Listen- I like firefox. I'm using it right now. I use it in preference over IE. I lobby for it on my financial web sites.
But the numbers are bogus.
Every patch generates a ton of new downloads. I download it once and install it on multiple computers. But it patches from each new computer as a new download.
What's important is market share- not some wierd counter of downloads.
There was a talking song that was pretty cool back in the late 90's. It started by saying "the long term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists unlike the rest of my advice which I will dispense with now". I think the artist was Boz Lurman or something like that.
Anyway- that was my tag line ("The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists") but unfortunately, a recent study showed that while sunscreen protects you from sunburns, it looks like it does not protect you from skin cancer.
Shouldn't it be cheaper in cities where the people are dense? Shouldn't I be able to get a true high speed fiber line inexpensively when I'm a block from a national trunk?
Yet you can't. Cost is the same whether you are 60 miles out of the city center or next door to the switching station.
Why isn't it cheaper in NY and MA. I mean 25 million people in a tiny area has to be comparable population density to Japan and Korea.
I think monopolies were formed when it was expensive and incentives were needed but now that it is much less expensive the monopolies should go the way of the buggy whip.
What he is saying is that when you go to Openoffice.org there should be a link on the home page that says "WINDOWS USERS- CLICK HERE TO INSTALL OPENOFFICE!"
I agree- it is a bit too many steps to locate and install openoffice. I would never ask my mom to try to install it.
Many windows users need hand-holding. Microsoft gives them hand holding. Opensource doesn't even teach them to fish- it just puts a fishingline, pole and bait on the boat and expects them to go from there. The biggest thing holding opensource back is userinterface/friendliness/hand holding. Opensource people are usually so technical that when they try to make it simple- it's still complicated.
It's okay for me- but if openoffice was easy to use and install on windows and mac, it would be eating office alive even more than it is now.
OO2.0 looks great btw. -- OO my official wp since about 1.9 build 64.
And I looked up the original interview and it mostly supports your argument.
O'Reilly lost it a bit because he felt Glick was siding with the people who killed Glick's Dad. Do I find it a bit disappointing? Sure.
However, I watch O'Reilly a few times a month- catch him on the radio a couple days a month- and you know what? Prior to this quote, based on the 40-50 times I've heard him talking (perhaps 100 hours total over the last couple years) he seems reasonable, decent, and honest. I'm much more liberal than he is socially- tho about as conservative as he is fiscally. I do not agree with everything he says.
I'll forgive him a slip- but agree that he should have handled Glick a little better.
Finally, to me, the transcript showed that Glick was being pretty rude as well- talking over O'Reilly instead of talking with him. Pretty rude- but also silly since as O'Reilly showed, he controlled the mike and you can't just rant on overhim. That would irritate me too.
I use it for simple and very complex word documents. The largest is about 250 pages long with many tables, lots of artwork and over 10 megabytes in size (7 megabytes when saved with word 6.0 or openoffice but 10 meg when saved by office XP- why the extra 3 megabytes???)
I use it for simple presentations (but animation and sound).
I use it for spreadsheets.
Everything works as long as I don't use microsoft visual basic to make "smart" forms.
I even use openoffice once to open OLD word documents and save them in new Word formats and to "fix" broken word documents that have become corrupted and crash Word.
O'Reilly is an old style conservative with a catholic issue bias set.
I like him because he's not mealy mouth and he's reasonable when he disagrees with people. I disagree with him on a few issues but at least he's CIVIL like people used to be 30-40 years ago.
Yea. Rather certainly had Bush nailed with those national guard records. You know- the ones where the bloggers were first to show they were probably fakes. The ones where CBS ignored their own warnings and published anyway?
If you build a chair, are you a furniture maker? If you put a board over a stream, are you a civil engineer? If you type a few pages that no one will publish, are you a writer? If you are a drop of rain, are you a storm?
We usually gain status and credibility in life through sustained effort.
Part of the reason we trust your embarrassing news about the mayor is that you have credibility.
Should people revealing stories about the mayor's sex life to any random person who comes up to them and claims to be a journalist expect protection?
If people reveal confidential information, are they protected if you publish the information for the public to read instead of keeping it private?
---
An interesting question would be: If the National Enquirer (with no real credibility) were to leak government secrets- would they qualify as journalists to get the protection for themselves and their sources?
