I would like to use your tag line.
I can't find how to edit my tag on Slashdot anymore. I dug all around in preferences and could not find it.
Where do I go to modify my tag line?
I should not have to do all that leg work to insure that I'm getting what I'm paying for. Imagine if every time your car stopped working you had to do all that you propose I do for my internet connection. Moreover, my point was that there is a limit to how much investigative legwork I will undertake to fix the problem before I just say, "Fuck it, this isn't worth the hassle." Perception is reality. If ISPs create the perception that the internet has slowed to intolerable speeds, thanks to throttling, it's going to cost them business.
What we really need is a good tool that you can log into that gives a precise, accurate assessment of your internet connection, and pinpoints where the slowdowns are happening, if any. And it needs to be immune to having its results inflated by being detected and enhanced by QoS services, like many of today's speed tests are rumored to be.
I recently tried to FTP upload a home movie to my web site so my family could download it. I noticed my FTP speeds were incredibly slow - slower than dial-up speeds and I have a 6MB/384K cable connection.
I've noticed that my P2P traffic seems to upload OK but downloads very slowly.
And I don't know where the problem is.
Knology, my ISP, claims they don't throttle. But how do I know someone somewhere along the way isn't throttling?
Even if I bothered to dig into the problem, I'm sure all I would get for my troubles would be a lot of finger pointing.
The bottom line is, if the internet quits working the way I want to use it, I'll quit paying for it, because it will have become useless to me.
I do. I see nothing wrong with protection of life and property, but you don't need a concealed gun to do that.
Well, you don't if open carry is allowed, I guess. There are, of course, many examples of people who actually have protected life and property with a concealed gun.
Basically they should outlaw any gun under five feet long. And bullets should be ridiculously priced, like $10k or something (although every 5ft or longer gun would come with one free bullet). That keeps the right for self defence but gets rid of the morons shooting at each other for fun.
Well, at least it would keep the right of self defense for the rich, at least.
You do realize that people who have concealed carry permits are 5-300 times less likely to commit crimes than people without them, right?
I've largely given up watching TV, as most of my "sit on my ass" time at home is spent playing games (COD2 addict) or surfing the web.
Given the choice between cable and internet, I take the internet. We had in introductory rate for cable+internet for 3 months at $55/month, then it went up to $100, at which point I canceled the TV part and stuck with just the cable for the same price.
We just signed on with Knowlogy for basic cable + 6MB internet for $67/moth. I figure an extra $10 a month for TV is an OK expense. It's not worth any more than that to me.
But TV over IP just isn't there yet. About the best I can reliably watch with my 6MB cable connection are the poor quality flash videos you see on Youtube. Try to watch anything of any kind of TV resolution and it's play....pause....play....pause....play.
I strongly suspect that I'm not getting the speed advertised on my cable internet, but I don't know how to realistically test it since I've heard all the ISPs give priority QoS to the common speed tests out there. I know my FTP upload attempts are lucky to break 43kbps, last time I tried.
>If you have a horse carriage business, and I invent the car and sell it, then your >horse carriages will soon get worthless. Am I a thief for making your horse carriages worthless?
No, that is just obsolescence through innovation, and that's a good thing.
It's different when your mousetrap becomes valueless because someone else bettered humanity by inventing a better mousetrap, THUS ELIMINATING DEMAND FOR/YOUR/ MOUSTRAP. It's another thing entirely when when someone comes along and just devalues your asset by making it available to everyone for free. It's not like demand for my asset went away, or you did the legwork to make something better that people preferred instead. Copying my asset and distributing it to the world just makes it worthless, in terms of being able to sell it.
>Name things after what they are. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft.
I never claimed otherwise. I just said the end result is the same. This is like saying stabbing me to death and shooting me to death are two different things. Yes, of course they are. But in the end I'm just as dead.
I bought a DVD burner for my PC. I also bought a TV tuner card for my PC. My plan was to watch episodes of Battlestar Galatcia on cable, piped into my PC, record it, edit out the commercials, and then burn it to a DVD to watch later.
Not only did the burning take a long time, but I never got DVDs that reliably played in either of the 2 DVD players we had at the time. They would play for about 2 minutes, then the video would pixellate while the audio kept going for a few minutes, and then it would stop.
