On the PNG front: PNG is so much better than any other format for [...] web pages. It's alpha tran[s]parency and colour pa[l]et[e] is all you need (it runs circles around GIF).
Yeah, too bad that alpha transparency is far from widely or uniformly supported among active User Agents. As far as color palette, PNG does permit more than 256 colors, but there are few instances where that many colors are needed *and* JPEG won't deliver superior compression, as most of those cases are of "photographic" elements better served by JPEG than GIF/PNG. On the Web, a smart program can create the illusion of >256 colors with 256 colors for indexed GIFs/PNGs.
All PNG really has going for it when it comes to final/published Web graphics is improved compression in cases where the author may have used a GIF -- and, at that, not always, and often only markedly so with the assistance of something like PNGcrush.
Paranoid Web publishers will only deliver PNGs to User Agents capable of rendering them (e.g. through Apache's MultiViews directive) -- which screws with many caches, killing most of the bandwidth gain of PNG in place of GIF. It's almost a zero-sum game for publishers looking to reduce bandwidth while still serving User Agents who don't understand PNGs at all.
And let's not forget about broken transparency support, single-color as well as alpha channel.
PNGs should be the internet standard for non vector graphics[...]
Even though it doesn't really deliver substantial advantage over the existing JPEG standard for "photographic" images? JPEG may be lossy, but at today's screen resolutions it usually packs more acceptable image in fewer bytes than PNG.
[B]ut alas, IE does not render [PNGs] properly (the colours get twisted and changed as far as I've experienced). If MS could stick to standards, it'd make the internet a whole lot better.
And we're going to ignore completely broken PNG support in Netscape 4.x? Or any other User Agent that doesn't support PNG's alpha channels, gamma correction, etc. etc.? Please. MSIE may fall down with PNG, but so do about 95% of all User Agents in common usage today. As with any useful standard to hit the Web, PNG is hobbled by lingering, hasty "me first" implementations from developers, whether from Redmond or not.
Gee. I suppose that will happen with JPEG2000, too.
oh why did i log onto slash today?
every year I try to get throug[h] the whole day
without someone pulling an april fools joke
on me.
Spending as much time on Slashdot today
should guarantee your safety. None of the
stories posted have approached measurable
hilarity factor.
Exception that proves the rule: the use
of pigeons by Google. On the other hand,
the humor was worn right off that story
by the frequent mentions in user posts
both before and after its appearance on
the 'dot.
DAILY MEDIA NEWS FEED FOR MONDAY, APRIL 1
Provided by IWantMedia.com
Send your news tips to tips@mediabistro.com.
YOU'VE GOT BLOGS! AOL BUYS INTO HOMEGROWN MEDIA
AOL Time Warner is acquiring the rights to many popular blogs, including
Instapundit and USS Clueless.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/28/24652.html
But they must have wised up, as it no longer
appears on
their front page.
Oops.
I wrote the above, but I don't understand the mod.
Asking Jeeves the question posed by the OP
["Did ask.com buy out teoma?"] would have been funny. If only because it prominently returns this
helpful link:
This result might also be viewed as funny,
in that it partly refutes
this claim that
Ask Jeeves
is considered by most an
"inferior search engine."
Looks to me like it can handle
hasty questions
from
five-digit Slashbots just fine.
Also of potential interest are a couple of links at the bottom of each search results page [to] try your search on AskJeeves.com or DirectHit.com. [I]t seems somewhat odd that they'd include links to what most people [...] consider to be inferior search engines instead.
Complete the thought.
Ask Jeeves, Inc.
owns both
Teoma (September 2001)
and
Direct Hit (January 2000).
The selected URLs prominently display that owership relation.
"Ask Jeeves has purchased the Teoma search engine, which has attracted interest over recent months as a potential relevancy challenger to Google."
You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.
Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?
Not sure if you realized this (I hope you did) but the first link in the Slashdot blurb goes to the actual review.
True. The unfortunate lack of precision in selecting
which copy to actually link does mislead those who
scan into thinking that first link goes to nothing
more than general, Sun-esque information about SO 6.0.
I remember this freeware app [...]
Instead of you putting in a password it would show you a picture of a bedroom or somthing.
V-GO Universal Password, crafted by
Passlogix?
I don't see it offered by the company anymore,
but it looks like it was a $30 shareware app
for Windows (likely mirrored out there, somewhere).
I don't know if they're using the AOL client or not but...
...I'm going to go ahead and post my speculations anyway? Does that make any sense at all?
[T]here should be no need for them to either.
