I realize that most websites run some version or another of "adverts", but generally speaking, most of those sites are marginal value to start. The sites I frequent usually use text ads, and not the flash (pun intended) graphical ads on some of the more questionable sites.
Do you even realize that the hosting/bandwidth for your marginal and questionable comment was paid for by adverts?
It doesn't seem like Firefox's status bar message is very accurate. My guess is that it shows the last thing loaded (e.g. Google Analytics) but not necessarily the item which is holding up the page.
Oh, I can put my finger on it. The New York Times and other major media outlets ran "Wikigroaning" articles making fun of the amount of trivia on the site. Soon afterwards, there was a fairly major effort to clean up popular culture articles and export a lot of the fan-cruft stuff to other wikis.
If there's one thing the wiki-collective reacts to, it's any kind of popular criticism.
Anyone who would actually care about this is also blocking cookies and javascript and won't show up in your web analytics in the first place. Even if ever browser had a prominent "block referrer" option, 90% of people wouldn't bother.
This isn't true, Windows software can copied to your user directory and run with no elevation prompt. (Google Chrome installs this way for example). You can easily test this by putting an EXE on your desktop.
The real issue is that the multi-user Admin versus User security dichotomy falls apart when the user is also the system's administrator. If you have a system where end users can install software, you can't prevent them from installing malware.
Assuming there is a market niche between netbooks and smartphones, there's really nothing stopping Intel from scaling downward and taking it over.
I think it's really going to come down to whether you want to pay $50 up front for the convenience of Windows apps, or whether you get a free device subsidized by google ads. There probably won't be a form-factor advantage, or at least not a permanent one.
Intel and Microsoft really really really want you to believe there's a fundamental difference between a "netbook" and regular desktop/laptop computer. Their margins depend on it.
But there really isn't, hardware-wise netbooks are are perceptually competitive with most desktop PCs, and most of them run a full desktop OS (Windows).
Question is, if you could have all the advantages of a desktop OS like Windows or Linux, and still access "the cloud" via Firefox, why would anyone choose an OS that only runs a web browser?
Nope you're wrong. IBM was under anti-trust orders to license out their hardware designs. They didn't have any choice in the matter.
They might not have originally intended it, but they made good money charging royalties for things like ISA and VGA from every other PC manufacturer through out the 1980s and early 1990s.
Cellphone software is a special kind of garbage. There's no way you could *sell* 50% of this shit on a desktop platform because users are smart enough to type in URLs.
Keep in mind the target customer base here are the same drooling mouth-breathers who also spend $8 quadrillion a year on MIDI ringtones.
And that sounds great if you're a programmer right out of college, but Win32 tie-in, specifically with MS Office is still a huge factor in the real world. A big problem here is that the hardware they're targeting will be able to run fullbore Windows 7 just fine.
We've had web-based word processors for fifteen years but Google's web-based word processor is different because it's from Google?
Yeah and all webapps which everyone hated when the iPhone did it
Everyone? Where's the evidence for that? Most iPhone users I know spend more of their time using Safari versus appstore stuff.
A significant chunk of the iPhone apps are just front-ends for web applications anyway. They could be replaced with webapps and the end users would barely notice the difference. (And this percentage would be even higher if the iPhone supported flash).
Developers and Apple love native apps because they can charge for stuff that's normally free on the WWW. Users love it mostly because of the store/icon placement. I don't see a whole lot of evidence that there's a technology preference being made here.
The W3C was almost irrelevant in the period when Netscape was the dominant browser. Netscape did whatever the hell it wanted (tables, frames), and the W3C was constantly playing catchup with them.
The major break was when Netscape pushed "JavaScript Style Sheets" over CSS and "Layers" over the W3C DOM.
Internet Explorer 4 contained preliminary versions of the W3C CSS and DOM standards. Yes they were incomplete and buggy and extended, but without them the W3C probably would have faded away completely.
When Mozilla came out, it was far more compatible with IE than it was with previous versions of Netscape.
Not to say that GIMP isn't good, but one does have to wonder exactly why it should be in the default install or live CD.
When I first started reading slashdot years ago, people consider The GIMP to be the "flagship" open source desktop application. As in the program that proved Linux was as good as any other PC OS. So its always held this historical position as #1 Desktop App, birthplace of GTK, etc.
