The bunny is from a pagan fertility goddess. (Early marketing for Christianity figured out that it was a lot easier to slide people into the Church if they could keep celebrating their decidedly-non-Christian festivals.)
And MIT students have been given a significant incentive to hack on projects like Freenet.
Remember when the MPAA decided not to support DVD players under Linux, thereby ensuring that a large number of irritated engineers were going to have plenty of free time to work on CSS?
That was a really bad idea. It resulted in a lot of people who otherwise would have stayed away from breaking CSS and making players easy to work with involved in those efforts.
Given that any person in the United States would make an equally acceptable "example", it seems that seeing how irritable you can make students at well-known technology schools is simply asking for trouble.
Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility.
I admit,.xxx is a novelty, but it's one the adult industry will want. Subsiquently, adult businesses will purchase them, and through the agreement, will be forced to rate their sites with ICRA.
I disagree that they would "want".xxx...where is their benefit? Remember, US-centric viewpoint -- what.xxx standards are you using? Is Sports Illustrated going to want to go.xxx to help out Saudi Arabia?
If you feel that they want to rate themselves, they can *already* use metatags. But for free, without changing anything, and without the drawbacks of.xxx.
$60 a year is peanuts to these businesses, and the same is true for all other high priced domains.
Yes, but why allow registrars to keep slowly driving up the cost of name registrations? The only person to benefit is the registrars.
$60 a year is peanuts to these businesses, and the same is true for all other high priced domains.
Sure, everyone can afford it. But the Internet is designed to be efficient, and there are a huge number of companies that try to reduce efficiency to feed themselves. Verisign, for instance, would *love* to bump up the.com registration fee.
1) verify that the site's rating is accurate
And do you think that will be done? There are a large number of companies already in this business. They do porn blocking. The scope is too large for humans.
2) call the number listed and determine a real person is on the other end that is affiliated with the business
Why would this (a) help or (b) be done? You're already required to provide valid contact information -- it's just that a lot of people don't. I don't see why this would be more of a benefit for.xxx.
Freenet is neat, P2P research is phenomenal, darknets are probably the way to go...but boy, it would be nice to have something that is not implemented in Java.
I understand the reasons that they use Java, but still, Freenet is one RAM and CPU-hungry beast.
I'm not personally affiliated with.xxx, despite the fact I know those involved, but I see no reason why it, or any other TLD for that matter shouldn't be approved.
They must also rate their site with ICRA, a web standard meta tag that most filtering software uses to determine the content of a site and whether ot not it is sutible for the filter to show.
And, you see, this is where.xxx becomes completely pointless. Metatags completely eliminate the need for.xxx.
So, what you have is a registrar that has done the following:
* Put itself to collect outsized fees, the work for which can be completely automated by a perl script (scan.xxx domain, see if response includes ICRA header).
* Put itself in a position where people are likely to demand that more domains purchase their services.
* Does absolutely nothing. If someone is in.xxx *and* is required to use ICRA, then the.xxx part is completely unnecessary (and causes all kinds of problems such as those I mentioned in my other post). All you need is ICRA...and if someone is choosing to use.xxx, they can as easily choose to use ICRA.
Basically, the only reason.xxx keeps coming up is because:
(a) A number of people don't understand the technical drawbacks. Reading the RFC on.sex should be mandatory before pushing.xxx.
(b) Registrars *really* want more TLDs, and preferably more expensive ones. These people would be put in a position of doing nothing and raking in lots of money for it.
A.xxx TLD is pretty much a loss for everyone other than said registrars.
Because most people don't know about it. This is because instead of advocating it, most people who might be pushing it are stuck on the.xxx TLD -- because they don't understand the technical flaws in.xxx.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
So.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just.xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors.xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
Any proxy usage will bypass a.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for.xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a.xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
[The reason that the Christian right is opposed to this is for *completely* different reasons. Their concern is that introducing a.xxx TLD will legitimize porn. Europeans have a certain right to be irritated that these concerns are dictating how the global Internet is run -- however, I strongly doubt that they have any impact. The standards folks are already strongly opposed to a.xxx for actual technical reasons, and has released an RFC 3675 on why it would be a really bad idea to implement it. This is what ICANN is going to pay attention to.
Yes, some conservative Christian groups oppose it, for the reason that they feel that it will "legitimize porn". I also oppose a.xxx TLD, for completely different reasons:
(1).xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address..xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason..xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There are better, existing systems to embed metatags in web pages. These approaches are far more powerful ("contains REALISTIC_VIOLENCE and NUDITY" and lets the user or ISP choose how to filter based on these content flags), provide better granularity (you don't have to stick an entire domain in.xxx if it contains one adult page), and can't be bypassed as blocking systems just because someone uses a proxy or something similar.
