you'll never get hit with the ads, though you'll still have a harmless window with a 404 error to close.
Hmmmm... the 404s shouldn't be too hard to fix. Just set up an Apache virtual host on your machine for "ads.x10.com" and have it redirect all 404 errors to a page that contains some Javascript which closes the current window (perhaps after checking to make sure that you are on the first page in the window's history so as not to inadvertantly close non-pop-up windows). Of course, you'll have to add an/etc/hosts and Apache virtual host entry for each host you want to block, but that's not too big of a deal (or if it is too big of a deal, you could run an instance of Apache on it's own IP address, like 127.0.0.2, and redirect all requests to that Apache instance to the window closing script regardless of the requested host).
Withholding is merely a way for the government to be assured of getting their due via compliance through employers.
Withholding serves other purposes as well:
It actually allows the government to collect more money, or (more accurately) to collect the amount due when it is most valuable. Due to inflation, a dollar today will buy more than it will be able to buy come next April 15th, so the government improves its buying power by collecting early.
It allows the government to mask how much of your wealth they are actually taking. Because you never actually have the money that is withheld from your paycheck and because it is taken gradually over the year, you don't get the sticker shock of having to shell over 40% of what you earned last year all at once. I think there was some bill proposed recently that would release employers from the responsibility of withholding taxes specifically so that citizens would be very aware on how much money the government is requiring (as taxpayers would have the money in hand for some time and would therefore experience the loss), but there's no way that's going to pass.
On a different note, yes, if you are self employed you only have to pay taxes once a year (and you don't have withholdings), but in most cases you will probably want to pay "estimated taxes" quarterly in order to avoid a penalty in April (around 9%, I think).
I always thought that Sun was just an OSS parasite, because they take but never give back (but again, I heard that on slashdot).
Sun purchased the company that made Star Office (Applixware), probably for several million dollars, and then proceeded to
release it under the GPL. I don't know what your definition of "giving back" to the OSS community is, but that certainly fits mine. The open source community instantly gained perhaps the single biggest piece that it was missing for global desktop domination (an extensive office suite).
There are one or two other examples I could think of off the top of my head where Sun has "given back", but the Star Office example should suffice in proving your original source incorrect.
It sounds to me like it would be pretty easy for the end user to distinguish between links that I've put there, and links that the browser generated to sites that MS thinks I might be interested in.
You are assuming way too much clue on behalf of the user. I frequently get email sent from a form on my web page where the senders ask questions about completely different websites apparently thinking that my site is the same as these other sites they were on because they followed a link from those sites and ended up on mine. These people aren't going to know what the difference between a regular link and a squiggly purple link signifies. Unless they have been trained to know (and you should assume that most people won't be), how is the end user supposed to know that squiggly purple links have been added by the browser and aren't part of the site? This is something that only technically savvy people are likely to recognize (as pathetic as that sounds).
I desperately hope there is some way to disable this from an individual webpage or for an entire site. Even for the "clueful" end users who do know the significance of the special links, I don't want this anywhere near my site which has negative commentary on Microsoft as it could totally distort the meaning. I don't want my site to be a springboard for Microsoft propaganda, especially since that is exactly what I'm trying to counteract on my site.
Sony uses the Mozilla/6.xx codebase, doing any necessary massive bugfixes to the code, but possibly waiting for the 6.5 release, which I've caught the rare passing mention of in Bugzilla. I have no idea if Netscape ever plans on doing another branch from the Mozilla trunk; I personally think that would be a very wise idea, giving a big boost to the Mozilla project's profile, as well as Netscape's credibility, no thanks to that 6.0 business.
When Mozilla 0.9 (on Linux) crashes for me (which is rare now) the "Talkback" window that pops up to send back a bug report has "Netscape 6.5" in the title. This led me to assume that Netscape would branch from Mozilla again before Netscape 6.5. It only makes sense as the current Mozilla is an order of magnitude better than 0.6, or whatever version it was that Netscape branched off of originally.
It's not a Nolo Press book, but "The Small Business Legal Kit" by J.W. Dicks, Esq. has a template "Confidentiality and Trade Secret Agreement" in it. I've used templates from this book a few times and I haven't had any problems, but I guess the only time problems would really come to the forefront would be when the contract needs to be enforced and that has yet to happen for me. My personal opinion is that these templates are written by a professional lawyer and if I were to go hire a professional lawyer to write me my own custom contracts I'd really have no way of knowing if his contract is better than the template, so I'll just go with the one that is cheaper and has been subjected to wide peer review (I guess using open source software has put me in the mindset that peer review can lead to excellent quality). Anyway, you should decide for yourself if legal templates are right for you and not take what I say as a guarantee of any sort.
