Here's the thing: if you're interested in doing anything, whether its learning to milk a cow or installing a new OS, you don't try it just two times, each book-ended by a 1.5 year window and then throw your hands up when it doesn't go quite how you expected. Now, it's fine if you're just not at all interested, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. You need to tell yourself that, despite all of your experience with something vaguely similar that would seemingly be analogous to the new thing you're trying out, you're only making those comparisons based on what you know, and the analogy may not in fact map as well as you'd like or think.
If you're doing something more complex than the default Ubuntu install, you need to take time to actually learn what's going on during the install and why, not just poke idly through the prompts and hoping you'll get it right by coincidence. If it's just the graphical installer crapping out (yup, loathe as many are to admit it, it's still flaky as hell on a ton of hardware), you need to try the alternate install disc. If it's something else, please be specific as to what it is so you can not only get help, but something can stand a chance of getting fixed if it is indeed broken.
Personally, I can't promise to fix anything that may be wrong with Ubuntu, but if you need help on the install, let me know, I've done many Ubuntu installs and I'm willing to help.
If there are entities presently not following standards set for the presentation of web content, what makes you think extending things to cater to a second intended medium will result in adherence to those standards? I'd agree with you if the intended niche for (X)HTML/CSS were pathetically small in scale, but it's not: the present intended audience of people creating content is so big as to make "damn huge" a laughable description.
Now, would it be wrong to suggest that there could be a *separate* XML specification made extremely similar to (X)HTML/CSS, with non-print oriented tags stripped out by default and the necessary stuff added in? No, of course not. That might actually be a pretty smart idea, because certainly there are existing structure tags that would work well for both, and others that would need to be named differently due to differing function, but may still be somewhat analogous to existing tags in limited ways. But this isn't what Lie was talking about: he wants to avoid creating something new by instead tacking new features on to something old to make it work in a different medium. For somebody involved in making a browser that pissants everywhere love to hold up as being one of the most standards-compliant beasts going, it's incredibly short-sighted thinking. Coupling that with the fact that he seems to believe creating new stand-alone standards like ODF as being a lot of unnecessary headache-inducing work, it's practically downright naive thinking as well.
Lie only ranted about the ridiculousness of going to the trouble to craft new standards, and then suggested that we instead repurpose a set of standards for web documents so that they work for exchanging documents intended for print. As somebody aware of what hell it's been dealing with web standards, your concern should be focusing not just how long it took for XHTML and CSS standards to be sort-of accepted, but how stupid it would be to go and extend something that people have been working hard to simplify.
I think it is important for everyone to understand that First Amendment rights don't exist on Websites, blogs, and message forums. Those that own those communication platforms are free to delete or censure anything they feel necessary to maintain the spirit and intentions of both the supporting business and the site as a whole.
You're absolutely right. What should be getting railed against here isn't perceived civil oppression, but rather a company saying, "Okay, we want you, our potential customers, to tell us what you want," and then plugging its ears and putting on the blinders when what some of these people want isn't what they want to hear. No wrong-doing has been committed, but it has been proved that said company's bid for input wasn't sincere, and if you think that's crap, don't buy from them.
No kidding. I worked at a retail job during-and-right-after-college and Chris, their drummer, was in the same department as me. Our shop, despite being owned by a big corporation, had a reputation for giving folks flexible hours if they had other obligations (and could still demonstrate a reasonable work ethic whilst on the clock), so we had quite a few musicians and artists around. Chris was nice enough to give the music-interested folks in the department copies of their demo, and what we heard was damn good. Three months on, he let us sample some newer material, and it was incredible. Six months down the line from there, they were regularly playing local shows multiple times a week. Their arrangements have gotten not only more complex, but more tuneful as well.
In short, they're a massively talented bunch of guys who've worked their asses off and earned the success they deserve. Makes you wonder how hard the "struggling artist" types really are working.
So in effect, you *are* asking for free broadband, becuase you want more service than you get now and don't want to pay for it. That's not to say that you shouldn't get better service from you ISP, but saying there are no options is just whinny.
No, I'm *not* asking for free broadband. When I say there are no other options, I mean it in a very literal sense. I live and work in a more residential, slowly-getting-redeveloped part of my city. There's *no* optical service available in my part of town, period. I've checked.
To get it, my only option is to move a good four miles SW of where am at the moment, to a part of town where rent averages double to triple of what I pay here, or to move to the SW 'burbs, where rent's very cheap but one's far enough from everything where one needs to buy and maintain a car if one ever plans to do much beyond stay at home and rely on delivered groceries. Either one of these cases would result in extra recurring expenses large enough to prohibit me from being able to afford such service. There's no winning solution.
