I wouldn't characterise "ethics" as "pseudo-religious political correctness".
That's okay. I wouldn't characterize only choosing to do business with inferior tools when superior tools are widely available because the inferior tools conform to some arbitrary standard of ideological acceptability "ethics."
I wouldn't call GNU a bad thing, nor the FSF, the EFF or anything of that kind.
Oh, gosh, I would. Gnu has done more to set back the cause of software collaboration than any other single group. Their maniacal crusade against anybody with the slightest interest in profiting from the sale of computer software has completely turned the world off to the idea of public-domain software. The FSF is nearly as bad, and everybody knows that the EFF is just a political front-group for radical leftists who want to affect a fundamental change in the way our society works.
Each of those things is very bad indeed. All the more so because they have apparently fooled people like yourself into thinking that they're not bad at all. Which is very, very sad.
Because there is no point in listing any databases that are not open source, for an open source project.
Uh... why? Is it some kind of pseudo-religious, political correctness thing for you? Does the idea of using the right tool for the job not carry any weight?
Those you mention are very respectable of course, in their own world.
I agree, except that "their own world" is "Earth."
I don't think it's fair to compare a site like Wikipedia to a bank. With a bank, it's vital that transactions complete and that they not be lost somewhere due to a computer glitch. Wikipedia is, for all intents and purposes, a hobby site. If the whole thing were to vanish tomorrow, nobody would miss it.
Of course, you're right on about not making a donation. If you want your money to go to a good use, make sure you vet who it is you're donating it to in advance. Do you really want to donate it to what basically amounts to some guy's personal home page gone way out of control?
One that complies with building and safety codes, for starters. In every jurisdiction with which I'm familiar -- admittedly not even close to all of them-- it's actually against the law to have a battery unit inside a data center cage. It's a violation of the safety code. When fire and rescue personnel go into a commercial building, they have to be sure that the power is really off. If there's a battery lying around somewhere, shorting to ground through a desk or door frame for instance, it can cause big problems.
Ask around. I bet you'll find that your data center explicitly forbids customer-installed battery units.
Fantastic post. So many comments around here attempt to be funny but are just dumb repetitions of in-jokes that were stupid the first time they were told. Your comment is literate and hilarious. Thanks for posting it.
I have a hard time assigning real value to Jane Doe's, "I had such a crappy day cause Bobby doesn't like me" posts.
They are tremendously valuable to Jane's friends and family, and to anybody who enjoys the voyeuristic rush of reading somebody else's diary. Of course, Jane's online diary becomes massively important to the whole world as soon as she posts, "I had such a crappy day because Bobby doesn't like me, and holy cow look at that giant tsunami!"
The whole point of blogs is that they comprise a vast, interconnected web... a world-wide web, if you will. The fact that the information on an individual blog isn't important to you doesn't mean it's not important to anybody else. Nor does it mean that it won't become important to you tomorrow.
Anything that allows more people to share more information is a good thing, yes?
I'm just saying the bar has been lowered (yet again) for the expertise necessary to create content on the web. I should say, I don't suppose that's really a BAD thing.
And yet you do an admirable job of making it sound like you think it's a bad thing.
As for tsunami stuff, I guess we'd have to see how many people would have seen those videos without visiting Bob's Blog. I seem to remember alot of home video on TV alone, right after it happened.
Heh. Where do you think the TV networks got the video?
at least one AP journalist says that they saw gannon wearing apress pass that said gannon
Except Gannon never held a press pass. Instead, he was given a series of day, or "A", passes, none of which have anybody's name on them. Your "at least one AP journalist" is either misremembering, or lying.
According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true.
Kay. Because you're uninformed about how the process works, you jump to the conclusion that the only way Gannon got into the room is through shenanigans. Do you realize how absurd that is, or are you operating under ignorance? Has the thought, "Gee, I'm uninformed, maybe I need to learn more before jumping to a conclusion" ever rocketed through your vast and empty mind?
I knew you would accuse me of gay bashing. I only pointed this out to show Jeff's obvious lack of journalistic experience
Then why didn't you say, "He lacks journalistic experience?" Then we could have talked about the fact that there's no minimum requirement for years spent in the business or number of credit hours passed. Instead, you hopped up and down on the "he's gay!" button, which is among the lowest things a person can do.
