That's a good recommendation. I have the 48G, no expansion slot, never needed it. Great calculator and the transition from the 48S is minimal. They revamped some of the applications to make them a bit easier to use, but you can still access the old 48S methods if that is what you prefer.
Except that any decent [Sennheiser; Grado; et cetera] pair of headphones running more than $60 can reproduce everything your better than average stereo system can reproduce. Just a little bit more, and your looking at headphones that can blow away even $10,000 rigs as far as dynamic range goes. Now if you're just using the cheese that comes free with the CD player, then you've got a point.:)
Since we were discussing keynote speeches, it seems rather obvious that the original statement is referring to the state of modern keynote speeches, not the state of Everything Under the Sun. That is your first mistake, and it is acceptable given that your still demonstrate harboring a strong fanatical basis to your way of thought.
However, much more interesting is your complete lack of logical ability. Read that first line again, and again, and again. Note that it says: Apple is like many other corporations.... Now, try to explain to me how that makes Apple inferior on a strictly logical basis, using that line alone. It looks as if I am calling foul on a general practice that exists these days, not something specific to Apple.
So, even if this line was referring to all of Apple and not just their conventions, it would still be putting all of them in a similar basket, none more superior than the other on this merit alone.
Here is a "mental trick" for you to try out: Some companies do not do this at all. They make serious computers for professionals, and don't really do much hyping. Does this make their products better than Apple's? Bonus points if you can make the logical connection between this question and the underlying point of the preceding paragraph.
If your answer was "not enough data," then congratulations! You indeed can see beyond a boolean world-view! Now apply that "trick" to everything else I've said, and compare it to your wild accusations and assumptions. You will quickly see that I have made no move in any direction (except for marketing) while you have been flailing all over the gamut with unsubstantiated non-sense and fanboy terminology.
I own Apple computers, hand-built Linux computers, FreeBSD computers, and yes even Windows computers. They are all tools, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. I do not "laugh off" news about any of them, as you already admitted to doing.
So who is the one with a chip on their shoulder? Who is the one who looks more like a troll, or a mindless robot? Go take a break, and come back when you can understand that a single statement about a facet of a complex system does not imply anything negative about the Entire System, by itself (and may not even imply an overall negative state to the facet in question.)
Trolling or blinded hatred? Interesting, you need to broaden your perspective a bit. Life is not a boolean.
If you wish to be pedantic, the keynote speech does not magically produce the products as he waves his hand on the stage. He is announcing them; hyping them for all their worth. So when I say that a keynote speech is all fluff, which it is, that implies absolutely nothing about the company or the products -- merely the marketing tactics employed.
Not once did I state that Apple products are inferior, or whatever else your went and got your ire raised on. I simply referred to the marketing technique. When I watch a Jobs Keynote, I expect to get nothing truly informative out of it. That is okay, he is a fun speaker to watch. I never said that is a bad thing. What I criticised is the lack of a meaty follow-up.
Anyway, I suggest your reassess your level of fanaticism. You appear to be exhibiting what is known as a 'knee-jerk' reaction. I stated a mildly negative aspect about a minor problem with a company and you flew off the handle making frothingly wild assumptions about everything from my "hatreds" to my intentions. That will teach me to look up definitions and help you out in the future, I suppose.
key-note Also keynote
2... b. attrib. as a keynote address or speech, orig. U.S., a speech usually as an opening address, designed to state the main concerns or to set the prevailing tone for a conference or the like; often used at political rallies merely to arouse enthusiasm or promote unity; so key-note speaker, one who gives a key-note speech.
From OED 2nd Ed.
And yes, it is originally a term applied to music (and is still used the way.) It is the lowest note of a scale, thus setting the tonality or transposition of the scale, or mode.
Now, basically as you can see, a keynoter is merely supposed to mainly be fluff. A bit that is fun to listen to if you agree with the speaker, and gets you in the mood for the rest of the show. Unfortunately Apple is like many other corporations these days, and nearly all fluff and no pudding. The keynote speech is not supposed to be the beginning and the end. So what we end up getting is nothing. A bunch of wild ranting and raving with no substance. That's what Jobs is good at.
