I don't really agree with that. I would guess you frequent different websites than the majority of the population, and are perfectly contempt with HTML and CSS 95% of the time.
But for (truly) animated menues, embedded video, and sound effects, I've never seen anything work as good as flash. And I don't think any of these should be seen as unnecessary bloat.
Sorry, but I first need to interject. Do you mean "perfectly content"?
Anyway, I don't think I've seen any (that I can think of at least) uses of Flash for animated menu systems or sound effects that wouldn't have been better served by doing it in a standard way, or else (just as likely) by doing it not at all. Scanning my memory, I don't think I've encountered a single flash menu system that was "truly animated" where the animation served any particular purpose. I can't think of any that were even tolerable and still had effects that couldn't have been achieved with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Can't think of any good uses of sound effects in web sites. Why should web sites have sound effects at all?
Using Flash for embedded video is the only thing that I'll grant has some merit, but even then, it has its share of problems, often requires a fair amount of javascript to function properly, and I'm not sure it's a far better solution than some of the alternatives.
I think there are two different issues being talked about here. The first is, "Has W3C done a good job of maintaining and developing standards?" I'm very open to the idea that they could have done better. I've dealt with HTML and CSS enough to have a long wishlist.
The second question, very roughly, is "What's the deal with Flash/Silverlight?" Are they good? Bad? Helpful? Troublesome? I can see how people are trying to connect these two issues, but they really are separate.
If you just want to say that Microsoft and Macromedia/Adobe developed these formats and technologies because HTML/CSS/Javascript weren't good enough, that may be an interesting historical analysis. However, it doesn't address the question as to why these technologies and formats are closed/proprietary. Macromedia/Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and everyone else could have joined together to develop and promote web standards other than those run by the W3C (like WHATWG). Hell, they could even develop technologies and formats to serve their purposes, and then open those formats in a way that allows other developers to create their own implementations (like what Adobe essentially did with PDF).
However, they've chosen to keep it all proprietary, and the intent is pretty clear: vendor lock-in. They want you to use their tools for development, their tools for display. In Microsoft's case, it has the added extra bonus that, if their format becomes popular enough, they can drop support for other operating systems and lock everyone into their platform.
And when you get down to it, these technologies don't really address a really great need. I've only seen a couple of good uses for Flash other than for casual games. For most of the content available on the web, HTML and CSS (flawed as they are) are better solutions.
If we did things their way we'd have perfectly rendering web pages all the time, but the content they hosted would be so dull most consumers wouldn't be interested.
That's evident by the fact that not one of the major websites out there that I can think of (facebook, google, microsoft, and even the bbc to name a few) are fully W3C compliant.
Well, there are a couple things about "compliance" to consider. First, because browsers don't always implement the standards fully or properly, you might have to use hacks to get everything to display properly in all browsers. Current web designers have to know browsers' bugs as much as the standards, so many web pages can't comply with the standards and render properly at the same time. That doesn't mean the standards are at fault. The inability to follow standards on the web is largely traceable to a single company which refuses to make a compliant browser.
But also, the real issue of standards is not to force everything into compliance at all times. It's to give a standard way of doing things so that people can expect certain things to be consistent. The point of web standards is so that I, as a developer, can write a web page in accordance with a set of rules, and then have a reasonable expectation that the page will display properly. It makes it so I shouldn't really have to worry about what browser the end-user has installed, because they should all display the page (roughly) the same way. If you wish to violate the standards for some purpose, that's fine, but then you should familiarize yourself with how that violation will effect various platforms. But, in fact, there are even standards about how formats should handle violations of the standard, and so even the violation may be... well... according to the standard.
But none of this explains to me why the standards would make the *content* of web pages "dull". If the content is interesting, the web wouldn't generally be dull. Relying on presentation to make your content exciting doesn't speak well for your content, and on the Internet, content is king.
If anything, it seems like the Internet wouldn't exist as it does today if the HTML standard hadn't been so simple and open. It allowed anyone with half a brain to make webpages and display their content. The ease with which individuals can create content is essential for the P2P "community" nature of the web. If not for that, it would be like TV-- pushed from big companies who have the resources and expertise to make it work. Even expecting someone to buy expensive software (e.g. Adobe Flash) in order to develop content would hurt the web immensely. The barrier of entry is much lower when the only necessary equipment for making content is a text editor.
I agree that it's good to have encryption and everything. I just think it's funny that people in here are talking about "Well what if you're being tortured?" Who here is doing something where they're likely to be tortured? Sure, that's probably a concern for some set of people, but how many of the people here are really a member of that set?
And of course all the examples people are using are like, "Use your first volume to hide porn and your financial information, and then use another volume in that volume's free space to hide your assassination plans." Is that really how you want to portray this technology? That, if you're really a terrorist or assassin, it can help you cover your tracks?