Now, if my ISP was even 3/4 as reliable as they promised to be in the contract, I wouldn't have any problems. As it stands, service sucks and I'm not getting what I pay for. If you think taking 10 minutes to upload a less-than 1MB file to a remote server is acceptable, try dealing with it multiple times throughout the week and consistently explaining to clients that you're a bit behind schedule because your ISP can't or won't opt to upgrade their equipment in your area.
the statement " does that make it right ", you need to read your contract. Since I spent time reading my contract, with bell south and with comcast and with American broad band, I can say without a doubt, I get what I pay for.
I'm glad that in your experiences, these companies have constantly kept up on their promise to maintain their promised minimum speed. I have experienced quite the opposite. I pay in every month for my "small business" connection and the service is massively inconsistent, to the point where I'm sometimes literally waiting for 5-10 minutes to throw a less than 1MB file onto a remote server. The competition around here is even worse than my current ISP. I don't make enough money to fund or take time off to engage in legal proceedings against my ISP, so I haven't got much choice besides changing jobs, and that seems like a stupid solution.
It depends. If the legs only disappeared when I was out of the room, then I wouldn't mind. Similarly, if my ISP over-sells their capacity, but monitors peak demands to ensure that I can get the full speed when I want it, I don't care that I can't get it when I don't. If I expected to be downloading 24/7, then I wouldn't expect to have a consumer-grade line.
What part of this don't you understand? The whole problem is that the ISP may not be doing a good job of monitoring peak demands and your connection may turn to crap for lengthy periods when you not only "want" the connection, but need it to get work done. Back to the chair legs example: sure, it doesn't matter if the legs are there or not when you're asleep, but basing when you can sit down and eat around the fact that the legs may go at any time is not only massively inconvenient, but seriously interferes with the rest of one's life. The lucky thing there is that chair legs don't come and go just like that, as well as the fact that there's likely plenty of other reasonably comfortable spots right in one's own home besides a dining room or kitchen table to sit down and eat dinner. Not so with internet connections.
With Flash and PDF you can do a lot more, but obviously authoring becomes a problem.
Well, maybe. Have you ever looked at font licenses? There are more than a few digital type foundries using licenses that expressly prohibit embedding outlines of the glyphs in other files. This is because the outlines of the glyphs (mathematically represented by the font software) are the one part of the font that's actually copyrightable; the actual glyphs themselves are not (this is why so many foundries have their own individual versions of Helvetica and so on). Not everybody's bad, but Linotype and Adobe have been rather outspoken about this over the last few years, though admitedly I haven't really seen them actually enforcing it too much.
Yes, exactly. Instead of taking one of two specifications created just for rich document formats, he suggests making a brand new specification by extending CSS/HTML to do something it doesn't yet seem ready to do.
This talk of not creating new standards is ludicrous: there are already existing XML schemes geared towards this sort of task. Why should HTML/CSS be extended for publishing non-web documents when the work's already been done elsewhere? It gets even more ridiculous when you stop to think about all the bullshit that's been edged out of HTML over the past decade or so that we're *still* struggling to get people away from.
People here seem to think that ISPs are evil for not having trunks that are 1:1 for what they sell. But that's the way it is for most things!
But again: does that make it alright? You're being complacent and accepting of a stupid precedent. You wouldn't be fine buying a dining room suite if the chair legs dematerialized and rematerialized sporadically, even though you're not sitting in one chair 24/7, would you?
It's not screwing your customers if that's how the business works. There's nothing crooked about it.
Fine. Then refusing to increase capacity because you'd rather maximize your profits to a ridiculous degree is incredibly fucking selfish and a sure-fire way of putting yourself out of business the second competition offers better service. The crooked part is doing everything possible to ensure that competition is either not present in a given community or is at least as bad, if not worse, than the service you're offering. Happy?
I'd disagree that it should stop. The real issue the ISP needs to know how to deal with is how are they going to add capacity in a heartbeat.
If they'd been interested in increasing capacity in the first place, they wouldn't be so heavily reliant on oversubscribing in the first place. The root of the problem is that the majority don't seem particularly interested in increasing capacity, but rather how long they can get away with avoiding it...and when they can't, how many bullshit excuses they can make for not increasing it.
That's not to say that ISPs shouldn't have a reasonable oversubscription rate -- you should be able to use most of your bandwidth most of the time -- but to suggest that ISPs should provide every subscriber with upstream access 24/7 at 100% of their local link speed is silly, becuase most of that bandwidth would go unused most of the time, and it would cost a fortune while doing it.
You say "silly" as though I'm asking for free broadband plus a handjob. I'm only asking to get some reasonable approximation of the service I'm paying for, and I don't think that's absurd by any stretch of the imagination.
You yourself admit the real problem: they do a piss poor job managing oversubscription. I pay about $120/mo. for a "small business" package with static IPs (I work from home 30-60 hours a week). Connectivity turns to dogshit *at least* 3 times a week for hour-plus long stretches during regular business hours alone. I've checked my equipment, and they've checked theirs, and there's apparently nothing wrong. When it takes 10 minutes to upload a file less than 1MB, that's pretty damned ridiculous. I wind up having to work further into the evening and effectively lose money because I can't charge the client for time spent waiting around on my ISP's shortcomings while I can't go away for other purposes for more than half an hour because there's no telling when the traffic issues resolve. I can't switch ISPs because the other one in the area is even less reliable.