I should add to this, shop lifting is two things. Being seen taking a product, and leaving the store with it, without claiming it at the checkout stand. Putting product in your pockets is not grounds for detainment, as you can always claim you were going to pay for it. It is only when you leave the premise with the unpurchased product that they have seen you take, that you can be detained under citizens arrest provisions (where they will often try to make a "deal" with you) and when an officer of the law arrives, you can then be searched and arrested.
This is probably a troll, but it is something that many people are not aware of so I will respond to it.
At first, I thought perhaps you were living outside of the U.S. but then I saw you reference Fred Meyer, a west coast chain. Hired security are not officers of the law. They are not allowed to carry firearms, and the only badge they sport is their security company's logo, and maybe their name tag.
They do not have the authority to detain you, unless you have been seen, either with video survelliance or guard's eye witness, shop lifting. They have no authority to search your person or belongings under any circumstances. Even if there is a sign that says they can.
I was in CompUSA (shudder) a few months back picking up a mouse since my other one broke. I had with me my laptop backpack. While wandering around in the store looking for a good portable mouse, a security guard approached me and told me that it is store policy to search my bag when I leave, and he just wanted me to know that they would do that. Sure enough, in the entrance of the store there is a placard saying they reserve the right to do searches of customers bags that they bring in.
Fortunatly I knew my rights, and told the fellow he had no authority to do that, even if there was a sign. No more than if you could post a sign saying that they reserve the right to take you in the back room and torture you with razor blades if you shoplift.
He tried the classic, this is private property, we can do what we like. So I asked to speak with the manager on duty. A few minutes later, the manager comes by, and I informed him that this security guard was threatening to invade my privacy with no due cause, and that if he did not ask his contract employees to stand down, I would never shop there again (not that I will at any rate), and that I would take my present business across the street to another store.
Naturally, the manager being of several orders of magnitude more brilliant than the rent-a-cop, understood the situation, and that their sign is completely consensual, and only works if the customer is ignorant. I went about my shopping and bid the guard a nice day on the way out.
This guard was an exception. Most have had some briefing on this rule, and you will hear it in their language. If you set off an alarm on exit of the store, they will approach and ask if they may audit the contents of your bag against the receipt. Most people, slightly embarassed by setting off an alarm, take this as something they must do to prove their innocence, It is not however, you have to give consent. You can just as freely walk right through the alarm and ignore the guard / employee that is requesting to invade your privacy.
Actually, unless they changed their system, you might want to be careful with your Netflix password. With it one could get your name, shipping address, billing address, and credit card information.
To arbitrarily dismiss all posthumous publication would be silly. Art transcends the artist, it always has and it always will. Often the artist thinks what they have done is wretched, but the rest of the world would disagree. Classic example. Franz Kafka told his best friend to burn all of his writings after he died. Did he do that? No, he sweat blood to get them all published. If he had not done that, the world would not have had Kafka, and few would deny that his writings have been an important influence to authors around the world since then.
Instead of just boycotting, it would be fairly easy to "jam" this sytem by urging people to take Mach 3 razors from the display, mill around the store for a while, set the razor down on a distant shelf and leave the store. Then they would get swamped with false positives, and merchandise littered all over the place.
Oh please. If that's the problem then set the camera to non-interlaced full frame capture and snap away. You get 29.97 DV quality stills per second (assuming NTSC). The "still shot" feature is an bonus feature! It's there for reference use only, not as a replacement for a digital camera. Like somebody else pointed out, the CCD is designed for high speed, low resolution continuous capture, not still photography. Have you ever tried printing a capture out of your video camera? To get decent resolution, you'll have to blow it up around 250% Nothing, and I mean nothing, is going to look good after that kind of enlargement, I don't care how lossy or fine the original JPEG looks (except quite possible a picture of a blank wall). To print the thing at its native resolution, it would barely be larger than a postage stamp. You aren't going to see the artifacts there either.
Get a grip. If you need a digital camera buy a digital camera. If the resolution that comes out of a video camera is good enough for you, you can find thousands of digital cameras for dirt cheap in that range -- kind of blows your "forces the user to buy extra equipment" whine out the water.
