... how many MS shops with an evaluation linux server (installed by their clueless MSCE) were included in this "survey"
Your criticism of the study on this basis is appropriate, but I must take umbrage with the phrasing you chose. How about:
... how many MS shops with an evaluation Linux server (likely installed and administered by someone who, while wholly capable with Microsoft products is a novice to Linux) were included in this "survey?"
Different gamers play for different reasons. There are plenty of differenttheories about people who play RPGs. I would argue that the nature of the games we're talking about here are more RPG than arcade, so I think these kinds of theories apply.
Unlockable content and cheat codes are precisely why some people play games, and certainly why some people are turned off by games. But it depends on the person.
Companies can produce games which they hope will be attractive to many kinds of gamers - and risk not being saleable to any of them - or they can produce games which will more certainly be saleable to one kind of gamer while ignoring the desires of others. Seems to me that people who are all about hidden content are more likely to be serious gamers, while those who aren't are likely to be casual gamers. Serious gamers spend more time with games, and more money on games. Casual gamers, less and less, respectively.
So let's do the math. If I am a game company and I want my game to make a lot of money, I'm going to develop it to be most saleable to a market that spends more money on games. That way, I get more sales today, and hopefully get some repeat customers out of the bargain for my next game.
Maybe you could leave a comment linking to a blog that plagiarizes a "news" item about Dvorak's own article. Then submit that circular reference to Digg, where it will be picked up by someone else who submits it to Slashdot. It'll appear on Slashdot three days later, and you can respond in that thread.
Then write an "ebook" about the whole experience and sell it with a MLM scheme using a mass-mailer.
Unless you're Dennis Hastert specifically (or congressional Republicans in general), then it's okay to insist that congressional offices never be searched, even for the purposes of a completely legitimate ongoing investigation into bribery charges.
So do I. And I don't do executive management for a living. It's an amusing situation, yes, but an unfair one. You don't expect an auto mechanic do also do the accounting and sales for the dealership; neither should you expect the comptroller to do a valve job.
I'm reminded of Michael Moore's bit where he goes to various companies and tries to get executives to do the things that the line workers do. Kudos to Ford Motor Company, where one of the execs came down and changed the oil on a Ford pickup.
Is it beneficial when the execs know the line work in some detail? Absolutely, but I don't think it's right to expect people who do one job to be able to do another. To those who will respond with, "But those execs get paid so much money, they should be able to do the line work!" -- the solution to that problem is to not pay execs so damned much money.
I was actually talking to an art teacher friend last night. She's going to buy a new computer, and has decided on a Mac, because of their better graphics capability.
Whether or not they actually have better graphics capability or not anymore, I don't know. But I know the historical use for Macs in business has been for graphic design, or other things that require very fine graphics.
All the best games have great graphics. You'd think that those games would be even better on a Mac, since they reportedly have so much better graphics capability. And yet, the big downfall for Mac historically has been that you have to have a Windows machine for gaming, because there just aren't games for Macs.
Which leads me to believe that maybe the "Macs have better graphics" line has always been a bunch of hooey. Had there been extensive game development for Mac earlier on, maybe there'd be 90% market share for Apple and 10% for Microsoft now. And you'd think that, early on and capitalism being what it is, game companies would have pushed games for the Mac. Did they?
FTP is not dead. Usenet is not dead. Nothing is dead, it just falls out of common use. AFAIK, you can still use Gopher if you want to.
Fact is, as different protocols fall out of favor, they can be used with more impunity by people who would avoid the eye of law enforcement and morality enforcement.
Example: When you hear about "crackdowns on child porn" in the media, the agencies doing the crackdowns are invariably described as "going after websites." Never is there any mention of Usenet, IRC. Just "websites," because that's what the general public thinks the internet consists wholly of.
Maybe those agencies are also tracking down offenders on Usenet, IRC, P2P, etc., and just not telling the media because reporters and consumers of mass media wouldn't understand.
Somehow I doubt it. If law enforcement reported that they were going after Usenet and IRC, the people who pay taxes would think, "Huh? What? What are we paying for?" Gotta keep those customers happy by focusing primarily on the things they understand.
Tangentially, this is the same reason many small businesses have such sloppy security. It costs money to implement security, and they don't understand it, so they don't want to spend any money on it, so it doesn't get done.
