If they didn't ask for it, and you still blast it out to a bunch of people, it's still unsolicited bulk email -- in other words, it's still spam.
Besides, think of the unintended consequences: You'd be making users used to accessing random proxies. How long before the malware writers start spamming "Hey, use our proxy!" and advertising their fake proxy which will send most traffic through, but will sniff usernames and passwords, and redirect certain sessions to phishing sites?
The parent post is clearly comparing Opera to BeOS (not sure in what terms -- design, perhaps? technically impressive, but not wildly popular?), but as it happens, you can actually find an old version of Opera for BeOS.
Re:Opera Supports BIG Pages better with less RAM
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A Talk With Opera CEO
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I'll agree on this. I've found that, at least on Linux, the typical MySpace page (I check referrers, okay?) tends to be much more responsive in Opera than in Firefox. On the other hand, random pages on Digg and my del.icio.us bookmarks slow Opera to a crawl, but Firefox is fine. So even though both browsers will display a page, performance is wildly different, and neither browser manages to come out on top 100% of the time.
The Firefox community, like many OSS communities, spend a lot of effort convincing their users to push the cause, but spend zero effort attempting to reign in those in their community who employ bad tactics and give the others a bad name
Not true. SpreadFirefox occasionally gets people posting, "Hey, I've got an idea! Let's block IE from our sites!" When I was visiting regularly, it rarely took long for others to jump on the post and point out that it was a bad idea. And it wasn't just me pointing it out, either.
I think I've clicked on maybe 5 ads in the last several years. But I rarely block them. I just tune them out.
It's only when an ad is extremely obnoxious, or interferes with the ability to actually see/use the page, that I block it. Unsolicited sound is a good way to either get your ad blocked or get me to close your page. I tend to open links in background tabs as I read, then move over to the next tab when I'm done. I don't want ads on 5 different tabs all providing their own soundtrack for pages I haven't started looking at yet.
Many people on Slashdot know that Opera used to be ad-supported until about 2 years ago. (In fact there's probably a few people here who think it still is, but that's beside the point.)
Way back when, there were a couple of sites that decided to block Opera users because they were afraid that their visitors would click on the ads in Opera's toolbar instead of the ads on their own site. They put up a similar page talking about how horrible it was that Opera was stealing their revenue. Keep in mind that Opera wasn't even blocking the site's own ads.
Later, after Opera went 100% free (as in beer), they eventually stopped blocking it.
I doubt they got any Opera users to visit with another browser. I suspect most of them just stopped visiting their site entirely. That is, of course, the lesson: if you actively block a browser, people will just leave. Some of them will complain, but unless your content is extremely compelling, most of them will just wander off to some other site that will let them in.
Well, it seems tied to that ridiculous "Firefox Myths" site. You know, the one filled with half-truths, strawman attacks, misquotes and more, that somehow only manages to find positive things to "debunk."
My favorite is "debunking" the claim that "Firefox is not a religion" by using things like the Book of Mozilla quotes and the crop circle project to prove that Firefox *is* a religion.
Somebody links to a blog article, which just links to another blog article, which in turn links to the actual story that everyone is talking about. Quit trying to drive visitors to your Blogspot account and just show me what you really wanted me to see.
This reminds me of a comment someone made on the introduction of the iPod Shuffle (bear with me, it's relevant). The idea was that, at the time, the iPod brand was perceived as signifying the high-end digital music player. By expanding into the low-end, Apple was trading a loss in the value of their brand (since it no longer meant "high-end" by default) in order to gain another segment of the market.
Similarly, Nielsen's article suggests that by tossing off random blog articles, even if you also post highly insightful material, you lower the average value of what you post. You effectively cede some of your reputation.
That's even more of an issue with topic-based blogs. If your focus is, say, US politics, or astronomy, etc. you have to stick close to your topic, or people will start complaining, "Why are you spending all this time talking about your cats!"
According to Wikipedia, Nirvana felt that they knew they had "made it" when Al wanted to do a parody of Smells Like Teen Spirit.
I remember hearing that in pre-Wikipedia days. I checked their citation, and it just lists the Weird Al FAQ. I wish I could remember whether it was a printed interview a video interview, or what. One of those "Behind the Music" things, maybe?
This is the worst kind of entrapment....the kind WITHOUT Catherine Zeta Jones.
Funny story...
