A Different Kind of Enlightenment
Russ Allbery
on /., but in this case I highly recommend it. Jon Katz just posted
something that is very reminicent of John Perry Barlow's Cyberspace
Independence Declaration, and which is well worth reading.
<URL:http://www.slashdot.org/features/99/03/15/160219.shtml>
I don't think we'll know the true significance of any of the things we're
living through until far later, if in our lifetimes, but this struck a lot
of chords with me.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Jim Kingdon
> Barlow's Cyberspace Independence Declaration, and which is well worth
> reading.
> <URL:http://www.slashdot.org/features/99/03/15/160219.shtml>
Oh, I guess. The first time I skimmed it. Now I re-read it a bit
more carefully and it still seems to more or less reduce to:
"The net is building a new culture and challenging orthodox
institutions"
(Katz is so long-winded).
The Katz article where I thought he 'arrived', in the sense of finding
something to write which made sense for slashdot, was
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/03/17/1634238.shtml
about the new Bill Gates book. I'm not completely sure I agree with
Katz here - although there are a lot of bad things to say about
Microsoft's business practices, there are also a lot of things that
Microsoft does right (and writes about from time to time - I saw a
pretty good article in an airline magazine about the Microsoft
business culture). A bit hard to say if I haven't read (and don't
plan to read) the Gates book :-).
Anyway, my point is that Katz's review was concise and talked about
something of interest to slashdot readers.
Russ Allbery
> Oh, I guess. The first time I skimmed it. Now I re-read it a bit more
> carefully and it still seems to more or less reduce to:
> "The net is building a new culture and challenging orthodox
> institutions"
> (Katz is so long-winded).
Okay, I'm getting distinctly varying reactions to this article when I
point people at it. :) (The other reaction I got was "*Wow*. I want my
students to read this.")
Now I'll admit that I'm a sucker for articles of this sort. It's Internet
propaganda at its heart, and like any chauvinist, I love propaganda. :)
It's not saying anything amazingly new, but it's encapsulating a bunch of
things that I believe in. The tying of sapere aude to open source and
Internet culture in general I found interesting to think about.
The bit about considering access to information to be a right also struck
a chord when it comes to Usenet, which is one of the reasons why I wanted
to post the URL here. Mostly because this is a perspective that I
normally argue *against*, coming from the "owners of the machines"
perspective of "Usenet is not a right." At the same time, thinking about
that aspect of Usenet in particular, I go out of my way to try to make
sure people have access to Usenet and access to information in general,
and generally agree with the ideals behind that.
It makes me wonder if there's some broader sense in which access to any
given news server isn't a right but Usenet in general is. (Keeping in
mind that in pretty much any culture rights can be taken away for crimes
against the culture.)
Jim Kingdon
> general I found interesting to think about.
Yeah, that's worth being reminded of, and very much in the spirit of
the net.
> The bit about considering access to information to be a right also
> struck a chord when it comes to Usenet, which is one of the reasons
> why I wanted to post the URL here. Mostly because this is a
> perspective that I normally argue *against*, coming from the "owners
> of the machines" perspective of "Usenet is not a right."
It is like access to printed materials. Freedom of the press on paper
belongs to those who own printing presses and freedom of the press on
usenet belongs to those who own usenet servers. In either case the
important thing is that some outside party, like the government,
shouldn't be intervening. If this is followed, as a consequence,
information becomes pretty widely available (even more so on usenet,
in which one can get a newsfeed without copyright worries - in the
presence of copyright the principle still applies, because materials
can be rewritten, but there is more friction in the process).
The extreme cases - culture crimes as you call them - are notable
precisely because so many aspects of the system (rightly) make it an
uphill battle to try to police them.
Now a case like U2 (or other, more exclusive, hierarchies) is kind of
an interesting issue. Do issues like freedom become less salient in a
small club? Or is a club which is built on strong foundations able to
avoid problems without either clamping down or losing what is good
about not being a `mass market' phenomenon.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Now I'll admit that I'm a sucker for articles of this sort. It's
>Internet propaganda at its heart, and like any chauvinist, I love
>propaganda. :)
It's only "propaganda" in that sense if you like the idea of
destroying social institutions. I'm increasingly disturbed by the
idea, as I see it play out. Whereas ten years ago, I thought it
was simply wonderful to be able to talk to people around the world
who shared my interests so easily, since I couldn't find them at
hand and still can't, now I am not sure the price is right. More
than anything else, I think the "online culture" fosters paranoia
and a geekish reinforced-stupidity when it comes to the nuances of
art & humanity. It will probably be the death blow to local
neighborhood culture as such, as if TV & the commuter mania weren't
enough. And by implication, it is a removal from context of that
sort which breeds sociopaths. Or, to put it in the bluntest terms,
many people on the net need a good punch in the nose, for their
own good as well as ours.
>It makes me wonder if there's some broader sense in which access
>to any given news server isn't a right but Usenet in general is.
That's a sensible view. My views on moderated groups are likewise
predicated on alternatives.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Russ Allbery
> It's only "propaganda" in that sense if you like the idea of destroying
> social institutions.
I'm still not sure how much of it replaces pre-existing social
institutions and how much of it provides opportunity for social
institutions that couldn't have existed otherwise.
I'm admittedly biased here. I may also be an odd case (although I know a
lot of others like me). For me, a lot of the contacts I've made on-line
go beyond just finding people who share my interests and have resulted in
being exposed to ideas and ways of thinking (via people I've come into
contact with) that have fundamentally changed how I view the world. And
I'm pretty sure a lot of them come from backgrounds that I never would
have been exposed to otherwise.
And I make a point of trying to pull human contacts back into face-to-face
contact on a periodic basis. I need to travel more than I do now.
> I'm increasingly disturbed by the idea, as I see it play out. Whereas
> ten years ago, I thought it was simply wonderful to be able to talk to
> people around the world who shared my interests so easily, since I
> couldn't find them at hand and still can't, now I am not sure the price
> is right. More than anything else, I think the "online culture" fosters
> paranoia and a geekish reinforced-stupidity when it comes to the nuances
> of art & humanity.
I think that sort of viewpoint is very common amongst the most vocal
participants in on-line culture, but I'm not sure of the cause and effect
there. The Internet's still pretty heavily focused towards the geeks and
technological in general, and pretty light on other viewpoints.
So fosters is probably not far off the mark in that those prejudices and
blindnesses have a chance to reinforce with more contact. On the other
hand, the culture would have existed regardless, and I'm not sure the
Internet has really made the effect much worse.
One of the inherent problems with "think for yourself" philosophies is
that they discard *too* much and end up not learning from history.
Probably par for the course.
> It will probably be the death blow to local neighborhood culture as
> such, as if TV & the commuter mania weren't enough. And by implication,
> it is a removal from context of that sort which breeds sociopaths. Or,
> to put it in the bluntest terms, many people on the net need a good
> punch in the nose, for their own good as well as ours.
Yeah. There is that. I largely disagree with Katz's analysis of flame
wars. I don't think they're rooted, or even largely influenced by, fear
of change or anything along those lines. I think most of them stem from
people not learning how to socially interact with others and how to
express opinions without being insulting.
On the other hand I've, more than once, had the experience of listening to
people in face-to-face conversations and be thinking while I am that no
one would put up with that sort of muddled expression, poor thinking, and
inaccurate analysis on Usenet. Sounds weird, given the jokes about
Usenet, but one of the benefits to the hard edge that Usenet has is that
you really can't spout utter nonsense and not get called on it sooner or
later. You can spout utter nonsense for years in well-chosen circles off
Usenet and have everyone agree with you.
But it's a medium dominated by the people who can express themselves the
"loudest," for some definition of volume.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>I may also be an odd case (although I know a lot of others like me).
Many of the people reading this will be in similar positions.
Obviously, the Internet provided a great opportunity for us. I'm
more concerned with how it will affect the middle-of-the-road
person, and as I see more non-technological people come online,
people I may have known for years before, the early returns are
not positive.
>One of the inherent problems with "think for yourself" philosophies
>is that they discard *too* much and end up not learning from history.
>Probably par for the course.
Sure, but let's also face the fact that "think for yourself" is
already the minority online, and it'll only get relatively smaller.
>I think most of them stem from people not learning how to socially
>interact with others and how to express opinions without being
>insulting.
Well, I happen to believe there is a place for being insulting,
although it's not too good if you find yourself falling into it
without knowing it. I would not want to wall off any aspect of
human expression.
>On the other hand I've, more than once, had the experience of
>listening to people in face-to-face conversations and be thinking
>while I am that no one would put up with that sort of muddled
>expression, poor thinking, and inaccurate analysis on Usenet.
I don't really disagree, and Usenet certainly remains a crucible
for learning the skills of abstract public debate, although I feel
compelled to point out that accurate and precise expression is not
really called for in most facets of most people's lives.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Jim Kingdon
> and a geekish reinforced-stupidity when it comes to the nuances of art
> culture as such, as if TV & the commuter mania weren't enough.
Hmm, I'm not sure about the impact on neighborhoods. MIT is the
canonical geek neighborhood, and it still seems to be alive and well
(as far as I've noticed). Most colleges probably have some kind of
online neighborhood (where I mean "neighborhood" in a physical sense,
not just a virtual one) - certainly mine did when I went to college
(although we were just, when I was there, beginning to get networked
outside our college so I don't know what has been going on since
then).
I could even assert that the potential of the net - when it becomes
more fully applied to neighborhood issues - might make neighborhoods
rather less at the mercy of city hall and distant corporations and
such. Of course when it comes to neighborhood newspapers (or most
things) it is a lot easier to say that the net has the potential to
enable something than to say that the net will actually get used that
way. My local neighborhood paper is on the web
(http://www.intowner.com/), and I'm also on a (DC-wide but with more
representation from the white areas) email list
(http://www.dcwatch.com/; the email list is "themail"). Not that I'm
sure I have any particular point/analysis other than their existence.
Maybe the answer is that the net empowers individuals. Whether
individuals use that power to build up their neighborhoods or reach
beyond them isn't the kind of thing which "online culture" tends to
encourage or discourage. Which might be what you are saying in terms
of being blind to nuances of art & humanity.
Todd Michel McComb
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>Most colleges probably have some kind of online neighborhood (where
>I mean "neighborhood" in a physical sense, not just a virtual one)
Well, I don't think college "neighborhoods" are very typical....
>I could even assert that the potential of the net - when it becomes
>more fully applied to neighborhood issues - might make neighborhoods
>rather less at the mercy of city hall and distant corporations and
>such.
Really, I think nothing can do that like getting together face to
face. There is no good substitute for that, although the Internet
at its best allows one to interact in some way with people one
would not ordinarily meet, but what does it say when people go
online to interact with someone who lives 50 feet away? I suppose
there's a point at which one can say that people will *not* meet
face to face and so at least the net allows them some interaction
without much time involved, but then without the time invested, it
isn't the same thing. It's not that people don't put neighborhood
newspapers online, but that so many people use the Internet as an
escape from dealing with people. It's another outlet, and a very
very big one. How will society cope with that kind of force?
>Maybe the answer is that the net empowers individuals.
I am not sure this is even true. Watch what is coming, as the big
corporations act to take more control. Free consumer bandwidth
with ads built into everything, and with the reciprocal cost of
providing all bandwidth for content being too prohibitive for many
small non-commercial sites... that is the big push. Yes you can
*act* to take power for yourself based on any new set of circumstances,
and the net will be no exception, but not only isn't the net really
very new any more, the default result is unlikely to be anything
but a more impersonal & commercial-filled life for most people.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>I don't accept the premise that more internet contact means less
>face-to-face contact.
Well, more doing one thing has to mean less doing *something* else,
unless we posit that they are done simultaneously....
>But will they dominate? I doubt it - the big buzzword `push' is
>dead for example. What everyone is talking about now is portals
That was last year. That market is nearly set now. I'm not even
talking about the future in this area, but only where the capital
is going right now.
>Maybe I'm just an optimist and you're a pessimist
Maybe so. But then I don't worry much about what I'll be doing,
that's for sure. Or you or Russ or most people I know. But to
say that all the new people on the Internet will be empowered?
No, I don't think so.
On the other hand, I *do* worry about how I will continue to provide
content over the net, if the schemes of provider-pays-for-bandwidth
reach complete fruition. For a non-profit like me, that would
basically mean doing "pledge drives" a la PBS, to get that money
back from people who are currently paying for their home bandwidth.
I don't want to belabor the implications of that stuff.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Jim Kingdon
> face. There is no good substitute for that, although the Internet
> at its best allows one to interact in some way with people one
> would not ordinarily meet, but what does it say when people go
> online to interact with someone who lives 50 feet away?
I don't accept the premise that more internet contact means less
face-to-face contact. Especially in a context like this, I expect
that more internet contact would mean more face-to-face contact. I
mean, that's often true even when getting together face-to-face is
difficult (like when newsgroups have conventions - I'm _still_ in
touch with a few of the people I met at the soc.motss con in
approximately 1990). So I would expect it to be all the more true
when interacting face-to-face is sometimes as simple as just stopping
and chatting with someone working in their garden, instead of driving
or walking by.
> a more impersonal & commercial-filled life for most people.