I just ran across this Tech Review article today which says pretty much the same thing you wrote, except in a more generalized form. It gives several examples of technologies in the past which were extensively hyped and then pronounced dead when the public's short attention span waned, but which eventually went on to achieve their original revolutionary promises (just on a longer timeframe).
I say give Linux on the desktop time - I switched to a 100% Linux desktop about two years ago and I love it. The important thing is that there are people who have switched more recently that wouldn't have bothered two years ago. Every day all the new functionality and useability which is added to Linux makes it a viable desktop for a few more people who have slightly less of a geek threshold than the adopters the day before. Linux on the desktop may be a niche today, but that niche is growing and given time it will eventually be more than a niche. Once it hits critical mass, expect things to explode as the Microsoft tax will no longer buy anything useful (it buys compatibility with other MS users today).
Microsoft knows what would happen if Red Hat and VA Linux Systems went under: whole segments of the open source community, including Slashdot and Sourceforge, would suddenly find themselves quite strapped for cash. Linux and OSS development would be permanently crippled, at least relative to today's heady pace. Eventually, Microsoft would once again beat Linux on technical merits.
The greatest horror won't be when aliens get our DNA sequences; it'll be when they get our reruns.
Or it could end up like that Futurama Episode where aliens 1,000 light years away attack because the season finale of "Single Female Lawyer" was interrupted 1,000 years ago and they wanted to see the ending. That episode was absolutely classic.
Car CD players are usually built to withstand shock, whereas my CD-ROM drive tends to skip when jostled. Is there a way to dampen the shocks from pot-holes, etc. when using a CD-ROM drive in a car? (I don't know if the site in question answers this as it seems to be slashdotted.)
There are GUIs for CVS for many operating systems (including Windows and MacOS) at cvsgui.org.
jCVS is also a decent graphical CVS front end and based on a cursory look at CVSGui/WinCVS, it runs on far more platforms and provides a consistent interface across them (it's written in Java, so it should work on pretty much anything with a good VM and set of class libraries). I used to use it all the time on Windows and now I use it all the time on Linux, so I know it works well on at least those two platforms. I think you can also set it up as a servlet so that users can access it from a web browser.
This isn't to say that CVSGui isn't a good program, I'm just pointing out another UI option.
Re:Can we please give them the benefit of the doub
on
Sony Violating GPL?
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, no. Sony is obligated to release the source used to create their binary, provided that they actually modified it. Cleaning up spaghetti code results in a different binary.
That has nothing to do with what I posted. I was only answering the original poster's question on how a binary can be ready for public consumption before the source. I explicitly stated that the situation I was proposing had nothing to do with Sony. I guess I should have also stated that the situation had nothing to do with GPLed code either, but was rather a statement about the readiness of code in general.
Re:Can we please give them the benefit of the doub
on
Sony Violating GPL?
·
· Score: 2
How can the binary be ready before the source code?
The source could be very poorly documented or strewn with spaghetti code that is to be cleaned up. The binary could be completely usable even though the source is an unreadable mess.
This is totally hypothetical in this case - I'm not saying that it is or isn't applicable to Sony, just that it is possible.
Your main cost is probably bandwidth, right? One very quick way to alleviate bandwidth problems is to drop the graphics on your high bandwidth pages (or if you must use graphics, use fewer of them, higher compression, and smaller sizes). I had a page that was getting 30k hits a day and dropping the graphics on this page cut my bandwidth usage for my entire site in half.
Another related trick which I use is to put the graphics which are necessary for my site in the web space that came with with Earthlink account. I figure I'm paying $20 a month for nothing right now (Earthlink is my backup account in case my DSL goes down, but my Speakeasy DSL has been absolutely rock solid so far) so I don't feel very guilty about offloading my traffic to Earthlink. If you have an ISP account that includes web space, consider putting your graphics there. This could save you considerable bandwidth.
Along those same lines, try to split up high traffic pages with a lot of content into multiple pages.
All of these changes also have the nice side effect of making your site easier to read and navigate. Not only is your site more accessible to the vision impared and users of text browsers like Lynx, but things tend to be more concise and consistent when you aren't focusing on form over function.
