* No more than 50k in size unless the user interacts with it (Then it can load more)
That's still ~ 50 x as large as a text ad, and so sucks up ~ 50 x the bandwidth and download time.
* No more than 15 seconds of animation
That's still 15 more seconds than a text ad, or no ad at all.
Sorry, were you supposed to be pointing out the pluses?
... but if the market has determined that animated banners are necessary...
Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The market hasn't determined jack shit; someone has determined they can exploit the market by exactly that much; that people will put up with exactly that much more while somebody else reaps the benefits.
If that's fine with you, consider this: a tapeworm doesn't take that much nutrition from your body overall, and causes no problems or discomfort for > 95% of people. A cold virus only affects you for about 7 days; if you get a cold every year that's still less than 2% of your entire life. So why don't we just let them live and thrive?
If they were really smart they would use static, silent, and small ( in file-size terms ) adds.
They do that right now, don't they?
advertisement ------------- advertisement
Oh, hang on, it's AdBlock Pro that's doing that... ergo, AdBlock is smarter than Google!
... maybe by making them artistic, entertaining or otherwise worthwhile watching.
No such thing; ads are parasites on humanity's senses and emotions. Artistic or entertaining ads would be like a tick that paints seascapes, or a tapeworm that does stand-up comedy - artistic or entertaining, maybe, but ultimately it's still a fucking parasite...
You might also be surprised at how many of those same people run small businesses, web-based or otherwise.
It never ceased to amaze me, when my job involved dealing with small~medium business owners, how straight-out dumb some of them were. Outside of their own little area of expertise, many were not too far above the "touch the fire to see if it's hot" level...
(No, I'm not talking about their tech skills. I really am referring to their everyday level of intelligence; the kind necessary to walk without falling over every second step, boil an egg without burning down the house, or avoid being ripped off by Thabo M'Beki and his amazingly generous 10% "helper's fee" offer.)
OK, now, I understand what the big music industry people are trying to accomplish. They're trying to keep from going the way of the buggy-whip makers.
Yes. By making it so you have to buy a buggy licensed by the whip maker just to use their buggy whips.
As much as I think that particular analogy is overrated, overused, and dumb, the behaviour of Universal Music and the rest of the ??AA is even dumber. Someone upthread was spot-on when they compared it to cutting off your dick to spite your girlfriend...
And then to go using PlayedForSureLastYearButNotAnymore... makes them look like they searched the Internet for inspiration, but never got beyond the Tard Blog.
Theo, in fact, tries to take credit for OpenSSH, which remains a pretty funny joke if you know the timeline and the history.
Well, it's plenty arguable that Theo doesn't take credit for OpenSSH, except for setting up an organisation to continue development of the original (turned closed-source) SSH via the pre-closed-source fork OSSH.
However, not even Theo and the OpenBSD crowd went as far as removing attribution from the original SSH or OSSH licences. In fact, even though Tatu Ylönen's original SSH v1.2.12 licence doesn't require the licence text remain intact, enough does remain that the intent can be read here.
Yes, the whole thing surrounding SSH->OSSH->OpenSSH is a joke. But it's just a joke, not a piece of sophistic bastardry...
Uh, this is Slashdot. Everyone else here knows that the correct way to debunk pseudoscience is to post a link to a YouTube video of Penn & Teller making ad hominem attacks while shouting "Bullshit!" at the camera...
Here in australia every station broadcasts it's guide for free.
I think you mean "Austria"...
In Australia, only the ABC broadcasts an EPG - free or otherwise. The commercials (including SBS) only broadcast the absolute minimum required by the DTV specs, "Now & Next" - and that's more often wrong than right.
They have recently announced an EPG service - available only to those PVRs "blessed" (i.e. crippled by having skip functions removed) by broadcasters.
Or do you mean the bandwidth-sucking, unusably-low bitrate, wait 5 minutes to see what's on tonight "Video Program Guide"? It's useless, and about as accurate as the now-and-next info they grudgingly provide...