During my last year in college, I had a dual-boot system but ran Linux most of the time, since I'd seen the crazy stuff people were able to do to Win9x boxes over the campus LAN. Early in the year, figuring some sort of file-sharing would be useful, I set up two samba shares, one read-only and one write-only. A folder where I could post things and a dropbox. Within a few months I'd forgotten about the dropbox. Sometime the following year I was cleaning up the system and stumbled across the folder. Embarrassingly, I discovered two very large MPEG files containing Entrapment. Apparently someone had found a writable share, uploaded it with the intent to transfer it somewhere else, and discovered they couldn't get the file back. (This was exactly why I made it write-only in the first place -- so it couldn't be used as a transfer point). I told my brother about this, and he laughed and said, "At the very least they could have pirated a good movie!"
for a lot of B5 people the world seems confined to a B5 / Star Trek dichotomy.
It seems like at times B5 is "starter Sci-Fi" for people who never read much sci-fi or whose only exposure on TV was Star Trek.
Looking back at the 1990s sci-fi scene, what I remember is that people who read a lot of sci-fi tended to be the ones who jumped from Star Trek to Babylon 5. Partly because there was finally something on TV that wasn't just Trek (were there any other space-based shows in the late 80s/early 90s that lasted more than a few episodes?), and partly because B5 had more of a literary background to it than the modern Treks. There were also a lot of people who had been fans of Classic Trek (whether first-run or in reruns) who were disappointed by Next Gen, and looked at B5 and saw the kind of show they had hoped Next Gen would be..
And in my experience, while many B5 fans looked down at Trek, Trek fans were more likely to be outright hostile, as if watching this upstart show would somehow be betraying Star Trek. Maybe it was a matter of the relative sizes of the fan bases, but if you picked a random B5 fan, chances were that he had seen (and maybe even enjoyed) a significant amount of Star Trek, but if you picked a random Trek fan, chances were that he had seen one episode, or had avoided it on principle.
As our society has become more technological it's become less spiritual, and we're now into the 21st century and not a peep of psychic power or spirituality is to be had.
Assuming, of course, you don't consider religion to be spiritual, given that religion actually seems to be increasing in societal importance over the last decade...
Don't some shops refuse or surcharge credit cards for small amounts?
Yes. The minimum is usually posted on the counter, next to the logos showing which cards they accept. Typically it'll be in the $3-5 range. Mainly they don't want the processing fees charged by the credit card company to eat up the entire profit on the sale.
Personally, I try to use cash for anything less than $10, and I'll use a debit or credit card for anything more than $20 (which I pay off each month unless I've made some particularly large purchase). In the $10-20 range, it depends on how much I have in my wallet and what else I'm planning on buying that day.
here (Scotland) one can refuse cash payment if the amount of change given is unreasonable.
Conversely, in the US, it's common for stores to refuse cash if the amount of change they would have to make is unreasonable. Many stores and counter-services restaurants post that they will not accept bills larger than $20 (or occasionally $50), because it's unreasonable to expect them to make change on a $4.50 purchase made with a $50 bill.
When it became clear that no SDK would be offered and this AJAX joke was taking its place, select AJAX developers suddenly took interest. You think those guys don't have macs?
Given the number of websites whose developers only seem to test in IE and Firefox, I'd say they probably don't.
You're wrong. Opera passed it first. On top of that, Safari didn't disable scrollbars until almost a year after they first claimed to pass it (disabling scrollbars is required by the Acid2 test).
No, it was Safari. Take it from someone who followed Acid2 from the time it was announced. Even this list of Acid2 in major browsers, made by an Opera employee, credits Safari with making it there first.
The scrollbar controversy you're thinking of was with Konqueror and in iCab. Safari developers (well, mainly Dave Hyatt) wrote a lot of code to pass Acid2, but WebKit had already diverged enough that Konqueror's developers weren't able to just apply the patches he released. They had to reimplement most of the changes themselves. They and iCab both missed the scrollbar -- as did the Web Standards Project when they looked at the results -- because it wasn't mentioned in the guide. Months later, some Opera folks pointed out the scrollbar issue in those two browsers.
If history is anything to judge by, if Safari (or Gecko, for that matter) achieved near 100% marketshare, the browser would stagnate. We're better off with multiple major players keeping each other motivated.
