The Daily Telegraph and Guido Fawkes report their websites have suddenly gone down.
Google also appears to be unable to retrieve searches for "MP's Expenses", "Iraq War Public Enquiry", "Is John Bercow the modern Incitatus?", "UK CCTV", "Metropolitan Police brutality", or "MOD data left on hard disc on train", amongst many other things...
With the internet, though, newspapers are no longer local, so all the newspapers compete on the internet with each other, and there is no real bottom to the cost.
The only real solution is for newspapers to continue to go out of business.
The first part of this quote is the clue to why the second part isn't necessarily correct. The internet does "local" really, really badly -- currently, at least.
Searching for a local service in Google, in English, will most probably give you either a large international dot.com result, or dozens and dozens of link farm sites. It's pretty hard to find the right answer. This is less true if you search in a more localized language, because the link-farmers haven't bothered gaming Google as much with that yet. But in English, you're pretty much going to have to search for a while to find anything meaningful local. Google and others have a very long way to go with improving search.
Local newspapers are useful. There's dozens of scandals and stories happening in every reasonable sized town. No-one, upon no-one is really digging into those stories. Someone should.
People will buy newspapers that actually inform them about what is going on locally. It doesn't have to be up-to-the-second relevant. A big expose of a local political scandal can wait a day or two if no-one else is carrying the story, and no-one is. People will not buy local papers that have international stories or celebutard crap in them -- they can find that anywhere and everywhere on the net. People will buy local papers that have genuine local investigative news in them. Local papers are a good place to advertise local services -- because the internet serves them badly too.
Put local news and local advertisers together and you have absolutely no competition for that model right now. People keep thinking too big. This is one case where small is strong.
Well, presumably it will only be notable video that's allowed.
And presumably also, every band on Earth will have a sample of their video on every page they can get away with, as well as every company that now successfully uses Wikipedia to astroturf their products will get a nice demo video up too.
It seems that as each month passes wikipedia becomes less and less relevant, and less reputable. Wholly because of bad administrative decisions.
The "Hawkeye Pierce" model of open source is still my favorite.
You jest perhaps... but you are on to something there!
Hawkeye disrespected petty bureaucracy, rebelled in general against closed-mindedness, thought laterally to solve problems, had fun, and always thought of the patient's need first.
That sounds exactly like the right way to run any organization!
"but many of the customizations you'd want to download for Firefox are already a part of Internet Explorer 8 right out of the box."
I think they don't get it. And to be honest Mozilla no longer does too. Customization is great. It is (well, was) the great thing about Firefox. Once you start packing a whole load of features into the basic browser you are losing all that flexibility. That's what add-ons are for, giving the user choice, while keeping the basic browser fast and effective.
I'm not using IE8 this side of Hell freezing over. However, I do appreciate upping the ante and offering competition.
Mozilla sat on their asses in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, while they stuff the basic browser full of crap in the same way they destroyed Netscape. That's the one good thing about IE8 it kicks Mozilla up the ass.
Now maybe Mozilla can start working harder on memory leaks, multi-threading, making Firefox not suck on a Mac, and getting rid of needless bloat like the Awesome bar.
It's one of the more reputable newspapers in Britain. Has a moderate left wing stance and a well educated readership.
That depends on your political perception. It is registered as supporting the Labour Party. The same Labour Party that is doing the redacting here. Their "outrage" at the censorship, may just be spin. While there's been minor criticisms of the Government in the past, they are the Government's lone supportive voice in the media (other than much of the BBC).
It's very likely that the crowd doing their sourcing, are Labour Party members, or supporters. I doubt very much anyone else reads the Guardian.
On the other hand, they've been lagging so far behind the Telegraph for years in readership, and the Telegraph has completely owned the whole expenses debacle. So it may be that they are trying to look relevant and investigative, long after the fact. A save our skins attempt to generate sales.
They are, of course, not the only news source looking at this, and it is important to have balance and all points of view in this. But trusting the Guardian solely with the truth would be very foolish indeed.
It is hard to avoid a sense of the "creeps" when you see pictures of your child(ren) used without your knowledge or permission, especially in another country.