Well, predicting the future is always hazardous and I'm sure that the
internet will contain some impersonal & commercial-filled services
(which I don't regard as a bad thing). But will they dominate? I
doubt it - the big buzzword `push' is dead for example. What everyone
is talking about now is portals - which are, roughly, a way to hook
up people with each other, rather than a way for a small number of
content providers to broadcast to passive viewers.
Maybe I'm just an optimist and you're a pessimist, or maybe we are
reading different social dynamics into the rather generic term
"internet".
David Damerell
>Really, I think nothing can do that like getting together face to
>face. There is no good substitute for that, although the Internet
>at its best allows one to interact in some way with people one
>would not ordinarily meet, but what does it say when people go
>online to interact with someone who lives 50 feet away?
What does it say when someone meets someone 50 feet away in real life who
they would never have met had they not been online? I've met a number of
people in Cambridge through ucam.chat and (to a lesser degree) cam.misc,
and the Monochrome BBS (not Usenet, but that's not, I think, important to
this question), many of whom I now see on a fairly frequent basis IRL.
Again, speaking to your friend 50 feet away without the Internet would have
meant picking an afternoon in advance. As it is, you can talk to him any
time.
But that's not true, because we've had the telephone for quite a while.
It's not clear to me that the Internet does anything in terms of allowing
locals who know each other to meet without meeting that the telephone didn't;
but one never meets new people on the 'phone at all.
--
David/Kirsty Damerell. dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
CUWoCS President. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/ Hail Eris!
|___| That is not dead which can eternal lie, Vote Cthulhu: why make do
| | | And with strange aeons even death may die. with the lesser evil?
Russ Allbery
> On the other hand, I *do* worry about how I will continue to provide
> content over the net, if the schemes of provider-pays-for-bandwidth
> reach complete fruition. For a non-profit like me, that would basically
> mean doing "pledge drives" a la PBS, to get that money back from people
> who are currently paying for their home bandwidth. I don't want to
> belabor the implications of that stuff.
Yeah, that's pretty disturbing to me too. I'm hoping that the bandwidth
levels at which that's going to kick in basically will make it not a
problem for most sites, but even still, it would be really hard for a new
Yahoo or Lycos to get off the ground in that environment.
I'm personally prepared to just pay for it if I have to. Maintaining the
archives I maintain and making them available to people is worth the money
to me. But there are a lot of people who either won't feel that way or
won't be in a position to bear the cost, if the worst case happens.
Peter da Silva
Russ and others have made some very good points.
In article <ylemmho...@windlord.stanford.edu>,
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>> More than anything else, I think the "online culture" fosters
>> paranoia and a geekish reinforced-stupidity when it comes to the nuances
>> of art & humanity.
>I think that sort of viewpoint is very common amongst the most vocal
>participants in on-line culture, but I'm not sure of the cause and effect
>there. The Internet's still pretty heavily focused towards the geeks and
>technological in general, and pretty light on other viewpoints.
This is the sort of point I used to try and get across to Dave
Hayes, Chris Caputo, and others who think the answer to spam and
abuse is "get a better killfile". There's a lot of people on the
net who are valuable resources who aren't geeks, and limiting
effective use of the net to geeks (which is the inevitable consequence
of 'true free speech') will lead to a poor grey dead net just as
it was beginning to flower and spread beyond geekdom.
>Usenet, but one of the benefits to the hard edge that Usenet has is that
>you really can't spout utter nonsense and not get called on it sooner or
>later. You can spout utter nonsense for years in well-chosen circles off
>Usenet and have everyone agree with you.
The World Wide Web, for example... you can put up a web page and
filter criticism and nobody can call you on it when you're spouting
complete and utter bullshit, like the typical oily apologias for
incompetence at Microsoft. See
http://www.taronga.com/~peter/io/microsoft.html .
Part of what you're seeing, though, is the difference between the
spoken and written media. It's like the Lincoln-Douglas debates...
Lincoln was by far the weaker debater in person: he rambled, took
to long to get to the point. But on paper... which is how most
American's saw them, his words were so much more effective than
Douglas's sound bites.
The diminishing of logic in public discourse is caused by radio
and television. Those very non-verbal cues that people bemoan
Usenet's lack of are what allow skilled public speakers to put
across rampant nonsense they could never express in print... and
unfortunately a photogenic face and dynamic gestural language
doesn't imply anything about the quality of ones ideas.
Which is, of course, yet another reason to fear the spread of things
like Real Audio.
>But it's a medium dominated by the people who can express themselves the
>"loudest," for some definition of volume.
Is it elitist to think that skill with the written word is more closely
allied to real intelligence than a photogenic face and dynamic gestural
language?
--
This is The Reverend Peter da Silva's Boring Sig File - there are no references
to Wolves, Kibo, Discordianism, or The Church of the Subgenius in this document
"[I]f we can make a society that's reasonably safe for women then men should be
reasonably safe from the occasional same-gender advance too." -- Anthony DeBoer
Peter da Silva
>content over the net, if the schemes of provider-pays-for-bandwidth
>reach complete fruition.
I don't see that happening. There are too many peole who see the net as
a place to put their stuff up. It's self-publishing and vanity press gone
totally over the top... and to serve it there are dozens of free web space
providers, and the competition between them for content is incredible.
Every time I update my "free pages" page there's new services out there.
There's sites that provide totally free cgi access. Yes, you can upload
executables and they'll run them. There's free domain name parking, free
email and free email reflectors and free file servers.
And of course the old established players like geocities are still drawing
in massive collections of sites.
Don't worry about finding a place to park your archives. Provider pays will
never get off the ground in this environment.
Russ Allbery
> And of course the old established players like geocities are still
> drawing in massive collections of sites.
> Don't worry about finding a place to park your archives. Provider pays
> will never get off the ground in this environment.
Well, I do tend to agree with you, but quoting your example above of
Geocities, if that's the way the future is trending, I'd be pretty
worried. Geocities is obnoxious about advertising, particularly to the
unclued visitor. You and I both know to turn off Javascript and similar
monstrosities. Geocities is *painful* to visit with that stuff turned on,
as ad banners pop up all over the place.
Geocities will work fine in a provider pays market, because they're making
their money off the advertising. It's just like those regional computer
rags that are given away free and have 20 pages of content to 200 pages of
ads.
Jim Kingdon
> content over the net, if the schemes of provider-pays-for-bandwidth
> reach complete fruition.
I'm having trouble understanding this one too. From where I'm
sitting, bandwidth is getting cheaper or holding steady. The reason
providers like slashdot are having trouble paying for their bandwidth
is excessive use of dynamic web pages, inline imagines and other
bandwidth hogs, not the bandwidth to transmit the actual text they are
serving. People make a big deal about a site getting "slashdotted"
(overwhelmed by people accessing it), but my web site has been
mentioned in slashdot a number of times without even really breaking a
sweat. And that's over a 28.8kbps dial-up modem (24x7).
Now, some sites, like the Linux kernel (ftp.kernel.org) do really need
a lot of bandwidth, but they have done pretty well with mirrors.
Other bright spots include http://metalab.unc.edu and
http://www.tux.org which have both found donors willing to provide
substantial bandwidth. Based on discussions with Eric Raymond (who
was running, or helping run, metalab for a while), the #1 constraint
on a site like this is dealing with the human issues - screening all
the uploads or figuring out who has upload access or whatever
mechanism you have.
By "schemes" do you mean things like the Sprint ION thing
(http://www.sprint.com/Stemp/press/releases/9812/9812070702.html)?
The phone companies have wanted per-minute (or per-byte) charges for
years or decades now, and the internet consumers aren't buying it. In
fact, the trend is the other way, as flat-rate becomes more common.
The phone companies will keep trying, but I don't see any reason they
will succeed on any kind of global scale (given even moderate
vigilance from netheads like you or I). Content providers have always
paid for bandwidth (or had their funders do it), and it hasn't been a
fatal problem in the past.
The whole thing strikes me as an Imminent Death of the Net Predicted
situation. But I guess we've already established I'm the optimist
:-).
Russ Allbery
would). It also really doesn't have that much to do with Todd's post,
which I'll respond to specifically in a separate message.
Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> writes:
> Sure, but let's also face the fact that "think for yourself" is already
> the minority online, and it'll only get relatively smaller.
Reflecting the fact that it seems to be the minority in the world at
large, yeah, and that of course is the pool from which we're drawing new
users. To bring up other standard analyses of Usenet, it's the standard
model of a culture clash. Are the newcomers going to adopt the current
on-line way of thinking, or are they going to change on-line culture to
match the broader TV and radio-inspired culture.
Here's one take on the difference: I consider myself to be an information
producer. The interaction between information producers and consumers
on-line has an odd twist. While copying of information is "essentially"
free, an increased number of consumers *does* create an increased load on
producers, largely via an increased question load. They don't understand
the produced information and ask for clarification. Television and the
like avoid this problem of scaling by simply not allowing anyone to ask
questions.
In that sort of information environment, being a producer as well as a
consumer not only means that you contribute to production globally, it
also means that you make information production easier locally. For
example, I installed qmail and "consumed" the installation instructions
and so on. And had some questions. But I then joined the qmail mailing
list and answered other people's questions, which to me is the *expected*
thing for me to do because I think of myself as a producer as well.
Because I did that, I offset the costs of my consumption of information by
dealing with other consumers.
*This is how information production that allows feedback scales.* The
beneficiaries of the additional explanation then pass along their
knowledge to other people, and the number of *producers* of a given
information type scales with the number of consumers. (Of course, being a
polite and frugal consumer also helps; RTFM, think before you ask, etc.
all reduces the load.) Without this effect, there's an upper limit to the
amount of information that one person can effectively produce, since they
get overwhelmed in questions and feedback.
There's currently a lot of emphasis going into ways to make people more
effective consumers. This is what search engines are fundamentally about.
It was (and is) the purpose of FAQs before that. It's one of the
motivations behind the instructions to read a group for a while before
posting to it (there are several). But I think we're losing some of the
emphasis on being an information *producer* as well as consumer, and it's
one of the aspects of on-line culture that's notably *absent* in the rest
of the world. There is no way for the average person to be a producer as
well as a consumer of the information communicated via television.
So the concept of "learn something and then pass it along to the next ten
people" can be a foreign concept to people who haven't been on Usenet for
years and years like we have. They may not even realize that they *can*
do that! I've seen so many people who view the world as "the people who
know" and "the people who don't know" and don't understand the transitions
between the two. They often express a lot of gratitude to "all of the
Perl gurus" for answering their questions, but it doesn't even occur to
some of them to stick around and answer other people's questions now that
they know more.
And Usenet pushes the interactivity bit pretty hard. One thing that
Usenet does fairly well is get people to realize that they can participate
too, partly because the way in which you ask a question and the way in
which you answer a question is essentially identical, and most groups have
a bunch of traffic that severely fuzzes the lines (ongoing discussions)
which provides a nice slow way of ramping up to being a producer.
If you look at the web, this is a *lot* worse. People are approaching the
web with a lot closer to the attitude that they approach television: it
exists for them to consume, and there's no feasible way for them to give
anything back to it. Web pages are inherently not shared endeavors;
unlike Usenet, there's no clear way for someone to jump in and improve a
web page that they think is missing something.
You see this reflected in the sort of feedback those web pages that allow
posted comments actually receive. The quality of information in those
comments is *appallingly* poor. As bad as /. discussion is, it's actually
pretty good compared to a lot; read through the "talk back" sections on
some of the news web sites for worse stuff. Or read the posted comments
on Lothlorien pictures; they're usually not worth bothering with at all.
It's pretty rare to find a Usenet newsgroup where the average quality is
*that* bad.
And, to continue the comparison, the sort of posted comments you see on
web pages reminds me a lot of the sort of comments you hear in another
popular culture medium with a marginal feedback mechanism: talk radio.
It's pretty rare to actually get interesting *discussion* going in a talk
radio call, and I think that's because of the producer/consumer mentality
presented. The talk radio host is quite clearly the information
*producer* and the callers are generally there to set up opportunities for
the host to say witty things. Caller comments on the substance of what's
being said are nearly always discounted because the *assumption* is that
the caller doesn't know as much. This is very similar to what you see on
web feedback pages, and is drastically different than Usenet which has a
strong egalitarian ideal.
This is what worries me. I see people coming on-line with the expectation
that they're going to be consumers, just like they are with other
information sources, not realizing they can be producers, and at most
aspiring to be the witty talk radio caller who might say something that
the host agrees with (and thereby puts his stamp of approval on, at the
same time reinforcing who's the real information producer there).
What then gets really frightening is to look at how advertising works with
this culture. Ignore for the moment the vapidness and low quality of the
information and the level of annoyance it produces. Look at the message
that advertising sends to a consumer, particularly with those Internet
sites that have a lot of advertising.
The consumer is being told that *the way to pay for the information one
consumes is to consume more information*! This is the entire theory of
advertising. You "pay" for being able to use Infoseek or Yahoo or the
like for free by reading all of the ads.
Relative to the morals of Usenet, this is *horrible*! It pounds home the
lesson that the average person can't consume, the average person has
nothing to give back, information content is provided by these large
organizations and by "exceptional smart people" and the only way that the
average user can support all of these information producers is to even
more mindlessly consume lower and lower quality information and hopefully
spend their money on it.
I think *this*, more than anything else, is the place where Usenet is a
different culture than the web in a fundamental and vitally important way.