Old-timers will have heard of various coloured boxes in connection with the phone system: Black Box {free incoming calls}, Blue Box {in-band signalling generator}, Red Box {payphone coin-insertion signal generator}, Beige Box {croc-clips to phone socket adaptor} and so on. More esoteric ones included the Jade {timer to avoid itemised bill threshhold}, Primrose {phone-line powered battery charger} and Violet {line holding circuit, defeats money-run-out on some subscriber-owned payphones} Boxes {all the good colours were already taken by the time they were invented}. But this setup truly is the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on"!
Terrorists can download.torrent files. And if terrorists can download.torrent files, then terrorists can obtain unlimited copies of material by Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, etc.
This will (obviously) lead to a greater hatred of America, and western culture in general.
Following this logic (terrorists acquire torrents of mass-produced crap which leads to greater hatred of the West) -- I side with the terrorists in their hatred.
(Note to NSA - not with the blowing up of things, just with the hatred.)
Can't be done? They could just talk to the NSA and AT&T! I'm sure the US would gladly help count all their email as long as they can read it too.
That would force US intelligence agencies to have to process zillions of spams every day. Wouldn't that amount to DDoS'ing?
Wait a minute, if they're already reading email (and you have to think they are), aren't they already reading zillions of spams a day? They must be employing some kind of Roswell-based spam filtering. Maybe the terrorists could get smart and start sending their messages via spam!
So you're suggesting that taxes such as this would be a good thing if the mechanics of collecting them were all in place to do so in an accountable fashion? Whether you intend it or not, you're arguing the wrong points, and by doing so are actually promoting this idea.
A fair point of discussion.
My comments were regarding the technical feasability of taxing email. Following those, begin to imagine the expense in money and time to make a hack-proof sender identification system for email (either with SMTP or with something else entirely). That expense would be far and away larger than any tax revenue from taxing email, which makes taxing email in the first place completely pointless.
Of course, this is all presuming that the people who make decisions have a whit of sense, which - since they're considering taxing email in the first place - they must not.
Now, do I think taxing email is justifiable as a concept? Doesn't matter one way or another; any such tax will be completely avoided, by way of hiding one's identity or using a different method of communication than SMTP. Don't get me started on "How are you going to tax email sent to/from a geographical area outside your jurisdiction, not that geography really matters on the InterWeb anyway?"
Can't be done, and if it could it would be amazingly costly to execute and easily avoidable. Let's consider it anyway! That's silliness.
Let's think of something that lots of people do, then say we're going to tax it! Without even considering any of the details on how to apply the tax to the correct person or organization, how to collect that tax, or how to punish those who avoid the tax! Woohoo! Let's run around waving our arms like we're doing something!
Anyone with a whit of sense has to know that under the current technology there is no way to tax email. If you want to tax the sender, there would have to be a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, which there's not. If you're going to tax the recipient, then you need to provide recipients a way to decline to receive email that they don't want to pay taxes on (spam), which means you have to have a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, and there's still not a way to do that.
Vonage chared that 3% fee even when my first month of service was free.
I tried to explain that $0 * 3% = 0. They didn't seem to understand.
It's made free by applying an instant rebate. So, you're charged your monthly service charge, that's taxed and feed, then you're discounted the amount of your monthly service charge. Works the same way with mail-in rebates - you have to pay sales tax on the full amount of the sale, then you receive a rebate check later. Only difference here is that the rebate is immediate.
It will be interesting to see how a many-to-many DDOS plays out.
I'm interested as well, but it's not going to be many-to-many. Each side will execute many-to-one. *Frog's many against spamvertisers one, multiple times, in a "one response per spam" action. Spammer's many against *Frog's one, in an "as much force as can be mustered" action.
Provided that the spammer's attack can find an appropriate target, and depending on the flexibility of *Frog to make itself a constantly moving target.
The weak link in the *Frog model is that human interaction is required to vet spam and build response scripts, then deliver those response scripts to *Frog clients. The "spam to be vetted and scripted against" information needs to be delivered to a single point somehow. The scripts created need to be distributed to clients from a single point somehow.
Maybe the new clients can make greater use of torrents in their operation (as opposed to simply distributing the client installer via torrent). Example: a "spam vetter" person runs an administrative app that searches for a specific torrent. Spam to be vetted is sent from normal clients via torrent, picked up by "neighbor" clients. Eventually, the admin app is able to see the torrent available on a "neighbor" and picks it up. Same way in reverse for delivering scripts - the admin app torrents the script to a smaller number of neigbors, which seed it for more, etc.
