I shopped exclusively on the Net this year - mainly from Amazon - and was happy in the end. Amazon shipped everything within 36 hours after my ordering it, with one exception, which still shipped within 96 hours.
I am not happy with UPS, however.
Amazon dumped a large shipment of stuff bound for my house onto a truck on December 16th, all marked two-day. UPS scheduled delivery for the 20th. They don't deliver on weekends, and that is fine by me - it gives them even less of an excuse to be late.
Late they were. On Tuesday, the 21st, I still hadn't got my packages, so I called UPS and asked for a refund on my shipment (to which they claim I'm entitlted).
"What refund?" the lady asked. I cited the web site. "Oh, that doesn't apply during holidays," I was told.
That shipment arrived on Thursday, the 23rd December. Another arrived on the 24th, thankfully.
At 20.17 Eastern, at the Republican Debate, Forbes referred to Linux as 'Loonix' while answering a question about why Microsoft should or shouldn't be broken up.
John is giving Dogma too much credit and Malkovich not enough.
Being John Malkovich is wonderfully innovative, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam & Monty Python, and very much a trip. Don't think any reviewer has told you what this film is really about, or even more than a tenth of what happens in it: it's much more than a hole into John Malkavich's brain. It's rather fantastical, and it's without a doubt the weirdest film I've ever seen.
Dogma on the other hand is a complete bust. If Smith decided to conduct this sort of religious attack on the Jews instead of the Catholics, hell would have flown in the Hollywood studios - and the satire isn't even funny! I laughed four times. The talent is phenomenal, and that's all: each actor in that film could have easily rewritten his or her part so that it was actually funny. George Carlin as a priest is a hilarious idea, and the funniest man in America is wasted in the part, as an example. If this is the worst that can be said about the Catholicism, I'd say the Church is in pretty good shape.
The people who've been going on about how the Internet won't replace malls and how people will always need a place to congragate have it half-right: people are inherently social animals. But the Internet will most definitely wipe out malls.
eCommerce will not always involve sitting at a computer. As long as it does, there will always be malls. But ten years from now, you'll be able to the intelligent agent hanging on your belt, "buy my wife a cashmere sweater, blue, turtleneck, high quality, price no object, use my Visa, delivery two-day", and the agent will have it delivered to your door two days later. Maybe even wrapped.
Malls developed because they provide an easy way for a shopper to get nearly everything they want in one stop. As soon as something else becomes easier, the paradigm will shift again. And humans will start congregating in places built for congregating, not in places primarily designed for letting you buy your wife a cashmere sweater, yourself a new TV, and your kid a baseball glove, all in one stop.
Maybe malls will adapt into the above. But somehow I doubt it.:)
I'm only going to comment on the first point, as you've brought up precisely what I am now responsible for at distributed.net.
You're absolutely right. And we're working to fix it.
We've finalized a redesign of our web site and are beginning a complete rewrite of nearly all of our web content. After the major pages are finished, we'll go to work on the documentation, which is very lacking, often in some extremely important areas. The site will have a new hierarchial structure, with simple URLs for news, help, and downloads. Deep information will be even more readily accessible for those diehards who want it.
The changes will be rolling out in stages over the next thirty days.
Come back to distributed.net in a month's time. I promise, you won't be disappointed.
Client core source - the source that does the actual crunching - is entirely open and available at our web site.
We have good reasons for not releasing our network's source. One is that we would become instantly vulnerable to block spoofing, threatening the integrity of the effort.
I've put a rate clock up for this contest. It refreshes every two minutes and is continually updated by the master keyserver. Stats don't get any more accurate than this...
The Supreme Court will only get more Republican in the next few years, what with a likely George Dubya presidency and two justices set to retire in the next few years...
Yes, Microsoft should definitely settle, if they can. The Federales, however, have nothing to lose now - they've seen blood, and if they're smart, there'll be no turning back.
In order to settle, MS will have to put forth an extremely juicy offer, yet still one that would result in less carnage than a Supreme Court verdict would.
On November 1, Microsoft and Intel were added to the Dow 30 Industrials, the most popular barometer of American (and thereby global) stock activity.
