A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
Tell that to all of the bloggers that went out and reported on what was happening during the Tsunami, or Katrina, or the Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When you've got literally millions of reporters all out there reporting, and almost that many with decently high-end cameras taking decent photos...it sortof becomes unnecessary to throw Dan Rather on a jet.
They're trying to grasp for anything that is floating. We've been telling every media company for the last 15 years that they need to embrace the internet. "The Internet" (it really feels awkward even calling it that) is the way of the future, and that dead-tree distribution is going to go away.
Some of them have embraced this, some of them have not. The ones that *have* are still making money, the ones that haven't...well....
Look, it's an age thing. As morbid as it sounds, humans have a usable life of about 80 years before we wear out and stop working. The people who were using your old model are wearing out, dying, and not buying your products.
The younger generation, the one accustomed to receiving their news the very minute (or second) that it happens are taking over. It used to be that the newspapers and magazines had the advantage, they could afford printing presses. Well imagine if a printing company decided that they were going to print and distribute your magazine or newspaper for free.
THAT is the internet. It isn't a series of tubes, it is an amazingly cheap distribution method for media.
One morning I came in and was looking at the logs. SMART was reporting that one of the disks in one of the servers was going to go bad soon. Not 15 minutes after i even noticed this in the logs, an IBM tech was there with a fresh one ready to replace it.
How? The server called home, told IBM about the error, and they disbatched a tech immediately.
If that "sucks", your service must come with free hookers or something.
Riiiight... That's why the term "rocket scientist" is used as a synonym for intelligence - because the engineering is so easy anyone can do it...
It is also why the term "Rocket Scientist" is a bit of a joke among rocket scientists. It ISN'T a difficult engineering problem.
We've been lobbing rockets around the planet for THOUSANDS of years. Granted, we only got precise with them in the last hundred years or so, but the term "Rocket Scientist" as somebody who is excessively intelligent is a result of the publics complete and total misunderstanding of the topic.
"Rocket Surgeon" is the preferred term, for future reference.
This isn't Apple, Spotify or any stores fault. It's the music business.
The apple apologists need to seriously STFU with this "it isn't apple's fault!" nonsense. They're partners. Apple is not some holy child that hath cometh down from the mountain to bestow upon the unwashed masses all that is holy and good.
They're a profit-finding company. The DRM serves their profit-driven interests. Bought that song on your computer at work? Want to listen to it on your computer at home? Well guess what, charlie, unless you find some obscure bullshit setting in some hidden window in some far off corner of some far off menu in iTunes, $1 more shall go to the Steve. "BUttttt BUTTT!!!! It's the MUSSSIC company's fault!!1 Aplle can do know rong!!" Guess what, jackass, apple represents one of, if not THE, largest marketplace for selling music. They have very effectively situated themselves in a position that makes them almost irreplaceable. Why do you think people don't use amazon? Or why yahoo failed? Or why microsoft's VASTLY superior subscription model is ignored? Do any of you people ever pull your head out of your asshole for long enough to realize that maybe, JUST MAYBE that company that is constantly boasting record profit and record stock growth might. just. MAYBE be after your wallet?
Apple is in the same position as wal-mart. Wal-mart goes to manufacturing companies and tells them to start making their packages smaller so that they will save money on diesel fuel. Guess what happens? They do it. They do it because if wal-mart stops selling their goods, they're going to take a major hit in the wallet.
It still blows me away how many people leave these stickers on their laptops. My mom has got a laptop that is easily 4 years old that *STILL* has the sticker advertising how "Easy to Use" it is complete with ethnically diverse photo of a group of people huddled around a computer. Every time that I try to remove these she FREAKS out and says something to the effect of "But what if i need to know what it has?" To me, this illustrates just HOW DEEP the ignorance of most computer users goes.
Mom, I love you, but PLEASE let me take the stickers off of your laptop.
