[...] It is fairly obvious that those here who put down hosts files are only alternate registered accounts used by silanea [...]
Interesting. The same old "they're out to get me" BS. On the other hand it is only ACs who rush to defend that crap. Show me one single post in all the recent apk resurrections where a non-AC backed up apk's position.
You his brother? You sure write exactly like him, sans the retarded misuse of special chars and punctuation. Does not matter anyway, one AC is as good as another.
Besides, you have yet to respond to my two points. I challenged two of your claims. So what is your reply to what I said previously? Especially the second point?
And that's adblock's MAIN problem: It's limited to single browsers only, and doesn't cover other programs that are also potentially threatened by bad sites or scripts even such as email programs that use HTML, like Outlook etc.
Using daemons?? Not needed in HOSTS files. Where do you get your misinformation from???
Also, to update adblock???? You also need internet access also!
Oh my, is apk still around? Aren't you getting bored of spreading your hosts file nonsense?
Requiring internet access to update Adblock is so much worse than obtaining and updating your hosts file from online sources as per your advice under 6. exactly how?
(Disclaimer: Yes, I know who that guy is and that discussion is futile. I am bored. Let me poke the troll. Brightens up the day every time.)
I am aware that my expectations are somewhat unrealistic, at least at the price point I put up as an example. But that is what I want as an ideal. The closer a publication comes to fulfilling those requirements the greater the chance that I might be willing to shell out money for it. Business models need to evolve in order to remain sustainable, and my previous post outlines the direction they have to take if they are aiming at my wallet.
I'm also wondering what people would consider something they'd pay for.
Off the top of my head:
Information that is relevant to me. I could not care less about sports or the latest celeb gossip, but I do care about technology and the innards of current political processes. Few print dailies offer the latter in any really comprehensive form, and none carries the former on an ongoing basis. I would need to be able to select a) which branches of news I am interested in, and b) on what level. I want the gory details on tech and politics, but I can do with a general overview of the economy since I do not know enough about this field to interpret detailed information on specific companies or industries. I can do without 90% of what is usually crammed into the "culture" section, but I do want to read about new film, book and music releases in certain genres.
Properly researched information, with all sources (bar confidential ones) given and all quotations properly attributed. It is the bloody 21st century and those idiots have yet to discover the mysterious magic of hyperlinks and bibliographic citations. I am sick and tired of reading that "circles say" or "eye-witnesses stated". Who said and did what? I want the ability to verify what they claim in their articles.
Reasonably objective reporting. Complete freedom from bias cannot be achieved, of course, but I do not need murders described in picturesque prose, as if Steven King himself had written the article. Also I want to know what happens in the world, not what publisher X deems compatible with my world view. Political correctness has no place in the selection and priorisation of news. Again, who did what, why did they do it, and what conclusions may be drawn from that?
Background and analysis. If MP x says "GM-food is safe!!1!1" while holding stocks in the top ten international biotech conglomerates that nifty little piece of information belongs in the article so I can put the reported issue into perspective. Also I expect any quoted numbers to be checked for correctness and so on. If *AA claims x fantastillion in damages from evil pirates I expect a proper journalist to check that number and break it down.
Updates! If an article was incorrect, I want to know. If a new development has come up I want to know. But transparently! Revision control is the keyword.
Ease of use. Customisable "home page" and RSS feeds are the bare minimum, along with a sensible feedback mechanism.
Searchable archive of all past issues. Any content older than, say, one week should be open to everyone for free. It is not news then anymore, is it?
Reasonable pricing, ideally based on how much content I order. Like $1 per topic per month for the basic overview, $3 for in-depth information.
It was a good third each of sarcasm, humor and seriousness. I did not take your comment as completely serious, but I did want to take up the point you made. This being/. I regularly come across articles from fields I know next to nothing about. That is OK, I am not the base metric of what is interesting for everyone. But this summary was one of the few times I was completely in the dark as to what it wanted to tell me. Even if it was a slashvertisement for some weird niche blog it was a massive fail. I guess Hanlon's Razor applies more than the theory about luring people in by keeping the information vague.