Oh it isn't all that bad now. I recently purchased a CD that came with a nice sized Boards of Canada sticker. As a nod to the nostalgia you are feeling, the CD is coloured black on both sides, making it look a bit like a record.
The Radiohead CD I bought the other day came with a nice booklet of fold-out artwork, some even printed on vellum.
Another Boards of Canada CD that I bought last year actually came in a hardback bound booklet, with the CD just being inserted into the pages of artwork like yet another page.
Then there is the Aube CD, Pages from the Book, which was created by sampling the hell (and going to hell for it) out of ripping pages from a Bible. That one came with a torn page that had actually been used in the sampling.
There are artists who still care, and there are those that do not... just like it was back then.
As it has been noted by several others, there is no firm reason to sell music as "albums." If you are going to move primary distribution to a media-less format, there is no reason go constrict your sales to formats that are bound to media constraints. There is nothing wrong with selling files in sets, this is a good thing because it allows the artist to play with multi-song themes and such. There has been much cleverness with the ablum based format, and I would hate to see that disappear. But the age of the single song release is approaching. Even if they come in sets, they should be available individually as well.
The primary concern of mine is audio quality. I will refuse to pay for MP3s. Those are for sampling what an artist has and deciding if you wish to purchase their work or not. Listening to even higher quality encodes on my system is pretty painful, and my system is not even that particularly expensive (in the grand scheme of audio, at any rate.)
I would pay for FLAC, but that is a lot of bandwidth.
Originally, I was going to write that you should provide the ability to re-download in the future at no cost, like some of the better eBook distributors, but I think that is unnecessary and too expensive for you. The user should be responsible with their purchase. When I buy a CD, I immediately rip it, burn a copy and then store encoded OGG files for light listening usage. I then use the CD-R for common usage, and the "master" goes back in the jewelcase and into the library where it isn't touched. It's just common sense to me. If you buy a CD and step on it ten years later you are going to have go buy another one. If you lose the files you bought from some online retailer ten years ago, you'll have to buy another copy. The same risk of whether or not the original is available is still there with CDs, the thing might be out of print. Half of the CDs I own are already out of print. That is why I am so careful with them.
Yes, though it doesn't bother me, when it does, I quit. Personally, playing with trolls can be fun.:)
I agree with what you are saying, I would rather get ads that interest me. What I have a problem with is the way they are going about it. Take Opera's ad system, for instance. That is something I don't mind. I tell it that books and art interest me, and that is the end of the story. It isn't tracking meta-tags in the pages I visit, or anything else without my knowledge. Why not just do things that way? If you are a registered user of NYT, or any other ad-supported service, and you get tired of the generic advertisments, you should be able to access your account settings and tweak them as you will. It would require far less resources on the serving side of things, and the user doesn't feel like they are being watched all of the time.
Second point, the type of tracking you are talking about here is very generic, and doesn't bother me too much, if that is indeed what they do. I don't mind if a publisher knows that the average person where I live is more interested in film than business, for instance; or figures that the average person walking down a terminal in O'Hare would probably find the Dow more interesting than the latest news from Cannes. That is a fairly non-invasive type of marketing. It is when they start assuming they know exactly what I need, based on some spreadsheet that it gets amusing -- and then annoying, because nine times out of ten the things I consume on a regular basis really aren't advertised much anywhere. Watching CDNOW.com trying to figure out my rather eclectic and obscure taste in music would be a primary example, when I still shopped there.
Oh, and by the way, I primarily shop used books, so I'm not sure if the publisher even gets that info at all -- but that is just a side issue. I don't mean it as a rebuttle, your original point still stands.
And shame on those telemarketing non-profs! Anyway, your points are all sound; I was never intending to say that the entire world should live as I do -- who knows it might be a worse or better place. All I know is what is best for me. I used to live in the consumer cycle, and I am glad to be out of it. Once I did leave it, forms of advertisment that used to get me now seem painfully obvious and contrived. You also start to view the entire circle as a little -- odd though. I mean where is all of this going, really? To what purpose is it serving, just to keep people's minds off of dying? There has to be a better way, because most of the systems employed and used do not really make life "better" for people, it just seems better because that is how everything is set up. The news I get from the local free/price-to-print newsletters are usually way more interesting and honest than the stuff with massive profiles and budgets.