I'd really like to see Usenet (and traditional open-participation mailing
lists, which in my mind work pretty much identically to Usenet and for
social purposes may as well be the same medium) pull the standard of the
web up a bit and teach people to be producers as well, and a lot of the
free web hosting sites have helped this. But the amount of force and
momentum behind forcing people back down into the role of brainless
consumers is very strong.
Witness the recent trend on the web, which can basically be summed up as
"time for all of those amateur site designers to give it up; web sites are
built by professionals now."
I don't know what specifically can be done about this. I think we're in a
fairly good position, all things considered, in that we've built up some
pretty strong cultures around the idea that everyone can be a producer.
And to tie this back to the free software movement, that's the same lesson
it's trying to teach people about software. But it's going to be under
fairly heavy attack from all the traditional information production
outlets, just like free software already is. ("The average user doesn't
need the source; they don't know how to program, never will, and will
never spend their time on it.")
It's hard to fight because it *is* partially true; not everyone is going
to be a great information producer, and certainly not everyone can write
software. But the focus on those individual cases where yes, someone
really can't give anything back in that particular way risks being
generalized into the idea that they can't give anything back in *any* way,
and that would be a disaster.
Russ Allbery
> Part of what you're seeing, though, is the difference between the spoken
> and written media. It's like the Lincoln-Douglas debates... Lincoln was
> by far the weaker debater in person: he rambled, took to long to get to
> the point. But on paper... which is how most American's saw them, his
> words were so much more effective than Douglas's sound bites.
This is a very good point, and one of the benefits for Usenet in staying
with a textual environment and perhaps even in not having a markup
language.
I have a love-hate relationship with markup languages. On one hand,
they're extremely valuable for more clearly expressing one's meaning, and
they're almost required for documents of any length. I find myself using
markup of some form with any text document over a few hundred lines, or at
least wanting to, because I know that the reader isn't going to be able to
hold the structure and flow of the document in their head without help.
And of course there's a difference between this and *this* that's captured
by the "punctuation" types of markup.
On the other hand, there aren't very many ways of providing "form" in
straight, plain text. You can do things with fully justified paragraphs
or little ASCII lines or various types of ASCII markup like underlines and
caps and smileys, but the "form" is so totally less visible than the
"content" that people generally only use it for meaning (and sometimes not
even then) and otherwise don't bother.
I consider this a feature when looking at what's been done with better
markup environments.
HTML is a markup language that's actually fairly well-designed for
providing the useful parts of markup, the parts that make it easier for
the reader to deal with a long document. The types of markup that provide
more structure and navigational aids, and that highlight checkpoints and
markers in the reading process to make it easier to see the overall layout
of the material. But it's flexible and has been made more flexible, and
now serves as a way for people to provide lots and lots of "form"
regardless of their content.
I get in trouble when I argue against markup on this basis, since it's
saying "don't give someone a tool that can be used for good because it can
be used for evil." And I agree; I don't think that's the way to approach
life in general. But nonetheless, the growth in markup feels too much to
me like an outgrowth of the whole trend towards making everything look
"professional" (meaning making it look like slick magazine advertisements)
regardless of the content. And people playing with Cute HTML Tricks on
their personal web pages are just buying into that trend.
Personally, I'm working towards the goal of never writing HTML again. My
longer documents already have a source language of formatted plain text
and are converted into HTML automatically for me. The next step is to be
able to write general HTML pages in an abstract structural markup language
and have that turned into HTML for me. There's a real lack of tools to do
that sort of thing, particularly if (like me) you detest writing in SGML
and dealing with all those angle brackets and verbose tags. I'm in the
process of rolling my own language and parser for this purpose, which
likely no one but me will ever use, but it'll save me a lot of time and
effort.
My home page is something of a statement on this subject (content vs.
form), as is said explicitly on the top page. The goal is to make
information easy to find, not to make the page look good.
> Is it elitist to think that skill with the written word is more closely
> allied to real intelligence than a photogenic face and dynamic gestural
> language?
No, but for me what matters is the ideas. Not even the intelligence level
of the person saying them. (I'm sure this is true for you too.) So skill
with the written word does at least have *more* correlation with the
content I'm looking for, but it's still not synonymous with it.
Russ Allbery
>> I think most of them stem from people not learning how to socially
>> interact with others and how to express opinions without being
>> insulting.
> Well, I happen to believe there is a place for being insulting, although
> it's not too good if you find yourself falling into it without knowing
> it. I would not want to wall off any aspect of human expression.
Oh, I agree. But when you, or any other long-time Usenet poster who has a
good grasp of how to communicate, choose to insult someone, it's a
*choice*. You know how to interact without doing that and you choose not
to because it isn't the effect that you want. It becomes a tool among
many others.
Like you say about finding oneself falling into insults without knowing
it, my point is more aimed at the people who don't seem to be able to have
a strong disagreement *without* going to insults. (And conversely,
without seeing insults in everything said to them.) A *lot* of Usenet
posters seem to fall into this category even in normal circumstances, and
many more when confronted with someone who tends to be brusque and not
pull punches.
> I don't really disagree, and Usenet certainly remains a crucible for
> learning the skills of abstract public debate, although I feel compelled
> to point out that accurate and precise expression is not really called
> for in most facets of most people's lives.
Point. But the more general ability to express oneself and one's ideas,
not necessarily in debate, is called for in an information producer.
Jim Kingdon
> *producer* as well as consumer, and it's one of the aspects of on-line
> culture that's notably *absent* in the rest of the world.
Well said, nice post. This is one of the key culture clashes which is
central to a lot of the flamewars and misunderstandings which are
going on in places like info-cvs. Now, I have been cultivating CVS
information producers with some success (a noticeable achievement, in
the sense that many of them came from Windows/Mac/&c worlds rather
than usenet/free-software/&c), but I haven't been as successful as I
would have hoped.
> Web pages are inherently not shared endeavors; unlike Usenet, there's
> no clear way for someone to jump in and improve a web page that they
> think is missing something.
Well, I don't think that the "single publisher" model is going to go
away completely. There are things which are just hard to handle on a
collaborative basis (for an example which does involve submissions,
free software generally has central maintainers who are often quite
selective about accepting submissions; but even the utility of having
submissions at all declines if you go farther to the "optimize for
aesthetic completeness" end rather than the "optimize for factual
correctness" end).
But people are experimenting with web pages which involve more
collaboration (see for example FAQ-O-Matic at
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~jonh/ff-serve/cache/1.html or DMoz at
http://dmoz.org/). Various things will need to fall into place (both
cultural and technical) for this mode of working to be more common,
but I think it will. I certainly hope so. Doing free software the
way Cygnus does - with mailing lists, maintainers, emailed patches,
centralized support producers, and stuff like that, only gets you a
20-30% boost over just writing the software within a single company
(number from Michael Tiemann and apparently Corel believes him).
Well, that isn't big enough to make up for the revenue loss from
giving up license fees. In order to make free software a viable
economic model, we need to get 10-fold and 100-fold improvements. I
think such improvements are out there - the way that Linux/*BSD
distributions make use of packages maintained in a decentralized way
is one pointer in the right direction. But I think that what we have
seen so far is just the start of what we need (and will be able to
get).
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>*This is how information production that allows feedback scales.*
I don't dispute that this is possible on the theoretical level. I
just don't think it will happen... I don't even think that most people
care to have it happen, or even *would* care if they knew what you
were talking about.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
>Is it elitist to think that skill with the written word is more
>closely allied to real intelligence than a photogenic face and
>dynamic gestural language?
I don't think it is elitist so much as it is a skewed comparison.
Each medium has its merits and abuses. One might just as well
compare someone with the insightfulness & quick wit to conceive
real answers & express them in real time, without resorting to
canned responses or bravado, to someone whose muddy thinking needs
the cover of slow & extensive editing so as not to be exposed.
The former person certainly has no reason to feel inferior, even
if his expression does not translate wholly to writing.
Todd Michel McComb
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>From where I'm sitting, bandwidth is getting cheaper or holding
>steady.
It is not getting cheaper on the backbone. Anything else is a
mirage. Any excess bandwidth could instantly be soaked up by more
intensive content or content-like fluff.
>By "schemes" do you mean things like the Sprint ION thing
There is a recent interview somewhere with the CEO of broadcast.com,
for instance.
>The phone companies have wanted per-minute (or per-byte) charges
>for years or decades now, and the internet consumers aren't buying
>it. In fact, the trend is the other way, as flat-rate becomes more
>common.
That's the consumer end. Yes, on the consumer end, the push is to
make nearly limitless bandwidth free. The thing is that the underlying
costs haven't gone away. On the medium-sized ISP scale, more
bandwidth costs more per unit, not less.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
>net as a place to put their stuff up. It's self-publishing and
>vanity press gone totally over the top... and to serve it there
>are dozens of free web space providers, and the competition between
>them for content is incredible.
Sure, for self-publishing and vanity, especially if you're willing
to have advertisements attached, there will certainly be a place.
Once you get into turning out some serious volume, and if you aren't
willing to go for advertisements, the options are far fewer. I
had over a million visitors last year alone, and those numbers just
go up, especially as we get larger volumes of information online.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>What does it say when someone meets someone 50 feet away in real
>life who they would never have met had they not been online?
To me, it says you probably spend a great deal of time online.
Jim Kingdon
> the flamewars and misunderstandings which are going on in places like
> info-cvs.
Speaking of which, I thought I'd expand on this and ask Russ (if he
wants to comment) whether he has any reaction to what goes on in the
CVS world (well, anyone else too I just know Russ is on info-cvs and
has participated in said world at least a bit). I know that I've made
some mistakes (like when I said "I don't have time" to Noah - I should
have known better. This is just standard communications skills -
avoid "don't waste my time"; sometimes say instead "I won't waste your
time"). But some mistakes by me here and there hardly seem to explain
the dynamics of what is going on there. I wonder whether there is
something much more fundamental about my approach - or forces beyond
my control - or something.
I mean, on some days I think there is some formula in terms of making
the CVS world more of a community and getting the various forces to
synergize instead of grind against each other. And on other days I
think that it is hopeless until there is more in the way of funding
(e.g. people maintaining bug lists, offering CVS/web hosting, or
whatever the activity is, as part of their jobs). And on the days in
between I just get kind of confused (and I'll have to admit, often a
bit discouraged).
Sorry if this is drifting too much to free software rather than usenet
as such, but there seems to be some overlap/similarity....
Russ Allbery
> Speaking of which, I thought I'd expand on this and ask Russ (if he
> wants to comment) whether he has any reaction to what goes on in the CVS
> world (well, anyone else too I just know Russ is on info-cvs and has
> participated in said world at least a bit). I know that I've made some
> mistakes (like when I said "I don't have time" to Noah - I should have
> known better. This is just standard communications skills - avoid
> "don't waste my time"; sometimes say instead "I won't waste your time").
> But some mistakes by me here and there hardly seem to explain the
> dynamics of what is going on there. I wonder whether there is something
> much more fundamental about my approach - or forces beyond my control -
> or something.
A lot of what I've seen going on with CVS strikes me as the symptoms of
"mature product syndrome," which is never as much a problem with the
product as it is with the expectations of the people involved in it.
It goes something like this: Early in the development cycle, there aren't
very many people already using it, there's a lot that obviously needs to
be done, and the solutions to most problems are fairly obvious. There's
also a lot of fairly simple things to be done. This makes for fast
progress on TODO lists and lots of advancement of the software fairly
fast.
This can only last so long, and then the package enters a different phase
in its lifecycle. It becomes mature. Lots of people are using it. All
those things that could be dismissed as changeable quirks or decided to be
bugs and changed by fiat are now things that people base obscure little
scripts and weird corners of their development on. The remaining problems
are generally Big Problems. Every proposed change has tradeoffs of some
sort, and it's really hard to find an improvement that doesn't also make
the package worse for someone else with different needs, if only in the
incompatibility with earlier versions.
This is the point where the test and build environments tend to start
showing their age, most frequently in the combination of odd hacks that
were put in at some point in the distant past for reasons that people no
longer remember or in the ports to platforms with obscure problems that
begin suffering from bit rot.
As mature product syndrome sets in, there tend to be splits in the
development community that are hard to resolve, because they fundamentally
come down to a conservative vs. radical split. The conservatives are the
ones who care deeply about backward compatibility, are aware of how hard
the hard problems are, have been using the package for many years and
already know how to work around all of its quirks, and have a lot of
interest in stability. The radicals are the people who may not be
familiar with past discussions, who think that this would all be so much
better if it could just be changed in this way, are willing to make huge
changes piecemeal rather than working them all out in advance, and don't
care that much about backward compatibility problems.
These people are going to argue. It's really hard to avoid it. And the
core maintainers tend to be more conservative than radical, if just
because they've used the package for longer.
We have these same problems with Perl in spades. It's precisely this
fundamental world view difference that results in the flamewars between
Tom and Ilya.
Having a mature product isn't a bad thing at all. It means it probably
does its job very well, and very reliably, and most of the changes that
people want are in the form of expanding it into new areas that weren't
part of the original design rather than fulfilling the initial design
goals.
(Oh, and somewhere about this time or a little later, almost invariably,
someone starts considering a complete rewrite, or some other change on a
similar scale.)
Kai Henningsen
> Of course when it comes to neighborhood newspapers
My first reaction here is "Huh? What's that supposed to be?".