I'm the consumer paying for service, and I'm getting hosed. I don't have any other choice besides perhaps getting a job elsewhere or moving, and that seems like a pretty ridiculous solution to me. My ISP needs to manage its resources more effectively, end of story.
Every ISP oversubscribes at some point. It's a fact of the business.
First, thanks for the good overview of how the ISPs oversell and also why they do it. It's greatly appreciated, and I say this because I don't want the following statement to be taken the wrong way:
So you're basically saying that it's acceptable for one business to screw their customers, as they themselves are willfully getting victimized by another business. Again, tell me how this isn't stupid or wrong?
And yes, that's largely rhetorical. I understand and sincerely appreciate your explanation of why, but it doesn't change my point of view, except for maybe now viewing ISPs as not only crooked businesses, but poorly run businesses as well.
I don't know, I have a tough time taking Tufte seriously when his site (edwardtufte.com) is a horrible mess in terms of organization. He's got a lot of interesting things to say, he writes well, and I even like his prints, but man...just look at that steamer
The thing is that overselling is selling more than you've (well, the ISP, not *you*) got and it shouldn't be happening in the first place. Playing this game of "we'll see if we can upgrade as real live usage increases and if we don't, no big deal" is a joke. It's about as stupid as (put your reduction safety hats on, it may not map well!) floating checks: sure, it's pretty likely that check from person A is going to clear in time for the check you wrote to person B to go through alright, despite the present lack of sufficient funds in your own account...you've thought it out, played it on the outside, person B probably won't deposit your check for a week, and you deposited the one from person A 3 days before physically handing B your check. But when something goes wrong in the in-between of financial institutions, you get bitten in the ass with fees, and deservedly so: you should've been more careful about what you were doing in the first place.
I guess the part that doesn't stop the ISPs from overselling bandwidth is that they don't face any real-live consequences most of the time. Most customers are complacent to sit back and take it. The ones who aren't often lack the choice of other providers (and that's discounting non-broadband options...suggesting switching to dial-up is a curmudgeonly suggestion for argumentative types to make and little else) or the capital to start their own ISP. Haven't seen any legal action taken yet, so...yeah. What incentive *do* they have to only sell what they've got or maintain capacity when they're often the only game in a particular part of town?
It's always interesting to observe the reaction of the people who supposedly make up the "open source community" when these things happen. On the original article and on the OSNews post as well the general attitude is the same that I saw when ESR dared criticize the CUPS GUI - he's a "fucking idiot", essentially.
I think that has to do with the fact that ESR is a high-profile guy in the so-called community that has a tendency to get really "bitchy" (I quote because I don't entirely mean it, but it's sort of applicable) when it finally dawns on him that something sucks. Never mind that the guy's got some very strong and sometimes controversial opinions. He makes a great big production out of something either breaking or not working in an expected way as though he's the first person to wrangle with these issues and yet is also the guy who's written pieces like "How to Become a Hacker" that encourage behaviors that don't coincide with his own in cases like these.
In the case of Fedora, it has, in my experience, been fairly doggish since around version 3. It's a pain in the ass to upgrade between versions, yum is slow and clunky, kernel headers aren't included by default anymore, it seems a bit slow, the repositories are incredibly limited, blah blah blah ad nauseum. There's certainly some folks out there who might find it useful (as I recall, it's a cinch to install and the package groupings you can select from in the process are actually sensibly arranged, which I thought was seriously bad-ass), but especially given Mr. Raymond's "we need to embrace some proprietary codecs" spiel months upon months ago, I'm honestly surprised he waited this long to move away from it. He had plenty of reasons to switch before and should have, instead of waiting to get himself into a corner, half-willfully breaking his system and subsequently raising a big stink. The better thing to do would've been to point out what he perceives as broken or wrong and suggest ways to fix it. Complaining in public is about as useful as standing about and grumbling how politican X is a shithead ruining your country but not actually getting involved in politics or advocacy for changing things: it's fine to blow off steam, but there's a point where it's counter-productive, not to mention a bit old.
In fact EVERYONE can benefit from a daily dose. Its much better than the cod liver oil of the past, many are flavored now or in gel cap form, my entire family takes them and we're better off for it.
Yes, you just wouldn't believe how me and the wife's lives have improved since we started acquiring the Innsmouth look. So much unspeakable, so many angles!
I'm using OS in the sense of "distribution" not "kernel." If there's really a full-fledged, desktop-ready, consumer-friendly distribution that doesn't at least encourage you to install a web browser with it, I'll eat my hat.
I didn't mean "kernel". I meant operating system in the very here-and-now contemporary sense of "a kernel and group of applications packaged with said kernel that allow you to do stuff with things".
