For my use case, this would be impractical, as I tend not to have many "staple" foodstuffs and tend to shop for the meal(s) I intend to make in the near future, and I've usually got a good idea of what's in the fridge.
Back when "fridges with screens that will manage your grocery list for you" was being talked about a lot, some people described situations where it could be helpful, but they all seemed to involve adopting a very rigid protocol around fridge use ("remember to punch in the percentage of ketchup remaining when you are done with it Billy!", to which my response was "screw that shit".
Personally I'd be way more open to this stuff if it didn't want an internet connection.
Ultimately I see very little practical application for any of this anyway. As I said in a previous comment, I played around with home automation "back in the day" and while it's nifty, it doesn't really add a whole lot of value outside of some very specialized use cases.
Isn't this what we all figured out back in the x10/smarthome days. After you get over the gee-wiz star trek appeal, there's very little that we actually want to automate, and most of those things are already well handled by stand alone devices which benifit very little from integration. My automatic coffee maker and thermostat don't need an internet connection, and having lights come on automatically when you walk in the room is cool and nifty, for about 20 minutes, then it is overcome by the annoyance of the lights turning off all the time because occupancy sensors suck. Sure we can try to make up justifications, and there may be some people who legitimately have a valid use case, but I think this is gonna be home automation fad part 2.
My old x10 gear still makes an appearance around Christmas, and I still use some of it in my bedroom to control the lights and ceiling fan from my bed, but my (at one time) expensive ocelot controller and like a few dozen various bits sit in a box collecting dust.
(Also usual warning that x10 is a terrible system that I wouldn't recommend to an enemy).
It was an episode of the simpsons because it's actually a thing. School systems are broke, and throwing a couple of shoe ads on the wall or selling extremely valuable classroom eyeballs seems to be what it's coming down to.
To me, the fact that it was being taken down for maintenance doesn't make it ineligible to be "ordered taken down" after the fact. The fact that it was being taken down to be fixed might have put the idea in someones head, but the fact is if it was originally planned to be put back up and is no longer, then that is mostly the same as if there had been no maintenance plans.
Very least it seems like all parties have come out with the line, and don't intend to put the thing back up for the cited reasoning.
Opportunistic maybe, but doesn't scream hoax to me.
Smaller local stuff is the way to go. The big cons are ridiculously overcrowded. I guess some people are into that and you do get to meet some of the bigger names, but not worth it in my opinion.
Shipping used to be a ridiculously dangerous thing. The navigator on a ship was probably one of the most skilled crew members, and if he fucked up, you were done.
I honestly believe even if we did still have that skill set, if you applied old techniques to the scale of modern shipping, it would indeed be catastrophic, and not just for those at sea.
The world now depends on international shipping. Sure, things could be re-juggled (our food didn't always spend half it's time floating across the sea from cheaper production facilities), but in the interim there would be mass problems as supply chains fell apart and things like oil, food, and materials suddenly became scarce.
That's because we never really "standardized" on it. Sure a distro can pick their preferred init system, but there was nothing stopping you from using another, because they were _just_ init systems and not the whole system platform clusterfuck that systemd is aiming to be.
Case and point, I use gentoo, and like most gentoo user, open-rc. Up until now this hasn't been a problem. Then systemd came along and started fucking everything up.
This is the thorn in everyone's side. Standardizing on anything is kinda anti-linux. We accept it as a reality for some things, but it's not something we should specifically aim for.
For physical stuff, have made multiple trips to the local eco recycling place with loads of old computers and peripherals. I'm still keeping some stuff (like my trusty Dragon32 and it's associated junk) do to sentimental value, but I'm less attached to the pile of CD-ROM drives, box of IDE cables, and stack of old machines. If I haven't turned it on in a year, it's gone!
For digital stuff, I keep most of it for the reason you pointed out. The sum total of 1996 to like early 2000 can probably fit in a few TB, and I've got a 20TB file server (which isn't really that uncommon any more). I've considered dumping it to an external (no need for it to be spinning all the time), but just can't be bothered.
Wow, I assumed you meant like he suspiciously makes a lot of dice related posts, but it's not even subtle.
Identified as "works for slashdot" and entire history seems to be nothing but dice.com posts. It's like this guys job is literally to post dice shit to slashdot all day.
This "article" could have just been jammed in the summary, hell Bennett writes larger blog posts in the summary all the time! I can also honestly say I thought to myself "well this is really lame" before noticing it was a shameless dice self post.
I hate apple and have no interest in a "smart watch", but having to charge the damn thing all the time is a well understood problem, something which is weighed as a con vs whatever pros people find in these things. If I had any interest in the features, I doubt this would be a show stopper. It just becomes a slight addition to the list of things I do before going to bed. If value of that effort exceeds the annoyance of that effort, then it's worth it?
