I tried live CDs of Ubuntu Breezy, Dapper, and Edgy. (I'm an Ubuntu fan, for obvious reasons.) None of them would boot up, so I gave up. I probably gave up too soon. The machine is a Sharp MP30 laptop, which, since it's very light, is still worth several times its weight in gold for me. It came with Linux pre-installed and a bunch of custom drivers for some of the weird hardware. It's also my main computer with my entire life on it. If it crapped out, I'd just have to change my name and go start a new life in the South Seas. But I think, given some of the ideas mentioned on this thread, I'll have another shot at trying live CDs.
I have legacy hardware, and too little knowledge, so I'm too afraid to switch from Core 3 to 6. God only knows what would break, and I sure don't know enough to work around it. But if I could get 6, I'd be in their statistic too. There's bound to be more people like me, who can't get 6 for some reason. So that number is a low estimate!
But who cares? I use Ubuntu. I already have good security and 3D desktops if I want them. Microsoft: if they were a day late and we were only a dollar short, they'd be doing way better than they've ever done.
Absolutely. I've been real turned off by Hillary, but suddenly she's front and center. I don't even care if she's pandering. Pandering like that, I can use.
I'm one of those people who could be hosting a bot and not even know it. (Just for the record, I try to make sure I don't, but I have no guarantees of success.) I'd really LIKE a system that turned off the traffic WITH A WARNING MESSAGE ABOUT WHY. I could understand if they didn't tell me how to fix it, since that would presumably differ on different systems. It would be a relief to know that in spite of my ignorance, I didn't have to worry about being part of the problem.
As a former college prof of many years, it seems to me that any source, electronic or paper, has to be approached critically. Wikipedia is no exception, but that doesn't mean it's useless. There's been an amazing amount of BS published on paper, too.
And, yes, research should always be based on original sources. Just because those sources are in Wikipedia doesn't change that.
As the world authority on an obscure genus of ground orchids, I looked it up in Wikipedia one day on a lark. I was surprised that there was a write-up, and I was surprised at how good it was. I amplified it and fixed a few small errors (things like the precise authority of some specific names). That means, if effect, that the Wikipedia entry is the equivalent of the other authoritative sources on that genus (i.e. published works by botanists specializing in the genus).
As time goes by, and scholars recognize Wikipedia for the astonishing resource that it is, authoritative entries will become more and more common. It's as silly to reject them based on where they are as it would be to say that anything on a CD is unacceptable. What matters is how much the author knows about the subject, not the medium of publication. The professor at Middlebury would have done better to insist on use of original sources and critical thinking -- in all cases -- instead of telling students to uncritically reject Wikipedia.
That, however, would have probably entailed more work for the professor.
As Rove has taught us, it doesn't have to make sense. Just associate hot-button-BAAAD stuff with whatever you're trying to drag down.
Since this whole controversy will take place primarily in the academic community--they're the producers and consumers in this case--I'll be curious to see how it plays out. We scientists are quite convinced we're smarter than your average Joe. Will we get hypnotized by this idiotic tactic? Or not? Stay tuned....
I hate spam. I still get mountains of it, because I haven't sent a separate snail mail to a separate address to every jerk on earth who wants to spam me. You wouldn't have to worry about any traffic-based filters if the messages only went out to real opt-in users.
Pretending spam has anything to do with free speech is like saying feces are food because both contain carbon.
thanks to Slashdot for giving this issue attention
on
Who won?
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· Score: 1
I'm sure a few hundred other people agree, but this is one case where redundancy is good. Thanks for giving this the time and space it needs. There is, as doom says, no more important issue facing the US.
About statistical significance: Exit polls are used to test the fairness of elections in developing countries. This level of significance in the discrepancy between exit polls and vote counts would have thrown a Third World election into doubt. In the US, we seem to have spent six crucial years hoping the problem would vanish if we squeezed our eyes shut.
That nag screen ordering a nonexistent upgrade got real old. And Macromedia _still_ can't seem to get its act together enough to point out that the rpm doesn't work on Core3. (Long story, but I have to run Core 3 for various reasons.)