(2).xxx sucks from a policy standpoint. We sorta-kinda can get away with saying "This is adult content, and this isn't" in the United States, because we've got a *somewhat* universal standard of acceptable content. Even then, there's friction (in San Francisco, it's been ruled legal to do nude yoga on a city street -- try doing that in the Deep South). But it's not nearly as much as the differences between countries and continents. Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a.xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*. In the UK, it's considered perfectly harmless to show topless women on television. In the US, we consider that unacceptable and obscene. In some conservative Islamic countries, a woman in regular business wear (or worse, a bikini) would be considered completely unacceptable. How do you do a good job of reconciling all these various wildly-differing social values into that single bit of information? No matter what happens, an awful lot of people are going to find your classification completely unacceptable. A.xxx TLD promises *years* of culture wars and infighting.
There are two main groups pushing for a.xxx TLD. First, there are a lot of people who simply don't have the technical background to understand the drawbacks of a.xxx TLD, but know that they want to be able to filter porn. They aren't familiar with the alternatives, and a.xxx TLD is easy to explain to them. The other group is the domain name registrars, which are absolutely salivating at the possibility of having people have to pay for a new domain based on the kind of content they are providing. Heck, get past the initial big step of getting people used to paying a domain name registrar tax to serve a particular type of content, and you can do it with all *kinds* of content. There's nothing that a domain name registrar would like better than something along these lines.
And that's why I really don't think that most people actually want a.xxx TLD. They may want to be able to filter porn, but they don't want a.xxx TLD.
Actually, I'd say we are going back to the 'less is better' design.
The problem, I would say, was an era with massive demand and little supply of web designers. As a result, absolutely absurd things went through. Web designers treated client websites as personal experiments ("Well, wouldn't it be cool if..."). Flash went one websites because Flash was fun to play with. Nonsense like logos and links for the *web designer* were prominently slapped on many websites -- that'd be like Chiat-Day sticking an ad for themselves over Apple's ads.
The user wants the website to be usable, and in almost all cases, that means as minimal as possible to get the necessary features across. Incidently, that also tends to make life easier for the disabled, for people using cell phone browsers, etc, etc.
There are still some major websites that are very complicated. A typical Yahoo! webpage has way too much *stuff* on it for me to even come close to fully scanning it.
My guess is that a lot of web-based companies fall prey to corporate organization issues. It's easy to do something new -- just get budget. It's hard to say "there's too much crap on this page" and ram someone's project back a link away from the main page (even if it actually makes that link *easier* to find) because that might generate friction.
I'd say that every Web company needs one person with the personal authority to sit down and basically say "This, this, and this are all coming off the main page. You can stick them in a hierarchy somewhere."
I don't know if he felt threatened by me being there or what, but he missed our first two meetings, found excuse after excuse when it came to telling me what the user base requirements were, didn't know what an MX record was, blah blah etc..
I remember submitting a question about our DNS policy to our local IT department. The ticket eventually wound its way up to global IT, and some guy responsible for DNS issues called me about two weeks later. He couldn't understand my question, because he had no idea what a CNAME was. It was depressing. How can you be a DNS admin for a major company when you haven't even the foggiest notion of even basic DNS terminology? What do you *do* all day?
Only small group has any chance of benefiting from protectionism -- workers who cannot compete with their overseas competitors and want to be subsidized by workers in other industries.
I hear stories constantly about people trying to hire decent developers. Heck, there are few employers that actually won't hire a really good developer given the chance.
The problem is that the competence level is so abysmally low. It's *damned hard* to find someone that really understands what they're working with. An amazing number of developers are simply completely unable to do their work.
As an example -- a guy in the next cubicle over has a project that needs to ship soon. It's not done. The reason why? He hired a consultant to write some basic C++ code to wrap some functions and log each call. Some minimal knowledge of MFC might be required -- that's about it. After two months of the consultant doing nothing but browsing the Web, he finally gave up and found another consultant. That guy can write code, but veeeerrrryyyy slowly. I think that yesterday he may have written two or three wrappers (and buggy, at that). Maybe forty lines of code to do nothing other than print out a few parameters to a file.
I remember sitting and listening to some people interview some other developers. One guy described himself as an, and I quote "expert-level C/C++ developer" and was interviewing for a C development position. An interviewer asked him to implement strcpy(). He was completely lost, even after hints from the interviewer (including having to explain that a char * was a string). He wound up describing the reason that it was difficult to implement the function by saying something about LDAP. Yes, I was confused too.
Probably half the developers I run into get a deer-with-glazed-eyes-in-the-headlights look the moment they hear "static library".
And almost all treat their development environment as a black box. If the debugger gets confused, they have no idea what might be going on. It's like a graphic designer only knowing how to use special effects plugins in Photoshop or something. Over the past week, I've seen three different developers manually unload a dynamically-loaded library containing code that they had a thread executing. Naturally, as soon as the thread starts executing, it crashes...and Visual Studio can't generate a call stack for them. None of them had the faintest idea of what might be wrong or how to track down the issue, even after days of work.