Apple's main target by releasing Safari on Windows is Internet Explorer; they want to basically get newbies who have tried iTunes or have iPods and liked it, and might be willing to try other Apple stuff. They aren't going after Firefox users, so a comparison of Safari v IE v Firefox makes no sense. Hell, why not include Opera as well, and OmniWeb, and Lynx! It'll be one confusing motherfucker of a pie chart, but by god Norwegians, both the people using OmniWeb and text-mode fetishists need representation too!
Logically, yes... but the "before" (IE/Firefox/Safari/Other) and "after" (IE/Safari) pie charts showed Safari eating Firefox for lunch and not making a dent in IE. Which makes you wonder...
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If they didn't ask for it, and you still blast it out to a bunch of people, it's still unsolicited bulk email -- in other words, it's still spam.
Besides, think of the unintended consequences: You'd be making users used to accessing random proxies. How long before the malware writers start spamming "Hey, use our proxy!" and advertising their fake proxy which will send most traffic through, but will sniff usernames and passwords, and redirect certain sessions to phishing sites?
The parent post is clearly comparing Opera to BeOS (not sure in what terms -- design, perhaps? technically impressive, but not wildly popular?), but as it happens, you can actually find an old version of Opera for BeOS.
I'll agree on this. I've found that, at least on Linux, the typical MySpace page (I check referrers, okay?) tends to be much more responsive in Opera than in Firefox. On the other hand, random pages on Digg and my del.icio.us bookmarks slow Opera to a crawl, but Firefox is fine. So even though both browsers will display a page, performance is wildly different, and neither browser manages to come out on top 100% of the time.
Or maybe they should have named it after a car.
Not true. SpreadFirefox occasionally gets people posting, "Hey, I've got an idea! Let's block IE from our sites!" When I was visiting regularly, it rarely took long for others to jump on the post and point out that it was a bad idea. And it wasn't just me pointing it out, either.
I think I've clicked on maybe 5 ads in the last several years. But I rarely block them. I just tune them out.
It's only when an ad is extremely obnoxious, or interferes with the ability to actually see/use the page, that I block it. Unsolicited sound is a good way to either get your ad blocked or get me to close your page. I tend to open links in background tabs as I read, then move over to the next tab when I'm done. I don't want ads on 5 different tabs all providing their own soundtrack for pages I haven't started looking at yet.
Many people on Slashdot know that Opera used to be ad-supported until about 2 years ago. (In fact there's probably a few people here who think it still is, but that's beside the point.)
Way back when, there were a couple of sites that decided to block Opera users because they were afraid that their visitors would click on the ads in Opera's toolbar instead of the ads on their own site. They put up a similar page talking about how horrible it was that Opera was stealing their revenue. Keep in mind that Opera wasn't even blocking the site's own ads.
Later, after Opera went 100% free (as in beer), they eventually stopped blocking it.
I doubt they got any Opera users to visit with another browser. I suspect most of them just stopped visiting their site entirely. That is, of course, the lesson: if you actively block a browser, people will just leave. Some of them will complain, but unless your content is extremely compelling, most of them will just wander off to some other site that will let them in.
Well, it seems tied to that ridiculous "Firefox Myths" site. You know, the one filled with half-truths, strawman attacks, misquotes and more, that somehow only manages to find positive things to "debunk."
My favorite is "debunking" the claim that "Firefox is not a religion" by using things like the Book of Mozilla quotes and the crop circle project to prove that Firefox *is* a religion.
So yeah, FUD seems like an apt description.
Yeah. I remember finding some post on The Cure for Information Overload, and it took forever to get to the actual story!
This reminds me of a comment someone made on the introduction of the iPod Shuffle (bear with me, it's relevant). The idea was that, at the time, the iPod brand was perceived as signifying the high-end digital music player. By expanding into the low-end, Apple was trading a loss in the value of their brand (since it no longer meant "high-end" by default) in order to gain another segment of the market.
Similarly, Nielsen's article suggests that by tossing off random blog articles, even if you also post highly insightful material, you lower the average value of what you post. You effectively cede some of your reputation.
That's even more of an issue with topic-based blogs. If your focus is, say, US politics, or astronomy, etc. you have to stick close to your topic, or people will start complaining, "Why are you spending all this time talking about your cats!"
Wait... Spain is a third-world country?