Also, prostitution gay or straight is illegal and, in my opinion, highly immoral.
I agree with you, 100%. However, we don't disqualify people from reporting the news because of what they do in their personal lives, even if what they choose to do is felonious.
Concerning Helen Thomas -- I guess thats what they call good journalist nowadays, abusive.
I think that kind of proves my point. Your contention is that the only people who should be allowed to report the news are those who are politically opposed to George W. Bush. You remind me of those liberal activists last week who called on Brit Hume to resign because he wasn't being enough of a liberal activist himself.
Guess what, friend? Everybody gets to report the news. Even those with whom you disagree. The attempt by a few anti-conservatives to discredit a journalist with whom they disagreed by digging up dirt on his past was shameful, and your full-throated endorsement of that attempt is just as shameful.
Of course I can understand how a former gay whore can be confused about that last point.
Tell me again how you're not slamming Gannon because he's a fag.
Publishing under a pseudonim means exactly that -- publishing under a pseudonim, not providing a pseudonim instead of your real name in real life situations.
Um. I don't think you really have the foggiest idea what you're talking about here. He was identified on C-SPAN by his pen name because that's the professional name he uses. Just like how Mara Liasson uses her maiden name instead of her married name, because that's the name under which she works.
Gannon's day pass was under his legal name, not his pen name.
And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse.
Not so. All you have to do is get your name on the list. (And it's two words: "White House.")
And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores
Ah, yes. Now we're getting down to brass tacks. Now we're getting down to the meat of your argument. Gannon didn't belong in the White House press room because he's a fag. Right? That's your point, isn't it?
And from the reporters that are allowed at the white house there are many experienced reporters that are not allowed to ask the president questions (including helen thomas who has been reporting at the white house for 40 years and was recently sent to the back row and ignored by bush).
First of all, you do know that you're talking about Helen Thomas, here, right? By far the most abusive reporter to ever set foot in the briefing room. Second, she's no longer even in the press room. She quit covering the White House and became a columnist.
Second, during a press conference, every reporter in the gallery gets to ask one or two questions. (It's usually one; sometimes the President bends the rules to make it two.) You go in seating order from back to front and left to right.
So basically, everything you said here was wrong. Try reading the article I gave you instead of getting all your news from gay-bashing liberals (how's that for a contradiction in terms) who are motivated solely by their hatred for the President.
He didn't use a fake name. He gave his real name, and published under a pen name. Just like lots of reporters do. And yes, any reporter who asks can get into the White House and ask the President questions at press conferences. That's called having a free press.
(Point of order: the events where the President stands up and takes questions are not briefings. They're press conferences. The President doesn't participate in the regular press briefings.)
Go read this. Unless, you know, you just don't give a damn about primary sources.
No, I dare say you're the one who missed the point. You need to drop this "you're all sheep, I'm better than you" attitude and recognize that everybody has something to contribute. You need to realize that other people are just as thoughtful, just as insightful, just as worthy of being heard as your own precious self.
You're an arrogant son of a bitch, and unfortunately, with all your "Oh, you missed my point" chatter, I see no sign that that's going to change.
Actually "blogs" just post links to other content.
You don't read many blogs, do you? Blogs haven't been about posting lists of links for a couple of years now. There are still list-of-link sites out there like Fark and MetaFilter and Memepool, but these sites are not blogs. Blogs have evolved.
The rebulican party has been paying bloggers big bucks for some time now. "Grassroots" propaganda. Dig deep into the "Jeff Gannon" story for more details.
Yes, please. Dig deep into the Gannon story. Because when you do, you'll find that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Republican party, or with bloggers, or with anybody paying anybody for anything.
I wouldn't have bothered to reply but for the fact that some Slashdot moderator with more points than sense felt the need to call this completely false post "interesting." Is "interesting" a code word for "big fucking lie" these days?
You're a fucking elitist asshole, and what's more, you're completely wrong.
Everybody has opinions. Having an opinion is one of the easiest things in the world to do. Go try and find one of these "sheep" you oh-so-smugly talk about. Go try and find somebody without an opinion. You can't. They don't exist. Everybody has opinions.
