Timothy wrote:
This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
Jamie wrote:
I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.
Looks to me like Jamie *was* wrong. See Monday's news on Stephen King's site, in which he reports 76.38% payment. Now, 19.8% of the 116,200 that he counts as having paid have actually just promised to pay, but haven't actually paid. 80.2% of them paid via credit card. That means that at least 61.3% of downloads have been paid for, which is more than twice Jamie's most optimistic estimate.
King goes on. In response to the question "Are you go for Part 3 in September?", he replies, simply, "Yes."
Another great read from Moody is his piece, I think it's from mid-'97, entitled "Microsoft's Greed is Good". My favorite quotes:
"Gates is fighting for the consumer and against the businessman, while most of his competitors, from Apple to Sun to Netscape, are fighting for the businessman at the expense of the consumer."
"[Microsoft] is the most misunderstood company in the history of American commerce"
"Microsoft...is driven by the need to make computers...cheaper and easier to use for consumers, rather than as profitable as possible for as many software and hardware companies as possible"
Let's not all forget Fred Moody's column from '98, "The (Anti-) Linux Crusade: Charge of the Linux Brigade". In this, Mr. Moody interviews an anonymous informant who is willing to say bad things about Linux, but only through extremely poor grammar and inaccuracies. Moody quotes this informant as saying:
"linux isnt secure and it isnt stable, its a moving target that never really gets out of beta. sure people run production sites on linux. i know alot of these people. they dont get much sleep and have grown opaque from the lack of sunlight. i have admin'd large linux shops. they require huge amounts of admin overhead, and if you want shit to really work you are going to spend alot of time manually fixing things. the number of outstanding security holes and lack of stable functionality is monumental."
Yup, that's the source of his article. He couldn't get anybody to go on the record saying these things, because they're grossly inaccurate. Moody concludes by saying:
"It will be a cold day at the equator before L. Torvalds sets aside his ego for the sake of someone else's better ideas." What a foolish, inflammatory asshole. There are few reporters that disgust me as much as this man.
The sound is caused by the pops and clicks as creases in the packaging material are pulled apart, and there is very little a theatergoer can do to decrease the loudness of those sounds, according to Eric Kramer, a physicist from Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Waiiit...so you're saying that the noise of opening candy is a product of the packaging? Well, hot damn! I figured it was just something in the air.
CNN calls this news? Must be by Jeannie Frickin Moos.
I must admit that my knowledge about LVS, or any clustering, is quite limited. But from what I just read on LinuxWorld , I ask: Do you think that a load-balancing system would be a factor in this case, given that Lynx was restarted for each connection? (Making persistant connections impossible.)
To be honest, I grabbed the hostname from somebody else's post. (Like I said -- don't know nuthin' about Microsoft's system.) I think I got that address from Spock the Vulcan's post, which is a single head dump from Lynx. Also, JOKane posted saying that 6.1% of his (?) 1,000 wgets were processed by the IIS server.
I wonder if the login server isn't different from the actual mail servers? Hotmail does, after all, immediately push you to one of their law.hotmail.msn.com servers. That was my assumption, though perhaps flawed, when I used the lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com address. Is anybody familiar with their topology?
Anyhow, I repeated the experiment, this time on lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com, which is the server that www.hotmail.com pushes to. My numbers there more closely matched yours:
I ran the following shell script: #!/bin/bash i=1 while [ "$i" -lt 253 ] do lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>/var/tmp/hotmail let i="$i"+1 done
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Microsoft's load-balancing setup, or if I skewed the results in any way as a result of my choice of server. So I reproduce all data here.
I tried to install the previous version of Evolution on my Yellow Dog box, and gave up after two hours. Bonobo wouldn't compile, OAF just whined at me, and some others were generally uncooperative. It's just too much.
I wrote this for folks on the Peacefire technical mailing list. So that's why it reads like an insider letter. I apologize for that.
I mentioned Mr. Stephani's implication that Peacefire hacked their server. It is only fair that I include his comments. I asked him about this after the speechifying was done, and he said that he never meant to imply that, only that it was an unfortunately coincidence.
I referred to Mr. Stephani's incredible statements as an "Old Faithful(tm) of shit," That should have read "A Historic Geyser of shit." My apologies to the National Park Service's Legal Department.
