I've heard a lot of people express the same point, but it's not something I've experienced, so I suspect it must have to do with the amount of interest in an article. I generally tend to write about fairly obscure topics, except when I'm just making spelling or grammar corrections in an article I'm reading. Perhaps topics with a lot of interest just tend to be modified more frequently, and it's not that you're being shoved out of someone else's turf, it's just that the turf in question happens to be subject to frequent change in general.
As far as the general decline in new articles, I'd say it's more than likely that every remotely obvious topic has already been covered and re-covered several times, so there will naturally be a decline unless WP is going to descend into trivia even more trivial than, say, detailed, heavily crosslinked articles on individual Pokemon. Likewise, as articles reach maturity, edits will be fewer, particularly on topics that are not subject to a great deal of change.
This would appear to be a violation of RFC 2821, which states: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification."
I love the way the OP makes this sound like a serious criminal violation. Microsoft (or you, or me) is free to violate RFC 2821 till the cows come home. Whether doing so is the best way to handle whatever problem they're trying to address is another matter, but they're not drowning puppies or breaking laws, they're violating voluntary standards, which is not exactly a newsworthy activity for Microsoft.
For the same reason that buying animals at a pet store because you feel sorry for the way they're being treated is self-defeating. If you shovel a bunch of money down the maw of the RIAA, they'll come back for more. Contrary to the popular (and petulant) belief around here, the RIAA doesn't actually care about music piracy. What they care about is making money. It just happens that music piracy stands in the way of that goal. They're just as happy to make their money by draining legal defense funds as they are by selling CDs.
If you want to fuck with the RIAA, a) write a letter to your congresscritter, perhaps along with a campaign donation, and b) don't buy RIAA products. But don't think giving a bunch of money to the RIAA is going to discourage them.
It's much more likely that Office will simply launch as a tab or iframe in IE, with no actual connection to the net besides the ability to store and retrieve documents from one of Microsoft's servers. What's being sold here, ultimately, is an MS-hosted fileserver with provisions for sharing files amongst one's coworkers.
In terms of actual document-editing capabilities, Google's office toys aren't serious competition for anyone. Their strength is in providing collaboration tools for small to medium-sized business. (Forget the enterprise.) OpenOffice actually is competition for MS Office in terms of capabilities, though it still lags way behind in collaboration tools. Until Google -- or someone else -- stops screwing around with second-rate DHTML clones of WordPad, and builds MS Office-equivalent (and interoperable) collaboration tools for OpenOffice, Microsoft has nothing to fear from Google in this area.
In the meantime, Microsoft is just fishing around for new revenue streams. The problem here isn't that Microsoft doesn't get it. They get it just fine. The problem is that neither their customer base nor their competition get it. You and I, dear reader, may be dismayed by their bullshit, but we aren't part of the target market in the first place.
Maybe it's just hard to give a shit what people say when you're a citizen of the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. If the day comes that my average purchase at a convenience store is no longer more than people in some countries make in a week, I might join you in your bizarre sense of injustice. Until then, could you pipe down with the whining? It's embarrassing.
The scary thing is that the authorities really think they've improved security when they've really just created new vulnerabilities. If you're a terrorist looking to kill a bunch of people, can you think of a better place to set off a bomb than the backlog of people waiting to pass through the metal detectors on a busy day?
Of course, in this case, we are talking about Boston, a city where the authorities flipped out over the terrible menace of Lite-Brites with cartoon characters on them.
what you're afraid of is your inability to be persuasive enough to get elected a person that, at the muncipal, county, and state level, will prohibit abusive behavior by officers (and support consequences for it).
No, what we're afraid of is that the majority of the population is okay with police brutality (or prefers to ignore it or deny its existence) as long as it doesn't happen to them or anyone they know personally. And it's not about rules of engagement. The problem is that if the police break the law, the police investigate the alleged violation of the law, and almost never is anyone convicted because, as everyone knows, cops cover for each other.
There's very good reason to be afraid of the use of such a device to stifle dissent. Having seen masked, black-clad riot police in cities like Portland act with absolute impunity because no one is individually identifiable and blame can always be shifted to out-of-county reinforcements, I see no reason to trust police who cannot be trusted with batons and pepper spray with something even more effective.
