Some of the gimmicks are useful, though. I have a CPU monitor open everywhere (just current load, no fancy histograms) because it tells me when a process goes bonkers. Same for mem and swap.
Can't help but laugh at the people who stood in line, paid 3-5 times the retail price on ebay or otherwise made a joke out of themselves to be the first on the block to own the overhyped playstation copy - only to be told that "They'll be playing again in three to five days..." - probably after some of their friends who were a little more sane.
Instead of being able to filter by topic and author, could we get some baysian filtering for/. ?
I'd really, really appreciate if I could mark stories as "spam" and/. learns what I like and what I don't.
Since/. needs ad bucks to roll, think of the advantages here - self-selected target audiences, anyone? Also, if there's enough performance, it may be possible for the mods to see how many people will filter out the post before it's posted. They'd have to adapt and thus improve story quality.
So what, if it still just crashes? In fact, this might be one of the reasons. Why can't M$ "innovate" (i.e. play catch-up with the real innovators) somewhere safe first? Wait, that's exactly what it is! Everyone else innovates first and goes to market second. M$ goes to market first, and does alpha testing in public, that way they're usually only slightly beyond and appear innovative.
The only way your model works is if you assume that you can just fire off emails and not respond or engage people. It might work for a brief time - but it wouldn't last.
Correct. But it doesn't have to last, not if it becomes more expensive to keep you than it is to lose you. So one thing you can be sure about is that you get up to $19,95 (or whatever the monthly rate is) in fakes.:-)
The culture would evolve
But it hasn't yet. I agree the model won't work forever, but it certainly works today.
Match.com has millions of people on the service. In order for this to be a policy, what size work force would they need to create positive word of mouth?
What kind of nerd are you if you can't do that simple math?
If writing one fake message per week is enough to keep most people happy, and it takes 2 minutes to compose and send said message, one employee can do say 25 per hour. That's 10 min. of time I include for overhead (bathroom visits, team meetings, whatever). That's 25*8 = 200 per work day, 1000 per work week. Which means one employee can make 1000 paying customers stay paying customers. Avg. $15 per months is $15k they pay. The guy/girl you pay for writing these messages will earn what? $2k a month? Plus overhead, expenses, etc. it's still $10k at least in profit.
Twist the numbers, be more careful - it'll come up with a net gain. Which means that it's being done, because "business ethics" is an oxymoron for most companies.
Is there any situation where you can see yourself open to the possibility of using an Ad-Supported operating system?
Absolutely not. I am a human being, first and foremost. I am not a piece of eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder, and there is way too much marketing bullshit and advertisement around already.
I try hard to keep my personal space ad-free. I have adblockers, popup-blockers, spamfilters. Stay the fuck out of my home with the marketing assault. It's offensive enough to see what, a thousand, two thousand? ads on the daily way to work already. Go away. Don't call me, I'll call you.
More importantly: Will they also upgrade the PPC models at Macworld in January? I'd buy a powerbook instantly if it had a better graphics card. Radeon 9700? Sorry, that's not a notebook with a few years of lifespan.
I'm sure that e-mail is important for blind people, especially as it is one of the few means of interaction where their handicap doesn't show at all to the recipient.
But I'm also sure that crossing a street without being run over because you can't see the cars, walking down stairs instead of falling down stairs because you didn't see them and making yourself something to eat without being able to read the packaging are way ahead on the priority list.
I'm not blind nor do I know anyone who is. But I dare say then when you just lost your eyesight, you suddenly realize that there's much more important and more basic stuff to re-learn than reading your e-mail.
Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts.
They forgot to mention that 67.3% of the windos counterparts did not solve the problem at all because they did not know of a vendor who had the software available, and those were not included in the statistics. Also, 23.1% of the windos projects were ten times over budget. 17.5% of the windos projects were fast, but in violation of on average 7 EULAs and 3 other license agreements. 55% of the Linux projects were slowed down by the requirement that no Free or Open Source software could be used, while 15.8% were limited by the requirement that no non-microsoft software could be employed, and Wine was specifically disallowed. Also, 97.5% of statistics are made up on the spot, including 87.3% of those who are conducted by so-called "independent institutes" for lots of money. Finally, 99.87% of studies paid for by someone surprisingly reveal exactly what the customer asked for.