There is no real need for a governing body though, no government sets the exchange rates, but they exist, so it would be with currency.
I figured someone would bring up the market, and that's fair. That doesn't address legitimacy or (come to think of it) uniqueness. Counterfeits of widely accepted currencies would be everywhere and everyone would be printing up their own "brands" of bills, for which there would need to be an insane web of exchange rates.
In fact, the US experienced this in its earlier days of currency. The gov't decided to allow banks to print their own currency, and it was a complete mess. The US gov't finally had to step in and take over all minting itself.
Lastly, without some kind of backing of the currency, its worth remains very low. US currency is backed by the economic and military power of the US gov't. I would argue that any sufficiently valuable and stable currency, in the absence of government, would make whatever group produces that currency into the gov't, ipso facto.
Anarchy and capitalism are somewhat at odds with one another, no? Without a governing body of some sort, who determines the legitimacy and value of currency (which capitalism certainly requires to thrive)?
If two things are completely and utterly indistinguishable, what's the point in treating them differently?
Now you're talking about philosophy. While I've been down that road before, in this thread I was thinking concretely.
Philosopy aside, the human community has the knowledge that computers are not run on magic. Certainly, many individuals in that community do not know anything about the facts of why and how computers work, and you'd be hard pressed to find any one person who knows everything about how and why computers work. Individuals who are not experts in a given arena must depend on and trust the knowledge of other people who are experts in that arena.
Now, if a sufficiently advanced technology appeared from outer space, much of humanity might treat it as magic. And I am certain that there will be some subset who will instead try to figure out how it works, because everything that humanity has thought was magic throughout the ages has turned out to have scientific explanations.
Slashdot Mirror
... how many MS shops with an evaluation linux server (installed by their clueless MSCE) were included in this "survey"
... how many MS shops with an evaluation Linux server (likely installed and administered by someone who, while wholly capable with Microsoft products is a novice to Linux) were included in this "survey?"
Your criticism of the study on this basis is appropriate, but I must take umbrage with the phrasing you chose. How about:
I'm just sayin'.
Different gamers play for different reasons. There are plenty of different theories about people who play RPGs. I would argue that the nature of the games we're talking about here are more RPG than arcade, so I think these kinds of theories apply.
Unlockable content and cheat codes are precisely why some people play games, and certainly why some people are turned off by games. But it depends on the person.
Companies can produce games which they hope will be attractive to many kinds of gamers - and risk not being saleable to any of them - or they can produce games which will more certainly be saleable to one kind of gamer while ignoring the desires of others. Seems to me that people who are all about hidden content are more likely to be serious gamers, while those who aren't are likely to be casual gamers. Serious gamers spend more time with games, and more money on games. Casual gamers, less and less, respectively.
So let's do the math. If I am a game company and I want my game to make a lot of money, I'm going to develop it to be most saleable to a market that spends more money on games. That way, I get more sales today, and hopefully get some repeat customers out of the bargain for my next game.
Maybe you could leave a comment linking to a blog that plagiarizes a "news" item about Dvorak's own article. Then submit that circular reference to Digg, where it will be picked up by someone else who submits it to Slashdot. It'll appear on Slashdot three days later, and you can respond in that thread.
Then write an "ebook" about the whole experience and sell it with a MLM scheme using a mass-mailer.
Unless you're Dennis Hastert specifically (or congressional Republicans in general), then it's okay to insist that congressional offices never be searched, even for the purposes of a completely legitimate ongoing investigation into bribery charges.
The double-standards are mind-boggling.
From the article, he had several engineers work on the problem. None of his MicroSoft employees could do anything.
Oh well, there you go then. That's what I get for not RTFA. Engineers should absolutely be able to deal with that situation.
I do that sort of stuff for a living.
So do I. And I don't do executive management for a living. It's an amusing situation, yes, but an unfair one. You don't expect an auto mechanic do also do the accounting and sales for the dealership; neither should you expect the comptroller to do a valve job.
I'm reminded of Michael Moore's bit where he goes to various companies and tries to get executives to do the things that the line workers do. Kudos to Ford Motor Company, where one of the execs came down and changed the oil on a Ford pickup.
Is it beneficial when the execs know the line work in some detail? Absolutely, but I don't think it's right to expect people who do one job to be able to do another. To those who will respond with, "But those execs get paid so much money, they should be able to do the line work!" -- the solution to that problem is to not pay execs so damned much money.