No kidding. When I was young and wild and involved in a bunch of very minor infractions of the law, I couldn't get rid of the police.
Now that I'm approaching middle-age and actually have assets worth stealing, I can't get the police to do anything. I stopped reporting break-ins a long time ago. The few minutes I spent on the phone trying to convince someone to let me file a report were better spent cleaning up the mess.
Agreed. From what I've seen and read, it was totally warranted for this guy to be arrested, but tasered? He was a nuisance, not a physical threat to anyone.
Seriously, why would you want to buy a Mac if you can have Ubuntu, apart from Adobe/Macromedia products?
And that, in a nutshell, is the issue for many of us. My dual-boot WinXP/Linux box will cease to be dual boot the day Adobe starts porting their apps to Linux. Until then, no deal. Outside of the development community and the fanboy fringe, no one buys a machine for the operating system, they buy it for the apps they can run. If you happen to be tied to certain apps, either out of necessity or by preference, a lot of your choices are already made for you.
I'm not sure that any of this is worse than several of the many ways you can die painfully on a battlefield, and definitely not worse than a lot of ways you can be maimed on a battlefield and not die.
Fuel air bombs look really impressive when they explode but they don't do a hell of a lot of damage. They mostly just char a lot of stuff and clear the area of life.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd say that anything that can "clear the area of life" counts as doing a hell of a lot of damage.
Are you suggesting that it would be okay if Windows was an excellent product? If so, I think you just illustrated the divide between the free and commercial software mindsets quite well.
I don't, incidentally, mean that as a put-down. Tastes differ. But to me, it wouldn't matter if Windows was an incomparable paragon of superb engineering and design (though I would be happy to stop providing tech support to relatives). But having been forced to deal with expensive (in both time and money) transitions, first by Apple's abandonment of the Apple II line, and then by Microsoft's shenanigans from DOS 3.3 onwards, I've come to rely on Linux for the important stuff as much as possible for the freedom it gives me to control how I want to use my computer.
All that said, after having been forced to install Vista on the new laptop I got for my daughter because there are no XP drivers for some important components, I hope Apple eats Microsoft's lunch. But I still don't think Steve Jobs ascendant will be any more pleasant to deal with than Bill Gates was.
I find it kinda amusing that either earlier today or yesterday there was an article about how Gateway got bought out for just over a dollar a share and most the comments were tashing the company's business model and how it was driven into the ground.
That's what you find amusing about Mac fanboys?
How about folks bitching about Microsoft's control of the operating system turning around and getting excited about Apple, which controls both the operating system and the hardware, as if Apple would be any less noxious if it had the kind of marketshare that Microsoft does.
That said, if someone came to me for advice about a choice between Vista and Mac, I'd recommend Mac. Vista blows that hard. Which may have as much to do with the recent spike in Apple sales as anything else.
This is not discovery - but an imposition on the way the software is to be re-written.
Nonsense. It's an order to change a configuration variable so that IP connections are logged. It doesn't require any writing or re-writing of software, just a change to a config file and a SIGHUP, or whatever the equivalent is on the presumably modern operating system that TorrentSpy runs on.
Let's not be bloody obtuse here. All this comes down to is what everyone knows: TorrentSpy's business model is based on piracy, and the brilliant minds behind that business model thought they could confuse the courts by disabling connection logging. We can argue all day about whether this is a wise move on the part of the MPAA, but there's no ambiguity about the facts that a) TorrentSpy facilitates massive piracy, and b) logging connections is trivial.
The problem isn't that the court is technically inept; it's that TorrentSpy was counting on the court being technically inept, and instead got a judge who isn't a complete drooling moron.
It's not just Islam. The press goes out of its way to avoid direct offense to the other major religions as well, often to the point of actively pandering to them. How many times in the past several years has one of the newsweeklies had a cover story on Jesus? And Jesus is news exactly how? How often do we see articles on the "debate" over evolution?
It's distantly possible that there is some actual fear of terrorism at work, but I suspect that most of the time, the guiding principle is what will best serve the real master of corporate media: Mammon.
For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability?