I don't have a braille keyboard and screenreader, nor could I operate one if I had. I also lack the many years of experience in operating without eyesight that these people have.
So turning off your monitor is not a good way to "see what they see", or rather: don't.
This is just too obvious. Microsoft should fire the astroturf campaigner they hired to set it up. (see my older comment).
Blind people lack (good) eyes, not brains. They'd not seriously cry over a document format, which is a backend-issue, when their specific problem is with frontend presentation.
Heck M$ Word will almost certainly include OpenDocument import (it will, of course, lack OpenDocument export), so there's really no reason here.
Follow the money, people. Who stands to lose if MA goes ahead? M$, nobody else. Using disabled people is just going for the sympathy bonus. If this doesn't work, they'll probably dig up some arcane Word feature that can somehow be used to stop your kids from accessing your Word file with the porn URLs in it and cry "but the chiiiildren! Will nobody think of the chiiildren?".
Is this a money making scheme or is it for real? I guess I'll find out when I submit some stuff, and tell them that since its non-commercial anyway, I can't pay a thing aside from maybe a few bucks for processing.
The problem is: Either it is difficult and/or expensive to get through the process, in which case a lot of good software won't make it simply because it's freeware, cheap shareware or the author doesn't care enough, or it's easy and cheap, in which case I don't see how it can be good enough to not fall for the spyware authors submitting their stuff.
The really funny thing is: The last batch of blank CD-Rs I bought are from - Sony.
Having the cake and eating it, too? These guys are funny. If they should succeed in curbing music copying, I'm sure the next thing they cry about is losses in the blank CD-R department. It'll be interesting to see what kind of law they push to get that fixed.
Because a huge part of Debian users couldn't care less about a GUI installer and want more important stuff done first. Most of the machines I put Debian on never switch out of text mode in their entire life, for example, and I'm still happily using dselect and apt-get because it gets the job done and that's all I care for. It'd take longer to find a mouse to plug into that server than it takes to go through a few menues.
Debian isn't behind, Debian is way ahead of most of the other distros in many ways. And it has other priorities. That's why I use it, that's why most of the people who use Debian use it.
I still don't agree with you. Homeland security is another agency, and the #1 item on their unofficial agenda is securing more funds for themselves. Securing the nation comes somewhere around #8 or so.
If they would really care for the nation's infrastructure and botnets, they would make a trip to Redmond in black limousines and have a serious talk with Balmer and Gates about how their little OS thingy needs to shape up, and quickly.
I hope they didn't forget to include the main reason, or if they did, consider it #11:
Microsoft has never, ever, got anything right on the first try. If you even consider switching a company network to Vista before Service Pack 1 is out, you should be liable for any damages due to gross negliegence.
The dept of Homeland Security has been worried for some time about the possibility of foreign nationals creating botnets
Ok, I understand why the massive botnets used by spammers don't count (because most of them are americans), but what about the 'nets you can buy cheaply (a few cents per machine) in russia, poland, heck all over the world?
I mean, possibility? Either you are the department is plain crazy. That's like saying air is possibly breathable.
Wake up. We have massive botnets already, many of them are controlled by foreign nationals.
What the homeland security actually fears is that they will continue to be used for spam and other low-profile acts, because they need a huge, frontpage incident to claim more funding. And if it doesn't happen by around summer 2006, I'd not be surprised if they staged one.
You are wrong and I have the research to prove it. I've done some work on optimizing worm propagation and I was asked about IPv6 a few times.
Yes, random scanning will die. It will be replaced faster by more intelligent and more efficient means than you can say "windos update". I'm not sure if we really want to force these worm authors to improve their methods...
Just like anything else, market forces will dictate when this gets adopted.
I call bullshit on that.
Is slavery right? The market will tell us. Is pollution acceptable? The market will tell us. Are we really running out of prison space? The market will tell us.
Markets don't create inventions or progress, they only pick them up and turn them into products.
I think everyday commerce with private individuals should be governed by a small, standardized set of contracts established by law.