What I would recommend is using a web log analyzer such as Wusage or Analog to determine what pages draw the most bandwidth and focus all your energy on the top pages. As with software profiling where most resources are generally used by a very small portion of the code, you will probably find that a very small portion of your content is contributing to the majority of your bandwidth usage. On my site, it was a single page contributing to over half of my bandwidth usage and optimizing that page solved my bandwidth problems.
The web is a subset of the internet. The internet existed decades before the web. That isn't to say that the web isn't very important, just that it isn't the same thing as the internet (which was, indeed, invented in the US).
This may be its hour in the sun, but it is not nearly as creative as other nations were at their peaks, like Britain, Spain, France and Greece. What has America done that compare?
How about inventing the internet? I would put the internet at least on par with the printing press in its importance in the evolution of human society. It makes instantaneous global communication effortless to the point that people from arbitrary places in the world can gather at places like Slashdot and share thoughts in a manner far more effective than was possible before the internet's invention. It allows anybody to very easily globally publish their opinions with almost no barrier to entry, whereas before you had to be wealthy enough to own a publishing company or you had to invest a great deal of effort and time in spreading your message (slowly) by word of mouth. It's essentially the printing press with an order of magnitude more ease of use and effectiveness.
Yes, US citizens generally don't have enough world perspective regarding the accomplishments of other countries, but that doesn't mean the US hasn't pulled its own weight in terms of accomplishments.
It's unfortunate to see SourceXChange close its doors. I tried their site out a few months ago when I was looking for a contract and the concept looked like something I would be interested in, but there were only about two projects listed at the time.
A site with a similar idea is
Cosource.com. The projects there tend to be a lot smaller in scope, but there are a lot more to choose from. Hopefully they won't end up in the same boat as SourceXChange.
A Web service provider can expose their system (programmed using.NET) using SOAP and UDDI and then you can leverage those services through your site/application very easily.
That only scratches the surface but the idea behind Web services is to create an Internet where it's easy to combine services from different vendors/suppliers to create your own Web applications.
This actually sounds useful. What open source alternatives are there that provide similar functionality? Does anybody know of a good web page that suggests open source alternatives for each of the different aspects of.NET? I could use this for a project that I'm working on right now, but I need software that is cross-platform (and not in Microsoft's definition of the term "cross-platform" - I want to run it on OpenBSD). I could also use a.NET comparison page to link to from my Microsoft Alternatives page which is in desperate need of updating.
we should collectively endorse the idea of paying for Free products (heh that reads kinda funny don't it)
Actually, it made me think of museums. A lot of museums are "free," but have a "suggested donation" at the door. Carrying this over into the software domain, you could probably get some interesting reactions by having what looks and smells like an order page, but allows you to enter in any amount that you want (include $0) to "pay" for your software.
Is there a way to have a patent killed without proving prior work? Can a claim of "this is a dumb-ass patent" be made with that office so they will dissolve it?
I believe that the requirement that an "invention" be non-obvious is a prerequisite to its patentability. It also has to be non-obvious to people in the relevant field of work, not just to the average Joe Schmoe. It's unfortunate that the PTO is so over-worked that this requirement is essentially ignored.
Obligatory dislaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I do watch Ally McBeal.
Wouldn't downloading compressed images over FTP constitute prior art (no pun intended)? How old is FTP? It's got to be older than this stupid patent.
The defense's lawyers should bring a motion to have TechSearch's lawyers dis-barred for negligent, unethical practices. Hopefully Mr. Aharonian will at least be able to counter-sue on negligence claims and be able to recover attornies' fees.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, but I do watch Ally McBeal.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmmm... the 404s shouldn't be too hard to fix. Just set up an Apache virtual host on your machine for "ads.x10.com" and have it redirect all 404 errors to a page that contains some Javascript which closes the current window (perhaps after checking to make sure that you are on the first page in the window's history so as not to inadvertantly close non-pop-up windows). Of course, you'll have to add an /etc/hosts and Apache virtual host entry for each host you want to block, but that's not too big of a deal (or if it is too big of a deal, you could run an instance of Apache on it's own IP address, like 127.0.0.2, and redirect all requests to that Apache instance to the window closing script regardless of the requested host).
Withholding serves other purposes as well:
On a different note, yes, if you are self employed you only have to pay taxes once a year (and you don't have withholdings), but in most cases you will probably want to pay "estimated taxes" quarterly in order to avoid a penalty in April (around 9%, I think).