This comes from highly intelligent people not having an outlet for their intelligence. They guy is a painter that lives in a world where paint has been banned. Of COURSE he is a criminal.
The engineer in all of us is going to go "What caused this? how can we fix it?". I don't know. Part of me wants to blame the schools. From personal experience, I know that some of the things my friends and I did in high school were illegal. The school system hated us. We were all failing out of class and constantly arguing with the teachers. School wasn't giving any of us an opportunity to get out there and stretch our intellectual legs. Naturally we gravitated towards breaking into the computers at the school. I think that a good majority of slashdot probably has had a similar experience to what I'm describing. Most of us did exceptionally well on our college entrance exams (good enough to get accepted with our horrible grades, at least) and some (not all) of us even tried going to college. College was more of the same. Failing classes, teachers that hated us, and breaking into the computers... It was like a drug. The real world was boring, plain, predictable. Computers offered us a sandbox to play in that had things in it that made us work. It is the same phenomenon that gets people addicted to WOW; WOW allows people the social stimulation that they don't (generally) find in the real world.
just make sure that the message is a powerpoint presentation of a scanned copy of a photograph of a screenshot of a PDF of a.tiff file created using the "Microsoft OFfice Document Image Writeer" being embedded in an iframe of a webpage that is being displayed inside of a the preview window of microsoft frontpage and you should be okay.
IN fact, you better split the screenshot into a multipart rar file, zip that into a.zip file, then tar that, then zip it again, then tar it again (so that it is twice as compressed).
Make sure that this is accessible via an attached web page containing a link to a windows share.
No. It means a bunch of drunk drivers will be on the streets free to run whoever they want over.
I think that what it actually means is that a bunch of people who supposedly violated some arbitrary limit on the limit of a specific substance in their bloodstream might have their lives un-ruined.
Is this going to matter for the people who were obviously intoxicated? No. This is going to matter for the people who passed a field sobriety test, didn't appear to be intoxicated, but admitted to having a beer that night and were required to take a breathalyser.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I live in Phoenix, AZ. We have got some of the most absurd drink driving laws in the country. They recently changed the law from.08 to "impaired to the slightest degree". Thats right, boys, did you use mouthwash before heading out tonight? Well, you're spending a month in jail and losing your license.
Wanna cut drunk driving? Keep the f*cking public transportation system running until 3:00am. Provide a free (or at least cheap) taxi service. Don't make a bunch of "creative" parking laws so that if you decide to take a cab home your car gets towed.
See, a lot of companies wouldn't like the idea of people "playing" with their servers, even if they were technically competent.
Yeah, I know what you mean. When I say "play" I mean more "use". Although, I would imagine a lot of the crazy google-hacks that are always hinted at the result of somebody "playing" (which is why google encourages you to spend 1 day of your week working on your own projects).
What if a company needs something done a certain way?
Give the hacker types a few laptops and a credit card. They'll have you a working perl script to do whatever you want over the weekend and at a total cost to you of whatever their bar-tab was.
I hope you aren't relying on this hire to manage your backups or do anything else that you deem critical. If his attention to detail is that lax on something that is presumably important to him, imagine how lax it'll be on something that's important to you.
I imagine that you're a windows guy...
Find a good BSD hacker and look around his house. It is probably disgusting. Really, REALLY disgusting. Empty bottles of gin and exotic Belgian beer laying all over the place. Random parts from servers built in the 80's strewn about the bedroom/office/machine room. A shower that never gets used, etc. etc. etc.
Now look around "inside" one of their machines. I imagine that you will find the computer-equivalent of a germaphobic neat-freak.
They types of people that end up being really great Unix hackers are usually highly, highly intelligent, and usually "suffer" from some mental disorders like manic depression (common among people with excessively above-average intelligence) and OCD. These both end up working to the advantage of whoever is employing them. These people's LIVES are their machines. They usually have a closer bond with their servers than they do with any people and because of this, they take excellent care of them. They're the type of people that will work 3 straight days and sleep on the floor under their desk if need be to keep things running.