After dinking around on the support forums for a while I was told that burning DVDs was a black art, not to burn at the full rated speed of the drive, yadda yadda yadda.
Eventually I gave up. It was easier and much faster to just save the raw video file on a hard drive, and go buy a 500GB hard drive to store all my video on. Now I watch all videos off of my hard drive. Burning to DVD was time consuming, tedious, and unreliable.
>If I shoplift a CD, the proprietor no longer has that CD. If I infringe your copyright you still >have both the work and its copyright.
But the end result is the same: I had something of value, and afterwards it no longer has any value.
If you steal my physical CD, I can't sell it anymore. If you infringe on my copyright and distribute a bajillion copies of my CD for free, I can't sell it anymore either.
>The problem is social, not technical. >Americans "need" to drive these huge cars to work and back.
I've heard rumors of $4/gallon by summer.
This is going to change a lot of people's habits very quickly. It has certainly changed mine. I used to be all about horsepower. Now I'm all about mileage.
I'm looking for 60MPG+, 50MPH+, 150 mile range, rain or shine capable. Ideally it should cost less than $10,000, but closer to $5,000. Electric would be nice, too.
I've been waiting for these little micro-cars to come out on the market. I had high hopes for the "Smart Car", but it's price is up around $12,000, and now they are down to 40MPG or so.
I think we are entering a phase of American driving where people will have a tiny, one-person, gas-sipping commuter car to go to work every day, and a "family car" for long-distance travels on the weekends.
And before everyone freaks out about the safety, I figure it's safer than a motorcycle.
>I suggest that your experience with "free" DVD ripping/re-encoding software should change >your mind only about the state of "open source DVD ripping software right now". My >experience with DVD ripping is similar to yours except that I eventually found the >package that worked the way I want it to. I had to try a lot of different applications >before I found the one that worked for me. It was a pain. I wouldn't have bothered if >I didn't do everything else in linux. However- this does not imply that OSS is >infeasible but that DVD ripping is in an unpolished state.
I think part of the reason why I found this particular exercise so frustrating is because if there is any arena where I would have expected the "free" stuff to work well it would be in the arena of ripping and re-encoding DVDs (and music, but that's not the point here), since the same people after free software are likely after free digital content, too.
Now I know there have been some tweaks to the copy protection schemes since then, but DeCSS has been around since 1999 - almost 10 years. I would have thought by now the process of taking a DVD and converting it into a.AVI file would be a slam-dunk by now. Maybe it's because only in the last couple of years has the price of hard drive storage really plummeted is such a thing really feasible.
>I want software that is written by people who write software because they love well written software that does what they want- not just because they crave my money.
I personally don't care what actually motivates the folks to write good software. And you are right - there are free software products out there that are really good, and there are commercial products out there that suck. So my comment really was just a fit of pique.
But I can tell you this - if I had paid money for any of the free DVD re-encoding software packages I installed, I'd be screaming for a refund. And I can't help but think that that axe hanging over the programmer's head helps ensure a better product.
>Then why the fuck do you need to comment? Facebook obviously isn't for you.
Uh, because that's what internet BBS forums are/for/? Because the GP asked what Facebook was all about? Honestly, did you read any of the preceding?
>Unless, I dare say... You're a bit lonely?
Hah. Look, I'm married and I have a wonderful daughter. This in itself would be fulfilling. But in addition I participate in medieval re-enactment and consequently hang out with hundreds of the same group of folks once a month, and I'm close friends with perhaps half a dozen of them that I've known for years and we get together often outside of re-enactment (LAN parties, etc.)
>It benefits people with active social lives. Not surprising then that so many slashdotters seem to be baffled by it.
It sounds just the opposite though. People don't seem to be using Facebook to socialize, they use it to digitally eavesdrop on the mundanities of people they no longer keep up with very well.
Except for the examples provided where people use it as a meant so schedule physical meetings, it doesn't sound like real, honest-to-goodness socializing, it sounds like a substitute for it.
>Anecdote: So this girl I know in meatspace asks me if I'm coming to her party, I don't know what party she meant...