Here we go, another parent who thinks parenting is everyone else's responsibility. You don't like pictures of your kids being used by others? Then do not publish them freely on the internet. In fact keep your damn kids off the internet and preferably out of all public sight whatsoever. Mollycoddle them at home, and have them grow up to be spoiled selfish incomplete adults.
Why is it more of an abuse to use pics of the kids than the parents? It isn't. It's only in your head. You are being hysterical.
Stop falling for Fox News and tabloid newspaper spin and pedophiles everywhere. It is simply scaremongering. This kind of nonsense didn't even exist 20 years ago, never mind 40 or 50. Your views are dangerous to society and your children, although you don't even realize it. You are the kind of person who will end up having us all live in a censored, monitored Dystopia because you are gullible enough to fall for the propaganda. That's why the propaganda exists, not to protect kids (which is your job, alone).
In this case, it's all a storm in a teacup. This family have not been harmed in any way. Why they are protesting so much is probably entirely related to greed. They'll get plenty of money from the news coverage. The photographer who took the pics also wants to promote their work. This is all about money and nothing to do with "rights" or "abuse".
I think this is a step sideways. The term "not for profit" is very misleading. In fact, most such organizations need to get their name and "issues" out there to raise funds. Hence, there's plenty of biased, scaremongering stories that comes from non-profit orgs, NGOs and charities. In fact, almost all scaremongering stories come from those very sources. Sensationalist headlines means the organizations name is out there along with a guilt trip designed to encourage people to donate to "fight" whatever issue is being trumped.
Many, if not all, Newspapers already regurgitate press releases from non-profit orgs as news. What would really help newspapers is to stop relying on press releases, and stop relying on the the A.P. or Reuters etc., and actually get out there and investigate actual news. Where are the Bob Woodwards? Those type of guys are what newspapers need. That will save them. There's plenty of stories and scandals in every national and local government, in every corporation -- things we really NEED to know about. But we're not finding out about because no-one is digging into them any more.
Blogs or Google News, or other news feeds, are the perfect places to report things from A.P. or non-profits, or entertainment P.R. Newspapers should be the sources of comment and actual investigative journalism.
So what? Dell has effective marketing people. Why is this news?
They are simply milking an overhyped communication medium, one where there are doubtless many easily influenced and gullible users -- their gullibility being the reason they are using Twitter in the first place.
Twitter made nothing from this. Twitter makes nothing at all -- other than an enormous amount of hot air. Sure, companies like Dell should ride the gravy train while it's still on the tracks, but it won't last. just like it didn't with Myspace, AOL, Facebook etc, etc, etc...
And if anything else, the more companies using Twitter to market themselves the even less cool and useful Twitter will be to the few who use it. It will die faster.
They are still bleeding more users than they retain, this kind of thing will only make it worse.
What's with the trend of calling technical info "porn"? A while ago on Wired, there was an article on "nanotech porn". It really reinforces the stereotype that tech guys are all a bunch of creepy bearded child molesters, whacking off to photoshopped images of Catherine Janeway in their mom's basement.
Not to mention the inanity of using the word "cloud". This also suggests that tech guys are a bunch of dumb, unthinking, corporate drone, buzzword-spouting jerks. Whereas, in fact, we all now that's marketing people. So the word "cloud" shouldn't be used on/. at all (along with blogosphere or any similar alpha-simian corporate-speak). Unless of course "cloud" refers to water vapour in the sky, or a spaceship called cloud, or something similar.
It's really quite simple. If you use buzzwords you are a dick, not a geek.
It's samzenpus who's editor on this. Hence stupid photograph. Samzenpus misses the Idle section evidently. He always posts pics with articles.
In this case he's actually managed to post a relevant pic, albeit not of the hand nor the meteorite. We should however be thankful he's at least in the ballpark with the image -- he's usually wildly irrelevant with his choice of images.
I think samzenpus would really like to work for Digg. I think many of us here would really like him to, too. His stories are usually bordering on idle at best. This is a rare exception, even though it is still quite a tabloid article.
I suppose the major problem with this is that it cannot tell the difference between truth and lies or urban legends, it just repeats what other people have said, even if they are conspiracy theorists. The query "Who killed JFK?" suggests the CIA did it.
I have to say I'm astonished that BT is third from the bottom. I would have expected it to be bottom. I had to help a friend recently, who had made the mistake of signing up to BT, with some bandwidth problems (other than the standard throttling from 5-midnight).
