Slashdot Mirror

I hope that yahoo! does not have the same lax privacy policy for paying customers as for non-paying customers


The really interesting part of all of this is that when Yahoo first started, thier service was exemplary. They were effecient, thoughtful, smart, and they implemented a host of useful resources.

Then, like the vast majority of the dot-com companies, the VCs and big-business types pulled the wool over the eyes of the original founders(people like Jerry Yang). Or, put another way, the original founders sold out. After that happened(about 1 year before the dot-com crash) Yahoo's service has continually degraded. That's about 2 years of constant monotonic degradation of service. Now they're insisting on customers paying for a service that was taken for granted 2 years ago?

Understandably the dot-com business model has all but evaporated in the face of diminished advertising revenue. (Ad companies are paying 1/10th what they used to per ad). This coupled with the fact that the stock inflators have all left town or gone broke, pretty much means that Yahoo has very little to go on. This of course is true of almost all the .com's, as the majority of them relied on advertising for revenue. (except sites like e-bay, etc. who are doing fine in this kind of environment).

It's very unlikely that any of this will change, as consumers are more and more fervently seeking out products that will block advertisments. The latest batch of "pop-up" style advertising techniques has pretty much buried any respect the advertising industry ever had in the mind of the consumer. Said another way, advertisers are paying less and less per ad because they percieve how ofter those ads are being avoided. In turn they insist on "eyeball time" and make even more hostile ads. This in turn increases the consumers anger, and the customer finds even more effective ways to block out all advertisements. It's a cycle that bears very little hope for the advertisement based web-business model.

I would suggest that there is a light at the end of the tunnel. But it requires the vast majority of us to embrace 2 distinct technologies. Wireless broadband, and Peer-To-Peer file-sharing, HTTP, and computing.

Those are big hurdles, but in conjunction they appear to be within our grasp:

1) Wireless broadband means buying a dedicated commodity unit for ~$150(before prices drop) that will provide 10Mbps 24/7(does your telco/cable co offer this?). Most importantly, there is no monthly cost...goodbye $50/month to Bell X.

2) P2P transfer of not only files, but also dynamic content like webpages. This would involve a dramatic paradigm shift away from the current client-server model. But with > 100 10Mbps nodes per square-mile in urban areas, and intelligent caching, there's every reason to suggest this is possible.

The client-server model that the "old internet" has relied on is broken. The ad-revenue cycle is destroying quality of service, shutting down many good sites permanently, and we're losing vast quantities of content in the process.

Currently 99% of the server load is on 1% of the connected machines. Leaving the other 99% of the client base Idle. A small investment of ~$150(about the price of a 2nd harddrive, or a new soundcard) could change all of this. Then those 99% idle client boxes could become very powerful P2P nodes.

This is not the distant future folks, it just takes a catalytic moment to get everyone to buy that 802.11X card. It happened to CD-ROM drives, sound-cards, etc. sooner or later a new standard component is adopted. Then the folks at Dell etc. will include one in every standard box they sell. Hopefully this will happen sooner rather than later. Then the OSS/private sector can build HTTP over P2P(challenging, but not impossible within this infrastructure).

I'm sincerely hoping all of this happens soon, because many great web-sites are going down, and we're losing a lot of good content. There's less and less in that Google cache every day, and we need to change that.

Now, I'm off to get some of those ant cups for my iBook; do you think plastic will do well on top of my processor?

It is a problem that they are researching to find out what attracts ants to electricity.

The Institute

Ars News Network

A 5 year old wired article very similiar to this story

Unfortunately, I think you're going to have to wait a long time for Logic Audio for Linux. Apple recently bought Emagic (Logic Audio's creator), and has announced it will discontinue the Windows version of Logic Audio. I think what we're seeing here - along with Apple's free offer of Adobe's Indesign, is Apple attempting to light a fire under the developers of the two major, killer Mac apps - Quark (QuarkExpress) and Digidesign (Protools) - that are rather late to the OS X party. We'll see.

this and this might be of interest

Look at the fee for micro hard drives - $21 per gigabyte. A 20GB iPod would cost an extra $420! That's insane!

Wired recently had an article about the FTC and spam.