The thing that really struck me was the little notice saying Actionscript is going to be open-sourced. That got past me when everybody else here probably noticed it. But if Adobe/Macromedia is open sourcing ANYTHING, I'm floored. They used to keep developers in locked cages (I exaggerate only slightly) to make sure no secrets escaped. The next time someone says open source is taking over the world, I'm going to believe them.
I'm an electric car fanatic. I'd be riding around in a golf cart if I could get a DMV sticker that would let me on the roads. And yet this thing is so-o-o ugly, the only thing worse out there is a HUmmer. Idiots.
Paypal. Absolutely. For me, cancellation took 4 years and a letter from the State District Attorney's office. But my friend's experience was even more amazing. She got told to change her name by one of their "service" reps if she wanted anything changed on her real-name account.
I was looking for a comment like this so I wouldn't have to write it myself. Just to add to the notes of caution + hope, the research on cell surface receptiors, signalling molecules, and the like, sounds very promising. A couple of months ago, there was a report on the BBC about a different "sugar" molecule that is involved in cell signalling during blood vessel growth. Since tumors can't grow without lots of new blood vessels to supply them, this approach can stop them in their tracks. The trick is getting it to work in live people instead of glass lab dishes.
It's also worth pointing out that these are not your father's sugar molecules. You don't find them in a donut. They don't taste sweet. They're huge molecules, generally complexed with proteins, or at least peptides, and they're as critical for the functioning of cells as traffic lights are to the flow of traffic. (If you want to take a look at just how complex, there's nothing better than John Liebler's (sp?) Life of a Cell made for Harvard. It's a flash 8 or above animation.) What this research is trying to find is a way to give cancer cells a turn signal, as it were, and shunt them down a side street to the town dump.
Yeah. That was my first thought, too. Wikipedia is a worldwide resource, by people and for people. Logically, with something like that, people would be paying for it. I. e. it should be taxpayer-funded, worldwide. That won't happen in a hurry, and in the meantime it needs money. Don't know what to say. Well, I do. It's, "GOD, NO!" But if they wind up doing ads, like other people have said, they should be text-based, unobtrusive, in a margin box of their own, and NO GODDAMN BLINKING, JUMPING, SINGING, DANCING CRAP. (Whew. I feel better now./Goes to look for meds./)
I'm not trying to be in the realm of economics. I'm trying to be in the realm of reality. Economics is based on the idea that all sellers and buyers have access to the same information, the same choices, and make their decisions based on rational thought. That was the sort of thing they hoped would be true in the 1700s.
Think outside the box. The barrier to entry is not at the producer's end, it's at the consumer's. There's two factors there. One is that people aren't interested in new ways of doing things, unless the new way allows them to do a whole lot more. People will switch from text-based DOS to a plug-and-play GUI OS, but unless there's a huge increase in functionality, they rarely switch. So rarely, that if, like Windows, it's what comes on over 90% of the machines shipped, it's what over 90% of people use. The other huge factor is that files have to be readable on other people's machines. Browser-based viewing has made that situation less acute, as has the fact that Macs now read and write PC formats, but if the information can't go wherever the consumer needs it to, that format will be a non-starter--except when it's a monopoly.
Search engines are similar. People have their default search engine. I don't remember the exact stats, but some phenomenal proportion never change what comes with the machine. Microsoft understood that and fought like hell to put their lame product there instead of Google. That seems to have gone nowhere, but only because people were already used to something else. Another stat is how rarely people go past the first page of search results. Even being "below the fold," ie down-screen on the first page, is considered the kiss of death by many businesses. The search engine has complete control over which priority to give to results.
So it's not that somebody can't come up with a better search engine and put it out there. Sure they can. It's just that, in the real world, that's irrelevant. The power and money flows like it does in a monopolistic situation, and that's why it needs to be regulated like one.
It looks to me like you know this. You just haven't made the connection. "Consider a utility. To enter the market you need licenses from federal, state, and local governments. Property easements...." Licenses are regulation. That's what is lacking in the search engine monopoly, so of course there is no analogy. Property easements in search engines are in the real estate of people's minds, not on the ground, but that only makes them harder to get. And so on.