This is where I would pull out a pencil and get the details of when and where the party was. I suppose it is marginally easier to say, "Oh, go check out my facebook page for the details" so you don't have to write anything down, but it doesn't seem to be/that/ huge of a thing to me
>Personally I find I don't have the time or perhaps the willingness to stay up to date with the >100 or so people who I have probably been fairly good friends with in the past 15 years
You see, I think that really sums up the problem for me, and explains why social networking sites don't appeal to me. I don't think I've had but perhaps 10 people I've been fairly good friends with in the past 15 years, and I keep in regular touch with all but 2 of them. The idea of having 100 or so fairly good friends is truly astonishing to me.
You know, youth may actually have a lot to do with it.
After reading the trivial things you get to keep track of from the post just above yours (I.E., guy B leaves the American Sandwich Society), I gather that this sort of things gives you very trivial data about people - things you just don't really need to know or keep track of.
When I was younger I had time for such dalliances. But as an adult with a 50+ hour work week, a wife and a child, a house, cars, and the rare time out for hobbies and gaming, I just don't have time to keep up with trivia any more. I mean there is so little time for the actual/important/ things in my life that I just don't have the time to care that "Guy B is friends with Guy C", that "Girl A is no longer single", etc. etc. etc.
>Hmmm... well, if you used a fake name, then maybe all your former friends did too. >The site only works if people use their real names.
I really don't have any former friends. There is one guy I've lost track of over the years, but he never kept a phone (his girlfriends kept calling getting him in trouble with his live-in girlfriend) and he hated computers so I doubt he's on the web anyway. But other than him, I don't have any long-lost buddies I'm trying to keep track of. I never had friends in high school so I'm not looking for long-ago classmates. I wasn't a traditional college student (I worked full time and went to school to get my degree) so I don't have any college buddies to track down, either.
If you just want to look people up, why not go use Yahoo People Search? Why opt into yet another database so you can be found?
>It enables the maintenance of casual friendships without having to write/phone explicitly.
This concept is completely foreign to me. If you are worthy enough of friendship than I will make the effort to maintain that friendship explicitly. If you aren't worthy enough of friendship then I'm not going to be interested in your digital trivia on some web page.
>If you think about it, this is how most casual friendships work - I don't specifially talk to John down >the hall at work to catch up, I might bump into him in the coffee room, see he's got a new shirt, find out >it was his birthday yesterday etc. etc.. Just seeing and bumping into someone lets you stay in touch without it being an effort.
The people I interface with at work are not friends, they are coworkers. I do happen to have a friend at work, but he is an actual friend, and I maintain our friendship by traditional means, speaking, telephone, email, going out to lunch, having his family over for dinner, etc. The rest of my coworkers, however, I don't care to interface with except for work-related matters. I don't care what kind of shirt they are wearing, when their birthday is, or any other trivial detail about them except whatever information I need from them to execute work functions. This is not to say I might not make additional friends out of co-workers, just that I don't need "casual" friendships.
>Email works for people you really want to stay in touch with, and chat forums work for a bunch of people who want to discuss the same topic(s).
This works for me.
>On Facebook I can find out that Fred who I went to school with is into a particular band too, >and if there's a couple of other guys from school 10 years ago maybe a group of us could go to a gig.
I figure if I haven't spoken to you in 6 months then you are off my radar. I don't have enough time to keep adequate track of all the people actually actively present in my life. I guess I just don't feel the need to go dredging up the past to fulfill my friendship needs.
What you've said about Facebook jives with what other people have told me about it. Ultimately I figure I'm just anti-social and consequently the thrill of accumulating lots of "casual friends" just holds very little appeal to me. I'm also one of those people who never asks strangers, "How are you doing?" because I don't really care how some stranger is doing, and I know it's just a dumb little thing that people say to each other as a greeting and most people don't care how you are doing, either.
>Staying in touch with a bunch of people who you do not care very much for their >center of interest is one of the most worthless activity i've ever heard of.
My sentiments exactly. It also smacks of voyeurism to me. Maybe that is part of the appeal?
Slashdot Mirror
I would like to use your tag line. I can't find how to edit my tag on Slashdot anymore. I dug all around in preferences and could not find it. Where do I go to modify my tag line?
You win the cookie for the reference. :)
Why don't they all just paint their satellites black?
I'm aware of all the things it could be.
