Yeah, because all of the sane webmasters would have quit or killed themselves and the insane ones would be creating pages that no-one would want to visit!
So in summary the article is "humans found to be averse to risk and change"? Hasn't that been known by psychologists for ages? Humans (as a species) are happy with what they know and don't like the unknown. New technology is, to many, an unknown, ergo they don't like it and avoid it for as long as possible.
Besides, who needs half of this flashy trash anyway? iPhone? Pah, I'd still have a Nokia 3310 if it wasn't about as cheap to buy a 3510 as it was to get a replacement battery for the 3310, and I'm 23.
Now to wait for Fedora 9 so I can more easily update:) I tried pointing Smart at the Development repos for the Gnome RC but there isn't a way to say "upgrade all Gnome" - no meta package or anything that I saw - so I didn't feel like doing it package by package.
I've yet to see the point of Cheese as a 'main Gnome' app, though.
That's a corporate vs home situation, though, where you're blocking at the boundaries rather than relying on standard AV where the source of the file should make no difference - it's a browser download so it should get checked.
FTP is a file download from a remote machine via an Internet connection. HTTP is a file download from a remote machine via an Internet connection. Both of them leave a file on your machine that you can then execute. I'd expect any normal firewall to check any files that a browser downloads - there's no obvious difference in where it comes from that means it is guaranteed safe just because it's a different protocol.
If AV writers have been overlooking that yet have the sense to check HTTP and SMTP/IMAP incoming files then it just makes me feel even safer that I now only run Linux.
As for FTP downloads at work, I've never been able to do them because the two places I've worked at have blocked them from most of their network. One let you access FTP if you dug out the necessary proxy settings, but in a corporate environment it solves the problem without needing some Gatekeeper product.
Better make sure your gateway scanner is configured to scan FTP traffic as well. Our F-Secure Internet Gatekeeper does this by default.
"This wasn't done as a sales pitch, but buy our Gatekeeper software!"
So what's the major difference between an FTP hosted file and a HTTP hosted file for most people? Either way it downloads a file from a site that they can be convinced to run. Sounds all about the same to me.
Way to force unnecessary and cluttered behaviour on the user ("Yes, we know you go to GMail a lot and it is easy to spell, but you've now got to bookmark it if you want to show it at the top of your results list").
As for the analogy, it does match, just with extra computerisation.
Paper books: you mark the places you want to go back to, you know the books you go to the contents page for a lot, you can (if you have big bookmarks that you can write on) quickly skim the bookmarks to find the one you want.
Browser: you mark the places (pages in sites) you want to go back to, you know the sites you go to the contents page of a lot, you can quickly skim your bookmarks to find the one you want.
"Awesomebar" browser: you mark the places you want to go back to or keep for reference, those places then always jump to the front when you don't necessarily want them, you know the sites you go to the contents page of a lot but you've got to type a reasonable amount of the address to guarantee you get the right one, they're never going to be in the same order twice, they change drastically as you type each character, etc.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, that's just old-style formatting (i.e. not "OMGWTF you must see this as it it covers a chunk of your browser window with icons and coloured text") not old-style behaviour.
At which point their research methods are terrible and whoever recommended removing DRM on the basis of the "they're not being shared if they're non-DRM" should be shot and given the sack.
But will that wipe the item from your history completely or just reset its weighting to 0? If you could say "for this search then ignore this result" it would let you blacklist complete failures in the search, but that'd still be a long and slow process to go "no, my results are wrong, must spend the next five minutes wiping the results while preferably keeping my browsing history just so I can get better results the next time I do it".
I don't bookmark them - why should I need to when I know the URL? Bookmarks are there to track useful sites you might want to go back to and find again but which were a bit tricky to track down.
As an analogy, do you put a book mark in the front page of all of your physical paper books, or just on the page you're up to and the pages that might be a useful reference at a later date? Bookmarking "my website" is equivalent to the first one.
Ah, but that searches through a search engine, not your history and your bookmarks where it can potentially reveal bookmarks that are buried off in folders that people won't see but which accidentally (and potentially embarrasingly) show up for otherwise innocuous terms, even after you've cleared your browsing history.
I suggested some kind of tag for the searching, e.g. "s: slashdot" searches for slashdot in URL, title, etc, where as "slashdot" uses old-style auto-complete but they wouldn't have any of it.
Unfortunately I think it's also quite deeply buried in the code, so it might not be too easy to replace the functionality.