Yeah, time to stop. Philosophy alert on the horizon.
I got recorded buying a book? I transact in cash. I don't use credit cards, I don't own any. I know they are tracking everyone else, and that bothers me a great deal, but I am outside of the system on this one. I shop at independent stores. They don't have membership cards, or anything. Nobody has ever even asked for my name.
Did I say anything about reading books being the only thing I ever do? No. So what was the point of that last line of nonsense? It was an activity comparison along the lines of: The mind of a person who eats what they have been told go eat by advertisers, and a person who grows and makes their own food. Oh, now you'll probably come back with, "to survive in this world, you need more than a garden, farmer boy!"
So, uh, try again -- I am still smiling. I have yet to see why my world is any less real than yours.
Hmm? I generally do not read newspapers. Sorry about the feint there, I was just hypothesizing about a dream advertising assimilation engine that erased itself, one of those things most people refer to as a joke. I don't actually read the Times, or any other major newspaper.
Or, you can just step out of the consumer-corporation mind jerk entirely and live your life the way you wish to live it, and not the way the banner/side-of-bus/television/et cetara tells you how to live it. Me, I live without all of these things and I seem to be doing just fine, quite happy, actually. And I could care less about most of these companies you are refering to, the ones that I do care about, they get my financial support in return for services, with or without their million dollar advertising campaigns (which I never see, anyway.)
So which is the real real world? The one where you spend the afternoon on your porch reading a book to your mate, or the one where you sit in front of a television and "reap the rewards" of advertising, so you can buy more stuff, presumably?
I am not saying my world is universally better than your world, but it is just as real.
Why would Google rely on meta tag directives if it could be accomplished in a robots file?
Of course there is a standard for robots.txt, but I do not think that it addresses full page chaching. The cache directives in the robots.txt file specially refer to how the spider should cache the text file, not the web pages that it controls. So you could set it to no-cache if your robots.txt file changes constantly.
I could be wrong, but the last time I checked that is all I saw. However, I am sure that w3c is well aware of the issue. When the drafts for robots.txt went around in '96, I don't think anyone was anticipating massive spiders that actually created a running copy of most the Internet once a month.
You say these things as if they are good things. Man, I don't want some newspapaper tracking everything that I read, so that they may serve me custom tailored advertisements! Although, it would be nice if the system actually was intelligent, it would eventually discern that I loath the advertisment philosophy, and stop sending them altogether -- ha.
Actually, click the second link the poster put it. It describes how you can do just that, have Google index the page, but not cache it. I'm sure you've even seen pages that use that. It just shows up with a "Similar Sites" link at the bottom. And yes, I am pretty sure that clicking on a story link without being reged will just take you to their login page, because it is cookie based, and checks onload.
True, there is no standard, but Google's method of allowing indexing and caching as independently selectably features is well documented and extremely easy to do. You can even tell Google specifically to stop caching, if you don't mind smaller engines caching.
So, it isn't a standard, but it is a piece of cake for NYT to figure out, and indeed, they already have. As the person above said, this is just C|Net trying to be a real news source. The article even says that the method I just described is the focus of their "discussions."
I imagine the discussions, if anything, were intially a friendly lawyer call (if even that,) which was quickly diverted to a tech issue and ended up with some webmaster at NYT getting the specifics of how to set up the Times so that Google will still index their pages and bring them up with searches, but not cache them.
Yeah, doesn't get rid of the people using embed blogs on their webpages, but generally they tend to be a big more interesting. I have actually come across some of the things I was searching for in other's blogs, so it isn't all bad.
How is that the same? It might be similar if say, up until this time AOL users couldn't access LiveJournal or Blog, and now they can -- but that is not what is happening. I don't even see how increased exposure to the web technique of journaling would cause a problem. LiveJournal is semi-exclusive, you have to know somebody to get in, and the official Blog service is less homogenized than LiveJournal, so an influx of users wouldn't hurt it that much, assuming there even would be one. If AOL's journalling feature turns out to be as good as some of the early reviews are saying, there wouldn't be much of a reason to switch. The people who would have reason to switch likely already use the alternatives as it is.