--- What are we trying to accomplish here? One major thing that we are trying to prevent is government secrecy from hiding corruption. So perhaps sources should only be protected if illegal activity and corruption is revealed through their leak.
I think some bloggers should qualify. I think time should be a factor. I think the number of articles you publish should be a factor. I think that your publication is always available to read by the public should be a factor.
---- So I would call person who regularly writes articles for public consumption and who has been doing so for at least a few months a journalist.
I would also say that anyone who started to write for an organization composed of qualified journalists could gain that status faster.
A major fallacy is that users know what they want at the start of development.
With iterative development and short cycles (4 weeks is good) you can show them where you are going frequently and they can think of all the things they didn't consider.
Bad requirements gathering is another issue. One project I worked on went like this. 1) BA's. Here are the requirements. Write the system! 2) Dev. These are incomplete- we need to ask the users some questions. 3) BA's. You can't talk to the users- it might lead to scope creep. 4) Dev. We can't develop until we talk to the users- you can control scope- we just want to get more detail. 5) Okay. 6) Dev. Spends a couple months gathering requirements, doing storyboards. 7) Management Review. What?? That's not what we wanted at all. 8) Dev. Spends another month doing storyboards, adjusting requirements. 9) Management Review. Hey that looks pretty good! 10) Dev. Spends another month finalizing business rules, glossary and specs. Now ready to code (8 months after first handed specs that were "ready to code". 11) Dev. Submits project for approval to start. Should take about 6 months to finish. 12) System Architects. We are going to purchase a packaged system. 13) Dev. That system doesn't meet user requirements. 14) SysArch. The users must conform to the system. Business processes will be changed to match the software.
After we retreated from Vietnam (where we should not have been in the first place), the vietcong, khamer rouge, and other communist movements did horrible terrible things to the populace.
The Left has never said a single word about it during or since. Apparently murder , torture, and other crimes only matter if a right wing force is doing them.
Is that clear enough or do I need to use large, EASY TO READ type?
Look at the federal government's responsibility. Nagin and Blanco emotionally asserted that it should respond faster than it did, but it has not historically (up to 5 days for some parts of Florida in previous hurricanes). The order of responsibility is 1) The person is responsible for themselves. 2) The city is responsible for it's citizens. 3) The parish is responsible for it's citizens. 4) The state is responsible for it's citizens. 5) Finally- the federal government is responsible for it's citizens.
In Katrina, in NO, levels 1-4 failed for 10% of the citizens. And they all complained bitterly about level 5.
It was Mayor Nagin's responsibility and he did not exercise it because he was too concerned about business and political issues which he should have already considered before instead of during the storm.
Look at Bill White's performance in a very similar situation.
Scapegoating is when you take an innocent person (Mr. Brown) and lay all the heat on them that should be on someone else. Mayor Nagin (and Governor Blanco) deserve the heat so it is not scapegoating them. Mr. Brown has historically done a decent job with other disasters (I think I heard 155 in the previous year) and was not prepared for the state and city to completely abandon their citizenry (and probably not for 20% of the police to quit and some police to actively loot themselves).
Since I mentioned the police, I should say that I -really- admire the ones who stuck through terrible conditions. One of the things I noticed was the mid 50's female officer who was toughing it out while many younger men abandoned the city and their jobs as police officers. And we wonder if women are up to combat duty compared to men?
Not a SINGLE word from the left about the murders, tortures, purges that took place there. Not a SINGLE movie or television show following up on what happened after the left forced us to leave.
Personally- we shouldn't have been there in the first place. It's not america's job or responsiblity to save the world (same applies to Iraq). But what the left did was pretty horrific. They are not really about keeping people alive or from being tortured- they are about opposing America and making it into a leftist state.
And they demonize the right every chance they get (Re: Geena Davis's new show- the republicans are not just wrong headed but actively evil as played by well known leftist Donald Sutherland). There are PLENTY of things bad about republicans to use without being that blatantly biased. A lot of them lately seem to feel the ends justify the means for example. A lot of them are hypocritical or out and out lie about the issue of religion and government.
It's like neither side has any principles any more- whatever it takes to get power is justified.