Possibly because you weren't looking. For all I know, they still exist, but the vendor we got one from went out of business a few years ago. They sold full-length PCI cards packed with 8GB of SDRAM -- and they had larger models -- that presented a SCSI interface to the system and, with the appropriate driver, could mirror to a magnetic drive. The cost was stratospheric, and our storage needs soon outgrew the available space. We also found that not as much of our processing was I/O-bound as we thought. Other than that, it worked great. Given enough money and a motherboard with a sufficiently large number of PCI slots, it might be the ideal solution for certain niche applications, but the cost and size constraints otherwise make them a poor substitute for magnetic drives in most cases.
That said, it was pretty cool to be able to reformat the "drive" in a few seconds.
All these analogies are pointless anyway. If the local legislature enacts a statute imposing a fine for unauthorized access to an unsecured network, and you get caught doing it, you can be fined. It doesn't matter in the least what network access is "like". Network access could be like skiing down the Swiss Alps or biting into a Peppermint Patty for all that it matters. We're not talking about a law regulating access to land being imaginatively applied to network access. We're talking about a law explicitly regulating network access.
And yes, people should secure their networks if they don't want to deal with casual intruders. But people should also stop taking advantage of the ignorance of other people, too.
"Dear commercial websites, could you please implement a system that will render yourself and your profit models irrelevant?"
It's my understanding that a crack team of programmers has been assigned to this problem. That team includes Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Great Pumpkin. Good luck and godspeed.
Are people just getting ruder, stupider, and prouder of it?
Well, yes, but I wouldn't worry too much about it in this context. I'm not a big fan of the notion that free markets can solve all kinds of problems, but one problem they can definitely solve is shitty service. Vendors who annoy their customers have a tendency to go out of business and be replaced by vendors who don't.
That said, if I guy came into my store and wanted to buy a gun and a bassoon, I'd be wary of him, too.
The legal status of auctions considerably pre-dates electricity, much less the web. I have a feeling that if you tried to argue that there was some difference between a web auction and a traditional auction in a US court, you'd get pretty much the same result this guy did.
Slashdot Mirror
I've heard a lot of people express the same point, but it's not something I've experienced, so I suspect it must have to do with the amount of interest in an article. I generally tend to write about fairly obscure topics, except when I'm just making spelling or grammar corrections in an article I'm reading. Perhaps topics with a lot of interest just tend to be modified more frequently, and it's not that you're being shoved out of someone else's turf, it's just that the turf in question happens to be subject to frequent change in general.
As far as the general decline in new articles, I'd say it's more than likely that every remotely obvious topic has already been covered and re-covered several times, so there will naturally be a decline unless WP is going to descend into trivia even more trivial than, say, detailed, heavily crosslinked articles on individual Pokemon. Likewise, as articles reach maturity, edits will be fewer, particularly on topics that are not subject to a great deal of change.
This would appear to be a violation of RFC 2821, which states: "Rejection of messages (for excessive recipients) with fewer than 100 RCPT commands is a violation of this specification."
I love the way the OP makes this sound like a serious criminal violation. Microsoft (or you, or me) is free to violate RFC 2821 till the cows come home. Whether doing so is the best way to handle whatever problem they're trying to address is another matter, but they're not drowning puppies or breaking laws, they're violating voluntary standards, which is not exactly a newsworthy activity for Microsoft.
For the same reason that buying animals at a pet store because you feel sorry for the way they're being treated is self-defeating. If you shovel a bunch of money down the maw of the RIAA, they'll come back for more. Contrary to the popular (and petulant) belief around here, the RIAA doesn't actually care about music piracy. What they care about is making money. It just happens that music piracy stands in the way of that goal. They're just as happy to make their money by draining legal defense funds as they are by selling CDs.
If you want to fuck with the RIAA, a) write a letter to your congresscritter, perhaps along with a campaign donation, and b) don't buy RIAA products. But don't think giving a bunch of money to the RIAA is going to discourage them.
It's much more likely that Office will simply launch as a tab or iframe in IE, with no actual connection to the net besides the ability to store and retrieve documents from one of Microsoft's servers. What's being sold here, ultimately, is an MS-hosted fileserver with provisions for sharing files amongst one's coworkers.
In terms of actual document-editing capabilities, Google's office toys aren't serious competition for anyone. Their strength is in providing collaboration tools for small to medium-sized business. (Forget the enterprise.) OpenOffice actually is competition for MS Office in terms of capabilities, though it still lags way behind in collaboration tools. Until Google -- or someone else -- stops screwing around with second-rate DHTML clones of WordPad, and builds MS Office-equivalent (and interoperable) collaboration tools for OpenOffice, Microsoft has nothing to fear from Google in this area.
