Weirdness is happening at the bottom of the threads. What's going on.? I for one will never click a MORE button, until I know how it got there. Is this site on the verge of accepting banner ads? Inquiring minds want to know.

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), April 17, 1999

Answers

The photos aren't there by accident; I'm experimenting with some new software that I wrote to serve banner ideas. In the long run, the software is supposed to be smart and read the content of the page and try to find related ideas elsewhere on the Internet. The presentation is supposed to clearly separate the banner ideas from the rest of the content on the page. The software will become part of my free open-source toolkit (see http://photo.net/wtr/ ) so I'm hoping that it will become a standard of sorts. Basically the idea is to point people toward stuff that they might have missed.

If you don't like the banner ideas, you have a few options. One is simply not to scroll down past the point where you can read them. Another is to stop using the forum. greenspun.com is a free service. We run it for research purposes, e.g., to test out ideas like this. If you don't like it, I'm sure that there are commercial services that would meet your needs. Remember that this forum all by itself consumes a good fraction of a $250,000 machine.

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), April 17, 1999.

Philip,

Thanks for the quick response. I was wondering too. Keep the banners in, if it helps to cover the cost of this site. I think we just all got caught by surprise and some of us do worry about a hacker virus.

-- Gordon (gpconnolly@aol.com), April 17, 1999.

Philip, I hope your ideas, new software & banners catch the eyes, wallets and *$$* dreams of 1000s of venture capitalists and bring you so much research-enabling cash that you develop a state-of-the-art SEARCH ENGINE which you try out here too!  :^)

xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), April 17, 1999.

To answer a couple of the threads above...

The banner ideas don't help us cover the cost of running the service. We're not linking to commercial sites (though I guess if we found interesting ideas on some we would) and we're not getting paid for the links. It just makes it worthwhile to put so much money and effort into this.

As for the search engine. That is indeed a sad tale. Oracle 8i was supposed to fix our problems. It was supposed to come out in December. It didn't come out until March 1999. Then when it did, it would only run on computers with fewer than 10 IP addresses (i.e., computers with fewer than 10 Web services). This particular machine runs about 20 different wacky research services and therefore we need the IP addresses. Now Oracle says that they will have the bug fixed in October of 1999! Maybe earlier if we twist their arm really hard. It is very frustrating for me, esp. as we're facing the same problem on my personal service (photo.net).

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), April 17, 1999.

Philip, thank you so much for explaining about the search engine! I remember somebody saying "Oracle will be fixed and have one in March" around November. Just knowing the facts helps put the nagging wondering to rest. Thanks.

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx

-- Leska (allaha@earthlink.net), April 17, 1999.

Ah! Another software project running a tad late. By the way Philip, your work here is very much appreciated. Thank you.

-- Mike Lang (webflier@erols.com), April 17, 1999.

Bad news Phil,

the good news is the number of hits this forum gets - you are providing a fantastic service - thanks!

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), April 17, 1999.

Go ahead and put the banners up Phil, you're not going to make any money on those articles!

-- @ (@@@.@), April 17, 1999.

Hey Philip,

(If you're still monitoring this thread...) You're hosting a few Y2K related forums here, and you're obviously a cool computer honcho. Any thoughts on Y2K that you'd be willing to share with us?

And thanks for all your efforts...

-- pshannon (pshannon@sangersreview.com), April 17, 1999.

Hey Philip,

the new software is great in a surrealistic sort of way - so far on this page I've seen a picture of dogs playing in the water, accompanied by text from the Michigan Militia website. On another thread I saw a picture of the old Klamath Falls Creamery, accompanied by text which analyzed the failure of many web entrepreneurs...

this is really kinda fun!

Arlin Adams

-- Arlin H. Adams (ahadams@ix.netcom.com), April 17, 1999.

Yeah Arlin, not to mention the following:

Aristophanes explaining homosexuality vs. heterosexuality... Originally, people did not go about singly, but were physically joined together with another person. There were male-male, female-female, and male-female combinations. You had four legs, four arms, two faces, etc. and when you wanted to move fast you did it by cartwheeling. The Gods became angry with Man at one point and split all of these couples up, taking the extra skin and making belly buttons. People now wandered around desperately lonely looking for their old partners. If you are a woman seeking women, you were originally intended to be part of a female-female pair; if you seek someone of the opposite sex, you were originally intended to be part of a male-female pair; if you are a man seeking a man (the most praiseworthy kind of person), you must have originally been intended to be part of a male-male pair. People who find the exact person for whom they were originally intended remain happily with that person for a lifetime; people who don't continue to search. Aristophanes cautions us to worship the Gods carefully; if they get angry again they'll split us all in half and we'll have to hop about on one leg. ... (more)

I'll have to say....I REALLY didn't know what to make of this info on this forum.......guess I still have some self exploring to do....(or not).
MR K
***not realling looking for extraneous info on a targeted format****

-- Mr. Kennedy (y2kPCfixes@MotivatedSeller.com), April 17, 1999.