As Jim Tyre pointed out, COPA was not struck down, but, in Jamie's words, "injunctified." Gosh, I love the English language.:)
The mysterious PlanetGood can be found at http://www.planetgood.net/. I'm still not totally clear on what it is, but I have it on good authority that it contains "Only the good, none of the bad."
It's still not a good idea, but I, personally, don't think it's the same as censorship. The information is still allowed to exist; you just have to go through alternate means to see it.
This is, IMHO, a really interesting point. I never thought of censorship quite like that.
OK, Let's pretend that Russia has banned The Wall Street Journal because it's too capitalist. (You know they can't shake those communist leanings...:) So you can't get it in that country. I think we can agree that is censorship.
You can get the Journal. You just have to leave the country. In schools, you can't see the ACLU's website. But you can if you leave the school.
I've been promoting the use of MAPS and ORBS to many of my clients for years. (Yeah, yeah, I know that you shouldn't rely on a centralised blacklist, etc. But it's the best existing solution.) If this hits mainstream press, I'm going to get all kinds of calls and e-mail from clients, and now I have to explain that, no, really, you can still trust that they're only filtering out spam, not good mail. They won't believe me, as they shouldn't, and I'll look like an asshole.
Amen. ZDNet and c|Net are utter shit. Neither has any sort of journalistic integrity, and both make me feel vaguely nauseous, like a trip to South of the Border or Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Let 'em buy each other. They can wallow in their collective filth. I don't give a damn.
See RFC 1876: "A Means for Expressing Location Information in the Domain Name System." Using geographic information to establish a domain, as opposed to vice-versa, seems unnecessary. (At least, *I* can't think of any applications.)
If they have any sense, they'll have professional liability insurance. For a company of our size, it's about $1.2K/year. Totally essential. For Razorfish, it'd be closer to $100K/year, I imagine. Still totally worth having, and it'll save their ass in this case.
I wasn't just bitching -- I really am glad that you mentioned it. I've already downloaded it, and I'll start playing with it. I'm spoiled by gcc, but what the hell, why not?:)
That's fantastic. I knew that Borland released older versions of their DOS C compiler (it's a really nice compiler, too, IMHO), but I wasn't aware that Symantec had followed suit for the Mac.
I'm puzzled by your font comment, though. The font in the proposal is commercially available, and has been for some time. It looks a lot like what's in my Middle Egyptian textbook, but no credit is given.
*blush* That's embarrassing. I rushed straight down to the glyphs and missed the fact that it's based on an existing font.:)
The characters are stylisticly quite similar to Budge's standard characters, but I have no idea where he got those. Ain't no way he drew everything in there himself, the lazy freak.;)
BTW, (I don't often encounter people that might be interested in knowing this) it's getting easier to find his dictionary. Both volumes! For years, I only had one. You can see them at Amazon, and buy it wherever politics permit.
Halla-fuckin'-lujia. Really. I'm sick of sketching them, and the existing fonts (there's a couple of sets) suck. Naturally, with a language that's both phonetic and ideogram based, the set is limited. But this set does a really good job of covering the bases. It's enough to get me back into Egyptian again.
From this article: But does he know what the words mean? Hasn't he just learned to associate particular sounds with particular objects or places?
I hate this. What are words but sounds that we've associated with things? My mother taught me and my twin brother to read at age 2. My kid sister could read simple words at 7 months. We'd have guests over, and they'd look at my not-yet-walking sister reading (I was about 6 years old), and say it was cute, or funny, but many people refused to acknowledge that she was reading. "Oh, she's just associated the shapes of the letters on the flashcards with nouns and verbs," they'd say. "She's not actually reading."
If that's not reading, and if Alex doesn't know what those words mean, then I must have a fundamental misunderstanding of language. Which is quite possible.
Slashdot Mirror
Timothy wrote:
:)
This still doesn't mean Jamie is wrong -- yet.
Jamie wrote:
I predict King's return rate will be something like 15%. Maybe it will go as much as twice as high, thanks to his deal with Amazon to let people use credit cards -- much more convenient.
Looks to me like Jamie *was* wrong. See Monday's news on Stephen King's site, in which he reports 76.38% payment. Now, 19.8% of the 116,200 that he counts as having paid have actually just promised to pay, but haven't actually paid. 80.2% of them paid via credit card. That means that at least 61.3% of downloads have been paid for, which is more than twice Jamie's most optimistic estimate.
