Yes it's about control. AOL makes money from the free AIM by putting adverts in it and from the full AOL service from subscription. They don't want their extremely expensive hardware, support and bandwidth to be gotten for free by third parties who complain bitterly about access but don't want to pay for the privilege.
I can sympathize with GAIM users since that's a grassroots kind of thing and perhaps AOL should make allowances for that kind of product. It certainly shouldn't make allowances for money making ventures such as Jabber.com.
Whether people like it or not AOL pitches itself as a family friendly service and has no choice but to monitor and censor screennames. Without such action the whole service would become such a cesspit that no parent would want their child to go near it.
Despite the screen name censorship, AOL doesn't censor Internet access unless you tell it to. So you can still plumb the depths of depravity if you so desire but not with a screen name like "rimjobbr69" whilst doing it.
Porting from one Unix to another (or Linux) is hardly brain surgery. Assuming they've coded the thing in a reasonably sane manner it shouldn't be that much effort to port over.
As to the justification for doing it I would have thought the large number of BSD servers would be good enough reason.
I have a Palm Vx and it's great. Why would anyone want to splash out on a Sony Clie, when it costs significantly more than the Vx (and much more than a III or a Handspring) but does precious little extra?
Yes it has a memory stick so you can play ATRAC music, but so what? I bet you could buy a Palm Pilot or Handspring and a dedicated MP3 player for the money you'd save. And your music playing wouldn't be hampered by Sony doing it's damndest to lock you into their hobbled music technology.
It hasn't always been on the fringe. Back with RedHat 5.2 it was one of the default window managers to be installed and a lot of people used it like that.
It wouldn't surprise me if Raster's big falling out with RH was because they just wanted a WM to run with GNOME and not a complete hackers desktop.
There is a piece of software that at one time had the potential to capture the lions share of the desktop - all those users who would use KDE or GNOME (with Sawmill) instead. The reason it didn't was because the principle authors were more concerned with writing kewl features to exploit their sound and image libraries than on producing a straightforward, light and consistent window manager.
Consequently everyone now uses Sawmill with GNOME or KDE with its builtin WM. Enlightenment has been pushed out onto the fringe.
Obviously some people think Norns are alive judging by the amount of hatemail AntiNorn got for his Norn Torture page. Personally I think it's hilarious.
I'm saying that on the Internet it's much easier to catch the sickos because they think they're anonymous when they're not. Every IP transaction leaves a huge swath of evidence leading right back to them. Authorities just have to lurk in chatrooms, bulltein boards and Usenet to catch them with ISPs & Telcos all too willing to help. Then you have idiots like Gary Glitter who are convicted after deleting the kiddy pictures and then taking the PC for repair not realising that delete is reversable on a FAT partition.
Of course there may be smart paedos who use encryption to hide their actions but they represent a tiny minority and not even they can erase all evidence of their actions.
No I wouldn't. But if I had a button on my keyboard that actual or future child abusers to have their nuts painfully ripped off and fed to them before dying a slow painful death then yes I would certainly press it.
I think of a "religion" as a cult or sect using quasi-religious rituals, psychological tricks and other means to bring their followers to heel. The "religion" must suppress the individual personality with browbeating, hardship, menial tasks, repetition and isolation from the real world while all the while fleecing them for money.
Religions don't, "religions" do. Scientology falls into the latter category. It fleeces it's gullible members into shelling out increasingly large amounts of cash for seminars in pursuit of reaching a "clear" state. The text of these seminars is the trade secret.
The last thing the CoS would want is for their secrets to be made publically available. Not only would they unable to charge for their contents, but people would have a really good laugh reading them.
Um, it should be easy for them to see what you're sharing, BECAUSE YOU'RE SHARING IT
I didn't say it should be difficult to share, I said it should be difficult for automated tools to see what you're sharing. Napster obviously needs to know what's on your machine but third party tools should be deterred. Napster could implement a number of measures that hardly inconvenienced the average user but made life considerably more difficult for automated tools:
Directory sharing could be an opt-in setting. If you don't set it, no one can see your entire list.
