You have just described, in very succinct detail, Microsoft's.NET plan.
"Can't afford Office? Can't afford a big new computer to run Office? For only $9.95 / month, you can run the newest and best Office from your old computer, using.NET."
Oh, and that report you titled "Breast Cancer incidence in Teenage Girls" has been reported to the FBI per the COPA laws regarding child pornography.
If you feel the need, use a proxy program that can "fix" the incoming HTML to recognize web bugs and "neuter" them.
I use this feature with the Proxomitron, a proxy that greps incoming HTML for bad stuff and replaces it with good stuff. I now have my copy looking for web bugs, and modifying the HTML to eliminate them. Specifically, I have it searching for IMG tags that include height and width components that are both five pixels or less. Instead of removing the image (which would cause severe image alignment problems) I simply replaced the SRC= with SRC=.\black.gif, which is just a small black image that gets stretched to fit the requested space. Extra benefit: no waiting for the HTTP connection to the web bug server! The local.GIF loads instantly.
Because I'm afraid we'd have to mod you down as well.
GPS signals contain two separate codes for position locating: C/A (Coarse Acquisition) and P (Precise). C/A was indeed degraded by Selective Availability, and SA was turned off by order of the President in May of last year. However, the way it works is that the C/A code only modulates the L1 carrier (1545.72 MHz) at a 1MHz rate, while the P code modulates both the L1 and L2 carriers at a 10MHz rate. Furthermore, the P code is encrypted (which is then referred to as the "Y" code.) The military GPS recievers typically acquire the easier L1 code first and from there scan for the P code.
The C/A code is still good only to a few meters, while the combination of the two carriers carrying the P code is able to detect and compensate for atmospheric disturbances yielding an accuracy of 10cm or less.
Did you notice that the "Vendor branches as required" lines are done in the same width as the "If we're unlucky" lines, not the "if we're lucky" lines?
The web site has it available in both PDF and MSWord format. While I find both formats almost equally abhorrent, (what's wrong with HTML, people?) at least there are two, and one of them's not Micro$oft.
Now, if we could just prove that they're both saying the same things, instead of the PDF one saying "Here's the Open Source AES implementation" and the DOC one saying "Dear A Valued Micro$oft Customer, trust this special Micro$oft/NSA joint venture AES implementation. *ERROR DETECTED: the network traffic light on your PC is blinking indicating it is malfunctioning. [ok][continue]"
Have the banner "frame" (as in border, not as in the FRAME/ tag) have a space that's distinctively yours (as in OSDN). Not a huge screen-spanning monster, but let just a narrow column of pixels down the right hand edge be OSDN's space, merged right into the advertiser's.PNG,.GIF. or.JPG. Two check boxes, one with a heart icon and one with a Mr. Yuk icon (or a matching set of thumbs-up/thumbs-down icons), a question mark and your OSDN logo all could be imagemapped to implement the "good ad, bad ad" scheme, as well as "help" and "advertise with us" links.
If people got used to seeing the same OSDN "frame" or "edge", they'd begin to associate (and differentiate) your ads from other ads. If they liked the "love/sucks" icons, they'd like your ads in general. You'd also be able to provide the useful feedback to your advertisers, as well.
ATTENTION ALL BUDDING PATENT ATTORNEYS: YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST!:-)
Yes, yes, I know all that. I even had it in the post in the first place, but it just kept getting too long. It wasn't worth mentioning then, and it hardly merits a response now.
To reiterate:
Not everyone puts <SARCASM> tags in their HTML -- it's not a required part of the standard.
Its all very well having a 1600GHz Athlon on your desk, but what use it it if Windows crashes every five minutes because you are overheating?
News flash: processor heat is probably not to blame for Windows crashing.
The reason for the overclocking is really to get the Windows boxes to reboot faster after a crash. Have you timed an NT reboot lately? 1600MHz might make it endurable.
Is it just me or does anyone else agree that we should really confine ourselves to running our CPUs at the speed they were designed for rather than some arbitary speed we choose?
Seriously, I think it's just you. Remember, CPUs are designed to run as fast as possible. The limitations being sidestepped by the overclocking crowd are physical world limits: heat will cause
failures in the CMOS semiconductor junctions. You sound like you are saying we should remove our fans and heat sinks and run our 500MHz boxes at 33MHz, because that's what God intended.
Don't confuse the engineering limits with the marketeering limits set by the Intel folks, either. They don't want people overclocking their cheap chips (and so avoid paying the premium for "faster" chips), so they put in circuitry designed to detect and prevent overclocking. They claim it's to "protect their name", but it's strictly financial.