"The FTC can only legally pursue cases where there are clear instances of spam being used to perpetuate a scam or conduct fraudulent business activities.
"The test is: Does the spam make a representation, an offer of some sort of product or service? Is that representation false? And would an average consumer believe that the representation was true?" Huseman explained. "If those conditions are met, the FTC can act."

Just think, millions of spam messages get sent to uce@ ftc.gov (not easy to remember), yet only six people are on the job.

You know what? They don't just look for e-mail addresses to send mail to. They also use the e-mail addresses as reply-to addresses. I found this out when I got an email from a guy who was puzzled by my auto-responder emailing him. It turns out that somebody sent a message to me and used his address as a reply-to address.

This might be due to the Klez virus or a variant. It forges the From address in email, using a random address from the victim's address book. So if someone has Alice and Bob in their address book and they get infected, they may send mail to Alice that claims to be from Bob. Here's a Wired article with more information.

You can with an iBook...

Here's the latest

Just in case you were curious, you were quoted in a Wired News article found here

There have been other products that tried to do this type of thing. Checkout this keychain-type product that people could use to identify songs they heard on the radio when they later hooked up the device to their computer. There is a more complete story at wired here.

An article in Wired's dead tree version a couple of months ago critiqued modern supertanker stability, a good read, especially for those in shipping.

An article in Wired's dead tree version a couple of months ago critiqued modern supertanker stability, a good read, especially for those in shipping.

No, actually our main company is on top on both on then, just like we are in most search engines I could care about, since 1995. We just happen to be following a number of keywords to track how Google is behaving. As a hosting company, we have a interest on traffic fluctuations, and Google is a key factor there. Any how, if you chose not to believe me, you may want to know what other critics are saying: just check out this news.com article about the Google Gods, or this Wired aricle about Google degraded cuality

>See, Google is a really unique entity. Most
>successful companies are driven by business
>types, suits. Google is a big collection of
>computer scientists doing research, and taking a
>no-compromises approach to product quality...

Ok, that is enough. You have a very idealistic view of Google, the marketing brand, and you are failing to see how Google, the real world company, is actually behaving. I think that you need a realty check, my friend.

Do you love Google? Good, many people do. It is a nice company, a very nice company. But it IS a company. It has been financed by venture capitals, it has professional managers, and it is expecting a return.

Google is not a community driven effort, no since they left Stanford. Everything else is just propaganda: They sold out, just like the rest. They ARE a profit driven company. Is that bad? Well, not at all, or, unless, no necessarily.

But, problem is, they hold 90% of the no-MSN queries, and that is not healthy at all for the rest of the market. Power may corrupt anybody, and excessive power certainly does corrupt any company. That is why America and the EU both have antimonopoly laws.

...has got to be the iBong.

Why did they need to take Dolby's bribe? Couldn't they get their students to help?

blakespot

Well, when you've got an entire section of your site called 'Cult of Mac' (the name of which I mildly object to), you've got to update it rather regularly.

Plus Wired has its share of Mac fans on the staff-- read the colophon sometime, it's like the freakin' Macintosh Product Guide. :-)

~Philly

One major difference: The guy in the Wired article is constantly surrounded by hot (often nude) chicks.

[Does anyone ever...] bother writing compliant html?

Check this out.. it's called Boong-ga Boong-ga, and it must be the first game to come with a finger-and-arse controller. When's the home version coming out?

Here's some shots and info... ... a wired article.. and a Register article

its mentioned along with some other popular japanese arcade games. its an interesting read, if short.

With the newly proposed Office of Global Internet Freedom, we may actually end up spending taxpayer dollars to subvert any kind of filtering that the EU enacts on US hate sites (which are roughly 63% of all hate sites on the Internet according to the EU).

Microsoft has argued in the past that "Internet Explorer" was a generic term and hence can't be trademarked, while at the same time arguing that "Windows" is not generic and hence can be trademarked.

Don't expect Microsoft to roll over and play dead. They'll just file a 1000 lawsuits in a 100 different jurisdictions against Eolas, and eventually bankrupt them.

Naked Objects is a Java framework designed to allow developers to get back to the central ideas of true Obect Oriented design and development, which, naturally includes proper OO User Interfaces.

