dada21 posts all the time on copyright issues right here on slashdot.
He gets the most erratic modding I've ever seen. Looks like his recent posts have all been modded up, but it's normal for half his posts to be modded flamebait and half insightful.
Exactly. The effects of 'piracy' in the US are miniscule. Sure some people download crappy copies of movies off of PirateBay. Big deal. Most people pay to buy a movie they liked in the theater, or at least rent it from Blockbuster if their friend recommends it.
In China pirate dvd shops that operate on a massive scale and are operated by and taxed by the government sell pirate dvds for $2. That's the market that hollywood and others are concerned about. Overseas markets often produce three times what domestic markets do for movies. Right now you often can't even buy legit dvds in china, and many of the pirate ones are 'real' dvds, the same chinese factories that crank out legit dvds during the day to send to the us crank out pirate dvds at night to sell locally.
Of course none of this is hurting Hollywood's profits; this year's slight 'slump' only exists because there isn't an unexpected Passion of the Christ this year like last. They just want to be free to make huger profits in the future. Check this out: http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID= 11281&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html/ This was passed by Unesco basically to affirm the countries have the right to encourage their own film-making industries and not just consume all the Hollywood we want them to. The vote was 148-2. I don't know which other country voted against it with the US.
You need an editor that supports some macros is all then. About 10 macros is about all I can remember (especially if I don't use all of them that often), so loading them in the F1-10 keys works fine in my editor (Crimson Editor). I got tired of typing the long junk you need in ASP like Response.Write or Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") so I loaded that as macro 2 and just hit Ctrl-F2. It's a very small thing, but I hated typing 15 to 39 characters for something I think of as a single operation.
I would like it though if the { and [ were on different keys. It's an awkward stretch to Shift [ while keeping your fingers on the home row and I don't always notice onscreen if I get the wrong one.
That's a pretty good theory. Also a proven track record probably figures into their algorithm somewhere. So when one account had generated a lot of click thrus for a long time, and one was brand new (and overpaying) they probably looked at the new account with suspicion. If the new account is willing to throw money away with $1 per click, google will be glad to help them. But if they pick a more moderate amount, they probably stop getting the "I've got money to burn" special treatment. I think if the experiment continued for a long time the results would trend towards each other, minus whatever dupe penalty the second account gets. And of course page rank may also factor in somehow, and again with the proven track record of the first page, it's probably got many more links to it than the new site.
By the way - wasn't this guy doing this to experiment with different ads and offers? There's always the chance with Cringely that he's just completely wrong in saying that the two sites were identical. The whole point of the experiment was to make them not identical.
A typical tech company would be divided into 3 groups: software dev, database managment, systems management. My experience is they always point fingers at each other and waste a lot of time, and if management is in the mix it's even worse.
An example: At an old company that laid off half it's workers the systems guys disabled all systems accounts except for current employees. We see a problem where the ecommerce site starts to slow down. Don't see any reason. DBA wipes out the data that was in cart tables that was old. System seems ok. Slows down again, wipe tables, it's ok, rinse, lather, repeat. We finally find the problem. A programmer who was laid off started a chron job under a systems account to clean out those tables, then that account was disabled by systems, and the DBA had no idea that the job had even existed. Whose fault was that? The whole time management was riding software for something we'd "done" that caused it, riding systems to make sure a disgruntled employee wasn't hacking us, and generally making everything worse. Also of course, since the system account was disabled it couldn't send an email to development that there had been a problem running. Not that that would have helped, because of course the email address to report things to was ralph@company and not dev@company like all the other error reporting emails.
A good manager would probably say 12 days. It always takes twice as long to develop something as you expect, and then takes a couple days playing to find out all the places where what you developed affects the rest of the system.
(google doesn't AFAIK have the option to non-googlify a link, if it did and/. used it, how many stories would beatles post?)
Sure, you can mark a link to not be followed by robots like googlebot quite easily. Just add a rel="nofollow" to the href. Movable Type started supporting that a while ago to fight comment spam. It's supported by google, yahoo, and msn at a minimum.
