What? There are still advertisements on the web? I hadn't noticed thanks to the Firefox adblock extension. It's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a bayesian filtering mechanism to operate on arbitrary HTML elements, and even text-based advertising will be a thing of the past. Spam still survives because it's virtually free for the spammer. People have to pay for web ads, and once they find most of their audience are filtering them out it is no longer an attractive proposition.
Google's ads prosper because they are not really ads in the conventional sense. I don't know what you'd call it; "sponsored push search", anyone? They just package and sell the services as advertising because that's what their target market understands. In time, these services will look less and less like ads, and more like something useful to people. This isn't the turning point but the last hurrah for web advertising before the arrival of (hopefully) less obnoxious marketing techniques.
I don't think it's offtopic at all. One of the major contributing factors to free software being where it is today in the server space is "under the radar" deployments. Plenty of businesses have so little in the way of formal enforced IT policy that their networks are full of unlicenced software. If that's possible, then sneaking freely licensed software on to the same machines should be a piece of cake. Then when and if the business gets around to formulating an IT policy, you're able to say "we've been using this for years".
Never underestimate the power of a fait accompli.
If only they would switch on the television!
on
Hooked On The Web
·
· Score: 1
But other users have a broader dependency and spend hours online each day, surfing the Web, trading stocks, instant messaging or blogging, and a fast-rising number are becoming addicted to Internet video games.
Yes, some people call it having an intellectual life, to complement their work life and mindless consumption life. I can see why business would be worried about their employees suffering from such an illness.
'We wanted to talk directly to the consumer first.'
Translation: We know it's not very impressive, so we can't afford to let reviewers get their hands on it in an uncontrolled situation. Hopefully we'll make a few bucks before word gets around.
What's non-commercial about the GPL? I sell GPL'd software all the time in my business.
Why is it that software covered by proprietary EULAs that prohibit selling copies is considered "commercial", while the GPL, which allows the selling of copies, isn't?
People should stop using the term "commercial" in this nonsensical way. And maybe some other terms like "free trade agreement" while we're at it.
I can't understand why Dvorak gets the attention he does, as he seems no more clueful than your average tech pundit. However he does make one good point about Google.
As of last year, Page and Brin can be as personally committed to not being "evil" as possible and it will make absolutely no difference, because now they answer to shareholders first and their consciences second.
Google is what it is because it's founders had the freedom to develop something useful before working out how it might be profitable. Now those priorities are reversed.
Can somebody explain to me why Google went to the stock market to raise capital? I can't see what they needed the money for. All they have done is shackled themselves, and given Microsoft a chance to catch up.
A lot of comments have claimed that anonymity is a prerequisite for this kind of behaviour. I disagree.
I've been involved in a number of discussion groups that meet in person in public venues, and it doesn't take more than a few meetings before someone comes along who wants to talk about the great Jewish conspiracy that runs the world. The next week, they'll bring a like-minded friend, and the next week another, until they run out of friends (which doesn't usually take too long), by which time the group has become untenable.
These people can be anything from outright Nazis to decent but gullible people who once read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and thought "My God! This explains everything!" Either way, they will attend any public meeting they happen to hear about, and leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
I would normally wait for.deb packages to become available, but with the Firefox/Thunderbird 1.0 releases, and now this, I just couldn't control myself.
I would suggest that unless your distro already puts stuff in there,/opt is the place to put third-party software. It means you can run the latest version alongside your distro's stable one, unless there are significant incompatibilities between versions. With Mozilla, file formats and config files have been pretty stable for a while, so you're pretty safe. I suspect you may have problems with some extensions, though.
No more so than for than any other type of retirement fund. They don't keep the money under a mattress and dole it out to you on retirement.
The difference is that under a public system, the public has some control over how that money is invested (depending on how democratic your country is). In principle, your money can be used to build and maintain the public infrastructure that will enable future generations to afford to support you.
In a private system the money goes wherever the greatest short-term benefit is, S&Ls, Enron, or whatever the hot new property is this year. Then your fund managers take their cut, and unless you're very wealthy you'll find at retirement age that you've got less money in your fund than you've contributed.