Your point still stands with respect to many entries on/., though.
I do, of course, realise that the/. summary cannot - and should not - have every finer point of TFA crammed into it. But if I cannot for the life of me figure out what general field it is talking about without consulting a search engine first, well, then I am inclined to simply skip to the next summary that I can make some sense of, skipping TFA (and the associated theoretical ad revenue) along with it.
Oh dear, I probably should not write that down, lest CmdrTaco gets taken to court because that website linked to just lost eleventyfive gazillion dollars in revenue. Damn those pirates! Ahem.
"Basic browser" for me encompasses what comes with vanilla Firefox. Some of that - the mentioned AwesomeBar and Personas - may actually be considered bloat. Everything else is to be expected of a 21st century web browser.
While I would argue that both bookmarks and history are integral parts of a modern browser - I cannot recall a single browser that does not have both in some form, with the possible exception of lynx - I agree with you on the other points. Both are nice ideas, and I really love the AwesomeBar, but both should be optional. In the same vein I am happy with Weave/Mozilla Sync, but I am hesitant to see it built into Firefox and Fennec.
[...] Opera comes build-in with all the features I need [...]
FTFY. I prefer Firefox's way of offering a basic browser and moving extended or niche features to optional extensions to monolithic blocks like Opera. Of course there is a risk associated with this model, but in my case the benefits far outweigh that risk.
Call me greedy, but I want both: The picturesque, photorealistic graphics and the soundtrack that carry you through an amazingly detailed, almost lifelike world, and the deep, catching storytelling, the ever developing characters, the immersion into a different universe where anything is possible. CoD 4 and 6 have left me a spoiled brat of a consumer. I will not go back to ugly graphics and crappy MIDI sound, no matter how good the plot. At the same time I lived and breathed through both parts of KOTOR and the Elder Scrolls and Gothic series. I don't do Far Cry 2, and I regret to this day ever lending Prototype. Eye candy is nice, but not sufficient to get me to open my wallet.
That said, there certainly is a market for what you describe, and for something in between your and my expectations. I love Scorched Earth, and the Worms games still get me. I regularly play Day of Defeat (both Source and the old one) and Insurgency, so "technical" games with little plot and rather superficial immersion still end up on my machine.
Not saying there is no problem, but my karma has been excellent since I started posting here on/. and I do tend to lash out against obvious trolls, shills and morons. And that includes iFans and Flash lovers. So it is possible to openly lavish vitriol and contempt on them and still be in good standing overall. Maybe/. should implement a visualisation of such "ideologic cleansings" to allow further analysis as to where the problem lies exactly.
I have yet to see a single non-niche or demo website implemented in Flash that does not have serious disadvantages to a comparable website implemented in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. From printing to links to scrolling to scaling to navigation.
Now I would usually attribute such an observation to stupid developers, not to an inadequacy of the tools. It is possible to write secure web applications in PHP, after all, even though the majority of projects in this language are essentially bundled security holes. But with Flash I have to wonder whether the technology simply does not lend itself to sane development and design practises.
The "end-user" does not give a flying rat's ass about Flash or HTML 5. They use a website and whatever software is required to view it. The majority of users has no idea what Flash is or whether they have it installed or whether they are "using" it right now on a website.
The vast majority of end-users is not part of the debate. Developers are.
Create a new profile and test a few flash heavy sites. If FF runs stable, change its preferences to what you used in your old profile, test again. If it still works, install any extension you have used one by one and test between each installation. Maybe one of your extensions or settings causes the problems, maybe your profile has become corrupted (likely if it is rather old).
If the problem persists, try a nightly build, first with your old profile (backup!!!), then with a fresh one.