I will point out, though, that there have been times when I've used it to find a page that I could remember part of the title of. I just think it's terrible design to force such potentially inconsistent results ("addresses starting with what is typed" versus "anything - page or bookmark - with the typed characters anywhere within it, including session IDs") with no way of doing a "just auto-complete" behaviour.
Us: This is terrible behaviour and hugely inconsistent. It will confuse novice users with inconsistency and searching in an address bar and it'll annoy power users who used to be able to consistently locate the places they wanted to go based on the URL (which they remembered and which remained consistent). If we wanted to search then we'd search. Yes, it can be useful in some situations, but if we know what we want to type then we don't want the browser thinking it is better than me and incorrectly second-guessing what we want. Them: Everyone searches, and it learns. Searching is the future, so we're going to make you search.
The two sites I visit most at work are Slashdot and the BBC news (news.bbc.co.uk). What used to turn up top for "ne", "new" and "news"? The BBC news, because I wanted to go there and it matched what I typed. What turns up now? Slashdot because of "news for nerds" in the title. It needs huge amounts more weighting on URL starts than titles, but they don't seem willing to change it.
The other one that really annoys me is one of my sites. I could normally go to "sk" and hit it as first result, but now I've got to type even more of it and it doesn't make it to the top until after I've done the whole domain (because the domain is in the title of another page that always turns up top).
That wasn't quite my point. Yes, you can over generalise and there will always be people who are inherently going to cheat, but if you're given a position of responsibility then people will often be responsible because they have been given something extra and feel they should show it was worth giving it to them.
The other similar one is respect. A lot of people complain that they don't get respect from youngsters and yet they won't give respect themselves. Once you start giving respect then you start getting respect, as many "these kids are unruly" experiments have shown. Yes, it might take some time, but it can work.
It encoded those audio books with a digital watermark and monitored online file sharing networks, only to find that pirated copies of its audio books had been made from physical CDs or DRM-encoded digital downloads whose anticopying protections were overridden.
People are pirating the DRM/physical versions, where as the watermarked versions (from the use and meaning of the phrase "only to find") weren't pirated (or were to a much lower level as to be insignificant). That reads (to me) as "people who were given DRM-free audio books were happier with them and didn't feel the need to pirate them". The reason they chose not to could, by human nature, be because they're being trusted and not restricted/instantly put under suspicion and locked out like criminals.
I think this is needed as a tag for this article - suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
Isn't this all based on something we try to teach children? If you give someone trust then they will do the right thing, but if you're instantly distrustful then they're never going to do the right thing.
Hurrah for non-DRM! It's good to see they put some effort in to this rather than just going "we must put digital restricting management on the files because of 'teh leet haxxorz' who will cost us trillions of dollars and destroy the world economy by being selfish enough to want to do what they wish with the file they've paid for".
If only I had the cabling to format-shift my two Discworld audio book tapes.
Yeah, the Brits always do things like this properly. Any time I watch the American versions I think "yeah, good show, but it'd be better without the commentator being a completely over-zealous tit". Jeremy Clarkson was okay in the first series, but I think Craig Charles and Phillipa Forrester were the best team.
Big battles are fun, but what you need is the extra skill and variance of the games like Gauntlet and the variety of "trials" they did:)
found it still contains the sound files from Snow Day, even though they aren't being used in the Olympic version
If they did decompile and recompile it then hurrah for the Chinese - they removed the music! Yes, there's a mute button, but I still hate any Flash games that insist on playing music.
The Chinese have seen an idea they like and make an imitation of it? Shock, horror, how will our technology markets ever survive if they repeat it somewhere else?
Oh, hang on, they already do copy gadgets and make cheap versions that look almost identical.
Yes the idea is the same, yes the clouds are suspiciously similar, but how many other games are there on the Net that are almost identical like that? Unless they actually copied exact content then there's no copyright issue I can see, just lack of creativity.
Haven't they only recently done some work at Jodrell Bank? It might just have been replacing some bearings that support a dish (no small task, but nothing amazingly interesting) but it'd be a shame to lose it.
I lived the other side of Manchester to Jodrell Bank and visited a few times with family and with school. That and Goonhilly are amazing places for anyone with even a slight scientific interest.
Also, I've driven past one of the gates recently and I'm sure that the University of Manchester has some stake in it as they have a sign on one of the gates (how much land do they own?!). I wonder what impact it'll have on the new Super-University after they swallowed UMIST.