Come to Germany, we've got something close to that.
The so-called AGB ("Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen", roughly meaning "general terms of doing business with us") are extremely common in Germany and regulate stuff like how to return stuff to claim warranty, how quickly to pay if you don't pay by cash or credit card, that the stuff remains property of the shop until paid in full, etc. etc. It's usually 1-2 pages of legalese in small print. And it's put up somewhere in the shop, linked from the websites, etc.
But - that ain't the beauty. The beauty is that german courts have enforced a rule to forbid "surprising clauses". See, some companies tried to slip outrageous stuff in there, just the stuff you find in EULAs, or the like. The courts have simply declared these clauses null and void. Anything that you wouldn't by common sense expect to find in the AGB is basically forbidden to be there.
Excellent measure. As a customer, I know I don't have to read the AGB unless I need to actually use them (i.e. return something, claim a refund, or check how long I can withhold payment before they want it back).
Good idea. I own one, and am pretty happy with it actually, but my next one won't be a Vaio again.
Why? Shady business tactics. It is sold with bluetooth, in some ads they even make a point of it having bluetooth on-board. But the bluetooth they ship is a crippled bluetooth. Both the M$ (XP SP2) and the Sony drivers lack several profiles, among them the only one I need bluetooth for - the headset profile. You'd think there's a lot more bluetooth headsets around than bluetooth printers, fax machines or digital cameras, but some freaks at M$ and Sony think different.
So the choice was losing 80 bucks for the headset and forgetting about it, or buying a bluetooth dongle, for a machine that is advertised as having bluetooth already.
I know I'm not going to trust the Vaio specs ever again.
This is an artificial shortage, so it's going to be as bad as it "needs" to.
Really, no karma-whoring today or I would've linked the 10 or so articles where that's all explained. Does/. get $1000 every time that xbox thingy is mentioned on the frontpage?
Slashdot Mirror
Some of the gimmicks are useful, though. I have a CPU monitor open everywhere (just current load, no fancy histograms) because it tells me when a process goes bonkers. Same for mem and swap.
Can't help but laugh at the people who stood in line, paid 3-5 times the retail price on ebay or otherwise made a joke out of themselves to be the first on the block to own the overhyped playstation copy - only to be told that "They'll be playing again in three to five days..." - probably after some of their friends who were a little more sane.
Instead of being able to filter by topic and author, could we get some baysian filtering for /. ?
/. learns what I like and what I don't.
/. needs ad bucks to roll, think of the advantages here - self-selected target audiences, anyone? Also, if there's enough performance, it may be possible for the mods to see how many people will filter out the post before it's posted. They'd have to adapt and thus improve story quality.
I'd really, really appreciate if I could mark stories as "spam" and
Since
Just an idea, you know...
So what, if it still just crashes? In fact, this might be one of the reasons. Why can't M$ "innovate" (i.e. play catch-up with the real innovators) somewhere safe first? Wait, that's exactly what it is! Everyone else innovates first and goes to market second. M$ goes to market first, and does alpha testing in public, that way they're usually only slightly beyond and appear innovative.
The only way your model works is if you assume that you can just fire off emails and not respond or engage people. It might work for a brief time - but it wouldn't last.
:-)
Correct. But it doesn't have to last, not if it becomes more expensive to keep you than it is to lose you. So one thing you can be sure about is that you get up to $19,95 (or whatever the monthly rate is) in fakes.
The culture would evolve
But it hasn't yet. I agree the model won't work forever, but it certainly works today.
Match.com has millions of people on the service. In order for this to be a policy, what size work force would they need to create positive word of mouth?
What kind of nerd are you if you can't do that simple math?
If writing one fake message per week is enough to keep most people happy, and it takes 2 minutes to compose and send said message, one employee can do say 25 per hour. That's 10 min. of time I include for overhead (bathroom visits, team meetings, whatever).
That's 25*8 = 200 per work day, 1000 per work week. Which means one employee can make 1000 paying customers stay paying customers. Avg. $15 per months is $15k they pay. The guy/girl you pay for writing these messages will earn what? $2k a month? Plus overhead, expenses, etc. it's still $10k at least in profit.
