Yes, many web sites require ad revenue to continue to exist. Yes, many people have been driven to use various forms of adblocking because of the intrusiveness or annoyance factor of online advertising.
One could infer, then, that the people who are not using adblocking fall into one of two categories: those who enjoy the advertising, and those who do not, but are too novice to set up adblocking. Both of those classes of people are the kinds that online advertisers want to target, because each of those classes is more easily separated from their money than the class of people who do not like online advertising and are savvy enough to block it.
This is why you don't hear online advertisers really making much noise about adblocking. Those who are blocking ads are much less likely to buy were they to see the ads anyway, and the fact that they're blocking reduces load on the technology supplying the ads.
It's a win-win. Those who don't want to see ads -- don't. Those who want to target ads to the consumers who are most likely to respond and buy -- do.
I would say that over the last year, I have seen Google put in some interesting situations. They've made those situations fairly public prior to deciding what to do about them, taken time to make a choice, chosen what could arguably be the lesser of evils, and made that public, too.
Examples: Google gets beat up all the time for tailoring its web searches to suit the Chinese gov't on google.cn. What about Yahoo and MSN? I'm sure that they tailor search results at teir China sites, too. Google gets beat up for having to turn over data to the Justice Dept, and yet they're the only ones who made any noise about it. I'm sure those same requests were made of other search engines, and that those engines happily turned over the requested data without informing the public at all.
Do I trust Google more now than I did a year ago? Yes, I do. Because they are public about situations of which the public should be aware, while their competitors are uncannily silent.
At a former employer, we moved from a PBX phone system to a VoIP (internal) phone system. In the VoIP system, voicemails were saved as.WAV files to a voice server, and also emailed to the recipient.
The company I worked for had come under subpoena in the past, and a lot of effort was expended to retrieve the data the subpoena requested. With the PBX, once a voicemail is deleted, it was gone. Not so with the VoIP system - voicemails would be found on the phone server, on mail servers, on workstation email client cache, and anywhere that end users decided to save the WAV files - and any backup tapes for the above. If another subpoena occurred, we may have been responsible to discover, transcribe and deliver information about voicemails going back to the beginning of the VoIP system.
That would be horrendously expensive. In order to circumvent this, investment was made in a third party system that would strip voicemail files out of everything. They wouldn't be backed up to tape they would be deleted from any system after some time period (30 days?). That way, we could state such in our data retention policy, and any subpoena including voicemails would only go back 30 days, and not forever.
If you don't have the data, and are destroying it in accordance with a data retention policy, it can't be subpoenaed.
I know this is all somewhat tangential to your question, but I figured you might find it interesting.
I don't have a specific game in mind (well, I do, BurnOut Drag Racing, but it's hella old), but bracket drag racing in reality is a competitive game that is able to pit any two cars against one another, regardless of how much faster one is than the other.
Each driver has a dial-in time, which is what they expect to be able to run in a quarter mile. The tree lights at the starting line are timed so that each car starts at a different time, depending on the dial-in time. If each driver gets off the line exactly when they get a greenlight, and runs exactly their dial-in time, both cars will cross the line at exactly the same time.
So, it comes down to reaction time at the tree, coming as close to (but not under) your dial-in time as possible, and beating your opponent to the finish line.
So - an expert driver with a finely tuned car and good reaction and driving skills can compete against a novice driver with a showroom stock car, and the novice has a chance to win.
This may not have been the genre of game that anyone was thinking about, but it qualifies.
In order to do without retail media for audio CDs, you must possess all of the following:
a) A computer
b) A CD burner
c) A reliable broadband internet connection
d) Interest in dealing with:
i) a limited number of online audio outlets, which will require a credit card.
ii) downloading from illegitimate sources
e) The ability, time and desire to compile the downloaded audio tracks to CDR
f) Satisfaction with the audio quality of downloaded audio tracks.
If any of the things above is lacking, retail CD media for audio is required. Besides this, there are still audio CD players out there that do not play burned CDs. I'm thinking most specifically of the one in my 1998 Grand Cherokee.
Think of this, too. The music industry mostly markets to kids. Kids don't have credit cards. In order for the target market of the music industry to acquire the product they're trying to sell, the kids need to either get a credit card number from parents, or download illegally. With retail CD media, they can take their allowance to the record store and buy the product themselves.