It looks like Slashdot could use some story recognition software.
Oops, you're right - my bad. I don't know why I thought Applix was the name of the company Sun bought to get StarOffice.
Sun purchased the company that made Star Office (Applixware), probably for several million dollars, and then proceeded to release it under the GPL. I don't know what your definition of "giving back" to the OSS community is, but that certainly fits mine. The open source community instantly gained perhaps the single biggest piece that it was missing for global desktop domination (an extensive office suite).
There are one or two other examples I could think of off the top of my head where Sun has "given back", but the Star Office example should suffice in proving your original source incorrect.
I, for one, am glad that I don't have to worry about one of those showing up in my back yard.
You are assuming way too much clue on behalf of the user. I frequently get email sent from a form on my web page where the senders ask questions about completely different websites apparently thinking that my site is the same as these other sites they were on because they followed a link from those sites and ended up on mine. These people aren't going to know what the difference between a regular link and a squiggly purple link signifies. Unless they have been trained to know (and you should assume that most people won't be), how is the end user supposed to know that squiggly purple links have been added by the browser and aren't part of the site? This is something that only technically savvy people are likely to recognize (as pathetic as that sounds).
I desperately hope there is some way to disable this from an individual webpage or for an entire site. Even for the "clueful" end users who do know the significance of the special links, I don't want this anywhere near my site which has negative commentary on Microsoft as it could totally distort the meaning. I don't want my site to be a springboard for Microsoft propaganda, especially since that is exactly what I'm trying to counteract on my site.
When Mozilla 0.9 (on Linux) crashes for me (which is rare now) the "Talkback" window that pops up to send back a bug report has "Netscape 6.5" in the title. This led me to assume that Netscape would branch from Mozilla again before Netscape 6.5. It only makes sense as the current Mozilla is an order of magnitude better than 0.6, or whatever version it was that Netscape branched off of originally.
It's not a Nolo Press book, but "The Small Business Legal Kit" by J.W. Dicks, Esq. has a template "Confidentiality and Trade Secret Agreement" in it. I've used templates from this book a few times and I haven't had any problems, but I guess the only time problems would really come to the forefront would be when the contract needs to be enforced and that has yet to happen for me. My personal opinion is that these templates are written by a professional lawyer and if I were to go hire a professional lawyer to write me my own custom contracts I'd really have no way of knowing if his contract is better than the template, so I'll just go with the one that is cheaper and has been subjected to wide peer review (I guess using open source software has put me in the mindset that peer review can lead to excellent quality). Anyway, you should decide for yourself if legal templates are right for you and not take what I say as a guarantee of any sort.
I say give Linux on the desktop time - I switched to a 100% Linux desktop about two years ago and I love it. The important thing is that there are people who have switched more recently that wouldn't have bothered two years ago. Every day all the new functionality and useability which is added to Linux makes it a viable desktop for a few more people who have slightly less of a geek threshold than the adopters the day before. Linux on the desktop may be a niche today, but that niche is growing and given time it will eventually be more than a niche. Once it hits critical mass, expect things to explode as the Microsoft tax will no longer buy anything useful (it buys compatibility with other MS users today).
Yeah, if RedHat and VALinux went under we'd be left with obscure little companies with nowhere near the same resources.
Or it could end up like that Futurama Episode where aliens 1,000 light years away attack because the season finale of "Single Female Lawyer" was interrupted 1,000 years ago and they wanted to see the ending. That episode was absolutely classic.
Car CD players are usually built to withstand shock, whereas my CD-ROM drive tends to skip when jostled. Is there a way to dampen the shocks from pot-holes, etc. when using a CD-ROM drive in a car? (I don't know if the site in question answers this as it seems to be slashdotted.)
jCVS is also a decent graphical CVS front end and based on a cursory look at CVSGui/WinCVS, it runs on far more platforms and provides a consistent interface across them (it's written in Java, so it should work on pretty much anything with a good VM and set of class libraries). I used to use it all the time on Windows and now I use it all the time on Linux, so I know it works well on at least those two platforms. I think you can also set it up as a servlet so that users can access it from a web browser.
This isn't to say that CVSGui isn't a good program, I'm just pointing out another UI option.
That has nothing to do with what I posted. I was only answering the original poster's question on how a binary can be ready for public consumption before the source. I explicitly stated that the situation I was proposing had nothing to do with Sony. I guess I should have also stated that the situation had nothing to do with GPLed code either, but was rather a statement about the readiness of code in general.