Is it really that odd, though? Think about the attachment that people get to their dogs... Think about the ammount of time these "geeks" spend with their 'puters.
So yeah, if you want a guy that is going to dress really nicely, get along really well with his/her coworkers, show up at 8:00 and leave at 5:00, turn his phone off on the weekends, and never, EVER come up with anything creative, hire the guy with the perfect resume printed on some exotic paper, who shows up in a pressed jacket and tie and has pretty eyes.
If you want a guy who well get so emotionally attached to his job that he will never, EVER let the machines go down, EVER, hire the guy that shows up in an old t-shirt, some shorts and flip-flops, has long hair and a beard, and wrote his resume on the back of a napkin.
Gahhh...ANGER. This shit is killing tech (warning: that last statement isn't true). Geeks aren't allowed to be geeks anymore! We're expected to be accountants, but here is the problem: we're not! Geekery requires vast amounts of creativity. Creativity is not fostered by forcing us into little cubicles, making us show up during "normal" business hours and getting pissed off when we don't "dress for success". You want me to perform? Let me set my own hours! Let me dress the way that I want to, let me listen to my music as loud as I want, let me drink beer during lunch, let me work from home when I want to! I ENJOY geeking, I love it. I do it for *fun* and I would probably do it for you free in exchange for letting me "play" with your servers.
per tradition, the President has a lot of political power to push an agenda, yes?
Explain this, please.
If by "a lot of political power to push an agenda" you mean "works with the lawmakers and talks to them" then yes, absolutely.
But here is a magical, wonderful secret about the United States Government: YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN IT! You can actually talk to the senators too! Just like the President! The senators and Congressman represent you. They work for you. The collective will of the people in their precinct are their boss.
Re:Ultimate ubuntu kung fu move
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
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· Score: 1
But, uh, why haven't you tried OS X?
Maybe I'm part gypsy or something, but just about all of my desktops are the scrounged-parts-together variety. If apple would sell me a copy of OSX and let me run it on my own hardware, I would.
Re:Ultimate ubuntu kung fu move
on
Ubuntu Kung Fu
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
About a year ago I switched from gentoo to OpenBSD on the servers here at work (postfix/spamassassin/courier-imap etc, snort, openvpn, apache/mysql, vsftpd) and haven't looked back since.
I know this is considered/. heresy, but I really believe that windows is the best OS for the desktop. I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
I have a feeling that I'm not the minority here, either. I runx Xming on my desktop at work and use putty's X11 forwarding to view things like etherape (wish they would write a client for windwos..that is a really neat piece of software) when I need X, and use putty for everything else. As long as your head is firmly rammed up your ass you should be fine doing the same. Run firefox with noscript. Keep the install light and enjoy being able to install things like the latest version of flash the day that they come out. OpenBSD for [most] of the servers, gentoo for the rest, and windows on the desktop.
Slashdot Mirror
Can step #1 be teaching everybody in my office that Caps lock is not the same as shift?
Also that you need to turn on num-lock to use the numpad?
Seriously...what ever happened to requiring basic computer skills to get an office job?
Signal-To-Noise
If only there were a few million people out there willing to filter through this stuff and decide what was good and what wasn't.
Yeah, you're right, blogging will never take off.
A cheap distribution method doesn't do that much to lower the costs of gathering the news.
Tell that to all of the bloggers that went out and reported on what was happening during the Tsunami, or Katrina, or the Terrorist attacks in Mumbai.
When you've got literally millions of reporters all out there reporting, and almost that many with decently high-end cameras taking decent photos...it sortof becomes unnecessary to throw Dan Rather on a jet.
They're trying to grasp for anything that is floating. We've been telling every media company for the last 15 years that they need to embrace the internet. "The Internet" (it really feels awkward even calling it that) is the way of the future, and that dead-tree distribution is going to go away.