This article doesn’t do anything besides point out the issue and make a fairly obvious correlation (something the author probably felt was way more clever than it actually was)?
Thing is, a lot of those entries are far more technically sound than Diaspora.
There are plenty of people who can/could deliver what Diaspora could not from a technical perspective. It's the whole user adoption thing that is the stumbling block.
It honestly was a bunch of guys without any idea of how to build a good, secure, scalable application trying to build one.
Pretty much this. They should never have gotten the amount of attention they did. Had they not been obligated at that point to produce something, they probably would have realized they were in way over their head early on.
I gotta give it to the guys for coming up with the idea
There have actually been several attempts at this. Obviously many have come afterwards as well. There's actually a wikipedia article listing them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
and open sourcing the protocol
They screwed this up. They didn't so much design a specification and get community buy in as just start coding and released what they had. Again, inexperience shows.
and generating the hype
This is the one thing they did right! In addition to raising a shit tonne of money, they got people not only talking about an alternative to facebook, but mainstream news was actually talking about what exactly a "distributed social network" meant and why someone might want that. What they really needed was one or two people who knew what they were doing on their team (someone who knows security and someone who knows how to develop a specification). They had a lot of energy and were very good at projecting that enthusiasm, they just didn't have the skill set to deliver.
I already made a fairly lengthy post about this above, but for advertising security as a killer feature, it became very clear that they had no clue what they were doing. It wasn't that they missed a few bugs, it was that their fundamental design didn't incorporate anything more complex than "check if the user is logged in before doing stuff". You can't just fix that.
Needed a bit of polish, but definitely promising. Never got the critical mass though.
Understatement! Diaspora was a complete mess.
Security was the problem everyone focused on. Good security is built in at a foundation level and a fundamental component to the entire design and implementation.
Generally when you are talking about a secure application, you have a primitive layer which does authentication and data access, and a layer on top of that which provides logic and user interface with all data access going through that first layer using some kind of authentication token. In this way, a small bug in say, the image upload script, won't let you do much because all operations through the primitive secure layer require an authentication token, which limits the scope of what those operations can do (to say, the logged in user).
Shitty security, like what diaspora had, basically does checks at the top layer (is this user logged in? good.. run this query!). The problem with this is that a small bug _anywhere_ gives you full access to _anything_, which is precisely what was happening. Sure you can patch those small bugs as you find them, but there will always be more.
In other words, it wasn't that diaspora had some security bugs or needed some polish, it was that security wasn't an integral part of the software, which can't really be fixed without a complete rewrite.
The less focused on problem was that the thing wasn't built to a specification, they just kinda started coding it. If you want to build something open and interoperable, that's not how you do it!
And then the main problem was that it had no killer feature to attract users. It did what the other two established offerings did, except without the established user base. Being full of security holes and having no api arn't really thinks most users care about, yet it still failed to gain any kind of adoption.
I honestly felt kind of sad for the team (one of whom apparently killed himself, possibly over stress of the whole thing). They were all very inexperienced, and we've all at some point said "hah, I could write a better <something> in a few weeks!" at that point in our careers. Usually we take a crack at it, realize we are in way over our heads, and it dies quietly. These guys got a shit tonne of attention, were obligated to produce something they didn't have the skills to produce, and then basically crashed and burned before us all.
Effective as advertising, not effective at generating profit.
I get that there's a reason generic "targeted" advertising took over. Arranging rental of ad space on a website was a pain for both parties and a much higher bar for entry than copy+pasting some code. This combined with the ongoing death of the topic specific website ensure the days of a website owner hand picking advertisements they think their audience might go for are probably not coming back.
As far as the advertisements actually generating effect, I think the old way was way better. Companies like google are succeeding on pure scale.
There actually was a time, when sites hosted their own ads, and advertisers payed a flat rate! You'd see the same ad over and over again, sitting their in the corner.
If it was interesting or confusing, eventually you'd break down and _have_ to click it to find out what the hell they were even trying to sell. At the very least if it was interesting it stuck in your head.
I actually think this was far more effective than all this targeted advertising we've got now.
I tend to lean towards the "pro version" model of funding as long as the free version isn't totally crippled and they don't start moving free functionality to the pro version. Come up with some neat but not essential extras (I'd probably pay money to be able to group contacts together and send snaps to "everyone in group 'work friends'") and there's probably plenty of people like me who's buy it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, the old "smart fridge" fad.
For my use case, this would be impractical, as I tend not to have many "staple" foodstuffs and tend to shop for the meal(s) I intend to make in the near future, and I've usually got a good idea of what's in the fridge.