Directory listings results could be delayed by a few seconds to slow down the rate they can be gathered at.
Searches and listings could be limited to 5 a minute to again slow down the rate they could be gathered at.
A daily maximum search limit could be set (e.g. 300 searches) per user.
In fact many of the same measures that the likes of Slashdot, Hotmail etc. employ to prevent spammers could be utilised in Napster.
Why am I the only one to see what would happen if this were the case. You buy a CD and what is the first thing you do? You rip it and share it on Napster.
The thing with CDs is that their high cost makes ripping and sharing worth it. When songs are sold electronically for 50 cents or few bucks for an entire album then there is considerably less motivation. Freeloaders will still use it of course, but for the sake of a few cents I suspect a great many people would rather use a reliable commercial service than waste their time with broken downloads, bad encoding and copyright theft via Napster/Gnutella.
This is all getting very hypothetical, but why should it be easy for the RIAA or any one else to scan the contents what someone chooses share via Napster? Perhaps you'd also be in favour of writing all your correspondance on postcards, banning encryption and reverse phonebooks to make it easier for people with automated processing tools? After all, what have you got to hide?
And people shouldn't feel sorry for the poor old record companies. They make billions every year, of which only a tiny percentage goes to the artist. They'd just rather use lawsuits to protect their cartel rather than riding the wave themselves. If they sold songs online for 50 cents a download from a reliable server then no one would even bother with the likes of Napster.
I'm wondering, why is it necessary to encode song names?
Privacy would be a very good reason. Tools which obfuscate song titles prevent evil market research companies (or the RIAA) from using automated tools to compile lists of what non-copyrighted music we own.
They would have to explicitly search for each mangled name which could take considerably longer, especially if a number of naming schemes came into effect and changed from day to day.
Who cares about the OS? In the handheld world it's the applications that run on top of it that matter. If HP release a handheld with a sucky set of applications then it won't matter a fig whether the thing is running WinCE or Linux underneath.
Will complex pages designed for one look the same in the other?
The whole point of open standards is that you shouldn't have to design pages for one particular browser. Assuming that Konqueror and Mozilla implement the standards correctly, then pages will look acceptable in either.
It is only Microsoft who want you to code your content to a specific browser - Internet Explorer.
Perhaps it isn't a big deal for you but I can assure you it is for other people, especially those who pay for local calls. And this is just *one* patch. If you wished to update Mandrake 7.2 to the latest of everything you're looking at nearer 12 hours of downloads.
I doubt that downloading binary diffs of the stuff that's changed would amount to a tenth of the download time.
Dial up accounts give you some protection because your IP changes for each login but that isn't sufficient. I'm usually logged in for several hours at a time and I find myself scanned at least once every hour. A kiddie could easily discover a weakness and exploit it in that time.
And given that dial-up users in general will be home users, security updates are doubly important for them because it may be the only way they harden their boxes.
Slashdot Mirror
I can sympathize with GAIM users since that's a grassroots kind of thing and perhaps AOL should make allowances for that kind of product. It certainly shouldn't make allowances for money making ventures such as Jabber.com.
The old player refuses to run if you have MacBugs installed. Talk about paranoid!
Perhaps AOL might be more amenable to 3rd party companies piggybacking their service if they put some money on the table?
Why is Mozilla a failure? It's here and it works great.
Despite the screen name censorship, AOL doesn't censor Internet access unless you tell it to. So you can still plumb the depths of depravity if you so desire but not with a screen name like "rimjobbr69" whilst doing it.
Is it legal where you are? If not I suggest you point this out to management. If they still persist tell the authorities.
As to the justification for doing it I would have thought the large number of BSD servers would be good enough reason.