Actually, all of the functions pertaining to turn signal usage were meant to fall under the inclusive "operation." That is why I did not specify that it only turns a blinker on or off. In comparison, we were discussing email clients. Email clients allow you to operate email functions. There are hundreds of things you can do with email in most clients, but there is no reason to list them all every time you talk about "using email." You both missed the point entirely, the comment was not meant to be an exhaustive run-down of everything a turn-signal stick can do in a 1996 Chrysler versus Outlook 2002 XP -- damn --hehe. The point was static function systems versus dynamic function systems, and why it takes a lot longer to get a dynamic system "new user" proof.
Eh, and depending on the quality of the bottle, to keep water out of the shampoo; to look pretty so that people will buy it; optionally with an improvised hook to hang from shower head, serving convenience and practicallity by keeping the bulk of the unused shampoo near the nozzle for fast use; not to mention flip tops as opposed to screw tops for more precise application of shampoo in palm. I am sure there is more. The latter design very much have the secondary purpose of ejecting shampoo. If the walls of the bottle were not pliable, you would never get anything out of a flip nozzle, assuming normal viscosity of the shampoo, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good recommendation. I have the 48G, no expansion slot, never needed it. Great calculator and the transition from the 48S is minimal. They revamped some of the applications to make them a bit easier to use, but you can still access the old 48S methods if that is what you prefer.
Except that any decent [Sennheiser; Grado; et cetera] pair of headphones running more than $60 can reproduce everything your better than average stereo system can reproduce. Just a little bit more, and your looking at headphones that can blow away even $10,000 rigs as far as dynamic range goes. Now if you're just using the cheese that comes free with the CD player, then you've got a point. :)
However, much more interesting is your complete lack of logical ability. Read that first line again, and again, and again. Note that it says: Apple is like many other corporations.... Now, try to explain to me how that makes Apple inferior on a strictly logical basis, using that line alone. It looks as if I am calling foul on a general practice that exists these days, not something specific to Apple.
So, even if this line was referring to all of Apple and not just their conventions, it would still be putting all of them in a similar basket, none more superior than the other on this merit alone.
Here is a "mental trick" for you to try out: Some companies do not do this at all. They make serious computers for professionals, and don't really do much hyping. Does this make their products better than Apple's? Bonus points if you can make the logical connection between this question and the underlying point of the preceding paragraph.
If your answer was "not enough data," then congratulations! You indeed can see beyond a boolean world-view! Now apply that "trick" to everything else I've said, and compare it to your wild accusations and assumptions. You will quickly see that I have made no move in any direction (except for marketing) while you have been flailing all over the gamut with unsubstantiated non-sense and fanboy terminology.
I own Apple computers, hand-built Linux computers, FreeBSD computers, and yes even Windows computers. They are all tools, each with their own set of strengths and weaknesses. I do not "laugh off" news about any of them, as you already admitted to doing.
So who is the one with a chip on their shoulder? Who is the one who looks more like a troll, or a mindless robot? Go take a break, and come back when you can understand that a single statement about a facet of a complex system does not imply anything negative about the Entire System, by itself (and may not even imply an overall negative state to the facet in question.)
If you wish to be pedantic, the keynote speech does not magically produce the products as he waves his hand on the stage. He is announcing them; hyping them for all their worth. So when I say that a keynote speech is all fluff, which it is, that implies absolutely nothing about the company or the products -- merely the marketing tactics employed.
Not once did I state that Apple products are inferior, or whatever else your went and got your ire raised on. I simply referred to the marketing technique. When I watch a Jobs Keynote, I expect to get nothing truly informative out of it. That is okay, he is a fun speaker to watch. I never said that is a bad thing. What I criticised is the lack of a meaty follow-up.
Anyway, I suggest your reassess your level of fanaticism. You appear to be exhibiting what is known as a 'knee-jerk' reaction. I stated a mildly negative aspect about a minor problem with a company and you flew off the handle making frothingly wild assumptions about everything from my "hatreds" to my intentions. That will teach me to look up definitions and help you out in the future, I suppose.