In Australia, we've had compulsory private superannuation since I started working in the 80's, and I've never had a year where the earnings on my superannuation has exceeded the fees paid to my fund managers.
Meanwhile all this money that would have been at the public's disposal is now used in speculative investments that drive down wages, and encourage all sorts of market-driven irrationality.
The anarchist Bakunin called representational democracy "beating the people with the people's stick". Compulsory private superannuation is the people paying to beat themselves.
That would be suicide in any area that involved interoperability; patents on encryption or compression algorithms, file formats, transfer protocols, etc.
It would mean a change from the GNU project's traditional stance of "we would rather you didn't use proprietary software" to "we refuse to allow you to use proprietary software alongside our software". The sorts of things that are patented are the things that should, in order to promote the use of free software, be available under non-copyleft terms; low-level stuff that tends to be put in libraries. What you propose would make it impossible to license these technologies under the LGPL.
BTW, I don't see why the GNU project should care any more about OSI certification than they do about MCSE certification. OSI is a separate organisation with different aims to GNU.
I recently aquired a virtual server in the US, and under "Unacceptable Content" in the terms of service, it said the following:
Other unacceptable content includes but is not limited to: sites promoting or discussing any domestic or international political issues...
As a non-US citizen this strikes me as frighteningly extreme. On the other hand, this is a country where people can be abducted by the state, imprisoned without charge and tortured (legally, according to the attorney general), so if I were running an Internet service in the US, I'd probably be reluctant to argue my clients' free speech rights too strenuously.
Let's assume (because I can't be bothered with research) that these clauses are becoming commonplace in hosting agreements. Well, you could always host your political website yourself. Except I imagine retail ISPs and other upstream bandwidth providers will also want to be seen to be doing their bit for homeland security, and adjust their TOS documents accordingly.
So where will you go for free political debate in the US? Call in to Rush Limbaugh? Meet in the dead of night in a cellar behind a cast-iron door with a peephole and a large armed man asking for the password ("crossfire")?
You have no idea how many web pages I've written that were composed almost entirely of FONT COLOR, because font color doesn't nest.
Font elements were a Netscape extension and their use has been strongly discouraged by the W3C since HTML 4. If you're still using them, and other presentational markup elements rather than using style sheets, it's probably no surprise you find HTML unwieldy.
Politicians have been spending the SS income rather than investing it for years now.
General rule: If you approve of where the money is going, you call it "investing", if you disapprove, you call it "spending".
Particular example: Publicly owned pension systems are inevitably unsustainable, and generally considered to be "in crisis" at any point in time. They are derided for relying on "generational transfers" (ie. the working age population financially supporting the retired population), and hence facing a "crunch" due to the ageing population.
Public pension systems raise money through the taxation system; these funds are used to finance things like public infrastructure, which depending on the precise ways the money is used, or your ideological viewpoint, can be seen either as an "investment" in the future prosperity of the country, or as wasteful "spending".
Private pension systems raise money through personal contributions which may in principle be voluntary, but in my country at least are compulsory. Hence these legally enforced contributions are effectively a system of taxation. The difference is that the money is collected by private institutions, and the decisions on how to "spend" or "invest" this money is made by these institutions.
Note that the two systems are virtually identical in principle, save for one crucial difference.
Both involve "generational transfer"; neither take your money and hide it under the mattress until you reach retirement age. Both state-run and private pension systems start "spending" or "investing" your money the moment they get their hands on it, so either way today's retired population are being paid by funds contributed by today's working population; the accounting is just done differently. Any "crisis" due to an ageing population will affect both systems equally.
The difference is that in a state-run system the decision on how to "invest" or "spend" is potentially determined by the population (depending on how democratic the state is). In a private pension system, the decision is made by the owners of the system. That is, the ability to determine where the money goes is heavily weighted in favour of the wealthy.
This I think goes a long way to explaining why in elite circles, shifting the pension system from public to private hands magically transforms "spending" into "investment".
Terrific. Now we can subvert our package management systems, and screw up our computers just like Windows users do. In no time at all we'll be formatting our hard drives and reinstalling everything from scratch on an annual basis. Maybe then GNU/Linux will be considered "ready for the desktop".