Twist the numbers, be more careful - it'll come up with a net gain. Which means that it's being done, because "business ethics" is an oxymoron for most companies.
Is there any situation where you can see yourself open to the possibility of using an Ad-Supported operating system?
Absolutely not. I am a human being, first and foremost. I am not a piece of eyeballs to be sold to the highest bidder, and there is way too much marketing bullshit and advertisement around already.
I try hard to keep my personal space ad-free. I have adblockers, popup-blockers, spamfilters. Stay the fuck out of my home with the marketing assault. It's offensive enough to see what, a thousand, two thousand? ads on the daily way to work already. Go away. Don't call me, I'll call you.
More importantly: Will they also upgrade the PPC models at Macworld in January? I'd buy a powerbook instantly if it had a better graphics card. Radeon 9700? Sorry, that's not a notebook with a few years of lifespan.
Nice try, but I didn't say that and you know it.
I'm sure that e-mail is important for blind people, especially as it is one of the few means of interaction where their handicap doesn't show at all to the recipient.
But I'm also sure that crossing a street without being run over because you can't see the cars, walking down stairs instead of falling down stairs because you didn't see them and making yourself something to eat without being able to read the packaging are way ahead on the priority list.
I'm not blind nor do I know anyone who is. But I dare say then when you just lost your eyesight, you suddenly realize that there's much more important and more basic stuff to re-learn than reading your e-mail.
Linux administrators took 68 per cent longer to implement new business requirements than their Windows counterparts.
They forgot to mention that 67.3% of the windos counterparts did not solve the problem at all because they did not know of a vendor who had the software available, and those were not included in the statistics. Also, 23.1% of the windos projects were ten times over budget. 17.5% of the windos projects were fast, but in violation of on average 7 EULAs and 3 other license agreements. 55% of the Linux projects were slowed down by the requirement that no Free or Open Source software could be used, while 15.8% were limited by the requirement that no non-microsoft software could be employed, and Wine was specifically disallowed. Also, 97.5% of statistics are made up on the spot, including 87.3% of those who are conducted by so-called "independent institutes" for lots of money. Finally, 99.87% of studies paid for by someone surprisingly reveal exactly what the customer asked for.
I don't have a braille keyboard and screenreader, nor could I operate one if I had. I also lack the many years of experience in operating without eyesight that these people have.
So turning off your monitor is not a good way to "see what they see", or rather: don't.
This is just too obvious. Microsoft should fire the astroturf campaigner they hired to set it up. (see my older comment).
Blind people lack (good) eyes, not brains. They'd not seriously cry over a document format, which is a backend-issue, when their specific problem is with frontend presentation.
Heck M$ Word will almost certainly include OpenDocument import (it will, of course, lack OpenDocument export), so there's really no reason here.
Follow the money, people. Who stands to lose if MA goes ahead? M$, nobody else. Using disabled people is just going for the sympathy bonus. If this doesn't work, they'll probably dig up some arcane Word feature that can somehow be used to stop your kids from accessing your Word file with the porn URLs in it and cry "but the chiiiildren! Will nobody think of the chiiildren?".
Is this a money making scheme or is it for real? I guess I'll find out when I submit some stuff, and tell them that since its non-commercial anyway, I can't pay a thing aside from maybe a few bucks for processing.
The problem is:
Either it is difficult and/or expensive to get through the process, in which case a lot of good software won't make it simply because it's freeware, cheap shareware or the author doesn't care enough, or it's easy and cheap, in which case I don't see how it can be good enough to not fall for the spyware authors submitting their stuff.
The really funny thing is: The last batch of blank CD-Rs I bought are from - Sony.
Having the cake and eating it, too? These guys are funny. If they should succeed in curbing music copying, I'm sure the next thing they cry about is losses in the blank CD-R department. It'll be interesting to see what kind of law they push to get that fixed.
Why's it taken so long?
Because a huge part of Debian users couldn't care less about a GUI installer and want more important stuff done first. Most of the machines I put Debian on never switch out of text mode in their entire life, for example, and I'm still happily using dselect and apt-get because it gets the job done and that's all I care for. It'd take longer to find a mouse to plug into that server than it takes to go through a few menues.