But I guess it's similar to the stuff a church sends out to its parish.
Apart from those, I don't think I've ever seen any.
Well, all I can say is that, since long before I found the net, I've
*never* seen any value in this sort of thing.
Physical neighbourhood, to me, never had any serious relation to
community. (Neither did school, or the military, and the university only
insofar as it was computer people.)
That may be partly because we moved so often, and partly because my social
skills started out pretty bad, after meeting nothing but adults for my
first 6 years.
The online communities, and before that the computer geek community (which
have a serious overlap, of course) were the first real communities outside
of my family where I actually felt I belonged. That hasn't changed much -
the job can be added to the list, but that's just about it.
Physical neighbours, to me, are still some usually obnoxious people that I
have to tolerate because there's nothing I can do about them, and which I
try to ignore as much as possible.
On the other hand, it was never true that I was only interested in
computers - far from it. DejaNews knows :-)
As for fears that the net will destroy something, well, I can't really see
it. Unless that something relies on closed minds, in which case I count it
as a win.
I think people who behave bad on the net usually behave just as bad off
the net - though not necessarily just as visible.
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Kai Henningsen
> It's not that people don't put neighborhood
> newspapers online, but that so many people use the Internet as an
> escape from dealing with people.
I'm always extremely sceptical about claims like that - perhaps because
I've heard similar claims applied to me where I knew they were completely
false, but I really think most such claims about escapes are quite bogus.
> >Maybe the answer is that the net empowers individuals.
>
> I am not sure this is even true.
I find it impossible to doubt this, it's so extremely obvious.
> Watch what is coming, as the big
> corporations act to take more control. Free consumer bandwidth
> with ads built into everything, and with the reciprocal cost of
> providing all bandwidth for content being too prohibitive for many
> small non-commercial sites... that is the big push.
As I'm involved with a small non-commercial site, I can tell you that I
don't see it happening.
Of course, I also live in a place where the small non-commercial sites
have mostly allied themselves in a rather large non-commercial
organization :-)
> Yes you can
> *act* to take power for yourself based on any new set of circumstances,
> and the net will be no exception,
But the net is *very* different, in that, for the first time ever, it
allows individuals, at costs most people can afford, to publish their
ideas to all of the world.
And there's no way to put *that* genie back into the bottle, short of a
shooting-type revolution.
> but not only isn't the net really
> very new any more,
That's just plain male bovine manure.
> the default result is unlikely to be anything
> but a more impersonal & commercial-filled life for most people.
If it is, then that's a result of *their* decision. Nobody can force them
into it.
Incidentally, I wonder if someone isn't desperately trying to shoot
himself into the foot here. Familiarity breeds contempt, remember? How
many banners do you really *look* at, these days? Ten seconds later, would
you even remember what it was advertizing?
I think people are already beginning to wake up and smell the coffee.
Lately, I'm seeing more and more sites that make a point of not having any
banners.
Kai Henningsen
> > Really, I think nothing can do that like getting together face to
> > face. There is no good substitute for that, although the Internet
> > at its best allows one to interact in some way with people one
> > would not ordinarily meet, but what does it say when people go
> > online to interact with someone who lives 50 feet away?
>
> I don't accept the premise that more internet contact means less
> face-to-face contact.
I know it's wrong for me personally. Online (BBS, not Internet) contacts
have been *generating* more face-to-face contacts for me.
Kai Henningsen
> In article <p4wbthk...@panix7.panix.com>,
> Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
> >I don't accept the premise that more internet contact means less
> >face-to-face contact.
>
> Well, more doing one thing has to mean less doing *something* else,
> unless we posit that they are done simultaneously....
Well of course. I know for a fact that I've been doing less TV, more
Internet, and more face-to-face contacts, as I grow older. Also less game
playing of any sort. It's even been quite a while since I last played a
computer game.
Incidentally, more volunteer-work, too, all of it net related in some form
or another.
> But to
> say that all the new people on the Internet will be empowered?
> No, I don't think so.
Well, all people on *Usenet* certainly are. Similar mailing lists. I'm
less certain of non-Usenet non-mailinglist people; forming communities
solely "on the web" has some serious problems; I've not yet seen any web
discussion group system that didn't suck badly enough for me to refuse to
use it.
> On the other hand, I *do* worry about how I will continue to provide
> content over the net, if the schemes of provider-pays-for-bandwidth
> reach complete fruition. For a non-profit like me, that would
> basically mean doing "pledge drives" a la PBS, to get that money
> back from people who are currently paying for their home bandwidth.
> I don't want to belabor the implications of that stuff.
Well, the stuff I'm accustomed to (because that's both the account where
I'm involved in running the non-profit, and the commercial one I keep as a
backup), private, strictly non-commercial use gets "unlimited" access in
return for a montly fixed cost around US$10-15. Plus whatever I pay the
telephone guys to get there, of course, which *does* involve time charges
that amount to quite a bit more.
Those US$10-15 are enough to pay for hardware and bandwidth, as long as
there are enough users.
Russ Allbery
>> Geocities is *painful* to visit with that stuff turned on, as ad
>> banners pop up all over the place.
> ObTopicDrift: www.junkbuster.com. It's a nifty tool that helps to
> eliminate just this very thing (banner ads and the like). It's easy to
> configure and use, and it apparently runs on most platforms (*NIX and
> M$).
But see, that's part of my point. I know how to turn off Javascript. I
can install stuff like that if I want to get rid of banner ads. Your
typical Internet user is going to have *no* clue about any of that.
They'll consider it par for the course and just decide it's how it has to
be.
Todd Michel McComb
Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DRXj...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>Physical neighbours, to me, are still some usually obnoxious people
>that I have to tolerate because there's nothing I can do about
>them, and which I try to ignore as much as possible.
You make my point very nicely. This is certainly not the sort of
behavior I want to see reinforced or even perpetuated. It is,
after all, sociopathic.
I claim the net attracts and/or breeds this stuff. Whether or not
that latter part should be tacked on is of course rather important
to future implications.
Todd Michel McComb
Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DRXk...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>Those US$10-15 are enough to pay for hardware and bandwidth, as long as
>there are enough users.
I don't know quite what to say about remarks like this or your
other one about sites removing banner ads, except that I don't
really think you are thinking them through. If "enough" users use
their unlimited bandwidth, the whole thing will be saturated. It
isn't something which scales. If you're doing a gigabyte a day,
someone is paying for it, somehow.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>But see, that's part of my point. I know how to turn off Javascript.
>I can install stuff like that if I want to get rid of banner ads.
>Your typical Internet user is going to have *no* clue about any of
>that. They'll consider it par for the course and just decide it's
>how it has to be.
Not only that, but consider a scenario where bigger sites really
don't want you to be able to look without seeing their ads. They
can require a specific browser, and enforce it by encrypting all
of their web content for that browser to decode. Tampering with
a copyrighted executable is already a crime.
Sure, you can still ignore it....
Jim Kingdon
> later, would you even remember what it was advertizing?
Well, that's what I used to think, but then I bought some banner ads
on slashdot and the click-through rates were about 0.5-1.0%, which
surprised me how high it was (that is, in ballpark numbers, as much
response as you'll get from any kind of advertising).
One of those click-throughs was from a friend of mine, who said
it was the first and only web ad he had ever clicked through on. A
fair number of people mention to me that they saw the ads, though.
Now, the friends, at least, had heard of Cyclic before they saw the
ad. But I don't remember any ribbing about going over to the dark
side or anything (maybe because it was slashdot? I dunno).
Discord
>Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DRXj...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>>Physical neighbours, to me, are still some usually obnoxious people
>>that I have to tolerate because there's nothing I can do about
>>them, and which I try to ignore as much as possible.
>
>You make my point very nicely. This is certainly not the sort of
>behavior I want to see reinforced or even perpetuated. It is,
>after all, sociopathic.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I'm pretty uninterested in meeting my neighbors, too. Some of them I just
find obnoxious... like the lady who, despite seeing me waiting for a
washer to be freed up, took her laundry out and immediately started two
more loads in the same washers, and then couldn't understand how I coudl
possibly have the gall to be upset with this. Or the downstairs neighbors
who apparently think I like their music better than mine. Or the upstairs
neighbors who are constantly screaming at eachother. Some of them I don't
think I'd have much in common with, given we don't even seem to share a
common fluent language. I might be missing someone interesting -- after all,
there's 100 apartments in this building -- but I'm inclined to doubt it.
On the other hand, being on the 'net has resulted in my maknig some
extremely cool and /close/ friends, some of whom live hundreds of miles
away, some of whom live in the same city as me -- who I see offline as
well as on, including the people in Indianapolis who I see a few times a
year. Being on the 'net is, IMO, no different than going ANYWHERE where I
think people with similar interests to me -- in other words, someone I
know I have somethign in common with -- are gonig to be. For some people,
that's classes or clubs or bars or conventions, one of which is another
method I use to find friends.
Being on the 'net has /also/ given me a much wider variety of topics to
talk to people about than I get in casual contact with my neighbors.
Discussing how the elevator is broken again doesn't seem to generate
friendships the way that talking about a topic I /really/ care about
does. And it guarantees that there will always be someone around, no
matter what my current schedule is... and even if I'm having a lack of
serious contiguous free time, I still get to have conversations.
More importantly, being the the 'net helps some people I know manage to
discuss things they find /difficult/ to discuss face to face with
someone. It offers a chance to be a bit mroe removed if that's what you
need. And some people do need that. The particular thing I'm thinknig of
is abuse survivors -- I do volunteer work related to this -- but there
are other problems people have that they wouldn't dream of talking about
f2f with a roomful of strangers... that they can find support for on the
'net without having to worry as much about feeling stupid. And
communities have grown based on this. What difference does it make if the
interaction is textual instead of some other flow of words?
--
When in doubt, refer to my address.
sw
I can't see that happening for any of the sites that actually matter.
Sure, www.msnbc.com and the like might go that route, but whoop de do.
Small to medium sites are likely to be unwilling to invest in specialized
encryption software and the extra processing juice to run it, at least
in the short term. Not to mention the fact that someone would have to
work out standards for the thing, et cetera.
So it could happen, but it's unlikely to pop up any time soon. And even
if it does, if it's truly obnoxious, someone, somewhere, will figure out
a way around it, just for the 'cool points' if nothing else.
Especially since the people most likely to push something like this are
major-league sources of bad karma like Microsoft.
--
"Ideas are not usually a good thing..." -- Tom Russell, describing RACC.
"I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make
my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it." -- Voltaire
Peter da Silva
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>There's currently a lot of emphasis going into ways to make people more
>effective consumers. This is what search engines are fundamentally about.
Search engines also make people more effective producers, if they're capable
of understaning how to use them effectively. You can use them for research,
you can use them as resources when you answer questions. The problem is that
you need reliable and *objective* search engines, and more and more search
engines are being turned into advertising tools.
>If you look at the web, this is a *lot* worse. People are approaching the
>web with a lot closer to the attitude that they approach television: it
>exists for them to consume, and there's no feasible way for them to give
>anything back to it. Web pages are inherently not shared endeavors;
>unlike Usenet, there's no clear way for someone to jump in and improve a
>web page that they think is missing something.
Feedback engines can work to fight this, to some extent, but only if people
use them. I'd like to see Mozilla automatically look for comments on crit.org,
for example.
I've thought about creating a feedback engine where the feedback mechanism
*is* a newsgroup, one created on the fly for that particular web page. So
to respond to my "Microsoft" page you'd be fed to a (possibly newly created)
newsgroup feedback.www-taronga-com.-peter.io.microsoft.html.
I've put that on the sidelines for a while until I can get more experience with
the more centralized and sound-bite-ish crit.org. But it's possible I'll
take it up again...
Peter da Silva
>>closely allied to real intelligence than a photogenic face and
>>dynamic gestural language?
>I don't think it is elitist so much as it is a skewed comparison.
>Each medium has its merits and abuses. One might just as well
>compare someone with the insightfulness & quick wit to conceive
>real answers & express them in real time, without resorting to
>canned responses or bravado, to someone whose muddy thinking needs
>the cover of slow & extensive editing so as not to be exposed.
I personally find it hard to believe that there is anyone whose immediate
response is better than the response that the same person would have come
up with if they took the time to think about and examine the problem. In
fact, "the cover of slow and extensive editing" is a part of the process
by which the right answers come to light.
While "the insightfulness and quick wit" to come up with an answer that
sounds good might be good enough for Benjy Mouse, it's the wit of the
staircase that I'm going to listen to.
>The former person certainly has no reason to feel inferior, even
>if his expression does not translate wholly to writing.
Inferior, no. A great tennis player has no reason to feel inferior, nor
does a pinball wizard. As someone to guide public policy and public opinion,
though, I'd rather take a Lincoln or a Dukakis.
Peter da Silva
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Well, I do tend to agree with you, but quoting your example above of
>Geocities, if that's the way the future is trending, I'd be pretty
>worried. Geocities is obnoxious about advertising, particularly to the
>unclued visitor. You and I both know to turn off Javascript and similar
>monstrosities. Geocities is *painful* to visit with that stuff turned on,
>as ad banners pop up all over the place.
