"what does the Slashdot community think the impact of Internet Explorer 7 will be on the web in general? Will we be forced to live a two-browser life once again?"
I think we never left the 'two-browser life' stage. As a developer, I obviously have both browsers installed and regularly use both to test designs, despite favouring Firefox for personal browsing. I think the competition is healthy, better to have people divided amongst 5 or 6 'core' browsers (IE, Opera, Firefox, Safari, Lynx maybe and Konqueror) is better than having everyone locked into one single program. It does make continuity and consistency an issue for web developers, but I'd still rather it was that way than have everyone using the same badly-written software.
Regarding the topic at hand, I think the release of IE7 won't change too much. Probably everyone running XP now, unaware of the alternate options, will just get the XP "upgrade now!" bubble and download the newer version without really being aware of the differences. From my attempts to educate my spyware-ridden family regarding OSS, it seems that often, computer laymen aren't aware that there are other browsers, and just see IE as the abritrary, sole browser in existence. The biggest thing is educating them to their options then allowing them to freely choose. IE7 won't convert many Firefox users back, it'll just upgrade the IE6 and Vista-buying public who never really know the difference to start with.
Because he personally had reset the nameservers in order to get his email working again. Of course, he declined to tell me this fact, initially calling me saying "The website isn't working!". I spent a pained few hours trying to figure it out, before I realised he'd somehow reset the nameservers and hadn't told me. I had to explain to him why he couldn't. My advice? Don't do work for family. They'll expect it for free and they'll use the fact that you're related to be rude and demanding to you; more so than they would be to any paid employee.
Haha, I love how each of the Manager's replies show a complete ignorance of the previous, helpful message from the CentOS tech. I had a similar situation trying to explain to my uncle (who I was building a site for) about how SMTP works and why mail forwarding only worked before we changed his nameservers (since he only bought domain names and not hosting). I spent a painstaking 20 minutes explaining it in layman's terms, only for him to pause then say, "My email isn't working". The CentOS guy should get a medal for keeping so calm here.
If GCSE History serves me correctly, didn't Hitler [1] do something like this? Some bill that granted him "emergency powers" over the Reichstag that meant he could pass laws on his own? One step closer to dictatorship we step..
[1]Note that I'm not equating Tony Blair to Hitler or Labour to the Nazis or anything, just an interesting co-incidence..
"There was enough glitches in the second install, that I can say if you have a Nvidia card or a motherboard with the Nvidia nForce chipset, you should look elsewhere for a linux o.s. or be prepared to do a fair amount of tweaking."
I have both an Nvidia graphics card and the nForce chipset, and this was my first Linux install ever. I formatted a 120gb hard drive, painstakingly backing everything up and exporting configs and such, and did the tedious format and install process. Once actually logged on to Fedora, the graphics were horrible and after a vague 15 minutes downloading the results of a "nvidia linux drivers" search (didn't work) I reformatted and put Windows back on (which incidentally, picked up "b4db0yz.exe" within an hour and wouldn't let me use Windows Update due to services failing, so had to be formatted again). If it wasn't for the slow response time due to the graphics issues and the horrible lag and refresh rates I would have kept it installed, though.
So in a way, these guys are the Buffy (Season One) to the Botnet's Master? They "slay" the host machine, the source of the trouble, but all the undead zombies are left lurching and crippled, waiting for someone else to lead them, who of course, eventually shows up.... so, can someone hook me up with the main Shadowserver girl?
I think my PC/audio setup is pretty good for an unemployed teen, and I have a lot of fun raiding my Dad's old record collection to find the gems. It just doesn't feel right playing The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck on CD when I have them on nice, warm and authentic vinyl. Also, the size of the sleeve and the picture discs are infinitely cooler than any CD.
For me, CD is still viable, and so is vinyl! I see my friend buying individual songs off iTunes for the price of a sandwich and I laugh at him. If you're going to get digital rips of music (and play them on awful tinny laptop speakers), you may as well just download it for free. When I pay for music I want to be able to touch it. If you've never experienced the joy of owning a 12" picture disc and sleeve, you've never loved music.
"It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance. Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas."