It goes on in this vein. And people that are not competent often simply do not have the grounding necessary to realize how little they know.
The reason companies are outsourcing is not (necessarily) because it's a business fad or anything similar. It's because the number of available people who are actually competent developers in in the US is depressingly small. Granted, in my experience India isn't great either, but at least it's cheaper.
The people I know who know what they are doing have absolutely no trouble getting jobs.
And the incredibly depressing thing about all this is that people in the US are phenomenally wealthy, have excellent educational resources and schools available, most have more than enough time to learn whatever they want...but they don't.
I'm sure that there are examples of competent people out there who have, indeed, lost their jobs. However, I strongly suspect that they are far outnumbered by hordes of people who have no idea what they are doing -- and worse, don't know that they don't know what they are doing. How many people can you think of that would describe themselves as "below average"? Yet, an awful lot of them are going to be in that oh-so-awful-sounding range.
I'm going to quote a previous post of mine regarding why.xxx isn't a great idea:
It's a bad idea.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say with page-level precision, contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
So.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just.xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors.xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
Any proxy usage will bypass a.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for.xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a.xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
There are few things more frightening in a workplace than a fool who is shown up to be a fool.
This whole thing was a disaster. The story should never have been posted on the CentOS forums in the first place.
Look, let's get our head screwed on right here. Sure, on first read the city manager guy looks like an insane nut going ballistic.
Now, go back. Read the dialog again. Assume that "CentOS" is equivalent in your mind to "Gator" (or Claria or whatever the hell they call it these days).
Actually, most of his responses were not that unreasonable. He blustered and was ready to go on the attack, but who hasn't done so on a bad day at some point in their life? I'd be more than happy to slag Claria at the drop of a pin. I remember once thinking that an online retailer had ripped me off and started threatening them, when in fact, I had simply misunderstood something about the product they sold me.
The initial response from the CentOS lead sounds kind of like the Claria people saying "it's free, so you should like it", and the "we provide it" sounds like the CentOS people put the thing on the website, from his standpoint. You have to realize that the guy thought that he had some sort of spyware, and figured that he was dealing with a rather nasty group of people.
I understand where the CentOS guy is coming from. I've had my own share of uninformed people that want tech support on the open source software I write. This is damned frusterating, he's a volunteer, and he went out of his way to resolve the problem to just be threatened even more. I would be very tempted to do the same thing he did (more likely, just ignore the sender). But...ultimately that's part of life when you provide software to a lot of people. Microsoft undoubtedly gets vast number of calls like this every day. This is why Tier I tech support exists -- because there are a lot of irate people that call up and insist that they know what they are talking about and are completely swinging at the air.
Now, here's why I think posting this was a really bad idea (at least from the CentOS standpoint). My manager is risk-adverse regarding Linux already. If something goes wrong, he doesn't want to be the one left holding the bag because he chose to try out Linux.
I can think of few things that will more rapidly sour an administrator towards a product than knowing that at one point before, someone tried to get technical support on the product, and had their (believed private) communications posted on a world-visible website with their real name attached, mocked, and then spread to major news sites. If my boss saw this, he would probably be very, very, very leery of ever letting me stick CentOS on any of our machines. He doesn't want even the possibility of being put in that situation. It doesn't cost *him* anything more to stick with Windows, and MS's tech people are not going to post his conversations with them and try to tell the world how stupid he is, which could be a severely career-damaging thing for him.
And despite all the bad things about Microsoft, they won't post private correspondence online. I'd feel pretty comfortable calling them and trust that they aren't going to use my conversation to make fun of me.
I understand the CentOS lead not wanting to do what Microsoft's tech support people do -- not wanting to have to deal with irate and ignorant people. He does this for fun, and dealing with abuse is not fun. But he also has to recognize that this is, to many people, a pretty damaging thing WRT his product's appeal.
There are solutions to this problem (and lots of people have been figuring out how to cash in on it for a while). Various companies sell support services for open source software. But it is very important that people make the decision to use volunteer-produced open source with both eyes open, and this is a significant drawback. The tech support can be very good -- but it can also be frighteningly damaging.
Well, that's one rather pessimistic way to look at it.
I think that having more blogs is pretty much inarguably a good thing. Up until now, media didn't really approximate much of a free market. You can't compete with CNN because they have deals and control many of the channels to viewers.
However, if you start writing a decent blog, it's easy for various people to try to evaluate how useful your blog is. Google does this sort of thing for webpages already, and I would expect techniques to only become more advanced. Of course, maybe you can subvert various "reputation evaluating" services, but there is a low barrier to entry in this world. If Altavista starts to suck, Google can easily displace them.