I don't know for sure, but I just have my doubts that most people here are really doing that sort of thing, and if they are, I don't particularly want them to get away with it. But there are valid uses for this technology.
So if the wrong people find Truecrypt on your computer guess what happens to you. If you say "Nothing" well: "Wrong answer!". They may give up after a few days of giving you the treatment, but it still means you get the treatment.
Whereas if everybody had truecrypt AND an encrypted partition, they could a) try to waterboard everyone, b) wait till they have more evidence.
Dude, what are you hiding, and who are you hiding it from? Should we all be concerned?
Yeah, it does seem like land lines are losing ground to mobile with the younger audience. But lots of older people and businesses still want land lines. What business there is there, they're losing to VoIP.
I really think that's the only thing that's spurring them to drop fiber in select areas. They're doing it in the areas where they're losing all their business ("all" as in both the voice service and the infrastructure part) to cable triple-play deals. Their only recourse is to offer a similar service (including TV service), which their existing infrastructure can't handle.
already sort of do have our roads built by a single company which bid on the project, are contracted to maintain it
So they don't own the roads, but are contractors working for someone else? How much say do they have over what traffic is allowed to flow over those roads? Would they have the power, for example, to start a trucking company and then only allow their trucks to use the roads?
Maybe I'm just the only one who doesn't understand what's upsetting you about the idea.
Yeah, cause its not like these municipalities are trying to say who can use the fiber that they want to build to connect their citizens to the Internet. Oh wait, yes they are.
Ok, so they are saying who can use their fiber? Who can use their fiber? What are the specific restrictions? I assume that the citizens can use their fiber. I'm also guessing that other ISPs are allowed to direct traffic over their fiber-- for example, that if I send e-mail to someone running a mail server on the municipal network, that the e-mail will reach the recipient. Also, I assume that people can provide services freely over their fiber, i.e. Google will still work as a search engine, Yahoo can allow people to share photos via Flickr.
Or are you talking about ISPs providing DHCP and DNS? Because-- well, honestly, I don't even use my ISP's DNS server, and I really wish I didn't have to use their DHCP service. Static IP would be much more desirable.
This would be like building a nice new highway, and getting Ford to pay part of the cost, and only allowing people with Fords to drive on it. [Slashdot car analogy at its finest].
You lost me again. I'm not being cute. What's the car, what's the highway, and who is Ford? Because I might guess that Ford is an ISP, and the network is the highway.
The whole "only allowing people with Fords" thing, the problem would be that (a) people would be forced to buy a new car even if they already owned one that functions, (b) cars are expensive, and (c) I might want to drive another brand of car. So the metaphor implies (as far as I can figure), that people will have to buy new expensive equipment (I guess a computer) from the ISP in order to use the Internet, even if they already had that equipment, and they would have no choice in what brand of equipment they buy.
Is that right? Somewhere in all this, citizens will be forced to buy a particular brand of computer, dictated by an ISP? Where are you seeing that?
You tend to get internet, phone, and TV services from a single provider. Unfortunately, phone services will go away as a revenue stream as people move to VOIP. I know plenty of people who have also canceled their tv service because they only watch a few shows and they prefer to get them online at their convenience. This means that providers loose the revenue attached to phone and tv services right off the bat. Then you have to consider how many big ISPs are also media industry giants and have a vested interest in ensuring you continue to consume media through premium channels and channels laden with advertising.
Yup. It's a problem. People often focus on the problem of limited choices in ISPs-- that your only real choice in a given area is usually "the phone company" or "the cable company"-- but they usually fail to recognize the conflict of interest involved in owning multiple points in the chain. Verizon, for example, is the owner of the infrastructure, the ISP, and the phone service provider. So right off, they aren't going to want VOIP to be successful, but also they don't have much interest in seeing successful alternative ISPs over their own infrastructure.
Cable companies can be even worse. Like with TimeWarner Cable, you have the same problems as Verizon, but substitute "cable TV" for "phone service". But in addition to that, their parent company also owns a bunch of the content being delivered on their TV service. So they own the infrastructure, they're the ISP, they provide a video service, and they provide the video content that they're providing in that service.
Now maybe there's some independence between those functions, but there's still a conflict of interest. As the company building infrastructure, it would normally be in your best interest to build infrastructure everywhere so that you could get paid. As the owner of the infrastructure (if you weren't an ISP) it would be in your interest to foster ISPs and new services who would pay for a variety of uses of that infrastructure, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you were the ISP, anything which made people want access to the internet would be to your advantage. As the video/voice service provider, you'd want the best/fastest network possible. As the content owner, you'd want your content on every possible channel (that makes money for you).
