I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it,
Out of curiosity, what makes your eyeballs so much better than theirs? Why should others 'pay' for your web browsing?
the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a) some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b) less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.
I hate to break it to you, but banner ads aren't working as it is. The reason they have to base advertising costs on page views is because clickthrough rates (the amount of people who actually click on a banner to see where it leads) decline by about 50% a year.
And it's the advertiser's own fault, really. Even with a theoretical clickthrough rate of 0.25% as of the end of 1999 (the article I cited above states the clickthrough rate is 0.5% at the end of 1998) how many of these are translated into actual sales? The problem is that once they get that clickthrough, they fail to deliver the goods. If I click on a banner that says "BUY QUAKE III NOW AND SAVE 20%!" I want to click on that link, enter my name and address and billing info that will get me Quake III. I don't want to get directed to the front page of http://www.coolnetgames.com/ and have to go hunting for it myself.
As others have said, when we make the transition to an advertising-based economy, you can expect products and services to go right down the tubes. (Hey, welcome to prime-time television! Has anyone else noticed that they squeeze ads in every place they can anymore, like during the end credit sequence of their shows?) Why should they care if I buy or not when they're making more money selling my eyeballs to other advertisers?
I would much prefer advertisers to put their money into something that is useful to them as well as to me -- that way, they will continue to pour their money into the internet, I'll find products I wish to purchase, and we will both get something of value. Because as it stands, this bubble is going to burst (whether or not Mozilla has image-blocking features) and the costs of your connection and other services are going to go up anyway.
Furthur more, say what you will, but I seriously doubt the world would be where it is today had someone not come along and designed an easy to use interface.
You're right -- three cheers to Xerox PARC! Hip-hip-hooray! And a tip of the hat to Apple for getting it out there for end users to see in the first place.
The only way to counter "bad" stuff is with "good" stuff, and if all the stuff he's talked about is bad, then what could be better than to ass whole libraries to the Net?
Tom Cruise is supposedly another famous scientologist. Does that mean that next month we're going to start ragging on Mission Impossible-2 as another cult indoctrination plot?
There's a world of difference between the two, and you know it.
Battlefield Earth was written by L. Ron Hubbard, the Church of Scientology's founder.
Despite Travolta's claims to the contrary, Scientologists and their front agencies are known to be involved in the production and marketing of Battlefield Earth.
You can't say either of those about MI2.
The "ethics" of the CoS specifically allow for lying and deception if it helps advance their goals. Intimidation, slander and harrassment are also "ethical" if it targets an "enemy". F.A.C.T. Net and Operation Clambake are two good resources about the CoS; there are numerous accounts by former Scientologists of brainwashing, intimidation, and extortion.
Let's face it, an attractive woman who sits around the house all day for a for-pay webcam is a quick profit.
...Except according to her and her journal, she's not making a lot of profit. She's commented many times that if more people actually signed up as members, she'd have the money to do some really cool stuff. I remember her discussing the move from 30-min refresh/2-min-for-members to 15 and 1, trying to see if the increase in bandwidth usage would break her or not.
Most of her hardware (including her laptop) is actually donated to her by fans. As for her bed selling on eBay for $2800? Well, she said she paid over $3000 for it, so hawking her stuff hasn't been too lucrative either.
She is profiting off of horny lonely men, and will not give out any refunds(a drunk friend of mine signed up for jennicam, and refused to give him a refund).
Funny, I'm not lonely -- I proposed to my fiancee back in November, yet I still resubscribed to Jenni last month. Trust me, if I'm horny, I don't need to go to a website to get my rocks off.
Besides, in the last year, I've actually seen her having sex maybe 4 times, 5 times tops. That's a piss-poor average for a "porn site".
i predict these webcams will stay popular until one evening a crazed stalker enters the home and rapes/kills her for EVERYONE (including the guest cam) to see.
Fortunately, Jenni seems to have enough sense to take reasonable precautions to protect herself.
You are not moderated here for how well you frame your argument, nor for your persuasiveness, nor for any evidence that you might bring to support your argument.
Funny, those are all criteria I use when I'm moderating. And I've used almost all my points for the past month bumping posts up.