I'm only in my early 20s and we had people doing that at University anyway, but with HDDs. They'd give a HDD to one guy, who'd give it to another, who'd give it to another, who'd give it back and then each of the guys in the group could share their music/movies without the hassle of downloading them (which was ridiculously fast on the Uni network anyway).
(I'm also not advocating copyright infringement, just pointing out a method that friends of mine were using a whole half decade ago for mass transfer)
And can anyone decipher the marketing BS that somehow says the Links bar is new?
I think the important bit is
a place to put and easily access all their favorite web content such as links, feeds, WebSlices and even Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents
They've only just added "WebSlices" (which look like they're poorly implemented because they'll show a button for people who can't install/use them) so it must be that that's the difference that now makes it "favourites" instead.
I guess it could be documents as well, but having not used IE for years and Windows for months then I couldn't be sure.
I suppose you would rather use the open source alternatives for every program that requires a cd key or activation to operate or function.
Erm, I do. Wine instead of Cedega for games (because it performs better as well), Gimp instead of Photoshop (because it doesn't have to run through Wine and it is only Photoshop 6), Monodevelop for almost all C# development instead of the VM version of Windows and Visual Studion.Net (which I still keep for System.Windows.Forms).
I do SW dev in my free time (and at work) and plan to release my free-time work as GPL. Redhat and Novell make their money in their way. Why not support development by using tools, reporting issues, suggesting features and releasing your own things rather than paying $100s and seeing pennies of it go to the developer?
You probably would - you only typed it once for XP (unless you upgraded your machine, at which point XP thought it was a new machine and wanted re-activating). The problem with CD keys (from Microsoft's point of view) is that you can copy a key and hand it around, but you can't copy an activation code that needs to be confirmed by a remote machine.
I'd rather have a single CD key than 35(?) characters I need to type in to the phone followed by 35(?) characters you have to type back in to your computer. I had to activate three XP laptops at work that were purchased specially for a project and that was a pain. Actually, no, I'd rather not have a CD key at all, but that's why I run Linux at home.
One of the linked articles does cover an implicit acceptance of piracy in countries like Romania, mainly as a way to get people hooked on Windows before making them buy it (or just to keep OSS in check).
Gone are the days when there was nothing to watch at 11:00 but the local news...
Yeah, now with the amount of trash on TV (even with Sky) then there is nothing to watch from 7pm but the news, and even that repeats every half-hour!
On a more related note, who are most likely to be sleep deprived if it is only one in ten - the lowest earners, who need to work every hour they can to survive, or the highest earners, who feel they have to work more than their contract to keep their job?
Personally, I get about seven or eight hours every night and I still sometimes feel sleep deprived!
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because all of the sane webmasters would have quit or killed themselves and the insane ones would be creating pages that no-one would want to visit!
So in summary the article is "humans found to be averse to risk and change"? Hasn't that been known by psychologists for ages? Humans (as a species) are happy with what they know and don't like the unknown. New technology is, to many, an unknown, ergo they don't like it and avoid it for as long as possible.
Besides, who needs half of this flashy trash anyway? iPhone? Pah, I'd still have a Nokia 3310 if it wasn't about as cheap to buy a 3510 as it was to get a replacement battery for the 3310, and I'm 23.
Now to wait for Fedora 9 so I can more easily update :) I tried pointing Smart at the Development repos for the Gnome RC but there isn't a way to say "upgrade all Gnome" - no meta package or anything that I saw - so I didn't feel like doing it package by package.
I've yet to see the point of Cheese as a 'main Gnome' app, though.
That's a corporate vs home situation, though, where you're blocking at the boundaries rather than relying on standard AV where the source of the file should make no difference - it's a browser download so it should get checked.
FTP is a file download from a remote machine via an Internet connection. HTTP is a file download from a remote machine via an Internet connection. Both of them leave a file on your machine that you can then execute. I'd expect any normal firewall to check any files that a browser downloads - there's no obvious difference in where it comes from that means it is guaranteed safe just because it's a different protocol.
If AV writers have been overlooking that yet have the sense to check HTTP and SMTP/IMAP incoming files then it just makes me feel even safer that I now only run Linux.
As for FTP downloads at work, I've never been able to do them because the two places I've worked at have blocked them from most of their network. One let you access FTP if you dug out the necessary proxy settings, but in a corporate environment it solves the problem without needing some Gatekeeper product.
"This wasn't done as a sales pitch, but buy our Gatekeeper software!"
So what's the major difference between an FTP hosted file and a HTTP hosted file for most people? Either way it downloads a file from a site that they can be convinced to run. Sounds all about the same to me.