I remember hearing that in pre-Wikipedia days. I checked their citation, and it just lists the Weird Al FAQ. I wish I could remember whether it was a printed interview a video interview, or what. One of those "Behind the Music" things, maybe?
Funny story...
During my last year in college, I had a dual-boot system but ran Linux most of the time, since I'd seen the crazy stuff people were able to do to Win9x boxes over the campus LAN. Early in the year, figuring some sort of file-sharing would be useful, I set up two samba shares, one read-only and one write-only. A folder where I could post things and a dropbox. Within a few months I'd forgotten about the dropbox. Sometime the following year I was cleaning up the system and stumbled across the folder. Embarrassingly, I discovered two very large MPEG files containing Entrapment. Apparently someone had found a writable share, uploaded it with the intent to transfer it somewhere else, and discovered they couldn't get the file back. (This was exactly why I made it write-only in the first place -- so it couldn't be used as a transfer point). I told my brother about this, and he laughed and said, "At the very least they could have pirated a good movie!"
Yes, that's the first thing I thought of when I heard that Bush had commuted Libby's sentence. So the response should be...
A. He is being taken care of. Well taken care of.
B. Bush just wants to make sure Libby gets what's coming to him.
C. He's a flip-flopper!
According to the article, they plan on sending another expedition next year and drilling at the lake.
But what about Rygel and Pilot from Farscape? I thought they blended fairly well.
Looking back at the 1990s sci-fi scene, what I remember is that people who read a lot of sci-fi tended to be the ones who jumped from Star Trek to Babylon 5. Partly because there was finally something on TV that wasn't just Trek (were there any other space-based shows in the late 80s/early 90s that lasted more than a few episodes?), and partly because B5 had more of a literary background to it than the modern Treks. There were also a lot of people who had been fans of Classic Trek (whether first-run or in reruns) who were disappointed by Next Gen, and looked at B5 and saw the kind of show they had hoped Next Gen would be..
And in my experience, while many B5 fans looked down at Trek, Trek fans were more likely to be outright hostile, as if watching this upstart show would somehow be betraying Star Trek. Maybe it was a matter of the relative sizes of the fan bases, but if you picked a random B5 fan, chances were that he had seen (and maybe even enjoyed) a significant amount of Star Trek, but if you picked a random Trek fan, chances were that he had seen one episode, or had avoided it on principle.
Assuming, of course, you don't consider religion to be spiritual, given that religion actually seems to be increasing in societal importance over the last decade...
...of New Babylon -- er, York.
Yes. The minimum is usually posted on the counter, next to the logos showing which cards they accept. Typically it'll be in the $3-5 range. Mainly they don't want the processing fees charged by the credit card company to eat up the entire profit on the sale.
Personally, I try to use cash for anything less than $10, and I'll use a debit or credit card for anything more than $20 (which I pay off each month unless I've made some particularly large purchase). In the $10-20 range, it depends on how much I have in my wallet and what else I'm planning on buying that day.
Conversely, in the US, it's common for stores to refuse cash if the amount of change they would have to make is unreasonable. Many stores and counter-services restaurants post that they will not accept bills larger than $20 (or occasionally $50), because it's unreasonable to expect them to make change on a $4.50 purchase made with a $50 bill.
Given the number of websites whose developers only seem to test in IE and Firefox, I'd say they probably don't.
No, it was Safari. Take it from someone who followed Acid2 from the time it was announced. Even this list of Acid2 in major browsers, made by an Opera employee, credits Safari with making it there first.
The scrollbar controversy you're thinking of was with Konqueror and in iCab. Safari developers (well, mainly Dave Hyatt) wrote a lot of code to pass Acid2, but WebKit had already diverged enough that Konqueror's developers weren't able to just apply the patches he released. They had to reimplement most of the changes themselves. They and iCab both missed the scrollbar -- as did the Web Standards Project when they looked at the results -- because it wasn't mentioned in the guide. Months later, some Opera folks pointed out the scrollbar issue in those two browsers.
If history is anything to judge by, if Safari (or Gecko, for that matter) achieved near 100% marketshare, the browser would stagnate. We're better off with multiple major players keeping each other motivated.
Logically, yes... but the "before" (IE/Firefox/Safari/Other) and "after" (IE/Safari) pie charts showed Safari eating Firefox for lunch and not making a dent in IE. Which makes you wonder...