The reason all this is important is because information is the new steel. It's an enormous wealth producer. Search is the only way to make sense of the information. It's like the foundries that process the steel. So far, there are a few complaints about Google, but not much that is really huge. My theory is that they really are trying not to be evil. How long that will last, and whether it will even be considered when the leadership passes to someone else, is a very open question. Capitalism is supposed to be a market--which is a highly regulated environment in a lot of ways--and not just highway robbery. Do we really want a future in which the gatekeepers to fame or fortune can demand any price they want?
[To a hammer, everything is a nail. Me, all I see is windmills.]
I think Giovanni has hit the target. A monopoly is defined as too little meaningful competition, not no competition, as some of the folks here seem to think. And even though Google doesn't yet have a complete monopoly even by that definition, it's headed there because search engines, like electric utilities, are natural monopolies. Natural, in the sense that competition is a waste in that case, like having 2 competing utilities, each stringing miles of wire. It's the same with searching. Whichever portal has the widest reach will be used the most, will therefore have an even wider reach, and so on. In short order, it can have a stranglehold on the process. That is Not Good.
There's a reason why monopolies are regulated. I would have thought that watching Microsoft leverage another "natural monopoly" product, an OS, into a stranglehold would have shown pretty clearly why this is something that needs to be controlled at the outset. I don't know about you, but I'd like to set my own criteria for my preferences. So far, Google's come up with some excellent products, but I want to use them by my choice, not Google's.
If it was just a nice thing MS did, they would have let everybody know about it, and the bloggers would have let everybody know. That's not how it worked, because with full disclosure the value of the influence MS had bought would have plummeted. I mean, what would your reaction be, reading a blogpost that said, "I received a megabucks laptop from Microsoft, just for being cute." Followed by a post that said, "By the way, Vista is the snake's eyebrows." You'd believe every word. Not.
Some people will do awful things. That's what this experiment tells us, just like Milgram's original one did, and that's something we really need to know and guard against. In this experiment, the people knew what the situation was. If they found out something they didn't want to know about themselves, it's sort of like getting a diagnosis of leukemia. The only way to start on a cure is to see the problem. This experiment is no more unethical that diagnosing an awful disease.
Electroshocking people was not, ostensibly, the point of Milgram's experiment. People were told they were helping the experimenter study learning, so the shocks were in a "higher cause," in the "service of science." Also, those people thought they were giving electroshocks to a real person who was really suffering. Under those conditions, something like 95% of the people kept administering shocks on the experimenter's instructions no matter what seemed to be happening to the supposed "learner."
In this experiment, people knew what the real purpose of the experiment was, and knew that the victim wasn't real. And yet half "considered stopping the study." If they really did stop, that's a huge improvement over 50 years ago.
I've used RedHat distros back to RH6, and Fedora Core 3 since two years ago. All were on dual boot systems with Win98, Win2000, WinXp, as the case might be. I haven't updated to Core 5 (6?) because I have a customized laptop and it would be more trouble than it's worth. But that does mean I may not be being entirely fair to Fedora.
I've used Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy on a Dell Inspiron, and I am wildly impressed. It installs and just works out of the box, but if you want to play with stuff, it is *nix, and you can go as deep as you want. (The stumbling block there is that Ubuntu makes it complicated to act as root, but if you get tired of that, go to Ubuntu Community help: root-sudo on how to do things your way.) Ubuntu also has much more active and useful help forums and wikis, in my experience, that the things I've found on Fedora. That may be my fault, because I'm not searching for them right, but even so, that means Ubuntu's are easier to find. I tried to collect useful info and links on dual-boot install of Ubuntu, but there's heaps of help out there.
That's a great idea! I've thought in terms of jumping up and down on the phone, but this is much better. Now we just need some research on the five most annoying tunes to cell phone bellowers.
Me too. I'm not that strong, but I have very sharp teeth. After listening to the stuff about not inflating my lifejacket, after the guy in front of me has leaned his seat back till his bald spot is in my face, after the inside of my nose feels like a potato chip and my brain is oxygen-starved so that the airline can save $$ by giving us thin parched air--after all that, add some idiot talking to his personal ghosts. Do the airlines really think I won't be in the right frame of mind to take out the nearest jugular?
I'm going to get my teeth filed down to points, just to be sure everything goes smoothly.
Slashdot Mirror
(Um, I'd never heard of CentOS. (red face here) Thanks for the tip. I'll try that out.)