So much for all those righteous folks' blaming homosexuality on modern corruption of morals, and so forth.

-- No Spam Please (No_Spam_Please@anon_ymous.com), April 18, 1999.

Folks above ask if I've any thoughts on the Y2K bug:

http://photo.net/philg/research/year-2000.html (what I say with my MIT hat on)

and

http://arsdigita.com/free-tools/year-2000.html (what I say with my Internet services company hat on)

Basically my message is that most computer stuff doesn't work well enough that anybody relies on it now.

greenspun.com is a lot of fun for me. The fact that this forum gets so much traffic occasionally presents some challenging performance problems (esp. since a lot of the users are connecting via slow links and unreliable computers).

Leska's comment above about venture capitalists is funny because of the assumption that VC's actually care about tech quality or bother to surf the Web. Remember that a venture capitalist is just someone that people with money hire because their time is too valuable to sit in meetings with entrepreneurs.

I like Mr. Kennedy's comment above. It shows that the software is working!

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), April 18, 1999.

lol, Philip, I guess it is!
Mr. K
***thinking again (lol)****

-- Mr. Kennedy (here@home.tonight), April 18, 1999.

Phil -

Many thanks for the forum. I was taken aback at first when the photos began appearing, but now I know that they can serve as interesting "suggestions" to help us all think a bit more laterally. Thanks again.

-- Mac (sneak@lurk.hid), April 18, 1999.

Phil, don't know if you remember our post on a "Thank you to Phil" thread a while back, but we used to have two big huge fluffy snowball Samoyeds, and Sammies RULE !!  ;^D

Are the pictures of your dog?

xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx

-- Ashton & Leska in Cascadia (allaha@earthlink.net), April 18, 1999.

Philip,

I was puzzled and cautious about the add-ons. Thanks for taking the time to explain them, and why they are there.

And thanks much for maintaining this site. For good or ill, it's on my list of daily updates.

-- LP (soldog@hotmail.com), April 18, 1999.

Mr. Philip Greenspun,

Sir, what can I say? Many, many thanks to you, for your time and effort, at keeping not only this forum, but the many other forums up and running! I think we all have some ideas on how to improve things here, beyond the search... we could all move to euy2k...

How open are you to ideas for improving this site? I have a few, and I'm sure that many of the regular Yourdonites have several more. Should we e-mail you? Yes, I do believe that you are doing this as a labor of love, and my $.01 is worth just about as much as... I'm just wondering..... <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), April 18, 1999.

LP just said, "I was puzzled and cautious about the add-ons. Thanks for taking the time to explain them, and why they are there." Now why can't "they" understand, as you do, that upfrontness is the key to trust and respect.

About three years ago, when I first got online, one of the first searches I ran was on photography. I came across a photo website run by one Phil Greenspun, a good down-to-earth entertaining and informative writer who was not afraid of venturing strong opinions about things photographic. He alluded to being some kind of 'puter geek. A year or so later, as I was cruising for Y2K info, there's that Greenspun guy again, providing a useful, one might even say life-saving, service to his readers.

A man should do at least two things well. I admire your efforts at both. Thanks, Phil.

Hallyx

"Travel light in life; take only what you need: A loving family, good friends, simple pleasures, Someone to love - and someone to love you. Enough to wear, enough to eat And a little more than enough to drink For thirst is a dangerous thing." --- Irish toast

-- Hallyx (Hallyx@aol.com), April 18, 1999.

Ive got to second all the thanks voiced above.

Thanks for this site and the others you host.

-- christa (christamike@hotmail.com), April 18, 1999.

BTW I enjoy the photos alot. Great photography.

-- christa (christamike@hotmail.com), April 18, 1999.

Phil,

Ditto to the kudos above. Thanks for explaining.

-- FM (vidprof@aol.com), April 18, 1999.

How ironic! LOL!

-- Bye! it's a beautiful day today! (LOL@home.now), April 18, 1999.

(gently...) Realizing that this was from June, 1998, and that he was "wearing his MIT hat" at the time, it appears as though our fine friend Philip Greenspun may be a bit of a "Pollyanna."

"What kind of a society would we have if everyone's computer crashed on January 1, 2000? The same kind that we have now. Computer software does not work. Macintoshes and Windows 3.1 machines crash every few hours. Windows 95 machines crash every day. Windows NT machines crash every week. Unix and mainframe applications very seldom are truly operated 24x7 (Web service is a strange exception that has everyone hot and bothered about 24x7 uptime but the systems on which society truly depends usually are taken down 6-8 hours/day)...

