/widespread problem. My point is that it might be a problem for *some* other people, but if it would be a problem for a lot of other people, that would mean these devices are in demand. If they're in demand and selling well, they won't be discontinued.