Some of the 'controversy' (if it actually exists) is probably just because open source advocates spent *a lot* of time and effort promoting GIMP and trying to convince people it was as good or better than various alternatives.
Expecting every user to whitelist all of their web content is certainly the most impractical plan ever (and doesn't address the real problem of social engineering anyway).
Using things like Tor isn't just impractical, it's paranoia.
How about browser vendors getting their shit together instead? Firefox is a prime example, loudly promoted as "secure", but actually a cheap whore for any DLL someone decides to throw onto your computer. If they focused on building effective sandboxes first rather than "development platforms" (that nobody asked for), the majority of this problem wouldn't exist.
Who says they didn't know? They probably had some management turnover and nobody bothered to check the old contracts. Or maybe the lawyers took a second look and thought they could get more money.
Novell almost forgot they owned UNIX System V, so it happens.
According to Apple, Psystar has violated its exclusive right to copy Mac OS X. Psystar admits that it has made copies of Mac OS X and installed those copies on non-Apple computers
i.e., The first copy to the imaging server was not legal, and therefore every subsequent copy/adaption was also illegal, regardless of the EULA & first sale doctrine.
The DMCA applies to "effective access control", but the OS X hardware lockout does not actually control access. 100% of the content on the OS X DVD is accessible without it.
As of yet, I don't believe the DMCA has been applied to this kind of software runtime check. Whether this would hold up against someone with competent lawyers is a good question.
The general rule of thumb for collectors is that the obscure bootlegs are worth far more than the real thing. (Franklins were not all that rare though.)
Slashdot Mirror
No, the main reason Flash is used is because it's "flashy" and draws more eyeballs to that space. Any additional tracking is just a side-benefit.
And everyone knows you can block ads if you really want to. Although Flash allows them to overlay ads over video and that kind of thing.
I realize that most websites run some version or another of "adverts", but generally speaking, most of those sites are marginal value to start. The sites I frequent usually use text ads, and not the flash (pun intended) graphical ads on some of the more questionable sites.
Do you even realize that the hosting/bandwidth for your marginal and questionable comment was paid for by adverts?
It doesn't seem like Firefox's status bar message is very accurate. My guess is that it shows the last thing loaded (e.g. Google Analytics) but not necessarily the item which is holding up the page.
Oh, I can put my finger on it. The New York Times and other major media outlets ran "Wikigroaning" articles making fun of the amount of trivia on the site. Soon afterwards, there was a fairly major effort to clean up popular culture articles and export a lot of the fan-cruft stuff to other wikis.
If there's one thing the wiki-collective reacts to, it's any kind of popular criticism.
Anyone who would actually care about this is also blocking cookies and javascript and won't show up in your web analytics in the first place. Even if ever browser had a prominent "block referrer" option, 90% of people wouldn't bother.
IBM certainly did collect licensing revenue for ISA etc., the common figure was about $5 per PC shipped.
The issue with MCA wasn't so much the price but that it wasn't under "RAND" licensing, i.e. IBM could use it to control other OEM's business models.
Non-root users can't install in Windows either.
This isn't true, Windows software can copied to your user directory and run with no elevation prompt. (Google Chrome installs this way for example). You can easily test this by putting an EXE on your desktop.
The real issue is that the multi-user Admin versus User security dichotomy falls apart when the user is also the system's administrator. If you have a system where end users can install software, you can't prevent them from installing malware.
> If someone wants to argue that IE's version of HTML is better than W3C's
The proposed HTML5 spec does contain some minor "IEisms", so they are apparently doing just that.
Assuming there is a market niche between netbooks and smartphones, there's really nothing stopping Intel from scaling downward and taking it over.
I think it's really going to come down to whether you want to pay $50 up front for the convenience of Windows apps, or whether you get a free device subsidized by google ads. There probably won't be a form-factor advantage, or at least not a permanent one.
More like Gmail has 2 million corporate customers.
From what I've seen of gmail shops, nobody's really using the apps. Admittedly it is a foothold though.
Certainly an SDK is a valuable asset, but it's a long way from there to "everyone hates webapps".
If the app store sold 99 cent bookmarks to ifart.com, I doubt many would really notice the difference.
To preemptively prevent AC flames, I meant a typical Linux desktop distro like Ubuntu.
Intel and Microsoft really really really want you to believe there's a fundamental difference between a "netbook" and regular desktop/laptop computer. Their margins depend on it.