Society pays hundreds of thousands of people to keep our computing systems together with chewing gum and baling wire. Year 2000 bugs will be subsumed into the sea of bugs that these folks fight every day anyway."

http:// photo.net/philg/research/year-2000.html

-- curious... (generally@phil.fan), April 18, 1999.

"Society pays hundreds of thousands of people to keep our computing systems together with chewing gum and baling wire. Year 2000 bugs will be subsumed into the sea of bugs that these folks fight every day anyway."

My diplomatic hat on now - I don't think Phil knows much about legacy code and mainframes, embedded chips, spin, and dominoes.

Other than that he's spot on target :)

-- Andy (2000EOD@prodigy.net), April 18, 1999.

Touche, Andy! I'm not an expert on this stuff. But people do ask my opinion so I give it. Remember that universities don't spend too much time worrying about practical stuff (though with http://6916.lcs.mit.edu I'm trying to reverse the trend a bit). And even in my arsdigita.com role, we don't have to worry about mainframes, only our Unix machines running Oracle.

Obviously the worst-case scenario for Y2K is very bad. And I've personally seem some catastrophic failures of large systems (e.g., the Morris Internet Worm of about 10 years ago that brought down most Unix machines; the Ping of Death that malicious people used a year ago to bring down most Windows NT machines connected to the Internet). And I live in Massachusetts where January 1-7 without any gas or electric service would be pretty unpleasant. But I still have some faith in the ability of humans to adapt.

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), April 18, 1999.

Phil,...I will return and read more, but wanted to take a moment to tell you that your travelogue/diary is wonderful. Thanks for sharing more of your obvious many talents with those willing to see/read/know.

-- Donna Barthuley (moment@pacbell.net), April 18, 1999.

"the software is supposed to be smart and read the content of the page and try to find related ideas elsewhere on the Internet."

Till you get this straightened out, I don't bother to scroll down. Great idea if you can get it to work, but a nuisance when the topics are unrelated. About as irritating as an expired link!

-- gail (gail@no.thanks.com), April 18, 1999.

Yes, I'll chime in and thank you too Phillip!

So the banner ideas which "find related ideas elsewhere on the Internet" can be used as a sidebar idea?

Would people have control over the "related" information, or not, Phillip?

Interesting concept. I can envision several potential applications.

Diane

-- Diane J. Squire (sacredspaces@yahoo.com), April 18, 1999.

Mr. Greenspun,

I love these boards and their design. All messages in one place, rather than having to go out-and-back-in, in order to read the replies. Much better than any others. Much...

M. Moth

-- M. Moth (derigueur2@aol.com), April 18, 1999.

"LP just said, 'I was puzzled and cautious about the add-ons. Thanks for taking the time to explain them, and why they are there.' Now why can't "they" understand, as you do, that upfrontness is the key to trust and respect." - Hallyx

Hallyx,

I don't know if your comment was directed at me or Philip (someone else?), but I agree with you about the worth of candor.

I have been trying over the years to find out why more people practice candor more often in their daily lives. Even counting the experiences I've had that have left scars, I still can't say that I know. Every answer seems too glib.

-- LP (soldog@hotmail.com), April 18, 1999.

I hate being left out!!! I don't see any banners or photos or anything! What are you guys talking about?????

-- Sheila (sross@bconnex.net), April 18, 1999.

OOOOOOOHHH!!! Never mind......now I do!!!

-- Sheila (sross@bconnex.net), April 18, 1999.

The pictures don't always match the words.

-- h (h@h.h), April 18, 1999.

1. By George, I think she's "Got It"!

@. Ah shucks - we get pretty pictures and neat links to other stuff - and somebody complains about the level of artificial intelligence that is supposed to link a thread topic's to the picture. Gee whiz....

-- Robert A Cook, PE (Kennesaw, GA) (Cook.R@csaatl.com), April 18, 1999.

Well, let's see -- the Oracle thing is at least 6 months late (march postponed to October, maybe more. Now all these Y2K projects that are supposed to be done by June 30 -- hey even if they are also six months late, they'll still be done just in time before New Years's eve.

:-)

-- vbProg (vbProg@MicrosoftAndIntelSuck.com), April 19, 1999.

I for one don't appreciate the banners.

Many of them invole politics, which don't belong here. Keep political comments on a political forum. They have no business intruding on nature forums.

If it continues, the nature photographers that frequent this board will likely leave.

-- Keith Clark (ClarkPhotography@spiritone.com), April 19, 1999.

Hey Phil,

In addition to the MORE button can we have a LESS button?

Just kidding. This place can't get much stranger...luckily we don't all work at the post office.

-- a (a@a.a), April 19, 1999.

I'm with Keith on this one.

The problem with banner ideas (or ads, it doesn't really make any difference), is that it changes the forum(s) from being an active retrieval system (where I have to want to see information), to a passive system where Phil's politics on just about any topic* pop up randomly.