I tried live CDs of Ubuntu Breezy, Dapper, and Edgy. (I'm an Ubuntu fan, for obvious reasons.) None of them would boot up, so I gave up. I probably gave up too soon. The machine is a Sharp MP30 laptop, which, since it's very light, is still worth several times its weight in gold for me. It came with Linux pre-installed and a bunch of custom drivers for some of the weird hardware. It's also my main computer with my entire life on it. If it crapped out, I'd just have to change my name and go start a new life in the South Seas. But I think, given some of the ideas mentioned on this thread, I'll have another shot at trying live CDs.
I have legacy hardware, and too little knowledge, so I'm too afraid to switch from Core 3 to 6. God only knows what would break, and I sure don't know enough to work around it. But if I could get 6, I'd be in their statistic too. There's bound to be more people like me, who can't get 6 for some reason. So that number is a low estimate!
But who cares? I use Ubuntu. I already have good security and 3D desktops if I want them. Microsoft: if they were a day late and we were only a dollar short, they'd be doing way better than they've ever done.
Absolutely. I've been real turned off by Hillary, but suddenly she's front and center. I don't even care if she's pandering. Pandering like that, I can use.
I'm one of those people who could be hosting a bot and not even know it. (Just for the record, I try to make sure I don't, but I have no guarantees of success.) I'd really LIKE a system that turned off the traffic WITH A WARNING MESSAGE ABOUT WHY. I could understand if they didn't tell me how to fix it, since that would presumably differ on different systems. It would be a relief to know that in spite of my ignorance, I didn't have to worry about being part of the problem.
As a former college prof of many years, it seems to me that any source, electronic or paper, has to be approached critically. Wikipedia is no exception, but that doesn't mean it's useless. There's been an amazing amount of BS published on paper, too.
And, yes, research should always be based on original sources. Just because those sources are in Wikipedia doesn't change that.
As the world authority on an obscure genus of ground orchids, I looked it up in Wikipedia one day on a lark. I was surprised that there was a write-up, and I was surprised at how good it was. I amplified it and fixed a few small errors (things like the precise authority of some specific names). That means, if effect, that the Wikipedia entry is the equivalent of the other authoritative sources on that genus (i.e. published works by botanists specializing in the genus).
As time goes by, and scholars recognize Wikipedia for the astonishing resource that it is, authoritative entries will become more and more common. It's as silly to reject them based on where they are as it would be to say that anything on a CD is unacceptable. What matters is how much the author knows about the subject, not the medium of publication. The professor at Middlebury would have done better to insist on use of original sources and critical thinking -- in all cases -- instead of telling students to uncritically reject Wikipedia.
That, however, would have probably entailed more work for the professor.
As Rove has taught us, it doesn't have to make sense. Just associate hot-button-BAAAD stuff with whatever you're trying to drag down.
Since this whole controversy will take place primarily in the academic community--they're the producers and consumers in this case--I'll be curious to see how it plays out. We scientists are quite convinced we're smarter than your average Joe. Will we get hypnotized by this idiotic tactic? Or not? Stay tuned....
I hate spam. I still get mountains of it, because I haven't sent a separate snail mail to a separate address to every jerk on earth who wants to spam me. You wouldn't have to worry about any traffic-based filters if the messages only went out to real opt-in users.
Pretending spam has anything to do with free speech is like saying feces are food because both contain carbon.
I'm sure a few hundred other people agree, but this is one case where redundancy is good. Thanks for giving this the time and space it needs. There is, as doom says, no more important issue facing the US.
About statistical significance: Exit polls are used to test the fairness of elections in developing countries. This level of significance in the discrepancy between exit polls and vote counts would have thrown a Third World election into doubt. In the US, we seem to have spent six crucial years hoping the problem would vanish if we squeezed our eyes shut.
That nag screen ordering a nonexistent upgrade got real old. And Macromedia _still_ can't seem to get its act together enough to point out that the rpm doesn't work on Core3. (Long story, but I have to run Core 3 for various reasons.)