For five years now, "terrorism" has been the excuse to trample on all sorts of privacy concerns in the US, even though there have not been any terrorist acts perpetrated in the US since WTC, and there's been no hard evidence that intrusion of privacy has prevented anything. One of the major differences, though, is that the rooting out of Communists in the early 1950's started in the State Dept; the rooting out of terrorists today completely skips that and goes right for the citizenry.
when reading the title "Nanotech and the Blind" was that we'll just make everything excruciatingly small so no one can see it, thereby making everyone "blind" and balancing the scales.
Kind of like how "No Child Left Behind" can be true, so long as everyone is held back equally.
This "XP on a Mac" thing is currently a hypothesis. It is something that has been reasoned as possible, and now has been tested one time. Provided that the tester kept meticulous notes, others should be able to follow those notes to reproduce the experiment, and report their results to the media. The more times the experiment is successful, the more it can be described as a theory or law.
However, since the current state of knowledge on this subject is thin, it is just as likely that the way to get Windows XP running on a Mac requires divine intervention. One could then describe a Mac running XP as "Intelligently Designed."
As much as I think any self respecting geek should be able to survive without the everyday comforts of his GUI, it is unreasonable to expect everyone to be capable.
Take that thought one step further. Just because one is not a genius at [command shell of your choosing], doesn't make them 'not capable.'
The point is getting the machine to do what you want it to do. If you can do that without ever using the keyboard, that's as good as anything. The interface you use to get the job done matters far less than the job getting done. Sometimes that does require the use of the command line, but the browbeating people tend to get for not knowing command line inside and out is simply elitist.
I find it odd, though not surprising really, that the Chinese gov't would have The Great Firewall of China in place, and have bank servers vulnerable to attack.
And, the way TFA reads, the bank server (owned by the Chinese government) is currently hosting phishing pages. Can anyone confirm whether the affected server has been taken offline, or are they just letting it go on phishing?
From TFA: This might help explain why Greg Tanner, who says he has a knack for "turning one dollar into two dollars," is now more than $30,000 in debt.
Sounds like it should be the other way around. He's doing great turning two dollars into one.
Mental health is an oft-neglected aspect of the world of healthcare, insurance therefor, and community support thereof. No one is ashamed of going to the doctor with symptoms that can be treated with common antibiotics, but many people are still ashamed of seeking medical assistance for depression.
I think it's important not to segregate mental health into its own category, making it seem less important than other health issues, or more taboo.
If the study was intended to focus on repetitive stress injuries from over-gaming, I bet the interest level in the story would be much lower. Even though repetitive stress injuries (if they exist) probably have a lower cost to society than impaired mental state (if they exist) would. Of course, that's unsupported conjecture, so take it as you will.
Yup. Blaster was the first, and Welchia was supposed to fix it. Problem was, Welchia located other nodes by pinging. It didn't take too long for a network full of Welchia to grind to a halt with all that traffic. I saw it happen; an office of about 200 people had to be disconnected from the WAN in order to keep it contained. (No, I was not in charge of that office or that network.)
Just like many others have said, I don't see this as news. Microsoft is just like every other big company? Surprise.
The problem with US companies - perhaps all companies - is that culture is completely upside down. People who run and own companies (executives and shareholders) are interested in more profits today. Or at least this quarter. Short-term, in any event.
In order to get those short term gains, the company cuts every cost possible. Considering that payroll and benefits is usually the biggest expense to a company, employees (the people doing the work that generates the profit) get to take home only as much as will keep them coming to work tomorrow.
A longer term view would be of benefit to everyone, including the people at the top who are interested in profits. The first aim of management should be to keep its employees very happy. Those employees will, in turn, keep customers happy. The customers will continue to purchase what you're selling, and will tell their colleagues about how great you are.
End result? Employees are happy and well-compensated. (Side note: I know that I would be more productive at work if I didn't have to worry about making ends meet at home.) Customers are satisfied and deliver profits with their own purchases and referrals. Management gets big bonuses. Shareholders get a higher value for their stock.
If your goal is to increase profits, the fallout is having to clean up after a short term gain. If your goal is to increase share value, the fallout is to clean up after shareholders take their short term gains. If your goal is to take good care of your employees, the long term benefits are substantial. This is how Japan took over the US auto industry; with five and ten year plans.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy for executives in the US to jump from one company to another, squeezing the life out of each until it's time to jump again.
For people who shuddered when they saw that the paper reporting this had "Christian Science" in the name like I did,...
I've been listening to NPR for some time now, and the first couple of times that there was a piece including a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, I thought it was curious myself.
So I decided to do a general ear perk around the rest of the media, paying particular attention to what CSMonitor was doing. The evidence I saw was that CSMonitor is not only legitimate, but of high quality, and well-respected.