AOL owns Netscape and owns a share in iPlanet so there are plenty of "normal" email options to choose from both on client and server.
A reasonable attempt to apply logic to this
topic. Unfortunately:
Perhaps some overzealous manager issued an edict that everyone *must* use AOL even though it's email software is next to useless in a work environment.
Or perhaps not. You take the time to point out that AOL/TW controls a number of possible resources they could leverage, then jump right back to the assumption that the corporation rebadged AOL 7.0 for internal communications. Unbelievable.
Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment.
Obviously the person who wrote the above didn't
even bother to understand the situation. From
the particular article referenced in the Slashdot "story":
The various types of e-mail software used by employees
aren't the same as those used by America Online subscribers at home. Instead, the divisions customized AOL products, such as those from its Netscape unit.
Agreed, another one that sucks are the one that your registrar sold you out on.
You really think that it takes registrar consent
to farm WHOIS entries for email addresses? Please.
Spare the melodrama. That your registrar happens
to be mentioned in the UCE? Did you ever stop to think that the registrar's information is also available through the self-same WHOIS query?
To the facelesss moderator: Interesting? Perhaps
as interesting as any well-known and well-worn
source of email addresses is to any discussion
of UCE. That someone points to his registrar as
a source of irritating UCE with little substantiation and apparently little understanding
of how open his domain registrations actually are?
Hardly interesting at all.
Elide the space between the letters
'r' and 'e' in 'children' above, of course.
You can even grab the full House Resolution as a
PDF from a government site... you want
H.R. 3833 (107th Congress). It has some
juicy bits.
For the record, I was going to submit the story
myself back on the 8th when I read the article
on CNN.com -- then I figued the editors would
quash it. Just like yesterday's submission
concerning the vogue of Web subscriptions...
guess they took it personally.;)
Response rates:
E-messaging 5%-15%
Traditional direct 0.5%-5.0%
Anybody know how accurate this is?
The 5-15% response rate for emessaging is about right for "direct email marketing" [non-UCE or unintentional ("oops, we f---ed up") UCE]. Actual response rate varies wildly, depending on list composition, message type (newsletter, service reminder, etc.), and the vlue proposition of the message itself. Response rate is usually defined as unique clickthroughs (at least one "click" on at least one link contained within an email per recipient == a response). Jupiter may have defined it to mean something else.
Response rates in this range generally require good recipient lists (recent, active accounts comprised of people who actually opted to receive your message). Weaker lists ("sign up for special messages from our partners when you open a HotMail account") typically net a 2-4% clickthrough response in best case scenarios.
Now, true UCE/spam... well, I find it difficult to believe that its response rates (measured as clickthrough) rarely approach even 2-4%, let alone 5-15%.
Note that the "response rates" for the two media you lifted (email v. direct mail) aren't necessarily measurements of the same *type* of response.
Opera's problem is that it doesn't support DHTML, in particular the full W3C DOM1 and DOM2 standards.
There is no such thing as DHTML.
You are very much on-target with
the comment about DOM support.
I personally gave up on Opera
early because of that lack of
support and the slow pace with
which its developers notified
people of its deficiencies in
specific, actionable terms.
I'm certain they're more forthcoming
now about Opera's capabilities, but
back with the early 5.x series, there
were no definite answers to be had.
Scratch my interest.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I'm a web consultant, I work with a lot of clients and see a lot of attitudes about new technologies[...]
Funny. Let me offer you my attitude about an older technology: HTTP. Does 404 ring a bell?
Exhbit A:
(User #121589 Info | http://www.skepsis.com/~tfarrell/resume/)
On the PNG front: PNG is so much better than any other format for [...] web pages. It's alpha tran[s]parency and colour pa[l]et[e] is all you need (it runs circles around GIF).
Yeah, too bad that alpha transparency is far from widely or uniformly supported among active User Agents. As far as color palette, PNG does permit more than 256 colors, but there are few instances where that many colors are needed *and* JPEG won't deliver superior compression, as most of those cases are of "photographic" elements better served by JPEG than GIF/PNG. On the Web, a smart program can create the illusion of >256 colors with 256 colors for indexed GIFs/PNGs.
All PNG really has going for it when it comes to final/published Web graphics is improved compression in cases where the author may have used a GIF -- and, at that, not always, and often only markedly so with the assistance of something like PNGcrush.
Paranoid Web publishers will only deliver PNGs to User Agents capable of rendering them (e.g. through Apache's MultiViews directive) -- which screws with many caches, killing most of the bandwidth gain of PNG in place of GIF. It's almost a zero-sum game for publishers looking to reduce bandwidth while still serving User Agents who don't understand PNGs at all.