Now you're using undefined qualifiers to specify what constitutes an operating system, and, besides meeting this previously unmentioned set of requirements, the browser now doesn't necessarily have to be installed at all costs, but now spec'd as a default option that can't be opted out of prior to installing the operating system.
Really, nobody's asking you to eat your hat or anything of the sort. You were just wrong. These things happen to everyone all the time. Misinformation needs to be corrected for the benefit of others who might read your modded-up statement and take it as being rooted in fact. If I make an incorrect statement, I expect somebody to step up and tell me and everyone else concerned know I was wrong. This is not for the sake of humiliation, but actual correction: we can't have people going around believing things that just aren't true, at least in the realm of genuinely verifiable factual matters. It's counter-productive and leads to people repeating false statements and possibly making bad decisions (though specific to this case, probably not so much).
(Incidentally, I'm not sure why people always insist that OS refers only to the disk controllers and such. The initials mean "operating system." Surely the web browser is an important part of the system? If nothing else, your computer needs to have a default browser so that you can go download an alternative one.)
No, it doesn't. You just need a program which can handle retrieving a file stored some place else and copies said file to a place on your local disk. It may not be incredibly practical, as in this case you'd to know what are available and where to get them, or maybe evenbe presented with a list of such applications and the option to install or not install them -functionality which you seem to perhaps be aware of but are suddenly discounting upon remembering- but no, it's not impossible.
If so then my question is what do you do now that the only OS that doesn't come with a web browser built-in is Abacus 1.0?
100% untrue. Numerous permutations of Linux and BSD come without web browsers, and most of the ones that do have them included make it fairly trivial to remove them. I'm sure there are other browser-less OSs out there besides these, though I'm not explicitly aware of them.
You need to try riding a bike on the road in traffic.
While moving on a bicycle at any speed above about 3mph, there's usually enough wind noise to obscure anything but the loudest or most proximity-immediate sounds. Add in extra ambient noise typically present in an urban environment and its very tough to hear an approaching vehicle until its almost on top of you, at which point you don't have enough time to do a shoulder-check if the vehicle in question isn't passing you.
OTOH, riding with headphones isn't necessarily all that great. Maybe it's fine if you can stand to listen to things at fairly low volumes, but I like to be able to hear as much of my music as I can and thus have a tendency to crank it. This would certainly obscure car horns and more distant emergency vehicle sirens to *some* degree...more likely any similarity in pitch between any sustained elements of the music would be more dangerous than the volume aspect of things.
But still, this is not the *real* issue to avoid headphones while riding! What's even more important is being able to hear my bike. If there's a repetitive noise vibrating up through the frame, I'm *not* going to notice it with the headphones on, because its going to be subtle, and I might miss out on doing some bit of maintenance that sound would otherwise have tipped me off to, and *that's* what's bad. Premature wear of good components is a pain in the wallet and time sunk on doing extra repair work (or time bike-less while it's in the shop if you're not mechanically inclined); something breaking outright mid-ride is probably a guaranteed injury or worse. You can mostly avoid this by regularly doing checks on your bike's components, but its not a sure-fire thing. Chances are, if you're really going to pee your pants over small-percentage risks, you're probably not getting out on the bike and riding on the road to begin with.
Me, I'm a bit obsessive/compulsive, so I don't ride with the headphones. But others who do feel safe doing it have every right to do so. It's quite different than, say, riding drunk or against the flow of traffic or without lights at night, which are downright stupid behaviors that should be avoided at all costs.:)
People who want something simple buy a mac. Now, people that also want to install multiple OS's (Linux, Windows, OS X) also buy a Mac.
Try again. Read the article. Hell, *don't* read the article...read the comments above! The issues he's having are largely to do with getting third-party software to work with Microsoft software, especially Exchange. This is going to be an issue with *any* non-Windows platform because of Microsoft's lack of respect and/or interest towards following standards and allowing for interoperability. Your suggestion -which, mind you, is a suggestion, not ANY sort of proposed solution to any problem raised in the article- is so unsuitable for the situation that you almost deserve to be modded troll.
Yeah, sorry, the market was ruined by the consumers, not the producers. If you don't demand competition, then don't be surprised when producers don't compete.
Insightful nothing. *We* demand competition. We get written off as cranks, crazies, too small of a marketshare. The market here is geared towards the uninformed consumer and nobody else. The scant handful of people who honestly vote with their dollar are too small in number to effectively rally for change. The market is fucking broke and demands some form of regulation to fix it, because we can't effectively *start* a new market. What are we going to do...barter? Print our own form of currency? Good luck extending that to a practical level.
Feh. This isn't the first (or last, sadly) post with the game "Clue" as the backdrop. Is it just the current knock-knock-joke expression of Web 2.0 that rates it 5-funny? Vastly overmodded, I daresay.
Some people find unfunny jokes to be the most amusing. These are occasionally referred to as "groaners". It's really a matter of (intentionally bad) taste.