BT operates a slave plantation in India for customer support. They are the singular worst customer support I have ever encountered. They tell you absolutely anything you want to hear, lying in the process. A engineer needed to come and check the line. However it took 3 weeks of shouting at customer support to actually get someone to turn up. Every day we were promised the engineer would come the next day, they never ever showed. In the end had to make an official complaint by snailmail to get someone to turn up.
And let's not forget Phorm.
BT would be much better concentrating on fixing their massive problems with their service than talking about iPlayer. The BBC should tell BT to go fuck themselves.
While twitter has many problems, the fact that the majority of people tend to play with a new thing and then stop isn't new, or news.
Not sure that's the case. The Harvard study suggests that Twitter is different, or at least different from other flash-in-the-pan fads like MySpace, Facebook or blogging, in the it really is bleeding an enormous number of users compared to other social networking fads.
I have to say, that while I know many technoliterate people, and many who use myspace or facebook, I know no-one whatsoever that is using, or has used, Twitter. It's seems to be at least 95% hype and nothing else.
Not on a Mac it doesn't. While Fx 3.0 is far better than previous versions on a Mac, it's still pretty poor. And you can't use Fx 3.0 on older Macs at all.
Adblock and flashblock etc are coming for Chrome. I use Firefox now, but unless Fx4.0 works significantly better on a Mac, and is multi-threaded, my continued use of it is time-limited. That's entirely Mozilla's own fault. They seem to be focusing on rebuilding Firefox as the Netscape suite, rather than actually making the core browser work efficiently.
Google has, unfortunately, been very slow about developing Chrome for Mac (as they usually are for all their software, Macs users appear to be an afterthought for them). This version appears to be intel only -- I sincerely hope that this is going to change. I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.
You know, this is just tinkering. It's a way of passing the buck. It's a way of devolving blame. It MUST be the equations, or the software, or some geek or some technological prblem that caused the economics failures.
It wasn't. It isn't.
The reason why we have economic problems is the same old one from the beginning of time -- good old fashioned human greed.
Equations, and new software isn't going to change that. What you need to do is ensure that the people operating systems and processes are ethical and honest. It's really that simple, and also, unfortunately, that difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
The Daily Telegraph and Guido Fawkes report their websites have suddenly gone down.
Google also appears to be unable to retrieve searches for "MP's Expenses", "Iraq War Public Enquiry", "Is John Bercow the modern Incitatus?", "UK CCTV", "Metropolitan Police brutality", or "MOD data left on hard disc on train", amongst many other things...
While this might be cool tech, and may even work, it's using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
There absolutely has to be dozens upon dozens of more efficient, less complex, and easier to maintain ways of generating power.
Captain, ma dongle canna tak much more o' this!
The Zune still exists?
I'm genuinely not meaning to trash MS, I really thought that the Zune was a dead product. I've never actually even seen one.
The first part of this quote is the clue to why the second part isn't necessarily correct. The internet does "local" really, really badly -- currently, at least.
Searching for a local service in Google, in English, will most probably give you either a large international dot.com result, or dozens and dozens of link farm sites. It's pretty hard to find the right answer. This is less true if you search in a more localized language, because the link-farmers haven't bothered gaming Google as much with that yet. But in English, you're pretty much going to have to search for a while to find anything meaningful local. Google and others have a very long way to go with improving search.
Local newspapers are useful. There's dozens of scandals and stories happening in every reasonable sized town. No-one, upon no-one is really digging into those stories. Someone should.
People will buy newspapers that actually inform them about what is going on locally. It doesn't have to be up-to-the-second relevant. A big expose of a local political scandal can wait a day or two if no-one else is carrying the story, and no-one is. People will not buy local papers that have international stories or celebutard crap in them -- they can find that anywhere and everywhere on the net. People will buy local papers that have genuine local investigative news in them. Local papers are a good place to advertise local services -- because the internet serves them badly too.
Put local news and local advertisers together and you have absolutely no competition for that model right now. People keep thinking too big. This is one case where small is strong.
Well, yes... some people do. Not anyone who reads /. though! So the original point was pretty valid for this audience!
Well, presumably it will only be notable video that's allowed.