1) Government is immune (sovereign immunity) 2) Mike Brown is being scapegoated. He did great work in lots of disasters previous to this one. In this one, some people who did NOT do their job (Nagin, Blanco) managed to create the false impression that it was the federal governments responsibility. It was not. We were not paying for that level of response. And we probably do not want the federal government to be powerful enough to respond that fast. Responsibility starts with the individual, then local governments- feds are last.
---
In regard to the fine article.... This has suddenly been a theme lately. And it is a ridiculous theme. If anything- most shops need CMM-0. A couple fast developers under a lead who knows what to do. Write the code fast with a quick testing cycle. CMM-5 can increase the time to code a project by 3-4 times as long. And unless management is kept from changing deadlines- it does NOT guarantee quality code. It just says you followed a process- and it makes developers hot swappable so they can be easily replaced (but with a huge drop in productivity since all knowledge is external to the developers head instead of inside it where it needs to be). CMM-5 is reasonable when lives are at stake AND it has solid support from management. ---
As far as the Opensource exposure- it seems pretty trivial to create a liscense which you have to agree to where you forgive the developer of any responsibility.
Entire thing is stupid- It's like requiring car mechanics to record their entire repair process, step by step in a log to confirm they didn't forget to screw in something.
In the -real- world when a couple thugs break out AK-47's and body armor they hurt a lot of people and then they bleed to death on the street shot in the ankle. Or they get the hell beat out of them. Or they get raped in jail.
Video games do not show the consequences in proportion to the crimes that take place in the games. In the real world- when you run you often get caught or killed in an accident. I had a friend who tried to run on a motercycle 3 times- they had patrol cars and helicopters and they caught him every time. 3rd time he lost the motorcycle and got to walk. Spent some time in jail too
...including a severed arm tumble out of the back of a car on prime time TV but showing a pink dot on a female chest (as opposed to the SAME PINK DOT on a male chest) or using a short list of "bad" words- many not bad in other contexts gets everyone riled up.
I don't think kids should know about sex or that kind of violence until they are 15 or 16. But in the real world- there are too many sources so why pick on video games over movies, television, radio, books, magazines, etc?
In fact there are products that implement local DNS on your computer so you can still browse by name if the main DNS servers are down/unreachable.
The DNS data -USED- to be huge- but now it is a dot on a typical 300 gig hard drive.
Nothing prevents any country, business, or person from setting up a new DNS server and saying "come here for your addresses first!" And all you have to do is configure your computer to use them.
If I set up a server, I could list a range of addresses on it by totally different names. I'd kinda like the Max domain.
THEY broke the deal by being greedy. Until they broke the deal, I was willing to put up with a small number of ads.
52 minutes of an hour show was ads 30 magazine pages out of a hundred were ads
They often put effort into witty clever ads that made me laugh- so they were entertaining and had value to watch even if I was never going to buy a budwieser since I do not drink beer.
But now-- 22 minutes of an hour show is ads. 70 pages of a hundred are ads.
They make more money- the actors on friends made a BLOODY MILLION DOLLARS AN EPISODE. I'm sure everyone else associated with the series made similarly bloated salaries.
On top of that, the entertainment industry has gotten it in their heads that they are bloody priceless when in reality- if you slashdot were to go down, I'd be over at zdnet or corrosion or etc. tomorrow.
Part of the reason bandwidth is expensive is because there is money to be made off of it. It's an artificial scarcity. Given all the willfully dark fiber, and given the availability and rates in japan and Korea, I would say we are easily paying 100 times what we should for bandwidth in America. At 1/100 the cost, it becomes almost too cheap to meter. Bandwidth is only going to get cheaper as we get fiber to the houses.
Likewise- I'm getting squeezed so I don't feel generous any more. Rich people run the big companies- lay off thousands of people while keeping salaries that would support several hundred employees and still let them be rich.
Every time I supress an ad, I feel like I stuck it in the eye of someone who was purposely hurting me.
We had a kinder, gentler ad time - with Uncola commercials- where everything was not so expensive and so intense. It's gone and now it's almost open warfare between people trying to push ads at us that we have NO INTEREST in and people trying to avoid even ads they might be interested in.
Personally, I don't need blocking software any more (except for the annoying popover layer ads) since I literally do not see the ads. I do not remember a single ad today on any web site that I browsed. I'm sure they were there- some bouncing- some raining, etc.