Are most people motivated enough to go to a lot of trouble to express their opinions? No, they've got better things to do with their time. But that's where outfits like Six Apart come in. By making blogging easy and cheap, they've lowered the activation energy of the reaction. Blogging is no more difficult than sending an e-mail now. (In fact, many blogging services offer an e-mail interface. They call it "moblogging," for "mobile blogging.")
What does this mean? It means we've got a world full of people with opinions. Of those people, some fraction have access to a computer and a few dollars a month to spend. These people are blogging. They're blogging by the millions.
There's a blog, I can't remember the name now, run by a Christian missionary woman in Kiev. She used to write about her missionary work, the friends she was making, what life was like in the Ukraine. It was basically a letter to her friends and family, delivered in blog form.
Then, one day, the people of the Ukraine had an election, and it didn't go well. The people took to the streets, dressed in orange, to demand a fair election. They were lining up and camping out by the thousands... right outside this missionary's window.
She took some pictures. She talked to some people and wrote down what they said. During a week when the Western press were running hundred-word blurbs about the Ukraine on the back page of the world section, this woman was providing in-depth, on-the-spot coverage of one of the biggest stories of 2004.
Was she one of the "sheep" that you speak of so dismissively? Or was she one of the "free thinkers" you seem to like so much? Neither! She was just a woman with a camera and a desire to tell her friends what was going on in her life. That she happened to be an eye witness to one of the most important events of this young century was just a coincidence.
People like you piss me off, frankly. You're oh-so-smug, oh-so-convinced that only you are enlightened and everybody else is a "sheep." The truth is, you're either completely ignorant of or deliberately choosing to ignore the things that are happened around you that put the lie to your "us and them" dichotomy.
Everything you said here is true, but it's wrong to think of blogs as replacing mass media. There's still a big place for mass media. Blogs provide an adjunct, picking up and disseminating stories that otherwise don't get covered, picking apart unfair coverage of stories (or utterly made up stories), and providing a network by which ordinary Joes can share their opinions about stuff. But the mass media isn't going to go away because of blogs. It's going to have to change its model a bit, become more accountable and responsive, but it's not going to go away.
the main product is something that is already available for free.
It's not free. Yes, you can sign up for something like a Blogspot account for free, but your site is going to be hard to use and difficult to customize. The point here isn't that the services are available for free; the point is that they're cheap -- practically anybody can afford $5 a month. And for only a little more than that, you can have your own dedicated server at a data center like Hosting Matters. It's incredibly easy to make $5 a month in ads and tips, and apparently it's even becoming the norm to sell content through a micropayment system.
All I came up with is, for every 4,000,000 blogs published, 1 is made by someone with something important and meaningful to say.
That's not actually how it's turning out, though. See, out of the 7 million blogs out there, there might be only 10 that are even remotely interesting to you. Somebody else has his own 10. And somebody else has his 10. The net result is that every blog has an audience.
Ed Driscoll had an article on Tech Central Station about this a few weeks back. He talked about the fact that the vast majority of blogs operate in a high-trust environment. A blog is read by the author's friends and family, his co-workers, people in his town, people who share his interests. A blogger who's really good will pick up some audience on merit, but generally his audience is gonna be limited to people who know him, either personally or professionally, directly or indirectly. A big blog might only have an audience of a few thousand people a day, but every one of those few thousand people trusts the blog's author.
See, you're thinking of a blog that's only of interest to a few hundred people as a waste of space. That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you need to look at it as a six-degrees-of-separation type thing. Consider the Eason Jordan story from last month. I know about that because I read about it on a blog written by a woman I work with; she heard the story from another blogger she collaborates with; she heard it from a Congressman, who was there.
Compare and contrast to the old model of news distribution where a reporter writes a story which may or may not be true, and that story gets distributed by a wire service that you may or may not trust, to end up in a newspaper you may or may not read.
Think about the tsunami videos. Within hours after the Indonesian quake, home videos were available on the Internet, passed from hand to hand from the people who shot them to bloggers who shared them with friends. Within a day, the whole world had seen them. It was a classic "tell two people" expansion.
Blogs with small audiences are not failures. They're part of the web. See?
I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read.
All of them. Technorati has a system whereby blogs that aren't updated regularly are dropped from their index. I don't know how regular you have to be to meet the threshold; I think it's something like once a week, or once every four days, or something like that.