2... b. attrib. as a keynote address or speech, orig. U.S., a speech usually as an opening address, designed to state the main concerns or to set the prevailing tone for a conference or the like; often used at political rallies merely to arouse enthusiasm or promote unity; so key-note speaker, one who gives a key-note speech.
From OED 2nd Ed.
And yes, it is originally a term applied to music (and is still used the way.) It is the lowest note of a scale, thus setting the tonality or transposition of the scale, or mode.
Now, basically as you can see, a keynoter is merely supposed to mainly be fluff. A bit that is fun to listen to if you agree with the speaker, and gets you in the mood for the rest of the show. Unfortunately Apple is like many other corporations these days, and nearly all fluff and no pudding. The keynote speech is not supposed to be the beginning and the end. So what we end up getting is nothing. A bunch of wild ranting and raving with no substance. That's what Jobs is good at.
I should add to this, shop lifting is two things. Being seen taking a product, and leaving the store with it, without claiming it at the checkout stand. Putting product in your pockets is not grounds for detainment, as you can always claim you were going to pay for it. It is only when you leave the premise with the unpurchased product that they have seen you take, that you can be detained under citizens arrest provisions (where they will often try to make a "deal" with you) and when an officer of the law arrives, you can then be searched and arrested.
At first, I thought perhaps you were living outside of the U.S. but then I saw you reference Fred Meyer, a west coast chain. Hired security are not officers of the law. They are not allowed to carry firearms, and the only badge they sport is their security company's logo, and maybe their name tag.
They do not have the authority to detain you, unless you have been seen, either with video survelliance or guard's eye witness, shop lifting. They have no authority to search your person or belongings under any circumstances. Even if there is a sign that says they can.
I was in CompUSA (shudder) a few months back picking up a mouse since my other one broke. I had with me my laptop backpack. While wandering around in the store looking for a good portable mouse, a security guard approached me and told me that it is store policy to search my bag when I leave, and he just wanted me to know that they would do that. Sure enough, in the entrance of the store there is a placard saying they reserve the right to do searches of customers bags that they bring in.
Fortunatly I knew my rights, and told the fellow he had no authority to do that, even if there was a sign. No more than if you could post a sign saying that they reserve the right to take you in the back room and torture you with razor blades if you shoplift.
He tried the classic, this is private property, we can do what we like. So I asked to speak with the manager on duty. A few minutes later, the manager comes by, and I informed him that this security guard was threatening to invade my privacy with no due cause, and that if he did not ask his contract employees to stand down, I would never shop there again (not that I will at any rate), and that I would take my present business across the street to another store.
Naturally, the manager being of several orders of magnitude more brilliant than the rent-a-cop, understood the situation, and that their sign is completely consensual, and only works if the customer is ignorant. I went about my shopping and bid the guard a nice day on the way out.
This guard was an exception. Most have had some briefing on this rule, and you will hear it in their language. If you set off an alarm on exit of the store, they will approach and ask if they may audit the contents of your bag against the receipt. Most people, slightly embarassed by setting off an alarm, take this as something they must do to prove their innocence, It is not however, you have to give consent. You can just as freely walk right through the alarm and ignore the guard / employee that is requesting to invade your privacy.
Actually, unless they changed their system, you might want to be careful with your Netflix password. With it one could get your name, shipping address, billing address, and credit card information.
To arbitrarily dismiss all posthumous publication would be silly. Art transcends the artist, it always has and it always will. Often the artist thinks what they have done is wretched, but the rest of the world would disagree. Classic example. Franz Kafka told his best friend to burn all of his writings after he died. Did he do that? No, he sweat blood to get them all published. If he had not done that, the world would not have had Kafka, and few would deny that his writings have been an important influence to authors around the world since then.
Instead of just boycotting, it would be fairly easy to "jam" this sytem by urging people to take Mach 3 razors from the display, mill around the store for a while, set the razor down on a distant shelf and leave the store. Then they would get swamped with false positives, and merchandise littered all over the place.
Get a grip. If you need a digital camera buy a digital camera. If the resolution that comes out of a video camera is good enough for you, you can find thousands of digital cameras for dirt cheap in that range -- kind of blows your "forces the user to buy extra equipment" whine out the water.