The thing that really struck me was the little notice saying Actionscript is going to be open-sourced. That got past me when everybody else here probably noticed it. But if Adobe/Macromedia is open sourcing ANYTHING, I'm floored. They used to keep developers in locked cages (I exaggerate only slightly) to make sure no secrets escaped. The next time someone says open source is taking over the world, I'm going to believe them.
I'm an electric car fanatic. I'd be riding around in a golf cart if I could get a DMV sticker that would let me on the roads. And yet this thing is so-o-o ugly, the only thing worse out there is a HUmmer. Idiots.
Paypal. Absolutely. For me, cancellation took 4 years and a letter from the State District Attorney's office. But my friend's experience was even more amazing. She got told to change her name by one of their "service" reps if she wanted anything changed on her real-name account.
I was looking for a comment like this so I wouldn't have to write it myself. Just to add to the notes of caution + hope, the research on cell surface receptiors, signalling molecules, and the like, sounds very promising. A couple of months ago, there was a report on the BBC about a different "sugar" molecule that is involved in cell signalling during blood vessel growth. Since tumors can't grow without lots of new blood vessels to supply them, this approach can stop them in their tracks. The trick is getting it to work in live people instead of glass lab dishes.
It's also worth pointing out that these are not your father's sugar molecules. You don't find them in a donut. They don't taste sweet. They're huge molecules, generally complexed with proteins, or at least peptides, and they're as critical for the functioning of cells as traffic lights are to the flow of traffic. (If you want to take a look at just how complex, there's nothing better than John Liebler's (sp?) Life of a Cell made for Harvard. It's a flash 8 or above animation.) What this research is trying to find is a way to give cancer cells a turn signal, as it were, and shunt them down a side street to the town dump.
Yeah. That was my first thought, too. Wikipedia is a worldwide resource, by people and for people. Logically, with something like that, people would be paying for it. I. e. it should be taxpayer-funded, worldwide. That won't happen in a hurry, and in the meantime it needs money. Don't know what to say. Well, I do. It's, "GOD, NO!" But if they wind up doing ads, like other people have said, they should be text-based, unobtrusive, in a margin box of their own, and NO GODDAMN BLINKING, JUMPING, SINGING, DANCING CRAP. (Whew. I feel better now. /Goes to look for meds./)
I'm not trying to be in the realm of economics. I'm trying to be in the realm of reality. Economics is based on the idea that all sellers and buyers have access to the same information, the same choices, and make their decisions based on rational thought. That was the sort of thing they hoped would be true in the 1700s.
Think outside the box. The barrier to entry is not at the producer's end, it's at the consumer's. There's two factors there. One is that people aren't interested in new ways of doing things, unless the new way allows them to do a whole lot more. People will switch from text-based DOS to a plug-and-play GUI OS, but unless there's a huge increase in functionality, they rarely switch. So rarely, that if, like Windows, it's what comes on over 90% of the machines shipped, it's what over 90% of people use. The other huge factor is that files have to be readable on other people's machines. Browser-based viewing has made that situation less acute, as has the fact that Macs now read and write PC formats, but if the information can't go wherever the consumer needs it to, that format will be a non-starter--except when it's a monopoly.
Search engines are similar. People have their default search engine. I don't remember the exact stats, but some phenomenal proportion never change what comes with the machine. Microsoft understood that and fought like hell to put their lame product there instead of Google. That seems to have gone nowhere, but only because people were already used to something else. Another stat is how rarely people go past the first page of search results. Even being "below the fold," ie down-screen on the first page, is considered the kiss of death by many businesses. The search engine has complete control over which priority to give to results.
So it's not that somebody can't come up with a better search engine and put it out there. Sure they can. It's just that, in the real world, that's irrelevant. The power and money flows like it does in a monopolistic situation, and that's why it needs to be regulated like one.
It looks to me like you know this. You just haven't made the connection. "Consider a utility. To enter the market you need licenses from federal, state, and local governments. Property easements. ..." Licenses are regulation. That's what is lacking in the search engine monopoly, so of course there is no analogy. Property easements in search engines are in the real estate of people's minds, not on the ground, but that only makes them harder to get. And so on.