No, but it means that since more people who may not otherwise have had access to such tools can get their voices heard. Sure, it means there's still a lot of pointless "Today I ate a sandwich"-esque blogs out there, but it also means we can get viewpoints and stories from places you'd never hear from before (google around for a recent blog by a homeless guy, or the ones from Iraq that give better and faster updates than the global news groups do). Just like the printing press blew open authorship from being limited to monks and the very rich, the internet has made it easier for Joe Public to get his voice heard. Sure, most of said Joe Publics aren't gonna change the world, but it makes logical sense that some of them are going to revolutionise the net.
I'm not really up on science stuff (as an Arts undergraduate) but one thing bothers me - how could they contain something, however small, that was as hot as the sun? Surely it would melt anything nearby? Or do I have a completely off-base idea of what it is they achieved?
Sounds like the US enjoys much better value (or is it certain plans?)
It's about 10 pence (£0.10) a message here if you're not on some kind of plan, that's 17 cents according to Google.
As for calls, I never make them because a 2 minute call is going to cost me much more than the price of a message. I guess that's why texting is much more popular here since it works out cheaper.
Yeah, I'd definitely be interested in the findings of research in that field.
"From the sound of your post, your sister's friends are much more fluent in Netspeak than she is, and she just "plays along," as it were."
To be honest, maybe I'm biased, but I think all the kids are a little clueless about it. It's a social thing, they feel they have to say these things but don't really know what it means. Case in point: Jamaican influenced English is popular in Nottingham amongst young kids getting into the hiphop/black culture. Consequently, I've heard crowds of white kids saying things like "Johnnos" (that's a phonetic transcription, I think the root of the phrase is "Jah knows"). From their pronunciation, and a little questioning from me, it seems none of them actually know what it means. I showed a group of my sister's friends on Wikipedia just who Jah is (some kind of Jamaican deity) and they had no idea. They just say such things because it's deemed 'cool' and thus, as most people are probably aware, you don't question what's cool if you want to remain cool, equally if you don't understand you must always pretend you do. Again, this is somewhere where spoken language trends evolve onto electronic forms.
I hear what you're saying about the reading thing, I guess I'm guilty of upholding books above all else. I guess the main problem is, despite the good quality stuff online, the lowest common denominator readers aren't gonna track it down.
All good points. I definitely agree with you that we shouldn't completely dismiss "AOLer speak" despite its perceived idiocy; it's a cultural reflection and if it's stupid, we're (as a society) stupid; these things don't come out of nowhere.
As for the quality, that's the real question. Keeping with the example of my sister, I've asked her sometimes what some of the gobbledegook on the screen means and she admits she doesn't know, but still "lol"s back at the other person, or responds in some generic way. I also have to say, that as evidenced in Orwell's 1984, the reduction of lexis obviously has a detrimental effect on language and thus meaning. I think, on a smaller scale, these kids that are using less and less words to make their points are obviously losing out as meaning becomes more and more ambiguous. One of my favourite things about the English language ever since I learned to read is the depth of it; there are so many words and synonyms for these words. The amount of ways you can express yourself is huge. I feel that "netspeak" (I think we need an agreed name for this language, although just like 'real' languages there are many dialects) doesn't feature this so in turn, kids are losing out and not expanding their vocabulary. Of course, this is all related to the drop in the popularity of reading. Since books are less cool than they've been for a long time, kids are less interested in reading and want access to their information and communication faster, which = the internet. I owe my level of intellect and skills to a love of reading from an early age.
If we're to believe literary critics (Terry Eagleton in particular), the love of literature by the masses came about as a means of control, enforced by the ruling class, to replace the lack of influence exerted by the Church. If the 20th century was the death of the Church in favour of literature, then is the 21st century the death of literature in favour of the computer? Interesting stuff.
What, the use of AIM and MSN etc is causing a decline in spelling skills! Unpossible!