But hey, that's cool. I mean, I thought Borat fucking *sucked*.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing: if you're interested in doing anything, whether its learning to milk a cow or installing a new OS, you don't try it just two times, each book-ended by a 1.5 year window and then throw your hands up when it doesn't go quite how you expected. Now, it's fine if you're just not at all interested, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. You need to tell yourself that, despite all of your experience with something vaguely similar that would seemingly be analogous to the new thing you're trying out, you're only making those comparisons based on what you know, and the analogy may not in fact map as well as you'd like or think.
If you're doing something more complex than the default Ubuntu install, you need to take time to actually learn what's going on during the install and why, not just poke idly through the prompts and hoping you'll get it right by coincidence. If it's just the graphical installer crapping out (yup, loathe as many are to admit it, it's still flaky as hell on a ton of hardware), you need to try the alternate install disc. If it's something else, please be specific as to what it is so you can not only get help, but something can stand a chance of getting fixed if it is indeed broken.
Personally, I can't promise to fix anything that may be wrong with Ubuntu, but if you need help on the install, let me know, I've done many Ubuntu installs and I'm willing to help.
If there are entities presently not following standards set for the presentation of web content, what makes you think extending things to cater to a second intended medium will result in adherence to those standards? I'd agree with you if the intended niche for (X)HTML/CSS were pathetically small in scale, but it's not: the present intended audience of people creating content is so big as to make "damn huge" a laughable description.
Now, would it be wrong to suggest that there could be a *separate* XML specification made extremely similar to (X)HTML/CSS, with non-print oriented tags stripped out by default and the necessary stuff added in? No, of course not. That might actually be a pretty smart idea, because certainly there are existing structure tags that would work well for both, and others that would need to be named differently due to differing function, but may still be somewhat analogous to existing tags in limited ways. But this isn't what Lie was talking about: he wants to avoid creating something new by instead tacking new features on to something old to make it work in a different medium. For somebody involved in making a browser that pissants everywhere love to hold up as being one of the most standards-compliant beasts going, it's incredibly short-sighted thinking. Coupling that with the fact that he seems to believe creating new stand-alone standards like ODF as being a lot of unnecessary headache-inducing work, it's practically downright naive thinking as well.
Lie only ranted about the ridiculousness of going to the trouble to craft new standards, and then suggested that we instead repurpose a set of standards for web documents so that they work for exchanging documents intended for print. As somebody aware of what hell it's been dealing with web standards, your concern should be focusing not just how long it took for XHTML and CSS standards to be sort-of accepted, but how stupid it would be to go and extend something that people have been working hard to simplify.
I think it is important for everyone to understand that First Amendment rights don't exist on Websites, blogs, and message forums. Those that own those communication platforms are free to delete or censure anything they feel necessary to maintain the spirit and intentions of both the supporting business and the site as a whole.
You're absolutely right. What should be getting railed against here isn't perceived civil oppression, but rather a company saying, "Okay, we want you, our potential customers, to tell us what you want," and then plugging its ears and putting on the blinders when what some of these people want isn't what they want to hear. No wrong-doing has been committed, but it has been proved that said company's bid for input wasn't sincere, and if you think that's crap, don't buy from them.
No kidding. I worked at a retail job during-and-right-after-college and Chris, their drummer, was in the same department as me. Our shop, despite being owned by a big corporation, had a reputation for giving folks flexible hours if they had other obligations (and could still demonstrate a reasonable work ethic whilst on the clock), so we had quite a few musicians and artists around. Chris was nice enough to give the music-interested folks in the department copies of their demo, and what we heard was damn good. Three months on, he let us sample some newer material, and it was incredible. Six months down the line from there, they were regularly playing local shows multiple times a week. Their arrangements have gotten not only more complex, but more tuneful as well.
In short, they're a massively talented bunch of guys who've worked their asses off and earned the success they deserve. Makes you wonder how hard the "struggling artist" types really are working.
So in effect, you *are* asking for free broadband, becuase you want more service than you get now and don't want to pay for it. That's not to say that you shouldn't get better service from you ISP, but saying there are no options is just whinny.
No, I'm *not* asking for free broadband. When I say there are no other options, I mean it in a very literal sense. I live and work in a more residential, slowly-getting-redeveloped part of my city. There's *no* optical service available in my part of town, period. I've checked.
To get it, my only option is to move a good four miles SW of where am at the moment, to a part of town where rent averages double to triple of what I pay here, or to move to the SW 'burbs, where rent's very cheap but one's far enough from everything where one needs to buy and maintain a car if one ever plans to do much beyond stay at home and rely on delivered groceries. Either one of these cases would result in extra recurring expenses large enough to prohibit me from being able to afford such service. There's no winning solution.