I wonder if all of the efforts that were made to deal with Y2K bugs may have a detrimental effect on future needs for technology improvement. Consider that a whole lot of businesses were convinced to spend a whole lot of money to do Y2K fixes, the result of which appeared to be... nothing. Executive committees, boards of directors, shareholders - the appearance is that a lot of money was spent, and after the turn of the millenium, everything was the same as before.
Now there's another need for technology improvement, in the area of data and network security. From a layman's standpoint, it looks like, "Hey, you need to spend a lot of money and increase the cost of doing business going forward, to prevent against a risk that may never come to pass." And even if the risk does come to pass, it's likely going to be a handful of victims, with little repercussion to the business whose lax security was the root cause.
We spent all that money on Y2K, and didn't get an obvious return on it. Why should we do that again? Interestingly, this belief surely exists at insurance companies - who are trying to get their clients to pay a regular fee to mitigate risks.
And, in truth, it's probably cheaper for these businesses to deal with clean-up costs after a few people are victimized than it is to spend proactively to protect everyone. It's like the automotive recall equation from Fight Club.
Yes, spare parts would be the literal equivalent of having binaries or source available, but that doesn't make sense when you consider the point I was trying to make.
For the purposes of my analogy, software support is analogous to spare parts.
When I worked at a particular car dealership, there was a Burger King half a block away. Every morning, we would send one of the parts drivers there to pick up breakfast for me and another guy.
Burger King has the Croissan'wich and Hash Rounds. Let's say I wanted one Croissan'wich and one Hash Rounds. I would request a "One and one." (The default Croissan'wich flavor was sausage. If you wanted a different flavor, you would say "One and one, ham," for example.)
You can do the math from there. One and two. Two and one. On particularly bold days, two and two.
I don't think we ever got into the "threes." Thank god.
Slashdot Mirror
I will give them all my buying habits for $10 per month.
It might be worth that to some company, but not if you're anonymous.
Yes, many web sites require ad revenue to continue to exist. Yes, many people have been driven to use various forms of adblocking because of the intrusiveness or annoyance factor of online advertising.
One could infer, then, that the people who are not using adblocking fall into one of two categories: those who enjoy the advertising, and those who do not, but are too novice to set up adblocking. Both of those classes of people are the kinds that online advertisers want to target, because each of those classes is more easily separated from their money than the class of people who do not like online advertising and are savvy enough to block it.
This is why you don't hear online advertisers really making much noise about adblocking. Those who are blocking ads are much less likely to buy were they to see the ads anyway, and the fact that they're blocking reduces load on the technology supplying the ads.
It's a win-win. Those who don't want to see ads -- don't. Those who want to target ads to the consumers who are most likely to respond and buy -- do.
I would say that over the last year, I have seen Google put in some interesting situations. They've made those situations fairly public prior to deciding what to do about them, taken time to make a choice, chosen what could arguably be the lesser of evils, and made that public, too.
Examples: Google gets beat up all the time for tailoring its web searches to suit the Chinese gov't on google.cn. What about Yahoo and MSN? I'm sure that they tailor search results at teir China sites, too. Google gets beat up for having to turn over data to the Justice Dept, and yet they're the only ones who made any noise about it. I'm sure those same requests were made of other search engines, and that those engines happily turned over the requested data without informing the public at all.
Do I trust Google more now than I did a year ago? Yes, I do. Because they are public about situations of which the public should be aware, while their competitors are uncannily silent.
Would you accept a shorter battery life for higher fidelity and/or better compressed files?
I would prefer a battery that lasted for 77,000 hours and total silence.
At a former employer, we moved from a PBX phone system to a VoIP (internal) phone system. In the VoIP system, voicemails were saved as .WAV files to a voice server, and also emailed to the recipient.
The company I worked for had come under subpoena in the past, and a lot of effort was expended to retrieve the data the subpoena requested. With the PBX, once a voicemail is deleted, it was gone. Not so with the VoIP system - voicemails would be found on the phone server, on mail servers, on workstation email client cache, and anywhere that end users decided to save the WAV files - and any backup tapes for the above. If another subpoena occurred, we may have been responsible to discover, transcribe and deliver information about voicemails going back to the beginning of the VoIP system.
That would be horrendously expensive. In order to circumvent this, investment was made in a third party system that would strip voicemail files out of everything. They wouldn't be backed up to tape they would be deleted from any system after some time period (30 days?). That way, we could state such in our data retention policy, and any subpoena including voicemails would only go back 30 days, and not forever.