In the meantime, Microsoft is just fishing around for new revenue streams. The problem here isn't that Microsoft doesn't get it. They get it just fine. The problem is that neither their customer base nor their competition get it. You and I, dear reader, may be dismayed by their bullshit, but we aren't part of the target market in the first place.
Maybe it's just hard to give a shit what people say when you're a citizen of the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the world. If the day comes that my average purchase at a convenience store is no longer more than people in some countries make in a week, I might join you in your bizarre sense of injustice. Until then, could you pipe down with the whining? It's embarrassing.
The scary thing is that the authorities really think they've improved security when they've really just created new vulnerabilities. If you're a terrorist looking to kill a bunch of people, can you think of a better place to set off a bomb than the backlog of people waiting to pass through the metal detectors on a busy day?
Of course, in this case, we are talking about Boston, a city where the authorities flipped out over the terrible menace of Lite-Brites with cartoon characters on them.
what you're afraid of is your inability to be persuasive enough to get elected a person that, at the muncipal, county, and state level, will prohibit abusive behavior by officers (and support consequences for it).
No, what we're afraid of is that the majority of the population is okay with police brutality (or prefers to ignore it or deny its existence) as long as it doesn't happen to them or anyone they know personally. And it's not about rules of engagement. The problem is that if the police break the law, the police investigate the alleged violation of the law, and almost never is anyone convicted because, as everyone knows, cops cover for each other.
There's very good reason to be afraid of the use of such a device to stifle dissent. Having seen masked, black-clad riot police in cities like Portland act with absolute impunity because no one is individually identifiable and blame can always be shifted to out-of-county reinforcements, I see no reason to trust police who cannot be trusted with batons and pepper spray with something even more effective.
No kidding. When I was young and wild and involved in a bunch of very minor infractions of the law, I couldn't get rid of the police.
Now that I'm approaching middle-age and actually have assets worth stealing, I can't get the police to do anything. I stopped reporting break-ins a long time ago. The few minutes I spent on the phone trying to convince someone to let me file a report were better spent cleaning up the mess.
Agreed. From what I've seen and read, it was totally warranted for this guy to be arrested, but tasered? He was a nuisance, not a physical threat to anyone.
Seriously, why would you want to buy a Mac if you can have Ubuntu, apart from Adobe/Macromedia products?
And that, in a nutshell, is the issue for many of us. My dual-boot WinXP/Linux box will cease to be dual boot the day Adobe starts porting their apps to Linux. Until then, no deal. Outside of the development community and the fanboy fringe, no one buys a machine for the operating system, they buy it for the apps they can run. If you happen to be tied to certain apps, either out of necessity or by preference, a lot of your choices are already made for you.
I'm not sure that any of this is worse than several of the many ways you can die painfully on a battlefield, and definitely not worse than a lot of ways you can be maimed on a battlefield and not die.
Fuel air bombs look really impressive when they explode but they don't do a hell of a lot of damage. They mostly just char a lot of stuff and clear the area of life.
Maybe it's just me, but I'd say that anything that can "clear the area of life" counts as doing a hell of a lot of damage.
In short, an accredited piece of paper means a lot, and not just in your field. Go for it!
This is especially true of a bachelor's degree in English, which should enable you to spell bachelor correctly.
Are you suggesting that it would be okay if Windows was an excellent product? If so, I think you just illustrated the divide between the free and commercial software mindsets quite well.
I don't, incidentally, mean that as a put-down. Tastes differ. But to me, it wouldn't matter if Windows was an incomparable paragon of superb engineering and design (though I would be happy to stop providing tech support to relatives). But having been forced to deal with expensive (in both time and money) transitions, first by Apple's abandonment of the Apple II line, and then by Microsoft's shenanigans from DOS 3.3 onwards, I've come to rely on Linux for the important stuff as much as possible for the freedom it gives me to control how I want to use my computer.
All that said, after having been forced to install Vista on the new laptop I got for my daughter because there are no XP drivers for some important components, I hope Apple eats Microsoft's lunch. But I still don't think Steve Jobs ascendant will be any more pleasant to deal with than Bill Gates was.