If you do not toe the party line, you are moderated down. This is, in fact, a form of censorship because many folks do not read Slashdot at a -1 threshold.
Don't thank Taco & Hemos or the moderators -- you can thank "[insert Slashdot editor here] sucks" and "Hot Grits" and "Natalie Portman" and "F1rZ7 p05t d0odZ" for my lack of enthusiasm for -1 posts and the recent raising of the default browsing level to 1.
(Although I do have "re-parent highly scored replies" turned on, so I frequently find myself dropping to -1 to find out what spawned a rather intersting reply. It'd be a lot easier if I could click on "Parent" and get the parent no matter _what_ it's scored...)
So, beware and be warned, karma whore that you are, you will be moderated down for not speaking the gospel according to Slashdot. You will be censored. You will be silenced. It is a fact of posting on Slashdot.
Look, if the moderation system is so bad here, why do you stay? That's what I don't get.
This sounds really lame, but I want one to act as a "front end" to my home network's streaming MP3 server. Right now I've got a crufty old P100 laptop doing duty, and it can barely run X and XMMS at the same time (I'm serious: I've tried BlackBox and even fvwm).
Well, I was going to ask why you need a GUI for just a plain ol' MP3 player (I use mpg123 more and more now, at least until I can get XMMS to play nice with my sound card) but then I saw the words "streaming mp3 server".
Are there any console-based/command-line MP3 players that will accept input from a streaming server? I have no clue. Does anyone else?
Why doesn't VA Linux or some other hardware company take this on?
Netpliance has shown that there is a market for cheap-ass, open thin clients. Even though you're going to double your investment adding the mods to it, apparently geeks are willing to shell out $400-$600 to get one of these things up and running.
So how about a company with more of a proven commitment to Linux and Open Source developing soemthing similar?
Give me a flat screen, minimal hard drive (or large flash ROM, as someone else pointed out) and an Ethernet adaptor. (Would sound be necessary on something like this? I guess it depends on what you're using it for.) Hell, don't even give me a keyboard or mouse -- I can get cheap ones for about $20.
Preload Linux or *BSD, or just open the specs and let someone else do it for you.
How much would something like this cost to make? How much would people be willing to pay?
Because you haven't quite grasped the point of the article.
The author complains about skinnable apps because it allows people to make skins which are usually ugly and it complains also that Apple did a bad job for its Quicktime4 player.
See the contradiction?
No.
The author's point is that we're seeing an increasing trend towards bad UI design in general. Skinnable apps are bad not because someone can write bad skins for them, but because the coders don't seem to put any real importance on the UI. A user shouldn't have to tweak skins so that Netscape 6 is usable on their system.
I personally think the best quote in the Suck article is:
"It's more than a little ironic that the most enthusiastic proponents of the magical power of standards -- the open-source kids -- would so strenuously ignore standards when it comes to the interface."
My fondest wish for Linux GUI apps (and this isn't a "Linux needs [X] to win the desktops" or "Linux will never be adopted commercially if they don't do [X]" -- though I think it would help a lot):
Consistent keystrokes for menu commands. This was Apple's bread-and-butter on the Macintosh. Command Q always closed an application. Command-Z was "undo", command-X was "cut", command-C was "copy", and command-V was "paste". Command-S was "save", command-W was "close", and command-P was "print". Were these intuitive? No, but they became intuitive through consistency. I remember when Mac trade magazines would dock applications for not adhering to the standard Mac guidelines; I hope they still do.
Should I have to remember if an app uses...
Ctrl-X
Ctrl-Q
Alt-X
Alt-Q
Alt-F4
Ctrl-X, Ctrl-C (I know Emacs isn't a GUI app, but c'mon! two keystrokes?)
...to close an app?
True, I think also that many skins sucks. So what? The author who created it must have liked it otherwise he/she wouldn't have released it.
Hmm. Wasn't it Lazarus Long who said "Writers who read their work in public may have other nasty habits"?
The music sounds just as good through mpg123, and it doesn't waste CPU cycles or colormap space on effects you don't want.
Amen!
I just threw away xmms this morning -- I haven't been able to get any version beyond the prebuilt one on RH 6.1 to work right. Hell, half of the time I'm not even looking at my PC when it's running -- I shuffle a bunch of MP3s together and let it go while I read a book or something.