I only see ads when I am looking for a specific product and related ads pop up to the product I'm searching for. Even then- I look at the urls and skip certain sites by rules I don't comprehend.
We are paying several thousand dollars more per vehicle for these kinds of laws- each added on the premise that it only "costs a few dollars extra per car".
In return we save a few hundred lives a year. Who knows if other folks die because they are driving an old broken down car, or they don't have a car during an emergency so that we can save those few hundred lives.
A few hundred sounds like a lot- but we are talking about a hundred million people- in those numbers drinking water resuls in a few deaths a year.
The cost of our safety structures are making us very uncompetitive with societies who do not care if a few hundred die if it means all the rest can be more competitive. A few thousand students die (suicide) each year but you do not see them making the tests less competitive yet.
Well this discussion is mostly dead but here goes.
What is the value of software that you do not write because you are putting so much effort into writing bug free software.
This is not an abstract question. At one company where I worked, the effort to get zero defects to production lowered our defect rate from 6 errors per release to.5 errors per release. And our release schedule went from one release per month to one release per 8 to 12 months. They were still paying us the same salary. The same amount of code was in each release.
But a lot less defects and a lot more "control" since they knew exactly when the next release would be. But we were producing 1/8th to 1/12th the amount of code. Was it worth it? I don't know.
Instead of direct email, they need to have a board pretty much like slashdot. New employees would start off with little Karma but could be modded up if they make a good suggestion.
The CEO could choose to read "3" or "5" posts depending on their free time. I'd keep everything- even meta moderating.
Slashdot Mirror
Listen- I like firefox. I'm using it right now. I use it in preference over IE. I lobby for it on my financial web sites.
But the numbers are bogus.
Every patch generates a ton of new downloads.
I download it once and install it on multiple computers. But it patches from each new computer as a new download.
What's important is market share- not some wierd counter of downloads.
There was a talking song that was pretty cool back in the late 90's. It started by saying "the long term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists unlike the rest of my advice which I will dispense with now". I think the artist was Boz Lurman or something like that.
Anyway- that was my tag line ("The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proven by scientists") but unfortunately, a recent study showed that while sunscreen protects you from sunburns, it looks like it does not protect you from skin cancer.
Shouldn't it be cheaper in cities where the people are dense?
Shouldn't I be able to get a true high speed fiber line inexpensively when I'm a block from a national trunk?
Yet you can't. Cost is the same whether you are 60 miles out of the city center or next door to the switching station.
Why isn't it cheaper in NY and MA. I mean 25 million people in a tiny area has to be comparable population density to Japan and Korea.
I think monopolies were formed when it was expensive and incentives were needed but now that it is much less expensive the monopolies should go the way of the buggy whip.
I think you misunderstood his point.
What he is saying is that when you go to Openoffice.org there should be a link on the home page that says "WINDOWS USERS- CLICK HERE TO INSTALL OPENOFFICE!"
I agree- it is a bit too many steps to locate and install openoffice. I would never ask my mom to try to install it.
Many windows users need hand-holding. Microsoft gives them hand holding. Opensource doesn't even teach them to fish- it just puts a fishingline, pole and bait on the boat and expects them to go from there. The biggest thing holding opensource back is userinterface/friendliness/hand holding. Opensource people are usually so technical that when they try to make it simple- it's still complicated.
It's okay for me- but if openoffice was easy to use and install on windows and mac, it would be eating office alive even more than it is now.
OO2.0 looks great btw.
--
OO my official wp since about 1.9 build 64.
Pretty good quote.
And I looked up the original interview and it mostly supports your argument.
O'Reilly lost it a bit because he felt Glick was siding with the people who killed Glick's Dad. Do I find it a bit disappointing? Sure.
However, I watch O'Reilly a few times a month- catch him on the radio a couple days a month- and you know what? Prior to this quote, based on the 40-50 times I've heard him talking (perhaps 100 hours total over the last couple years) he seems reasonable, decent, and honest. I'm much more liberal than he is socially- tho about as conservative as he is fiscally. I do not agree with everything he says.
I'll forgive him a slip- but agree that he should have handled Glick a little better.
