The DHTML sites you mention would probably be better off if done in Flash, however. You can say what you want about Flash, but it's a *lot* easier on browsers than pages with all sorts of whizzbang JavaScript menu's and shit like that.
Actually, it would probably be best if these DHTML sites and Flash only sites didn't exist at all, but that's a different issue altogether.
I'd say 'twist Sugar Ray's face into a fractal' or 'remix Amon Tobin's finest loops' are both ridiculous functions that keep visitors hanging around your site the first time they pay a visit. Gadgets are not extended function, IMHO.
I disagree. I think basic *and* extended functions should be done in HTML. Flash is really cool, but it should only be used for 'gadgets', not for information. For example, a lot of electronic musicians use Flash on their site to implement all sorts of audio toys that lets visitors 'play' with the music of these artists. That, I think, is fine. What isn't fine, however, is the fact that on most of these sites, 'important' information such as release dates and tour dates is put up in Flash as well.
1) It's hard to keep up to date. Until you can make Flash that updates itself from SQL, it's worthless for any real data.
You can. This has been a feature since Flash 4. The only problem is, in most webdevelopment shops, all things Flash are the domain of the designers, whereas the SQL stuff gets done by the programmers, so it's a feature that's left unused a lot (probably for the better, though).
... considering that Flash is killing the web by effectively blocking content from search engines, making it impossible to link to specific information etc is that Macromedia apparently is giving the developer interface yet another complete overhaul. I'm willing to bet this is going to piss off a lot of web designers, who've had to take time off from active development to familiarize themselves with the revamped Flash 5 interface only a year ago. And if it doesn't piss them off, I'm sure it will their employers. Now I actually *like* Flash, provided it's used as the toy it really is, and I *like* the fact that Macromedia seems to 'get' the web a lot more than Adobe (designing webpages is a *lot* more pleasant in Fireworks than it is in Photoshop or ImageReady), but they should really stop trying to reinvent their flagship product every year. It alienates their support base and doesn't get them anywhere.
Well, I'm not cheering, just saying it's not all *that* bad. No legislation means no one's stopping you to do it another way. There's always going to be DRM free hardware, there's always going to be Open Source, there's always going to be a way to copy media (somewhere along the line, a "protected" stream needs to be turned into an unprotected signal), and if these guys get their way, there isn't going to be any law that says Open Source developers can't ignore "industry standards".
Well of course, Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen aren't going to be very impressed with your 600-word letters unless you're in a position of power. If you were Bill Gates, they'd listen. Or at least pretend to. Maybe they'd even listen if you and 5 million of your closest friends sent them these letters, but you alone? No way.
It says: yes, "chief executives of IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and five other corporations said they were eager to work with Hollywood to find "technically feasible, cost effective solutions" for protecting entertainment delivered in digital form".
It also says "America's largest and most powerful tech firms have agreed on one point: Keep Congress far away from digital content standards."
This is not "ganging up on the consumers", it's "ganging up" on congress to make them stay out of this. Sure, they're brown-nosing media companies ("look, we want to protect your copyrights just as much as you do") but the important message is that they want to decide for themselves how to do it. And if there isn't any legislation in place, some other people (Linux developers, say) can do things their way and ditch DRM altogether if they want.
So it's good.
I think.
Not terribly bad, anyway, the way you make it sound.
Did two of the group's members (HP Carly Fiorina and NCR Lars Nyberg) not sign the letter? Do they have some ulterior motive in distancing themselves from a group that doesn't want the SSSCA passed (see, I read articles before I post)? Or is this just a coincidence and they were 'out of town' or something when the letter was drafted.
Obviously, you don't really have an idea about what "freedom" means in the west.
No? I was raised in the west (Wisconsin, USA to be precise; educated at UW-Madison, to be even more precise), which means that, unlike you, I have personal experience living under both systems.
My bad, sorry for assuming. Though I did live more than half of my life in a collectivist, less than free asian society (Indonesia), so maybe you shouldn't be assuming things either;-).
I did not say East and West limit freedoms in the same manner. I simply said both East and West limits freedoms. It is not the limiting of freedoms which is at issue here, it is merely the particulars relating to the nature and methods of the limitations which are at odds.
And I still say that if you're equating Chinese 'if you disagree with the government and say so, you'll end up in a labor camp' with western 'you can say what you want about the government, but if we don't like it, we'll ignore you', you've got a serious problem with putting things in perspective. Sophistry, I think, is the term for what you're doing here.