Seriously, this is a big issue. My little sister is 14 and whenever I see her on the computer she's typing away to her friends in another language. It's more than just the old cliché "lol"s and "omfg"s, it's also a large influence from 'ghetto' speak or whatever you want to call that particular variety of pidgin English. All her friends do the same and it's so difficult to decipher it. Contractions are the order of the day, even contractions of contractions, so "uk babe" means "are you okay, my dear?" - that one's quite ambiguous to a non-savvy reader. Also, these other words creep in from spoken language; eg, in Nottingham it seems to be 'cool' for these kids to refer to members of the female gender as "gyals" - your guess is as good as mine as to how this one's pronounced, but they all know what it means.
The fact is (and I'm speaking as an English undergraduate) that written and spoken language are (obviously) two very different beasts, but the rise of technology and the communications advances it brings have blurred the lines. What method of communication is IM - spoken or written? Logic would say written, but virtually nobody (below the age of 20, anyway) types as they would write in, say, a letter. Instant Messaging and other forms of online communication (email, forums, etc) aren't one or the other, but they do tend to show closer links with spoken language, which is having a detrimental effect on written language since the twain should never meet, historically. We know it's becoming an issue when kids are handing in exam papers written in 'net shorthand, and if there aren't better controls established either in schools to make sure kids can see the differences, or online to try to limit the level of intellect-crushing abrvtns, the future generations are gonna be really limited.
To be fair, FarCry was B-Movie material in terms of plot anyway. The "acting" was ridiculously laughable, with the stereotyped male lead who's just out to kill everything that moves, or make moves on them (see also: female lead, with gratuitous semi-naked scenes of course). The revelation that the end bad guy is the one who's been helping you all along was an awful ending, so predictable and cheesy, and the plot itself was pretty poor. I don't think it could be "ruined" when it wasn't to the standard of, say, HL2, to start with.
I realise this is not a final build by any means, but my initial reaction to any new program is to poke around in the options/preferences and see what tweaks I can make. I couldn't find any in this (wasn't I looking hard enough, or aren't there any?) and that made me sad, one of my favourite iTunes features (although it occasionally truncates stuff) is the library organising stuff, keeping my music well labelled. Also, it was a little overwhelming with all the bookmarks and services all down the side. I turn all that crap off in iTunes, and when I minimised it and then restored it they all expanded themselves again.. not cool! I'll keep an eye on this though, as an OSS equivalent to iTunes is definitely something I'm interested in.
Hmm, true. I guess these are the only kids of that generation that I'm exposed to, so it's all I can really base my opinions on. But in general I've seen my old school (where she now attends) get lower and lower exam scores over the years, and more and more kids getting suspended; the two are almost directly correlated.
I'd definitely agree with this. My little sister is 14, and although she's not bright in the way that my other sister and I were, she's not dumb. However, she and her friends generally seem uninterested in learning, reading (the hobby that I attribute most of my intelligence today to), and just general education. Kids today (and I say this as a 19 year old, so don't mod me -1, Old Timer) are just apathetic about learning, and I can definitely say that as time passes, kids just aren't getting smarter.
You know what? I got in on this when it was first released, and a few weeks down the line, I'm not that impressed.
True, I didn't review every single aspect of the system, but from a cursory overview it just seems like a jazzed-up version of Analog, which most webhosts offer as standard built-in logfile assessment. It's filled with 'executive' displays so you can show your boss fancy pie charts and graphs with nice-looking displays, but if you really just need page stats there's many simpler ways (and unlimited in signups) to go about it, particularly without loading google's external JS into your site. I personally found AXS to be pretty straightforward but usable.
It won't surprise me if other people here experienced bad service from CyberPixels.
Basically, Christmas 2004, our site suddenly went down, no explanation. It had happened before, usually not for long, so I wrote it off to experience. An hour later when I next tried it, however, it was still down. I spent some time refreshing the page and trying to ping the server, got nothing, and no FTP access either. I checked out the CyberPixels site and got nothing.
"Ah well", I thought. "They're probably aware of it and fixing it now." How wrong I was.
When it got to the next day and it still wasn't back, I logged onto the CyberPixels forum and found I was not the only one. It seemed _everyone_ hosted by CP had gone down, and they were pissed.