Maybe there's a reason the almighty Canadian dollar coin is referred to as the loonie.
And curiously enough, there's also the twoonie ("tune-y"). Maybe iTunes could do a promotion in Canada: "A tune-y for a twoonie."
I was actually talking to an art teacher friend last night. She's going to buy a new computer, and has decided on a Mac, because of their better graphics capability.
Whether or not they actually have better graphics capability or not anymore, I don't know. But I know the historical use for Macs in business has been for graphic design, or other things that require very fine graphics.
All the best games have great graphics. You'd think that those games would be even better on a Mac, since they reportedly have so much better graphics capability. And yet, the big downfall for Mac historically has been that you have to have a Windows machine for gaming, because there just aren't games for Macs.
Which leads me to believe that maybe the "Macs have better graphics" line has always been a bunch of hooey. Had there been extensive game development for Mac earlier on, maybe there'd be 90% market share for Apple and 10% for Microsoft now. And you'd think that, early on and capitalism being what it is, game companies would have pushed games for the Mac. Did they?
They just want to have a dry run at such lawsuits before their own gets going full speed.
Wait, this isn't April Fools' Day?
FTP is not dead. Usenet is not dead. Nothing is dead, it just falls out of common use. AFAIK, you can still use Gopher if you want to.
Fact is, as different protocols fall out of favor, they can be used with more impunity by people who would avoid the eye of law enforcement and morality enforcement.
Example: When you hear about "crackdowns on child porn" in the media, the agencies doing the crackdowns are invariably described as "going after websites." Never is there any mention of Usenet, IRC. Just "websites," because that's what the general public thinks the internet consists wholly of.
Maybe those agencies are also tracking down offenders on Usenet, IRC, P2P, etc., and just not telling the media because reporters and consumers of mass media wouldn't understand.
Somehow I doubt it. If law enforcement reported that they were going after Usenet and IRC, the people who pay taxes would think, "Huh? What? What are we paying for?" Gotta keep those customers happy by focusing primarily on the things they understand.
Tangentially, this is the same reason many small businesses have such sloppy security. It costs money to implement security, and they don't understand it, so they don't want to spend any money on it, so it doesn't get done.
Old-timers will have heard of various coloured boxes in connection with the phone system: Black Box {free incoming calls}, Blue Box {in-band signalling generator}, Red Box {payphone coin-insertion signal generator}, Beige Box {croc-clips to phone socket adaptor} and so on. More esoteric ones included the Jade {timer to avoid itemised bill threshhold}, Primrose {phone-line powered battery charger} and Violet {line holding circuit, defeats money-run-out on some subscriber-owned payphones} Boxes {all the good colours were already taken by the time they were invented}. But this setup truly is the fabled "sky blue pink box with yellow spots on"!
Phreak on, phreaka!
Terrorists can download .torrent files. And if terrorists can download .torrent files, then terrorists can obtain unlimited copies of material by Britney Spears, Kelly Clarkson, etc.
This will (obviously) lead to a greater hatred of America, and western culture in general.
Following this logic (terrorists acquire torrents of mass-produced crap which leads to greater hatred of the West) -- I side with the terrorists in their hatred.
(Note to NSA - not with the blowing up of things, just with the hatred.)
Didn't NASA pull the budget for these rovers not so long ago? More amazing is that the project continues on without official financing.
Can't be done? They could just talk to the NSA and AT&T! I'm sure the US would gladly help count all their email as long as they can read it too.
That would force US intelligence agencies to have to process zillions of spams every day. Wouldn't that amount to DDoS'ing?
Wait a minute, if they're already reading email (and you have to think they are), aren't they already reading zillions of spams a day? They must be employing some kind of Roswell-based spam filtering. Maybe the terrorists could get smart and start sending their messages via spam!
So you're suggesting that taxes such as this would be a good thing if the mechanics of collecting them were all in place to do so in an accountable fashion? Whether you intend it or not, you're arguing the wrong points, and by doing so are actually promoting this idea.
A fair point of discussion.
My comments were regarding the technical feasability of taxing email. Following those, begin to imagine the expense in money and time to make a hack-proof sender identification system for email (either with SMTP or with something else entirely). That expense would be far and away larger than any tax revenue from taxing email, which makes taxing email in the first place completely pointless.
Of course, this is all presuming that the people who make decisions have a whit of sense, which - since they're considering taxing email in the first place - they must not.