The reason all this is important is because information is the new steel. It's an enormous wealth producer. Search is the only way to make sense of the information. It's like the foundries that process the steel. So far, there are a few complaints about Google, but not much that is really huge. My theory is that they really are trying not to be evil. How long that will last, and whether it will even be considered when the leadership passes to someone else, is a very open question. Capitalism is supposed to be a market--which is a highly regulated environment in a lot of ways--and not just highway robbery. Do we really want a future in which the gatekeepers to fame or fortune can demand any price they want?
[To a hammer, everything is a nail. Me, all I see is windmills.]
I think Giovanni has hit the target. A monopoly is defined as too little meaningful competition, not no competition, as some of the folks here seem to think. And even though Google doesn't yet have a complete monopoly even by that definition, it's headed there because search engines, like electric utilities, are natural monopolies. Natural, in the sense that competition is a waste in that case, like having 2 competing utilities, each stringing miles of wire. It's the same with searching. Whichever portal has the widest reach will be used the most, will therefore have an even wider reach, and so on. In short order, it can have a stranglehold on the process. That is Not Good.
There's a reason why monopolies are regulated. I would have thought that watching Microsoft leverage another "natural monopoly" product, an OS, into a stranglehold would have shown pretty clearly why this is something that needs to be controlled at the outset. I don't know about you, but I'd like to set my own criteria for my preferences. So far, Google's come up with some excellent products, but I want to use them by my choice, not Google's.
If it was just a nice thing MS did, they would have let everybody know about it, and the bloggers would have let everybody know. That's not how it worked, because with full disclosure the value of the influence MS had bought would have plummeted. I mean, what would your reaction be, reading a blogpost that said, "I received a megabucks laptop from Microsoft, just for being cute." Followed by a post that said, "By the way, Vista is the snake's eyebrows." You'd believe every word. Not.
Some people will do awful things. That's what this experiment tells us, just like Milgram's original one did, and that's something we really need to know and guard against. In this experiment, the people knew what the situation was. If they found out something they didn't want to know about themselves, it's sort of like getting a diagnosis of leukemia. The only way to start on a cure is to see the problem. This experiment is no more unethical that diagnosing an awful disease.
Electroshocking people was not, ostensibly, the point of Milgram's experiment. People were told they were helping the experimenter study learning, so the shocks were in a "higher cause," in the "service of science." Also, those people thought they were giving electroshocks to a real person who was really suffering. Under those conditions, something like 95% of the people kept administering shocks on the experimenter's instructions no matter what seemed to be happening to the supposed "learner."
In this experiment, people knew what the real purpose of the experiment was, and knew that the victim wasn't real. And yet half "considered stopping the study." If they really did stop, that's a huge improvement over 50 years ago.
The kids may be all right.
I've used RedHat distros back to RH6, and Fedora Core 3 since two years ago. All were on dual boot systems with Win98, Win2000, WinXp, as the case might be. I haven't updated to Core 5 (6?) because I have a customized laptop and it would be more trouble than it's worth. But that does mean I may not be being entirely fair to Fedora.
I've used Ubuntu Dapper and Edgy on a Dell Inspiron, and I am wildly impressed. It installs and just works out of the box, but if you want to play with stuff, it is *nix, and you can go as deep as you want. (The stumbling block there is that Ubuntu makes it complicated to act as root, but if you get tired of that, go to Ubuntu Community help: root-sudo on how to do things your way.) Ubuntu also has much more active and useful help forums and wikis, in my experience, that the things I've found on Fedora. That may be my fault, because I'm not searching for them right, but even so, that means Ubuntu's are easier to find. I tried to collect useful info and links on dual-boot install of Ubuntu, but there's heaps of help out there.
Good luck!That's a great idea! I've thought in terms of jumping up and down on the phone, but this is much better. Now we just need some research on the five most annoying tunes to cell phone bellowers.
Me too. I'm not that strong, but I have very sharp teeth. After listening to the stuff about not inflating my lifejacket, after the guy in front of me has leaned his seat back till his bald spot is in my face, after the inside of my nose feels like a potato chip and my brain is oxygen-starved so that the airline can save $$ by giving us thin parched air--after all that, add some idiot talking to his personal ghosts. Do the airlines really think I won't be in the right frame of mind to take out the nearest jugular?
I'm going to get my teeth filed down to points, just to be sure everything goes smoothly.
Good point. ;-/