A severe drop in Microsoft could send the Dow plummeting. This would definitely not be good news for anyone (except of course those waiting to buy). Looks like the Dow boys picked the wrong time to add at least one of those two companies to the list...
What do you mean, 'Grow as a person?' If you asked Hemos, he would probably tell you that he would much rather his house had not burned down, and he would gladly trade his newfound 'growth' for the possessions he just lost.
I could be wrong, and I don't speak for him. Just a hunch.
*cuts off your legs, arms, other extremities* - Let's see you lift that rock now, eh? Or anything at all for that matter...
Beware Bromides. Getting your house burned down sucks, plain and simple - there's no positive side to it. Insurance skyrockets, valuables are lost, effort has to be wasted rebuilding.
"Society is drowning in a wave of absurd and unnecessary appliances and electronics, continuously and wastefully cranked out by some of the best minds alive."
Drowning in what?
1999 has thus far been one of the top five most economically successful years of the twentieth century. This entire decade qualifies as the most prosperous, or is at least second to the Twenties. Our economy's engine is the microchip, say people with more education & experience in economics than the author of the above quote.
Yes, Tamagotchi is absurd. But it sells well, and kids all over the nation open their wallets for a Tam of their own - and that money helps move the economy forward.
In this world, profitless enterprises go to hell quickly. Nothing really useless lasts for long. Even psychics are going out of style.
If this constitutes drowning, then I'd like to see what this quote's author considers swimming.
"Simplify. Save time. Reduce effort. Liberate yourself from toil. This has been the continuing siren song of consumer technology through the twentieth century..."
Has not!
Computers help us do our work better. They do not promise to let us work less, or to simplify our lives, or to liberate us from [insert horror here].
What computers do do is magnify our productivity. As the anvil let us bend iron, the microchip offloads menial tasks, freeing the mind to think.
Architects, just as one example, no longer need to spend days painstakingly drawing perfect lines on blueprint; instead, they can sit at a CAD program and use their brains - arguably far more taxing! But the line-drawing is best left to a laser printer. Said architect might work twice as hard, now, with his computer; but he'll make five times as much money with the added clients he can accomodate.
That's what it all boils down to. The creation of wealth, the betterment of life. Computers are very good at helping us accomplish the above.
Vernor Vinge's Technological Singularity should be required reading on this topic. I'll summarize it, for those unwilling to hit the link:
Within 30 years, we will have created computers that, intelligent or not, can solve problems faster than mankind can. The computers will, among other things, be able to build better computers faster than men can. An automated economy will emerge, with the artificial quasintelligences directing progress almost completely.
The change in how homo sapiens sapiens moves forward technologically will be approximately as drastic as that of homo sapiens neandertalis discovering fire. No Neandertal could have predicted what the world would have been like post-fire.
Will we live to see homo sapiens++?
I personally believe Vinge is correct. It'll be a hell of a ride.
I've read a number of comments deriding Rob, Jeff & Co for "selling out" and throwing away their affiliation to the open source software movement. I'd just like to ask these people, and anyone else who holds similar beliefs: what is wrong with making money?
The six dot three mil BSI received for/. has bought a lot, so far. It's bought four booty-kickin' servers to make sure everyone can get to the site whenever they want to, most visibly. But most importantly, it's bought the Malda and his boys freedom from worrying about what they're going to eat next week.
Without incentives, the vast majority programmers would not program. I sure wouldn't. I don't want to see the Internet turn into an infinitely deep pool of free information just for kicks; I want it to happen because it'll make us all rich, improving our lives immeasurably.
The point of the Internet is to get everyone rich. So quit harping about how Rob's tossed his ideals out the window. His ideals, I suspect, were never yours: if they had been, Slashdot would not exist.
I'm quite sure that the karma does not have a half-life.
Everyone I've spoken to regarding MetaModeration has watched their karma plummet through the floor. It appears to take plunges soon after the user completes a batch of moderation - mine, for instance, dropped 3 points on the first day moderation was enabled (I was a moderator that day), and five points the next day I moderated. Other users have reported similar patterns.