Some of them have embraced this, some of them have not. The ones that *have* are still making money, the ones that haven't...well....
Look, it's an age thing. As morbid as it sounds, humans have a usable life of about 80 years before we wear out and stop working. The people who were using your old model are wearing out, dying, and not buying your products.
The younger generation, the one accustomed to receiving their news the very minute (or second) that it happens are taking over. It used to be that the newspapers and magazines had the advantage, they could afford printing presses. Well imagine if a printing company decided that they were going to print and distribute your magazine or newspaper for free.
THAT is the internet. It isn't a series of tubes, it is an amazingly cheap distribution method for media.
Wait wait wait.
Are you trying to say that they just took snort and repackaged it with a different name and some shiny new buzzwords?
That sort of thing *NEVER* happens in tech!
This has all happened before.
Even IBM does better, and they suck.
One morning I came in and was looking at the logs. SMART was reporting that one of the disks in one of the servers was going to go bad soon. Not 15 minutes after i even noticed this in the logs, an IBM tech was there with a fresh one ready to replace it.
How? The server called home, told IBM about the error, and they disbatched a tech immediately.
If that "sucks", your service must come with free hookers or something.
Is not honor reward enough? Doing the right thing is its own reward.
I can't take honor to the store and convert it into food. The power company also doesn't take honor as a form of payment.
At 6:20 pm EST there was a SEG FAULT and skynet must reboot to continue genocide
I think what you mean to say was:
Operatior action required on device SKYNET1A (Cancel Reply Ignore)
Unchecked Function
Reply:__________________________________________________
Riiiight... That's why the term "rocket scientist" is used as a synonym for intelligence - because the engineering is so easy anyone can do it...
It is also why the term "Rocket Scientist" is a bit of a joke among rocket scientists. It ISN'T a difficult engineering problem.
We've been lobbing rockets around the planet for THOUSANDS of years. Granted, we only got precise with them in the last hundred years or so, but the term "Rocket Scientist" as somebody who is excessively intelligent is a result of the publics complete and total misunderstanding of the topic.
"Rocket Surgeon" is the preferred term, for future reference.
This isn't Apple, Spotify or any stores fault. It's the music business.
The apple apologists need to seriously STFU with this "it isn't apple's fault!" nonsense. They're partners. Apple is not some holy child that hath cometh down from the mountain to bestow upon the unwashed masses all that is holy and good.
They're a profit-finding company. The DRM serves their profit-driven interests. Bought that song on your computer at work? Want to listen to it on your computer at home? Well guess what, charlie, unless you find some obscure bullshit setting in some hidden window in some far off corner of some far off menu in iTunes, $1 more shall go to the Steve.
"BUttttt BUTTT!!!! It's the MUSSSIC company's fault!!1 Aplle can do know rong!!"
Guess what, jackass, apple represents one of, if not THE, largest marketplace for selling music. They have very effectively situated themselves in a position that makes them almost irreplaceable. Why do you think people don't use amazon? Or why yahoo failed? Or why microsoft's VASTLY superior subscription model is ignored? Do any of you people ever pull your head out of your asshole for long enough to realize that maybe, JUST MAYBE that company that is constantly boasting record profit and record stock growth might. just. MAYBE be after your wallet?
Apple is in the same position as wal-mart. Wal-mart goes to manufacturing companies and tells them to start making their packages smaller so that they will save money on diesel fuel. Guess what happens? They do it. They do it because if wal-mart stops selling their goods, they're going to take a major hit in the wallet.
Apple is NOT on your side. Get over it.
It still blows me away how many people leave these stickers on their laptops. My mom has got a laptop that is easily 4 years old that *STILL* has the sticker advertising how "Easy to Use" it is complete with ethnically diverse photo of a group of people huddled around a computer.
Every time that I try to remove these she FREAKS out and says something to the effect of "But what if i need to know what it has?"