Waco, Texas... genocide
WTF?? Waco Texas was *an incident* were the US government dealt rather clumsily, with *very unfortunate consequences*, with a group of people who were *actively* opposing the government and public safety in general. It's not US government policy to perpetrate murder of ethnic/religous groups (that's what genocide is). Once again, you're comparing apples and oranges.
airliners bit
Once again, those were incidents, not standard policy.
You really don't have a clue, do you? Just because western governments aren't perfect, not by a long shot, and just because western history is as soaked in blood as the rest of the world's history does not mean you can equate the practices of an actively repressing regime such as the PRC with the fuck ups of western government, which, under most circumstances anyway, and for their own citizens, upholds the basic tenets of freedom and human rights in general. I happen to think this is good, as I value the freedoms and rights of the individual above those of the collective. You may disagree. Fine. Just don't go attempting to prove the PRC isn't significantly more repressive than western governments, because it is.
Obviously, you don't really have an idea about what "freedom" means in the west. Now I'll grant you that the Chinese government isn't as oppressive and totalitarian as it was twenty or thirty years ago, but if you think the way the Chinese gov't limits freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly or what have you in a manner resembling the way western gov'ts limit them, you've got a lot to learn about western values. For one, to name a recent example (Falun Gong), if I were to join my cult in a peaceful demonstration on Times Square, most likely, the authorities would let me do this without sending in the army. Next, if I start a Truly Democratic Party That Thinks The Government Is a Bunch Of Corrupt Assholes in North America or Western Europe, I can. I won't be elected into office, but I won't be sent to a dissident camp either. Finally, suppose I slander someone in the media. I don't have the right to do this in the US or in Europe, I'll be sent to court and be forced to take back what I said (if libel can be proven). In China, I end up in jail or worse. To this day.
Now I respect your Chinese culture and I respect your having a different opinion on what constitutes freedom and all that, but please do not go disrespecting my individualistic western culture by claiming the Chinese government is, by western standards not the brutal dictatorship we westerners think it is.
OK, so what about this: I live in the Netherlands, Enterprise doesn't air here until next year or so. I do, however, have a broadband connection. Guess what? I want to see that show so bad I'll just download it two days after it airs in the US. Illegal? Yes. Would I do the same thing if they'd give up that stupid "release in the US first, then UK, then rest of the world" policy of theirs and had Enterprise in NL, even if were, say, two weeks behind schedule? Probably not, as I prefer to watch TV on my TV.
"computers are devices used to pirate media" and "Microsoft being as large and ubiquitous as it is, it's being thought of as the poster boy for computers", Microsoft has little choice but to play nice with media companies and the DCMA. They'd be an easy target if they didn't, unlike Linux (too fragmented in the sense there's no single legal entity you can blame for "pirating"). Also, don't forget Apple has put some rather nasty DCMA-friendly measures into their crippled DVD burners as well...
Agreed. The word "bloat" just aquired a whole new meaning when XP came out. Win2K? A Windows OS your games *may* work on but maybe they won't? Kinda defeats the whole purpose of using Windows, right?
Maybe because fuckmicrosoft.com is one of the most poorly informed, unreliable "news sources" out there. Case in point? Read their latest "Index.dat" story.
Maybe the church won't, but the general idea has been happening since the sixties. IIRC, Joseph Weizenbaum (sp?) noted his colleagues wanted to be left alone while 'speaking' to Eliza, as they were sharing personal secrets with that rather crappy (by today's standards) piece of software
I wouldn't call PayPal a dot com (bomb), however. They have something most dot coms lack: a good business model. If they manage to become the number one P2P transaction provider, they'll be worth much more than 777.4 million, I'd wager.
I understand that. I'm just saying you'll be hard pressed to find any company intranet were most documents worth indexing aren't primarily in.DOC format or somesuch. Converting all those documents to X/HTML and creating meaningful (!= auto-linked based on keywords) just so you can use Google doesn't make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
The DHTML sites you mention would probably be better off if done in Flash, however. You can say what you want about Flash, but it's a *lot* easier on browsers than pages with all sorts of whizzbang JavaScript menu's and shit like that.
Actually, it would probably be best if these DHTML sites and Flash only sites didn't exist at all, but that's a different issue altogether.