But since these companies basically run the whole supply chain, their interests are different. Building the infrastructure comes out of their own pocket, they don't want to build anything without knowing it'll provide the best ROI, so they don't bother building in lots of places. As the owner of the infrastructure, they want to restrict its use to pushing their own services. As the ISP, their interests are best served by restricting usage, as much as possible, to pushing their own content and services. As video/voice service provider, your interests are served by seeing Internet service being slow outside of a QoS for your own services. As the content owner, you want to restrict your content to channels that you control, and also use those channels to push/advertise your content.
All of this is a bit of an oversimplification, but I still think we would be well-served by breaking some of these functions out into separate companies. Primarily I have in mind that whoever builds/maintains the infrastructure should be forbidden from providing any services on that infrastructure. I admit that I'm not an expert in telecommunications or economics, but it seems reasonable to me.
If it's not possible to build infrastructure by itself, without providing services, then it seems like an argument in favor of a completely public infrastructure.
We think of electricity as a necessary infrastructure, yet in the early days many people were without it.
Right. For every kind of infrastructure we have, there has been a time when we lived without it. Telephones, electricity, indoor plumbing, roads. In the hunter/gatherer sense of the word "necessary", none of these things are necessary.
However, they're all vital to our economy, and an important factor in the development of our civilization. Having a couple big companies exercise complete control over all allowed infrastructure, and that infrastructure's use, is unacceptable.
Would we hand over construction of our roads to a single private company, allow them to build roads where they want and not build roads elsewhere, and then allow them to arbitrarily decide what kind of traffic is allowed, based solely on what they believe would be most profitable?
...therefore all my servers are given a hostname string equal to the Dell "Service Tag", followed by a dash, followed by the Dell "Express Service Code".
I get that this is a joke, but you do know that the "Express Service Code" is just the Service Tag in Base36, right?
>_ Yet another thing where someone did something heinous, and can't be charged for it, because there was no law against it.
As sick as what she did, I don't see how faking an identity in order to harass someone until the point that they kill themselves would not be covered under like, involuntary manslaughter at the very least.
Good points in your post, but I just don't see what "faking an identity" really has to do with it. She harassed a teenager until that teenager killed herself. I don't see how it would have absolved her in any way if she had been completely honest with the girl, but still harassed her into suicide.
The bigger question in my mind is, was she trying to get the girl to commit suicide? Or if not that, then should she have reasonably expected that her harassment would end in the girl's suicide? Even so, IANAL, so I'm not sure any of it would be a crime. But I think the woman's intentions are much more at issue than her honesty.
But in any case, I agree that you shouldn't prosecute someone for actions that weren't illegal at the time the actions took place. And you shouldn't prosecute someone for a bogus crime because they did something legal that you think is bad. Even if it's completely despicable.
Yeah, I'd like an explanation as to what MS gets by buying Yahoo. Are they going to use any particular technology, or are they just trying to buy the userbase? If the latter, then it makes me wonder how much of the userbase will stay when everything is converted to MS brands.
Like, if Microsoft ditches the Yahoo webmail and implements their own, ditches the chat client and makes Yahoo users use the MSN chat client, then how many users stick around? Or does Microsoft leave all of that intact?
I'm not ready to judge whether it would be good or bad, but I'd be interested to know what Microsoft intends to do with Yahoo once they own them. Or maybe they don't even know? I sometimes think that might be the case with some of these buy-outs, that they don't have a sound business case for them. Like maybe it's an semi-emotional decision, that they're hoping that by buying more people and having a bigger presence, they're less likely to fail regardless of what services they're offering.
Big? Let's see... Let's say a company with ~20 locations, having locations in 3 countries, with about 30 servers in each location and probably 200 per location (on average). Maybe that's not *huge*, but I hesitate to call that a "medium-sized" business.
And yeah, we weren't too strict about the whole thing. We used Greek gods, Roman gods, Norse gods, LoTR characters, the three stooges, animal names, etc. They weren't all the same, but they were themed, so that similar servers at the same site would have related names. Some names were reused in different domains (there were some domains I had no control over).
And frankly, I'm not sure why we used names like that. I was just following the convention other people started. That's why I said, "I assume it's because..."
Name the servers with logical names based on their function, and maybe an extra number to distinguish servers with the same function. Put all of the REAL info into database. Trying to put lots of config/location details into the DNS name is a waste of time. There no reason to have names like FILESERVER-CHICAGO-02-2003RT when FILESERVER2 would suffice.
The big companies I've worked for have always used the theme of mythical heroes/beasts (usually greek or roman, sometimes LoTR or something). I assume it's because they want to be able to shuffle the functions these servers are serving while keeping the name.
However, running a network for a small company, I've always chosen to keep it as simple as possible, and expect that I'm going to rename a server if I repurpose it. So, for example, the internal name for the mail server might be as simple as mail.[company name].local. I mean, if it's a small company and you know you're only going to have 1 mail server, then why not? If it's something like a fileserver, where i think I might have several general fileservers on the same site, I might do files01.[company name].local. Yeah, they might have to keep straight which server their documents are on, but they're only forced to remember a number, and they can figure the rest out.