Or maybe you mean the Foxtel guide? Damned right; if I was paying > $70/Mo I'd want an accurate program guide too. Pity theirs isn't particularly accurate either - or stable, for that matter; ever since they introduced the IQ it tends to flake out non-IQ boxes...
But, in the end, an EPG is only worthwhile if it's accurate. I don't really expect the TV networks to update their guides when they deliberately run their schedule up to 55 minutes late; do you?
"Whoo-hoo-hoo, look who knows so much. It just so happens that glass is only MOSTLY inert. There's a big difference between mostly inert and all inert. Mostly inert is slightly active."
>>>If only they could find a bullshit-absorbing mineral.
>Slashdotium 404. A rare, low-energy isotope of unobtanium.
Unfortunately, every particle of bullshit it absorbs initiates a cascade which releases 2 particles of high-energy crapola. Luckily this only results in a brief spike of karma before decaying to the lower -2 energy state.
This is a failure on the part of ISC to make their DHCP server standards compliant...
So, you're saying the reference server produced by the Internet Standards Consortium is broken?
Not snarking, clarifying. It could well be that you're right, but you'd want to be bloody sure before arguing it too hard...
FWIW, I could describe a dozen cases of broken dhcp clients that work with the ISC dhcpd but fail with other implementations, but I won't. Instead, just google +"Xbox" +"dhcp", +"printer" +"dhcp", +"nslu2" +"dhcp", +"playstation" +"dhcp",...
In fact, I'd be a little surprised if it does turn out to be a problem with the ISC dhcpd - it's streets ahead of every single other dhcpd available on Linux or the *BSDs.
I heard the monks will challenge the ninjas to a rematch, but this time they'll field their wrinkly little bald monk who sweeps the temple.
Ah, a martial arts arms race!
In response, the ninjas will just field that one guy who just stands there in the middle, arms crossed, waiting for the devestation all around him to die down. The monks will then hire a little guy in a white suit from the Yazuka, and so on, and so on...
Pretty soon we'll be knee-deep in hopping vampires and pirates, and we all know where that leads!
Your prejudice betrays you - if that was a rant, then it was the kindest, gentlest one in the whole history of public discussion.
Now, Theo has a (somewhat) well-deserved reputation for abrasiveness - he certainly doesn't suffer (people who he thinks prove themselves to be) fools gladly - but the more I read of the bsd-* lists, the more I kinda like the guy. He doesn't bite without reason, though you may be left wondering what that reason is...
Go read those posts again. He's not ranting, he's not raving, he's not flaming - he's stating fairly clearly whyhe thinks it's disappointing, in a sadly ironic way, that some people who ostensibly support a licence which forces freedom are taking advantage of a different one which merely hopes for it.
From a BSD licence POV, it's like "free software" is a community space with free open access and a right to use however you want - and the GPL is where somebody has come along and built a fence around part of it. Theo's saying that yeah, sure, it's allowed - but it's just sad that a part chooses to take advantage of the generosity and open nature of the whole...
"this is the same network that f*cked with its time schedule so shows ended at 8:31 and such to try and f*ck Tivo owners."
Then never come to Australia, where 5, 10, 15, or even 20 minutes different to the scheduled & advertised start / stop times is the norm for commercial networks.
If you want to record something past about 9:30pm, it's best to give it padding of 30 minutes before & 2 hours after, just to be sure. And, even then, you'll occasionally miss a beginning or end.
Oh, and no network-supplied EPG on the horizon - unless you plan to buy one of the network-approved non-ad-skipping PVRs if/when they are launched.
"Interesting; I never realized Pournelle was such a dick."
That's all it took for you to realise Pournelle was a dick? What, you've never read any of the inflated self-important name-dropping crap he's written for Byte or his blog over the last 30 years?
Stuff like 3 pages to tell you how his PSU died, so his son the admiral spoke directly to the naval chief-of-staff, who had a quiet word to the commander in chief, who picked up the Oval Office hotline to Dell - resulting in Michael Dell coming out personally to replace the PSU, and incidentally bringing with him a 3 TB array housing, which he'll review in a future column.