From reading around in the forum, net gossip got back to us and it seemed that the owner, Rebecca, had fired the two main support staffers (people got this info from livejournals, blogs and forums) and was currently away skiing for the Christmas holidays. Most people defended her about this, saying of course she wouldn't just leave the company without anyone to run support. Of course, this is all going on in the week before Christmas, so many of us were running promotions and stuff on our sites. Or were.
Anyway, cutting a long a frustrating story short, the sites were down for about a week. Suddenly on Christmas Eve, SQL came back up, eventually followed by the sites themselves. No explanation, no word from CyberPixels (who nobody had heard from for the duration of the downtime). The first thing we all did when the service was back up was to download current backups and make sure we were covered. The second thing? Searching for a new webhost.
Days later I discovered Dreamhost, and I've never looked back. They've upgraded our accounts (free, Gmail style) tons of times, I now have 20gb of storage and 1TB (yes, TB) of bandwidth. If you're reading this and thinking "wow, sure sounds reliable, kinda like those email providers offering 100gb", seriously, DH rule. They have a personal blog and I won a free year's hosting and domain just by entering (and not winning, might I add) a video editing contest. They gave that prize to all the entrants. As for support and uptime, they're perfect, the name Dreamhost really isn't an exxageration.
Anyway, to conclude the story, my site was just recovering from the Santy worm, so once I'd repaired it and backed everything up, our CyberPixels account was left to expire (it was due anyway) and we moved to Dreamhost. However, as a final insult, CyberPixels, without asking us, or contacting us in any way to explain the crazy week, billed us for another year's service without our approval (we hadn't signed for a 2 year package or anything). After some angry phonecalls we got back the cash, but I would heartily reccomend Dreamhost and warn anyone reading this to steer clear of CyberPixels (who are, beyond belief, still operating).
Slashdot Mirror
"what does the Slashdot community think the impact of Internet Explorer 7 will be on the web in general? Will we be forced to live a two-browser life once again?"
I think we never left the 'two-browser life' stage. As a developer, I obviously have both browsers installed and regularly use both to test designs, despite favouring Firefox for personal browsing. I think the competition is healthy, better to have people divided amongst 5 or 6 'core' browsers (IE, Opera, Firefox, Safari, Lynx maybe and Konqueror) is better than having everyone locked into one single program. It does make continuity and consistency an issue for web developers, but I'd still rather it was that way than have everyone using the same badly-written software.
Regarding the topic at hand, I think the release of IE7 won't change too much. Probably everyone running XP now, unaware of the alternate options, will just get the XP "upgrade now!" bubble and download the newer version without really being aware of the differences. From my attempts to educate my spyware-ridden family regarding OSS, it seems that often, computer laymen aren't aware that there are other browsers, and just see IE as the abritrary, sole browser in existence. The biggest thing is educating them to their options then allowing them to freely choose. IE7 won't convert many Firefox users back, it'll just upgrade the IE6 and Vista-buying public who never really know the difference to start with.
Because he personally had reset the nameservers in order to get his email working again. Of course, he declined to tell me this fact, initially calling me saying "The website isn't working!". I spent a pained few hours trying to figure it out, before I realised he'd somehow reset the nameservers and hadn't told me. I had to explain to him why he couldn't. My advice? Don't do work for family. They'll expect it for free and they'll use the fact that you're related to be rude and demanding to you; more so than they would be to any paid employee.
Haha, I love how each of the Manager's replies show a complete ignorance of the previous, helpful message from the CentOS tech. I had a similar situation trying to explain to my uncle (who I was building a site for) about how SMTP works and why mail forwarding only worked before we changed his nameservers (since he only bought domain names and not hosting). I spent a painstaking 20 minutes explaining it in layman's terms, only for him to pause then say, "My email isn't working". The CentOS guy should get a medal for keeping so calm here.
If GCSE History serves me correctly, didn't Hitler [1] do something like this? Some bill that granted him "emergency powers" over the Reichstag that meant he could pass laws on his own? One step closer to dictatorship we step..
[1]Note that I'm not equating Tony Blair to Hitler or Labour to the Nazis or anything, just an interesting co-incidence..
I really wish I'd read this before Sunday.