So now you have radically reduced the barrier to entry into the media world, and you have systems for evaluating the worth of that media that will only become better.
I agree that things will not magically and instantly become perfect. There will be loopholes, and those loopholes will be exploited. There will be *many* years of ideas and improvements to come, and many unforseen problems that will have to be addressed. But I believe that the blog world has the potential to become far more valuable a source of information than the traditional media companies have been.
Okay, I'll grant that I oversimplified, but I think that I made my point.
I am not saying that Linux sucks. I use only Linux at home -- I like it a great deal. But IBM is only to be expected to be one of the first companies to choose to use Linux internally. They have side benefits to doing so.
They know that if Apple can put OSX 10.5 on shelves in November, that will start the snowball rolling, and the avalanche is coming.
Given that Apple sells luxury consumer-oriented products over which they maintain tight control, I really don't think that there is going to be a vast shift from businesses.
IBM is switching to Linux because they *sell Linux-based computers* and they want to (a) provide an example and (b) eat their own dogfood. That doesn't mean that moving to Linux is a bad idea, but it's kind of like Microsoft choosing to use Windows. It just isn't all that surprising.
Re:Not until the moon dust problem is solved.
on
US Plans Lunar Motel
·
· Score: 1
Formerly known as "stone-grinder's disease," silicosis first came to idespread public attention during the Great Depression when hundreds of miners drilling the Hawk's Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia died within five years of breathing the fine quartz dust kicked into the air by dry drilling--even though they had been ex-posed for only a few months. "It was one of the biggest occupational health disasters in U.S. history," Kerschmann says...."
Never heard of it before now, but Wikipedia has an article on everything.
Look, I don't like Microsoft. They piss me off a great deal. I also don't like their software, which I do have to interact with more than I like. (Currently Visual C++ Embedded is the largest steaming pile of unstable and broken shit by way of development software than I have ever seen -- I cannot imagine how anyone, anywhere, successfully writes Win CE software without going batshit insane.)
But I simply cannot see someone getting enjoyment from watching some sort of nonsense in internal project management on a Microsoft project. I'm sure that occasionally Bill Gates trips and falls flat on his face. But that really does not provide me with any kind of cathartic happiness.
Microsoft is a Very Large Company. I'm sure that they have things going wrong for them every single day, and we could read about things every single day. But, really, who cares?
Let me tell you the only thing that really matters about Vista -- it's pretty unexciting, based on watching people poke at the betas. Take WinXP, add some minor features (the Wikipedia Windows Vista page is *way* out of date, and lists a ton of Vista features that have been cut), and slap an ugly interface on it. The interface will doubtlessly piss off a large number of OS X users when they see it, since it's basically OS X but done wrong. The most egregious offender, IMHO -- you know how OS X makes windows transparent so that you can use the data behind them? When Vista copied this one, it *blurred* the image behind it, apparently because someone at Microsoft figured that more visual effects equals better. Unfortunately, this also reduces the background image to a few vague dirty smears, completely eliminating the functionality of the entire thing.
The rest of it is all a bunch of internal project management nonsense at Microsoft that I can treat as a black box. The only thing I care about is whether or not it's going to turn out something that I want. It isn't, but I'm sure that I'm going to have to put up with it when it comes out anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
The bunny is from a pagan fertility goddess. (Early marketing for Christianity figured out that it was a lot easier to slide people into the Church if they could keep celebrating their decidedly-non-Christian festivals.)
And MIT students have been given a significant incentive to hack on projects like Freenet.
Remember when the MPAA decided not to support DVD players under Linux, thereby ensuring that a large number of irritated engineers were going to have plenty of free time to work on CSS?
That was a really bad idea. It resulted in a lot of people who otherwise would have stayed away from breaking CSS and making players easy to work with involved in those efforts.
Given that any person in the United States would make an equally acceptable "example", it seems that seeing how irritable you can make students at well-known technology schools is simply asking for trouble.
It works with reddit too, not just digg.
You are familiar with MagnaTune? No DRM there, and they have a "Why we are not evil" link on their page.
Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility.
Have you read this?
Results: Client appcompat % hovering at <40% (GASP - INTERNAL INFO... better moderate this one out!!!!)
I admit, .xxx is a novelty, but it's one the adult industry will want. Subsiquently, adult businesses will purchase them, and through the agreement, will be forced to rate their sites with ICRA.
.xxx...where is their benefit? Remember, US-centric viewpoint -- what .xxx standards are you using? Is Sports Illustrated going to want to go .xxx to help out Saudi Arabia?
.xxx.
.com registration fee.
.xxx.
I disagree that they would "want"
If you feel that they want to rate themselves, they can *already* use metatags. But for free, without changing anything, and without the drawbacks of
$60 a year is peanuts to these businesses, and the same is true for all other high priced domains.