I suppose that if I were dealing with multiple sites, I might try to have it structured something like mail.[location].[company name].local, but I don't know off-hand what the downsides would be of that. i guess really it depends on who's going to need to be finding these servers by name, and what those people need to know from the name. Do they need to know where the server is physically located?
Of course, you can always make aliases, and set up the client computers to search a set domain. One of my goals in naming is to be able to tell users that if they want to access webmail from inside the company, they can go into their browser's address bar and type "webmail". I want things to be that easy. Now that doesn't mean that the webmail is on a server called "webmail", but my DNS will point them to the correct place anyhow.
Anybody have any good arguments for justifying these ultra-light cars (VW, SmartCar) to those that do equate a certain size=safety measure?
Why should we have to justify the energy/resource efficient vehicles? I'm with you that it's probably more dangerous to be driving these things on the same roads as Jeep Wranglers and Hummers, but how about we ask people to justify driving those things?
Because when you think about it, if we generally drove these smaller cars, we'd all be safer. Think about pedestrians. Think about bicyclists. Sure, if you're in an accident, it's a bit safer for you if you're in an SUV, but it's much more dangerous for whoever you've gotten into an accident with.
Personally, I can see an argument that SUVs, big vans, and trucks should be considered commercial vehicles (or else farm equipment, or whatever), and their use should somehow be discouraged. Require a specific kind of license to drive them, restrict their sale or use on roads, or tax them. Something. I know they're useful, but for too many owners it's a status symbol, and people are driving these dangerous vehicles for no real reason.
Even when people are buying them for safety, they're putting everyone else at greater risk.
I can't help but think, if we're going to gather our time, effort, energy, money, and brightest minds, why can't we come up with a "Manhattan Project" to wean ourselves off of oil entirely?
Yeah, the thing that bothers me about all this is that the solutions people want are always to develop a "Manhattan Project" in order to effectively keep things the way they are. They either want to get more oil, or develop a way so that we can have essentially the same kinds of cars running on a different energy source.
Why not set your goals a little higher? If you're going to bring the best and brightest together, why not be looking towards redeveloping/repurposing our cities and transportation infrastructure towards something more energy efficient? I mean, let's look at having more personal transportation vehicles like this microcar, instead each person using a big 5-passenger car for his/her daily commute. Let's look at improving the public transportation, providing new designs for cities and public transportation.
Hell, let's attack the problem from a fresh perspective. Is there a way to get the best of personal transportation and public transportation in one system? Does it make sense to develop different/separate transportation systems for different purposes? Are there ways to reduce the amount of commuting that we do? Can we develop self-sustaining communities that don't really need very much to be brought in from outside the community?
There's no paradox at all.... People are rightly suspicious when they hear someone state explicitly that they are not planning on doing something evil.
I guess it depends on what you consider the word "paradox" to mean. The idea that telling someone you won't do something evil will convince them that you're planning something evil sounds a bit paradoxical to me. How do you, then, convince someone with words that your intentions are good?
Of course, here comes everyone out of the woodwork to tell me that I'm wrong about what a paradox is. I know, it's almost as much fun as arguing about whether something is "ironic".
There was a study or two a little while ago that mentioned that the mind has trouble with negative constructions over time.
"Your data is safe with me. That's right, I am not going to *broadcast your data all over the internet where all the world can see it, reverse engineer your life, and tag it in the southeastern dialect of Klingon attached to a mashup of Steve Ballmer and Jack Thompson. Nosirree, I promise to take good care of you and not *rip your life to shreds and offer your data as bait to the CIA, or Viacom."
The mind melts and forgets it is in "reversal mode", and becomes exhausted from the scare words.
It might also be that the person wasn't aware that someone could do all that with your data, until you said it.
Is anyone terribly surprised? How we answer questions depends on how the question is asked. Specifically, we try to read social cues as to how the information will be received. Ask someone a personal question in a context that makes them think their answer will garner praise, and they'll answer much more readily than in a situation where it's implied the answer will lead people to condemn them.
I remember in college a bunch of people were taking purity tests, and one girl took the test and scored on the relatively pure end of the spectrum, and seemed proud of that. When everyone was much more impressed with people who scored incredibly impure, she took the test again and managed to get a much different score.
Solar power sounds great and is very trendy. Why evaluate the possible consequences for our actions when we can plow ahead blindly? Going ahead with energy policy without considering the environmental effects has worked well for us so far!
Besides, being in favor of solar power helps you score with hippie chicks.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really agree with that. I would guess you frequent different websites than the majority of the population, and are perfectly contempt with HTML and CSS 95% of the time.
But for (truly) animated menues, embedded video, and sound effects, I've never seen anything work as good as flash. And I don't think any of these should be seen as unnecessary bloat.