Back when "fridges with screens that will manage your grocery list for you" was being talked about a lot, some people described situations where it could be helpful, but they all seemed to involve adopting a very rigid protocol around fridge use ("remember to punch in the percentage of ketchup remaining when you are done with it Billy!", to which my response was "screw that shit".
Yup.
Personally I'd be way more open to this stuff if it didn't want an internet connection.
Ultimately I see very little practical application for any of this anyway. As I said in a previous comment, I played around with home automation "back in the day" and while it's nifty, it doesn't really add a whole lot of value outside of some very specialized use cases.
Isn't this what we all figured out back in the x10/smarthome days. After you get over the gee-wiz star trek appeal, there's very little that we actually want to automate, and most of those things are already well handled by stand alone devices which benifit very little from integration. My automatic coffee maker and thermostat don't need an internet connection, and having lights come on automatically when you walk in the room is cool and nifty, for about 20 minutes, then it is overcome by the annoyance of the lights turning off all the time because occupancy sensors suck. Sure we can try to make up justifications, and there may be some people who legitimately have a valid use case, but I think this is gonna be home automation fad part 2.
My old x10 gear still makes an appearance around Christmas, and I still use some of it in my bedroom to control the lights and ceiling fan from my bed, but my (at one time) expensive ocelot controller and like a few dozen various bits sit in a box collecting dust.
(Also usual warning that x10 is a terrible system that I wouldn't recommend to an enemy).
It was an episode of the simpsons because it's actually a thing. School systems are broke, and throwing a couple of shoe ads on the wall or selling extremely valuable classroom eyeballs seems to be what it's coming down to.
To me, the fact that it was being taken down for maintenance doesn't make it ineligible to be "ordered taken down" after the fact. The fact that it was being taken down to be fixed might have put the idea in someones head, but the fact is if it was originally planned to be put back up and is no longer, then that is mostly the same as if there had been no maintenance plans.
Very least it seems like all parties have come out with the line, and don't intend to put the thing back up for the cited reasoning.
Opportunistic maybe, but doesn't scream hoax to me.
Indeed.
Smaller local stuff is the way to go. The big cons are ridiculously overcrowded. I guess some people are into that and you do get to meet some of the bigger names, but not worth it in my opinion.
Shipping used to be a ridiculously dangerous thing. The navigator on a ship was probably one of the most skilled crew members, and if he fucked up, you were done.
I honestly believe even if we did still have that skill set, if you applied old techniques to the scale of modern shipping, it would indeed be catastrophic, and not just for those at sea.
The world now depends on international shipping. Sure, things could be re-juggled (our food didn't always spend half it's time floating across the sea from cheaper production facilities), but in the interim there would be mass problems as supply chains fell apart and things like oil, food, and materials suddenly became scarce.
And planes would be even worse off!
That's because we never really "standardized" on it. Sure a distro can pick their preferred init system, but there was nothing stopping you from using another, because they were _just_ init systems and not the whole system platform clusterfuck that systemd is aiming to be.
Case and point, I use gentoo, and like most gentoo user, open-rc. Up until now this hasn't been a problem. Then systemd came along and started fucking everything up.
Standardising on a single init system
This is the thorn in everyone's side. Standardizing on anything is kinda anti-linux. We accept it as a reality for some things, but it's not something we should specifically aim for.
I mean, they always used to when linking to things on SourceForge or ThinkGeek.
Indeed, or even if the article was about or related to either. I know it's an old tune, but slashdot is just going down hill...
I've been going through much the same.
For physical stuff, have made multiple trips to the local eco recycling place with loads of old computers and peripherals. I'm still keeping some stuff (like my trusty Dragon32 and it's associated junk) do to sentimental value, but I'm less attached to the pile of CD-ROM drives, box of IDE cables, and stack of old machines. If I haven't turned it on in a year, it's gone!
For digital stuff, I keep most of it for the reason you pointed out. The sum total of 1996 to like early 2000 can probably fit in a few TB, and I've got a 20TB file server (which isn't really that uncommon any more). I've considered dumping it to an external (no need for it to be spinning all the time), but just can't be bothered.
Wow, I assumed you meant like he suspiciously makes a lot of dice related posts, but it's not even subtle.
Identified as "works for slashdot" and entire history seems to be nothing but dice.com posts. It's like this guys job is literally to post dice shit to slashdot all day.
Bleh
This "article" could have just been jammed in the summary, hell Bennett writes larger blog posts in the summary all the time! I can also honestly say I thought to myself "well this is really lame" before noticing it was a shameless dice self post.
I hate apple and have no interest in a "smart watch", but having to charge the damn thing all the time is a well understood problem, something which is weighed as a con vs whatever pros people find in these things. If I had any interest in the features, I doubt this would be a show stopper. It just becomes a slight addition to the list of things I do before going to bed. If value of that effort exceeds the annoyance of that effort, then it's worth it?