I don't agree with Phil's assertion that banner ideas piss people off who aren't offended by banner ads. I tend to get annoyed by both, but I understand their requirement in certain sites; I just thought that photo.net might remain an island in a sea of uninvited information.

When I go walking in a national park, I don't want to see the latest thoughts on homelessness in America nailed to the nearest tree.

(*) - I don't disagree with much of what Phil has to say, so this isn't about _what_ he's saying, just how he goes about presenting it.

duncan

-- Duncan McRae (duncanm@zip.com.au), April 19, 1999.

(bugger)

-- Duncan McRae (duncanm@zip.com.au), April 19, 1999.

Phil- I like the "add-ons" -some are quite interesting- good to know they're meant to be there.Great dog photos. Looks like my pyrenese..

-- anita (hillsidefarm@drbs.com), April 19, 1999.

Keith, Duncan:

"If you don't like the banner ideas, you have a few options. One is simply not to scroll down past the point where you can read them. Another is to stop using the forum. greenspun.com is a free service. We run it for research purposes, e.g., to test out ideas like this. If you don't like it, I'm sure that there are commercial services that would meet your needs. Remember that this forum all by itself consumes a good fraction of a $250,000 machine.

-- Philip Greenspun (philg@mit.edu), April 17, 1999."

Duh! Don't like it? Leave!

-- Stupid People Bug The Hell Out Of Me (---@duh!.com), April 19, 1999.

Oh,

I'm sorry.. I forgot that noone's supposed to have an opinion unless it agrees with almightly phil.

I'll remember to genuflect next time.

duncan

-- Duncan McRae (duncanm@zip.com.au), April 19, 1999.

Alright, I expand on my argument.. I apologise for the off-the-cuff remarks in the last post.

The point is, Phil, if you're trying to produce a web-based system that's going to change the world, you're going to need to understand the people that use it, the consumers. ie: me, Keith, Joe Bloggs, Redneck Pete, whoever.

This is a _discussion_ forum. Yes, it's yours, yes it's wonderful, but it does you and others a disservice to just say "if you don't like it, then naff off". If this is the general consensus, then you'll end up with a narrow-minded bunch of people visiting the site. They may agree with everything you say and bow in your presence, but they'll be just as insular as the people you criticise.

Then again, if you want to produce a web site that caters only to like-minded photo-nerds with similar views on the rest of the world then that's your perogative and I'll butt out.

duncan

-- Duncan McRae (duncanm@zip.com.au), April 19, 1999.

Oh, one other thing I forgot.

If the whole purpose of this is ".. for research purposes, e.g., to test out ideas like this" then I see little point in ignoring half of the results.

'And the conclusion to my web thesis is, everyone loves my ideas. The reason? Because I ignored all criticisms'

duncan

-- Duncan McRae (duncanm@zip.com.au), April 19, 1999.

What's the big deal here? This stuff is at the BOTTOM of the page. If you're not interested, don't scroll past the Contribute button. If Mr. Greenspun wants to try out an idea, on HIS FREE forun, under traffic conditions... Jeez, some people complain about everything! <:)=

-- Sysman (y2kboard@yahoo.com), April 19, 1999.

I dont like the gratuitous off topic ramblings attached to to bottom of the page, but then If i were pursuing a money making idea it would be a program for people like me which would allow us to turn off certain such unwelcome features . As it is I turn off my load images button to avoid most advertising and other unsought drivel. I feel no obligation to read what I do not wish to read. I just wish that "public service announcements from the AD council" and other unsolicited public propaganda and consent manipulating tactics could be programmed out of my radio. Im tired of self righteous liberal idiots presuming themselves so wise that they think they must usurp our liberty and "form public opinion" as it serves their purposes publicly haranging us with repetitous public service messages which issue us the "correct" opinion or attitude they want us to hold. The motives of an outright commercial message are obvious but one must be ten times as wary of the purposes served by the dissemination of ideas that may eventually elicit a "pavlov's dog" response in individuals who might otherwise have carefully considered a more appropriate response to whatever situation for which they were carefully groomed by repetitous "public service messages" to predictably react. Without the constant indoctrination citizens would normally assemble and consider the facts of each situation and make wiser and more appropriate decisions based on those facts. As it is now I find most people fiercely hold passionate opinions on so many things, but as their opinions were bestowed upon them they cannot adequately defend why they believe anything about anything.

-- Ann Fisher (zyax55b@prodigy.com), April 21, 1999.

Ann: Don't let the door hit ya where the Lord split ya!

-- DoorMan (adios@ll.right?), April 21, 1999.

I right clicked on the picture w/ gray archways, green grass, pink flowers and shadows from windows overhead and made it the wallpaper on my monitor. But then, I AM wallflower! Thanks, Phil, et al., for the nice photography.

-- Wallflower (y2kwallflr@aol.com), April 22, 1999.