Sorry, but I first need to interject. Do you mean "perfectly content"?
Anyway, I don't think I've seen any (that I can think of at least) uses of Flash for animated menu systems or sound effects that wouldn't have been better served by doing it in a standard way, or else (just as likely) by doing it not at all. Scanning my memory, I don't think I've encountered a single flash menu system that was "truly animated" where the animation served any particular purpose. I can't think of any that were even tolerable and still had effects that couldn't have been achieved with HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Can't think of any good uses of sound effects in web sites. Why should web sites have sound effects at all?
Using Flash for embedded video is the only thing that I'll grant has some merit, but even then, it has its share of problems, often requires a fair amount of javascript to function properly, and I'm not sure it's a far better solution than some of the alternatives.
I think there are two different issues being talked about here. The first is, "Has W3C done a good job of maintaining and developing standards?" I'm very open to the idea that they could have done better. I've dealt with HTML and CSS enough to have a long wishlist.
The second question, very roughly, is "What's the deal with Flash/Silverlight?" Are they good? Bad? Helpful? Troublesome? I can see how people are trying to connect these two issues, but they really are separate.
If you just want to say that Microsoft and Macromedia/Adobe developed these formats and technologies because HTML/CSS/Javascript weren't good enough, that may be an interesting historical analysis. However, it doesn't address the question as to why these technologies and formats are closed/proprietary. Macromedia/Adobe, Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera, and everyone else could have joined together to develop and promote web standards other than those run by the W3C (like WHATWG). Hell, they could even develop technologies and formats to serve their purposes, and then open those formats in a way that allows other developers to create their own implementations (like what Adobe essentially did with PDF).
However, they've chosen to keep it all proprietary, and the intent is pretty clear: vendor lock-in. They want you to use their tools for development, their tools for display. In Microsoft's case, it has the added extra bonus that, if their format becomes popular enough, they can drop support for other operating systems and lock everyone into their platform.
And when you get down to it, these technologies don't really address a really great need. I've only seen a couple of good uses for Flash other than for casual games. For most of the content available on the web, HTML and CSS (flawed as they are) are better solutions.
If we did things their way we'd have perfectly rendering web pages all the time, but the content they hosted would be so dull most consumers wouldn't be interested.
That's evident by the fact that not one of the major websites out there that I can think of (facebook, google, microsoft, and even the bbc to name a few) are fully W3C compliant.
Well, there are a couple things about "compliance" to consider. First, because browsers don't always implement the standards fully or properly, you might have to use hacks to get everything to display properly in all browsers. Current web designers have to know browsers' bugs as much as the standards, so many web pages can't comply with the standards and render properly at the same time. That doesn't mean the standards are at fault. The inability to follow standards on the web is largely traceable to a single company which refuses to make a compliant browser.
But also, the real issue of standards is not to force everything into compliance at all times. It's to give a standard way of doing things so that people can expect certain things to be consistent. The point of web standards is so that I, as a developer, can write a web page in accordance with a set of rules, and then have a reasonable expectation that the page will display properly. It makes it so I shouldn't really have to worry about what browser the end-user has installed, because they should all display the page (roughly) the same way. If you wish to violate the standards for some purpose, that's fine, but then you should familiarize yourself with how that violation will effect various platforms. But, in fact, there are even standards about how formats should handle violations of the standard, and so even the violation may be... well... according to the standard.
But none of this explains to me why the standards would make the *content* of web pages "dull". If the content is interesting, the web wouldn't generally be dull. Relying on presentation to make your content exciting doesn't speak well for your content, and on the Internet, content is king.
If anything, it seems like the Internet wouldn't exist as it does today if the HTML standard hadn't been so simple and open. It allowed anyone with half a brain to make webpages and display their content. The ease with which individuals can create content is essential for the P2P "community" nature of the web. If not for that, it would be like TV-- pushed from big companies who have the resources and expertise to make it work. Even expecting someone to buy expensive software (e.g. Adobe Flash) in order to develop content would hurt the web immensely. The barrier of entry is much lower when the only necessary equipment for making content is a text editor.
I agree that it's good to have encryption and everything. I just think it's funny that people in here are talking about "Well what if you're being tortured?" Who here is doing something where they're likely to be tortured? Sure, that's probably a concern for some set of people, but how many of the people here are really a member of that set?
And of course all the examples people are using are like, "Use your first volume to hide porn and your financial information, and then use another volume in that volume's free space to hide your assassination plans." Is that really how you want to portray this technology? That, if you're really a terrorist or assassin, it can help you cover your tracks?
I don't know for sure, but I just have my doubts that most people here are really doing that sort of thing, and if they are, I don't particularly want them to get away with it. But there are valid uses for this technology.