The source could be very poorly documented or strewn with spaghetti code that is to be cleaned up. The binary could be completely usable even though the source is an unreadable mess.
This is totally hypothetical in this case - I'm not saying that it is or isn't applicable to Sony, just that it is possible.
Your main cost is probably bandwidth, right? One very quick way to alleviate bandwidth problems is to drop the graphics on your high bandwidth pages (or if you must use graphics, use fewer of them, higher compression, and smaller sizes). I had a page that was getting 30k hits a day and dropping the graphics on this page cut my bandwidth usage for my entire site in half.
Another related trick which I use is to put the graphics which are necessary for my site in the web space that came with with Earthlink account. I figure I'm paying $20 a month for nothing right now (Earthlink is my backup account in case my DSL goes down, but my Speakeasy DSL has been absolutely rock solid so far) so I don't feel very guilty about offloading my traffic to Earthlink. If you have an ISP account that includes web space, consider putting your graphics there. This could save you considerable bandwidth.
Along those same lines, try to split up high traffic pages with a lot of content into multiple pages.
All of these changes also have the nice side effect of making your site easier to read and navigate. Not only is your site more accessible to the vision impared and users of text browsers like Lynx, but things tend to be more concise and consistent when you aren't focusing on form over function.
What I would recommend is using a web log analyzer such as Wusage or Analog to determine what pages draw the most bandwidth and focus all your energy on the top pages. As with software profiling where most resources are generally used by a very small portion of the code, you will probably find that a very small portion of your content is contributing to the majority of your bandwidth usage. On my site, it was a single page contributing to over half of my bandwidth usage and optimizing that page solved my bandwidth problems.
The Web != The Internet.
The web is a subset of the internet. The internet existed decades before the web. That isn't to say that the web isn't very important, just that it isn't the same thing as the internet (which was, indeed, invented in the US).
How about inventing the internet? I would put the internet at least on par with the printing press in its importance in the evolution of human society. It makes instantaneous global communication effortless to the point that people from arbitrary places in the world can gather at places like Slashdot and share thoughts in a manner far more effective than was possible before the internet's invention. It allows anybody to very easily globally publish their opinions with almost no barrier to entry, whereas before you had to be wealthy enough to own a publishing company or you had to invest a great deal of effort and time in spreading your message (slowly) by word of mouth. It's essentially the printing press with an order of magnitude more ease of use and effectiveness.
Yes, US citizens generally don't have enough world perspective regarding the accomplishments of other countries, but that doesn't mean the US hasn't pulled its own weight in terms of accomplishments.
Anywho looks to me like it's still up.
A site with a similar idea is Cosource.com. The projects there tend to be a lot smaller in scope, but there are a lot more to choose from. Hopefully they won't end up in the same boat as SourceXChange.
That only scratches the surface but the idea behind Web services is to create an Internet where it's easy to combine services from different vendors/suppliers to create your own Web applications.
This actually sounds useful. What open source alternatives are there that provide similar functionality? Does anybody know of a good web page that suggests open source alternatives for each of the different aspects of .NET? I could use this for a project that I'm working on right now, but I need software that is cross-platform (and not in Microsoft's definition of the term "cross-platform" - I want to run it on OpenBSD). I could also use a .NET comparison page to link to from my Microsoft Alternatives page which is in desperate need of updating.
Actually, it made me think of museums. A lot of museums are "free," but have a "suggested donation" at the door. Carrying this over into the software domain, you could probably get some interesting reactions by having what looks and smells like an order page, but allows you to enter in any amount that you want (include $0) to "pay" for your software.
I believe that the requirement that an "invention" be non-obvious is a prerequisite to its patentability. It also has to be non-obvious to people in the relevant field of work, not just to the average Joe Schmoe. It's unfortunate that the PTO is so over-worked that this requirement is essentially ignored.
Obligatory dislaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I do watch Ally McBeal.
Wouldn't downloading compressed images over FTP constitute prior art (no pun intended)? How old is FTP? It's got to be older than this stupid patent.
The defense's lawyers should bring a motion to have TechSearch's lawyers dis-barred for negligent, unethical practices. Hopefully Mr. Aharonian will at least be able to counter-sue on negligence claims and be able to recover attornies' fees.
Obligatory disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, but I do watch Ally McBeal.