I find it kinda amusing that either earlier today or yesterday there was an article about how Gateway got bought out for just over a dollar a share and most the comments were tashing the company's business model and how it was driven into the ground.
That's what you find amusing about Mac fanboys?
How about folks bitching about Microsoft's control of the operating system turning around and getting excited about Apple, which controls both the operating system and the hardware, as if Apple would be any less noxious if it had the kind of marketshare that Microsoft does.
That said, if someone came to me for advice about a choice between Vista and Mac, I'd recommend Mac. Vista blows that hard. Which may have as much to do with the recent spike in Apple sales as anything else.
This is not discovery - but an imposition on the way the software is to be re-written.
Nonsense. It's an order to change a configuration variable so that IP connections are logged. It doesn't require any writing or re-writing of software, just a change to a config file and a SIGHUP, or whatever the equivalent is on the presumably modern operating system that TorrentSpy runs on.
Let's not be bloody obtuse here. All this comes down to is what everyone knows: TorrentSpy's business model is based on piracy, and the brilliant minds behind that business model thought they could confuse the courts by disabling connection logging. We can argue all day about whether this is a wise move on the part of the MPAA, but there's no ambiguity about the facts that a) TorrentSpy facilitates massive piracy, and b) logging connections is trivial.
The problem isn't that the court is technically inept; it's that TorrentSpy was counting on the court being technically inept, and instead got a judge who isn't a complete drooling moron.
It's not just Islam. The press goes out of its way to avoid direct offense to the other major religions as well, often to the point of actively pandering to them. How many times in the past several years has one of the newsweeklies had a cover story on Jesus? And Jesus is news exactly how? How often do we see articles on the "debate" over evolution?
It's distantly possible that there is some actual fear of terrorism at work, but I suspect that most of the time, the guiding principle is what will best serve the real master of corporate media: Mammon.
For that matter, how come we never saw magnetic drives with builtin RAM caches in the GB scale, occasionally written (in parallel) back to the magnetic disc for reliability?
Possibly because you weren't looking. For all I know, they still exist, but the vendor we got one from went out of business a few years ago. They sold full-length PCI cards packed with 8GB of SDRAM -- and they had larger models -- that presented a SCSI interface to the system and, with the appropriate driver, could mirror to a magnetic drive. The cost was stratospheric, and our storage needs soon outgrew the available space. We also found that not as much of our processing was I/O-bound as we thought. Other than that, it worked great. Given enough money and a motherboard with a sufficiently large number of PCI slots, it might be the ideal solution for certain niche applications, but the cost and size constraints otherwise make them a poor substitute for magnetic drives in most cases.
That said, it was pretty cool to be able to reformat the "drive" in a few seconds.
All these analogies are pointless anyway. If the local legislature enacts a statute imposing a fine for unauthorized access to an unsecured network, and you get caught doing it, you can be fined. It doesn't matter in the least what network access is "like". Network access could be like skiing down the Swiss Alps or biting into a Peppermint Patty for all that it matters. We're not talking about a law regulating access to land being imaginatively applied to network access. We're talking about a law explicitly regulating network access.
And yes, people should secure their networks if they don't want to deal with casual intruders. But people should also stop taking advantage of the ignorance of other people, too.
...3D Realms has announced that Duke Nukem Forever will require installation of quantum RAM.
"Dear commercial websites, could you please implement a system that will render yourself and your profit models irrelevant?"
It's my understanding that a crack team of programmers has been assigned to this problem. That team includes Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Great Pumpkin. Good luck and godspeed.
They're monopolies or semi-monopolies. If you don't have a free market, you don't get the benefits of competition.
Are people just getting ruder, stupider, and prouder of it?
Well, yes, but I wouldn't worry too much about it in this context. I'm not a big fan of the notion that free markets can solve all kinds of problems, but one problem they can definitely solve is shitty service. Vendors who annoy their customers have a tendency to go out of business and be replaced by vendors who don't.
That said, if I guy came into my store and wanted to buy a gun and a bassoon, I'd be wary of him, too.
The legal status of auctions considerably pre-dates electricity, much less the web. I have a feeling that if you tried to argue that there was some difference between a web auction and a traditional auction in a US court, you'd get pretty much the same result this guy did.
Since when is a severe flaw in BIND's implementation news?