So if the wrong people find Truecrypt on your computer guess what happens to you. If you say "Nothing" well: "Wrong answer!". They may give up after a few days of giving you the treatment, but it still means you get the treatment.
Whereas if everybody had truecrypt AND an encrypted partition, they could a) try to waterboard everyone, b) wait till they have more evidence.
Dude, what are you hiding, and who are you hiding it from? Should we all be concerned?
I've never actually seen that. But even in that case, I think the metaphor only works if Microsoft is the ISP.
Yeah, it does seem like land lines are losing ground to mobile with the younger audience. But lots of older people and businesses still want land lines. What business there is there, they're losing to VoIP.
I really think that's the only thing that's spurring them to drop fiber in select areas. They're doing it in the areas where they're losing all their business ("all" as in both the voice service and the infrastructure part) to cable triple-play deals. Their only recourse is to offer a similar service (including TV service), which their existing infrastructure can't handle.
So when you say that you wonder about the competition VoIP presents, are you suggesting that it doesn't present much competition?
already sort of do have our roads built by a single company which bid on the project, are contracted to maintain it
So they don't own the roads, but are contractors working for someone else? How much say do they have over what traffic is allowed to flow over those roads? Would they have the power, for example, to start a trucking company and then only allow their trucks to use the roads?
Let Alabama run the Internet and you'll find yourself in jail for watching MrHands.avi or WeLiveTogether.
Even if that were true (which I doubt), then good luck getting something like that to hold up on appeal to a Federal court.
Maybe I'm just the only one who doesn't understand what's upsetting you about the idea.
Yeah, cause its not like these municipalities are trying to say who can use the fiber that they want to build to connect their citizens to the Internet. Oh wait, yes they are.
Ok, so they are saying who can use their fiber? Who can use their fiber? What are the specific restrictions? I assume that the citizens can use their fiber. I'm also guessing that other ISPs are allowed to direct traffic over their fiber-- for example, that if I send e-mail to someone running a mail server on the municipal network, that the e-mail will reach the recipient. Also, I assume that people can provide services freely over their fiber, i.e. Google will still work as a search engine, Yahoo can allow people to share photos via Flickr.
Or are you talking about ISPs providing DHCP and DNS? Because-- well, honestly, I don't even use my ISP's DNS server, and I really wish I didn't have to use their DHCP service. Static IP would be much more desirable.
This would be like building a nice new highway, and getting Ford to pay part of the cost, and only allowing people with Fords to drive on it. [Slashdot car analogy at its finest].
You lost me again. I'm not being cute. What's the car, what's the highway, and who is Ford? Because I might guess that Ford is an ISP, and the network is the highway.
The whole "only allowing people with Fords" thing, the problem would be that (a) people would be forced to buy a new car even if they already owned one that functions, (b) cars are expensive, and (c) I might want to drive another brand of car. So the metaphor implies (as far as I can figure), that people will have to buy new expensive equipment (I guess a computer) from the ISP in order to use the Internet, even if they already had that equipment, and they would have no choice in what brand of equipment they buy.
Is that right? Somewhere in all this, citizens will be forced to buy a particular brand of computer, dictated by an ISP? Where are you seeing that?
You tend to get internet, phone, and TV services from a single provider. Unfortunately, phone services will go away as a revenue stream as people move to VOIP. I know plenty of people who have also canceled their tv service because they only watch a few shows and they prefer to get them online at their convenience. This means that providers loose the revenue attached to phone and tv services right off the bat. Then you have to consider how many big ISPs are also media industry giants and have a vested interest in ensuring you continue to consume media through premium channels and channels laden with advertising.
Yup. It's a problem. People often focus on the problem of limited choices in ISPs-- that your only real choice in a given area is usually "the phone company" or "the cable company"-- but they usually fail to recognize the conflict of interest involved in owning multiple points in the chain. Verizon, for example, is the owner of the infrastructure, the ISP, and the phone service provider. So right off, they aren't going to want VOIP to be successful, but also they don't have much interest in seeing successful alternative ISPs over their own infrastructure.
Cable companies can be even worse. Like with TimeWarner Cable, you have the same problems as Verizon, but substitute "cable TV" for "phone service". But in addition to that, their parent company also owns a bunch of the content being delivered on their TV service. So they own the infrastructure, they're the ISP, they provide a video service, and they provide the video content that they're providing in that service.
Now maybe there's some independence between those functions, but there's still a conflict of interest. As the company building infrastructure, it would normally be in your best interest to build infrastructure everywhere so that you could get paid. As the owner of the infrastructure (if you weren't an ISP) it would be in your interest to foster ISPs and new services who would pay for a variety of uses of that infrastructure, instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. If you were the ISP, anything which made people want access to the internet would be to your advantage. As the video/voice service provider, you'd want the best/fastest network possible. As the content owner, you'd want your content on every possible channel (that makes money for you).