The manufacturer can make more $ by saving those few pennies. ( even 10 cents adds up when you sell millions of units )
Well, that's the thing, isn't it?
You save 10c - an amount of money that lots of people don't even bother to stop and pick up if they drop it. However, saving that 10c costs you $blank_disc + $40_minutes - considerably more than that original 10c.
Congratulations, you just ripped yourself off to save 10c - that is, if they even bothered to reduce the price by 10c when they stopped supplying rescue discs. More likely, you've just ripped yourself off to save exactly $0.00.
Meanwhile, the manufacturer has sold 200,000 units. They've just made $2000 extra profit by costing everyone who purchased a unit for them $(blank_disc + 40_minutes). Hey, forget the time taken - let's just say 50c for a blank disc. Collectively, their customers have to pay out $100,000 so that the manufacturer can make an extra $2000.
(Fuck it. Just buy a Mac - they come with real OS system discs, not crappy rescue discs or an even more useless rescue partition...)
Honestly - What's the best way to raise wages, real income for workers? Hire them. Hire all of them. Create competition.
Which is exactly why they don't aim for that; modern macroeconomic thinking tells us that 3%~4.5% unemployment is much better for the economy than 0%.
3%~4.5% is low enough to keep most people happy and their money flowing around, but high enough to keep them worried that they might be screwed if they lose their job.
On the other hand lithium metal polymer are said to "have service lives as long as 10 years, under ambient temperatures from -40C to +65C."
Funny thing is, I've got here plenty of manufacturer data sheets claiming pretty much the same thing for SLA / VRLA batteries.
In practice, for ambient temps between 15C & 40C, service life seemed to be ~ 3 years max. And not much, if any, better in a regulated 25C ~30C environment.
OTOH, I remember these being used to replace batteries of flooded lead-acid cells, subject to a fairly well regulated 20C ~ 30C, that were still in near-perfect condition - no silting, no visible sulphation, no chlorine poisoning, minimal post corrosion, discharge test results of > 90% capacity @ C10 rate, etc - despite being more than 30 years old.
Yeah, traditional flooded cells require at least yearly maintenance; preferably 1/2 yearly or quarterly. But, as I've mentioned here before, I've seen SLA batteries go from visually/quantatively OK to "oozing their guts" in less than 3 months...
"Placing punctuation marks outside of quotation marks is most commonly seen in the writings of programmers", and is the grammatically correct way of using punctuation in most of the English-speaking world - with the major exception being the United States.
AlienWare markets to the rich enthusiast community who enjoy gaming, but who aren't geeky enough to build their own rigs.
Hell, there's a whole spectrum of "gamers". From bottom to top, it ranges like this:
Gamer who knows his rig is 1337 because it's from AlienWare, and he read on a forum once that AlienWare m4k35 l337 rigz. Wonders why he keeps getting his arse kicked in WoW, so he buys a new rig every 3 months to get the latest video card he read about on Tom's. That extra 1/4 fps will make all the difference...
Slightly more 1337 than (1); still buys AlienWare PCs but only every 6 months. Between times, he takes it to the local PC chop shop because the PFY there can open the case and change the vid card without breaking the warranty seal.
Buys AlienWare PCs, but can change own video card. May also be able to change CPUs and heatsinks if they come with an A1-sized instruction sheet with lots of pictures, or a how-to DVD. Works part-time in the local PC chop shop, where his greasy skin comes in handy for unsticking warranty seals.
Owns an AlienWare PC - well, the case is still AlienWare; everything else has been replaced over the years. Used to work at the local PC chop shop - until some greasy pimply-faced kid offered to work for 5 bucks an hour + first crack at any porn found on customer PCs. Is now a counter-prop at the local Geek Squad.
Never bought an AlienWare PC, but owns one - made up from all the 'faulty' parts replaced at the local Geek Squad, where he is one of 3 trainee managers. Is currently on the lookout for a 10,000RPM 500Gig SATA HDD, so be careful...