And let's not forget about broken transparency support, single-color as well as alpha channel.
PNGs should be the internet standard for non vector graphics[...]
Even though it doesn't really deliver substantial advantage over the existing JPEG standard for "photographic" images? JPEG may be lossy, but at today's screen resolutions it usually packs more acceptable image in fewer bytes than PNG.
[B]ut alas, IE does not render [PNGs] properly (the colours get twisted and changed as far as I've experienced). If MS could stick to standards, it'd make the internet a whole lot better.
And we're going to ignore completely broken PNG support in Netscape 4.x? Or any other User Agent that doesn't support PNG's alpha channels, gamma correction, etc. etc.? Please. MSIE may fall down with PNG, but so do about 95% of all User Agents in common usage today. As with any useful standard to hit the Web, PNG is hobbled by lingering, hasty "me first" implementations from developers, whether from Redmond or not.
Gee. I suppose that will happen with JPEG2000, too.
This [thrillers] is not a genre that usually has airtight stories (although there are exceptions like the sixth sense).
[eyes rolling] Yeah, movies about ghosts are so airtight. [/eyes rolling]
I've always wondered why it never raised more of a fuss than it did.
No one was listening to NPR. They were all tuned in to W-K-ROQ-LITE-Q-Z FM.
oh why did i log onto slash today? every year I try to get throug[h] the whole day without someone pulling an april fools joke on me.
Spending as much time on Slashdot today should guarantee your safety. None of the stories posted have approached measurable hilarity factor. Exception that proves the rule: the use of pigeons by Google. On the other hand, the humor was worn right off that story by the frequent mentions in user posts both before and after its appearance on the 'dot.
I hate April Fools ... but probably not as much as others do. Example:
Media Bistro
posted this "story" as the lead in its
daily News Feed:
But they must have wised up, as it no longer appears on their front page. Oops.
I wrote the above, but I don't understand the mod.
Asking Jeeves the question posed by the OP ["Did ask.com buy out teoma?"] would have been funny. If only because it prominently returns this helpful link:
This result might also be viewed as funny, in that it partly refutes this claim that Ask Jeeves is considered by most an "inferior search engine." Looks to me like it can handle hasty questions from five-digit Slashbots just fine.
Also of potential interest are a couple of links at the bottom of each search results page [to] try your search on AskJeeves.com or DirectHit.com. [I]t seems somewhat odd that they'd include links to what most people [...] consider to be inferior search engines instead.
Complete the thought. Ask Jeeves, Inc. owns both Teoma (September 2001) and Direct Hit (January 2000). The selected URLs prominently display that owership relation.
Did ask.com buy out teoma?
It isn't too hard to follow the link labeled Press Information at the Teoma site to find another link to the Search Engine Watch report entitled Ask Jeeves Acquires Teoma from Ovtober, 2001.
The good folks at Teoma were even nice enough to excerpt the following:
You may even notice that Ask Jeeves is plastered all over the contact page. I don't think they're hiding the connection between the two brands from anyone.
Has the use of search engines impaired our ability to follow links from one document to the next?
Heck, a Google search of your exact question led to the NewsTrove tracking of the assimilation. Then again, the other results were a little iffy. ;)
Not sure if you realized this (I hope you did) but the first link in the Slashdot blurb goes to the actual review.
True. The unfortunate lack of precision in selecting which copy to actually link does mislead those who scan into thinking that first link goes to nothing more than general, Sun-esque information about SO 6.0.
It reminds me of a film [...] with Patrick Stewart [...] where each day he had to put these strange Chinese characters into a picture[.]
Safe House?
Default image: the BSD !
In case you haven't heard, *BSD is dying. I think you meant the BSOD.
fin
I remember this freeware app [...] Instead of you putting in a password it would show you a picture of a bedroom or somthing.
V-GO Universal Password, crafted by Passlogix? I don't see it offered by the company anymore, but it looks like it was a $30 shareware app for Windows (likely mirrored out there, somewhere).
Johnny Mnemonic
Whoa!
I don't know if they're using the AOL client or not but...
[T]here should be no need for them to either. AOL owns Netscape and owns a share in iPlanet so there are plenty of "normal" email options to choose from both on client and server.
A reasonable attempt to apply logic to this topic. Unfortunately:
Perhaps some overzealous manager issued an edict that everyone *must* use AOL even though it's email software is next to useless in a work environment.