Release versions have been quite unstable on Flash heavy sites some time ago. I have switched to nightly builds several months ago and - barring the occasional hiccup when new features are introduced - have found it to run incredibly stable and performant even with a larger selection of extensions installed.
In theory I do not give a flying fuck about Apple, either. My household is i*-free. The problem is that too many other companies look at what Apple does and follow its example. Mobile devices have come a long way towards an open and consumer-friendly ecosystem, but actions such as this drag us all right back down the hill.
[...] if you don't want to have these things don't use it. Nobody is forcing people to use this phone [...] Who cares if it's retroactive? It's a service and service and privacy agreements get updated *all the time*. You pay for that service. [...]
Reading comprehension fail. Let me try again: People who already own an iPhone are forced to accept terms that were not part of the original deal in order to continue to receive software updates - which, as far as I can tell, is a prerequisite for receiving support when issues arise - or to purchase new apps. Altering a contract unilaterally after the parties involved agreed on it is subject to legal restrictions. Apple can try, but I would not be surprised to read about them getting handed their balls in court over this on/. in a few weeks, and rightly so.
If AT&T tomorrow doubled its rates I would probably dump AT&T and sell my phone. [...]
Those contracts usually have a minimum duration.
You would be very unlikely to recover your expenses on the phone and instead end up selling it at a loss.
Also I disagree with your "rendering their devices useless" point. C'mon - not using location based services doesn't render the phone useless.
Learn to fucking read, and do not stop reading after the first handful of words that you can put into a meaningful connexion but continue until you reach the end of the text. "Location based services" most likely encompasses navigation services, which is a oh-not-so insignificant feature on a phone that comes with a fucking map feature as factory default.
I usually try not to resort to insults, but His Jobsiness' boot lickers are unbearable. How dare I criticise the Empire that can do now wrong? It is a free market after all. Sorry, that is more bullshit than the whole of Texas can muster. Apple lures people with features and then alters and disables them on a whim after it received the cash, with practically no way of recourse for its customers. People do not simply buy a phone, they buy a whole closed ecosystem. They invest in apps, music, e-books and so on. So they cannot simply put their device on eBay, they would lose access to a good deal of other things they paid for and cannot recover (at least not without breaking laws).
Which part of "retroactive" needs to be explained to you? They change the license not just for new customers but also for existing users, effectively rendering their devices useless as far as many advertised features are concerned unless they agree to the new terms.
I did not notice my rock was so crowded. I did know that some part of this whole Chrome ecosystem was open source, but I still do not really know the relationship between Chrome and Chromium. Why? Because I do not give a damn about it. Does everybody on/. know off the top of their head what Electrolysis (w. r. t. browsers) is? I doubt it.
Not to say you are wrong in your prediction, but remember that it is the extensions that have to support Safari to get people to switch from Firefox, not the other way around.
One's fear for iPod is nothing compared to, possibly, milions of people whose lives depend on piece of electronic.
Corpses do not harass the support dept. Millions of angry iPaperweight owners on the other hand could make Night of the Living Dead look like Disney's version of reality.
Slashdot Mirror
[...] It is fairly obvious that those here who put down hosts files are only alternate registered accounts used by silanea [...]
Interesting. The same old "they're out to get me" BS. On the other hand it is only ACs who rush to defend that crap. Show me one single post in all the recent apk resurrections where a non-AC backed up apk's position.
You his brother? You sure write exactly like him, sans the retarded misuse of special chars and punctuation. Does not matter anyway, one AC is as good as another.
Besides, you have yet to respond to my two points. I challenged two of your claims. So what is your reply to what I said previously? Especially the second point?
And that's adblock's MAIN problem: It's limited to single browsers only, and doesn't cover other programs that are also potentially threatened by bad sites or scripts even such as email programs that use HTML, like Outlook etc.
Using daemons?? Not needed in HOSTS files. Where do you get your misinformation from???
Also, to update adblock???? You also need internet access also!