How are alcohol classes an appropriate punishment for calling someone an asshat?
IMHO anyone who complains to the dean about a fellow student's calling them an asshat on their blog is automatically an asshat and deserving of being called one.
HerLittlePony.com would be a contested URL by Hasbro and would be taken to WIPO for a resolution since it's an existing trademark.
A porn site running a.com is normal, they're a commercial money making group, and ICANN refuses to even make.xxx available for their use. Where are they supposed to operate their sites? Currently anything that's commercial should operate out of.com.
Your description is totally flawed too. You missed "Mary clicks on the Yes I'm 18 button" and "Mary enters a valid credit card number".
The one site that I'm surprised hasn't been kicked out yet is whitehouse.com (NSFW).
How many internet addicts used to be tv addicts? Is there harm involved in switching from a passive form of entertainment to a more interactive form of entertainment?
What is psychological addiction? It's meaningless. It just means you like doing something a lot. Physical addiction causes withdrawal symptoms. Measurable, medical symptoms in your body. It's real.
Is a driven businessman addicted to making money? Is a huge football fan addicted to football? Is someone who's at the gym 3 hours a day addicted to working out? Is a prolific writer addicted to writing?
Ah, but nobody thinks that the above things are bad, so they're never classified as an addiction. Only things that are 'bad' are labelled addictions. Classification systems in psychology always have at their core a thoroughly non-scientific conception about what should constitute a 'normal life'.
Look at the difference between physical ailments and psychological ailments. Physical ailments are defined by their causes. Psychological ailments are described by their symptoms. The latter strategy is very unlikely to correspond to what's really going on in the brain. 100 years ago someone would be treated for symptoms, like chest pain, in most medical interactions. Today their cause is treated, plaque in the arteries or whatever. Psychologists have no idea what the cause of ailments like addiction, OCD, or whatever are. Take everything they say with a large block of salt.
I looked up oracle groupware, and found a few articles saying oracle bought a company and intended to start offering this. However, I can't find it on their site. Searching their site brings up 3 totally unrelated things. The google hit on groupware that was on oracle's site was on the partner solutions page.
Do you have a url? I'm curious about the price, can't believe anything from oracle is cheap.
This is so annoying. Two companies hold patents on something that they never, ever, intended to turn into a product. One innovative company actually makes a wildly successful product and bam, lawsuits.
Although what's really cool about this being only one page is that when you click back you're back to the index, and not on page 3 of the article. That's incredibly user friendly.
Actually, if you look in the left hand column they provide their own custom Font(+) and Font(-) widgets, which you admittedly wouldn't know to look for unless you read the site regularly. They use some fairly slick javascript to format the text, taking into account the font size and article layout you've chosen, to keep it fitting in the main article box and showing/hiding the prev next buttons as appropriate.
It's pretty clever, they just divide up the article text and show/hide it with style settings. If you do View->Page Style->No Style (in firefox) you see the raw page layout (including the full article text), everything else, like positioning the main article and everything, is CSS.
Page views. That was one page where the text was divided up into divs with their visibility set to hidden, and activated sequentially by the next button. Wonderful user interface, very fast and responsive.
But, even though it was a 4 page article, it only counts as one 'page view' in a stats tracking system. Sites like NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. want to have a high number of page views to convince advertisers to spend more money, and I guess also so they could show a different ad on each page.
Advertising driven stats driven media cares nothing for the user experience sadly, only the bottom line.
The classic test card is visa 4111 1111 1111 1111.
As another poster pointed out, your mastercard doesn't start with a 5, which they all do. Also, if you meant visa, you don't have the right number of digits.
Slashdot Mirror
dada21 posts all the time on copyright issues right here on slashdot.
He gets the most erratic modding I've ever seen. Looks like his recent posts have all been modded up, but it's normal for half his posts to be modded flamebait and half insightful.
Exactly. The effects of 'piracy' in the US are miniscule. Sure some people download crappy copies of movies off of PirateBay. Big deal. Most people pay to buy a movie they liked in the theater, or at least rent it from Blockbuster if their friend recommends it.