I should not have to do all that leg work to insure that I'm getting what I'm paying for. Imagine if every time your car stopped working you had to do all that you propose I do for my internet connection. Moreover, my point was that there is a limit to how much investigative legwork I will undertake to fix the problem before I just say, "Fuck it, this isn't worth the hassle." Perception is reality. If ISPs create the perception that the internet has slowed to intolerable speeds, thanks to throttling, it's going to cost them business.
What we really need is a good tool that you can log into that gives a precise, accurate assessment of your internet connection, and pinpoints where the slowdowns are happening, if any. And it needs to be immune to having its results inflated by being detected and enhanced by QoS services, like many of today's speed tests are rumored to be.
I recently tried to FTP upload a home movie to my web site so my family could download it. I noticed my FTP speeds were incredibly slow - slower than dial-up speeds and I have a 6MB/384K cable connection.
I've noticed that my P2P traffic seems to upload OK but downloads very slowly.
And I don't know where the problem is.
Knology, my ISP, claims they don't throttle. But how do I know someone somewhere along the way isn't throttling?
Even if I bothered to dig into the problem, I'm sure all I would get for my troubles would be a lot of finger pointing.
The bottom line is, if the internet quits working the way I want to use it, I'll quit paying for it, because it will have become useless to me.
This, once again, highlights the trouble of using "remotely hosted applications" - you are not in control of your data.
/I/ lose it it's on /my/ head.
I always POP my email down to my own local computer.
At least if
>Just because we CAN do something doesn't mean we SHOULD. If something CAN be done it WILL.
I do. I see nothing wrong with protection of life and property, but you don't need a concealed gun to do that.
Well, you don't if open carry is allowed, I guess. There are, of course, many examples of people who actually have protected life and property with a concealed gun.
Basically they should outlaw any gun under five feet long. And bullets should be ridiculously priced, like $10k or something (although every 5ft or longer gun would come with one free bullet). That keeps the right for self defence but gets rid of the morons shooting at each other for fun.
Well, at least it would keep the right of self defense for the rich, at least.
You do realize that people who have concealed carry permits are 5-300 times less likely to commit crimes than people without them, right?
I've largely given up watching TV, as most of my "sit on my ass" time at home is spent playing games (COD2 addict) or surfing the web.
Given the choice between cable and internet, I take the internet. We had in introductory rate for cable+internet for 3 months at $55/month, then it went up to $100, at which point I canceled the TV part and stuck with just the cable for the same price.
We just signed on with Knowlogy for basic cable + 6MB internet for $67/moth. I figure an extra $10 a month for TV is an OK expense. It's not worth any more than that to me.
But TV over IP just isn't there yet. About the best I can reliably watch with my 6MB cable connection are the poor quality flash videos you see on Youtube. Try to watch anything of any kind of TV resolution and it's play....pause....play....pause....play.
I strongly suspect that I'm not getting the speed advertised on my cable internet, but I don't know how to realistically test it since I've heard all the ISPs give priority QoS to the common speed tests out there. I know my FTP upload attempts are lucky to break 43kbps, last time I tried.
>If you have a horse carriage business, and I invent the car and sell it, then your
/YOUR/ MOUSTRAP. It's another thing entirely when when someone comes along and just devalues your asset by making it available to everyone for free. It's not like demand for my asset went away, or you did the legwork to make something better that people preferred instead. Copying my asset and distributing it to the world just makes it worthless, in terms of being able to sell it.
>horse carriages will soon get worthless. Am I a thief for making your horse carriages worthless?
No, that is just obsolescence through innovation, and that's a good thing.
It's different when your mousetrap becomes valueless because someone else bettered humanity by inventing a better mousetrap, THUS ELIMINATING DEMAND FOR
>Name things after what they are. Copyright infringement is copyright infringement, not theft.
I never claimed otherwise. I just said the end result is the same. This is like saying stabbing me to death and shooting me to death are two different things. Yes, of course they are. But in the end I'm just as dead.
I bought a DVD burner for my PC. I also bought a TV tuner card for my PC. My plan was to watch episodes of Battlestar Galatcia on cable, piped into my PC, record it, edit out the commercials, and then burn it to a DVD to watch later.