I am convinced that massive negative meta-moderation of my moderation is causing this, and as a result, I am now afraid to moderate. In the last week, I've had one +4 post and one +5 post, and my karma is still five points lower than it was seven days ago.
What we're seeing here is moderators getting afraid to moderate (such as me - I keep doing it anyway 'cause my Karma is quite high, but I will stop when I'm within range of zero). This is not good.
The Meta-Moderation system is flawed in that it subtracts a full point for every negative vote, but does not add an equal amount for every positive vote. There is no way around this flaw, however: to add a positive integer for every positive vote to your moderation would probably cause the opposite; people's karma rocketing skyward.
I'm all for scrapping meta-moderation. Here's my replacement system:
Give each moderator a number of moderation points proportional to his or her karmic level.
The highly-ranked people have obviously got a handle on how to write a good comment. Wouldn't they, therefore, be the best people to tell good comments? Give them the weight they deserve. And keep all the other people in the system at a lower level to help out.
Way back three point some-odd billion years ago, in the oxygenless primoridial soup that covered this planet's surface, a bunch of oils and proteins came together during a lightning strike to form an amino acid. That acid and others like it remained whole throughout that tumultuous period in Earth's history, and when things started to calm down a bit, found solace in a soap bubble with other amino acids, and merged with others like it, and began to undergo chemical reactions... and life was formed. That ain't too much of an oversimplification.
Half of this experiment was already reconstructed in a test-tube back in the 1950s - various chemicals and simulated lightning produced amino acids in laboratory conditions. This is reproducable. All we need to do is find the time (might take a long while) and recreate the other half.
Or maybe we'll find an easier, better way.
The reason we are the dominant species on this planet is that we possess reasoning brains. Humans have a knack for figuring stuff out, and for solving problems more efficiently than quasirandom genetic drift does. Saber-tooth tiger got big teeth? Use sharpened tree-limb to kill tiger at ten feet. Don't let him get within range! Eat good dinner.
The reasoning human mind also makes stuff like Slashdot, when it's bored.
I'm quite confident that the limits of what rational thought can accomplish lie approximately where the edge of the universe sits. If it exists, it can be understood.
Thus far, progress has not hit a single barrier it couldn't crush like a steamroller.
In the United States, you cannot be sued for linking to illegal material. Remember the suit a photographer whose images were linked to from IMDB brought? It was thrown out of court...
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact same thing as Communists.
Sorry. This is a stretch. "Communist" contains the word "Commune", or a group of people who all work to create software for each others' computers, and not voluntarily at that. I and other "techno-literate libertarians" write my own software, and (because it doesn't hurt me) give it away as an afterthought.
Exactly. It all loops back to people being happier when they're working for their own good in collaboration with others. The others serve as a check on errors (bugs), and it's really easy to get them involved - but the primary purpose of any open-source project is to get the damned thing done, and make it the best it can be.
The open source movement exists because people want better software.
Many people admit that Communism is dead, but they often say they'd like it if it weren't tied to that totalitarian government it always seems bundled with.
But Communism can't come without that totalitarian government, much as Exploder can't come without Windows. The system does not work without a state to enforce it (much as Exploder wouldn't own the browser market if it weren't bundled with Windows; pardon the stretched analogy).
Communism requires people to work for the good of each other, not for themselves. Capitalism requires people to work for themselves to survive. This is the simple, straightforward difference between the two systems, but many people have a hard time grasping it.
Would you trust other people to harvest the raw materials that'll put food on your table? Or would you rather do it yourself?
Most people, including myself, answer "Give me the plowshare!" to the above. Once I'm done feeding myself, I've got no problem helping my neighbor harvest his crop, but only after I've got a full stomach. So, in Communist nations, the Government sticks a gun to your back while you harvest your neighbor's crop.
Linux wasn't created like this. People wrote software for themselves - whether they were just creating utilities for their own use, or they got a "natural high" from helping other people, they had their own interests at heart. And they hate central authority.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact opposite of Communists.
Slashdot Mirror
I shopped exclusively on the Net this year - mainly from Amazon - and was happy in the end. Amazon shipped everything within 36 hours after my ordering it, with one exception, which still shipped within 96 hours.