But there really isn't, hardware-wise netbooks are are perceptually competitive with most desktop PCs, and most of them run a full desktop OS (Windows).
Question is, if you could have all the advantages of a desktop OS like Windows or Linux, and still access "the cloud" via Firefox, why would anyone choose an OS that only runs a web browser?
Nope you're wrong. IBM was under anti-trust orders to license out their hardware designs. They didn't have any choice in the matter.
They might not have originally intended it, but they made good money charging royalties for things like ISA and VGA from every other PC manufacturer through out the 1980s and early 1990s.
Cellphone software is a special kind of garbage. There's no way you could *sell* 50% of this shit on a desktop platform because users are smart enough to type in URLs.
Keep in mind the target customer base here are the same drooling mouth-breathers who also spend $8 quadrillion a year on MIDI ringtones.
Exactly.
And that sounds great if you're a programmer right out of college, but Win32 tie-in, specifically with MS Office is still a huge factor in the real world. A big problem here is that the hardware they're targeting will be able to run fullbore Windows 7 just fine.
We've had web-based word processors for fifteen years but Google's web-based word processor is different because it's from Google?
Yeah and all webapps which everyone hated when the iPhone did it
Everyone? Where's the evidence for that? Most iPhone users I know spend more of their time using Safari versus appstore stuff.
A significant chunk of the iPhone apps are just front-ends for web applications anyway. They could be replaced with webapps and the end users would barely notice the difference. (And this percentage would be even higher if the iPhone supported flash).
Developers and Apple love native apps because they can charge for stuff that's normally free on the WWW. Users love it mostly because of the store/icon placement. I don't see a whole lot of evidence that there's a technology preference being made here.
The W3C was almost irrelevant in the period when Netscape was the dominant browser. Netscape did whatever the hell it wanted (tables, frames), and the W3C was constantly playing catchup with them.
The major break was when Netscape pushed "JavaScript Style Sheets" over CSS and "Layers" over the W3C DOM.
Internet Explorer 4 contained preliminary versions of the W3C CSS and DOM standards. Yes they were incomplete and buggy and extended, but without them the W3C probably would have faded away completely.
When Mozilla came out, it was far more compatible with IE than it was with previous versions of Netscape.
Not to say that GIMP isn't good, but one does have to wonder exactly why it should be in the default install or live CD.
When I first started reading slashdot years ago, people consider The GIMP to be the "flagship" open source desktop application. As in the program that proved Linux was as good as any other PC OS. So its always held this historical position as #1 Desktop App, birthplace of GTK, etc.
Some of the 'controversy' (if it actually exists) is probably just because open source advocates spent *a lot* of time and effort promoting GIMP and trying to convince people it was as good or better than various alternatives.
Expecting every user to whitelist all of their web content is certainly the most impractical plan ever (and doesn't address the real problem of social engineering anyway).
Using things like Tor isn't just impractical, it's paranoia.
How about browser vendors getting their shit together instead? Firefox is a prime example, loudly promoted as "secure", but actually a cheap whore for any DLL someone decides to throw onto your computer. If they focused on building effective sandboxes first rather than "development platforms" (that nobody asked for), the majority of this problem wouldn't exist.
Who says they didn't know? They probably had some management turnover and nobody bothered to check the old contracts. Or maybe the lawyers took a second look and thought they could get more money.
Novell almost forgot they owned UNIX System V, so it happens.
No, I don't think so. The ruling starts:
A. Reproduction Right and Section 117.
According to Apple, Psystar has violated its exclusive right to copy Mac OS X. Psystar admits that it has made copies of Mac OS X and installed those copies on non-Apple computers
i.e., The first copy to the imaging server was not legal, and therefore every subsequent copy/adaption was also illegal, regardless of the EULA & first sale doctrine.
You give way too much credit to Apple. The only thing proprietary about their chipsets is a secret key burned into the system management module.
The DMCA applies to "effective access control", but the OS X hardware lockout does not actually control access. 100% of the content on the OS X DVD is accessible without it.
As of yet, I don't believe the DMCA has been applied to this kind of software runtime check. Whether this would hold up against someone with competent lawyers is a good question.
The general rule of thumb for collectors is that the obscure bootlegs are worth far more than the real thing. (Franklins were not all that rare though.)