Yes, but why allow registrars to keep slowly driving up the cost of name registrations? The only person to benefit is the registrars.
$60 a year is peanuts to these businesses, and the same is true for all other high priced domains.
Sure, everyone can afford it. But the Internet is designed to be efficient, and there are a huge number of companies that try to reduce efficiency to feed themselves. Verisign, for instance, would *love* to bump up the
1) verify that the site's rating is accurate
And do you think that will be done? There are a large number of companies already in this business. They do porn blocking. The scope is too large for humans.
2) call the number listed and determine a real person is on the other end that is affiliated with the business
Why would this (a) help or (b) be done? You're already required to provide valid contact information -- it's just that a lot of people don't. I don't see why this would be more of a benefit for
Freenet is neat, P2P research is phenomenal, darknets are probably the way to go...but boy, it would be nice to have something that is not implemented in Java.
I understand the reasons that they use Java, but still, Freenet is one RAM and CPU-hungry beast.
No self respecting creationist denies that species adapt to different environmental conditions, such as new drugs.
This is called the No True Scotsman fallacy.
I'm not personally affiliated with .xxx, despite the fact I know those involved, but I see no reason why it, or any other TLD for that matter shouldn't be approved.
.xxx becomes completely pointless. Metatags completely eliminate the need for .xxx.
.xxx domain, see if response includes ICRA header).
.xxx *and* is required to use ICRA, then the .xxx part is completely unnecessary (and causes all kinds of problems such as those I mentioned in my other post). All you need is ICRA...and if someone is choosing to use .xxx, they can as easily choose to use ICRA.
.xxx keeps coming up is because:
.sex should be mandatory before pushing .xxx.
.xxx TLD is pretty much a loss for everyone other than said registrars.
See my post.
They must also rate their site with ICRA, a web standard meta tag that most filtering software uses to determine the content of a site and whether ot not it is sutible for the filter to show.
And, you see, this is where
So, what you have is a registrar that has done the following:
* Put itself to collect outsized fees, the work for which can be completely automated by a perl script (scan
* Put itself in a position where people are likely to demand that more domains purchase their services.
* Does absolutely nothing. If someone is in
Basically, the only reason
(a) A number of people don't understand the technical drawbacks. Reading the RFC on
(b) Registrars *really* want more TLDs, and preferably more expensive ones. These people would be put in a position of doing nothing and raking in lots of money for it.
A
Because most people don't know about it. This is because instead of advocating it, most people who might be pushing it are stuck on the .xxx TLD -- because they don't understand the technical flaws in .xxx.
It doesn't even require a header. You can just cram the tags in the .HTML.
From a previous post of mine:
.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
.xxx TLD will legitimize porn. Europeans have a certain right to be irritated that these concerns are dictating how the global Internet is run -- however, I strongly doubt that they have any impact. The standards folks are already strongly opposed to a .xxx for actual technical reasons, and has released an RFC 3675 on why it would be a really bad idea to implement it. This is what ICANN is going to pay attention to.
It's a bad idea.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,
So
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block
Any proxy usage will bypass a
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of
[The reason that the Christian right is opposed to this is for *completely* different reasons. Their concern is that introducing a
Yes, some conservative Christian groups oppose it, for the reason that they feel that it will "legitimize porn". I also oppose a .xxx TLD, for completely different reasons:
.xxx sucks from a technical standpoint. Using DNS to categorize sites allows anyone else to set up a non-.xxx address that points at the same address. .xxx is useless for blocking, for this reason. .xxx allows only a single bit of information to be encoded about a an entire domain (is it "adult", whatever that means, or not?) There are better, existing systems to embed metatags in web pages. These approaches are far more powerful ("contains REALISTIC_VIOLENCE and NUDITY" and lets the user or ISP choose how to filter based on these content flags), provide better granularity (you don't have to stick an entire domain in .xxx if it contains one adult page), and can't be bypassed as blocking systems just because someone uses a proxy or something similar.
.xxx sucks from a policy standpoint. We sorta-kinda can get away with saying "This is adult content, and this isn't" in the United States, because we've got a *somewhat* universal standard of acceptable content. Even then, there's friction (in San Francisco, it's been ruled legal to do nude yoga on a city street -- try doing that in the Deep South). But it's not nearly as much as the differences between countries and continents. Remember that this is not xxx.us -- this is a .xxx *TLD*. It applies to *everyone*. In the UK, it's considered perfectly harmless to show topless women on television. In the US, we consider that unacceptable and obscene. In some conservative Islamic countries, a woman in regular business wear (or worse, a bikini) would be considered completely unacceptable. How do you do a good job of reconciling all these various wildly-differing social values into that single bit of information? No matter what happens, an awful lot of people are going to find your classification completely unacceptable. A .xxx TLD promises *years* of culture wars and infighting.