What makes a blog a blog is that there is one central voice
A great many blogs have more than one author. So that's not it.
No, if anything separates Slashdot from blogs, it's that blogs usually have original content on them. Slashdot just reprints anything that anybody submits, basically without discrimination.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Slashdot isn't a blog. It just means that, if you judge Slashdot by the standards of blogs, Slashdot is a really bad blog.
they're already paying him for his time, so the entire time it takes him to get it working on x86 is time that they're already paying him. that = $0 to 'the people upstairs'.
The phrase you're looking for here is "opportunity cost." The fact that you're being paid for your time isn't a license to do things the hard way. An IT professional is expected to pursue the right solution to technological problems.
making management change their mind is very often impossible.
This is a narrow-minded and obtuse approach if I ever saw one.
at my company there is no way linux will be in widespread use on servers in less than a decade, and no amount of pushing will make it happen any sooner.
Sounds like your management team has more good sense than you give them credit for.
help him with the problem he asked about.
Sometimes the best way to help somebody solve a problem is to point out that they don't have to solve the problem at all.
Because 'the people upstairs' who make purchasing decisions are dead-set on x86 hardware in the server room.
They are wrong. Explain this to them. That's part of your job.
Also, there's perfectly good x86 hardware in there now, I'd rather use itr than pay Apple for new metal.
Given that this "perfectly good x86 hardware" is absolutely incapable of doing what you want it to do without a massive investment of time and effort, it seems obvious to me that it's not "perfectly good" at all, is it?
Run the numbers. You will find that buying an Xserve will cost you much less than trying to make your jury-rigged solution work.
Slashdot Mirror
to caricature it as...
You didn't finish your sentence.
Any so-called worldview you're working with here would condone Mengele in the same sentence as DB2
What?
I wouldn't characterise "ethics" as "pseudo-religious political correctness".
That's okay. I wouldn't characterize only choosing to do business with inferior tools when superior tools are widely available because the inferior tools conform to some arbitrary standard of ideological acceptability "ethics."
I wouldn't call GNU a bad thing, nor the FSF, the EFF or anything of that kind.
Oh, gosh, I would. Gnu has done more to set back the cause of software collaboration than any other single group. Their maniacal crusade against anybody with the slightest interest in profiting from the sale of computer software has completely turned the world off to the idea of public-domain software. The FSF is nearly as bad, and everybody knows that the EFF is just a political front-group for radical leftists who want to affect a fundamental change in the way our society works.
Each of those things is very bad indeed. All the more so because they have apparently fooled people like yourself into thinking that they're not bad at all. Which is very, very sad.
Hm. I guess it is some kind of pseudo-religious political correctness thing.
That's a shame. Whenever ideology gets in the way of technology, bad things result.
Because there is no point in listing any databases that are not open source, for an open source project.
... why? Is it some kind of pseudo-religious, political correctness thing for you? Does the idea of using the right tool for the job not carry any weight?
Uh
Those you mention are very respectable of course, in their own world.
I agree, except that "their own world" is "Earth."
I don't think it's fair to compare a site like Wikipedia to a bank. With a bank, it's vital that transactions complete and that they not be lost somewhere due to a computer glitch. Wikipedia is, for all intents and purposes, a hobby site. If the whole thing were to vanish tomorrow, nobody would miss it.
Of course, you're right on about not making a donation. If you want your money to go to a good use, make sure you vet who it is you're donating it to in advance. Do you really want to donate it to what basically amounts to some guy's personal home page gone way out of control?
What constitutes a "real" datacenter.
One that complies with building and safety codes, for starters. In every jurisdiction with which I'm familiar -- admittedly not even close to all of them-- it's actually against the law to have a battery unit inside a data center cage. It's a violation of the safety code. When fire and rescue personnel go into a commercial building, they have to be sure that the power is really off. If there's a battery lying around somewhere, shorting to ground through a desk or door frame for instance, it can cause big problems.
Ask around. I bet you'll find that your data center explicitly forbids customer-installed battery units.
Oracle, DB2 and Sybase of course all pass the test. I'm unclear on why you would omit those. (I'm a Sybase fan, myself.)