Oh my, is apk still around? Aren't you getting bored of spreading your hosts file nonsense?
(Disclaimer: Yes, I know who that guy is and that discussion is futile. I am bored. Let me poke the troll. Brightens up the day every time.)
I am aware that my expectations are somewhat unrealistic, at least at the price point I put up as an example. But that is what I want as an ideal. The closer a publication comes to fulfilling those requirements the greater the chance that I might be willing to shell out money for it. Business models need to evolve in order to remain sustainable, and my previous post outlines the direction they have to take if they are aiming at my wallet.
I'm also wondering what people would consider something they'd pay for.
Off the top of my head:
It was a good third each of sarcasm, humor and seriousness. I did not take your comment as completely serious, but I did want to take up the point you made. This being /. I regularly come across articles from fields I know next to nothing about. That is OK, I am not the base metric of what is interesting for everyone. But this summary was one of the few times I was completely in the dark as to what it wanted to tell me. Even if it was a slashvertisement for some weird niche blog it was a massive fail. I guess Hanlon's Razor applies more than the theory about luring people in by keeping the information vague.
Your point still stands with respect to many entries on /., though.
I do, of course, realise that the /. summary cannot - and should not - have every finer point of TFA crammed into it. But if I cannot for the life of me figure out what general field it is talking about without consulting a search engine first, well, then I am inclined to simply skip to the next summary that I can make some sense of, skipping TFA (and the associated theoretical ad revenue) along with it.
Oh dear, I probably should not write that down, lest CmdrTaco gets taken to court because that website linked to just lost eleventyfive gazillion dollars in revenue. Damn those pirates! Ahem.
"Basic browser" for me encompasses what comes with vanilla Firefox. Some of that - the mentioned AwesomeBar and Personas - may actually be considered bloat. Everything else is to be expected of a 21st century web browser.
Indeed. What is a Droid X? What is an eFuse? I gather it is a phone? Editorial fail. This should never have made the front page in this state.
While I would argue that both bookmarks and history are integral parts of a modern browser - I cannot recall a single browser that does not have both in some form, with the possible exception of lynx - I agree with you on the other points. Both are nice ideas, and I really love the AwesomeBar, but both should be optional. In the same vein I am happy with Weave/Mozilla Sync, but I am hesitant to see it built into Firefox and Fennec.
[...] Opera comes build-in with all the features I need [...]
FTFY. I prefer Firefox's way of offering a basic browser and moving extended or niche features to optional extensions to monolithic blocks like Opera. Of course there is a risk associated with this model, but in my case the benefits far outweigh that risk.
Call me greedy, but I want both: The picturesque, photorealistic graphics and the soundtrack that carry you through an amazingly detailed, almost lifelike world, and the deep, catching storytelling, the ever developing characters, the immersion into a different universe where anything is possible. CoD 4 and 6 have left me a spoiled brat of a consumer. I will not go back to ugly graphics and crappy MIDI sound, no matter how good the plot. At the same time I lived and breathed through both parts of KOTOR and the Elder Scrolls and Gothic series. I don't do Far Cry 2, and I regret to this day ever lending Prototype. Eye candy is nice, but not sufficient to get me to open my wallet.
That said, there certainly is a market for what you describe, and for something in between your and my expectations. I love Scorched Earth, and the Worms games still get me. I regularly play Day of Defeat (both Source and the old one) and Insurgency, so "technical" games with little plot and rather superficial immersion still end up on my machine.
Not saying there is no problem, but my karma has been excellent since I started posting here on /. and I do tend to lash out against obvious trolls, shills and morons. And that includes iFans and Flash lovers. So it is possible to openly lavish vitriol and contempt on them and still be in good standing overall. Maybe /. should implement a visualisation of such "ideologic cleansings" to allow further analysis as to where the problem lies exactly.
I have yet to see a single non-niche or demo website implemented in Flash that does not have serious disadvantages to a comparable website implemented in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. From printing to links to scrolling to scaling to navigation.