Now, if my ISP was even 3/4 as reliable as they promised to be in the contract, I wouldn't have any problems. As it stands, service sucks and I'm not getting what I pay for. If you think taking 10 minutes to upload a less-than 1MB file to a remote server is acceptable, try dealing with it multiple times throughout the week and consistently explaining to clients that you're a bit behind schedule because your ISP can't or won't opt to upgrade their equipment in your area.
the statement " does that make it right ", you need to read your contract. Since I spent time reading my contract, with bell south and with comcast and with American broad band, I can say without a doubt, I get what I pay for.
I'm glad that in your experiences, these companies have constantly kept up on their promise to maintain their promised minimum speed. I have experienced quite the opposite. I pay in every month for my "small business" connection and the service is massively inconsistent, to the point where I'm sometimes literally waiting for 5-10 minutes to throw a less than 1MB file onto a remote server. The competition around here is even worse than my current ISP. I don't make enough money to fund or take time off to engage in legal proceedings against my ISP, so I haven't got much choice besides changing jobs, and that seems like a stupid solution.
It depends. If the legs only disappeared when I was out of the room, then I wouldn't mind. Similarly, if my ISP over-sells their capacity, but monitors peak demands to ensure that I can get the full speed when I want it, I don't care that I can't get it when I don't. If I expected to be downloading 24/7, then I wouldn't expect to have a consumer-grade line.
What part of this don't you understand? The whole problem is that the ISP may not be doing a good job of monitoring peak demands and your connection may turn to crap for lengthy periods when you not only "want" the connection, but need it to get work done. Back to the chair legs example: sure, it doesn't matter if the legs are there or not when you're asleep, but basing when you can sit down and eat around the fact that the legs may go at any time is not only massively inconvenient, but seriously interferes with the rest of one's life. The lucky thing there is that chair legs don't come and go just like that, as well as the fact that there's likely plenty of other reasonably comfortable spots right in one's own home besides a dining room or kitchen table to sit down and eat dinner. Not so with internet connections.
With Flash and PDF you can do a lot more, but obviously authoring becomes a problem.
Well, maybe. Have you ever looked at font licenses? There are more than a few digital type foundries using licenses that expressly prohibit embedding outlines of the glyphs in other files. This is because the outlines of the glyphs (mathematically represented by the font software) are the one part of the font that's actually copyrightable; the actual glyphs themselves are not (this is why so many foundries have their own individual versions of Helvetica and so on). Not everybody's bad, but Linotype and Adobe have been rather outspoken about this over the last few years, though admitedly I haven't really seen them actually enforcing it too much.
Yes, exactly. Instead of taking one of two specifications created just for rich document formats, he suggests making a brand new specification by extending CSS/HTML to do something it doesn't yet seem ready to do.
This talk of not creating new standards is ludicrous: there are already existing XML schemes geared towards this sort of task. Why should HTML/CSS be extended for publishing non-web documents when the work's already been done elsewhere? It gets even more ridiculous when you stop to think about all the bullshit that's been edged out of HTML over the past decade or so that we're *still* struggling to get people away from.
People here seem to think that ISPs are evil for not having trunks that are 1:1 for what they sell. But that's the way it is for most things!
But again: does that make it alright? You're being complacent and accepting of a stupid precedent. You wouldn't be fine buying a dining room suite if the chair legs dematerialized and rematerialized sporadically, even though you're not sitting in one chair 24/7, would you?
It's not screwing your customers if that's how the business works. There's nothing crooked about it.
Fine. Then refusing to increase capacity because you'd rather maximize your profits to a ridiculous degree is incredibly fucking selfish and a sure-fire way of putting yourself out of business the second competition offers better service. The crooked part is doing everything possible to ensure that competition is either not present in a given community or is at least as bad, if not worse, than the service you're offering. Happy?
I'd disagree that it should stop. The real issue the ISP needs to know how to deal with is how are they going to add capacity in a heartbeat.
If they'd been interested in increasing capacity in the first place, they wouldn't be so heavily reliant on oversubscribing in the first place. The root of the problem is that the majority don't seem particularly interested in increasing capacity, but rather how long they can get away with avoiding it...and when they can't, how many bullshit excuses they can make for not increasing it.
That's not to say that ISPs shouldn't have a reasonable oversubscription rate -- you should be able to use most of your bandwidth most of the time -- but to suggest that ISPs should provide every subscriber with upstream access 24/7 at 100% of their local link speed is silly, becuase most of that bandwidth would go unused most of the time, and it would cost a fortune while doing it.
You say "silly" as though I'm asking for free broadband plus a handjob. I'm only asking to get some reasonable approximation of the service I'm paying for, and I don't think that's absurd by any stretch of the imagination.
You yourself admit the real problem: they do a piss poor job managing oversubscription. I pay about $120/mo. for a "small business" package with static IPs (I work from home 30-60 hours a week). Connectivity turns to dogshit *at least* 3 times a week for hour-plus long stretches during regular business hours alone. I've checked my equipment, and they've checked theirs, and there's apparently nothing wrong. When it takes 10 minutes to upload a file less than 1MB, that's pretty damned ridiculous. I wind up having to work further into the evening and effectively lose money because I can't charge the client for time spent waiting around on my ISP's shortcomings while I can't go away for other purposes for more than half an hour because there's no telling when the traffic issues resolve. I can't switch ISPs because the other one in the area is even less reliable.