I remember reading, back when B5 started, that all the episodes were actually filmed in widescreen and would be available eventually on DVD, in widescreen, with extra scenes. Did this ever happen?
Okay, I've held off on commenting on Mozilla and/or Netscape 6 until I had a version that would actually run.
The themeable/skinnable GUI is just a bad, bad, BAD idea. I haven't tried it on my Mac yet, but the Win32 beta is horribly slow and unresponsive (one time I got a "this cookie wants to be set" dialog after I had closed the browser window!), and the UI sticks out like a sore thumb -- it feels like I'm running a big honking Java applet instead of the "leanest, most stable browser on the market".
Yes, I know this is a beta, but I have yet to see any program improve 200% over a preview version, which is what this needs.
The HTML rendering is great, however. Although it's weird to see the background GIFs rendering incrementally then tiled, and watching tables render incrementally is odd as well, it does feel faster than Netscape 4.x.
In the capitalist economy that we are supposedly living under, then market forces alone are sufficient to enable both consumers to purchase quality products and for corporations to have the freedom to innovate and grow.
What the hell do you think "market forces" consist of? A good part of it is consumer feedback -- both to the supplier of a product and other consumers.
DeCSS is extremely bad because it is so insidiously criminal - as evidenced by the foaming at the mouth/. open source zealots and their mindless rampage to crush anyone who dares claim so.
Failure of logic, part one: "This is illegal because people I don't agree with attack me when I say so."
DeCSS, which would have made any long-haired Linux "guru" able to watch DVDs,
Failure of logic, part two: The ad hominem attack.
did not have a license and as such would have lost those companies a lot of money. Hence, it was stealing. Get it?
Failure of logic, part three: "Loss of revenue equals stealing".
Better go back to troll school and learn to do it right.
How easy is it to migrate from 2.2.x to 2.4 (well, 2.3.99pre, in this case)? Can I just download source, compile and go like I can with current 2.2 kernels? Or are other crucial pieces of software going to have to be upgraded as well?
Oh well, I'm off to kuro5hin.org, which doesn't suck yet.
Slashdot's idea of an April Fool's prank is so bad that Anonymous Coward is leaving? I never thought I'd see the day.
I'm going to miss him... I swear, he posts on every topic on here, and not just once, but like 178 times. Some of his posts are funny, some of them are insightful, but some of them just seem like lame troll attempts. He's kooky in an all-over-the-map kind of way.
Re:where do you guys get this stuff from?
on
Quickielanche
·
· Score: 1
does anyone really care about any of that stuff anyways. it's like the damn forwards that people send me i don't really want them but people send them anyways. they are just useless without and have no meaning at all.
Oh sure, you take a penny, -- you take pennies all the time, don't you? -- but you never leave a penny.
At the convenience store next door to my work, I leave pennies all of the time. So much so, in fact, one time I goofed up and was a quarter short -- they guy said "don't worry about it".
Granted, I may be in a minority, but I don't think people are as greedy as your comment suggests...
BTW: Have you noticed how the moderators have pretty much given up Level 0 to the trollers?
[snip]
Moderators: Fight back and reconquer level 0 for us please!
The problem with that is, it takes twice as many moderator points to bump a 1-scored post -- from a troller who creates a login -- to -1 than it does to bump a 0-scored post to -1; therefore, fewer points are available to moderate good posts up. Which I suspect is the intention...
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's a (practically, not ethically) good thing that a browser that is destined to become a major product (or at any rate, let's hope so) should not have an ad blocker feature. If it did, too many people would activate it,
Out of curiosity, what makes your eyeballs so much better than theirs? Why should others 'pay' for your web browsing?
the efficiency of ads would decrease and that would mean either (a) some other means of advertising being invented, probably not as nice, or (b) less money for the web, so more expensive connections or something of the sort.
I hate to break it to you, but banner ads aren't working as it is. The reason they have to base advertising costs on page views is because clickthrough rates (the amount of people who actually click on a banner to see where it leads) decline by about 50% a year.