= 11281&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html/
In China pirate dvd shops that operate on a massive scale and are operated by and taxed by the government sell pirate dvds for $2. That's the market that hollywood and others are concerned about. Overseas markets often produce three times what domestic markets do for movies. Right now you often can't even buy legit dvds in china, and many of the pirate ones are 'real' dvds, the same chinese factories that crank out legit dvds during the day to send to the us crank out pirate dvds at night to sell locally.
Of course none of this is hurting Hollywood's profits; this year's slight 'slump' only exists because there isn't an unexpected Passion of the Christ this year like last. They just want to be free to make huger profits in the future. Check this out: http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID
This was passed by Unesco basically to affirm the countries have the right to encourage their own film-making industries and not just consume all the Hollywood we want them to. The vote was 148-2. I don't know which other country voted against it with the US.
You need an editor that supports some macros is all then. About 10 macros is about all I can remember (especially if I don't use all of them that often), so loading them in the F1-10 keys works fine in my editor (Crimson Editor). I got tired of typing the long junk you need in ASP like Response.Write or Server.CreateObject("ADODB.Connection") so I loaded that as macro 2 and just hit Ctrl-F2. It's a very small thing, but I hated typing 15 to 39 characters for something I think of as a single operation.
I would like it though if the { and [ were on different keys. It's an awkward stretch to Shift [ while keeping your fingers on the home row and I don't always notice onscreen if I get the wrong one.
I love indian :P
That's a pretty good theory. Also a proven track record probably figures into their algorithm somewhere. So when one account had generated a lot of click thrus for a long time, and one was brand new (and overpaying) they probably looked at the new account with suspicion. If the new account is willing to throw money away with $1 per click, google will be glad to help them. But if they pick a more moderate amount, they probably stop getting the "I've got money to burn" special treatment. I think if the experiment continued for a long time the results would trend towards each other, minus whatever dupe penalty the second account gets. And of course page rank may also factor in somehow, and again with the proven track record of the first page, it's probably got many more links to it than the new site.
By the way - wasn't this guy doing this to experiment with different ads and offers? There's always the chance with Cringely that he's just completely wrong in saying that the two sites were identical. The whole point of the experiment was to make them not identical.
Hours?
With software, yes. With a big magnet about 5 seconds.
A typical tech company would be divided into 3 groups: software dev, database managment, systems management. My experience is they always point fingers at each other and waste a lot of time, and if management is in the mix it's even worse.
An example:
At an old company that laid off half it's workers the systems guys disabled all systems accounts except for current employees. We see a problem where the ecommerce site starts to slow down. Don't see any reason. DBA wipes out the data that was in cart tables that was old. System seems ok. Slows down again, wipe tables, it's ok, rinse, lather, repeat. We finally find the problem. A programmer who was laid off started a chron job under a systems account to clean out those tables, then that account was disabled by systems, and the DBA had no idea that the job had even existed. Whose fault was that? The whole time management was riding software for something we'd "done" that caused it, riding systems to make sure a disgruntled employee wasn't hacking us, and generally making everything worse. Also of course, since the system account was disabled it couldn't send an email to development that there had been a problem running. Not that that would have helped, because of course the email address to report things to was ralph@company and not dev@company like all the other error reporting emails.
A good manager would probably say 12 days. It always takes twice as long to develop something as you expect, and then takes a couple days playing to find out all the places where what you developed affects the rest of the system.
Sure, you can mark a link to not be followed by robots like googlebot quite easily. Just add a rel="nofollow" to the href. Movable Type started supporting that a while ago to fight comment spam. It's supported by google, yahoo, and msn at a minimum.
I like the innovation of slashdot running this story again.
I read the exact same story on slashdot years ago. And that time the links actually worked.
How are alcohol classes an appropriate punishment for calling someone an asshat?
IMHO anyone who complains to the dean about a fellow student's calling them an asshat on their blog is automatically an asshat and deserving of being called one.
Ever heard of talking to people?