The Radiohead CD I bought the other day came with a nice booklet of fold-out artwork, some even printed on vellum.
Another Boards of Canada CD that I bought last year actually came in a hardback bound booklet, with the CD just being inserted into the pages of artwork like yet another page.
Then there is the Aube CD, Pages from the Book, which was created by sampling the hell (and going to hell for it) out of ripping pages from a Bible. That one came with a torn page that had actually been used in the sampling.
There are artists who still care, and there are those that do not ... just like it was back then.
The primary concern of mine is audio quality. I will refuse to pay for MP3s. Those are for sampling what an artist has and deciding if you wish to purchase their work or not. Listening to even higher quality encodes on my system is pretty painful, and my system is not even that particularly expensive (in the grand scheme of audio, at any rate.)
I would pay for FLAC, but that is a lot of bandwidth.
Originally, I was going to write that you should provide the ability to re-download in the future at no cost, like some of the better eBook distributors, but I think that is unnecessary and too expensive for you. The user should be responsible with their purchase. When I buy a CD, I immediately rip it, burn a copy and then store encoded OGG files for light listening usage. I then use the CD-R for common usage, and the "master" goes back in the jewelcase and into the library where it isn't touched. It's just common sense to me. If you buy a CD and step on it ten years later you are going to have go buy another one. If you lose the files you bought from some online retailer ten years ago, you'll have to buy another copy. The same risk of whether or not the original is available is still there with CDs, the thing might be out of print. Half of the CDs I own are already out of print. That is why I am so careful with them.
I agree with what you are saying, I would rather get ads that interest me. What I have a problem with is the way they are going about it. Take Opera's ad system, for instance. That is something I don't mind. I tell it that books and art interest me, and that is the end of the story. It isn't tracking meta-tags in the pages I visit, or anything else without my knowledge. Why not just do things that way? If you are a registered user of NYT, or any other ad-supported service, and you get tired of the generic advertisments, you should be able to access your account settings and tweak them as you will. It would require far less resources on the serving side of things, and the user doesn't feel like they are being watched all of the time.
Second point, the type of tracking you are talking about here is very generic, and doesn't bother me too much, if that is indeed what they do. I don't mind if a publisher knows that the average person where I live is more interested in film than business, for instance; or figures that the average person walking down a terminal in O'Hare would probably find the Dow more interesting than the latest news from Cannes. That is a fairly non-invasive type of marketing. It is when they start assuming they know exactly what I need, based on some spreadsheet that it gets amusing -- and then annoying, because nine times out of ten the things I consume on a regular basis really aren't advertised much anywhere. Watching CDNOW.com trying to figure out my rather eclectic and obscure taste in music would be a primary example, when I still shopped there.
Oh, and by the way, I primarily shop used books, so I'm not sure if the publisher even gets that info at all -- but that is just a side issue. I don't mean it as a rebuttle, your original point still stands.
And shame on those telemarketing non-profs! Anyway, your points are all sound; I was never intending to say that the entire world should live as I do -- who knows it might be a worse or better place. All I know is what is best for me. I used to live in the consumer cycle, and I am glad to be out of it. Once I did leave it, forms of advertisment that used to get me now seem painfully obvious and contrived. You also start to view the entire circle as a little -- odd though. I mean where is all of this going, really? To what purpose is it serving, just to keep people's minds off of dying? There has to be a better way, because most of the systems employed and used do not really make life "better" for people, it just seems better because that is how everything is set up. The news I get from the local free/price-to-print newsletters are usually way more interesting and honest than the stuff with massive profiles and budgets.
Yeah, time to stop. Philosophy alert on the horizon.
I got recorded buying a book? I transact in cash. I don't use credit cards, I don't own any. I know they are tracking everyone else, and that bothers me a great deal, but I am outside of the system on this one. I shop at independent stores. They don't have membership cards, or anything. Nobody has ever even asked for my name.
Did I say anything about reading books being the only thing I ever do? No. So what was the point of that last line of nonsense? It was an activity comparison along the lines of: The mind of a person who eats what they have been told go eat by advertisers, and a person who grows and makes their own food. Oh, now you'll probably come back with, "to survive in this world, you need more than a garden, farmer boy!"