Way to force unnecessary and cluttered behaviour on the user ("Yes, we know you go to GMail a lot and it is easy to spell, but you've now got to bookmark it if you want to show it at the top of your results list").
As for the analogy, it does match, just with extra computerisation.
Paper books: you mark the places you want to go back to, you know the books you go to the contents page for a lot, you can (if you have big bookmarks that you can write on) quickly skim the bookmarks to find the one you want.
Browser: you mark the places (pages in sites) you want to go back to, you know the sites you go to the contents page of a lot, you can quickly skim your bookmarks to find the one you want.
"Awesomebar" browser: you mark the places you want to go back to or keep for reference, those places then always jump to the front when you don't necessarily want them, you know the sites you go to the contents page of a lot but you've got to type a reasonable amount of the address to guarantee you get the right one, they're never going to be in the same order twice, they change drastically as you type each character, etc.
As has been pointed out elsewhere, that's just old-style formatting (i.e. not "OMGWTF you must see this as it it covers a chunk of your browser window with icons and coloured text") not old-style behaviour.
At which point their research methods are terrible and whoever recommended removing DRM on the basis of the "they're not being shared if they're non-DRM" should be shot and given the sack.
But will that wipe the item from your history completely or just reset its weighting to 0? If you could say "for this search then ignore this result" it would let you blacklist complete failures in the search, but that'd still be a long and slow process to go "no, my results are wrong, must spend the next five minutes wiping the results while preferably keeping my browsing history just so I can get better results the next time I do it".
I don't bookmark them - why should I need to when I know the URL? Bookmarks are there to track useful sites you might want to go back to and find again but which were a bit tricky to track down.
As an analogy, do you put a book mark in the front page of all of your physical paper books, or just on the page you're up to and the pages that might be a useful reference at a later date? Bookmarking "my website" is equivalent to the first one.
Ah, but that searches through a search engine, not your history and your bookmarks where it can potentially reveal bookmarks that are buried off in folders that people won't see but which accidentally (and potentially embarrasingly) show up for otherwise innocuous terms, even after you've cleared your browsing history.
I suggested some kind of tag for the searching, e.g. "s: slashdot" searches for slashdot in URL, title, etc, where as "slashdot" uses old-style auto-complete but they wouldn't have any of it.
Unfortunately I think it's also quite deeply buried in the code, so it might not be too easy to replace the functionality.
I will point out, though, that there have been times when I've used it to find a page that I could remember part of the title of. I just think it's terrible design to force such potentially inconsistent results ("addresses starting with what is typed" versus "anything - page or bookmark - with the typed characters anywhere within it, including session IDs") with no way of doing a "just auto-complete" behaviour.
To put it bluntly: You're sh*t out of luck.
See here for the discussion that basically goes:
Us: This is terrible behaviour and hugely inconsistent. It will confuse novice users with inconsistency and searching in an address bar and it'll annoy power users who used to be able to consistently locate the places they wanted to go based on the URL (which they remembered and which remained consistent). If we wanted to search then we'd search. Yes, it can be useful in some situations, but if we know what we want to type then we don't want the browser thinking it is better than me and incorrectly second-guessing what we want.
Them: Everyone searches, and it learns. Searching is the future, so we're going to make you search.
The two sites I visit most at work are Slashdot and the BBC news (news.bbc.co.uk). What used to turn up top for "ne", "new" and "news"? The BBC news, because I wanted to go there and it matched what I typed. What turns up now? Slashdot because of "news for nerds" in the title. It needs huge amounts more weighting on URL starts than titles, but they don't seem willing to change it.
The other one that really annoys me is one of my sites. I could normally go to "sk" and hit it as first result, but now I've got to type even more of it and it doesn't make it to the top until after I've done the whole domain (because the domain is in the title of another page that always turns up top).
That wasn't quite my point. Yes, you can over generalise and there will always be people who are inherently going to cheat, but if you're given a position of responsibility then people will often be responsible because they have been given something extra and feel they should show it was worth giving it to them.
The other similar one is respect. A lot of people complain that they don't get respect from youngsters and yet they won't give respect themselves. Once you start giving respect then you start getting respect, as many "these kids are unruly" experiments have shown. Yes, it might take some time, but it can work.
People are pirating the DRM/physical versions, where as the watermarked versions (from the use and meaning of the phrase "only to find") weren't pirated (or were to a much lower level as to be insignificant). That reads (to me) as "people who were given DRM-free audio books were happier with them and didn't feel the need to pirate them". The reason they chose not to could, by human nature, be because they're being trusted and not restricted/instantly put under suspicion and locked out like criminals.