Fantastic post. So many comments around here attempt to be funny but are just dumb repetitions of in-jokes that were stupid the first time they were told. Your comment is literate and hilarious. Thanks for posting it.
I have a hard time assigning real value to Jane Doe's, "I had such a crappy day cause Bobby doesn't like me" posts.
... a world-wide web, if you will. The fact that the information on an individual blog isn't important to you doesn't mean it's not important to anybody else. Nor does it mean that it won't become important to you tomorrow.
They are tremendously valuable to Jane's friends and family, and to anybody who enjoys the voyeuristic rush of reading somebody else's diary. Of course, Jane's online diary becomes massively important to the whole world as soon as she posts, "I had such a crappy day because Bobby doesn't like me, and holy cow look at that giant tsunami!"
The whole point of blogs is that they comprise a vast, interconnected web
Anything that allows more people to share more information is a good thing, yes?
I'm just saying the bar has been lowered (yet again) for the expertise necessary to create content on the web. I should say, I don't suppose that's really a BAD thing.
And yet you do an admirable job of making it sound like you think it's a bad thing.
As for tsunami stuff, I guess we'd have to see how many people would have seen those videos without visiting Bob's Blog. I seem to remember alot of home video on TV alone, right after it happened.
Heh. Where do you think the TV networks got the video?
at least one AP journalist says that they saw gannon wearing apress pass that said gannon
Except Gannon never held a press pass. Instead, he was given a series of day, or "A", passes, none of which have anybody's name on them. Your "at least one AP journalist" is either misremembering, or lying.
According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true.
Kay. Because you're uninformed about how the process works, you jump to the conclusion that the only way Gannon got into the room is through shenanigans. Do you realize how absurd that is, or are you operating under ignorance? Has the thought, "Gee, I'm uninformed, maybe I need to learn more before jumping to a conclusion" ever rocketed through your vast and empty mind?
I knew you would accuse me of gay bashing. I only pointed this out to show Jeff's obvious lack of journalistic experience
Then why didn't you say, "He lacks journalistic experience?" Then we could have talked about the fact that there's no minimum requirement for years spent in the business or number of credit hours passed. Instead, you hopped up and down on the "he's gay!" button, which is among the lowest things a person can do.
Also, prostitution gay or straight is illegal and, in my opinion, highly immoral.
I agree with you, 100%. However, we don't disqualify people from reporting the news because of what they do in their personal lives, even if what they choose to do is felonious.
Concerning Helen Thomas -- I guess thats what they call good journalist nowadays, abusive.
I think that kind of proves my point. Your contention is that the only people who should be allowed to report the news are those who are politically opposed to George W. Bush. You remind me of those liberal activists last week who called on Brit Hume to resign because he wasn't being enough of a liberal activist himself.
Guess what, friend? Everybody gets to report the news. Even those with whom you disagree. The attempt by a few anti-conservatives to discredit a journalist with whom they disagreed by digging up dirt on his past was shameful, and your full-throated endorsement of that attempt is just as shameful.
Of course I can understand how a former gay whore can be confused about that last point.
Tell me again how you're not slamming Gannon because he's a fag.
Publishing under a pseudonim means exactly that -- publishing under a pseudonim, not providing a pseudonim instead of your real name in real life situations.
Um. I don't think you really have the foggiest idea what you're talking about here. He was identified on C-SPAN by his pen name because that's the professional name he uses. Just like how Mara Liasson uses her maiden name instead of her married name, because that's the name under which she works.
Gannon's day pass was under his legal name, not his pen name.
And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse.
Not so. All you have to do is get your name on the list. (And it's two words: "White House.")
And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores
Ah, yes. Now we're getting down to brass tacks. Now we're getting down to the meat of your argument. Gannon didn't belong in the White House press room because he's a fag. Right? That's your point, isn't it?
And from the reporters that are allowed at the white house there are many experienced reporters that are not allowed to ask the president questions (including helen thomas who has been reporting at the white house for 40 years and was recently sent to the back row and ignored by bush).
First of all, you do know that you're talking about Helen Thomas, here, right? By far the most abusive reporter to ever set foot in the briefing room. Second, she's no longer even in the press room. She quit covering the White House and became a columnist.
Second, during a press conference, every reporter in the gallery gets to ask one or two questions. (It's usually one; sometimes the President bends the rules to make it two.) You go in seating order from back to front and left to right.