.xxx TLD. First, there are a lot of people who simply don't have the technical background to understand the drawbacks of a .xxx TLD, but know that they want to be able to filter porn. They aren't familiar with the alternatives, and a .xxx TLD is easy to explain to them. The other group is the domain name registrars, which are absolutely salivating at the possibility of having people have to pay for a new domain based on the kind of content they are providing. Heck, get past the initial big step of getting people used to paying a domain name registrar tax to serve a particular type of content, and you can do it with all *kinds* of content. There's nothing that a domain name registrar would like better than something along these lines.
.xxx TLD. They may want to be able to filter porn, but they don't want a .xxx TLD.
(1)
(2)
There are two main groups pushing for a
And that's why I really don't think that most people actually want a
Reposted from an earlier post of mine here
For homebrew games, one can use the buffer overflow in GTA to launch a loader.
If you're simply trying to pirate PSP UMD images and play them from a memcard...then, yes, you need a 2.0-or-below-BIOS.
Actually, I'd say we are going back to the 'less is better' design.
The problem, I would say, was an era with massive demand and little supply of web designers. As a result, absolutely absurd things went through. Web designers treated client websites as personal experiments ("Well, wouldn't it be cool if..."). Flash went one websites because Flash was fun to play with. Nonsense like logos and links for the *web designer* were prominently slapped on many websites -- that'd be like Chiat-Day sticking an ad for themselves over Apple's ads.
The user wants the website to be usable, and in almost all cases, that means as minimal as possible to get the necessary features across. Incidently, that also tends to make life easier for the disabled, for people using cell phone browsers, etc, etc.
There are still some major websites that are very complicated. A typical Yahoo! webpage has way too much *stuff* on it for me to even come close to fully scanning it.
My guess is that a lot of web-based companies fall prey to corporate organization issues. It's easy to do something new -- just get budget. It's hard to say "there's too much crap on this page" and ram someone's project back a link away from the main page (even if it actually makes that link *easier* to find) because that might generate friction.
I'd say that every Web company needs one person with the personal authority to sit down and basically say "This, this, and this are all coming off the main page. You can stick them in a hierarchy somewhere."
I don't know if he felt threatened by me being there or what, but he missed our first two meetings, found excuse after excuse when it came to telling me what the user base requirements were, didn't know what an MX record was, blah blah etc..
I remember submitting a question about our DNS policy to our local IT department. The ticket eventually wound its way up to global IT, and some guy responsible for DNS issues called me about two weeks later. He couldn't understand my question, because he had no idea what a CNAME was. It was depressing. How can you be a DNS admin for a major company when you haven't even the foggiest notion of even basic DNS terminology? What do you *do* all day?
Professor Weinstein, if you want to know his name.
:-)
And a lot of people listened to him and minored in business.
You have to appreciate the irony of an professor (presumably an academic) giving this advice.
Only small group has any chance of benefiting from protectionism -- workers who cannot compete with their overseas competitors and want to be subsidized by workers in other industries.
I hear stories constantly about people trying to hire decent developers. Heck, there are few employers that actually won't hire a really good developer given the chance.
The problem is that the competence level is so abysmally low. It's *damned hard* to find someone that really understands what they're working with. An amazing number of developers are simply completely unable to do their work.
As an example -- a guy in the next cubicle over has a project that needs to ship soon. It's not done. The reason why? He hired a consultant to write some basic C++ code to wrap some functions and log each call. Some minimal knowledge of MFC might be required -- that's about it. After two months of the consultant doing nothing but browsing the Web, he finally gave up and found another consultant. That guy can write code, but veeeerrrryyyy slowly. I think that yesterday he may have written two or three wrappers (and buggy, at that). Maybe forty lines of code to do nothing other than print out a few parameters to a file.
I remember sitting and listening to some people interview some other developers. One guy described himself as an, and I quote "expert-level C/C++ developer" and was interviewing for a C development position. An interviewer asked him to implement strcpy(). He was completely lost, even after hints from the interviewer (including having to explain that a char * was a string). He wound up describing the reason that it was difficult to implement the function by saying something about LDAP. Yes, I was confused too.
Probably half the developers I run into get a deer-with-glazed-eyes-in-the-headlights look the moment they hear "static library".
And almost all treat their development environment as a black box. If the debugger gets confused, they have no idea what might be going on. It's like a graphic designer only knowing how to use special effects plugins in Photoshop or something. Over the past week, I've seen three different developers manually unload a dynamically-loaded library containing code that they had a thread executing. Naturally, as soon as the thread starts executing, it crashes...and Visual Studio can't generate a call stack for them. None of them had the faintest idea of what might be wrong or how to track down the issue, even after days of work.
It goes on in this vein. And people that are not competent often simply do not have the grounding necessary to realize how little they know.