Not only did the burning take a long time, but I never got DVDs that reliably played in either of the 2 DVD players we had at the time. They would play for about 2 minutes, then the video would pixellate while the audio kept going for a few minutes, and then it would stop.
After dinking around on the support forums for a while I was told that burning DVDs was a black art, not to burn at the full rated speed of the drive, yadda yadda yadda.
Eventually I gave up. It was easier and much faster to just save the raw video file on a hard drive, and go buy a 500GB hard drive to store all my video on. Now I watch all videos off of my hard drive. Burning to DVD was time consuming, tedious, and unreliable.
>If I shoplift a CD, the proprietor no longer has that CD. If I infringe your copyright you still
>have both the work and its copyright.
But the end result is the same: I had something of value, and afterwards it no longer has any value.
If you steal my physical CD, I can't sell it anymore. If you infringe on my copyright and distribute a bajillion copies of my CD for free, I can't sell it anymore either.
>The problem is social, not technical.
>Americans "need" to drive these huge cars to work and back.
I've heard rumors of $4/gallon by summer.
This is going to change a lot of people's habits very quickly. It has certainly changed mine. I used to be all about horsepower. Now I'm all about mileage.
I'm looking for 60MPG+, 50MPH+, 150 mile range, rain or shine capable. Ideally it should cost less than $10,000, but closer to $5,000. Electric would be nice, too.
I've been waiting for these little micro-cars to come out on the market. I had high hopes for the "Smart Car", but it's price is up around $12,000, and now they are down to 40MPG or so.
I think we are entering a phase of American driving where people will have a tiny, one-person, gas-sipping commuter car to go to work every day, and a "family car" for long-distance travels on the weekends.
And before everyone freaks out about the safety, I figure it's safer than a motorcycle.
>I suggest that your experience with "free" DVD ripping/re-encoding software should change
.AVI file would be a slam-dunk by now. Maybe it's because only in the last couple of years has the price of hard drive storage really plummeted is such a thing really feasible.
>your mind only about the state of "open source DVD ripping software right now". My
>experience with DVD ripping is similar to yours except that I eventually found the
>package that worked the way I want it to. I had to try a lot of different applications
>before I found the one that worked for me. It was a pain. I wouldn't have bothered if
>I didn't do everything else in linux. However- this does not imply that OSS is
>infeasible but that DVD ripping is in an unpolished state.
I think part of the reason why I found this particular exercise so frustrating is because if there is any arena where I would have expected the "free" stuff to work well it would be in the arena of ripping and re-encoding DVDs (and music, but that's not the point here), since the same people after free software are likely after free digital content, too.
Now I know there have been some tweaks to the copy protection schemes since then, but DeCSS has been around since 1999 - almost 10 years. I would have thought by now the process of taking a DVD and converting it into a
>I want software that is written by people who write software because they love well written software that does what they want- not just because they crave my money.
I personally don't care what actually motivates the folks to write good software. And you are right - there are free software products out there that are really good, and there are commercial products out there that suck. So my comment really was just a fit of pique.
But I can tell you this - if I had paid money for any of the free DVD re-encoding software packages I installed, I'd be screaming for a refund. And I can't help but think that that axe hanging over the programmer's head helps ensure a better product.
n/t
>Then why the fuck do you need to comment? Facebook obviously isn't for you.
/for/? Because the GP asked what Facebook was all about? Honestly, did you read any of the preceding?
Uh, because that's what internet BBS forums are
>Unless, I dare say... You're a bit lonely?
Hah. Look, I'm married and I have a wonderful daughter. This in itself would be fulfilling. But in addition I participate in medieval re-enactment and consequently hang out with hundreds of the same group of folks once a month, and I'm close friends with perhaps half a dozen of them that I've known for years and we get together often outside of re-enactment (LAN parties, etc.)
No, I'm not lonely.
>It benefits people with active social lives. Not surprising then that so many slashdotters seem to be baffled by it.
It sounds just the opposite though. People don't seem to be using Facebook to socialize, they use it to digitally eavesdrop on the mundanities of people they no longer keep up with very well.
Except for the examples provided where people use it as a meant so schedule physical meetings, it doesn't sound like real, honest-to-goodness socializing, it sounds like a substitute for it.