This article doesn’t do anything besides point out the issue and make a fairly obvious correlation (something the author probably felt was way more clever than it actually was)?
I agree that security wasn't gonna attract the masses, but it was one of the major selling points they were using, and they totally blew it.
Thing is, a lot of those entries are far more technically sound than Diaspora.
There are plenty of people who can/could deliver what Diaspora could not from a technical perspective. It's the whole user adoption thing that is the stumbling block.
It honestly was a bunch of guys without any idea of how to build a good, secure, scalable application trying to build one.
Pretty much this. They should never have gotten the amount of attention they did. Had they not been obligated at that point to produce something, they probably would have realized they were in way over their head early on.
I gotta give it to the guys for coming up with the idea
There have actually been several attempts at this. Obviously many have come afterwards as well. There's actually a wikipedia article listing them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
and open sourcing the protocol
They screwed this up. They didn't so much design a specification and get community buy in as just start coding and released what they had. Again, inexperience shows.
and generating the hype
This is the one thing they did right! In addition to raising a shit tonne of money, they got people not only talking about an alternative to facebook, but mainstream news was actually talking about what exactly a "distributed social network" meant and why someone might want that. What they really needed was one or two people who knew what they were doing on their team (someone who knows security and someone who knows how to develop a specification). They had a lot of energy and were very good at projecting that enthusiasm, they just didn't have the skill set to deliver.
Indeed.
I already made a fairly lengthy post about this above, but for advertising security as a killer feature, it became very clear that they had no clue what they were doing. It wasn't that they missed a few bugs, it was that their fundamental design didn't incorporate anything more complex than "check if the user is logged in before doing stuff". You can't just fix that.
Needed a bit of polish, but definitely promising. Never got the critical mass though.
Understatement! Diaspora was a complete mess.
Security was the problem everyone focused on. Good security is built in at a foundation level and a fundamental component to the entire design and implementation.
Generally when you are talking about a secure application, you have a primitive layer which does authentication and data access, and a layer on top of that which provides logic and user interface with all data access going through that first layer using some kind of authentication token. In this way, a small bug in say, the image upload script, won't let you do much because all operations through the primitive secure layer require an authentication token, which limits the scope of what those operations can do (to say, the logged in user).
Shitty security, like what diaspora had, basically does checks at the top layer (is this user logged in? good.. run this query!). The problem with this is that a small bug _anywhere_ gives you full access to _anything_, which is precisely what was happening. Sure you can patch those small bugs as you find them, but there will always be more.
In other words, it wasn't that diaspora had some security bugs or needed some polish, it was that security wasn't an integral part of the software, which can't really be fixed without a complete rewrite.
The less focused on problem was that the thing wasn't built to a specification, they just kinda started coding it. If you want to build something open and interoperable, that's not how you do it!
And then the main problem was that it had no killer feature to attract users. It did what the other two established offerings did, except without the established user base. Being full of security holes and having no api arn't really thinks most users care about, yet it still failed to gain any kind of adoption.
I honestly felt kind of sad for the team (one of whom apparently killed himself, possibly over stress of the whole thing). They were all very inexperienced, and we've all at some point said "hah, I could write a better <something> in a few weeks!" at that point in our careers. Usually we take a crack at it, realize we are in way over our heads, and it dies quietly. These guys got a shit tonne of attention, were obligated to produce something they didn't have the skills to produce, and then basically crashed and burned before us all.
How does that in any way imply they are dumb...
Effective as advertising, not effective at generating profit.
I get that there's a reason generic "targeted" advertising took over. Arranging rental of ad space on a website was a pain for both parties and a much higher bar for entry than copy+pasting some code. This combined with the ongoing death of the topic specific website ensure the days of a website owner hand picking advertisements they think their audience might go for are probably not coming back.
As far as the advertisements actually generating effect, I think the old way was way better. Companies like google are succeeding on pure scale.
No, but I haven't had all the sense of whimsy ground out of me yet.
* sitting there
There actually was a time, when sites hosted their own ads, and advertisers payed a flat rate! You'd see the same ad over and over again, sitting their in the corner.
If it was interesting or confusing, eventually you'd break down and _have_ to click it to find out what the hell they were even trying to sell. At the very least if it was interesting it stuck in your head.
I actually think this was far more effective than all this targeted advertising we've got now.
* key words are
* their
hey .. I just got up!
I have no idea, but I'm not a creative person!
I tend to lean towards the "pro version" model of funding as long as the free version isn't totally crippled and they don't start moving free functionality to the pro version. Come up with some neat but not essential extras (I'd probably pay money to be able to group contacts together and send snaps to "everyone in group 'work friends'") and there's probably plenty of people like me who's buy it.