When Microsoft tries to inject it's "royalty-free" patented technology into standards, and hence into free software that uses those standards, the reaction quite rightly ranges from suspicion to outrage. When IBM encourages developers to incorporate it's royalty-free patented technologies into free software, we're supposed to thank them for it?
How does it make a jot of difference if "has pledged to seek no royalties from and to place no restrictions on companies, groups or individuals who use them in open-source projects"? The technology is still patented. IBM can withdraw it's "pledge" at any time. How do you fancy a replay of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft MP3 debacle times five hundred?
Apart from anything else, software incorporating royalty-free patents is likely to be license-incompatible with the next generation of free software licenses (GPLv3 among others).
This is at best a well-intentioned blunder, and at worst a trojan horse. If IBM was serious about helping the community, they'd release these patents into the public domain.
Back in '96 ("the year of the Intranet") I accidentally ended up getting paid to do web development work with Perl on Windows. I wasn't then, nor am I now, really a programmer (still less a hacker); I just happened to be a little better at abstract reasoning than anybody around me at the time.
I had never heard of the free software movement or the GPL, and the term "Open Source" hadn't even been coined. It's hard to imagine now how different the IT world was less than a decade ago. I chose Perl because it was free as in beer. At the time, it hadn't even occurred to me that you could apply the other meaning of the word "free" to software.
Then one day, while avoiding work, I was browsing through the documentation for Perl, and came across the following:
The licenses for most software are designed to take away your freedom to share and change it. By contrast, the GNU General Public License is intended to guarantee your freedom to share and change free software--to make sure the software is free for all its users.
At the time I was a union delegate in a big multinational company, so I knew in intimate detail the awful nature of the institution. I hated my job, didn't know anybody who didn't hate theirs, and despaired of ever finding a vocation that I wasn't ashamed of.
Reading the GPL, and then going to the GNU website and devouring everything there was a life-changing experience. RMS demonstrated that it was possible to make a living without compromising on ethics, and for the first time in my life I felt that there was a place for me in the world, if not as a genious hacker, then at least by applying the same moral principles to whatever field I had an aptitude for.
I stopped using proprietary software myself. Over time, I stopped installing proprietary software for my friends, and now I run a business supporting free software.
It all started with running a free program on a non-free operating system. If the free world had enforced strict border controls, on the dubious logic that more people would migrate if they weren't allowed to visit, I wouldn't be a part of it now, and my life would be a lot poorer for it.
At this time of the year it is worth stopping to remember this crazy guy with long hair and wild ideas about helping your neighbour, and how he changed the world.
CSS *sucks* for cross-browser compatibility. It takes a lot of work, and still will not support legacy browsers.
CSS-based pages render perfectly legibly in pre-CSS browsers. Not pretty, but legible. I think you're talking about those few browsers from Microsoft and Netscape that claim to support CSS, but in reality deliberately misinterpret CSS with the intention of breaking the standard, and forcing authors to create "This site best viewed with..." websites. I don't see how you can blame the standard for the consequenses of a couple of rogue companies trying to sabotage the web, or expect the standard to adapt to support this "legacy" behaviour.
Easy, since all the programs do it, and we've all been doing it since 1995. How tricky could <TR><TD> etc get?
You've obviously never had to maintain somebody else's tables-based code, or you have a Rain-Man-like capacity for knowing precisely where you are when you're a dozen nested tables deep into a page.
Multi-column layouts without intense pain. CSS can do this, but you have to play silly games.
Is it just me, or does this read like a press release?
Is it just me, or has Slashdot been posting quite a few articles lately that involve nothing more than a large company and vague intimations of something related to technology going on there?
I used to use them all the time when I lived in a town that had them. They just went where you expected them to go without you having to steer them, fill them up with petrol, or get a license to use them.
And the best thing is, you can legally and safely use them while drunk!
Prior to the invasion Allawi and Chalabi between them appeared to have been the source of all the US government's intelligence information. It's about time the US reciprocated.
The crooks in the "interim" (soon to be permanent) government gave us the fantasies of mobile weapons laboratories and chemical weapons delivered in 45 minutes (or your money back), and the US government has returned the compliment with fantasies of democracy in occupied Iraq and a safer world.