I am not happy with UPS, however.
Amazon dumped a large shipment of stuff bound for my house onto a truck on December 16th, all marked two-day. UPS scheduled delivery for the 20th. They don't deliver on weekends, and that is fine by me - it gives them even less of an excuse to be late.
Late they were. On Tuesday, the 21st, I still hadn't got my packages, so I called UPS and asked for a refund on my shipment (to which they claim I'm entitlted).
"What refund?" the lady asked. I cited the web site. "Oh, that doesn't apply during holidays," I was told.
That shipment arrived on Thursday, the 23rd December. Another arrived on the 24th, thankfully.
I've just sold my UPS stock.
At 20.17 Eastern, at the Republican Debate, Forbes referred to Linux as 'Loonix' while answering a question about why Microsoft should or shouldn't be broken up.
:)
Leenix or Lihnux, sure. But Loonux?
John is giving Dogma too much credit and Malkovich not enough.
Being John Malkovich is wonderfully innovative, reminiscent of Terry Gilliam & Monty Python, and very much a trip. Don't think any reviewer has told you what this film is really about, or even more than a tenth of what happens in it: it's much more than a hole into John Malkavich's brain. It's rather fantastical, and it's without a doubt the weirdest film I've ever seen.
Dogma on the other hand is a complete bust. If Smith decided to conduct this sort of religious attack on the Jews instead of the Catholics, hell would have flown in the Hollywood studios - and the satire isn't even funny! I laughed four times. The talent is phenomenal, and that's all: each actor in that film could have easily rewritten his or her part so that it was actually funny. George Carlin as a priest is a hilarious idea, and the funniest man in America is wasted in the part, as an example. If this is the worst that can be said about the Catholicism, I'd say the Church is in pretty good shape.
The people who've been going on about how the Internet won't replace malls and how people will always need a place to congragate have it half-right: people are inherently social animals. But the Internet will most definitely wipe out malls.
eCommerce will not always involve sitting at a computer. As long as it does, there will always be malls. But ten years from now, you'll be able to the intelligent agent hanging on your belt, "buy my wife a cashmere sweater, blue, turtleneck, high quality, price no object, use my Visa, delivery two-day", and the agent will have it delivered to your door two days later. Maybe even wrapped.
Malls developed because they provide an easy way for a shopper to get nearly everything they want in one stop. As soon as something else becomes easier, the paradigm will shift again. And humans will start congregating in places built for congregating, not in places primarily designed for letting you buy your wife a cashmere sweater, yourself a new TV, and your kid a baseball glove, all in one stop.
Maybe malls will adapt into the above. But somehow I doubt it. :)
I'm only going to comment on the first point, as you've brought up precisely what I am now responsible for at distributed.net.
You're absolutely right. And we're working to fix it.
We've finalized a redesign of our web site and are beginning a complete rewrite of nearly all of our web content. After the major pages are finished, we'll go to work on the documentation, which is very lacking, often in some extremely important areas. The site will have a new hierarchial structure, with simple URLs for news, help, and downloads. Deep information will be even more readily accessible for those diehards who want it.
The changes will be rolling out in stages over the next thirty days.
Come back to distributed.net in a month's time. I promise, you won't be disappointed.
Client core source - the source that does the actual crunching - is entirely open and available at our web site.
We have good reasons for not releasing our network's source. One is that we would become instantly vulnerable to block spoofing, threatening the integrity of the effort.
I've put a rate clock up for this contest. It refreshes every two minutes and is continually updated by the master keyserver. Stats don't get any more accurate than this...
The Supreme Court will only get more Republican in the next few years, what with a likely George Dubya presidency and two justices set to retire in the next few years...
Yes, Microsoft should definitely settle, if they can. The Federales, however, have nothing to lose now - they've seen blood, and if they're smart, there'll be no turning back.
In order to settle, MS will have to put forth an extremely juicy offer, yet still one that would result in less carnage than a Supreme Court verdict would.
The ball is in the hands of Reno and her DoJ now.