Finally, to me, the transcript showed that Glick was being pretty rude as well- talking over O'Reilly instead of talking with him. Pretty rude- but also silly since as O'Reilly showed, he controlled the mike and you can't just rant on overhim. That would irritate me too.
That's not true.
Have you used the software any time recently?
I use it for simple and very complex word documents. The largest is about 250 pages long with many tables, lots of artwork and over 10 megabytes in size (7 megabytes when saved with word 6.0 or openoffice but 10 meg when saved by office XP- why the extra 3 megabytes???)
I use it for simple presentations (but animation and sound).
I use it for spreadsheets.
Everything works as long as I don't use microsoft visual basic to make "smart" forms.
I even use openoffice once to open OLD word documents and save them in new Word formats and to "fix" broken word documents that have become corrupted and crash Word.
A lot of right-wingers feel O'reilly is liberal.
O'Reilly is an old style conservative with a catholic issue bias set.
I like him because he's not mealy mouth and he's reasonable when he disagrees with people. I disagree with him on a few issues but at least he's CIVIL like people used to be 30-40 years ago.
Wow-- that is a killer reference! One point for you!
My god.
Are you so far gone that you want to believe that information on obviously FORGED documents is true?
Whatever his record was (and I suspect it wasn't good), nothing based on the documents should be considered period.
Yea. Rather certainly had Bush nailed with those national guard records.
You know- the ones where the bloggers were first to show they were probably fakes.
The ones where CBS ignored their own warnings and published anyway?
Come on-- admit you set yourself up for that.
If you build a chair, are you a furniture maker?
If you put a board over a stream, are you a civil engineer?
If you type a few pages that no one will publish, are you a writer?
If you are a drop of rain, are you a storm?
We usually gain status and credibility in life through sustained effort.
Part of the reason we trust your embarrassing news about the mayor is that you have credibility.
Should people revealing stories about the mayor's sex life to any random person who comes up to them and claims to be a journalist expect protection?
If people reveal confidential information, are they protected if you publish the information for the public to read instead of keeping it private?
---
An interesting question would be: If the National Enquirer (with no real credibility) were to leak government secrets- would they qualify as journalists to get the protection for themselves and their sources?
---
What are we trying to accomplish here? One major thing that we are trying to prevent is government secrecy from hiding corruption. So perhaps sources should only be protected if illegal activity and corruption is revealed through their leak.
I think some bloggers should qualify.
I think time should be a factor.
I think the number of articles you publish should be a factor.
I think that your publication is always available to read by the public should be a factor.
----
So I would call person who regularly writes articles for public consumption and who has been doing so for at least a few months a journalist.
I would also say that anyone who started to write for an organization composed of qualified journalists could gain that status faster.
One of the basic issues is the waterfall model.
A major fallacy is that users know what they want at the start of development.
With iterative development and short cycles (4 weeks is good) you can show them where you are going frequently and they can think of all the things they didn't consider.
Bad requirements gathering is another issue. One project I worked on went like this.
1) BA's. Here are the requirements. Write the system!
2) Dev. These are incomplete- we need to ask the users some questions.
3) BA's. You can't talk to the users- it might lead to scope creep.
4) Dev. We can't develop until we talk to the users- you can control scope- we just want to get more detail.
5) Okay.
6) Dev. Spends a couple months gathering requirements, doing storyboards.
7) Management Review. What?? That's not what we wanted at all.
8) Dev. Spends another month doing storyboards, adjusting requirements.
9) Management Review. Hey that looks pretty good!
10) Dev. Spends another month finalizing business rules, glossary and specs. Now ready to code (8 months after first handed specs that were "ready to code".
11) Dev. Submits project for approval to start. Should take about 6 months to finish.
12) System Architects. We are going to purchase a packaged system.
13) Dev. That system doesn't meet user requirements.
14) SysArch. The users must conform to the system. Business processes will be changed to match the software.
----
Makes you go.... HMMMMMM.
After we retreated from Vietnam (where we should not have been in the first place), the vietcong, khamer rouge, and other communist movements did horrible terrible things to the populace.
The Left has never said a single word about it during or since. Apparently murder , torture, and other crimes only matter if a right wing force is doing them.
Is that clear enough or do I need to use large, EASY TO READ type?
No.