The pretexts are false, only the bloodshed is real.
Slashdot Mirror
... that finally the last person even tenuously connected in any way with the Kennedys has been alleged to have been implicated in the assassination.
What? There are still advertisements on the web? I hadn't noticed thanks to the Firefox adblock extension. It's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a bayesian filtering mechanism to operate on arbitrary HTML elements, and even text-based advertising will be a thing of the past. Spam still survives because it's virtually free for the spammer. People have to pay for web ads, and once they find most of their audience are filtering them out it is no longer an attractive proposition.
Google's ads prosper because they are not really ads in the conventional sense. I don't know what you'd call it; "sponsored push search", anyone? They just package and sell the services as advertising because that's what their target market understands. In time, these services will look less and less like ads, and more like something useful to people. This isn't the turning point but the last hurrah for web advertising before the arrival of (hopefully) less obnoxious marketing techniques.
I don't think it's offtopic at all. One of the major contributing factors to free software being where it is today in the server space is "under the radar" deployments. Plenty of businesses have so little in the way of formal enforced IT policy that their networks are full of unlicenced software. If that's possible, then sneaking freely licensed software on to the same machines should be a piece of cake. Then when and if the business gets around to formulating an IT policy, you're able to say "we've been using this for years".
Never underestimate the power of a fait accompli.
Yes, some people call it having an intellectual life, to complement their work life and mindless consumption life. I can see why business would be worried about their employees suffering from such an illness.
That sounds rather like a prediction of the present.
Translation: We know it's not very impressive, so we can't afford to let reviewers get their hands on it in an uncontrolled situation. Hopefully we'll make a few bucks before word gets around.
Micropayments to publishers are the last gasp of the middlemen. I want my twenty-five cents to go toward production, not publishing and promotion.
What I want to know is, where can I pay to finance the production, and release under a free license, of the sort of stuff I want to see?
What's non-commercial about the GPL? I sell GPL'd software all the time in my business.
Why is it that software covered by proprietary EULAs that prohibit selling copies is considered "commercial", while the GPL, which allows the selling of copies, isn't?
People should stop using the term "commercial" in this nonsensical way. And maybe some other terms like "free trade agreement" while we're at it.
Am I missing something? This definitely does not appear to be the case.
I can't understand why Dvorak gets the attention he does, as he seems no more clueful than your average tech pundit. However he does make one good point about Google.
As of last year, Page and Brin can be as personally committed to not being "evil" as possible and it will make absolutely no difference, because now they answer to shareholders first and their consciences second.
Google is what it is because it's founders had the freedom to develop something useful before working out how it might be profitable. Now those priorities are reversed.
Can somebody explain to me why Google went to the stock market to raise capital? I can't see what they needed the money for. All they have done is shackled themselves, and given Microsoft a chance to catch up.
A lot of comments have claimed that anonymity is a prerequisite for this kind of behaviour. I disagree.
I've been involved in a number of discussion groups that meet in person in public venues, and it doesn't take more than a few meetings before someone comes along who wants to talk about the great Jewish conspiracy that runs the world. The next week, they'll bring a like-minded friend, and the next week another, until they run out of friends (which doesn't usually take too long), by which time the group has become untenable.
These people can be anything from outright Nazis to decent but gullible people who once read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and thought "My God! This explains everything!" Either way, they will attend any public meeting they happen to hear about, and leave a trail of destruction in their wake.
I would normally wait for .deb packages to become available, but with the Firefox/Thunderbird 1.0 releases, and now this, I just couldn't control myself.
I would suggest that unless your distro already puts stuff in there, /opt is the place to put third-party software. It means you can run the latest version alongside your distro's stable one, unless there are significant incompatibilities between versions. With Mozilla, file formats and config files have been pretty stable for a while, so you're pretty safe. I suspect you may have problems with some extensions, though.
No more so than for than any other type of retirement fund. They don't keep the money under a mattress and dole it out to you on retirement.