I'd say 'twist Sugar Ray's face into a fractal' or 'remix Amon Tobin's finest loops' are both ridiculous functions that keep visitors hanging around your site the first time they pay a visit. Gadgets are not extended function, IMHO.
I disagree. I think basic *and* extended functions should be done in HTML. Flash is really cool, but it should only be used for 'gadgets', not for information. For example, a lot of electronic musicians use Flash on their site to implement all sorts of audio toys that lets visitors 'play' with the music of these artists. That, I think, is fine. What isn't fine, however, is the fact that on most of these sites, 'important' information such as release dates and tour dates is put up in Flash as well.
1) It's hard to keep up to date. Until you can make Flash that updates itself from SQL, it's worthless for any real data.
You can. This has been a feature since Flash 4. The only problem is, in most webdevelopment shops, all things Flash are the domain of the designers, whereas the SQL stuff gets done by the programmers, so it's a feature that's left unused a lot (probably for the better, though).
... considering that Flash is killing the web by effectively blocking content from search engines, making it impossible to link to specific information etc is that Macromedia apparently is giving the developer interface yet another complete overhaul. I'm willing to bet this is going to piss off a lot of web designers, who've had to take time off from active development to familiarize themselves with the revamped Flash 5 interface only a year ago. And if it doesn't piss them off, I'm sure it will their employers. Now I actually *like* Flash, provided it's used as the toy it really is, and I *like* the fact that Macromedia seems to 'get' the web a lot more than Adobe (designing webpages is a *lot* more pleasant in Fireworks than it is in Photoshop or ImageReady), but they should really stop trying to reinvent their flagship product every year. It alienates their support base and doesn't get them anywhere.
Because the ad/spyware monkeys have the largest userbase and in P2P land, he who has the most users (=content) is king.
Might be something to your conspiracy theory - if you go to the kazaa website, they're specifically urging morpheus users to switch over.
According to the Morpheus press release, the DOS attack targeted their ad servers, not the FastTrack network itself.
I think you'll find dongle-protected apps such as CuBase, 3D Studio Max (up to v.3) et al have been available cracked for a long time.
Wasn't there some sort of backgammon game around during the 1950s?
One major reason would be that Gnutella is open source and Fasttrack is not.
DMCA or no, you can watch DVD's on Linux now, even though it's strictly speaking illegal to do so ...
Well, I'm not cheering, just saying it's not all *that* bad. No legislation means no one's stopping you to do it another way. There's always going to be DRM free hardware, there's always going to be Open Source, there's always going to be a way to copy media (somewhere along the line, a "protected" stream needs to be turned into an unprotected signal), and if these guys get their way, there isn't going to be any law that says Open Source developers can't ignore "industry standards".
Well of course, Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen aren't going to be very impressed with your 600-word letters unless you're in a position of power. If you were Bill Gates, they'd listen. Or at least pretend to. Maybe they'd even listen if you and 5 million of your closest friends sent them these letters, but you alone? No way.
It says: yes, "chief executives of IBM, Microsoft, Motorola, Intel and five other corporations said they were eager to work with Hollywood to find "technically feasible, cost effective solutions" for protecting entertainment delivered in digital form".
It also says "America's largest and most powerful tech firms have agreed on one point: Keep Congress far away from digital content standards."
This is not "ganging up on the consumers", it's "ganging up" on congress to make them stay out of this. Sure, they're brown-nosing media companies ("look, we want to protect your copyrights just as much as you do") but the important message is that they want to decide for themselves how to do it. And if there isn't any legislation in place, some other people (Linux developers, say) can do things their way and ditch DRM altogether if they want.
So it's good.
I think.
Not terribly bad, anyway, the way you make it sound.
Did two of the group's members (HP Carly Fiorina and NCR Lars Nyberg) not sign the letter? Do they have some ulterior motive in distancing themselves from a group that doesn't want the SSSCA passed (see, I read articles before I post)? Or is this just a coincidence and they were 'out of town' or something when the letter was drafted.
Obviously, you don't really have an idea about what "freedom" means in the west.
;-).
... genocide
No? I was raised in the west (Wisconsin, USA to be precise; educated at UW-Madison, to be even more precise), which means that, unlike you, I have personal experience living under both systems.
My bad, sorry for assuming. Though I did live more than half of my life in a collectivist, less than free asian society (Indonesia), so maybe you shouldn't be assuming things either
I did not say East and West limit freedoms in the same manner. I simply said both East and West limits freedoms. It is not the limiting of freedoms which is at issue here, it is merely the particulars relating to the nature and methods of the limitations which are at odds.