Wood and metal scraps. Paper. What luxury! We had to scratch the O.S. into stone tablets with just our fingernails, using only zeros and ones. And we never had enough ones. Whenever we ran out of ones, we had to make do with just zeros.
And we'd have given anything to have a gerbil. We had to get a group of half-starved cockroaches running in the same direction on an old 45 RPM turntable, and that's not easy, let me tell you. And for blinking lights, we had to rent fireflies, we couldn't afford to actually buy them outright, you know.
You kids today, you don't know how lucky you have it.
The point is that CA is having power supply problems, and power wholesalers refuse to cut rates. This is what happens when a monopoly is in control: higher price, lower quantity, more profit
Excuse me? I missed the part where the monopolies were in control, since CA deregulated the electrical industry a couple of years ago.
As far as I know, they are free to purchase more energy off the grid, but can't because there is currently not enough generating capacity in the state. The wholesalers are pretty much free to charge whatever they want (free market, supply and demand, all that Econ 101 crap.) I don't see any monopoly there.
On an interesting side note, NPR had a report featuring third-party companies profiteering from the situation. There are high-energy-consumption manufacturers who signed purchase contracts for electricity at ~$20-$30/megawatt, and are shutting down to sell their "capacity" for ~$200-$500/megawatt. Due to the nature of their contracts, they make more money by selling their potential usage than they would produce out the other end of the factory. (As a bonus, they get to lay off their workers while the factories are closed.) So don't worry -- some companies are still making money.
It's possible that both of these behaviors are designed IN.
The first -- annoying flashy grpahics that are distracting? Perfect. You saw them. If only for one second to drag the scrollbar down far enough to ignore them, they caught your eye. They're like the horrible local TV ads for a home improvement center. They have a hick banjo theme, their volume levels are twice that of the surrounding program, and the announcer is so excited about the value of one-coat paint that you want to throw a brick through your TV. But they catch you, and that's their point.
Second, if you have a page that displays the banner ad at the top for a few seconds before finishing the page, you have the equivalent of a commercial. What if dubbleclick decided to not transmit the last byte of their banner ads until a five second pause had elapsed? You'd see their banner for five seconds before the connection was released and freed up to go grab further graphics. For all I know, this might be what they're doing today (not that the Proxomitron lets me see this evil behavior, however...)
What makes you think I work for Target? Perhaps I just think Target is representative of the kind of business that would benefit from inline advertising.
Perhaps I actually DO work for Target, but I'm just posting this stuff straight up. They may have software in their firewall that modifies my outgoing data and automatically inserts anchor tags and their URL around the word Target whenever it appears. (There's an evil thought, isn't it?)
People have complained about advertising since the dawn of electronic media. This is nothing new. That so many investors "bet the farm" on something so universally [ loathed | shunned | ignored ] in the "old media" world speaks volumes for their own greed and stupidity. The karmic wheels keep turnin', and these people are simply reaping what they have sown.
The nature of banner ads on the internet has always made them invisible to most readers. When the commercials come on, TV viewers hit the mute buttons, VCR viewers hit their fast forward buttons, and ReplayTV viewers hit Quick Skip. The world has learned (for the most part) to tune out the easily identifiable advertising. On the internet, it's even easier. At least with a TV, you pay attention to enough of the ads to know when you've returned to your show. Not so with a banner ad. It takes a miniscule amount of effort to read them, and their size/shape/color makes them instantly identifiable as something to be ignored. Even filter programs can identify them and eliminate them quite accurately (hurray for the Proxomitron!)
So, given that, what are the advertisers going to do now? Some will fold up their tents. The smarter ones will adapt. One of the cleverest approaches I've seen was on a mapping site. Midway through the printed instructions was the location of a WalMart store that we would be passing. I suspect advertising will have to take a more active role in content in order to command money. Think old-tyme TV shows, brought to you by Alpo; or more likely, the Truman Show (with Yummy Mocha Cocoa.) Who knows, even corporate shills who work for big corporations like Target might be asked to plop advertising links in the middle of their usenet posts or Slashdot discussions.
Advertisers will find a way, but it'll take more effort than they've given it so far.
If he's so worried about government regulation, why doesn't he propose an actual solution: a "government approved truth proxy"?