Even though so many developers use OO languages, they often end up with designs that harken back to the bad old days of data processing - data fed into procedure oriented programs. OOUI is in an even sadder state. Most deisgns seem to use the UI to cloak what's going on in the underlying object model (if there is one). It's especially ironic when you realize that some of the few programs that acutally use truly OOUI's are the Integrated Development Environments that those same developers use to create those horrible UI's. Can't they even see what's right in front of them?

Current design philosophy ends up giving the users horrible interfaces that just get in the way of actually getting the job done. Even worse, this process oriented view of the world treats the users as slaves to our machines that can do pattern recoginition better than the machine can. The Naked Objects approach, views the users as problem solvers and provides several different ways to accomplish a task. You've seen it before in spread sheets, drawing programs and IDE's. Naked Objects brings this level of expressiveness to every program and frees the user to be creative rather than just some cog in a machine.

So throw off your GUI and expose your business objects for the world to manipulate! Rejoice in the Naked Objects philosophy and free yourself of all that cruft weighing you down. So run free and let your objects swing in the breeze and... er, um... you get the idea :)

I remembered an interesting article in Wired about a kind of "energy internet" very similar to what you describe.

Lifestreams which I tried a few years ago was extremely interesting although pretty darn slow, it organized docs in windows and seemed to be a java based daemon which you could access through the web. It appears that was the beginning of Scopeware. You can see an article he did in Wired magazine in 1997 here.

Too bad 98% of the posts on Slashdot are so idiotic and conceited. Think about it. The most hyped company for UI on linux fails, the most celebrated UI ideas in Linux are motif, Windows look-alikes and "themes" (spare me), and a guy who has some of the most interesting ideas, plus experience, plus working code, plus what seems like a real strategy or something, gets clobbered.

How many posters actually tried the code before reacting and saying how full of shit he is etc., or is everyone so sure they would do better in an NYT interview? I'm going to install this thing, though I might have to buy a hard disk first..

Anyway consider this little fact. BeOS had some fantastic search capabilities with its queries (automatically updated search results running fast, in real time) but they are toast (well I hope the technology is revived, I need it). Unless you maybe have google for intranet or altavista on your machine, you don't have as usable a search facility probably. Windows searching is terribly slow and dumb. And most of my own efforts and disk space is always spent trying to ensure the longevity of work and files across multiple computer systems, across years of evolving systems.

This guy has a point and even if it isn't the be all and end all we need to help him and other scientists try and solve the problems before Microsoft does. I am no M$ fan but didn't you notice Windows looks nicer than it used to? My hope is Apple liscenses something like Scopeware and this sort of idea sees a lot of work and home desktops. I hope he gets rich!

Here's an interesting article from a month or two back in wired. True story about some kids from MIT breaking Vegas.

here is an news thing about it
anyone have the web site?

Well pen computers are common... look at Apple Newton. The original Newton 100 to 120 didn't do it right, but Apple did the right thing for Newton 2000 and 2100, sad that Steve Jobs killed it. Check Wired : Apple's Newton Just won't Drop. Also the Go pen computing operating system. Both Go and Apple suffered the "first mover disadvantage". Too early. Hand recognitions were crappy for early models.

Now let's not worry about how evil is Microsoft first. Really the reason I use a computer because I write crappy stuff and want to express my idea QUICK. I bet many people can type more than 50 words per minute. Try do that with that Tablet PC. Yea that's why the Danger PDA and the Treo comes back with the keyboard. Also if you notice from Microsoft's propaganda, other than their classic "editorial", you should be able to see that Microsoft wants people to write more of their idea in their handwritten form... okay... taking all my notes electronically, is it easier if I bring a smaller Wacom tablet with a small Sony VAIO or my beloved Powerbook ? This way I can draw and type productively. (Yea Apple adopted Newton's handwritten technology into Inkwell also)

Also, now get to the price of a $1000 to $2500 USD for one of this table, for its handwritten purposes, I might get a yellow pad papers at OfficeMax for $5 USD, still serve me well.

Also I wonder if I lose of the table PC, then I've ruin the rest of my day with it. I did that many times with my Palm.

I'd rather bet on the OQO more. Yea some of the employees are ex-Apple, somebody correct me if I'm wrong

here
actualy tells you about ways to use clean technology in chip business

If Microsoft makes a serious effort to make Windows easy to use, they could theoretically win the TCO fight, or at least beat the penguins.