On November 1, Microsoft and Intel were added to the Dow 30 Industrials, the most popular barometer of American (and thereby global) stock activity.
A severe drop in Microsoft could send the Dow plummeting. This would definitely not be good news for anyone (except of course those waiting to buy). Looks like the Dow boys picked the wrong time to add at least one of those two companies to the list...
Something to think about.
What do you mean, 'Grow as a person?' If you asked Hemos, he would probably tell you that he would much rather his house had not burned down, and he would gladly trade his newfound 'growth' for the possessions he just lost.
I could be wrong, and I don't speak for him. Just a hunch.
*cuts off your legs, arms, other extremities* - Let's see you lift that rock now, eh? Or anything at all for that matter...
Beware Bromides. Getting your house burned down sucks, plain and simple - there's no positive side to it. Insurance skyrockets, valuables are lost, effort has to be wasted rebuilding.
Drowning in what?
1999 has thus far been one of the top five most economically successful years of the twentieth century. This entire decade qualifies as the most prosperous, or is at least second to the Twenties. Our economy's engine is the microchip, say people with more education & experience in economics than the author of the above quote.
Yes, Tamagotchi is absurd. But it sells well, and kids all over the nation open their wallets for a Tam of their own - and that money helps move the economy forward.
In this world, profitless enterprises go to hell quickly. Nothing really useless lasts for long. Even psychics are going out of style.
If this constitutes drowning, then I'd like to see what this quote's author considers swimming.
Has not!
Computers help us do our work better. They do not promise to let us work less, or to simplify our lives, or to liberate us from [insert horror here].
What computers do do is magnify our productivity. As the anvil let us bend iron, the microchip offloads menial tasks, freeing the mind to think.
Architects, just as one example, no longer need to spend days painstakingly drawing perfect lines on blueprint; instead, they can sit at a CAD program and use their brains - arguably far more taxing! But the line-drawing is best left to a laser printer. Said architect might work twice as hard, now, with his computer; but he'll make five times as much money with the added clients he can accomodate.
That's what it all boils down to. The creation of wealth, the betterment of life. Computers are very good at helping us accomplish the above.
AppleInsider just posted a press shot of the new iMac.
Vernor Vinge's Technological Singularity should be required reading on this topic. I'll summarize it, for those unwilling to hit the link:
Within 30 years, we will have created computers that, intelligent or not, can solve problems faster than mankind can. The computers will, among other things, be able to build better computers faster than men can. An automated economy will emerge, with the artificial quasintelligences directing progress almost completely.
The change in how homo sapiens sapiens moves forward technologically will be approximately as drastic as that of homo sapiens neandertalis discovering fire. No Neandertal could have predicted what the world would have been like post-fire.
Will we live to see homo sapiens++?
I personally believe Vinge is correct. It'll be a hell of a ride.
I've read a number of comments deriding Rob, Jeff & Co for "selling out" and throwing away their affiliation to the open source software movement. I'd just like to ask these people, and anyone else who holds similar beliefs: what is wrong with making money?
The six dot three mil BSI received for /. has bought a lot, so far. It's bought four booty-kickin' servers to make sure everyone can get to the site whenever they want to, most visibly. But most importantly, it's bought the Malda and his boys freedom from worrying about what they're going to eat next week.
Without incentives, the vast majority programmers would not program. I sure wouldn't. I don't want to see the Internet turn into an infinitely deep pool of free information just for kicks; I want it to happen because it'll make us all rich, improving our lives immeasurably.
The point of the Internet is to get everyone rich. So quit harping about how Rob's tossed his ideals out the window. His ideals, I suspect, were never yours: if they had been, Slashdot would not exist.
I have just one question:
Has anybody seen or felt any improvement in the atmosphere at /. since the M2 system was implemented?
I'm quite sure that the karma does not have a half-life.
Everyone I've spoken to regarding MetaModeration has watched their karma plummet through the floor. It appears to take plunges soon after the user completes a batch of moderation - mine, for instance, dropped 3 points on the first day moderation was enabled (I was a moderator that day), and five points the next day I moderated. Other users have reported similar patterns.