If you don't have the data, and are destroying it in accordance with a data retention policy, it can't be subpoenaed.
I know this is all somewhat tangential to your question, but I figured you might find it interesting.
I don't have a specific game in mind (well, I do, BurnOut Drag Racing, but it's hella old), but bracket drag racing in reality is a competitive game that is able to pit any two cars against one another, regardless of how much faster one is than the other.
Each driver has a dial-in time, which is what they expect to be able to run in a quarter mile. The tree lights at the starting line are timed so that each car starts at a different time, depending on the dial-in time. If each driver gets off the line exactly when they get a greenlight, and runs exactly their dial-in time, both cars will cross the line at exactly the same time.
So, it comes down to reaction time at the tree, coming as close to (but not under) your dial-in time as possible, and beating your opponent to the finish line.
So - an expert driver with a finely tuned car and good reaction and driving skills can compete against a novice driver with a showroom stock car, and the novice has a chance to win.
This may not have been the genre of game that anyone was thinking about, but it qualifies.
In order to do without retail media for audio CDs, you must possess all of the following:
a) A computer
b) A CD burner
c) A reliable broadband internet connection
d) Interest in dealing with:
i) a limited number of online audio outlets, which will require a credit card.
ii) downloading from illegitimate sources
e) The ability, time and desire to compile the downloaded audio tracks to CDR
f) Satisfaction with the audio quality of downloaded audio tracks.
If any of the things above is lacking, retail CD media for audio is required. Besides this, there are still audio CD players out there that do not play burned CDs. I'm thinking most specifically of the one in my 1998 Grand Cherokee.
Think of this, too. The music industry mostly markets to kids. Kids don't have credit cards. In order for the target market of the music industry to acquire the product they're trying to sell, the kids need to either get a credit card number from parents, or download illegally. With retail CD media, they can take their allowance to the record store and buy the product themselves.
And I'm not talking about Jenny McCarthy, either.
For five years now, "terrorism" has been the excuse to trample on all sorts of privacy concerns in the US, even though there have not been any terrorist acts perpetrated in the US since WTC, and there's been no hard evidence that intrusion of privacy has prevented anything. One of the major differences, though, is that the rooting out of Communists in the early 1950's started in the State Dept; the rooting out of terrorists today completely skips that and goes right for the citizenry.
And here's her Wikipedia user page, and her own website.
when reading the title "Nanotech and the Blind" was that we'll just make everything excruciatingly small so no one can see it, thereby making everyone "blind" and balancing the scales.
Kind of like how "No Child Left Behind" can be true, so long as everyone is held back equally.
This "XP on a Mac" thing is currently a hypothesis. It is something that has been reasoned as possible, and now has been tested one time. Provided that the tester kept meticulous notes, others should be able to follow those notes to reproduce the experiment, and report their results to the media. The more times the experiment is successful, the more it can be described as a theory or law.
However, since the current state of knowledge on this subject is thin, it is just as likely that the way to get Windows XP running on a Mac requires divine intervention. One could then describe a Mac running XP as "Intelligently Designed."
As much as I think any self respecting geek should be able to survive without the everyday comforts of his GUI, it is unreasonable to expect everyone to be capable.
Take that thought one step further. Just because one is not a genius at [command shell of your choosing], doesn't make them 'not capable.'
The point is getting the machine to do what you want it to do. If you can do that without ever using the keyboard, that's as good as anything. The interface you use to get the job done matters far less than the job getting done. Sometimes that does require the use of the command line, but the browbeating people tend to get for not knowing command line inside and out is simply elitist.
Have you really administrated XP anytime in a larger enviroment? Its a big ugly PITA and demands crazy amounts of work to stay awake.
That's the part I love the best. It keeps me in a job. Be careful what you wish for.
I find it odd, though not surprising really, that the Chinese gov't would have The Great Firewall of China in place, and have bank servers vulnerable to attack.
And, the way TFA reads, the bank server (owned by the Chinese government) is currently hosting phishing pages. Can anyone confirm whether the affected server has been taken offline, or are they just letting it go on phishing?
From TFA: This might help explain why Greg Tanner, who says he has a knack for "turning one dollar into two dollars," is now more than $30,000 in debt.
Sounds like it should be the other way around. He's doing great turning two dollars into one.
I hate you, and I hereby call for your destruction.
Mental health is an oft-neglected aspect of the world of healthcare, insurance therefor, and community support thereof. No one is ashamed of going to the doctor with symptoms that can be treated with common antibiotics, but many people are still ashamed of seeking medical assistance for depression.