Look at the federal government's responsibility. Nagin and Blanco emotionally asserted that it should respond faster than it did, but it has not historically (up to 5 days for some parts of Florida in previous hurricanes).
The order of responsibility is
1) The person is responsible for themselves.
2) The city is responsible for it's citizens.
3) The parish is responsible for it's citizens.
4) The state is responsible for it's citizens.
5) Finally- the federal government is responsible for it's citizens.
In Katrina, in NO, levels 1-4 failed for 10% of the citizens. And they all complained bitterly about level 5.
It was Mayor Nagin's responsibility and he did not exercise it because he was too concerned about business and political issues which he should have already considered before instead of during the storm.
Look at Bill White's performance in a very similar situation.
Scapegoating is when you take an innocent person (Mr. Brown) and lay all the heat on them that should be on someone else. Mayor Nagin (and Governor Blanco) deserve the heat so it is not scapegoating them. Mr. Brown has historically done a decent job with other disasters (I think I heard 155 in the previous year) and was not prepared for the state and city to completely abandon their citizenry (and probably not for 20% of the police to quit and some police to actively loot themselves).
Since I mentioned the police, I should say that I -really- admire the ones who stuck through terrible conditions. One of the things I noticed was the mid 50's female officer who was toughing it out while many younger men abandoned the city and their jobs as police officers. And we wonder if women are up to combat duty compared to men?
Look at how they performed after Vietnam fell.
Not a SINGLE word from the left about the murders, tortures, purges that took place there. Not a SINGLE movie or television show following up on what happened after the left forced us to leave.
Personally- we shouldn't have been there in the first place. It's not america's job or responsiblity to save the world (same applies to Iraq). But what the left did was pretty horrific. They are not really about keeping people alive or from being tortured- they are about opposing America and making it into a leftist state.
And they demonize the right every chance they get (Re: Geena Davis's new show- the republicans are not just wrong headed but actively evil as played by well known leftist Donald Sutherland). There are PLENTY of things bad about republicans to use without being that blatantly biased. A lot of them lately seem to feel the ends justify the means for example. A lot of them are hypocritical or out and out lie about the issue of religion and government.
It's like neither side has any principles any more- whatever it takes to get power is justified.
1) Government is immune (sovereign immunity)
2) Mike Brown is being scapegoated. He did great work in lots of disasters previous to this one. In this one, some people who did NOT do their job (Nagin, Blanco) managed to create the false impression that it was the federal governments responsibility. It was not. We were not paying for that level of response. And we probably do not want the federal government to be powerful enough to respond that fast. Responsibility starts with the individual, then local governments- feds are last.
---
In regard to the fine article....
This has suddenly been a theme lately. And it is a ridiculous theme.
If anything- most shops need CMM-0. A couple fast developers under a lead who knows what to do. Write the code fast with a quick testing cycle.
CMM-5 can increase the time to code a project by 3-4 times as long. And unless management is kept from changing deadlines- it does NOT guarantee quality code. It just says you followed a process- and it makes developers hot swappable so they can be easily replaced (but with a huge drop in productivity since all knowledge is external to the developers head instead of inside it where it needs to be).
CMM-5 is reasonable when lives are at stake AND it has solid support from management.
---
As far as the Opensource exposure- it seems pretty trivial to create a liscense which you have to agree to where you forgive the developer of any responsibility.
Entire thing is stupid- It's like requiring car mechanics to record their entire repair process, step by step in a log to confirm they didn't forget to screw in something.
http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/kooijman s.htmlt racts/2000-2004/01AB.pdfa /vidgameviolence.htm
http://www.psychology.iastate.edu/faculty/caa/abs
http://mentalhealth.about.com/cs/familyresources/
Yea... nobody confuses the two.
In the -real- world when a couple thugs break out AK-47's and body armor they hurt a lot of people and then they bleed to death on the street shot in the ankle. Or they get the hell beat out of them. Or they get raped in jail.
Video games do not show the consequences in proportion to the crimes that take place in the games. In the real world- when you run you often get caught or killed in an accident. I had a friend who tried to run on a motercycle 3 times- they had patrol cars and helicopters and they caught him every time. 3rd time he lost the motorcycle and got to walk. Spent some time in jail too
...including a severed arm tumble out of the back of a car on prime time TV but showing a pink dot on a female chest (as opposed to the SAME PINK DOT on a male chest) or using a short list of "bad" words- many not bad in other contexts gets everyone riled up.