'Serious' gamer. Refreshes Tom's and Anand's every 5 minutes looking for the latest reviews, before ordering on-line (and sending the vendor emails every 5 minutes wanting to know why it hasn't shipped yet when he checked 'Priority Shipping'). Can replace his own video card, CPU, heatsinks, LED-equipped fans, and biohazard-shaped fan guards. Often also encountered on motherboard forums asking how to recover from a BIOS flash gone wrong, and bumping his post every 10 minutes.
Builds own PC. Sometimes gets into trouble with incompatible RAM or dodgy chipset drivers, but can generally work things out for himself. Continually installs the latest video drivers, but almost inevitably ends up dropping back to the previous version.
Note: only the last type might have a chance at getting something tricky like a CableCard working...
I'm normally one of the first to shout 'grow some balls and take responsibility!' when things like this come up, but she does have a couple of points:
the improper blocking of alleged (RIAA) warning messages by AOL and Sharman: This is interesting. If AOL (or, somehow, Kazaa/Sharman Networks) prevented her from receiving warning messages which may have caused her to stop, then any infringement after those messages were sent may be at least partially down to them. If so, they they should take some of the liability.
the secretive file sharing system of and by Kazaa: This is a goodie! Any normal & reasonable user expects a program to stop running when you click the 'close' button, right? Kazaa kept running in the background! If a user takes reasonable steps (i.e. clicking that 'close' button) to stop infringing, and yet the program continues on infringing, whose fault is that? The user has tried, in good faith and to the best of their knowledge, to avoid further infringement - but the program decided that it knew better...
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, were you supposed to be pointing out the pluses? Well, that's the thing, isn't it? The market hasn't determined jack shit; someone has determined they can exploit the market by exactly that much; that people will put up with exactly that much more while somebody else reaps the benefits.
If that's fine with you, consider this: a tapeworm doesn't take that much nutrition from your body overall, and causes no problems or discomfort for > 95% of people. A cold virus only affects you for about 7 days; if you get a cold every year that's still less than 2% of your entire life. So why don't we just let them live and thrive?
You're too young to remember even AltaVista, aren't you?
You've never actually done any product-level R&D, have you?
It's a little more complicated than the LEGO experience you seem to be describing...
You might also be surprised at how many of those same people run small businesses, web-based or otherwise.
It never ceased to amaze me, when my job involved dealing with small~medium business owners, how straight-out dumb some of them were. Outside of their own little area of expertise, many were not too far above the "touch the fire to see if it's hot" level...
(No, I'm not talking about their tech skills. I really am referring to their everyday level of intelligence; the kind necessary to walk without falling over every second step, boil an egg without burning down the house, or avoid being ripped off by Thabo M'Beki and his amazingly generous 10% "helper's fee" offer.)
Don't advertise.
"Oh, but how will we make money if people don't hear about our wonderful <insert product &/or service here>?"
Not my problem, mate. I'm off to Google "African King Beads" and click on the ads a few times...
As much as I think that particular analogy is overrated, overused, and dumb, the behaviour of Universal Music and the rest of the ??AA is even dumber. Someone upthread was spot-on when they compared it to cutting off your dick to spite your girlfriend...
And then to go using PlayedForSureLastYearButNotAnymore
However, not even Theo and the OpenBSD crowd went as far as removing attribution from the original SSH or OSSH licences. In fact, even though Tatu Ylönen's original SSH v1.2.12 licence doesn't require the licence text remain intact, enough does remain that the intent can be read here.
Yes, the whole thing surrounding SSH->OSSH->OpenSSH is a joke. But it's just a joke, not a piece of sophistic bastardry...
Uh, this is Slashdot. Everyone else here knows that the correct way to debunk pseudoscience is to post a link to a YouTube video of Penn & Teller making ad hominem attacks while shouting "Bullshit!" at the camera...
In Australia , only the ABC broadcasts an EPG - free or otherwise. The commercials (including SBS) only broadcast the absolute minimum required by the DTV specs, "Now & Next" - and that's more often wrong than right.
They have recently announced an EPG service - available only to those PVRs "blessed" (i.e. crippled by having skip functions removed) by broadcasters.