"There was enough glitches in the second install, that I can say if you have a Nvidia card or a motherboard with the Nvidia nForce chipset, you should look elsewhere for a linux o.s. or be prepared to do a fair amount of tweaking."
I have both an Nvidia graphics card and the nForce chipset, and this was my first Linux install ever. I formatted a 120gb hard drive, painstakingly backing everything up and exporting configs and such, and did the tedious format and install process. Once actually logged on to Fedora, the graphics were horrible and after a vague 15 minutes downloading the results of a "nvidia linux drivers" search (didn't work) I reformatted and put Windows back on (which incidentally, picked up "b4db0yz.exe" within an hour and wouldn't let me use Windows Update due to services failing, so had to be formatted again). If it wasn't for the slow response time due to the graphics issues and the horrible lag and refresh rates I would have kept it installed, though.
So in a way, these guys are the Buffy (Season One) to the Botnet's Master? They "slay" the host machine, the source of the trouble, but all the undead zombies are left lurching and crippled, waiting for someone else to lead them, who of course, eventually shows up. ... so, can someone hook me up with the main Shadowserver girl?
What? No "*Ballmer throws a chair*" comment? For shame, /.
I think my PC/audio setup is pretty good for an unemployed teen, and I have a lot of fun raiding my Dad's old record collection to find the gems. It just doesn't feel right playing The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Jeff Beck on CD when I have them on nice, warm and authentic vinyl. Also, the size of the sleeve and the picture discs are infinitely cooler than any CD.
For me, CD is still viable, and so is vinyl! I see my friend buying individual songs off iTunes for the price of a sandwich and I laugh at him. If you're going to get digital rips of music (and play them on awful tinny laptop speakers), you may as well just download it for free. When I pay for music I want to be able to touch it. If you've never experienced the joy of owning a 12" picture disc and sleeve, you've never loved music.
"It may be easier for the average guy to write his own song, blog, or whatever, but that doesn't mean that he is contributing to societal advance. Just because it is easier to distribute ideas doesn't mean that it is easier to come up with *good* ideas."
No, but it means that since more people who may not otherwise have had access to such tools can get their voices heard. Sure, it means there's still a lot of pointless "Today I ate a sandwich"-esque blogs out there, but it also means we can get viewpoints and stories from places you'd never hear from before (google around for a recent blog by a homeless guy, or the ones from Iraq that give better and faster updates than the global news groups do). Just like the printing press blew open authorship from being limited to monks and the very rich, the internet has made it easier for Joe Public to get his voice heard. Sure, most of said Joe Publics aren't gonna change the world, but it makes logical sense that some of them are going to revolutionise the net.
I'm not really up on science stuff (as an Arts undergraduate) but one thing bothers me - how could they contain something, however small, that was as hot as the sun? Surely it would melt anything nearby? Or do I have a completely off-base idea of what it is they achieved?
I swear I closed that tag, sorry.
They need the Sega Master System Controller. Square edges = owww after sustained gaming, and the one-piece D-pad made controlling extra challenging.
Sounds like the US enjoys much better value (or is it certain plans?)
It's about 10 pence (£0.10) a message here if you're not on some kind of plan, that's 17 cents according to Google.
As for calls, I never make them because a 2 minute call is going to cost me much more than the price of a message. I guess that's why texting is much more popular here since it works out cheaper.
Yeah, I'd definitely be interested in the findings of research in that field.
"From the sound of your post, your sister's friends are much more fluent in Netspeak than she is, and she just "plays along," as it were."
To be honest, maybe I'm biased, but I think all the kids are a little clueless about it. It's a social thing, they feel they have to say these things but don't really know what it means. Case in point: Jamaican influenced English is popular in Nottingham amongst young kids getting into the hiphop/black culture. Consequently, I've heard crowds of white kids saying things like "Johnnos" (that's a phonetic transcription, I think the root of the phrase is "Jah knows"). From their pronunciation, and a little questioning from me, it seems none of them actually know what it means. I showed a group of my sister's friends on Wikipedia just who Jah is (some kind of Jamaican deity) and they had no idea. They just say such things because it's deemed 'cool' and thus, as most people are probably aware, you don't question what's cool if you want to remain cool, equally if you don't understand you must always pretend you do. Again, this is somewhere where spoken language trends evolve onto electronic forms.