I don't think kids should know about sex or that kind of violence until they are 15 or 16. But in the real world- there are too many sources so why pick on video games over movies, television, radio, books, magazines, etc?
In fact there are products that implement local DNS on your computer so you can still browse by name if the main DNS servers are down/unreachable.
The DNS data -USED- to be huge- but now it is a dot on a typical 300 gig hard drive.
Nothing prevents any country, business, or person from setting up a new DNS server and saying "come here for your addresses first!" And all you have to do is configure your computer to use them.
If I set up a server, I could list a range of addresses on it by totally different names. I'd kinda like the Max domain.
www.msn.max
www.maxo.max
www.min.max
www.slashdot.max (aka www.duplicatearticles.max)
If you configured your browser to look at my computer for addresses first, then you could use those addresses in your browser and other programs.
THEY broke the deal by being greedy. Until they broke the deal, I was willing to put up with a small number of ads.
52 minutes of an hour show was ads
30 magazine pages out of a hundred were ads
They often put effort into witty clever ads that made me laugh- so they were entertaining and had value to watch even if I was never going to buy a budwieser since I do not drink beer.
But now-- 22 minutes of an hour show is ads.
70 pages of a hundred are ads.
They make more money- the actors on friends made a BLOODY MILLION DOLLARS AN EPISODE.
I'm sure everyone else associated with the series made similarly bloated salaries.
On top of that, the entertainment industry has gotten it in their heads that they are bloody priceless when in reality- if you slashdot were to go down, I'd be over at zdnet or corrosion or etc. tomorrow.
Part of the reason bandwidth is expensive is because there is money to be made off of it. It's an artificial scarcity. Given all the willfully dark fiber, and given the availability and rates in japan and Korea, I would say we are easily paying 100 times what we should for bandwidth in America. At 1/100 the cost, it becomes almost too cheap to meter. Bandwidth is only going to get cheaper as we get fiber to the houses.
Likewise- I'm getting squeezed so I don't feel generous any more. Rich people run the big companies- lay off thousands of people while keeping salaries that would support several hundred employees and still let them be rich.
Every time I supress an ad, I feel like I stuck it in the eye of someone who was purposely hurting me.
We had a kinder, gentler ad time - with Uncola commercials- where everything was not so expensive and so intense. It's gone and now it's almost open warfare between people trying to push ads at us that we have NO INTEREST in and people trying to avoid even ads they might be interested in.
Personally, I don't need blocking software any more (except for the annoying popover layer ads) since I literally do not see the ads. I do not remember a single ad today on any web site that I browsed. I'm sure they were there- some bouncing- some raining, etc.
I only see ads when I am looking for a specific product and related ads pop up to the product I'm searching for. Even then- I look at the urls and skip certain sites by rules I don't comprehend.
We are paying several thousand dollars more per vehicle for these kinds of laws- each added on the premise that it only "costs a few dollars extra per car".
In return we save a few hundred lives a year. Who knows if other folks die because they are driving an old broken down car, or they don't have a car during an emergency so that we can save those few hundred lives.
A few hundred sounds like a lot- but we are talking about a hundred million people- in those numbers drinking water resuls in a few deaths a year.
The cost of our safety structures are making us very uncompetitive with societies who do not care if a few hundred die if it means all the rest can be more competitive. A few thousand students die (suicide) each year but you do not see them making the tests less competitive yet.
Well this discussion is mostly dead but here goes.
.5 errors per release. And our release schedule went from one release per month to one release per 8 to 12 months. They were still paying us the same salary. The same amount of code was in each release.
What is the value of software that you do not write because you are putting so much effort into writing bug free software.
This is not an abstract question. At one company where I worked, the effort to get zero defects to production lowered our defect rate from 6 errors per release to
But a lot less defects and a lot more "control" since they knew exactly when the next release would be. But we were producing 1/8th to 1/12th the amount of code. Was it worth it? I don't know.
Instead of direct email, they need to have a board pretty much like slashdot.
New employees would start off with little Karma but could be modded up if they make a good suggestion.
The CEO could choose to read "3" or "5" posts depending on their free time.
I'd keep everything- even meta moderating.