Absolutely. I have ranted about that on my Free Pages Page at some length,
but on the one there's a vast array of alternatives that are a lot less
obnoxious, and on the other hand I'm not saying "hie thee to Geocities",
I'm saying "the people who publish through Geocities are not going to put
up with being made to fork out money to contribute to the web".
>Geocities will work fine in a provider pays market, because they're making
>their money off the advertising.
If they have to pay, they will have to raise their rates, and that will reduce
their revenue, or they'll have to make their ads more obnoxious, and they'll
lose their user base. They'll fight it, and the people using Geocities will
fight it, and all the rest of the free web page people will fight it.
Russ Allbery
> Well, that's what I used to think, but then I bought some banner ads on
> slashdot and the click-through rates were about 0.5-1.0%, which
> surprised me how high it was (that is, in ballpark numbers, as much
> response as you'll get from any kind of advertising).
Well, keep in mind that the people advertising on Slashdot are places like
VAResearch or Cyclic whose home pages I visit regularly anyway. I often
go to VAResearch's page to see if they have any new server models
available. Sometimes I'll go there by clicking through a banner ad just
so that Slashdot gets some credit for it.
Todd Michel McComb
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
>I personally find it hard to believe that there is anyone whose
>immediate response is better than the response that the same person
>would have come up with if they took the time to think about and
>examine the problem. In fact, "the cover of slow and extensive
>editing" is a part of the process by which the right answers come
>to light.
Hmm. I have to return to my own element to discuss this. Do you
believe that an improvised musical performance is never as good as
(or better than) what the same person could do in a studio?
Todd Michel McComb
>will reduce their revenue, or they'll have to make their ads more
>obnoxious, and they'll lose their user base. They'll fight it, and
>the people using Geocities will fight it, and all the rest of the
>free web page people will fight it.
One nice thing about advertising is that it does scale revenue-wise
with increased visits/bandwidth. In fact, just as bandwidth actually
increases in per unit cost past a certain point, so does advertising.
Even with that, will Geocities or whoever let you do a gigabyte a
day in traffic? Can they, and keep their network open? The only
thing I've seen on these "free web page" sites are very modest web
pages. There will always be a volume under which your production
usage will basically be "noise" and will be accommodated in one
way or another. Also keep in mind that, at some point, the pressure
on Geocities to censor will be very high, if they don't already.
Look at the forces acting on relative bandwidth costs. Right now
bandwidth costs are shared more or less equally by producers and
consumers, with only the relatively few mega-producers paying a
substantial premium (and selling either a product or advertising).
Consumers want nearly-free bandwidth. Big producers want nearly-free
consumer bandwidth (for the reasons outlined previously). Now
think about poking your head above the level at which your bandwidth
use is merely "noise" as a medium-sized producer.... For now it
is very possible. For later? Well, there will be significant
barriers, of that I am very certain.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert
>I'm in the
>process of rolling my own language and parser for this purpose, which
>likely no one but me will ever use, but it'll save me a lot of time and
>effort.
That's so... so... typical.
Geeks. Love em.
K.
(who's seriously considered it herself)
--
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert - http://netizen.com.au/
The best book on programming for the layman is 'Alice in Wonderland',
but that's because it's the best book on anything for the layman.
Peter da Silva
>>immediate response is better than the response that the same person
>>would have come up with if they took the time to think about and
>>examine the problem. In fact, "the cover of slow and extensive
>>editing" is a part of the process by which the right answers come
>>to light.
>Hmm. I have to return to my own element to discuss this. Do you
>believe that an improvised musical performance is never as good as
>(or better than) what the same person could do in a studio?
I'm not a musician, and I'm not an artist (though I've tried my hand at that),
and I'm not a storyteller (not for want of trying), but I am quite well aware
that there are people who do better at impromptu performances. But in the case
of a piece of music or a painting or a story, what you have is a self-contained
work. It doesn't have to be right, and in fact a painting or a story can
contain impossible elements, or may even require them. It has to look good,
or sound good.
I'm not trying to diminish the worth or difficulty of music, painting or
storytelling when I say this. I *know* how hard they are, and I'm an ardent
consumer of that sort of work. No, what I'm saying is rather that they have
a different measure of success.
You see...
When trying to find the solution to a social or a technical problem, a solution
that "sounds good" but doesn't actually solve the problem is no solution at
all.
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert
>
>Here's one take on the difference: I consider myself to be an information
>producer. The interaction between information producers and consumers
>on-line has an odd twist. While copying of information is "essentially"
>free, an increased number of consumers *does* create an increased load on
>producers, largely via an increased question load. They don't understand
>the produced information and ask for clarification. Television and the
>like avoid this problem of scaling by simply not allowing anyone to ask
>questions.
>
>In that sort of information environment, being a producer as well as a
>consumer not only means that you contribute to production globally, it
>also means that you make information production easier locally. For
>example, I installed qmail and "consumed" the installation instructions
>and so on. And had some questions. But I then joined the qmail mailing
>list and answered other people's questions, which to me is the *expected*
>thing for me to do because I think of myself as a producer as well.
>Because I did that, I offset the costs of my consumption of information by
>dealing with other consumers.
Uh, what he said.
Damn, I hate that. I've been trying to explain to people since about
1993 that being a net producer of information is what's important to me,
wrt net community.
Fsck.
Russ, kudos to you, but WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE THAT 5 YEARS AGO AND GIVE
IT TO ME?
K.
(having an AOL moment there, scuse the caps)
--
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert - http://netizen.com.au/
| <- You must be smarter than this stick to ride the Internet
-- Mike Handler, paraphrased from Bev White
Peter da Silva
>on Geocities to censor will be very high, if they don't already.
Of course they do. I don't bring up Geocities as a good thing. In fact,
Geocities is one of the worst of the free web page servers... at one point
my "Free Pages" editorial was a tirade against their jumble of experimental
banner tricks and the difficulty of getting a page set up there in the
first place.
I repeat, the message isn't "use Geocities", it's "there's millions of low
and medium sized producers who won't stand for anyone increasing their
costs".
As for bandwidth, people are already distributing sites over multiple free
page servers. Now that front ends like "i.am" and "surf.to" are up, they can
even load-balance across multiple mirrors. They can also use the places to
do free domain hosting and round-robin their pages there.
Look, the voice of relatively few BBS users held off business rates for BBSes
in Houston for years. The Internet vanity press community is larger by orders
of magnitude. Don't discount them.
Peter da Silva
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>Well, that's what I used to think, but then I bought some banner ads
>on slashdot and the click-through rates were about 0.5-1.0%, which
>surprised me how high it was (that is, in ballpark numbers, as much
>response as you'll get from any kind of advertising).
I clicked on that one. I can't say why... but for every banner I click on,
there's a couple of hundred I ignore. I don't even notice when a page has
banners any more, unless it's something that piques my interest.
Although... sometimes I sit there and hit EVERY banner, just to see what's
out there. Like sometimes I do web searches on random word combinations, to
expose myself to ideas outside my experience. And in this I think banner ads
are even providing a useful service.
Mark Atwood
> It's only "propaganda" in that sense if you like the idea of
> destroying social institutions. I'm increasingly disturbed by the
> idea, as I see it play out. Whereas ten years ago, I thought it
> was simply wonderful to be able to talk to people around the world
> who shared my interests so easily, since I couldn't find them at
> hand and still can't, now I am not sure the price is right.
So you are saying that being able to talk to people outside your
village is a bad thing?
--
Mark Atwood | But that's the way of the puritans - mind like a steel trap:
m...@pobox.com | you take the bait, and it snaps shut in its deathgrip.
| -- Rich Grise <rich...@entheosengineering.com>
Mark Atwood
>
> There's currently a lot of emphasis going into ways to make people more
> effective consumers. This is what search engines are fundamentally about.
> motivations behind the instructions to read a group for a while before
> posting to it (there are several). But I think we're losing some of the
> emphasis on being an information *producer* as well as consumer, and it's
> one of the aspects of on-line culture that's notably *absent* in the rest
> of the world.
This doesn't apply all that much to production of more abstract
knowledge (i.e. human readable text), but in the open source
development communities there are tools fleshing out, derived from
tools and lessons learned in closed development shops, that are
stepping up the effectiveness of bazaar coders. The patch checking
organization of the Linux kernel and Bugzilla, for example.
Dan Ritter
>Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>>From where I'm sitting, bandwidth is getting cheaper or holding
>>steady.
>
>It is not getting cheaper on the backbone. Anything else is a
>mirage. Any excess bandwidth could instantly be soaked up by more
>intensive content or content-like fluff.
>
...
>The phone companies have wanted per-minute (or per-byte) charges
>make nearly limitless bandwidth free. The thing is that the underlying
>costs haven't gone away. On the medium-sized ISP scale, more
>bandwidth costs more per unit, not less.
>
This is an artifact of the current technological shifts in telecom. This
too shall pass.
The trend is for more bandwidth to be available at similar prices. In the
next 3-5 years, you should see at least five OC-192 networks implemented
across the continental US. (I don't keep much more than a weather eye on
international networks, sorry.) While the initial costs of these are high,
the ongoing costs are much lower than have previously been seen, on a bit/
second/mile basis.
First, I think we'll see the supply moving up to (come closer to) meeting
demand. During that transition, prices will remain about the same, but
availability will be much greater. Then, prices will start to decline, with
availability remaining constant. When they stop declining, it'll be time to
build faster networks again.
Right now the going rate for a DS3 in any metro location in the US is somewhere
between 35-50K/month. Two years ago, that was 70-100K/month. My feeling is that
a medium-sized ISP uses a few DS3s to say, two Tier-Ones and an exchange. Is
that what you're thinking about, Todd?
In last-mile bandwidth, we're living in an age of flux. For the short term,
In last-mile bandwidth, we live in an age of flux. Short-term, I'd bet on
cable modems, in areas where they are available. ADSL isn't carrier-class
yet; it's probably a reasonable choice in places where a small to mid ISP
can work out arrangements with the local telco.
Based on all that, I think that the current arrangements - source pays for
what it sends, over a pipe that is roughly symmetric - will last for quite
a while. Advertising-funded sites will continue, in no small part because
that appears to be what people want.
No corporate opinions in this article.
-dsr-
pays for
Jim Kingdon
> somewhere between 35-50K/month. Two years ago, that was 70-100K/month.
Thanks for posting. I'm glad someone was around who knew a bit more
about this stuff. On the level of intuition and anecdote, I'm pretty
convinced prices are coming down (what with Qwest laying fiber and any
number of other anecdotes), but that is no substitute for hearing from
someone who has actually been following this more closely than I have.
Jim Kingdon
> "mature product syndrome," which is never as much a problem with the
> product as it is with the expectations of the people involved in it.
Mmm, yeah, we briefly mentioned this at LISA too. Thanks for your
thoughts (and let's hope the perl community and the CVS community can
keep trying to learn from each other).
I think that your implication is right, in the sense that this
solution is to build up a new set of expectations. The specific
problems can be solved - by adding new features in a compatible way,
deprecating old features, emphasizing testsuites, and that sort of
thing. But people need to adjust to the need for it, which wasn't as
present earlier in the history of the project. Seems to me this
worked OK with B news (I'm not sure that any news software since has
really made that shift as well, but then again INN today faces much
more difficult problems - in terms of a larger community and so on).
> (Oh, and somewhere about this time or a little later, almost invariably,
> someone starts considering a complete rewrite, or some other change on a
> similar scale.)
Oh, this is well underway with CVS - with PRCS being the most obvious
replacement but there being other ideas too.
And I'm not religious on the subject - if the "replacement" is free
software, then Cyclic can (presumably) support it just as well as we
could support CVS. And if it isn't free software, it won't really be
a replacement.
Since I, personally, am a conservative by nature, the idea of
replacement (or even replacing/redesigning particular features) isn't
a space that I am most comfortable in, but I do see the need. Most of
the CVS users of today weren't using it 5 years ago (or even 2 years
ago, perhaps), and I have every hope of continuing that kind of growth.
The implication is that putting up with ugliness just isn't a winning
strategy - it represents optimizing for the long-time users which is
the uncommon case.
Todd Michel McComb
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
>When trying to find the solution to a social or a technical problem,
>a solution that "sounds good" but doesn't actually solve the
>problem is no solution at all.
There are actually many "rules" which a musical improvisation must
follow, or the "experts" will go into a hissy-fit, whether it
"sounds good" or not. In a very real sense, you do have to get it
right, at least in the serious styles.
But that aside....
What you are suggesting is that the person is truly making up their
ideas as they go along. If you're talking about politics, how
often does that happen, whether it's the Gettysburg Address or
Douglass' debating rhetoric? No, they long since knew more or less
what they wanted to say, and are engaged in the art of expressing
themselves. Sure, a medium such as Usenet can work fairly well
toward actually coming up with ideas in the first place, given the
right attitudes from the participants, but so can a heated personal
conversation, especially one without TV cameras. What major
politician has ever gone before the public, in whatever medium,
not having yet formed his core ideas on the basic issues?
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
Mark Atwood <m...@pobox.com> wrote:
>So you are saying that being able to talk to people outside your
>village is a bad thing?
Taken in isolation, it certainly isn't.
Todd Michel McComb
>Don't discount them.
I guess I just wonder how much bandwidth most of these people will
ever use, and so whether it means much to them that there be sensible
opportunities for medium-sized web publishing, or indeed whether
their voices will even be heard at the point when the dollar figures
hit the steep part of the curve.