And presumably also, every band on Earth will have a sample of their video on every page they can get away with, as well as every company that now successfully uses Wikipedia to astroturf their products will get a nice demo video up too.
It seems that as each month passes wikipedia becomes less and less relevant, and less reputable. Wholly because of bad administrative decisions.
You jest perhaps... but you are on to something there!
Hawkeye disrespected petty bureaucracy, rebelled in general against closed-mindedness, thought laterally to solve problems, had fun, and always thought of the patient's need first.
That sounds exactly like the right way to run any organization!
I think they don't get it. And to be honest Mozilla no longer does too. Customization is great. It is (well, was) the great thing about Firefox. Once you start packing a whole load of features into the basic browser you are losing all that flexibility. That's what add-ons are for, giving the user choice, while keeping the basic browser fast and effective.
I'm not using IE8 this side of Hell freezing over. However, I do appreciate upping the ante and offering competition.
Mozilla sat on their asses in terms of efficiency and effectiveness, while they stuff the basic browser full of crap in the same way they destroyed Netscape. That's the one good thing about IE8 it kicks Mozilla up the ass.
Now maybe Mozilla can start working harder on memory leaks, multi-threading, making Firefox not suck on a Mac, and getting rid of needless bloat like the Awesome bar.
That depends on your political perception. It is registered as supporting the Labour Party. The same Labour Party that is doing the redacting here. Their "outrage" at the censorship, may just be spin. While there's been minor criticisms of the Government in the past, they are the Government's lone supportive voice in the media (other than much of the BBC).
It's very likely that the crowd doing their sourcing, are Labour Party members, or supporters. I doubt very much anyone else reads the Guardian.
On the other hand, they've been lagging so far behind the Telegraph for years in readership, and the Telegraph has completely owned the whole expenses debacle. So it may be that they are trying to look relevant and investigative, long after the fact. A save our skins attempt to generate sales.
They are, of course, not the only news source looking at this, and it is important to have balance and all points of view in this. But trusting the Guardian solely with the truth would be very foolish indeed.
... this means WAR!!!!
... who clicks ads? (other than for click fraud purposes)
Here we go, another parent who thinks parenting is everyone else's responsibility. You don't like pictures of your kids being used by others? Then do not publish them freely on the internet. In fact keep your damn kids off the internet and preferably out of all public sight whatsoever. Mollycoddle them at home, and have them grow up to be spoiled selfish incomplete adults.
Why is it more of an abuse to use pics of the kids than the parents? It isn't. It's only in your head. You are being hysterical.
Stop falling for Fox News and tabloid newspaper spin and pedophiles everywhere. It is simply scaremongering. This kind of nonsense didn't even exist 20 years ago, never mind 40 or 50. Your views are dangerous to society and your children, although you don't even realize it. You are the kind of person who will end up having us all live in a censored, monitored Dystopia because you are gullible enough to fall for the propaganda. That's why the propaganda exists, not to protect kids (which is your job, alone).
In this case, it's all a storm in a teacup. This family have not been harmed in any way. Why they are protesting so much is probably entirely related to greed. They'll get plenty of money from the news coverage. The photographer who took the pics also wants to promote their work. This is all about money and nothing to do with "rights" or "abuse".
I think this is a step sideways. The term "not for profit" is very misleading. In fact, most such organizations need to get their name and "issues" out there to raise funds. Hence, there's plenty of biased, scaremongering stories that comes from non-profit orgs, NGOs and charities. In fact, almost all scaremongering stories come from those very sources. Sensationalist headlines means the organizations name is out there along with a guilt trip designed to encourage people to donate to "fight" whatever issue is being trumped.
Many, if not all, Newspapers already regurgitate press releases from non-profit orgs as news. What would really help newspapers is to stop relying on press releases, and stop relying on the the A.P. or Reuters etc., and actually get out there and investigate actual news. Where are the Bob Woodwards? Those type of guys are what newspapers need. That will save them. There's plenty of stories and scandals in every national and local government, in every corporation -- things we really NEED to know about. But we're not finding out about because no-one is digging into them any more.
Blogs or Google News, or other news feeds, are the perfect places to report things from A.P. or non-profits, or entertainment P.R. Newspapers should be the sources of comment and actual investigative journalism.