So basically, everything you said here was wrong. Try reading the article I gave you instead of getting all your news from gay-bashing liberals (how's that for a contradiction in terms) who are motivated solely by their hatred for the President.
He didn't use a fake name. He gave his real name, and published under a pen name. Just like lots of reporters do. And yes, any reporter who asks can get into the White House and ask the President questions at press conferences. That's called having a free press.
(Point of order: the events where the President stands up and takes questions are not briefings. They're press conferences. The President doesn't participate in the regular press briefings.)
Go read this. Unless, you know, you just don't give a damn about primary sources.
No, I dare say you're the one who missed the point. You need to drop this "you're all sheep, I'm better than you" attitude and recognize that everybody has something to contribute. You need to realize that other people are just as thoughtful, just as insightful, just as worthy of being heard as your own precious self.
You're an arrogant son of a bitch, and unfortunately, with all your "Oh, you missed my point" chatter, I see no sign that that's going to change.
Who claimed that we don't have opinions?
You, with all your yabber-yabber about how people don't think for themselves. Wanna back off that position, Sparky?
That was my original claim. You have not refuted it.
Oh, great. Yet another kid who thinks he's on his high-school debate team. Well, that goes with the smugness and the sense of superiority.
Actually "blogs" just post links to other content.
You don't read many blogs, do you? Blogs haven't been about posting lists of links for a couple of years now. There are still list-of-link sites out there like Fark and MetaFilter and Memepool, but these sites are not blogs. Blogs have evolved.
The rebulican party has been paying bloggers big bucks for some time now. "Grassroots" propaganda. Dig deep into the "Jeff Gannon" story for more details.
Yes, please. Dig deep into the Gannon story. Because when you do, you'll find that it has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the Republican party, or with bloggers, or with anybody paying anybody for anything.
I wouldn't have bothered to reply but for the fact that some Slashdot moderator with more points than sense felt the need to call this completely false post "interesting." Is "interesting" a code word for "big fucking lie" these days?
You're a fucking elitist asshole, and what's more, you're completely wrong.
... right outside this missionary's window.
Everybody has opinions. Having an opinion is one of the easiest things in the world to do. Go try and find one of these "sheep" you oh-so-smugly talk about. Go try and find somebody without an opinion. You can't. They don't exist. Everybody has opinions.
Are most people motivated enough to go to a lot of trouble to express their opinions? No, they've got better things to do with their time. But that's where outfits like Six Apart come in. By making blogging easy and cheap, they've lowered the activation energy of the reaction. Blogging is no more difficult than sending an e-mail now. (In fact, many blogging services offer an e-mail interface. They call it "moblogging," for "mobile blogging.")
What does this mean? It means we've got a world full of people with opinions. Of those people, some fraction have access to a computer and a few dollars a month to spend. These people are blogging. They're blogging by the millions.
There's a blog, I can't remember the name now, run by a Christian missionary woman in Kiev. She used to write about her missionary work, the friends she was making, what life was like in the Ukraine. It was basically a letter to her friends and family, delivered in blog form.
Then, one day, the people of the Ukraine had an election, and it didn't go well. The people took to the streets, dressed in orange, to demand a fair election. They were lining up and camping out by the thousands
She took some pictures. She talked to some people and wrote down what they said. During a week when the Western press were running hundred-word blurbs about the Ukraine on the back page of the world section, this woman was providing in-depth, on-the-spot coverage of one of the biggest stories of 2004.
Was she one of the "sheep" that you speak of so dismissively? Or was she one of the "free thinkers" you seem to like so much? Neither! She was just a woman with a camera and a desire to tell her friends what was going on in her life. That she happened to be an eye witness to one of the most important events of this young century was just a coincidence.
People like you piss me off, frankly. You're oh-so-smug, oh-so-convinced that only you are enlightened and everybody else is a "sheep." The truth is, you're either completely ignorant of or deliberately choosing to ignore the things that are happened around you that put the lie to your "us and them" dichotomy.