I hear what you're saying about the reading thing, I guess I'm guilty of upholding books above all else. I guess the main problem is, despite the good quality stuff online, the lowest common denominator readers aren't gonna track it down.
All good points. I definitely agree with you that we shouldn't completely dismiss "AOLer speak" despite its perceived idiocy; it's a cultural reflection and if it's stupid, we're (as a society) stupid; these things don't come out of nowhere.
As for the quality, that's the real question. Keeping with the example of my sister, I've asked her sometimes what some of the gobbledegook on the screen means and she admits she doesn't know, but still "lol"s back at the other person, or responds in some generic way. I also have to say, that as evidenced in Orwell's 1984, the reduction of lexis obviously has a detrimental effect on language and thus meaning. I think, on a smaller scale, these kids that are using less and less words to make their points are obviously losing out as meaning becomes more and more ambiguous. One of my favourite things about the English language ever since I learned to read is the depth of it; there are so many words and synonyms for these words. The amount of ways you can express yourself is huge. I feel that "netspeak" (I think we need an agreed name for this language, although just like 'real' languages there are many dialects) doesn't feature this so in turn, kids are losing out and not expanding their vocabulary. Of course, this is all related to the drop in the popularity of reading. Since books are less cool than they've been for a long time, kids are less interested in reading and want access to their information and communication faster, which = the internet. I owe my level of intellect and skills to a love of reading from an early age.
If we're to believe literary critics (Terry Eagleton in particular), the love of literature by the masses came about as a means of control, enforced by the ruling class, to replace the lack of influence exerted by the Church. If the 20th century was the death of the Church in favour of literature, then is the 21st century the death of literature in favour of the computer? Interesting stuff.
What, the use of AIM and MSN etc is causing a decline in spelling skills! Unpossible!
Seriously, this is a big issue. My little sister is 14 and whenever I see her on the computer she's typing away to her friends in another language. It's more than just the old cliché "lol"s and "omfg"s, it's also a large influence from 'ghetto' speak or whatever you want to call that particular variety of pidgin English. All her friends do the same and it's so difficult to decipher it. Contractions are the order of the day, even contractions of contractions, so "uk babe" means "are you okay, my dear?" - that one's quite ambiguous to a non-savvy reader. Also, these other words creep in from spoken language; eg, in Nottingham it seems to be 'cool' for these kids to refer to members of the female gender as "gyals" - your guess is as good as mine as to how this one's pronounced, but they all know what it means.
The fact is (and I'm speaking as an English undergraduate) that written and spoken language are (obviously) two very different beasts, but the rise of technology and the communications advances it brings have blurred the lines. What method of communication is IM - spoken or written? Logic would say written, but virtually nobody (below the age of 20, anyway) types as they would write in, say, a letter. Instant Messaging and other forms of online communication (email, forums, etc) aren't one or the other, but they do tend to show closer links with spoken language, which is having a detrimental effect on written language since the twain should never meet, historically. We know it's becoming an issue when kids are handing in exam papers written in 'net shorthand, and if there aren't better controls established either in schools to make sure kids can see the differences, or online to try to limit the level of intellect-crushing abrvtns, the future generations are gonna be really limited.
"PS Politicization isn't a word, but I'm not sure there's a better term."
"Dumbing-down"?
To be fair, FarCry was B-Movie material in terms of plot anyway. The "acting" was ridiculously laughable, with the stereotyped male lead who's just out to kill everything that moves, or make moves on them (see also: female lead, with gratuitous semi-naked scenes of course). The revelation that the end bad guy is the one who's been helping you all along was an awful ending, so predictable and cheesy, and the plot itself was pretty poor. I don't think it could be "ruined" when it wasn't to the standard of, say, HL2, to start with.