And it's the advertiser's own fault, really. Even with a theoretical clickthrough rate of 0.25% as of the end of 1999 (the article I cited above states the clickthrough rate is 0.5% at the end of 1998) how many of these are translated into actual sales? The problem is that once they get that clickthrough, they fail to deliver the goods. If I click on a banner that says "BUY QUAKE III NOW AND SAVE 20%!" I want to click on that link, enter my name and address and billing info that will get me Quake III. I don't want to get directed to the front page of http://www.coolnetgames.com/ and have to go hunting for it myself.
As others have said, when we make the transition to an advertising-based economy, you can expect products and services to go right down the tubes. (Hey, welcome to prime-time television! Has anyone else noticed that they squeeze ads in every place they can anymore, like during the end credit sequence of their shows?) Why should they care if I buy or not when they're making more money selling my eyeballs to other advertisers?
I would much prefer advertisers to put their money into something that is useful to them as well as to me -- that way, they will continue to pour their money into the internet, I'll find products I wish to purchase, and we will both get something of value. Because as it stands, this bubble is going to burst (whether or not Mozilla has image-blocking features) and the costs of your connection and other services are going to go up anyway.
Jay (=
Furthur more, say what you will, but I seriously doubt the world would be where it is today had someone not come along and designed an easy to use interface.
You're right -- three cheers to Xerox PARC! Hip-hip-hooray! And a tip of the hat to Apple for getting it out there for end users to see in the first place.
Jay (=
magine how hard it would be tell people how to get to ./ if it was http://slashdot.dot.
I think what he has in mind is:
http://slash.dot/
Now that would be cool!
Jay (=
The only way to counter "bad" stuff is with "good" stuff, and if all the stuff he's talked about is bad, then what could be better than to ass whole libraries to the Net?
See? Billington is right!
Everywhere I look, I see sex, sex, sex!
Jay (=
(couldn't resist, sorry)
Tom Cruise is supposedly another famous scientologist. Does that mean that next month we're going to start ragging on Mission Impossible-2 as another cult indoctrination plot?
There's a world of difference between the two, and you know it.
You can't say either of those about MI2.
The "ethics" of the CoS specifically allow for lying and deception if it helps advance their goals. Intimidation, slander and harrassment are also "ethical" if it targets an "enemy". F.A.C.T. Net and Operation Clambake are two good resources about the CoS; there are numerous accounts by former Scientologists of brainwashing, intimidation, and extortion.
Jay (=
They should have made a Mission Earth movie(s)....
Yaaah!!
A "Mission: Earth" movie would be like, what? 26 hours long???
Jay (=
(Glad to know he's not the only non-Scientologist who read that serise, though.)
Let's face it, an attractive woman who sits around the house all day for a for-pay webcam is a quick profit.
...Except according to her and her journal, she's not making a lot of profit. She's commented many times that if more people actually signed up as members, she'd have the money to do some really cool stuff. I remember her discussing the move from 30-min refresh/2-min-for-members to 15 and 1, trying to see if the increase in bandwidth usage would break her or not.
Most of her hardware (including her laptop) is actually donated to her by fans. As for her bed selling on eBay for $2800? Well, she said she paid over $3000 for it, so hawking her stuff hasn't been too lucrative either.
She is profiting off of horny lonely men, and will not give out any refunds(a drunk friend of mine signed up for jennicam, and refused to give him a refund).
Funny, I'm not lonely -- I proposed to my fiancee back in November, yet I still resubscribed to Jenni last month. Trust me, if I'm horny, I don't need to go to a website to get my rocks off.
Besides, in the last year, I've actually seen her having sex maybe 4 times, 5 times tops. That's a piss-poor average for a "porn site".
i predict these webcams will stay popular until one evening a crazed stalker enters the home and rapes/kills her for EVERYONE (including the guest cam) to see.
Fortunately, Jenni seems to have enough sense to take reasonable precautions to protect herself.
Jay (=
You are not moderated here for how well you frame your argument, nor for your persuasiveness, nor for any evidence that you might bring to support your argument.
Funny, those are all criteria I use when I'm moderating. And I've used almost all my points for the past month bumping posts up.
If you do not toe the party line, you are moderated down. This is, in fact, a form of censorship because many folks do not read Slashdot at a -1 threshold.