So what? Dell has effective marketing people. Why is this news?
They are simply milking an overhyped communication medium, one where there are doubtless many easily influenced and gullible users -- their gullibility being the reason they are using Twitter in the first place.
Twitter made nothing from this. Twitter makes nothing at all -- other than an enormous amount of hot air. Sure, companies like Dell should ride the gravy train while it's still on the tracks, but it won't last. just like it didn't with Myspace, AOL, Facebook etc, etc, etc...
And if anything else, the more companies using Twitter to market themselves the even less cool and useful Twitter will be to the few who use it. It will die faster.
They are still bleeding more users than they retain, this kind of thing will only make it worse.
Not to mention the inanity of using the word "cloud". This also suggests that tech guys are a bunch of dumb, unthinking, corporate drone, buzzword-spouting jerks. Whereas, in fact, we all now that's marketing people. So the word "cloud" shouldn't be used on /. at all (along with blogosphere or any similar alpha-simian corporate-speak). Unless of course "cloud" refers to water vapour in the sky, or a spaceship called cloud, or something similar.
It's really quite simple. If you use buzzwords you are a dick, not a geek.
All hail the Coprotoad.
It's samzenpus who's editor on this. Hence stupid photograph. Samzenpus misses the Idle section evidently. He always posts pics with articles.
In this case he's actually managed to post a relevant pic, albeit not of the hand nor the meteorite. We should however be thankful he's at least in the ballpark with the image -- he's usually wildly irrelevant with his choice of images.
I think samzenpus would really like to work for Digg. I think many of us here would really like him to, too. His stories are usually bordering on idle at best. This is a rare exception, even though it is still quite a tabloid article.
So much like Wikipedia then?
I have to say I'm astonished that BT is third from the bottom. I would have expected it to be bottom. I had to help a friend recently, who had made the mistake of signing up to BT, with some bandwidth problems (other than the standard throttling from 5-midnight).
BT operates a slave plantation in India for customer support. They are the singular worst customer support I have ever encountered. They tell you absolutely anything you want to hear, lying in the process. A engineer needed to come and check the line. However it took 3 weeks of shouting at customer support to actually get someone to turn up. Every day we were promised the engineer would come the next day, they never ever showed. In the end had to make an official complaint by snailmail to get someone to turn up.
And let's not forget Phorm.
BT would be much better concentrating on fixing their massive problems with their service than talking about iPlayer. The BBC should tell BT to go fuck themselves.
Vive la France!
Not sure that's the case. The Harvard study suggests that Twitter is different, or at least different from other flash-in-the-pan fads like MySpace, Facebook or blogging, in the it really is bleeding an enormous number of users compared to other social networking fads.
I have to say, that while I know many technoliterate people, and many who use myspace or facebook, I know no-one whatsoever that is using, or has used, Twitter. It's seems to be at least 95% hype and nothing else.
Evidently the submitter voted UKIP.
Not on a Mac it doesn't. While Fx 3.0 is far better than previous versions on a Mac, it's still pretty poor. And you can't use Fx 3.0 on older Macs at all.
Adblock and flashblock etc are coming for Chrome. I use Firefox now, but unless Fx4.0 works significantly better on a Mac, and is multi-threaded, my continued use of it is time-limited. That's entirely Mozilla's own fault. They seem to be focusing on rebuilding Firefox as the Netscape suite, rather than actually making the core browser work efficiently.
Google has, unfortunately, been very slow about developing Chrome for Mac (as they usually are for all their software, Macs users appear to be an afterthought for them). This version appears to be intel only -- I sincerely hope that this is going to change. I have an old G3 running 10.3 that looks great and works well for surfing and playing music. I'd absolutely love to get Fx 2.0 off it, and use a browser that works effectively.
You know, this is just tinkering. It's a way of passing the buck. It's a way of devolving blame. It MUST be the equations, or the software, or some geek or some technological prblem that caused the economics failures.
It wasn't. It isn't.
The reason why we have economic problems is the same old one from the beginning of time -- good old fashioned human greed.
Equations, and new software isn't going to change that. What you need to do is ensure that the people operating systems and processes are ethical and honest. It's really that simple, and also, unfortunately, that difficult.