King goes on. In response to the question "Are you go for Part 3 in September?", he replies, simply, "Yes."
Sorry, Jamie.
-Waldo
-------------------
- "Gates is fighting for the consumer and against the businessman, while most of his competitors, from Apple to Sun to Netscape, are fighting for the businessman at the expense of the consumer."
- "[Microsoft] is the most misunderstood company in the history of American commerce"
- "Microsoft...is driven by the need to make computers...cheaper and easier to use for consumers, rather than as profitable as possible for as many software and hardware companies as possible"
He's such a sycophant.-Waldo
-------------------
I'm sorry, I failed to provide a link. You can find this article at http://www.abcne ws.go.com/sections/tech/FredMoody/moody981120.html .
-Waldo
-------------------
Let's not all forget Fred Moody's column from '98, "The (Anti-) Linux Crusade: Charge of the Linux Brigade". In this, Mr. Moody interviews an anonymous informant who is willing to say bad things about Linux, but only through extremely poor grammar and inaccuracies. Moody quotes this informant as saying:
"linux isnt secure and it isnt stable, its a moving target that never really gets out of beta. sure people run production sites on linux. i know alot of these people. they dont get much sleep and have grown opaque from the lack of sunlight. i have admin'd large linux shops. they require huge amounts of admin overhead, and if you want shit to really work you are going to spend alot of time manually fixing things. the number of outstanding security holes and lack of stable functionality is monumental."
Yup, that's the source of his article. He couldn't get anybody to go on the record saying these things, because they're grossly inaccurate. Moody concludes by saying:
"It will be a cold day at the equator before L. Torvalds sets aside his ego for the sake of someone else's better ideas."
What a foolish, inflammatory asshole. There are few reporters that disgust me as much as this man.
-Waldo
-------------------
The sound is caused by the pops and clicks as creases in the packaging material are pulled apart, and there is very little a theatergoer can do to decrease the loudness of those sounds, according to Eric Kramer, a physicist from Simon's Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.
Waiiit...so you're saying that the noise of opening candy is a product of the packaging? Well, hot damn! I figured it was just something in the air.
CNN calls this news? Must be by Jeannie Frickin Moos.
-Waldo
-------------------
I must admit that my knowledge about LVS, or any clustering, is quite limited. But from what I just read on LinuxWorld , I ask: Do you think that a load-balancing system would be a factor in this case, given that Lynx was restarted for each connection? (Making persistant connections impossible.)
-Waldo
-------------------
I wonder if the login server isn't different from the actual mail servers? Hotmail does, after all, immediately push you to one of their law.hotmail.msn.com servers. That was my assumption, though perhaps flawed, when I used the lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com address. Is anybody familiar with their topology?
Anyhow, I repeated the experiment, this time on lc2.law5.hotmail.passport.com, which is the server that www.hotmail.com pushes to. My numbers there more closely matched yours:
4.7% W2K. That's closer the the results that I'd *like* to see.
-Waldo
-------------------
#!/bin/bash
i=1
while [ "$i" -lt 253 ]
do
lynx -head -dump http://lw7fd.law7.hotmail.msn.com/ |grep Server >>
let i="$i"+1
done
I got the following results:
- 202 "Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 SSLeay/0.9.0b"
- 798 "Microsoft-IIS/5.0"
Disclaimer: I know nothing about Microsoft's load-balancing setup, or if I skewed the results in any way as a result of my choice of server. So I reproduce all data here.-Waldo
-------------------
FYI, Linux PCC guru Stew Benedict has a great article in this month's Linux Journal, "Yellow Dog Linux on the iMac." He gives a good overview of the process, the benefits and drawbacks to YDL, etc.
:)
FWIW, I use Yellowdog (I have for over a year), and I absolutely love it. There's nuthin' prettier than Helix Gnome on an iMac.
-Waldo
-------------------
I tried to install the previous version of Evolution on my Yellow Dog box, and gave up after two hours. Bonobo wouldn't compile, OAF just whined at me, and some others were generally uncooperative. It's just too much.
It's still not a good idea, but I, personally, don't think it's the same as censorship. The information is still allowed to exist; you just have to go through alternate means to see it.