Everything you said here is true, but it's wrong to think of blogs as replacing mass media. There's still a big place for mass media. Blogs provide an adjunct, picking up and disseminating stories that otherwise don't get covered, picking apart unfair coverage of stories (or utterly made up stories), and providing a network by which ordinary Joes can share their opinions about stuff. But the mass media isn't going to go away because of blogs. It's going to have to change its model a bit, become more accountable and responsive, but it's not going to go away.
the main product is something that is already available for free.
It's not free. Yes, you can sign up for something like a Blogspot account for free, but your site is going to be hard to use and difficult to customize. The point here isn't that the services are available for free; the point is that they're cheap -- practically anybody can afford $5 a month. And for only a little more than that, you can have your own dedicated server at a data center like Hosting Matters. It's incredibly easy to make $5 a month in ads and tips, and apparently it's even becoming the norm to sell content through a micropayment system.
All I came up with is, for every 4,000,000 blogs published, 1 is made by someone with something important and meaningful to say.
That's not actually how it's turning out, though. See, out of the 7 million blogs out there, there might be only 10 that are even remotely interesting to you. Somebody else has his own 10. And somebody else has his 10. The net result is that every blog has an audience.
Ed Driscoll had an article on Tech Central Station about this a few weeks back. He talked about the fact that the vast majority of blogs operate in a high-trust environment. A blog is read by the author's friends and family, his co-workers, people in his town, people who share his interests. A blogger who's really good will pick up some audience on merit, but generally his audience is gonna be limited to people who know him, either personally or professionally, directly or indirectly. A big blog might only have an audience of a few thousand people a day, but every one of those few thousand people trusts the blog's author.
See, you're thinking of a blog that's only of interest to a few hundred people as a waste of space. That's the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you need to look at it as a six-degrees-of-separation type thing. Consider the Eason Jordan story from last month. I know about that because I read about it on a blog written by a woman I work with; she heard the story from another blogger she collaborates with; she heard it from a Congressman, who was there.
Compare and contrast to the old model of news distribution where a reporter writes a story which may or may not be true, and that story gets distributed by a wire service that you may or may not trust, to end up in a newspaper you may or may not read.
Think about the tsunami videos. Within hours after the Indonesian quake, home videos were available on the Internet, passed from hand to hand from the people who shot them to bloggers who shared them with friends. Within a day, the whole world had seen them. It was a classic "tell two people" expansion.
Blogs with small audiences are not failures. They're part of the web. See?
I wonder what fraction are regularly updated and read.
All of them. Technorati has a system whereby blogs that aren't updated regularly are dropped from their index. I don't know how regular you have to be to meet the threshold; I think it's something like once a week, or once every four days, or something like that.
What makes a blog a blog is that there is one central voice
A great many blogs have more than one author. So that's not it.
No, if anything separates Slashdot from blogs, it's that blogs usually have original content on them. Slashdot just reprints anything that anybody submits, basically without discrimination.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Slashdot isn't a blog. It just means that, if you judge Slashdot by the standards of blogs, Slashdot is a really bad blog.
Actually, you're a little behind the curve. Here's an example of a blogger who's selling his content on the honor system. He says he just started this week, so I'm anxious to hear how it goes over.
they're already paying him for his time, so the entire time it takes him to get it working on x86 is time that they're already paying him. that = $0 to 'the people upstairs'.
The phrase you're looking for here is "opportunity cost." The fact that you're being paid for your time isn't a license to do things the hard way. An IT professional is expected to pursue the right solution to technological problems.
making management change their mind is very often impossible.
This is a narrow-minded and obtuse approach if I ever saw one.
at my company there is no way linux will be in widespread use on servers in less than a decade, and no amount of pushing will make it happen any sooner.
Sounds like your management team has more good sense than you give them credit for.
help him with the problem he asked about.
Sometimes the best way to help somebody solve a problem is to point out that they don't have to solve the problem at all.
Because 'the people upstairs' who make purchasing decisions are dead-set on x86 hardware in the server room.
They are wrong. Explain this to them. That's part of your job.
Also, there's perfectly good x86 hardware in there now, I'd rather use itr than pay Apple for new metal.
Given that this "perfectly good x86 hardware" is absolutely incapable of doing what you want it to do without a massive investment of time and effort, it seems obvious to me that it's not "perfectly good" at all, is it?
Run the numbers. You will find that buying an Xserve will cost you much less than trying to make your jury-rigged solution work.