But since these companies basically run the whole supply chain, their interests are different. Building the infrastructure comes out of their own pocket, they don't want to build anything without knowing it'll provide the best ROI, so they don't bother building in lots of places. As the owner of the infrastructure, they want to restrict its use to pushing their own services. As the ISP, their interests are best served by restricting usage, as much as possible, to pushing their own content and services. As video/voice service provider, your interests are served by seeing Internet service being slow outside of a QoS for your own services. As the content owner, you want to restrict your content to channels that you control, and also use those channels to push/advertise your content.
All of this is a bit of an oversimplification, but I still think we would be well-served by breaking some of these functions out into separate companies. Primarily I have in mind that whoever builds/maintains the infrastructure should be forbidden from providing any services on that infrastructure. I admit that I'm not an expert in telecommunications or economics, but it seems reasonable to me.
If it's not possible to build infrastructure by itself, without providing services, then it seems like an argument in favor of a completely public infrastructure.
We think of electricity as a necessary infrastructure, yet in the early days many people were without it.
Right. For every kind of infrastructure we have, there has been a time when we lived without it. Telephones, electricity, indoor plumbing, roads. In the hunter/gatherer sense of the word "necessary", none of these things are necessary.
However, they're all vital to our economy, and an important factor in the development of our civilization. Having a couple big companies exercise complete control over all allowed infrastructure, and that infrastructure's use, is unacceptable.
Would we hand over construction of our roads to a single private company, allow them to build roads where they want and not build roads elsewhere, and then allow them to arbitrarily decide what kind of traffic is allowed, based solely on what they believe would be most profitable?
...therefore all my servers are given a hostname string equal to the Dell "Service Tag", followed by a dash, followed by the Dell "Express Service Code".
I get that this is a joke, but you do know that the "Express Service Code" is just the Service Tag in Base36, right?
>_ Yet another thing where someone did something heinous, and can't be charged for it, because there was no law against it.
As sick as what she did, I don't see how faking an identity in order to harass someone until the point that they kill themselves would not be covered under like, involuntary manslaughter at the very least.
Good points in your post, but I just don't see what "faking an identity" really has to do with it. She harassed a teenager until that teenager killed herself. I don't see how it would have absolved her in any way if she had been completely honest with the girl, but still harassed her into suicide.
The bigger question in my mind is, was she trying to get the girl to commit suicide? Or if not that, then should she have reasonably expected that her harassment would end in the girl's suicide? Even so, IANAL, so I'm not sure any of it would be a crime. But I think the woman's intentions are much more at issue than her honesty.
But in any case, I agree that you shouldn't prosecute someone for actions that weren't illegal at the time the actions took place. And you shouldn't prosecute someone for a bogus crime because they did something legal that you think is bad. Even if it's completely despicable.
Informative? How about funny?
Yeah, I'd like an explanation as to what MS gets by buying Yahoo. Are they going to use any particular technology, or are they just trying to buy the userbase? If the latter, then it makes me wonder how much of the userbase will stay when everything is converted to MS brands.
Like, if Microsoft ditches the Yahoo webmail and implements their own, ditches the chat client and makes Yahoo users use the MSN chat client, then how many users stick around? Or does Microsoft leave all of that intact?
I'm not ready to judge whether it would be good or bad, but I'd be interested to know what Microsoft intends to do with Yahoo once they own them. Or maybe they don't even know? I sometimes think that might be the case with some of these buy-outs, that they don't have a sound business case for them. Like maybe it's an semi-emotional decision, that they're hoping that by buying more people and having a bigger presence, they're less likely to fail regardless of what services they're offering.
Big? Let's see... Let's say a company with ~20 locations, having locations in 3 countries, with about 30 servers in each location and probably 200 per location (on average). Maybe that's not *huge*, but I hesitate to call that a "medium-sized" business.
And yeah, we weren't too strict about the whole thing. We used Greek gods, Roman gods, Norse gods, LoTR characters, the three stooges, animal names, etc. They weren't all the same, but they were themed, so that similar servers at the same site would have related names. Some names were reused in different domains (there were some domains I had no control over).
And frankly, I'm not sure why we used names like that. I was just following the convention other people started. That's why I said, "I assume it's because..."
Name the servers with logical names based on their function, and maybe an extra number to distinguish servers with the same function. Put all of the REAL info into database. Trying to put lots of config/location details into the DNS name is a waste of time. There no reason to have names like FILESERVER-CHICAGO-02-2003RT when FILESERVER2 would suffice.
The big companies I've worked for have always used the theme of mythical heroes/beasts (usually greek or roman, sometimes LoTR or something). I assume it's because they want to be able to shuffle the functions these servers are serving while keeping the name.