Don't thank Taco & Hemos or the moderators -- you can thank "[insert Slashdot editor here] sucks" and "Hot Grits" and "Natalie Portman" and "F1rZ7 p05t d0odZ" for my lack of enthusiasm for -1 posts and the recent raising of the default browsing level to 1.
(Although I do have "re-parent highly scored replies" turned on, so I frequently find myself dropping to -1 to find out what spawned a rather intersting reply. It'd be a lot easier if I could click on "Parent" and get the parent no matter _what_ it's scored...)
So, beware and be warned, karma whore that you are, you will be moderated down for not speaking the gospel according to Slashdot. You will be censored. You will be silenced. It is a fact of posting on Slashdot.
Look, if the moderation system is so bad here, why do you stay? That's what I don't get.
Jay (=
(they also work nicely on boring press releases ;)
I guess that explains why so many ppl's submissions never get posted...
I wouldn't post your submission either, if you emailed it to me instead of using the story submission form...
Jay (=
This sounds really lame, but I want one to act as a "front end" to my home network's streaming MP3 server. Right now I've got a crufty old P100 laptop doing duty, and it can barely run X and XMMS at the same time (I'm serious: I've tried BlackBox and even fvwm).
Well, I was going to ask why you need a GUI for just a plain ol' MP3 player (I use mpg123 more and more now, at least until I can get XMMS to play nice with my sound card) but then I saw the words "streaming mp3 server".
Are there any console-based/command-line MP3 players that will accept input from a streaming server? I have no clue. Does anyone else?
Jay (=
Why doesn't VA Linux or some other hardware company take this on?
Netpliance has shown that there is a market for cheap-ass, open thin clients. Even though you're going to double your investment adding the mods to it, apparently geeks are willing to shell out $400-$600 to get one of these things up and running.
So how about a company with more of a proven commitment to Linux and Open Source developing soemthing similar?
Give me a flat screen, minimal hard drive (or large flash ROM, as someone else pointed out) and an Ethernet adaptor. (Would sound be necessary on something like this? I guess it depends on what you're using it for.) Hell, don't even give me a keyboard or mouse -- I can get cheap ones for about $20.
Preload Linux or *BSD, or just open the specs and let someone else do it for you.
How much would something like this cost to make? How much would people be willing to pay?
On topic but a tangent, what would happen if someone ported GTK (or Qt) to Windows?
According to TrollTech's site, Qt is available for Windows.
Jay (=
I find this article a bit self-contradictory.
Because you haven't quite grasped the point of the article.
The author complains about skinnable apps because it allows people to make skins which are usually ugly and it complains also that Apple did a bad job for its Quicktime4 player.
See the contradiction?
No.
The author's point is that we're seeing an increasing trend towards bad UI design in general. Skinnable apps are bad not because someone can write bad skins for them, but because the coders don't seem to put any real importance on the UI. A user shouldn't have to tweak skins so that Netscape 6 is usable on their system.
I personally think the best quote in the Suck article is:
My fondest wish for Linux GUI apps (and this isn't a "Linux needs [X] to win the desktops" or "Linux will never be adopted commercially if they don't do [X]" -- though I think it would help a lot):
Consistent keystrokes for menu commands. This was Apple's bread-and-butter on the Macintosh. Command Q always closed an application. Command-Z was "undo", command-X was "cut", command-C was "copy", and command-V was "paste". Command-S was "save", command-W was "close", and command-P was "print". Were these intuitive? No, but they became intuitive through consistency. I remember when Mac trade magazines would dock applications for not adhering to the standard Mac guidelines; I hope they still do.
Should I have to remember if an app uses...
...to close an app?
True, I think also that many skins sucks. So what? The author who created it must have liked it otherwise he/she wouldn't have released it.
Hmm. Wasn't it Lazarus Long who said "Writers who read their work in public may have other nasty habits"?
Jay (=
The music sounds just as good through mpg123, and it doesn't waste CPU cycles or colormap space on effects you don't want.
Amen!
I just threw away xmms this morning -- I haven't been able to get any version beyond the prebuilt one on RH 6.1 to work right. Hell, half of the time I'm not even looking at my PC when it's running -- I shuffle a bunch of MP3s together and let it go while I read a book or something.