I'm the consumer paying for service, and I'm getting hosed. I don't have any other choice besides perhaps getting a job elsewhere or moving, and that seems like a pretty ridiculous solution to me. My ISP needs to manage its resources more effectively, end of story.
Every ISP oversubscribes at some point. It's a fact of the business.
First, thanks for the good overview of how the ISPs oversell and also why they do it. It's greatly appreciated, and I say this because I don't want the following statement to be taken the wrong way:
So you're basically saying that it's acceptable for one business to screw their customers, as they themselves are willfully getting victimized by another business. Again, tell me how this isn't stupid or wrong?
And yes, that's largely rhetorical. I understand and sincerely appreciate your explanation of why, but it doesn't change my point of view, except for maybe now viewing ISPs as not only crooked businesses, but poorly run businesses as well.
I don't know, I have a tough time taking Tufte seriously when his site (edwardtufte.com) is a horrible mess in terms of organization. He's got a lot of interesting things to say, he writes well, and I even like his prints, but man...just look at that steamer
The thing is that overselling is selling more than you've (well, the ISP, not *you*) got and it shouldn't be happening in the first place. Playing this game of "we'll see if we can upgrade as real live usage increases and if we don't, no big deal" is a joke. It's about as stupid as (put your reduction safety hats on, it may not map well!) floating checks: sure, it's pretty likely that check from person A is going to clear in time for the check you wrote to person B to go through alright, despite the present lack of sufficient funds in your own account...you've thought it out, played it on the outside, person B probably won't deposit your check for a week, and you deposited the one from person A 3 days before physically handing B your check. But when something goes wrong in the in-between of financial institutions, you get bitten in the ass with fees, and deservedly so: you should've been more careful about what you were doing in the first place.
I guess the part that doesn't stop the ISPs from overselling bandwidth is that they don't face any real-live consequences most of the time. Most customers are complacent to sit back and take it. The ones who aren't often lack the choice of other providers (and that's discounting non-broadband options...suggesting switching to dial-up is a curmudgeonly suggestion for argumentative types to make and little else) or the capital to start their own ISP. Haven't seen any legal action taken yet, so...yeah. What incentive *do* they have to only sell what they've got or maintain capacity when they're often the only game in a particular part of town?
It's always interesting to observe the reaction of the people who supposedly make up the "open source community" when these things happen. On the original article and on the OSNews post as well the general attitude is the same that I saw when ESR dared criticize the CUPS GUI - he's a "fucking idiot", essentially.
I think that has to do with the fact that ESR is a high-profile guy in the so-called community that has a tendency to get really "bitchy" (I quote because I don't entirely mean it, but it's sort of applicable) when it finally dawns on him that something sucks. Never mind that the guy's got some very strong and sometimes controversial opinions. He makes a great big production out of something either breaking or not working in an expected way as though he's the first person to wrangle with these issues and yet is also the guy who's written pieces like "How to Become a Hacker" that encourage behaviors that don't coincide with his own in cases like these.
In the case of Fedora, it has, in my experience, been fairly doggish since around version 3. It's a pain in the ass to upgrade between versions, yum is slow and clunky, kernel headers aren't included by default anymore, it seems a bit slow, the repositories are incredibly limited, blah blah blah ad nauseum. There's certainly some folks out there who might find it useful (as I recall, it's a cinch to install and the package groupings you can select from in the process are actually sensibly arranged, which I thought was seriously bad-ass), but especially given Mr. Raymond's "we need to embrace some proprietary codecs" spiel months upon months ago, I'm honestly surprised he waited this long to move away from it. He had plenty of reasons to switch before and should have, instead of waiting to get himself into a corner, half-willfully breaking his system and subsequently raising a big stink. The better thing to do would've been to point out what he perceives as broken or wrong and suggest ways to fix it. Complaining in public is about as useful as standing about and grumbling how politican X is a shithead ruining your country but not actually getting involved in politics or advocacy for changing things: it's fine to blow off steam, but there's a point where it's counter-productive, not to mention a bit old.
In fact EVERYONE can benefit from a daily dose. Its much better than the cod liver oil of the past, many are flavored now or in gel cap form, my entire family takes them and we're better off for it.
Yes, you just wouldn't believe how me and the wife's lives have improved since we started acquiring the Innsmouth look. So much unspeakable, so many angles!
I'm using OS in the sense of "distribution" not "kernel." If there's really a full-fledged, desktop-ready, consumer-friendly distribution that doesn't at least encourage you to install a web browser with it, I'll eat my hat.
I didn't mean "kernel". I meant operating system in the very here-and-now contemporary sense of "a kernel and group of applications packaged with said kernel that allow you to do stuff with things".