I think it's important not to segregate mental health into its own category, making it seem less important than other health issues, or more taboo.
If the study was intended to focus on repetitive stress injuries from over-gaming, I bet the interest level in the story would be much lower. Even though repetitive stress injuries (if they exist) probably have a lower cost to society than impaired mental state (if they exist) would. Of course, that's unsupported conjecture, so take it as you will.
Yup. Blaster was the first, and Welchia was supposed to fix it. Problem was, Welchia located other nodes by pinging. It didn't take too long for a network full of Welchia to grind to a halt with all that traffic. I saw it happen; an office of about 200 people had to be disconnected from the WAN in order to keep it contained. (No, I was not in charge of that office or that network.)
Just like many others have said, I don't see this as news. Microsoft is just like every other big company? Surprise.
The problem with US companies - perhaps all companies - is that culture is completely upside down. People who run and own companies (executives and shareholders) are interested in more profits today. Or at least this quarter. Short-term, in any event.
In order to get those short term gains, the company cuts every cost possible. Considering that payroll and benefits is usually the biggest expense to a company, employees (the people doing the work that generates the profit) get to take home only as much as will keep them coming to work tomorrow.
A longer term view would be of benefit to everyone, including the people at the top who are interested in profits. The first aim of management should be to keep its employees very happy. Those employees will, in turn, keep customers happy. The customers will continue to purchase what you're selling, and will tell their colleagues about how great you are.
End result? Employees are happy and well-compensated. (Side note: I know that I would be more productive at work if I didn't have to worry about making ends meet at home.) Customers are satisfied and deliver profits with their own purchases and referrals. Management gets big bonuses. Shareholders get a higher value for their stock.
If your goal is to increase profits, the fallout is having to clean up after a short term gain. If your goal is to increase share value, the fallout is to clean up after shareholders take their short term gains. If your goal is to take good care of your employees, the long term benefits are substantial. This is how Japan took over the US auto industry; with five and ten year plans.
Unfortunately, it's all too easy for executives in the US to jump from one company to another, squeezing the life out of each until it's time to jump again.
For people who shuddered when they saw that the paper reporting this had "Christian Science" in the name like I did, ...
I've been listening to NPR for some time now, and the first couple of times that there was a piece including a reporter from the Christian Science Monitor, I thought it was curious myself.
So I decided to do a general ear perk around the rest of the media, paying particular attention to what CSMonitor was doing. The evidence I saw was that CSMonitor is not only legitimate, but of high quality, and well-respected.
Boxxet will create the page for me, and then /. will read it for me. I don't need to get online at all!
I wonder if all of the efforts that were made to deal with Y2K bugs may have a detrimental effect on future needs for technology improvement. Consider that a whole lot of businesses were convinced to spend a whole lot of money to do Y2K fixes, the result of which appeared to be ... nothing. Executive committees, boards of directors, shareholders - the appearance is that a lot of money was spent, and after the turn of the millenium, everything was the same as before.
Now there's another need for technology improvement, in the area of data and network security. From a layman's standpoint, it looks like, "Hey, you need to spend a lot of money and increase the cost of doing business going forward, to prevent against a risk that may never come to pass." And even if the risk does come to pass, it's likely going to be a handful of victims, with little repercussion to the business whose lax security was the root cause.
We spent all that money on Y2K, and didn't get an obvious return on it. Why should we do that again? Interestingly, this belief surely exists at insurance companies - who are trying to get their clients to pay a regular fee to mitigate risks.
And, in truth, it's probably cheaper for these businesses to deal with clean-up costs after a few people are victimized than it is to spend proactively to protect everyone. It's like the automotive recall equation from Fight Club.
It's quite curious that I have been reading The Cat in the Hat Comes Back to my son at bedtime recently.
All we need is some VOOM.
(Check the first '*' footnote in that last link.)
Yes, spare parts would be the literal equivalent of having binaries or source available, but that doesn't make sense when you consider the point I was trying to make.
For the purposes of my analogy, software support is analogous to spare parts.
When I worked at a particular car dealership, there was a Burger King half a block away. Every morning, we would send one of the parts drivers there to pick up breakfast for me and another guy.
Burger King has the Croissan'wich and Hash Rounds. Let's say I wanted one Croissan'wich and one Hash Rounds. I would request a "One and one." (The default Croissan'wich flavor was sausage. If you wanted a different flavor, you would say "One and one, ham," for example.)
You can do the math from there. One and two. Two and one. On particularly bold days, two and two.
I don't think we ever got into the "threes." Thank god.