It would solve all his problems: only web pages that have grade-A USWA (U.S. Web Authority) factual content are available from this proxy. It won't link to any non-true web pages. The USWA would bless each page they host. Advertise the heck out of it: "Think about it: COMMUNISTS don't use the USWA.GOV proxy!" or "If it isn't USWA approved, IT'S ALL LIES." They wouldn't have to link to pictures of the human body, and they wouldn't have to link to MP3s. Netscape and I.E.6 could come preconfigured to use the USWA.GOV proxy.
And those of us who scoff at their idiot mind-set can continue to ignore them.
The article is not worth reading, and therefore his books surely aren't. Even Jon Katz reviews more interesting and/or useful books than this one. It's barely worth the time to read the/. comments...:-)
What is 4C's reponse to "why don't you push for enforcement of the current copyright laws instead of an unpopular techno "fix" that will be thwarted upon release?" How do they justify their position?
Slashdot Mirror
"Can't afford Office? Can't afford a big new computer to run Office? For only $9.95 / month, you can run the newest and best Office from your old computer, using .NET."
Oh, and that report you titled "Breast Cancer incidence in Teenage Girls" has been reported to the FBI per the COPA laws regarding child pornography.
John
I use this feature with the Proxomitron, a proxy that greps incoming HTML for bad stuff and replaces it with good stuff. I now have my copy looking for web bugs, and modifying the HTML to eliminate them. Specifically, I have it searching for IMG tags that include height and width components that are both five pixels or less. Instead of removing the image (which would cause severe image alignment problems) I simply replaced the SRC= with SRC=.\black.gif, which is just a small black image that gets stretched to fit the requested space. Extra benefit: no waiting for the HTTP connection to the web bug server! The local .GIF loads instantly.
John
Because I'm afraid we'd have to mod you down as well.
GPS signals contain two separate codes for position locating: C/A (Coarse Acquisition) and P (Precise). C/A was indeed degraded by Selective Availability, and SA was turned off by order of the President in May of last year. However, the way it works is that the C/A code only modulates the L1 carrier (1545.72 MHz) at a 1MHz rate, while the P code modulates both the L1 and L2 carriers at a 10MHz rate. Furthermore, the P code is encrypted (which is then referred to as the "Y" code.) The military GPS recievers typically acquire the easier L1 code first and from there scan for the P code.
The C/A code is still good only to a few meters, while the combination of the two carriers carrying the P code is able to detect and compensate for atmospheric disturbances yielding an accuracy of 10cm or less.
For a much better explanation, see Trimble's How GPS works article.
John
I assume this was done for AOL's 'benefit.'
John
Now, if we could just prove that they're both saying the same things, instead of the PDF one saying "Here's the Open Source AES implementation" and the DOC one saying "Dear A Valued Micro$oft Customer, trust this special Micro$oft/NSA joint venture AES implementation. *ERROR DETECTED: the network traffic light on your PC is blinking indicating it is malfunctioning. [ok][continue]"
John
If people got used to seeing the same OSDN "frame" or "edge", they'd begin to associate (and differentiate) your ads from other ads. If they liked the "love/sucks" icons, they'd like your ads in general. You'd also be able to provide the useful feedback to your advertisers, as well.
ATTENTION ALL BUDDING PATENT ATTORNEYS: YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST! :-)
Just my 2 clickthroughs worth.
John
That's good enough for me!
John
Next thing you know, it'll be hydroxyl acid rain.
John
To reiterate:
Not everyone puts <SARCASM> tags in their HTML -- it's not a required part of the standard.
John
News flash: processor heat is probably not to blame for Windows crashing.
The reason for the overclocking is really to get the Windows boxes to reboot faster after a crash. Have you timed an NT reboot lately? 1600MHz might make it endurable.
Is it just me or does anyone else agree that we should really confine ourselves to running our CPUs at the speed they were designed for rather than some arbitary speed we choose?
Seriously, I think it's just you. Remember, CPUs are designed to run as fast as possible. The limitations being sidestepped by the overclocking crowd are physical world limits: heat will cause failures in the CMOS semiconductor junctions. You sound like you are saying we should remove our fans and heat sinks and run our 500MHz boxes at 33MHz, because that's what God intended.
Don't confuse the engineering limits with the marketeering limits set by the Intel folks, either. They don't want people overclocking their cheap chips (and so avoid paying the premium for "faster" chips), so they put in circuitry designed to detect and prevent overclocking. They claim it's to "protect their name", but it's strictly financial.
John
John
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
John
Wood and metal scraps. Paper. What luxury! We had to scratch the O.S. into stone tablets with just our fingernails, using only zeros and ones. And we never had enough ones. Whenever we ran out of ones, we had to make do with just zeros.