Regarding Russ' producer remarks in general, I also tend to believe
the net originally attracted the producer-types. This is a natural
conclusion. If it doesn't also manufacture them, this entire issue
diminishes in relative importance over time, as fewer new people
want to put up more than a picture of their cat & "go team!"
Todd Michel McComb
Dan Ritter <dri...@pasilla.bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>My feeling is that a medium-sized ISP uses a few DS3s to say, two
>Tier-Ones and an exchange. Is that what you're thinking about,
>Todd?
Sure, that's a good baseline.
>Advertising-funded sites will continue, in no small part because
>that appears to be what people want.
I guess that's part of what disturbs me. I think that "people"
want exactly some of the things I've been describing.
Todd Michel McComb
Jim Kingdon <kin...@panix7.panix.com> wrote:
>On the level of intuition and anecdote, I'm pretty convinced prices
>are coming down
For the same amount of bandwidth, sure. The described changes will
definitely raise the ceiling, and in fact they have to happen,
given the population increases on the net, just to keep things from
sliding backwards. Everything will expand upward with a multiplier
factor as the technology expands, everything including where the
price structure marks usage and the points at which different kinds
of increases kick in. If your producer-usage goes up slower than
this, then you'll stay where you are in the price structure, if
not, you won't.
This is of course ignoring whether or not the producer-pays idea
will be reflected in future price changes.
On the consumer level, absolutely, prices are coming down fast.
Leaving aside the commercial incentive to subsidize consumer
bandwidth costs and recoup with advertising, when the population
of the net goes up, the consumer doesn't suddenly have more time
to "surf" (as opposed to the producer who will automatically have
more visitors).
ADSL is tuned for greater bandwidth on downloads than on uploads,
you know. Just a passing remark.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Kai Henningsen
> Todd Michel McComb pounded silicon into:
>
> > In article <7DRXj...@khms.westfalen.de>, Kai Henningsen
> > <kaih=7DRXj...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
> >> Physical neighbours, to me, are still some usually obnoxious people
> >> that I have to tolerate because there's nothing I can do about
> >> them, and which I try to ignore as much as possible.
>
> > You make my point very nicely. This is certainly not the sort of
> > behavior I want to see reinforced or even perpetuated. It is, after
> > all, sociopathic.
I think you got that seriously backwards.
Sociopaths are the people who, without invitation of any kind, enter your
garden and cut down your trees - actual observed behaviour in our
neighbours. Snobbery, nearly completely missing politeness ...
The people on the other side of the street tend more to simple vandalism
or street brawls.
There's a reason I don't like neighbours very much. It doesn't tend to
create friendly feelings if you see your mother come back from a
neighbourhood meeting in tears, having been told she has to uproot half
her garden for reasons that I certainly don't understand.
I may not have the greatest social skills in the world, but you'll never
catch me starting things like that.
> > I claim the net attracts and/or breeds this stuff.
Neither of which matches my experience.
What I *have* seen is that people with poor social skills attract
sociopaths. Certainly happened to me - as a kid, I got beat up by every
bully around.
> I think it is somewhat subtler. The net does attract those of us with
> poor social skills. It also attracts people with greater social
> skills. Having attracted them, it then acts as an amplifier with a
> large feedback factor. People with very poor social skills tend to
> become much worse on the net, people with nearly 'average' social
> skills tend to float along, and people with very good social skills
> tend to use the net as yet another social medium in which they thrive.
You're ignoring a pretty important point here, and that is that the net
requires *different* social skills. You can be great at the one and awful
at the other; there are quite a number of people like that. One of the
worst flamers on a BBS network, for example - people who knew him
personally have repeatedly told me that he is *completely* different face-
to-face.
It's not a net-specific thing, either. Lots of people behave different in
different situations. For a specific US example, think of (some) Vietnam
veterans - nice people while at home, no-questions-asked brutal mass
murderers while at places like My Lai (sp?).
Kai
--
http://www.westfalen.de/private/khms/
"... by God I *KNOW* what this network is for, and you can't have it."
- Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu)
Kai Henningsen
> In article <7DRXk...@khms.westfalen.de>,
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DRXk...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
> >Those US$10-15 are enough to pay for hardware and bandwidth, as long as
> >there are enough users.
>
> I don't know quite what to say about remarks like this or your
> other one about sites removing banner ads, except that I don't
> really think you are thinking them through. If "enough" users use
> their unlimited bandwidth, the whole thing will be saturated. It
> isn't something which scales. If you're doing a gigabyte a day,
> someone is paying for it, somehow.
Well, all I can say is the German experience says it gets *better* with
more users.
That's because the "if 'enough' users use their unlimited bandwidth"
argument doesn't take into account that typically, with large user
populations, there will be *far* more light users than heavy users. Plus,
it helps if your contract with the upstream says you can saturate your
pipe; so there's no way a user can make you get broke.
Besides, saturation isn't as big a problem as it's made out to be, as long
as it's not a permanent condition. Just make sure users know they're not
paying for a commercial service.
If I count right, we currently have 176 users on a 128 kbit link. It's
more expensive than we'd like, because we can't link to DFN (German
research network) in this city (mostly problems with the local university
politics) but must go to another city 50 km away to do that. Still, our
budget is balanced.
We're a *small* IN (Individual Network e.V.) domain. Larger domains have
no problems paying for bandwidth to spare. Typically the problem is
getting DFN to be able to *provide* that bandwidth. The DFN POP we're
connected at provides bandwidth to several other IN domains, including
some of the largest, and is (IIRC) in the process of being upgraded so
those domains can have a few more megabits.
Todd Michel McComb
Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DSf3...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>It's not a net-specific thing, either. Lots of people behave
>different in different situations.
Yes, that's very true. There's also the question of which part they
consider their "normal" interaction and which they don't, and most
people do prioritize in this way.
Todd Michel McComb
>their unlimited bandwidth" argument doesn't take into account that
>typically, with large user populations, there will be *far* more
>light users than heavy users.
That works as long as the guy using 1meg/day doesn't mind subsidizing
the guy using 1000megs/day. Maybe people in Germany feel naturally
more accommodating in this way.
David Damerell
>>What does it say when someone meets someone 50 feet away in real
>>life who they would never have met had they not been online?
>To me, it says you probably spend a great deal of time online.
Oh, the 'get a life' slur? How very amusing.
--
David/Kirsty Damerell. dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~damerell/ w.sp.lic.#pi<largestprime>.2106
|___| "Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc." Consenting Mercrediphile.|___|
| | | Or, in Klingon: "nucharghqangbogh chaH DISopchu' 'e' wItIv." | | |
Todd Michel McComb
David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
>>To me, it says you probably spend a great deal of time online.
>Oh, the 'get a life' slur? How very amusing.
I don't know how you can find a slur in what I said.
Dan Ritter
>Advertising-funded sites will continue, in no small part because
>>that appears to be what people want.
>
>I guess that's part of what disturbs me. I think that "people"
>want exactly some of the things I've been describing.
>
I think I have a pretty good feel for several sides of this: I
have friends and relatives who are consumers; I used to run a small
ISP; I'm well-acquainted with the workings of a giant ISP. And, of
course, I'm a Usenetter and a sysadmin.
Consumers are willing to put up with more intrusions and aggravations
than techies or their businesses, both of which know better. Given
that "they" are used to advertising-supported broadcasting, the stretch
to ad-supported websites is a short one.
Techies tend to *like* advertising, when it's for things that they want,
Techies, OTOH, have a filtering preprocessor that only triggers on
contact with interesting content. So, the ubiquitous banner ad is considered
the [reasonable] price paid for access to desired information. If it gets
annoying enough, they find technological ways around it.
As a small ISP, I would have a difficult balancing act. If I'm exclusive
enough, I can accurately predict bandwidth needs and charge accordingly.
I can't make much money, though. Huge ISPs can also accurately predict
their bandwidth needs, because the irregularities even out over their
customer base.
In between, the mid-sized ISPs we just defined are riding a rocky road. Small
ISPs can provide great quality; giant ISPs provide great quantity. In the
middle, you are not familiar enough with your customers to be certain that
their won't be a giant usage spike, and you don't have enough to be able to
smooth that out.
An advertising-supported webspace provider - Geocities or whoever - is now
a very attractive business model. You can easily grow to be large enough to
smooth over your costs; content can be as boring or as lively as your users.
You can charge more for each ad as you grow, up to a point where you can't
charge more per, but your volume takes over as the profit generator. There's
relatively little maintenance, especially if you trade some profits for the
convenience of buying datacenter space and bandwidth from some of the Tier
Ones...
The economics justify doing it. That's why it won't go away.
"Still no corporate opinions..."
-dsr-
Todd Michel McComb
Dan Ritter <dri...@pasilla.bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>I think I have a pretty good feel for several sides of this
I don't disagree with anything you've said. I also think that
having ads attached to your material is very demeaning. It's not
a point to which I will stoop, and to return to one of the fundamental
questions here, I wonder just how "empowering" something which ends
up bringing so much more advertising junk into people's homes really
is.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Dan Ritter
In the same way that freedom of the press doesn't mean presses are free,
advertising on webpages and attached to email is a form of payment for
specific means of speech.
Anyone can pay some fairly reasonable amount of money and get an ISP
account, from which they can post to their heart's content without any
further payment.
In many locations, libraries and/or schools have public terminals for those
who do not or cannot go to the expense of buying a computer.
With money and knowledge, none of which is secret, you can set up your own
ISP and be even more independent. With the right peering agreements, you can
have a maximum amount of independence from any one person's or company's
attempt to control your speech.
None of this is free. None of this is accessible to everyone. I will assert,
however, that a larger percentage of the population has had the opportunity
to acquire a potentially global voice in the last 30 years than in all of
humanity's history prior.
Advertising-supported speech is an option. It is not the only option. It is
not pretty, it is not beautiful, but it nonetheless has a place.
It is just a form of payment. Enlightenment doesn't depend on payment, but
on ideas - Leonardo Da Vinci was employed by some pretty unsavory characters.
-dsr-
Kai Henningsen
> And of course there's a difference between this and *this* that's captured
> by the "punctuation" types of markup.
I wonder why it seems so hard to get this to work at least in most cases -
mostly because I'm already seeing it work.
For example, I'm seeing the second "this" as a green word in black-on-grey
text.
Kai Henningsen
> In article <7d94qg$n...@bonkers.taronga.com>,
> Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
> >I personally find it hard to believe that there is anyone whose
> >immediate response is better than the response that the same person
> >would have come up with if they took the time to think about and
> >examine the problem. In fact, "the cover of slow and extensive
> >editing" is a part of the process by which the right answers come
> >to light.
>
> Hmm. I have to return to my own element to discuss this. Do you
> believe that an improvised musical performance is never as good as
> (or better than) what the same person could do in a studio?
Well, this perhaps points out an important difference. Music is mainly
artistic; for the word content we're discussing, artistic merit is at best
secondary.
As for the direct question, I'm pretty far from an expert on music.
However, I *can* say that I'm not a great fan of improvisations.
Russ Allbery
> David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>> Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
>>> To me, it says you probably spend a great deal of time online.
>> Oh, the 'get a life' slur? How very amusing.
> I don't know how you can find a slur in what I said.
I can see it, but I think it's the wrong interpretation. Todd, you're
saying something that's perceptive, but that sounds a lot like stuff that
isn't perceptive at all and gets used as insults. :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like your overall point is
that while this net culture has attracted and works well for *us*, who are
in some sense the early adopters, it isn't necessarily going to have good
effects on the general population. Who don't share a number of common
quirks or have the understanding and copying mechanisms that we already
have.
--
Russ Allbery (r...@stanford.edu) <URL:http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
Russ Allbery
> In the same way that freedom of the press doesn't mean presses are free,
> advertising on webpages and attached to email is a form of payment for
> specific means of speech.
But, see, for some of us this is the problem. I'm not willing to ever put
advertising up on any of my web pages or archives. I won't do it because
I think it reinforces a sense of helpless consumption in people and
because it buys into the notion that one should consume additional
worthless information to pay for the information one wants to consume,
rather than producing one's own information to offset the consumption.
(Other people won't do it because it's demeaning, because it's ugly, or
for a variety of other reasons.)
It's fine that it's a form of payment; what I don't want to see happen is
for it to be the *only* form of payment that scales sufficiently. But
this seems to have already happened in other media.
> Advertising-supported speech is an option. It is not the only option. It
> is not pretty, it is not beautiful, but it nonetheless has a place.
I agree with this so far as it goes; I'm just worried about how central of
a place it's taking.
Russ Allbery
> r...@stanford.edu (Russ Allbery) wrote:
>> And of course there's a difference between this and *this* that's
>> captured by the "punctuation" types of markup.
> I wonder why it seems so hard to get this to work at least in most cases
> - mostly because I'm already seeing it work.
Because it's fragile in some circumstances, such as when you're talking
about wildcards. If I talk about *binaries* groups, am I using that as a
wildcard or for emphasis?