However, running a network for a small company, I've always chosen to keep it as simple as possible, and expect that I'm going to rename a server if I repurpose it. So, for example, the internal name for the mail server might be as simple as mail.[company name].local. I mean, if it's a small company and you know you're only going to have 1 mail server, then why not? If it's something like a fileserver, where i think I might have several general fileservers on the same site, I might do files01.[company name].local. Yeah, they might have to keep straight which server their documents are on, but they're only forced to remember a number, and they can figure the rest out.
I suppose that if I were dealing with multiple sites, I might try to have it structured something like mail.[location].[company name].local, but I don't know off-hand what the downsides would be of that. i guess really it depends on who's going to need to be finding these servers by name, and what those people need to know from the name. Do they need to know where the server is physically located?
Of course, you can always make aliases, and set up the client computers to search a set domain. One of my goals in naming is to be able to tell users that if they want to access webmail from inside the company, they can go into their browser's address bar and type "webmail". I want things to be that easy. Now that doesn't mean that the webmail is on a server called "webmail", but my DNS will point them to the correct place anyhow.
Anybody have any good arguments for justifying these ultra-light cars (VW, SmartCar) to those that do equate a certain size=safety measure?
Why should we have to justify the energy/resource efficient vehicles? I'm with you that it's probably more dangerous to be driving these things on the same roads as Jeep Wranglers and Hummers, but how about we ask people to justify driving those things?
Because when you think about it, if we generally drove these smaller cars, we'd all be safer. Think about pedestrians. Think about bicyclists. Sure, if you're in an accident, it's a bit safer for you if you're in an SUV, but it's much more dangerous for whoever you've gotten into an accident with.
Personally, I can see an argument that SUVs, big vans, and trucks should be considered commercial vehicles (or else farm equipment, or whatever), and their use should somehow be discouraged. Require a specific kind of license to drive them, restrict their sale or use on roads, or tax them. Something. I know they're useful, but for too many owners it's a status symbol, and people are driving these dangerous vehicles for no real reason.
Even when people are buying them for safety, they're putting everyone else at greater risk.
I can't help but think, if we're going to gather our time, effort, energy, money, and brightest minds, why can't we come up with a "Manhattan Project" to wean ourselves off of oil entirely?
Yeah, the thing that bothers me about all this is that the solutions people want are always to develop a "Manhattan Project" in order to effectively keep things the way they are. They either want to get more oil, or develop a way so that we can have essentially the same kinds of cars running on a different energy source.
Why not set your goals a little higher? If you're going to bring the best and brightest together, why not be looking towards redeveloping/repurposing our cities and transportation infrastructure towards something more energy efficient? I mean, let's look at having more personal transportation vehicles like this microcar, instead each person using a big 5-passenger car for his/her daily commute. Let's look at improving the public transportation, providing new designs for cities and public transportation.
Hell, let's attack the problem from a fresh perspective. Is there a way to get the best of personal transportation and public transportation in one system? Does it make sense to develop different/separate transportation systems for different purposes? Are there ways to reduce the amount of commuting that we do? Can we develop self-sustaining communities that don't really need very much to be brought in from outside the community?
There's no paradox at all.... People are rightly suspicious when they hear someone state explicitly that they are not planning on doing something evil.
I guess it depends on what you consider the word "paradox" to mean. The idea that telling someone you won't do something evil will convince them that you're planning something evil sounds a bit paradoxical to me. How do you, then, convince someone with words that your intentions are good?
Of course, here comes everyone out of the woodwork to tell me that I'm wrong about what a paradox is. I know, it's almost as much fun as arguing about whether something is "ironic".
There was a study or two a little while ago that mentioned that the mind has trouble with negative constructions over time.
"Your data is safe with me. That's right, I am not going to *broadcast your data all over the internet where all the world can see it, reverse engineer your life, and tag it in the southeastern dialect of Klingon attached to a mashup of Steve Ballmer and Jack Thompson. Nosirree, I promise to take good care of you and not *rip your life to shreds and offer your data as bait to the CIA, or Viacom."
The mind melts and forgets it is in "reversal mode", and becomes exhausted from the scare words.
It might also be that the person wasn't aware that someone could do all that with your data, until you said it.
Is anyone terribly surprised? How we answer questions depends on how the question is asked. Specifically, we try to read social cues as to how the information will be received. Ask someone a personal question in a context that makes them think their answer will garner praise, and they'll answer much more readily than in a situation where it's implied the answer will lead people to condemn them.
I remember in college a bunch of people were taking purity tests, and one girl took the test and scored on the relatively pure end of the spectrum, and seemed proud of that. When everyone was much more impressed with people who scored incredibly impure, she took the test again and managed to get a much different score.
Solar power sounds great and is very trendy. Why evaluate the possible consequences for our actions when we can plow ahead blindly? Going ahead with energy policy without considering the environmental effects has worked well for us so far!
Besides, being in favor of solar power helps you score with hippie chicks.