Now I would usually attribute such an observation to stupid developers, not to an inadequacy of the tools. It is possible to write secure web applications in PHP, after all, even though the majority of projects in this language are essentially bundled security holes. But with Flash I have to wonder whether the technology simply does not lend itself to sane development and design practises.
The "end-user" does not give a flying rat's ass about Flash or HTML 5. They use a website and whatever software is required to view it. The majority of users has no idea what Flash is or whether they have it installed or whether they are "using" it right now on a website.
The vast majority of end-users is not part of the debate. Developers are.
You do realise that Flash is hated not only, and not even most prominently, for being closed but for being a technical nightmare?
Any particular reason why you run an outdated build? Not trolling, just wondering.
I would recommend the following:
Release versions have been quite unstable on Flash heavy sites some time ago. I have switched to nightly builds several months ago and - barring the occasional hiccup when new features are introduced - have found it to run incredibly stable and performant even with a larger selection of extensions installed.
[...(] no, you can't use the internet to send the message that the internet needs to be shut down).
Generations of script kiddies prove you wrong. Getting it working again that way may proof a little more, ah, challenging though.
In theory I do not give a flying fuck about Apple, either. My household is i*-free. The problem is that too many other companies look at what Apple does and follow its example. Mobile devices have come a long way towards an open and consumer-friendly ecosystem, but actions such as this drag us all right back down the hill.
[...] if you don't want to have these things don't use it. Nobody is forcing people to use this phone [...] Who cares if it's retroactive? It's a service and service and privacy agreements get updated *all the time*. You pay for that service. [...]
Reading comprehension fail. Let me try again: People who already own an iPhone are forced to accept terms that were not part of the original deal in order to continue to receive software updates - which, as far as I can tell, is a prerequisite for receiving support when issues arise - or to purchase new apps. Altering a contract unilaterally after the parties involved agreed on it is subject to legal restrictions. Apple can try, but I would not be surprised to read about them getting handed their balls in court over this on /. in a few weeks, and rightly so.
If AT&T tomorrow doubled its rates I would probably dump AT&T and sell my phone. [...]
Also I disagree with your "rendering their devices useless" point. C'mon - not using location based services doesn't render the phone useless.
Learn to fucking read, and do not stop reading after the first handful of words that you can put into a meaningful connexion but continue until you reach the end of the text. "Location based services" most likely encompasses navigation services, which is a oh-not-so insignificant feature on a phone that comes with a fucking map feature as factory default .
I usually try not to resort to insults, but His Jobsiness' boot lickers are unbearable. How dare I criticise the Empire that can do now wrong? It is a free market after all. Sorry, that is more bullshit than the whole of Texas can muster. Apple lures people with features and then alters and disables them on a whim after it received the cash, with practically no way of recourse for its customers. People do not simply buy a phone, they buy a whole closed ecosystem. They invest in apps, music, e-books and so on. So they cannot simply put their device on eBay, they would lose access to a good deal of other things they paid for and cannot recover (at least not without breaking laws).
Which part of "retroactive" needs to be explained to you? They change the license not just for new customers but also for existing users, effectively rendering their devices useless as far as many advertised features are concerned unless they agree to the new terms.
I did not notice my rock was so crowded. I did know that some part of this whole Chrome ecosystem was open source, but I still do not really know the relationship between Chrome and Chromium. Why? Because I do not give a damn about it. Does everybody on /. know off the top of their head what Electrolysis (w. r. t. browsers) is? I doubt it.
Safari supports extensions now too [...]
Not to say you are wrong in your prediction, but remember that it is the extensions that have to support Safari to get people to switch from Firefox, not the other way around.
One's fear for iPod is nothing compared to, possibly, milions of people whose lives depend on piece of electronic.
Corpses do not harass the support dept. Millions of angry iPaperweight owners on the other hand could make Night of the Living Dead look like Disney's version of reality.