>Anecdote: So this girl I know in meatspace asks me if I'm coming to her party, I don't know what party she meant...
/that/ huge of a thing to me
This is where I would pull out a pencil and get the details of when and where the party was. I suppose it is marginally easier to say, "Oh, go check out my facebook page for the details" so you don't have to write anything down, but it doesn't seem to be
>Personally I find I don't have the time or perhaps the willingness to stay up to date with the
>100 or so people who I have probably been fairly good friends with in the past 15 years
You see, I think that really sums up the problem for me, and explains why social networking sites don't appeal to me. I don't think I've had but perhaps 10 people I've been fairly good friends with in the past 15 years, and I keep in regular touch with all but 2 of them. The idea of having 100 or so fairly good friends is truly astonishing to me.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=407050&cid=21926308
You know, youth may actually have a lot to do with it.
/important/ things in my life that I just don't have the time to care that "Guy B is friends with Guy C", that "Girl A is no longer single", etc. etc. etc.
After reading the trivial things you get to keep track of from the post just above yours (I.E., guy B leaves the American Sandwich Society), I gather that this sort of things gives you very trivial data about people - things you just don't really need to know or keep track of.
When I was younger I had time for such dalliances. But as an adult with a 50+ hour work week, a wife and a child, a house, cars, and the rare time out for hobbies and gaming, I just don't have time to keep up with trivia any more. I mean there is so little time for the actual
>So, an internet on the internet?
I guess so.
Steve
>Hmmm... well, if you used a fake name, then maybe all your former friends did too.
>The site only works if people use their real names.
I really don't have any former friends. There is one guy I've lost track of over the years, but he never kept a phone (his girlfriends kept calling getting him in trouble with his live-in girlfriend) and he hated computers so I doubt he's on the web anyway. But other than him, I don't have any long-lost buddies I'm trying to keep track of. I never had friends in high school so I'm not looking for long-ago classmates. I wasn't a traditional college student (I worked full time and went to school to get my degree) so I don't have any college buddies to track down, either.
If you just want to look people up, why not go use Yahoo People Search? Why opt into yet another database so you can be found?
>It enables the maintenance of casual friendships without having to write/phone explicitly.
This concept is completely foreign to me. If you are worthy enough of friendship than I will make the effort to maintain that friendship explicitly. If you aren't worthy enough of friendship then I'm not going to be interested in your digital trivia on some web page.
>If you think about it, this is how most casual friendships work - I don't specifially talk to John down
>the hall at work to catch up, I might bump into him in the coffee room, see he's got a new shirt, find out
>it was his birthday yesterday etc. etc.. Just seeing and bumping into someone lets you stay in touch without it being an effort.
The people I interface with at work are not friends, they are coworkers. I do happen to have a friend at work, but he is an actual friend, and I maintain our friendship by traditional means, speaking, telephone, email, going out to lunch, having his family over for dinner, etc. The rest of my coworkers, however, I don't care to interface with except for work-related matters. I don't care what kind of shirt they are wearing, when their birthday is, or any other trivial detail about them except whatever information I need from them to execute work functions. This is not to say I might not make additional friends out of co-workers, just that I don't need "casual" friendships.
>Email works for people you really want to stay in touch with, and chat forums work for a bunch of people who want to discuss the same topic(s).
This works for me.
>On Facebook I can find out that Fred who I went to school with is into a particular band too,
>and if there's a couple of other guys from school 10 years ago maybe a group of us could go to a gig.
I figure if I haven't spoken to you in 6 months then you are off my radar. I don't have enough time to keep adequate track of all the people actually actively present in my life. I guess I just don't feel the need to go dredging up the past to fulfill my friendship needs.
What you've said about Facebook jives with what other people have told me about it. Ultimately I figure I'm just anti-social and consequently the thrill of accumulating lots of "casual friends" just holds very little appeal to me. I'm also one of those people who never asks strangers, "How are you doing?" because I don't really care how some stranger is doing, and I know it's just a dumb little thing that people say to each other as a greeting and most people don't care how you are doing, either.
>Staying in touch with a bunch of people who you do not care very much for their
>center of interest is one of the most worthless activity i've ever heard of.
My sentiments exactly. It also smacks of voyeurism to me. Maybe that is part of the appeal?