The difference is that under a public system, the public has some control over how that money is invested (depending on how democratic your country is). In principle, your money can be used to build and maintain the public infrastructure that will enable future generations to afford to support you.
In a private system the money goes wherever the greatest short-term benefit is, S&Ls, Enron, or whatever the hot new property is this year. Then your fund managers take their cut, and unless you're very wealthy you'll find at retirement age that you've got less money in your fund than you've contributed.
In Australia, we've had compulsory private superannuation since I started working in the 80's, and I've never had a year where the earnings on my superannuation has exceeded the fees paid to my fund managers.
Meanwhile all this money that would have been at the public's disposal is now used in speculative investments that drive down wages, and encourage all sorts of market-driven irrationality.
The anarchist Bakunin called representational democracy "beating the people with the people's stick". Compulsory private superannuation is the people paying to beat themselves.
That would be suicide in any area that involved interoperability; patents on encryption or compression algorithms, file formats, transfer protocols, etc.
It would mean a change from the GNU project's traditional stance of "we would rather you didn't use proprietary software" to "we refuse to allow you to use proprietary software alongside our software". The sorts of things that are patented are the things that should, in order to promote the use of free software, be available under non-copyleft terms; low-level stuff that tends to be put in libraries. What you propose would make it impossible to license these technologies under the LGPL.
BTW, I don't see why the GNU project should care any more about OSI certification than they do about MCSE certification. OSI is a separate organisation with different aims to GNU.
I recently aquired a virtual server in the US, and under "Unacceptable Content" in the terms of service, it said the following:
As a non-US citizen this strikes me as frighteningly extreme. On the other hand, this is a country where people can be abducted by the state, imprisoned without charge and tortured (legally, according to the attorney general), so if I were running an Internet service in the US, I'd probably be reluctant to argue my clients' free speech rights too strenuously.
Let's assume (because I can't be bothered with research) that these clauses are becoming commonplace in hosting agreements. Well, you could always host your political website yourself. Except I imagine retail ISPs and other upstream bandwidth providers will also want to be seen to be doing their bit for homeland security, and adjust their TOS documents accordingly.
So where will you go for free political debate in the US? Call in to Rush Limbaugh? Meet in the dead of night in a cellar behind a cast-iron door with a peephole and a large armed man asking for the password ("crossfire")?
Font elements were a Netscape extension and their use has been strongly discouraged by the W3C since HTML 4. If you're still using them, and other presentational markup elements rather than using style sheets, it's probably no surprise you find HTML unwieldy.
General rule: If you approve of where the money is going, you call it "investing", if you disapprove, you call it "spending".
Particular example: Publicly owned pension systems are inevitably unsustainable, and generally considered to be "in crisis" at any point in time. They are derided for relying on "generational transfers" (ie. the working age population financially supporting the retired population), and hence facing a "crunch" due to the ageing population.
Public pension systems raise money through the taxation system; these funds are used to finance things like public infrastructure, which depending on the precise ways the money is used, or your ideological viewpoint, can be seen either as an "investment" in the future prosperity of the country, or as wasteful "spending".
Private pension systems raise money through personal contributions which may in principle be voluntary, but in my country at least are compulsory. Hence these legally enforced contributions are effectively a system of taxation. The difference is that the money is collected by private institutions, and the decisions on how to "spend" or "invest" this money is made by these institutions.
Note that the two systems are virtually identical in principle, save for one crucial difference.
Both involve "generational transfer"; neither take your money and hide it under the mattress until you reach retirement age. Both state-run and private pension systems start "spending" or "investing" your money the moment they get their hands on it, so either way today's retired population are being paid by funds contributed by today's working population; the accounting is just done differently. Any "crisis" due to an ageing population will affect both systems equally.
The difference is that in a state-run system the decision on how to "invest" or "spend" is potentially determined by the population (depending on how democratic the state is). In a private pension system, the decision is made by the owners of the system. That is, the ability to determine where the money goes is heavily weighted in favour of the wealthy.
This I think goes a long way to explaining why in elite circles, shifting the pension system from public to private hands magically transforms "spending" into "investment".