So, uh, try again -- I am still smiling. I have yet to see why my world is any less real than yours.
Hmm? I generally do not read newspapers. Sorry about the feint there, I was just hypothesizing about a dream advertising assimilation engine that erased itself, one of those things most people refer to as a joke. I don't actually read the Times, or any other major newspaper.
So which is the real real world? The one where you spend the afternoon on your porch reading a book to your mate, or the one where you sit in front of a television and "reap the rewards" of advertising, so you can buy more stuff, presumably?
I am not saying my world is universally better than your world, but it is just as real.
Of course there is a standard for robots.txt, but I do not think that it addresses full page chaching. The cache directives in the robots.txt file specially refer to how the spider should cache the text file, not the web pages that it controls. So you could set it to no-cache if your robots.txt file changes constantly.
I could be wrong, but the last time I checked that is all I saw. However, I am sure that w3c is well aware of the issue. When the drafts for robots.txt went around in '96, I don't think anyone was anticipating massive spiders that actually created a running copy of most the Internet once a month.
You say these things as if they are good things. Man, I don't want some newspapaper tracking everything that I read, so that they may serve me custom tailored advertisements! Although, it would be nice if the system actually was intelligent, it would eventually discern that I loath the advertisment philosophy, and stop sending them altogether -- ha.
Actually, click the second link the poster put it. It describes how you can do just that, have Google index the page, but not cache it. I'm sure you've even seen pages that use that. It just shows up with a "Similar Sites" link at the bottom. And yes, I am pretty sure that clicking on a story link without being reged will just take you to their login page, because it is cookie based, and checks onload.
True, there is no standard, but Google's method of allowing indexing and caching as independently selectably features is well documented and extremely easy to do. You can even tell Google specifically to stop caching, if you don't mind smaller engines caching.
So, it isn't a standard, but it is a piece of cake for NYT to figure out, and indeed, they already have. As the person above said, this is just C|Net trying to be a real news source. The article even says that the method I just described is the focus of their "discussions."
I imagine the discussions, if anything, were intially a friendly lawyer call (if even that,) which was quickly diverted to a tech issue and ended up with some webmaster at NYT getting the specifics of how to set up the Times so that Google will still index their pages and bring them up with searches, but not cache them.
Yeah, doesn't get rid of the people using embed blogs on their webpages, but generally they tend to be a big more interesting. I have actually come across some of the things I was searching for in other's blogs, so it isn't all bad.
How is that the same? It might be similar if say, up until this time AOL users couldn't access LiveJournal or Blog, and now they can -- but that is not what is happening. I don't even see how increased exposure to the web technique of journaling would cause a problem. LiveJournal is semi-exclusive, you have to know somebody to get in, and the official Blog service is less homogenized than LiveJournal, so an influx of users wouldn't hurt it that much, assuming there even would be one. If AOL's journalling feature turns out to be as good as some of the early reviews are saying, there wouldn't be much of a reason to switch. The people who would have reason to switch likely already use the alternatives as it is.
Actually, all of the functions pertaining to turn signal usage were meant to fall under the inclusive "operation." That is why I did not specify that it only turns a blinker on or off. In comparison, we were discussing email clients. Email clients allow you to operate email functions. There are hundreds of things you can do with email in most clients, but there is no reason to list them all every time you talk about "using email." You both missed the point entirely, the comment was not meant to be an exhaustive run-down of everything a turn-signal stick can do in a 1996 Chrysler versus Outlook 2002 XP -- damn --hehe. The point was static function systems versus dynamic function systems, and why it takes a lot longer to get a dynamic system "new user" proof.
Eh, and depending on the quality of the bottle, to keep water out of the shampoo; to look pretty so that people will buy it; optionally with an improvised hook to hang from shower head, serving convenience and practicallity by keeping the bulk of the unused shampoo near the nozzle for fast use; not to mention flip tops as opposed to screw tops for more precise application of shampoo in palm. I am sure there is more. The latter design very much have the secondary purpose of ejecting shampoo. If the walls of the bottle were not pliable, you would never get anything out of a flip nozzle, assuming normal viscosity of the shampoo, of course.