Now you're using undefined qualifiers to specify what constitutes an operating system, and, besides meeting this previously unmentioned set of requirements, the browser now doesn't necessarily have to be installed at all costs, but now spec'd as a default option that can't be opted out of prior to installing the operating system.
Really, nobody's asking you to eat your hat or anything of the sort. You were just wrong. These things happen to everyone all the time. Misinformation needs to be corrected for the benefit of others who might read your modded-up statement and take it as being rooted in fact. If I make an incorrect statement, I expect somebody to step up and tell me and everyone else concerned know I was wrong. This is not for the sake of humiliation, but actual correction: we can't have people going around believing things that just aren't true, at least in the realm of genuinely verifiable factual matters. It's counter-productive and leads to people repeating false statements and possibly making bad decisions (though specific to this case, probably not so much).
(Incidentally, I'm not sure why people always insist that OS refers only to the disk controllers and such. The initials mean "operating system." Surely the web browser is an important part of the system? If nothing else, your computer needs to have a default browser so that you can go download an alternative one.)
No, it doesn't. You just need a program which can handle retrieving a file stored some place else and copies said file to a place on your local disk. It may not be incredibly practical, as in this case you'd to know what are available and where to get them, or maybe evenbe presented with a list of such applications and the option to install or not install them -functionality which you seem to perhaps be aware of but are suddenly discounting upon remembering- but no, it's not impossible.
If so then my question is what do you do now that the only OS that doesn't come with a web browser built-in is Abacus 1.0?
100% untrue. Numerous permutations of Linux and BSD come without web browsers, and most of the ones that do have them included make it fairly trivial to remove them. I'm sure there are other browser-less OSs out there besides these, though I'm not explicitly aware of them.
You need to try riding a bike on the road in traffic.
While moving on a bicycle at any speed above about 3mph, there's usually enough wind noise to obscure anything but the loudest or most proximity-immediate sounds. Add in extra ambient noise typically present in an urban environment and its very tough to hear an approaching vehicle until its almost on top of you, at which point you don't have enough time to do a shoulder-check if the vehicle in question isn't passing you.
OTOH, riding with headphones isn't necessarily all that great. Maybe it's fine if you can stand to listen to things at fairly low volumes, but I like to be able to hear as much of my music as I can and thus have a tendency to crank it. This would certainly obscure car horns and more distant emergency vehicle sirens to *some* degree...more likely any similarity in pitch between any sustained elements of the music would be more dangerous than the volume aspect of things.
But still, this is not the *real* issue to avoid headphones while riding! What's even more important is being able to hear my bike. If there's a repetitive noise vibrating up through the frame, I'm *not* going to notice it with the headphones on, because its going to be subtle, and I might miss out on doing some bit of maintenance that sound would otherwise have tipped me off to, and *that's* what's bad. Premature wear of good components is a pain in the wallet and time sunk on doing extra repair work (or time bike-less while it's in the shop if you're not mechanically inclined); something breaking outright mid-ride is probably a guaranteed injury or worse. You can mostly avoid this by regularly doing checks on your bike's components, but its not a sure-fire thing. Chances are, if you're really going to pee your pants over small-percentage risks, you're probably not getting out on the bike and riding on the road to begin with.
Me, I'm a bit obsessive/compulsive, so I don't ride with the headphones. But others who do feel safe doing it have every right to do so. It's quite different than, say, riding drunk or against the flow of traffic or without lights at night, which are downright stupid behaviors that should be avoided at all costs. :)
People who want something simple buy a mac. Now, people that also want to install multiple OS's (Linux, Windows, OS X) also buy a Mac.
Try again. Read the article. Hell, *don't* read the article...read the comments above! The issues he's having are largely to do with getting third-party software to work with Microsoft software, especially Exchange. This is going to be an issue with *any* non-Windows platform because of Microsoft's lack of respect and/or interest towards following standards and allowing for interoperability. Your suggestion -which, mind you, is a suggestion, not ANY sort of proposed solution to any problem raised in the article- is so unsuitable for the situation that you almost deserve to be modded troll.
Yeah, sorry, the market was ruined by the consumers, not the producers. If you don't demand competition, then don't be surprised when producers don't compete.
Insightful nothing. *We* demand competition. We get written off as cranks, crazies, too small of a marketshare. The market here is geared towards the uninformed consumer and nobody else. The scant handful of people who honestly vote with their dollar are too small in number to effectively rally for change. The market is fucking broke and demands some form of regulation to fix it, because we can't effectively *start* a new market. What are we going to do...barter? Print our own form of currency? Good luck extending that to a practical level.
Feh. This isn't the first (or last, sadly) post with the game "Clue" as the backdrop. Is it just the current knock-knock-joke expression of Web 2.0 that rates it 5-funny? Vastly overmodded, I daresay.
Some people find unfunny jokes to be the most amusing. These are occasionally referred to as "groaners". It's really a matter of (intentionally bad) taste.
But hey, that's cool. I mean, I thought Borat fucking *sucked*.