Terrific. Now we can subvert our package management systems, and screw up our computers just like Windows users do. In no time at all we'll be formatting our hard drives and reinstalling everything from scratch on an annual basis. Maybe then GNU/Linux will be considered "ready for the desktop".
And I'll say it again:
CHICKEN ENTRAILS.
I've heard Alan Greenspan swears by them. Anything else is just voodoo economics.
Work, buy, consume, die.
When Microsoft tries to inject it's "royalty-free" patented technology into standards, and hence into free software that uses those standards, the reaction quite rightly ranges from suspicion to outrage. When IBM encourages developers to incorporate it's royalty-free patented technologies into free software, we're supposed to thank them for it?
How does it make a jot of difference if "has pledged to seek no royalties from and to place no restrictions on companies, groups or individuals who use them in open-source projects"? The technology is still patented. IBM can withdraw it's "pledge" at any time. How do you fancy a replay of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft MP3 debacle times five hundred?
Apart from anything else, software incorporating royalty-free patents is likely to be license-incompatible with the next generation of free software licenses (GPLv3 among others).
This is at best a well-intentioned blunder, and at worst a trojan horse. If IBM was serious about helping the community, they'd release these patents into the public domain.
Back in '96 ("the year of the Intranet") I accidentally ended up getting paid to do web development work with Perl on Windows. I wasn't then, nor am I now, really a programmer (still less a hacker); I just happened to be a little better at abstract reasoning than anybody around me at the time.
I had never heard of the free software movement or the GPL, and the term "Open Source" hadn't even been coined. It's hard to imagine now how different the IT world was less than a decade ago. I chose Perl because it was free as in beer. At the time, it hadn't even occurred to me that you could apply the other meaning of the word "free" to software.
Then one day, while avoiding work, I was browsing through the documentation for Perl, and came across the following:
At the time I was a union delegate in a big multinational company, so I knew in intimate detail the awful nature of the institution. I hated my job, didn't know anybody who didn't hate theirs, and despaired of ever finding a vocation that I wasn't ashamed of.
Reading the GPL, and then going to the GNU website and devouring everything there was a life-changing experience. RMS demonstrated that it was possible to make a living without compromising on ethics, and for the first time in my life I felt that there was a place for me in the world, if not as a genious hacker, then at least by applying the same moral principles to whatever field I had an aptitude for.
I stopped using proprietary software myself. Over time, I stopped installing proprietary software for my friends, and now I run a business supporting free software.
It all started with running a free program on a non-free operating system. If the free world had enforced strict border controls, on the dubious logic that more people would migrate if they weren't allowed to visit, I wouldn't be a part of it now, and my life would be a lot poorer for it.
At this time of the year it is worth stopping to remember this crazy guy with long hair and wild ideas about helping your neighbour, and how he changed the world.
Thanks RMS!
CSS-based pages render perfectly legibly in pre-CSS browsers. Not pretty, but legible. I think you're talking about those few browsers from Microsoft and Netscape that claim to support CSS, but in reality deliberately misinterpret CSS with the intention of breaking the standard, and forcing authors to create "This site best viewed with..." websites. I don't see how you can blame the standard for the consequenses of a couple of rogue companies trying to sabotage the web, or expect the standard to adapt to support this "legacy" behaviour.
You've obviously never had to maintain somebody else's tables-based code, or you have a Rain-Man-like capacity for knowing precisely where you are when you're a dozen nested tables deep into a page.
What's so hard about:
Is it just me, or does this read like a press release?
Is it just me, or has Slashdot been posting quite a few articles lately that involve nothing more than a large company and vague intimations of something related to technology going on there?
I used to use them all the time when I lived in a town that had them. They just went where you expected them to go without you having to steer them, fill them up with petrol, or get a license to use them.
And the best thing is, you can legally and safely use them while drunk!
Prior to the invasion Allawi and Chalabi between them appeared to have been the source of all the US government's intelligence information. It's about time the US reciprocated.
The crooks in the "interim" (soon to be permanent) government gave us the fantasies of mobile weapons laboratories and chemical weapons delivered in 45 minutes (or your money back), and the US government has returned the compliment with fantasies of democracy in occupied Iraq and a safer world.
The pretexts are false, only the bloodshed is real.