I realise this is not a final build by any means, but my initial reaction to any new program is to poke around in the options/preferences and see what tweaks I can make. I couldn't find any in this (wasn't I looking hard enough, or aren't there any?) and that made me sad, one of my favourite iTunes features (although it occasionally truncates stuff) is the library organising stuff, keeping my music well labelled. Also, it was a little overwhelming with all the bookmarks and services all down the side. I turn all that crap off in iTunes, and when I minimised it and then restored it they all expanded themselves again.. not cool! I'll keep an eye on this though, as an OSS equivalent to iTunes is definitely something I'm interested in.
Hmm, true. I guess these are the only kids of that generation that I'm exposed to, so it's all I can really base my opinions on. But in general I've seen my old school (where she now attends) get lower and lower exam scores over the years, and more and more kids getting suspended; the two are almost directly correlated.
I'd definitely agree with this. My little sister is 14, and although she's not bright in the way that my other sister and I were, she's not dumb. However, she and her friends generally seem uninterested in learning, reading (the hobby that I attribute most of my intelligence today to), and just general education. Kids today (and I say this as a 19 year old, so don't mod me -1, Old Timer) are just apathetic about learning, and I can definitely say that as time passes, kids just aren't getting smarter.
You know what? I got in on this when it was first released, and a few weeks down the line, I'm not that impressed.
True, I didn't review every single aspect of the system, but from a cursory overview it just seems like a jazzed-up version of Analog, which most webhosts offer as standard built-in logfile assessment. It's filled with 'executive' displays so you can show your boss fancy pie charts and graphs with nice-looking displays, but if you really just need page stats there's many simpler ways (and unlimited in signups) to go about it, particularly without loading google's external JS into your site. I personally found AXS to be pretty straightforward but usable.
Gah, sorry everyone, been away from /. long enough to forget that it doesn't auto-insert linebreak tags.
It won't surprise me if other people here experienced bad service from CyberPixels. Basically, Christmas 2004, our site suddenly went down, no explanation. It had happened before, usually not for long, so I wrote it off to experience. An hour later when I next tried it, however, it was still down. I spent some time refreshing the page and trying to ping the server, got nothing, and no FTP access either. I checked out the CyberPixels site and got nothing. "Ah well", I thought. "They're probably aware of it and fixing it now." How wrong I was. When it got to the next day and it still wasn't back, I logged onto the CyberPixels forum and found I was not the only one. It seemed _everyone_ hosted by CP had gone down, and they were pissed. From reading around in the forum, net gossip got back to us and it seemed that the owner, Rebecca, had fired the two main support staffers (people got this info from livejournals, blogs and forums) and was currently away skiing for the Christmas holidays. Most people defended her about this, saying of course she wouldn't just leave the company without anyone to run support. Of course, this is all going on in the week before Christmas, so many of us were running promotions and stuff on our sites. Or were. Anyway, cutting a long a frustrating story short, the sites were down for about a week. Suddenly on Christmas Eve, SQL came back up, eventually followed by the sites themselves. No explanation, no word from CyberPixels (who nobody had heard from for the duration of the downtime). The first thing we all did when the service was back up was to download current backups and make sure we were covered. The second thing? Searching for a new webhost. Days later I discovered Dreamhost, and I've never looked back. They've upgraded our accounts (free, Gmail style) tons of times, I now have 20gb of storage and 1TB (yes, TB) of bandwidth. If you're reading this and thinking "wow, sure sounds reliable, kinda like those email providers offering 100gb", seriously, DH rule. They have a personal blog and I won a free year's hosting and domain just by entering (and not winning, might I add) a video editing contest. They gave that prize to all the entrants. As for support and uptime, they're perfect, the name Dreamhost really isn't an exxageration. Anyway, to conclude the story, my site was just recovering from the Santy worm, so once I'd repaired it and backed everything up, our CyberPixels account was left to expire (it was due anyway) and we moved to Dreamhost. However, as a final insult, CyberPixels, without asking us, or contacting us in any way to explain the crazy week, billed us for another year's service without our approval (we hadn't signed for a 2 year package or anything). After some angry phonecalls we got back the cash, but I would heartily reccomend Dreamhost and warn anyone reading this to steer clear of CyberPixels (who are, beyond belief, still operating).