Or do you mean the bandwidth-sucking, unusably-low bitrate, wait 5 minutes to see what's on tonight "Video Program Guide"? It's useless, and about as accurate as the now-and-next info they grudgingly provide...
Or maybe you mean the Foxtel guide? Damned right; if I was paying > $70/Mo I'd want an accurate program guide too. Pity theirs isn't particularly accurate either - or stable, for that matter; ever since they introduced the IQ it tends to flake out non-IQ boxes...
But, in the end, an EPG is only worthwhile if it's accurate. I don't really expect the TV networks to update their guides when they deliberately run their schedule up to 55 minutes late; do you?
>>>If only they could find a bullshit-absorbing mineral.
>Slashdotium 404. A rare, low-energy isotope of unobtanium.
Unfortunately, every particle of bullshit it absorbs initiates a cascade which releases 2 particles of high-energy crapola. Luckily this only results in a brief spike of karma before decaying to the lower -2 energy state.
Not snarking, clarifying. It could well be that you're right, but you'd want to be bloody sure before arguing it too hard...
FWIW, I could describe a dozen cases of broken dhcp clients that work with the ISC dhcpd but fail with other implementations, but I won't. Instead, just google +"Xbox" +"dhcp", +"printer" +"dhcp", +"nslu2" +"dhcp", +"playstation" +"dhcp",
In fact, I'd be a little surprised if it does turn out to be a problem with the ISC dhcpd - it's streets ahead of every single other dhcpd available on Linux or the *BSDs.
In response, the ninjas will just field that one guy who just stands there in the middle, arms crossed, waiting for the devestation all around him to die down. The monks will then hire a little guy in a white suit from the Yazuka, and so on, and so on...
Pretty soon we'll be knee-deep in hopping vampires and pirates, and we all know where that leads!
Now, Theo has a (somewhat) well-deserved reputation for abrasiveness - he certainly doesn't suffer (people who he thinks prove themselves to be) fools gladly - but the more I read of the bsd-* lists, the more I kinda like the guy. He doesn't bite without reason, though you may be left wondering what that reason is...
Go read those posts again. He's not ranting, he's not raving, he's not flaming - he's stating fairly clearly why he thinks it's disappointing, in a sadly ironic way, that some people who ostensibly support a licence which forces freedom are taking advantage of a different one which merely hopes for it.
From a BSD licence POV, it's like "free software" is a community space with free open access and a right to use however you want - and the GPL is where somebody has come along and built a fence around part of it. Theo's saying that yeah, sure, it's allowed - but it's just sad that a part chooses to take advantage of the generosity and open nature of the whole...
"this is the same network that f*cked with its time schedule so shows ended at 8:31 and such to try and f*ck Tivo owners."
Then never come to Australia, where 5, 10, 15, or even 20 minutes different to the scheduled & advertised start / stop times is the norm for commercial networks.
If you want to record something past about 9:30pm, it's best to give it padding of 30 minutes before & 2 hours after, just to be sure. And, even then, you'll occasionally miss a beginning or end.
Oh, and no network-supplied EPG on the horizon - unless you plan to buy one of the network-approved non-ad-skipping PVRs if/when they are launched.
Truly, we are The Lucky Country...
"Interesting; I never realized Pournelle was such a dick."
That's all it took for you to realise Pournelle was a dick? What, you've never read any of the inflated self-important name-dropping crap he's written for Byte or his blog over the last 30 years?
Stuff like 3 pages to tell you how his PSU died, so his son the admiral spoke directly to the naval chief-of-staff, who had a quiet word to the commander in chief, who picked up the Oval Office hotline to Dell - resulting in Michael Dell coming out personally to replace the PSU, and incidentally bringing with him a 3 TB array housing, which he'll review in a future column.
Recommended...
In my part of the world they're informally known as "NotBands" (after the NotDogs meatless hot dogs) or SpamBands (100% manufactured meat).
Americans probably call them "I Can't Believe It's Not Music!" or something...