The reason companies are outsourcing is not (necessarily) because it's a business fad or anything similar. It's because the number of available people who are actually competent developers in in the US is depressingly small. Granted, in my experience India isn't great either, but at least it's cheaper.
The people I know who know what they are doing have absolutely no trouble getting jobs.
And the incredibly depressing thing about all this is that people in the US are phenomenally wealthy, have excellent educational resources and schools available, most have more than enough time to learn whatever they want...but they don't.
I'm sure that there are examples of competent people out there who have, indeed, lost their jobs. However, I strongly suspect that they are far outnumbered by hordes of people who have no idea what they are doing -- and worse, don't know that they don't know what they are doing. How many people can you think of that would describe themselves as "below average"? Yet, an awful lot of them are going to be in that oh-so-awful-sounding range.
I'm going to quote a previous post of mine regarding why .xxx isn't a great idea:
.xxx is a blanket statement. It allows only one bit of information to be stored regarding a website -- contains "adult" content or not. Use a tagging system, and you can say with page-level precision, contains NUDITY, contains PROFANITY, whatever.
.xxx is already a vastly technically outclassed solution.
.xxx URLs from people. However, TLDs are exceedingly poor technical choices for this purpose. It would be just as easy to obtain this data via the IP address or an alternate URL, not just .xxx. Hell, I could easily see someone setting up a DNS that mirrors .xxx just to screw with the system -- foo.xxx would also be reachable via "foo.xxx.pornbypass.com"
.xxx TLD block, whereas metatags in a page cannot be bypassed (unless the proxy specifically filters these metatags out).
.xxx.us. There are undoubtedly some people who honestly don't realize that there are vastly different social standards in the world. In a conservative Muslim country, what we consider street clothing on a woman might be considered obscene. While we consider female toplessness unacceptable in the United States, folks in the UK get female toplessness on their TV regularly. No matter what bar is chosen for .xxx, it is going to be completely unacceptable to some people.
.xxx -- the fact that it is essentially a new tax sending money to registrars, the fact that it will cause social friction between countries, the fact that it starts a precedent of using TLDs to segregate content (completely broken, unless you have only one classification that you wish to do on the Internet), the fact that it ignores metatags...I honestly think that every person out there that is in favor of a .xxx TLD has not thoroughly thought through the implications.
It's a bad idea.
If you want to rate pages, there are already standard mechanisms for plugging content metadata into pages. Just for a start, this is a technically-superior system -- there is absolutely no reason to need to purchase an entirely separate TLD just because you have a few pages that contain adult content. The domain name registrars would have loved this -- heck, they'd love people to have to buy a new TLD for *every* sort of content, not just adult.
In addition,
So
What else is wrong with it? The obvious point of such a TLD would be to block
Any proxy usage will bypass a
And, finally, the worst issue. It promises a long and unpleasant future of social problems, precisely because it is a TLD. Even if this were a technically good solution, it would still be better to have
The argument "more data is better than none" does have some merit, but the disadvantages of
There are few things more frightening in a workplace than a fool who is shown up to be a fool.
This whole thing was a disaster. The story should never have been posted on the CentOS forums in the first place.
Look, let's get our head screwed on right here. Sure, on first read the city manager guy looks like an insane nut going ballistic.
Now, go back. Read the dialog again. Assume that "CentOS" is equivalent in your mind to "Gator" (or Claria or whatever the hell they call it these days).
Actually, most of his responses were not that unreasonable. He blustered and was ready to go on the attack, but who hasn't done so on a bad day at some point in their life? I'd be more than happy to slag Claria at the drop of a pin. I remember once thinking that an online retailer had ripped me off and started threatening them, when in fact, I had simply misunderstood something about the product they sold me.
The initial response from the CentOS lead sounds kind of like the Claria people saying "it's free, so you should like it", and the "we provide it" sounds like the CentOS people put the thing on the website, from his standpoint. You have to realize that the guy thought that he had some sort of spyware, and figured that he was dealing with a rather nasty group of people.
I understand where the CentOS guy is coming from. I've had my own share of uninformed people that want tech support on the open source software I write. This is damned frusterating, he's a volunteer, and he went out of his way to resolve the problem to just be threatened even more. I would be very tempted to do the same thing he did (more likely, just ignore the sender). But...ultimately that's part of life when you provide software to a lot of people. Microsoft undoubtedly gets vast number of calls like this every day. This is why Tier I tech support exists -- because there are a lot of irate people that call up and insist that they know what they are talking about and are completely swinging at the air.
Now, here's why I think posting this was a really bad idea (at least from the CentOS standpoint). My manager is risk-adverse regarding Linux already. If something goes wrong, he doesn't want to be the one left holding the bag because he chose to try out Linux.