This is, IMHO, a really interesting point. I never thought of censorship quite like that.
OK, Let's pretend that Russia has banned The Wall Street Journal because it's too capitalist. (You know they can't shake those communist leanings...:) So you can't get it in that country. I think we can agree that is censorship.
You can get the Journal. You just have to leave the country. In schools, you can't see the ACLU's website. But you can if you leave the school.
What's the difference between these two examples?
-Waldo
I've been promoting the use of MAPS and ORBS to many of my clients for years. (Yeah, yeah, I know that you shouldn't rely on a centralised blacklist, etc. But it's the best existing solution.) If this hits mainstream press, I'm going to get all kinds of calls and e-mail from clients, and now I have to explain that, no, really, you can still trust that they're only filtering out spam, not good mail. They won't believe me, as they shouldn't, and I'll look like an asshole.
Thanks for nothing.
-Waldo
Amen. ZDNet and c|Net are utter shit. Neither has any sort of journalistic integrity, and both make me feel vaguely nauseous, like a trip to South of the Border or Gatlinburg, Tennessee.
Let 'em buy each other. They can wallow in their collective filth. I don't give a damn.
-Waldo
See RFC 1876: "A Means for Expressing Location Information in the Domain Name System." Using geographic information to establish a domain, as opposed to vice-versa, seems unnecessary. (At least, *I* can't think of any applications.)
If they have any sense, they'll have professional liability insurance. For a company of our size, it's about $1.2K/year. Totally essential. For Razorfish, it'd be closer to $100K/year, I imagine. Still totally worth having, and it'll save their ass in this case.
Note: IANAIA. (I Am Not An Insurance Agent)
-Waldo
Naw, think of it as a math tax. If you can't do math, you should be paying the math tax to help kids learn math.
If only the money went to that...
I wasn't just bitching -- I really am glad that you mentioned it. I've already downloaded it, and I'll start playing with it. I'm spoiled by gcc, but what the hell, why not? :)
-Waldo
ftp ://ftp.apple.com/developer/Tool_Chest/Core_Mac_OS_ Tools/MPW_etc./MPW-GM/MPW/
Looks like it's only good for 68K, and is overall pretty weak. (See Gavin Haines' 10/99 post to Info-Mac.) But it is, in fact, a free compiler.
-Waldo
That's fantastic. I knew that Borland released older versions of their DOS C compiler (it's a really nice compiler, too, IMHO), but I wasn't aware that Symantec had followed suit for the Mac.
-Waldo
I just hunted down the Chinese Room Argument -- thanks for the reference. This is fascinating.
-Waldo
There ain't no free (beer) compiler for us Mac users.
-W
I'm puzzled by your font comment, though. The font in the proposal is commercially available, and has been for some time. It looks a lot like what's in my Middle Egyptian textbook, but no credit is given.
:)
;)
*blush* That's embarrassing. I rushed straight down to the glyphs and missed the fact that it's based on an existing font.
The characters are stylisticly quite similar to Budge's standard characters, but I have no idea where he got those. Ain't no way he drew everything in there himself, the lazy freak.
BTW, (I don't often encounter people that might be interested in knowing this) it's getting easier to find his dictionary. Both volumes! For years, I only had one. You can see them at Amazon, and buy it wherever politics permit.
-Waldo
Halla-fuckin'-lujia. Really. I'm sick of sketching them, and the existing fonts (there's a couple of sets) suck. Naturally, with a language that's both phonetic and ideogram based, the set is limited. But this set does a really good job of covering the bases. It's enough to get me back into Egyptian again.
-Waldo
From this article:
But does he know what the words mean? Hasn't he just learned to associate particular sounds with particular objects or places?
I hate this. What are words but sounds that we've associated with things? My mother taught me and my twin brother to read at age 2. My kid sister could read simple words at 7 months. We'd have guests over, and they'd look at my not-yet-walking sister reading (I was about 6 years old), and say it was cute, or funny, but many people refused to acknowledge that she was reading. "Oh, she's just associated the shapes of the letters on the flashcards with nouns and verbs," they'd say. "She's not actually reading."
If that's not reading, and if Alex doesn't know what those words mean, then I must have a fundamental misunderstanding of language. Which is quite possible.
-Waldo