HerLittlePony.com would be a contested URL by Hasbro and would be taken to WIPO for a resolution since it's an existing trademark.
.com is normal, they're a commercial money making group, and ICANN refuses to even make .xxx available for their use. Where are they supposed to operate their sites? Currently anything that's commercial should operate out of .com.
A porn site running a
Your description is totally flawed too. You missed "Mary clicks on the Yes I'm 18 button" and "Mary enters a valid credit card number".
The one site that I'm surprised hasn't been kicked out yet is whitehouse.com (NSFW).
What if there's no harm?
How many internet addicts used to be tv addicts? Is there harm involved in switching from a passive form of entertainment to a more interactive form of entertainment?
What is psychological addiction? It's meaningless. It just means you like doing something a lot. Physical addiction causes withdrawal symptoms. Measurable, medical symptoms in your body. It's real.
Is a driven businessman addicted to making money? Is a huge football fan addicted to football? Is someone who's at the gym 3 hours a day addicted to working out? Is a prolific writer addicted to writing?
Ah, but nobody thinks that the above things are bad, so they're never classified as an addiction. Only things that are 'bad' are labelled addictions. Classification systems in psychology always have at their core a thoroughly non-scientific conception about what should constitute a 'normal life'.
Look at the difference between physical ailments and psychological ailments. Physical ailments are defined by their causes. Psychological ailments are described by their symptoms. The latter strategy is very unlikely to correspond to what's really going on in the brain. 100 years ago someone would be treated for symptoms, like chest pain, in most medical interactions. Today their cause is treated, plaque in the arteries or whatever. Psychologists have no idea what the cause of ailments like addiction, OCD, or whatever are. Take everything they say with a large block of salt.
I looked up oracle groupware, and found a few articles saying oracle bought a company and intended to start offering this. However, I can't find it on their site. Searching their site brings up 3 totally unrelated things. The google hit on groupware that was on oracle's site was on the partner solutions page.
Do you have a url? I'm curious about the price, can't believe anything from oracle is cheap.
This is so annoying. Two companies hold patents on something that they never, ever, intended to turn into a product. One innovative company actually makes a wildly successful product and bam, lawsuits.
GREAT way to encourage innovation.
Although what's really cool about this being only one page is that when you click back you're back to the index, and not on page 3 of the article. That's incredibly user friendly.
This is CLASSIC bad programming/commenting - "(you'll want to remove debug for production releases)". Jeezus.
As others pointed out above, they do no validation whatsoever on the cc number.
Actually, if you look in the left hand column they provide their own custom Font(+) and Font(-) widgets, which you admittedly wouldn't know to look for unless you read the site regularly. They use some fairly slick javascript to format the text, taking into account the font size and article layout you've chosen, to keep it fitting in the main article box and showing/hiding the prev next buttons as appropriate.
Look at the page javascript: http://www.iht.com/js/articlelayout.js/.
It's pretty clever, they just divide up the article text and show/hide it with style settings. If you do View->Page Style->No Style (in firefox) you see the raw page layout (including the full article text), everything else, like positioning the main article and everything, is CSS.
Interesting side effect. Since the text was divided into 4 virtual pages with divs set to hidden, you got all the text on one single page. Neat.
Do you really want to know the sad truth?
Page views. That was one page where the text was divided up into divs with their visibility set to hidden, and activated sequentially by the next button. Wonderful user interface, very fast and responsive.
But, even though it was a 4 page article, it only counts as one 'page view' in a stats tracking system. Sites like NYTimes, Washington Post, etc. want to have a high number of page views to convince advertisers to spend more money, and I guess also so they could show a different ad on each page.
Advertising driven stats driven media cares nothing for the user experience sadly, only the bottom line.
The classic test card is visa 4111 1111 1111 1111.
As another poster pointed out, your mastercard doesn't start with a 5, which they all do. Also, if you meant visa, you don't have the right number of digits.
There are hundreds of conspiracy theory books about the Kennedy assassinations.
Is every single one of them libel?
I don't think so.