To me, this illustrates just HOW DEEP the ignorance of most computer users goes.
Mom, I love you, but PLEASE let me take the stickers off of your laptop.
This comes from highly intelligent people not having an outlet for their intelligence. They guy is a painter that lives in a world where paint has been banned. Of COURSE he is a criminal.
The engineer in all of us is going to go "What caused this? how can we fix it?". I don't know. Part of me wants to blame the schools. From personal experience, I know that some of the things my friends and I did in high school were illegal. The school system hated us. We were all failing out of class and constantly arguing with the teachers. School wasn't giving any of us an opportunity to get out there and stretch our intellectual legs. Naturally we gravitated towards breaking into the computers at the school.
I think that a good majority of slashdot probably has had a similar experience to what I'm describing.
Most of us did exceptionally well on our college entrance exams (good enough to get accepted with our horrible grades, at least) and some (not all) of us even tried going to college. College was more of the same. Failing classes, teachers that hated us, and breaking into the computers...
It was like a drug. The real world was boring, plain, predictable. Computers offered us a sandbox to play in that had things in it that made us work.
It is the same phenomenon that gets people addicted to WOW; WOW allows people the social stimulation that they don't (generally) find in the real world.
just make sure that the message is a powerpoint presentation of a scanned copy of a photograph of a screenshot of a PDF of a .tiff file created using the "Microsoft OFfice Document Image Writeer" being embedded in an iframe of a webpage that is being displayed inside of a the preview window of microsoft frontpage and you should be okay.
IN fact, you better split the screenshot into a multipart rar file, zip that into a .zip file, then tar that, then zip it again, then tar it again (so that it is twice as compressed).
Make sure that this is accessible via an attached web page containing a link to a windows share.
Am I bitter towards the users today?
No. Why?
No. It means a bunch of drunk drivers will be on the streets free to run whoever they want over.
I think that what it actually means is that a bunch of people who supposedly violated some arbitrary limit on the limit of a specific substance in their bloodstream might have their lives un-ruined.
Is this going to matter for the people who were obviously intoxicated? No. This is going to matter for the people who passed a field sobriety test, didn't appear to be intoxicated, but admitted to having a beer that night and were required to take a breathalyser.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I live in Phoenix, AZ. We have got some of the most absurd drink driving laws in the country. They recently changed the law from .08 to "impaired to the slightest degree". Thats right, boys, did you use mouthwash before heading out tonight? Well, you're spending a month in jail and losing your license.
Wanna cut drunk driving? Keep the f*cking public transportation system running until 3:00am. Provide a free (or at least cheap) taxi service. Don't make a bunch of "creative" parking laws so that if you decide to take a cab home your car gets towed.
Great. And now my company reliese on some garbage unreadable perl script that no one else will be able to maintain. No thanks.
The alternative is to rely on the work of some overpaid guy in a polo with a bachelor's degree in marketing and to pay him $40,000 a year.
If you continue to employ said hackers, this is not a problem.
See, a lot of companies wouldn't like the idea of people "playing" with their servers, even if they were technically competent.
Yeah, I know what you mean. When I say "play" I mean more "use". Although, I would imagine a lot of the crazy google-hacks that are always hinted at the result of somebody "playing" (which is why google encourages you to spend 1 day of your week working on your own projects).
What if a company needs something done a certain way?
Give the hacker types a few laptops and a credit card. They'll have you a working perl script to do whatever you want over the weekend and at a total cost to you of whatever their bar-tab was.
I hope you aren't relying on this hire to manage your backups or do anything else that you deem critical. If his attention to detail is that lax on something that is presumably important to him, imagine how lax it'll be on something that's important to you.
I imagine that you're a windows guy...
Find a good BSD hacker and look around his house. It is probably disgusting. Really, REALLY disgusting. Empty bottles of gin and exotic Belgian beer laying all over the place. Random parts from servers built in the 80's strewn about the bedroom/office/machine room. A shower that never gets used, etc. etc. etc.