Or perhaps not. You take the time to point out that AOL/TW controls a number of possible resources they could leverage, then jump right back to the assumption that the corporation rebadged AOL 7.0 for internal communications. Unbelievable.
At least read this excerpt from the MSNBC article. Or maybe go back and read the article first?
Obviously the person who sent out that decree has either a. never used aol mail, or b. never used email in a corporate environment.
Obviously the person who wrote the above didn't even bother to understand the situation. From the particular article referenced in the Slashdot "story":
Emphasis mine, smartass.
Agreed, another one that sucks are the one that your registrar sold you out on.
You really think that it takes registrar consent to farm WHOIS entries for email addresses? Please. Spare the melodrama. That your registrar happens to be mentioned in the UCE? Did you ever stop to think that the registrar's information is also available through the self-same WHOIS query?
To the facelesss moderator: Interesting? Perhaps as interesting as any well-known and well-worn source of email addresses is to any discussion of UCE. That someone points to his registrar as a source of irritating UCE with little substantiation and apparently little understanding of how open his domain registrations actually are? Hardly interesting at all.
I always thought pobox.com was a good service for that. Never used 'em though, never quite needed what they offered.
pobox.com (didn't I just say that?) isn't much cheaper than Yahoo!'s offer. Subscriptions begin at $15.
I dont' remember the source of the story though I think it was news.com, it was about 2 months ago, and did try to submit here to /.
Ummm...
http://www.cnn.com/2002/TECH/internet/03/08/childr en.internet.ap/
Elide the space between the letters 'r' and 'e' in 'children' above, of course. You can even grab the full House Resolution as a PDF from a government site ... you want
H.R. 3833 (107th Congress). It has some
juicy bits.
For the record, I was going to submit the story myself back on the 8th when I read the article on CNN.com -- then I figued the editors would quash it. Just like yesterday's submission concerning the vogue of Web subscriptions ...
guess they took it personally. ;)
Lots of free sites that used to be fun are now making themselves "useful" by charging for subscriptions.
Such wonderful timing:
- CNN.com (AP Newswire), 18 March 2002
Response rates:
E-messaging 5%-15%
Traditional direct 0.5%-5.0%
Anybody know how accurate this is?
The 5-15% response rate for emessaging is about right for "direct email marketing" [non-UCE or unintentional ("oops, we f---ed up") UCE]. Actual response rate varies wildly, depending on list composition, message type (newsletter, service reminder, etc.), and the vlue proposition of the message itself. Response rate is usually defined as unique clickthroughs (at least one "click" on at least one link contained within an email per recipient == a response). Jupiter may have defined it to mean something else.
Response rates in this range generally require good recipient lists (recent, active accounts comprised of people who actually opted to receive your message). Weaker lists ("sign up for special messages from our partners when you open a HotMail account") typically net a 2-4% clickthrough response in best case scenarios.
Now, true UCE/spam ... well, I find it difficult to believe that its response rates (measured as clickthrough) rarely approach even 2-4%, let alone 5-15%.
Note that the "response rates" for the two media you lifted (email v. direct mail) aren't necessarily measurements of the same *type* of response.
- fmr. direct email mktg. cog
I encounter daily sites providing content thru the use of ActiveX controls: [snip list]
Geez. I'm impressed. Someone here actually comprehends how things work. Thank you.
He isn't dumb, he pointed out that most AOL users don't bother to upgrade[.]
Let's cut the AOListas a little slack. The 'average' person on the Internet don't bother to upgrade unless helped, forced, or tricked.
Opera's problem is that it doesn't support DHTML, in particular the full W3C DOM1 and DOM2 standards.
There is no such thing as DHTML. You are very much on-target with the comment about DOM support.
I personally gave up on Opera early because of that lack of support and the slow pace with which its developers notified people of its deficiencies in specific, actionable terms.
I'm certain they're more forthcoming now about Opera's capabilities, but back with the early 5.x series, there were no definite answers to be had. Scratch my interest.
The parent is obviously a troll. Look at the craftsmanship:
Oft-repeated and tiresome plea:
Could we try, at least this time, to have a discussion [...]instead of yet another Jonkatz bashing fest?
Statement of the obvious:
If you don't like Jon, ignore the storie and change your settings accordingly.
Public expression of persecution complex:
Yes, I know I'll loose karma over this
Grammar Nazi bait:
Classic signs of frist p0st mentality:
Now that there aren't so many posts yet...
thank you
We could all learn a lot from this post... about trolling, not proper moderation.