And I still say that if you're equating Chinese 'if you disagree with the government and say so, you'll end up in a labor camp' with western 'you can say what you want about the government, but if we don't like it, we'll ignore you', you've got a serious problem with putting things in perspective. Sophistry, I think, is the term for what you're doing here.
Waco, Texas
WTF?? Waco Texas was *an incident* were the US government dealt rather clumsily, with *very unfortunate consequences*, with a group of people who were *actively* opposing the government and public safety in general. It's not US government policy to perpetrate murder of ethnic/religous groups (that's what genocide is). Once again, you're comparing apples and oranges.
airliners bit
Once again, those were incidents, not standard policy.
You really don't have a clue, do you? Just because western governments aren't perfect, not by a long shot, and just because western history is as soaked in blood as the rest of the world's history does not mean you can equate the practices of an actively repressing regime such as the PRC with the fuck ups of western government, which, under most circumstances anyway, and for their own citizens, upholds the basic tenets of freedom and human rights in general. I happen to think this is good, as I value the freedoms and rights of the individual above those of the collective. You may disagree. Fine. Just don't go attempting to prove the PRC isn't significantly more repressive than western governments, because it is.
Obviously, you don't really have an idea about what "freedom" means in the west. Now I'll grant you that the Chinese government isn't as oppressive and totalitarian as it was twenty or thirty years ago, but if you think the way the Chinese gov't limits freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly or what have you in a manner resembling the way western gov'ts limit them, you've got a lot to learn about western values. For one, to name a recent example (Falun Gong), if I were to join my cult in a peaceful demonstration on Times Square, most likely, the authorities would let me do this without sending in the army. Next, if I start a Truly Democratic Party That Thinks The Government Is a Bunch Of Corrupt Assholes in North America or Western Europe, I can. I won't be elected into office, but I won't be sent to a dissident camp either. Finally, suppose I slander someone in the media. I don't have the right to do this in the US or in Europe, I'll be sent to court and be forced to take back what I said (if libel can be proven). In China, I end up in jail or worse. To this day.
Now I respect your Chinese culture and I respect your having a different opinion on what constitutes freedom and all that, but please do not go disrespecting my individualistic western culture by claiming the Chinese government is, by western standards not the brutal dictatorship we westerners think it is.
OK, so what about this: I live in the Netherlands, Enterprise doesn't air here until next year or so. I do, however, have a broadband connection. Guess what? I want to see that show so bad I'll just download it two days after it airs in the US. Illegal? Yes. Would I do the same thing if they'd give up that stupid "release in the US first, then UK, then rest of the world" policy of theirs and had Enterprise in NL, even if were, say, two weeks behind schedule? Probably not, as I prefer to watch TV on my TV.
"computers are devices used to pirate media" and "Microsoft being as large and ubiquitous as it is, it's being thought of as the poster boy for computers", Microsoft has little choice but to play nice with media companies and the DCMA. They'd be an easy target if they didn't, unlike Linux (too fragmented in the sense there's no single legal entity you can blame for "pirating"). Also, don't forget Apple has put some rather nasty DCMA-friendly measures into their crippled DVD burners as well ...
Agreed. The word "bloat" just aquired a whole new meaning when XP came out. Win2K? A Windows OS your games *may* work on but maybe they won't? Kinda defeats the whole purpose of using Windows, right?
Maybe because fuckmicrosoft.com is one of the most poorly informed, unreliable "news sources" out there. Case in point? Read their latest "Index.dat" story.
Maybe the church won't, but the general idea has been happening since the sixties. IIRC, Joseph Weizenbaum (sp?) noted his colleagues wanted to be left alone while 'speaking' to Eliza, as they were sharing personal secrets with that rather crappy (by today's standards) piece of software
I wouldn't call PayPal a dot com (bomb), however. They have something most dot coms lack: a good business model. If they manage to become the number one P2P transaction provider, they'll be worth much more than 777.4 million, I'd wager.
I understand that. I'm just saying you'll be hard pressed to find any company intranet were most documents worth indexing aren't primarily in .DOC format or somesuch. Converting all those documents to X/HTML and creating meaningful (!= auto-linked based on keywords) just so you can use Google doesn't make sense.