Jay (=
I remember reading, back when B5 started, that all the episodes were actually filmed in widescreen and would be available eventually on DVD, in widescreen, with extra scenes. Did this ever happen?
*sigh*
Not yet...
Jay (=
(looking at his calendar... "someday"...)
Okay, I've held off on commenting on Mozilla and/or Netscape 6 until I had a version that would actually run.
The themeable/skinnable GUI is just a bad, bad, BAD idea. I haven't tried it on my Mac yet, but the Win32 beta is horribly slow and unresponsive (one time I got a "this cookie wants to be set" dialog after I had closed the browser window!), and the UI sticks out like a sore thumb -- it feels like I'm running a big honking Java applet instead of the "leanest, most stable browser on the market".
Yes, I know this is a beta, but I have yet to see any program improve 200% over a preview version, which is what this needs.
The HTML rendering is great, however. Although it's weird to see the background GIFs rendering incrementally then tiled, and watching tables render incrementally is odd as well, it does feel faster than Netscape 4.x.
Jay (=
In the capitalist economy that we are supposedly living under, then market forces alone are sufficient to enable both consumers to purchase quality products and for corporations to have the freedom to innovate and grow.
What the hell do you think "market forces" consist of? A good part of it is consumer feedback -- both to the supplier of a product and other consumers.
Jay (=
DeCSS is extremely bad because it is so insidiously criminal - as evidenced by the foaming at the mouth /. open source zealots and their mindless rampage to crush anyone who dares claim so.
Failure of logic, part one: "This is illegal because people I don't agree with attack me when I say so."
DeCSS, which would have made any long-haired Linux "guru" able to watch DVDs,
Failure of logic, part two: The ad hominem attack.
did not have a license and as such would have lost those companies a lot of money. Hence, it was stealing. Get it?
Failure of logic, part three: "Loss of revenue equals stealing".
Better go back to troll school and learn to do it right.
Jay (=
How easy is it to migrate from 2.2.x to 2.4 (well, 2.3.99pre, in this case)? Can I just download source, compile and go like I can with current 2.2 kernels? Or are other crucial pieces of software going to have to be upgraded as well?
Jay (=
Oh well, I'm off to kuro5hin.org, which doesn't suck yet.
Slashdot's idea of an April Fool's prank is so bad that Anonymous Coward is leaving? I never thought I'd see the day.
I'm going to miss him... I swear, he posts on every topic on here, and not just once, but like 178 times. Some of his posts are funny, some of them are insightful, but some of them just seem like lame troll attempts. He's kooky in an all-over-the-map kind of way.
I'm sorry to see you go, AC.
Jay (=
I thought it was a windows problem, so I called Micosoft Tech support
i ddenfromlusers/Win95rv4.iso i ddenfromlusers/Win98SE.iso
Well, that was your first mistake, right there...
They had me format my drive and reinstall Windoze, from the original floppies, 3 times.
Geez! Microsoft had you on the ropes, didn't they? Everyone knows that you can get the Windoze ISO images for "emergency reinstalls".
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/techsupport/.../blind/h
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/techsupport/.../blind/h
Jay (=
does anyone really care about any of that stuff anyways. it's like the damn forwards that people send me i don't really want them but people send them anyways. they are just useless without and have no meaning at all.
So why haven't you gone into your Slashdot preferences and clicked on the "Quickies" box?
Jay (=
Oh sure, you take a penny, -- you take pennies all the time, don't you? -- but you never leave a penny.
At the convenience store next door to my work, I leave pennies all of the time. So much so, in fact, one time I goofed up and was a quarter short -- they guy said "don't worry about it".
Granted, I may be in a minority, but I don't think people are as greedy as your comment suggests...
Jay (=
Uhh...I don't think the US Supreme Court has a lot of influence in France.
:)
Spoken by a person who has never played "Illuminati: New World Order" by Steve Jackson Games...
Jay (=
BTW: Have you noticed how the moderators have
pretty much given up Level 0 to the trollers?
[snip]
Moderators: Fight back and reconquer level 0 for us please!
The problem with that is, it takes twice as many moderator points to bump a 1-scored post -- from a troller who creates a login -- to -1 than it does to bump a 0-scored post to -1; therefore, fewer points are available to moderate good posts up. Which I suspect is the intention...
Jay (=