I think this is needed as a tag for this article - suddenoutbreakofcommonsense.
Isn't this all based on something we try to teach children? If you give someone trust then they will do the right thing, but if you're instantly distrustful then they're never going to do the right thing.
Hurrah for non-DRM! It's good to see they put some effort in to this rather than just going "we must put digital restricting management on the files because of 'teh leet haxxorz' who will cost us trillions of dollars and destroy the world economy by being selfish enough to want to do what they wish with the file they've paid for".
If only I had the cabling to format-shift my two Discworld audio book tapes.
Yeah, the Brits always do things like this properly. Any time I watch the American versions I think "yeah, good show, but it'd be better without the commentator being a completely over-zealous tit". Jeremy Clarkson was okay in the first series, but I think Craig Charles and Phillipa Forrester were the best team.
:)
Big battles are fun, but what you need is the extra skill and variance of the games like Gauntlet and the variety of "trials" they did
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robot_wars
If they did decompile and recompile it then hurrah for the Chinese - they removed the music! Yes, there's a mute button, but I still hate any Flash games that insist on playing music.
The Chinese have seen an idea they like and make an imitation of it? Shock, horror, how will our technology markets ever survive if they repeat it somewhere else?
Oh, hang on, they already do copy gadgets and make cheap versions that look almost identical.
Yes the idea is the same, yes the clouds are suspiciously similar, but how many other games are there on the Net that are almost identical like that? Unless they actually copied exact content then there's no copyright issue I can see, just lack of creativity.
Haven't they only recently done some work at Jodrell Bank? It might just have been replacing some bearings that support a dish (no small task, but nothing amazingly interesting) but it'd be a shame to lose it.
I lived the other side of Manchester to Jodrell Bank and visited a few times with family and with school. That and Goonhilly are amazing places for anyone with even a slight scientific interest.
Also, I've driven past one of the gates recently and I'm sure that the University of Manchester has some stake in it as they have a sign on one of the gates (how much land do they own?!). I wonder what impact it'll have on the new Super-University after they swallowed UMIST.
I'm only in my early 20s and we had people doing that at University anyway, but with HDDs. They'd give a HDD to one guy, who'd give it to another, who'd give it to another, who'd give it back and then each of the guys in the group could share their music/movies without the hassle of downloading them (which was ridiculously fast on the Uni network anyway).
(I'm also not advocating copyright infringement, just pointing out a method that friends of mine were using a whole half decade ago for mass transfer)
I think the important bit is
They've only just added "WebSlices" (which look like they're poorly implemented because they'll show a button for people who can't install/use them) so it must be that that's the difference that now makes it "favourites" instead.
I guess it could be documents as well, but having not used IE for years and Windows for months then I couldn't be sure.
One has intelligence, the other just collects it from other people ;)
Erm, I do. Wine instead of Cedega for games (because it performs better as well), Gimp instead of Photoshop (because it doesn't have to run through Wine and it is only Photoshop 6), Monodevelop for almost all C# development instead of the VM version of Windows and Visual Studion
I do SW dev in my free time (and at work) and plan to release my free-time work as GPL. Redhat and Novell make their money in their way. Why not support development by using tools, reporting issues, suggesting features and releasing your own things rather than paying $100s and seeing pennies of it go to the developer?
You probably would - you only typed it once for XP (unless you upgraded your machine, at which point XP thought it was a new machine and wanted re-activating). The problem with CD keys (from Microsoft's point of view) is that you can copy a key and hand it around, but you can't copy an activation code that needs to be confirmed by a remote machine.
I'd rather have a single CD key than 35(?) characters I need to type in to the phone followed by 35(?) characters you have to type back in to your computer. I had to activate three XP laptops at work that were purchased specially for a project and that was a pain. Actually, no, I'd rather not have a CD key at all, but that's why I run Linux at home.
One of the linked articles does cover an implicit acceptance of piracy in countries like Romania, mainly as a way to get people hooked on Windows before making them buy it (or just to keep OSS in check).
Yeah, now with the amount of trash on TV (even with Sky) then there is nothing to watch from 7pm but the news, and even that repeats every half-hour!
On a more related note, who are most likely to be sleep deprived if it is only one in ten - the lowest earners, who need to work every hour they can to survive, or the highest earners, who feel they have to work more than their contract to keep their job?
Personally, I get about seven or eight hours every night and I still sometimes feel sleep deprived!