Yes it has a memory stick so you can play ATRAC music, but so what? I bet you could buy a Palm Pilot or Handspring and a dedicated MP3 player for the money you'd save. And your music playing wouldn't be hampered by Sony doing it's damndest to lock you into their hobbled music technology.
It wouldn't surprise me if Raster's big falling out with RH was because they just wanted a WM to run with GNOME and not a complete hackers desktop.
There is a piece of software that at one time had the potential to capture the lions share of the desktop - all those users who would use KDE or GNOME (with Sawmill) instead. The reason it didn't was because the principle authors were more concerned with writing kewl features to exploit their sound and image libraries than on producing a straightforward, light and consistent window manager.
Consequently everyone now uses Sawmill with GNOME or KDE with its builtin WM. Enlightenment has been pushed out onto the fringe.
Obviously some people think Norns are alive judging by the amount of hatemail AntiNorn got for his Norn Torture page. Personally I think it's hilarious.
Of course there may be smart paedos who use encryption to hide their actions but they represent a tiny minority and not even they can erase all evidence of their actions.
No I wouldn't. But if I had a button on my keyboard that actual or future child abusers to have their nuts painfully ripped off and fed to them before dying a slow painful death then yes I would certainly press it.
Maybe this may seem counter intuitive, but the more paedophiles that get online the better. They're much easier to catch than in the real world.
I think of a "religion" as a cult or sect using quasi-religious rituals, psychological tricks and other means to bring their followers to heel. The "religion" must suppress the individual personality with browbeating, hardship, menial tasks, repetition and isolation from the real world while all the while fleecing them for money.
The CoS does all of these things and more.
The last thing the CoS would want is for their secrets to be made publically available. Not only would they unable to charge for their contents, but people would have a really good laugh reading them.
I didn't say it should be difficult to share, I said it should be difficult for automated tools to see what you're sharing. Napster obviously needs to know what's on your machine but third party tools should be deterred. Napster could implement a number of measures that hardly inconvenienced the average user but made life considerably more difficult for automated tools:
In fact many of the same measures that the likes of Slashdot, Hotmail etc. employ to prevent spammers could be utilised in Napster.
Why am I the only one to see what would happen if this were the case. You buy a CD and what is the first thing you do? You rip it and share it on Napster.
The thing with CDs is that their high cost makes ripping and sharing worth it. When songs are sold electronically for 50 cents or few bucks for an entire album then there is considerably less motivation. Freeloaders will still use it of course, but for the sake of a few cents I suspect a great many people would rather use a reliable commercial service than waste their time with broken downloads, bad encoding and copyright theft via Napster/Gnutella.
And people shouldn't feel sorry for the poor old record companies. They make billions every year, of which only a tiny percentage goes to the artist. They'd just rather use lawsuits to protect their cartel rather than riding the wave themselves. If they sold songs online for 50 cents a download from a reliable server then no one would even bother with the likes of Napster.
Privacy would be a very good reason. Tools which obfuscate song titles prevent evil market research companies (or the RIAA) from using automated tools to compile lists of what non-copyrighted music we own.
They would have to explicitly search for each mangled name which could take considerably longer, especially if a number of naming schemes came into effect and changed from day to day.
They should just licence Ghostscript or use the GPL version and be done with it.
Who cares about the OS? In the handheld world it's the applications that run on top of it that matter. If HP release a handheld with a sucky set of applications then it won't matter a fig whether the thing is running WinCE or Linux underneath.
The whole point of open standards is that you shouldn't have to design pages for one particular browser. Assuming that Konqueror and Mozilla implement the standards correctly, then pages will look acceptable in either.
It is only Microsoft who want you to code your content to a specific browser - Internet Explorer.
Are you stupid or something? If you don't want news. email etc., why did you bother installing them when the installer gave you the option not to?
I doubt that downloading binary diffs of the stuff that's changed would amount to a tenth of the download time.
And given that dial-up users in general will be home users, security updates are doubly important for them because it may be the only way they harden their boxes.