And we'd have given anything to have a gerbil. We had to get a group of half-starved cockroaches running in the same direction on an old 45 RPM turntable, and that's not easy, let me tell you. And for blinking lights, we had to rent fireflies, we couldn't afford to actually buy them outright, you know.
You kids today, you don't know how lucky you have it.
John
Excuse me? I missed the part where the monopolies were in control, since CA deregulated the electrical industry a couple of years ago.
As far as I know, they are free to purchase more energy off the grid, but can't because there is currently not enough generating capacity in the state. The wholesalers are pretty much free to charge whatever they want (free market, supply and demand, all that Econ 101 crap.) I don't see any monopoly there.
On an interesting side note, NPR had a report featuring third-party companies profiteering from the situation. There are high-energy-consumption manufacturers who signed purchase contracts for electricity at ~$20-$30/megawatt, and are shutting down to sell their "capacity" for ~$200-$500/megawatt. Due to the nature of their contracts, they make more money by selling their potential usage than they would produce out the other end of the factory. (As a bonus, they get to lay off their workers while the factories are closed.) So don't worry -- some companies are still making money.
John
The first -- annoying flashy grpahics that are distracting? Perfect. You saw them. If only for one second to drag the scrollbar down far enough to ignore them, they caught your eye. They're like the horrible local TV ads for a home improvement center. They have a hick banjo theme, their volume levels are twice that of the surrounding program, and the announcer is so excited about the value of one-coat paint that you want to throw a brick through your TV. But they catch you, and that's their point.
Second, if you have a page that displays the banner ad at the top for a few seconds before finishing the page, you have the equivalent of a commercial. What if dubbleclick decided to not transmit the last byte of their banner ads until a five second pause had elapsed? You'd see their banner for five seconds before the connection was released and freed up to go grab further graphics. For all I know, this might be what they're doing today (not that the Proxomitron lets me see this evil behavior, however...)
John
Perhaps I actually DO work for Target, but I'm just posting this stuff straight up. They may have software in their firewall that modifies my outgoing data and automatically inserts anchor tags and their URL around the word Target whenever it appears. (There's an evil thought, isn't it?)
But to answer your question, yes, I do work for Target. Or at least Marshall Field's.
John
The nature of banner ads on the internet has always made them invisible to most readers. When the commercials come on, TV viewers hit the mute buttons, VCR viewers hit their fast forward buttons, and ReplayTV viewers hit Quick Skip. The world has learned (for the most part) to tune out the easily identifiable advertising. On the internet, it's even easier. At least with a TV, you pay attention to enough of the ads to know when you've returned to your show. Not so with a banner ad. It takes a miniscule amount of effort to read them, and their size/shape/color makes them instantly identifiable as something to be ignored. Even filter programs can identify them and eliminate them quite accurately (hurray for the Proxomitron!)
So, given that, what are the advertisers going to do now? Some will fold up their tents. The smarter ones will adapt. One of the cleverest approaches I've seen was on a mapping site. Midway through the printed instructions was the location of a WalMart store that we would be passing. I suspect advertising will have to take a more active role in content in order to command money. Think old-tyme TV shows, brought to you by Alpo; or more likely, the Truman Show (with Yummy Mocha Cocoa.) Who knows, even corporate shills who work for big corporations like Target might be asked to plop advertising links in the middle of their usenet posts or Slashdot discussions.
Advertisers will find a way, but it'll take more effort than they've given it so far.
John
John
That pretty much sums this author up: his name is spelled Caleb Carr, but it's pronounced Jon Katz.
John
It would solve all his problems: only web pages that have grade-A USWA (U.S. Web Authority) factual content are available from this proxy. It won't link to any non-true web pages. The USWA would bless each page they host. Advertise the heck out of it: "Think about it: COMMUNISTS don't use the USWA.GOV proxy!" or "If it isn't USWA approved, IT'S ALL LIES. " They wouldn't have to link to pictures of the human body, and they wouldn't have to link to MP3s. Netscape and I.E.6 could come preconfigured to use the USWA.GOV proxy.
And those of us who scoff at their idiot mind-set can continue to ignore them.
The article is not worth reading, and therefore his books surely aren't. Even Jon Katz reviews more interesting and/or useful books than this one. It's barely worth the time to read the /. comments... :-)
John
John
How about "fscking trolls!"
Jeez, now you could have it do a variant on a Beatles tune, Hey Jude. "Take a bad idea, and make it lamer."
John
and did anybody look inside?