I can think of few things that will more rapidly sour an administrator towards a product than knowing that at one point before, someone tried to get technical support on the product, and had their (believed private) communications posted on a world-visible website with their real name attached, mocked, and then spread to major news sites. If my boss saw this, he would probably be very, very, very leery of ever letting me stick CentOS on any of our machines. He doesn't want even the possibility of being put in that situation. It doesn't cost *him* anything more to stick with Windows, and MS's tech people are not going to post his conversations with them and try to tell the world how stupid he is, which could be a severely career-damaging thing for him.
And despite all the bad things about Microsoft, they won't post private correspondence online. I'd feel pretty comfortable calling them and trust that they aren't going to use my conversation to make fun of me.
I understand the CentOS lead not wanting to do what Microsoft's tech support people do -- not wanting to have to deal with irate and ignorant people. He does this for fun, and dealing with abuse is not fun. But he also has to recognize that this is, to many people, a pretty damaging thing WRT his product's appeal.
There are solutions to this problem (and lots of people have been figuring out how to cash in on it for a while). Various companies sell support services for open source software. But it is very important that people make the decision to use volunteer-produced open source with both eyes open, and this is a significant drawback. The tech support can be very good -- but it can also be frighteningly damaging.
Well, that's one rather pessimistic way to look at it.
I think that having more blogs is pretty much inarguably a good thing. Up until now, media didn't really approximate much of a free market. You can't compete with CNN because they have deals and control many of the channels to viewers.
However, if you start writing a decent blog, it's easy for various people to try to evaluate how useful your blog is. Google does this sort of thing for webpages already, and I would expect techniques to only become more advanced. Of course, maybe you can subvert various "reputation evaluating" services, but there is a low barrier to entry in this world. If Altavista starts to suck, Google can easily displace them.
So now you have radically reduced the barrier to entry into the media world, and you have systems for evaluating the worth of that media that will only become better.
I agree that things will not magically and instantly become perfect. There will be loopholes, and those loopholes will be exploited. There will be *many* years of ideas and improvements to come, and many unforseen problems that will have to be addressed. But I believe that the blog world has the potential to become far more valuable a source of information than the traditional media companies have been.
Okay, I'll grant that I oversimplified, but I think that I made my point.
I am not saying that Linux sucks. I use only Linux at home -- I like it a great deal. But IBM is only to be expected to be one of the first companies to choose to use Linux internally. They have side benefits to doing so.
They know that if Apple can put OSX 10.5 on shelves in November, that will start the snowball rolling, and the avalanche is coming.
Given that Apple sells luxury consumer-oriented products over which they maintain tight control, I really don't think that there is going to be a vast shift from businesses.
IBM is switching to Linux because they *sell Linux-based computers* and they want to (a) provide an example and (b) eat their own dogfood. That doesn't mean that moving to Linux is a bad idea, but it's kind of like Microsoft choosing to use Windows. It just isn't all that surprising.
Formerly known as "stone-grinder's disease," silicosis first came to idespread public attention during the Great Depression when hundreds of miners drilling the Hawk's Nest Tunnel through Gauley Mountain in West Virginia died within five years of breathing the fine quartz dust kicked into the air by dry drilling--even though they had been ex-posed for only a few months. "It was one of the biggest occupational health disasters in U.S. history," Kerschmann says...."
Never heard of it before now, but Wikipedia has an article on everything.
Even aside from that...who cares?
Look, I don't like Microsoft. They piss me off a great deal. I also don't like their software, which I do have to interact with more than I like. (Currently Visual C++ Embedded is the largest steaming pile of unstable and broken shit by way of development software than I have ever seen -- I cannot imagine how anyone, anywhere, successfully writes Win CE software without going batshit insane.)
But I simply cannot see someone getting enjoyment from watching some sort of nonsense in internal project management on a Microsoft project. I'm sure that occasionally Bill Gates trips and falls flat on his face. But that really does not provide me with any kind of cathartic happiness.
Microsoft is a Very Large Company. I'm sure that they have things going wrong for them every single day, and we could read about things every single day. But, really, who cares?
Let me tell you the only thing that really matters about Vista -- it's pretty unexciting, based on watching people poke at the betas. Take WinXP, add some minor features (the Wikipedia Windows Vista page is *way* out of date, and lists a ton of Vista features that have been cut), and slap an ugly interface on it. The interface will doubtlessly piss off a large number of OS X users when they see it, since it's basically OS X but done wrong. The most egregious offender, IMHO -- you know how OS X makes windows transparent so that you can use the data behind them? When Vista copied this one, it *blurred* the image behind it, apparently because someone at Microsoft figured that more visual effects equals better. Unfortunately, this also reduces the background image to a few vague dirty smears, completely eliminating the functionality of the entire thing.
The rest of it is all a bunch of internal project management nonsense at Microsoft that I can treat as a black box. The only thing I care about is whether or not it's going to turn out something that I want. It isn't, but I'm sure that I'm going to have to put up with it when it comes out anyway.