Now look around "inside" one of their machines. I imagine that you will find the computer-equivalent of a germaphobic neat-freak.
They types of people that end up being really great Unix hackers are usually highly, highly intelligent, and usually "suffer" from some mental disorders like manic depression (common among people with excessively above-average intelligence) and OCD. These both end up working to the advantage of whoever is employing them. These people's LIVES are their machines. They usually have a closer bond with their servers than they do with any people and because of this, they take excellent care of them. They're the type of people that will work 3 straight days and sleep on the floor under their desk if need be to keep things running.
Is it really that odd, though? Think about the attachment that people get to their dogs... Think about the ammount of time these "geeks" spend with their 'puters.
So yeah, if you want a guy that is going to dress really nicely, get along really well with his/her coworkers, show up at 8:00 and leave at 5:00, turn his phone off on the weekends, and never, EVER come up with anything creative, hire the guy with the perfect resume printed on some exotic paper, who shows up in a pressed jacket and tie and has pretty eyes.
If you want a guy who well get so emotionally attached to his job that he will never, EVER let the machines go down, EVER, hire the guy that shows up in an old t-shirt, some shorts and flip-flops, has long hair and a beard, and wrote his resume on the back of a napkin.
Gahhh...ANGER. This shit is killing tech (warning: that last statement isn't true). Geeks aren't allowed to be geeks anymore! We're expected to be accountants, but here is the problem: we're not! Geekery requires vast amounts of creativity. Creativity is not fostered by forcing us into little cubicles, making us show up during "normal" business hours and getting pissed off when we don't "dress for success". You want me to perform? Let me set my own hours! Let me dress the way that I want to, let me listen to my music as loud as I want, let me drink beer during lunch, let me work from home when I want to! I ENJOY geeking, I love it. I do it for *fun* and I would probably do it for you free in exchange for letting me "play" with your servers.
I used to meta-moderate almost every time I saw the link for it.
I tried once after we switched to slashdot v2.0 and could not figure it out, so I haven't moderated since.
can you provide citations for any of this?
per tradition, the President has a lot of political power to push an agenda, yes?
Explain this, please.
If by "a lot of political power to push an agenda" you mean "works with the lawmakers and talks to them" then yes, absolutely.
But here is a magical, wonderful secret about the United States Government: YOU CAN PARTICIPATE IN IT! You can actually talk to the senators too! Just like the President!
The senators and Congressman represent you. They work for you. The collective will of the people in their precinct are their boss.
Have you meta-moderated lately?
Senate elections aren't for another 2 years.
But, uh, why haven't you tried OS X?
Maybe I'm part gypsy or something, but just about all of my desktops are the scrounged-parts-together variety. If apple would sell me a copy of OSX and let me run it on my own hardware, I would.
About a year ago I switched from gentoo to OpenBSD on the servers here at work (postfix/spamassassin/courier-imap etc, snort, openvpn, apache/mysql, vsftpd) and haven't looked back since.
I know this is considered /. heresy, but I really believe that windows is the best OS for the desktop. I've run gentoo, suse, mandrake, redhat, centos, federoa, ubuntu, and I'm sure a few others over the years and none of them have even come CLOSE to the usability of windows.
I have a feeling that I'm not the minority here, either. I runx Xming on my desktop at work and use putty's X11 forwarding to view things like etherape (wish they would write a client for windwos..that is a really neat piece of software) when I need X, and use putty for everything else.
As long as your head is firmly rammed up your ass you should be fine doing the same. Run firefox with noscript. Keep the install light and enjoy being able to install things like the latest version of flash the day that they come out.
OpenBSD for [most] of the servers, gentoo for the rest, and windows on the desktop.
I'm guessing you haven't seen a photo of him
I'm guessing that you haven't talked to a girl aged 12-25 lately.