Now, do I think taxing email is justifiable as a concept? Doesn't matter one way or another; any such tax will be completely avoided, by way of hiding one's identity or using a different method of communication than SMTP. Don't get me started on "How are you going to tax email sent to/from a geographical area outside your jurisdiction, not that geography really matters on the InterWeb anyway?"
Can't be done, and if it could it would be amazingly costly to execute and easily avoidable. Let's consider it anyway! That's silliness.
I, for one, welcome our new taxing overlords....
Oh, who am I kidding, no I don't.
What about the current taxing overlords? How do you feel about them?
Let's think of something that lots of people do, then say we're going to tax it! Without even considering any of the details on how to apply the tax to the correct person or organization, how to collect that tax, or how to punish those who avoid the tax! Woohoo! Let's run around waving our arms like we're doing something!
Anyone with a whit of sense has to know that under the current technology there is no way to tax email. If you want to tax the sender, there would have to be a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, which there's not. If you're going to tax the recipient, then you need to provide recipients a way to decline to receive email that they don't want to pay taxes on (spam), which means you have to have a way to absolutely identify the sender of the email, and there's still not a way to do that.
Vonage chared that 3% fee even when my first month of service was free.
I tried to explain that $0 * 3% = 0. They didn't seem to understand.
It's made free by applying an instant rebate. So, you're charged your monthly service charge, that's taxed and feed, then you're discounted the amount of your monthly service charge. Works the same way with mail-in rebates - you have to pay sales tax on the full amount of the sale, then you receive a rebate check later. Only difference here is that the rebate is immediate.
It will be interesting to see how a many-to-many DDOS plays out.
I'm interested as well, but it's not going to be many-to-many. Each side will execute many-to-one. *Frog's many against spamvertisers one, multiple times, in a "one response per spam" action. Spammer's many against *Frog's one, in an "as much force as can be mustered" action.
Provided that the spammer's attack can find an appropriate target, and depending on the flexibility of *Frog to make itself a constantly moving target.
The weak link in the *Frog model is that human interaction is required to vet spam and build response scripts, then deliver those response scripts to *Frog clients. The "spam to be vetted and scripted against" information needs to be delivered to a single point somehow. The scripts created need to be distributed to clients from a single point somehow.
Maybe the new clients can make greater use of torrents in their operation (as opposed to simply distributing the client installer via torrent). Example: a "spam vetter" person runs an administrative app that searches for a specific torrent. Spam to be vetted is sent from normal clients via torrent, picked up by "neighbor" clients. Eventually, the admin app is able to see the torrent available on a "neighbor" and picks it up. Same way in reverse for delivering scripts - the admin app torrents the script to a smaller number of neigbors, which seed it for more, etc.
And here I figured it was just a made up word.
There is no real need for a governing body though, no government sets the exchange rates, but they exist, so it would be with currency.
I figured someone would bring up the market, and that's fair. That doesn't address legitimacy or (come to think of it) uniqueness. Counterfeits of widely accepted currencies would be everywhere and everyone would be printing up their own "brands" of bills, for which there would need to be an insane web of exchange rates.
In fact, the US experienced this in its earlier days of currency. The gov't decided to allow banks to print their own currency, and it was a complete mess. The US gov't finally had to step in and take over all minting itself.
Lastly, without some kind of backing of the currency, its worth remains very low. US currency is backed by the economic and military power of the US gov't. I would argue that any sufficiently valuable and stable currency, in the absence of government, would make whatever group produces that currency into the gov't, ipso facto.
Anarchy and capitalism are somewhat at odds with one another, no? Without a governing body of some sort, who determines the legitimacy and value of currency (which capitalism certainly requires to thrive)?
If two things are completely and utterly indistinguishable, what's the point in treating them differently?
Now you're talking about philosophy. While I've been down that road before, in this thread I was thinking concretely.
Philosopy aside, the human community has the knowledge that computers are not run on magic. Certainly, many individuals in that community do not know anything about the facts of why and how computers work, and you'd be hard pressed to find any one person who knows everything about how and why computers work. Individuals who are not experts in a given arena must depend on and trust the knowledge of other people who are experts in that arena.
Now, if a sufficiently advanced technology appeared from outer space, much of humanity might treat it as magic. And I am certain that there will be some subset who will instead try to figure out how it works, because everything that humanity has thought was magic throughout the ages has turned out to have scientific explanations.
That's intelligent design.