For what it's worth, I currently use:
# Turns *some text* into <strong>some text</strong>, while trying to be
# careful to avoid other uses of wildcards.
sub embolden {
local $_ = shift;
s%(^|\s)\*(\w.*?\S)\*([,.!?;\s])%$1<strong>$2</strong>$3%gs;
$_;
}
in my text to HTML converter, and that regex should give you an idea of
how picky and fragile this sort of conversion can be.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>I'm not willing to ever put advertising up on any of my web pages
>or archives. I won't do it because I think it reinforces a sense
>of helpless consumption in people and because it buys into the
>notion that one should consume additional worthless information to
>pay for the information one wants to consume, rather than producing
>one's own information to offset the consumption. (Other people
>won't do it because it's demeaning, because it's ugly, or for a
>variety of other reasons.)
To be clear, that's more or less what I meant by "demeaning" ...
what you said, as well as the "ugly" part, which I consider closely
allied (in the world of aesthetics, we consider "ugly" a pretty
potent term). It's actually even more complicated than that for
a formal non-profit, but those are the main reasons I wouldn't want
to overcome the bureaucratic hurdles anyway.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds to me like your overall
>point is that while this net culture has attracted and works well
>for *us*, who are in some sense the early adopters, it isn't
>necessarily going to have good effects on the general population.
Partly that, but more fundamentally in this particular exchange,
I am saying that if people spend more time online, they are spending
more time online.
That's time, a scare resource, something they aren't spending doing
something else. Is that something we really want, to have more of
the population spending more time sitting in front of a computer?
I am rather skeptical that this can be good on a broad scale. It's
good for some individuals, certainly, although I think it's worth
noting that many of these individuals would be sitting in front of
the computer *anyway* but at least with the Internet they're getting
more out of it.
I don't want to go around bashing people on this... I mean, many of
the people responding have already admitted to poor social skills.
Some are proud of them. We all have our strengths and weaknesses,
but I think it takes a pretty tall argument to suggest that society
is benefited by fostering poor social skills, if indeed that's what
happens.
The poster in this sub-thread said nothing more about himself than
something which suggested to me that he spent a lot of time online.
I have no idea if he even has poor social skills, although if I'm
being blunt his later response suggests that (the first is
indeterminate), and so I didn't say anything but what I said, to
answer his question. See paragraph #1, which as far as I'm concerned
means something.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Russ Allbery
> I guess I just wonder how much bandwidth most of these people will ever
> use, and so whether it means much to them that there be sensible
> opportunities for medium-sized web publishing, or indeed whether their
> voices will even be heard at the point when the dollar figures hit the
> steep part of the curve.
Yes, it's a worry. There's a big jump between the level of traffic
generated by the average free web site and the kind of traffic that a
Slashdot or User Friendly, or an extensive archive, can start generating.
(I used to just get a trickle of traffic and downloads, and then I
mirrored the rec.arts.anime.creative archives, and my traffic went *way*
up.)
> Regarding Russ' producer remarks in general, I also tend to believe the
> net originally attracted the producer-types. This is a natural
> conclusion. If it doesn't also manufacture them, this entire issue
> diminishes in relative importance over time, as fewer new people want to
> put up more than a picture of their cat & "go team!"
More fundamentally, in my mindset, *everyone* is a producer. It doesn't
take very much to be one; if you obtain answers, you just stick around for
a bit and answer a few other questions as well. It's harder to be a
producer in a web culture, but in a discussion group culture it's
extremely easy and even natural. The occasional thank you note in e-mail
is information production as far as I'm concerned; it provides positive
feedback and reinforcement and serves as a guide for information
production.
(Why do I think that I'm probably reinventing or mangling lots of the
basics of information theory here without being aware of it? I'm sure one
could probably recast this entire line of reasoning in terms of memetics
or some such thing.)
To me, it's not a matter of wanting producer-types as the idea that
*everyone* can be a producer, and in fact is expected to be one in some
small fashion. Exclusive consumption is, to me, bizarre and unnatural.
Russ Allbery
> Damn, I hate that. I've been trying to explain to people since about
> 1993 that being a net producer of information is what's important to me,
> wrt net community.
It's interesting that you'd say that, since I thought about that term
("net producer") when I was writing that message and decided that it
didn't apply. It implies that there's some sort of measurement that one
is balancing, which isn't how I view it.
I don't have any real idea what "quantity" of information I've given to
the net in general, since I don't think electronic information is all that
quantifiable. Measuring the size of the data certainly doesn't do it; the
Constitution, for example, has (at least in my opinion) higher information
content than every Hardy Boys book ever written taken together, despite
the fact that there is much more raw data in the latter. And that example
also raises the point that the quantity of information is inherently
subjective.
My goal is better stated as wanting to enter each situation with the
mindset of a producer as well as a consumer. I can't always produce
information in a given setting (for example, I've been lurking the egcs
list for about eight months now and haven't produced any information at
all there; I don't have the necessary background or understanding for any
of the opportunities that have come up). But if I go into the situation
with the idea that I *might* be able to, and take advantage of the chances
that I have, then I'm fulfilling my obligation to the community as I see
it.
It's never bothered me that someone may not be able to contribute much to
some community I'm involved in. I think a person who isn't contributing
very much has an obligation to make the impact of their consumption as
light as they can, but I don't mind answering their questions and helping
them do what they want to do. It's a *mindset* that's important to me,
not the quantity or quality of what's produced by it. It's the mindset of
a community where everyone takes part and contributes as best they can,
rather than the mindset of a traditional media where all of the content
comes from the producers and the consumers have to just take it as it is
and have very few ways of changing any of it.
(Interesting side thought: I suppose in some ways it's a rejection of a
division of labor, or at least some specific divisions of labor.)
> Russ, kudos to you, but WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE THAT 5 YEARS AGO AND GIVE
> IT TO ME?
'cause I didn't know any of those things five years ago? :)
Russ Allbery
> Partly that, but more fundamentally in this particular exchange, I am
> saying that if people spend more time online, they are spending more
> time online.
I've been thinking about this point since you mentioned it before.
Obviously I spend a huge amount of time on-line (most of my waking hours,
in fact). It's fairly simply explained by the fact that my job is
on-line, and like the typical system administrator I work sixty hour weeks
(or more), and on top of that my primary hobby is writing fiction, and
fiction-like things, which I also do on-line or at least in front of a
computer, and which I probably spend an average of three hours a day on,
and sometimes as much as eight to ten.
But thinking back on this, this is just characteristic of me, and not a
property of Usenet or the net. You're certainly right that I have to be
spending less time on something else to be spending more time on-line.
Thinking back, I used to read magazines voraciously (from trade rags to
political commentary), I used to follow sports religiously (football and
basketball primarily), and I used to watch a great deal of television.
I'd generally have it on while I was doing something else. I also used to
spend lots of time playing video games.
I essentially stopped watching television completely about the time I
really got involved in Usenet; I've probably seen ten or fifteen hours of
television total in the past year. I no longer even pay attention to
sports, let alone follow them; I happened to watch the Super Bowl this
year mostly because it was a good excuse to spend an afternoon at a
friend's house and that was the first football game I'd watched in five
years. I have a Playstation, but my roommate's about the only one who
ever turns it on.
So in my case, all the things that I gave up to spend time on-line aren't
particularly social activities, and aren't activites that to me have any
major value that I feel like I'm missing. In most cases, I've switched
from things with less intellectual and creative stimulation to things that
have a great deal more. Sometimes I just started doing an activity that I
used to do off-line on-line instead (reading magazines and reading Usenet
and web pages end up being roughly equivalent, once you know how to filter
Usenet effectively and efficiently).
> That's time, a scare resource, something they aren't spending doing
> something else. Is that something we really want, to have more of the
> population spending more time sitting in front of a computer?
I think it depends a lot on what they would be doing otherwise. If they
spend more time sitting in front of a computer instead of sitting in front
of a television, sure, I think that's something we really want. If they
spend more time in front of a computer instead of talking to their
friends, family, and neighbors, no, that's probably bad.
In my family, what's happened is that my grandparents have all gotten
accounts (my parents have had one for quite some time), and my mother
writes to them (and they write back) on a daily to weekly basis. It's
resulted in considerably more frequent communication within the family
than we'd had before; telephone calls are too expensive to happen that
often, and the culture of e-mail seems to encourage more frequent and
chatty messages even from people of my grandparent's generation. My
mother spends some time every night reading and answering e-mail, time
that she used to spend reading and responding to paper letters.
> I don't want to go around bashing people on this... I mean, many of the
> people responding have already admitted to poor social skills. Some are
> proud of them. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, but I think it
> takes a pretty tall argument to suggest that society is benefited by
> fostering poor social skills, if indeed that's what happens.
True.
I'll buck the trend here, though. I suppose it's rather hard for a person
to really be able to judge their own social skills, but you've met me, or
people can ask Neil who's probably reading this. I don't think I have
poor social skills, or that spending a lot of time on-line is degrading
them any. I'm certainly not *gregarious*, and I'm not someone who meets
new people easily, but that's the way I've always been. I score about 60%
introverted on standardized tests; it's personality rather than ability or
experience.
I don't think I'm really disagreeing with anything you're saying, just
expressing optimism.
Todd Michel McComb
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>If they spend more time sitting in front of a computer instead of
>sitting in front of a television, sure, I think that's something
>we really want.
If you can convert them to your producer attitudes, maybe so, if
not, there's basically no change. Of course, there is also something
of a culture of watching TV as a group, and I don't know how well
that works with the purely consumer end of a computer.
>In my family, what's happened is that my grandparents have all
>gotten accounts
I have one cousin who got an account on AOL, but I don't think he
uses it much.
>I don't think I have poor social skills, or that spending a lot
>of time on-line is degrading them any.
I don't have a problem with Marty's analysis of this phenomenon,
at last insofar as it applies to people with mature personalities.
When it comes to children, I think it's the case that adolescents
go through times where they could turn either way, and if this is
here, do they expend the effort to get their social skills up to
some suitable level? I don't know.
>I don't think I'm really disagreeing with anything you're saying,
>just expressing optimism.
That's fine. I just read read "Hey, the Internet will be the
greatest thing for social interaction since the invention of fire"
and thought "Gosh, I dunno, it definitely has its weaknesses too."
I don't think I'm quite ready to scrap the whole idea.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert
>Kirrily 'Skud' Robert <skud+...@netizen.com.au> writes:
>
>> Damn, I hate that. I've been trying to explain to people since about
>> 1993 that being a net producer of information is what's important to me,
>> wrt net community.
>
>It's interesting that you'd say that, since I thought about that term
>("net producer") when I was writing that message and decided that it
>didn't apply. It implies that there's some sort of measurement that one
>is balancing, which isn't how I view it.
Yeah. After posting I realised that it had those connotations, too. I
figure that what I meant was something softer-sounding, but I haven't
found a term I like yet. Probably something like "give back as much as
you take out" or "contribute as well as consume" or something.
Then I realised the pun inherent in "net producer" and decided I liked
it anyway. In a different kinda way.
>My goal is better stated as wanting to enter each situation with the
>mindset of a producer as well as a consumer. I can't always produce
>information in a given setting (for example, I've been lurking the egcs
>list for about eight months now and haven't produced any information at
>all there; I don't have the necessary background or understanding for any
>of the opportunities that have come up). But if I go into the situation
>with the idea that I *might* be able to, and take advantage of the chances
>that I have, then I'm fulfilling my obligation to the community as I see
>it.
Yuh.
>> Russ, kudos to you, but WHY DIDN'T YOU WRITE THAT 5 YEARS AGO AND GIVE
>> IT TO ME?
>
>'cause I didn't know any of those things five years ago? :)
Bah, a poor excuse!
K.
--
Kirrily 'Skud' Robert - http://netizen.com.au/
Sex is not the answer. Sex is the question. Yes is the answer.
Tony Finch
>
>This doesn't apply all that much to production of more abstract
>knowledge (i.e. human readable text), but in the open source
>development communities there are tools fleshing out, derived from
>tools and lessons learned in closed development shops, that are
>stepping up the effectiveness of bazaar coders. The patch checking
>organization of the Linux kernel and Bugzilla, for example.
I'm not convinced that Linux development should be held up as an
example of best current practice in the free software world. I think
that projects based on a public CVS tree to which more than one person
can contribute have a better way of working. You don't have to wait for
a release to get the latest code, and releases aren't dependent on one
person combining reviewed patches together.
Tony.
--
f.a.n.finch d...@dotat.at fa...@demon.net
Peter da Silva
>>Don't discount them.
>I guess I just wonder how much bandwidth most of these people will
>ever use, and so whether it means much to them that there be sensible
>opportunities for medium-sized web publishing, or indeed whether
>their voices will even be heard at the point when the dollar figures
>hit the steep part of the curve.
More bandwidth than I could imagine using, since so many of them put up
graphic-heavy sites full of pictures of their pets, their favorite actors
and anime characters and hiking trails, and on and on and on...
--
This is The Reverend Peter da Silva's Boring Sig File - there are no references
to Wolves, Kibo, Discordianism, or The Church of the Subgenius in this document
"[I]f we can make a society that's reasonably safe for women then men should be
reasonably safe from the occasional same-gender advance too." -- Anthony DeBoer
Jim Kingdon
> generated by the average free web site and the kind of traffic that a
> Slashdot or User Friendly, or an extensive archive, can start generating.
Well, this is just another case of how a centralized system doesn't
scale (or, more precisely, doesn't scale without centralized $$$$).