You save 10c - an amount of money that lots of people don't even bother to stop and pick up if they drop it. However, saving that 10c costs you $blank_disc + $40_minutes - considerably more than that original 10c.
Congratulations, you just ripped yourself off to save 10c - that is, if they even bothered to reduce the price by 10c when they stopped supplying rescue discs. More likely, you've just ripped yourself off to save exactly $0.00.
Meanwhile, the manufacturer has sold 200,000 units. They've just made $2000 extra profit by costing everyone who purchased a unit for them $(blank_disc + 40_minutes). Hey, forget the time taken - let's just say 50c for a blank disc. Collectively, their customers have to pay out $100,000 so that the manufacturer can make an extra $2000.
(Fuck it. Just buy a Mac - they come with real OS system discs, not crappy rescue discs or an even more useless rescue partition...)
3%~4.5% is low enough to keep most people happy and their money flowing around, but high enough to keep them worried that they might be screwed if they lose their job.
A hole in the ground, a hole in the ground
There ain't no place like a hole in the ground
With a big fat goon a-floatin' around."
I think you mean "subsistence"...
In practice, for ambient temps between 15C & 40C, service life seemed to be ~ 3 years max. And not much, if any, better in a regulated 25C ~30C environment.
OTOH, I remember these being used to replace batteries of flooded lead-acid cells, subject to a fairly well regulated 20C ~ 30C, that were still in near-perfect condition - no silting, no visible sulphation, no chlorine poisoning, minimal post corrosion, discharge test results of > 90% capacity @ C10 rate, etc - despite being more than 30 years old.
Yeah, traditional flooded cells require at least yearly maintenance; preferably 1/2 yearly or quarterly. But, as I've mentioned here before, I've seen SLA batteries go from visually/quantatively OK to "oozing their guts" in less than 3 months...
"Placing punctuation marks outside of quotation marks is most commonly seen in the writings of programmers", and is the grammatically correct way of using punctuation in most of the English-speaking world - with the major exception being the United States.
- Gamer who knows his rig is 1337 because it's from AlienWare, and he read on a forum once that AlienWare m4k35 l337 rigz. Wonders why he keeps getting his arse kicked in WoW, so he buys a new rig every 3 months to get the latest video card he read about on Tom's. That extra 1/4 fps will make all the difference...
- Slightly more 1337 than (1); still buys AlienWare PCs but only every 6 months. Between times, he takes it to the local PC chop shop because the PFY there can open the case and change the vid card without breaking the warranty seal.
- Buys AlienWare PCs, but can change own video card. May also be able to change CPUs and heatsinks if they come with an A1-sized instruction sheet with lots of pictures, or a how-to DVD. Works part-time in the local PC chop shop, where his greasy skin comes in handy for unsticking warranty seals.
- Owns an AlienWare PC - well, the case is still AlienWare; everything else has been replaced over the years. Used to work at the local PC chop shop - until some greasy pimply-faced kid offered to work for 5 bucks an hour + first crack at any porn found on customer PCs. Is now a counter-prop at the local Geek Squad.
- Never bought an AlienWare PC, but owns one - made up from all the 'faulty' parts replaced at the local Geek Squad, where he is one of 3 trainee managers. Is currently on the lookout for a 10,000RPM 500Gig SATA HDD, so be careful...
- 'Serious' gamer. Refreshes Tom's and Anand's every 5 minutes looking for the latest reviews, before ordering on-line (and sending the vendor emails every 5 minutes wanting to know why it hasn't shipped yet when he checked 'Priority Shipping'). Can replace his own video card, CPU, heatsinks, LED-equipped fans, and biohazard-shaped fan guards. Often also encountered on motherboard forums asking how to recover from a BIOS flash gone wrong, and bumping his post every 10 minutes.
- Builds own PC. Sometimes gets into trouble with incompatible RAM or dodgy chipset drivers, but can generally work things out for himself. Continually installs the latest video drivers, but almost inevitably ends up dropping back to the previous version.
Note: only the last type might have a chance at getting something tricky like a CableCard working...As I said, interesting...