I am convinced that massive negative meta-moderation of my moderation is causing this, and as a result, I am now afraid to moderate. In the last week, I've had one +4 post and one +5 post, and my karma is still five points lower than it was seven days ago.
What we're seeing here is moderators getting afraid to moderate (such as me - I keep doing it anyway 'cause my Karma is quite high, but I will stop when I'm within range of zero). This is not good.
The Meta-Moderation system is flawed in that it subtracts a full point for every negative vote, but does not add an equal amount for every positive vote. There is no way around this flaw, however: to add a positive integer for every positive vote to your moderation would probably cause the opposite; people's karma rocketing skyward.
I'm all for scrapping meta-moderation. Here's my replacement system:
Give each moderator a number of moderation points proportional to his or her karmic level.
The highly-ranked people have obviously got a handle on how to write a good comment. Wouldn't they, therefore, be the best people to tell good comments? Give them the weight they deserve. And keep all the other people in the system at a lower level to help out.
I searched /. for the story; alas, i could not locate it. I'm quite sure I read it here approximately a year ago.
To say that humans cannot create life is absurd.
Way back three point some-odd billion years ago, in the oxygenless primoridial soup that covered this planet's surface, a bunch of oils and proteins came together during a lightning strike to form an amino acid. That acid and others like it remained whole throughout that tumultuous period in Earth's history, and when things started to calm down a bit, found solace in a soap bubble with other amino acids, and merged with others like it, and began to undergo chemical reactions... and life was formed. That ain't too much of an oversimplification.
Half of this experiment was already reconstructed in a test-tube back in the 1950s - various chemicals and simulated lightning produced amino acids in laboratory conditions. This is reproducable. All we need to do is find the time (might take a long while) and recreate the other half.
Or maybe we'll find an easier, better way.
The reason we are the dominant species on this planet is that we possess reasoning brains. Humans have a knack for figuring stuff out, and for solving problems more efficiently than quasirandom genetic drift does. Saber-tooth tiger got big teeth? Use sharpened tree-limb to kill tiger at ten feet. Don't let him get within range! Eat good dinner.
The reasoning human mind also makes stuff like Slashdot, when it's bored.
I'm quite confident that the limits of what rational thought can accomplish lie approximately where the edge of the universe sits. If it exists, it can be understood.
Thus far, progress has not hit a single barrier it couldn't crush like a steamroller.
In the United States, you cannot be sued for linking to illegal material. Remember the suit a photographer whose images were linked to from IMDB brought? It was thrown out of court...
Sorry. This is a stretch. "Communist" contains the word "Commune", or a group of people who all work to create software for each others' computers, and not voluntarily at that. I and other "techno-literate libertarians" write my own software, and (because it doesn't hurt me) give it away as an afterthought.
Exactly. It all loops back to people being happier when they're working for their own good in collaboration with others. The others serve as a check on errors (bugs), and it's really easy to get them involved - but the primary purpose of any open-source project is to get the damned thing done, and make it the best it can be.
The open source movement exists because people want better software.
Many people admit that Communism is dead, but they often say they'd like it if it weren't tied to that totalitarian government it always seems bundled with.
But Communism can't come without that totalitarian government, much as Exploder can't come without Windows. The system does not work without a state to enforce it (much as Exploder wouldn't own the browser market if it weren't bundled with Windows; pardon the stretched analogy).
Communism requires people to work for the good of each other, not for themselves. Capitalism requires people to work for themselves to survive. This is the simple, straightforward difference between the two systems, but many people have a hard time grasping it.
Would you trust other people to harvest the raw materials that'll put food on your table? Or would you rather do it yourself?
Most people, including myself, answer "Give me the plowshare!" to the above. Once I'm done feeding myself, I've got no problem helping my neighbor harvest his crop, but only after I've got a full stomach. So, in Communist nations, the Government sticks a gun to your back while you harvest your neighbor's crop.
Linux wasn't created like this. People wrote software for themselves - whether they were just creating utilities for their own use, or they got a "natural high" from helping other people, they had their own interests at heart. And they hate central authority.
We're anarcho-libertarians. The exact opposite of Communists.