Debian isn't behind, Debian is way ahead of most of the other distros in many ways. And it has other priorities. That's why I use it, that's why most of the people who use Debian use it.
I still don't agree with you. Homeland security is another agency, and the #1 item on their unofficial agenda is securing more funds for themselves. Securing the nation comes somewhere around #8 or so.
If they would really care for the nation's infrastructure and botnets, they would make a trip to Redmond in black limousines and have a serious talk with Balmer and Gates about how their little OS thingy needs to shape up, and quickly.
I hope they didn't forget to include the main reason, or if they did, consider it #11:
Microsoft has never, ever, got anything right on the first try. If you even consider switching a company network to Vista before Service Pack 1 is out, you should be liable for any damages due to gross negliegence.
The dept of Homeland Security has been worried for some time about the possibility of foreign nationals creating botnets
Ok, I understand why the massive botnets used by spammers don't count (because most of them are americans), but what about the 'nets you can buy cheaply (a few cents per machine) in russia, poland, heck all over the world?
I mean, possibility? Either you are the department is plain crazy. That's like saying air is possibly breathable.
Wake up. We have massive botnets already, many of them are controlled by foreign nationals.
What the homeland security actually fears is that they will continue to be used for spam and other low-profile acts, because they need a huge, frontpage incident to claim more funding.
And if it doesn't happen by around summer 2006, I'd not be surprised if they staged one.
The main reason, most likely, is that Apple already tried to allow clones years ago - and it wasn't exactly a great success.
I don't think they're going to make the same mistake again.
You are wrong and I have the research to prove it. I've done some work on optimizing worm propagation and I was asked about IPv6 a few times.
Yes, random scanning will die. It will be replaced faster by more intelligent and more efficient means than you can say "windos update". I'm not sure if we really want to force these worm authors to improve their methods...
Just like anything else, market forces will dictate when this gets adopted.
I call bullshit on that.
Is slavery right? The market will tell us.
Is pollution acceptable? The market will tell us.
Are we really running out of prison space? The market will tell us.
Markets don't create inventions or progress, they only pick them up and turn them into products.
I think everyday commerce with private individuals should be governed by a small, standardized set of contracts established by law.
Come to Germany, we've got something close to that.
The so-called AGB ("Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen", roughly meaning "general terms of doing business with us") are extremely common in Germany and regulate stuff like how to return stuff to claim warranty, how quickly to pay if you don't pay by cash or credit card, that the stuff remains property of the shop until paid in full, etc. etc.
It's usually 1-2 pages of legalese in small print. And it's put up somewhere in the shop, linked from the websites, etc.
But - that ain't the beauty. The beauty is that german courts have enforced a rule to forbid "surprising clauses". See, some companies tried to slip outrageous stuff in there, just the stuff you find in EULAs, or the like.
The courts have simply declared these clauses null and void. Anything that you wouldn't by common sense expect to find in the AGB is basically forbidden to be there.
Excellent measure. As a customer, I know I don't have to read the AGB unless I need to actually use them (i.e. return something, claim a refund, or check how long I can withhold payment before they want it back).
will make me think twice about buying a Vaio.
Good idea. I own one, and am pretty happy with it actually, but my next one won't be a Vaio again.
Why? Shady business tactics. It is sold with bluetooth, in some ads they even make a point of it having bluetooth on-board.
But the bluetooth they ship is a crippled bluetooth. Both the M$ (XP SP2) and the Sony drivers lack several profiles, among them the only one I need bluetooth for - the headset profile.
You'd think there's a lot more bluetooth headsets around than bluetooth printers, fax machines or digital cameras, but some freaks at M$ and Sony think different.
So the choice was losing 80 bucks for the headset and forgetting about it, or buying a bluetooth dongle, for a machine that is advertised as having bluetooth already.
I know I'm not going to trust the Vaio specs ever again.
This is an artificial shortage, so it's going to be as bad as it "needs" to.
/. get $1000 every time that xbox thingy is mentioned on the frontpage?
Really, no karma-whoring today or I would've linked the 10 or so articles where that's all explained. Does