The alternative is that Microsoft will try to raise the TCO for open source, by buying laws that criminalize open-source development, by turning the personal computer into a locked box that dispenses pay-per-view content to consumers, and by threatening "intellectual property" lawsuits against companies and individual developers.

Of course, that's just a paranoid theory. I mean, if things like that were happening in real life, people would do more than just whine about it on Slashdot, right?

Here's a something related to chew on . . . especially after last nights election results.

"A little-known amendment in the Senate version of the bill makes it much easier for ISPs to disclose e-mail communications without being served with a warrant, which had been prohibited before the Patriot Act of 2001." - wired

Check it here

I'm sure this would be modded much higher if everyone knew the full story.

If you don't know everyone at the party, then why are you having one?

Didn't someone who went to jail in the last few years for computer related crimes admit that he went to DEFCON to collect keys for the FBI?

http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,44007,00 .html

Wired also have a good article from 1999 on the Nokia culture, as well as how they have affected Finland.

Here's a better link from Wired, it has more technical meat and explains better why this technology is newsworthy.

A nice detail is that it runs Linux!

...the more they stay the same. The third-world telco monopolies have been fighting a similar battle against long distance "callback" companies for over five years now, and for the most part they've been losing badly. They've known for a while that VoIP services were the next big threat, but it doesn't look like they have any better idea how to deal with them.

One detail that usually gets left out of these articles, though: the "local third world telco monopoly" is not in any way a homegrown Panamanian entity. No, the citizens of Panama, like most of their neighbors in the carribean, are getting royally screwed by our dear friends at Cable and Wireless.

Sing it brother!

Is there some development methodology or practice a company can implement to protect itself from "rogue" programmers like this? The NSA / CIA / FBI / Pentagon must have software that they want to guarantee is uncompromised. How do they do it?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.11/microsof t. html

This is a great writeup from a guy who had a lot of access to the players with the understanding that he wouldn't publish until after the trial. I wish it would get turned into a book.

My favorite part about this is how it shows you the isolation that Gates and others live(d) in--he really seems to think he was innocent.

Another interesting revelation in this is that Gates micromanaged the law team.

The magnet next to the hard drive?

This one?

1. I love how the European representative is much more sanguine about this move than Karl. Makes me laugh them /. trolls whine about how ICANN is a US puppet.
2. If you take this article seriously, ICANN dies a painful death come June. What will replace it is another question.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! Give it up for the likeness of my head carved into a pumpkin!!!!!!

no, that doesn't allow you to do what I want. That allows you to turn stylesheets on and off, and it allows you to set the user stylesheet.

If a page provides multiple stylesheets (for example, wired.com's new design has different stylesheets which specify different font sizes) IE will use the default stylesheet and not give you any method of choosing another one.

Mozilla, on the other hand, will list each of the stylesheets in the View->Use Style menu. (try it right now.. go to Wired.com in Mozilla and look at the View->Use Style menu. You can choose between four different stylesheets for that page.)

To do the same thing in IE, you need to go to favelets.com and grab the "choose stylesheet" javascript.

Another cool site which shows off the ability to have multiple stylesheets on the page is this page .. it's much more interesting than Wired's font size changes. :)

no, that doesn't allow you to do what I want. That allows you to turn stylesheets on and off, and it allows you to set the user stylesheet.

If a page provides multiple stylesheets (for example, wired.com's new design has different stylesheets which specify different font sizes) IE will use the default stylesheet and not give you any method of choosing another one.

Mozilla, on the other hand, will list each of the stylesheets in the View->Use Style menu. (try it right now.. go to Wired.com in Mozilla and look at the View->Use Style menu. You can choose between four different stylesheets for that page.)

To do the same thing in IE, you need to go to favelets.com and grab the "choose stylesheet" javascript.

Another cool site which shows off the ability to have multiple stylesheets on the page is this page .. it's much more interesting than Wired's font size changes. :)

This Wired Article by Neal Stephenson back in 1996 is all about the underseas fibre, the major players and what the world was like at the start of the web revolution. It weighs in at 56 pages (link to first page only).

In it he charts a new cable as it goes 28,000km around the world. Its well worth a read if you have time.