Freshmeat and the Linux kernel (www.kernel.org) are examples of sites
which are basic on static, mirrorable pages. And which have made a
point of cultivating mirrors. And which perhaps even have a system
for signing up new mirrors which makes it easy to scale up to as many
mirrors as needed. The primary server for kernel.org is on a T1,
which is a very small amount of bandwidth for this task (although it
took a while to convice the people maintaining it that T1 != infinite,
or in this case even enough :-)).
People set up mirrors (a) to give back to the community, (b) to
improve their own access, (c) sometimes for other purposes such as
getting credit (the kernel.org mirrors are explicitly allowed to
include "this mirror brought to you by X" notices if memory serves).
In short, the same kinds of reasons that producers produce in general.
I don't know about User Friendly, but Slashdot sucks up centralized
bandwidth (and server CPU) because they have chosen to centralize
things like customizing the site for your own preferences. This has
its own advantages, but I wouldn't jump to any conclusions that things
must be done this way.
Tony Finch
>
>While "the insightfulness and quick wit" to come up with an answer that
>sounds good might be good enough for Benjy Mouse, it's the wit of the
>staircase that I'm going to listen to. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
^^^^^^^^^
That's the first time I've seen that phrase used in English :-)
Dan Ritter
Russ Allbery <r...@stanford.edu> wrote:
>Dan Ritter <dri...@pasilla.bbnplanet.com> writes:
>
>for it to be the *only* form of payment that scales sufficiently. But
>this seems to have already happened in other media.
>
>> Advertising-supported speech is an option. It is not the only option. It
>> is not pretty, it is not beautiful, but it nonetheless has a place.
>
>I agree with this so far as it goes; I'm just worried about how central of
>a place it's taking.
For traditional media that are being transplanted to the Net, advertising
is a traditional method of payment that seems fairly appropriate to me. After
all, CNN, the local evening news, the New York Times and Time are supported
by advertising in both original and new, extra-crunchy flavors.
The question under consideration, really, is how to pay for publishing a non-
traditional media source; the new phenomena of the Net.
For small sources, producer-pays can work out reasonably well, until they
get quite popular. This is the scaling problem. Because advertising is known
to scale well, people often turn to it.
What are the potential alternatives?
- Mandatory consumer-pays doesn't seem to work on a site-by-site basis. It can't
work when you're small, because it doesn't produce enough money, and won't
let you grow to the point where it might be economical.
- Voluntary consumer-pays has the shareware problem: no one ever got rich from
shareware. The public doesn't seem interested in paying for anything less
compelling than PBS.
- Government-pays annoys the Libertarians. It also has the most potential for
abuse, in my opinion.
- Some pornography-oriented sites may be having success with a unionized
approach, in which consumers pay once (or by subscription) for access to
a large number of member producers.
- That could be replicated on a larger scale, I think, with membership unions
joining producers with consumers. Would enough people pay a small monthly fee
for access to communities of interest? Universities could buy memberships in
various research consortia, news archives...
Unfortunately I think that last one could work. It's not very appealing to me -
in fact, it reminds me all too much of RMS's [literarily awful] attempt at SF.
Sigh. There are definitely better ways; I just don't know what they are.
-dsr-
David Damerell
>>Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
>>Oh, the 'get a life' slur? How very amusing.
>I don't know how you can find a slur in what I said.
My interpretation of that - presumably incorrect, sorry - was that you
were implying I _hadn't_ met the hypothetical person 50 feet away
_because_ I spend all my time spodding when I could be out meeting them.
Perhaps I'm overly touchy 'cos we've had a lot of this recently on
ucam.chat [1], where the latest crop of lusers seems to feel that because
the regulars have a clue they must not have a life; it's easy to interpret
comments that way.
[1] ucam.* == University of Cambridge.
--
David/Kirsty Damerell. dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk
It moves between us, for one moment, like opium in your heart, with remedies
from the ancient gods, to heal the morals of our shadows. Devil, come to me,
open up the door, lead me ciahra to the centre of it all...(FotN:Submission)
Todd Michel McComb
Peter da Silva <pe...@taronga.com> wrote:
>More bandwidth than I could imagine using, since so many of them
>put up graphic-heavy sites full of pictures of their pets, their
>favorite actors and anime characters and hiking trails, and on and
>on and on...
The point I guess I keep failing to express is that, unless a million
people want to see a picture of their pet, the bandwidth still doesn't
add up to anything.
Todd Michel McComb
>computer-as-=a- communications-device is going to get smaller and
>lighter and more portable, to the point where you're wearing one
>like a walkman as you go for a walk in the park.
Ok, now you're talking... the "internet terminal" as such will
change dramatically. One area I ponder on a nearly daily basis (a
book on the subject is among my long-term projects) is the role of
writing in this environment. To put it succinctly, with the ease
of distributing information in various multimedia formats, I expect
literacy among "educated people" to fall dramatically within three
generations. This idea certainly colors my views on your remarks
regarding the superiority of the written medium. The working title
of the book is "The End of Writing" BTW.
>People joke about how wearable computers make you into a troll,
>but think about what a wearable radio would have been like in the
>'50s... that's where we're at now.
This is another area where I see a lot of danger signals to go
along with the positives. It's a big argument from way back. At
one point in college, around the time the NSFNET was indicating
the probability of some of what we have now, one of my circle of
friends decided to conduct a little survey on whether people wanted
to have powerful computer implants. It was a very divisive topic.
Some people such as yourself thought it would be a great thing,
whereas someone like me would never consider wearing them. I don't
even wear a watch, let alone a walkman (which I correlate with
anti-social behavior. hello.)
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
Dan Ritter <dri...@pasilla.bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>After all, CNN, the local evening news, the New York Times and
>Time are supported by advertising in both original and new,
>extra-crunchy flavors.
Well, the conclusion is supposed to be that we are improving on
these things.... It's funny, but I never looked at them, even
before the Internet. It's also the case that advertising has gone
right on getting more creepier, and it pops up more places too,
such as some people's favorite example, the names of college football
bowl games.
>- Voluntary consumer-pays has the shareware problem: no one ever
>got rich from shareware. The public doesn't seem interested in
>paying for anything less compelling than PBS.
So far, I am doing fine with this. Not getting rich, of course,
but that was never the intention. Plenty of people are willing to
give me money (and you can too, tax deductable!). I suppose that
makes me as compelling as PBS? That would be cool. I definitely
worry about scaling though, and I sure don't want to get into
anything like a pledge drive.
I'll tell you, right now our formal public budget projections have
"Internet expenses" moving from negligible this year to the biggest
operating expense in 2001 (and I am showing a negative balance for
2002, unless we find some new source of funding, but that's a long
way off, so...).
>There are definitely better ways; I just don't know what they are.
Maybe so....
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org
Todd Michel McComb
>not be the "right" ones. Even using a definition of "right" like "based
>on their own core ideas".
But wouldn't we like to know how often they do get it right? I
think the historical premise here, unless you've shifted the context
rather far from political debates, is that sometimes the elected
leaders are required to make instantaneous decisions, such as in
a war or something.
Dan Ritter
>Dan Ritter <dri...@pasilla.bbnplanet.com> wrote:
>>After all, CNN, the local evening news, the New York Times and
>>Time are supported by advertising in both original and new,
>>extra-crunchy flavors.
>
>>paying for anything less compelling than PBS.
>So far, I am doing fine with this. Not getting rich, of course,
>but that was never the intention. Plenty of people are willing to
>give me money (and you can too, tax deductable!). I suppose that
>makes me as compelling as PBS? That would be cool. I definitely
Having taken a look at www.medieval.org, I can assure you that I,
at least, find the content at least as compelling as some PBS programs,
and more so than others.
>I'll tell you, right now our formal public budget projections have
>"Internet expenses" moving from negligible this year to the biggest
>operating expense in 2001 (and I am showing a negative balance for
>2002, unless we find some new source of funding, but that's a long
>way off, so...).
Well, if I saw this sort of thing being located physically in the Boston
area, I'd say apply for a grant from the Barony of Carolingia. Not knowing
quite where you are, except across the continent, I would advise you seek
financial assistance from the local SCA group.
This doesn't solve the general problem, though: how do you make worthy
information easily available?
There's one more source, of course: sell something in order to finance
the rest of it. Probably unappealing, though, and not everyone can win.
-dsr-
Kai Henningsen
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DSfY...@khms.westfalen.de> writes:
> > r...@stanford.edu (Russ Allbery) wrote:
>
> >> And of course there's a difference between this and *this* that's
> >> captured by the "punctuation" types of markup.
>
> > I wonder why it seems so hard to get this to work at least in most cases
> > - mostly because I'm already seeing it work.
>
> Because it's fragile in some circumstances, such as when you're talking
> about wildcards. If I talk about *binaries* groups, am I using that as a
> wildcard or for emphasis?
Well, that's why I have a key to toggle this stuff on (default) or off :-)
Simple solutions often work good enough.
> in my text to HTML converter, and that regex should give you an idea of
> how picky and fragile this sort of conversion can be.
Oh, I know all right. In a certain BBS net, rules for this this have been
hashed out, repeatedly.
OTOH, you're talking about a batch system, whereas I am talking about an
interactive one. Interactively, you can get away with non-perfect
conversion, just as long as there's a way to undo the conversion and look
at the raw stuff.
Kai Henningsen
> pe...@taronga.com (Peter da Silva) wrote:
> >
> >While "the insightfulness and quick wit" to come up with an answer that
> >sounds good might be good enough for Benjy Mouse, it's the wit of the
> >staircase that I'm going to listen to. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> ^^^^^^^^^
> That's the first time I've seen that phrase used in English :-)
Incidentally, can someone please explain it? I've never seen it at all,
and guesses as to the meaning only get you so far ...
Kai Henningsen
> In article <7DSf3...@khms.westfalen.de>,
> Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DSf3...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
> >Well, all I can say is the German experience says it gets *better*
> >with more users. ... That's because the "if 'enough' users use
> >their unlimited bandwidth" argument doesn't take into account that
> >typically, with large user populations, there will be *far* more
> >light users than heavy users.
>
> That works as long as the guy using 1meg/day doesn't mind subsidizing
> the guy using 1000megs/day. Maybe people in Germany feel naturally
> more accommodating in this way.
Well, it certainly works for people who want stuff they won't get from the
typical commercial ISP, and it also works because said typical commercial
ISP either wants time charges, or at least the same baseline.
In this city, AFAIK, there's exactly one cheaper option. That's completely
free, and it includes full email but only local web, and the city pays for
it. Everything else costs at least a little more than our IP accounts (and
a lot more than our UUCP accounts).
As long as it's cheap, you can easily put up with something like that.
Kai Henningsen
> Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> writes:
> > David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> >> Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
>
> >>> To me, it says you probably spend a great deal of time online.
>
> >> Oh, the 'get a life' slur? How very amusing.
>
> > I don't know how you can find a slur in what I said.
>
> I can see it, but I think it's the wrong interpretation. Todd, you're
> saying something that's perceptive, but that sounds a lot like stuff that
> isn't perceptive at all and gets used as insults. :)
Actually, in this case, not only doesn't it sound perceptive to me, it
sounds like Todd completely misunderstood what he commented.
Kai Henningsen
> People joke about how wearable computers make you into a troll, but think
> about what a wearable radio would have been like in the '50s... that's where
> we're at now. Trying to come up with a wearable radio back then would have
> been as outlandish as a wearable computer now.
I don't know, *I* think that wearable radios are outlandish today. So are
wearable telephones, of course. I often think we'd all be better off
without those.
Kai Henningsen
> In article <5Eb*az...@news.chiark.greenend.org.uk>,
> David Damerell <dame...@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
> >Todd Michel McComb <mcc...@medieval.org> wrote:
> >>To me, it says you probably spend a great deal of time online.
> >Oh, the 'get a life' slur? How very amusing.
>
> I don't know how you can find a slur in what I said.
I don't know about David, but I find quite a number of slurs in what you
write - throw-away slurs *instead* of arguments. I've been tempted for
some days to say something about it.
Kai Henningsen
> Well, sure. But your example hinges on putting people into extreme
> situations.
Of course - the effect is most visible in extreme situations. That doesn't
mean it's absent in non-extreme situations, though - just subtler.
>At that point, second order social effects take over.
> Being on the next hardly compares to being drafted into a combat
> situation you don't want to be in, in which you can't tell the enemy
> from the ally, and which you aren't emotionally mature enough to cope
> with. At least, I hope not.
This is something that's been bugging me for years - people claiming you
can't compare stuff, when actually you can compare it very well, you just
shouldn't claim it's equivalent.
Todd Michel McComb
Kai Henningsen <kaih=7DYCN...@khms.westfalen.de> wrote:
>I don't know about David, but I find quite a number of slurs in what you
>write - throw-away slurs *instead* of arguments.
Well, I'll admit that what I said to you was more slur-like, and
I felt kind of bad about it, but the way you described yourself
absolutely does fit the clinical definition of sociopathy. Whether
or not there are worse sociopaths around you doesn't really affect
that....
But I'm not making arguments at all. I'm just expressing my views
on some things. If I convince you to adopt them, what does that
get me? Nothing really. So no arguments... you're reading what
I write through the wrong lens if that's what you expect. Or to
put it in a convoluted way which may make more immediate sense, my
paradigm is that of an artist not that of an engineer.
Todd McComb
mcc...@medieval.org