If Adobe manages to do as well of a job with this latest enterprise as they've done with Flash CS4, then Amazon should be handed the entire market on a platter. Flash CS4 is the single most painful, unresponsive program I've ever had the displeasure of using, and I'm shocked how the same engineers that can produce a program as high-quality as Photoshop can't manage to catch repetitive 10-20 second UI freezes in Flash during testing.
No I don't complain about Apple, I just choose avoidance. Avoiding anything with their logo on it is a lot easier than getting upset every time they treat their customers poorly.
What? I'm being lazy? Listen, here's my usage of "content" that people are so eager to sell:
When I want to read news, I load news.google.com. I've got it set up to load my local news also. I browse through the various sections, customized as I like, and look for stories that interest me. When I see one story I'll usually click on several sources to try to find different accounts or pictures (turns out much of it is syndicated anyway).
So I'm going to whatever random sites Google has in their index for that story at that point in time. I don't pick and choose sites based on advertising. I go to a site, if it doesn't load in my chosen browser or is a pain to read I'll close that tab and try the next result. Every web site is competing against every other. If someone wants to "sell" me their content, they better not make it difficult for me or else I'll close them and go to the next guy. It's not a matter of avoidance vs. acceptance, it's about finding a decent delivery mechanism for the content I'm looking for. I don't care what your business model is as long as it doesn't impact my experience. When your business model makes it a pain for me to do what I want, then I'll avoid it.
This isn't about ethics either. It's about usability.
Ahh, I saw something on the Hormel site which indicated that the Hormel Foods International subsidiary exported to 40 countries. So don't worry, the nasty meat you don't want to eat is probably the same as the nasty meat I don't want to eat.
You know what, this is a discussion that I never, ever thought I would be having.
Yeah, I'm not sure about the technical details of the BitTorrent spec, but I do know that one fellow was able to register his printer's IP as a proof-of-concept. It could be that he assigned the IP to a computer temporarily, but I think that would defeat the purpose. He ended up receiving 9 takedown notices on his printer though.
From what I understand, the notices are not being sent because of traffic, but because of IP logs (which are not the same). Specifically, they look at the IP logs on the torrent tracker to identify which machines have the content. Any machine is able to register itself with the tracker and say it has any content, regardless of whether it does or not, and regardless of whether it's even running BitTorrent. That's how the guy got his printer DMCA'd - he manually registered his printer's IP address with one or more trackers.
Considering the fact that it's possible to do that, I am completely confused as to how it is possible that every single IP address that the RIAA, MPAA, Congress, or Senate uses has not been registered with as many trackers as possible. Sure, it would degrade BitTorrent performance on those trackers, but it would be worth it to have the RIAA flood the house or senate with takedown notices when no illegal activity has taken place. Then we might start to see that "under the penalty of perjury" clause get enforced.
If they aren't actually connecting to those machines and verifying that 1) they are receiving traffic and 2) they are distributing content, then they haven't exactly made a good-faith effort.
Just to continue the "missing the joke" thread, all 12 of Hormel's production facilities are in the US, which would mean that the US is the *only* source of SPAM.
XML is so much more of a pain to work with. When I'm processing a data structure I'm not interested in traversing through a bunch of child nodes in order to find what I'm looking for. It's much, much easier to refer to a specific property in an object than it is to traverse an XML structure looking for attributes or text nodes.
Like I said, developers are free to choose between XML and JSON. It's not just random chance or ignorance that so many people choose JSON over XML. People look at the pros and cons of each and decide that JSON is a better fit for their application. If I have an associative array in PHP that I want to return to a Javascript request, is it a better idea to choose one of the myriad PHP XML libraries, build my XML structure from the array, and output the markup, or just send my array to json_encode and be done with it?
I see. Just because there are 50-500 people who are willing to comment without reading TFA, we don't have to worry about the destruction of the business model that produces TFA.
I can only speak for myself, but I am in no way worried about the destruction of that particular business model. That is not something that keeps me awake at night.
There's no reason why both can't exist
That's true, and that's not to say that the only way professional content can exist is by pushing ads that users don't want to see.
I don't see why some anarchists should be able to dictate the terms for all of us
It sounds like you're trying to dictate a non-ad-blocking future. Most anarchists seem to be in favor of personal choice. If the majority of users online chose to block ads they wouldn't be anarchists, they would be the norm.
That being said, believe it or not but I don't block ads myself. Ads are rarely intrusive enough to make me want to block them and, if they are, I just leave the site. The only time I actually want to pro-actively block ads are when I'm looking at a blank page and see the status bar saying "Waiting for ads.xxx.xxx.com". Ironically enough, in that case the presence of the ads is actually stopping me from viewing the content, not allowing me to. If the ads weren't on the page it would have already loaded.
The major thing that is really pushing me towards blocking ads are the stories that people spread out over several pages. I know that the only reason they do that is to maximize their ad revenue because they can get more ad impressions per story. So I feel like they're making my experience less friendly, less usable, and more time-consuming in order to increase their revenue, and in that case I'm more than willing to push back and not allow those ads to get delivered to me in the first place. Again, this goes back to advertisers needing to find a non-obnoxious way to spread their message. If they delivered an entire several-thousand word story on a single page and had ads going down the sidebar or something, I'm fine with that. I can focus on the story, I get the content, and they get their ad impressions. If they want to break up my experience to maximize ads then I don't want to support that decision. The same goes for the Javascript advertising that highlights keywords in a story to popup some ad when you mouse over it, that's also not something I want to see.
So I'm not all gung-ho about ad blocking, I just don't like people telling me how I should use the internet to allow them to sustain their business model, because the reason I use the internet is not to help people make money. It also probably doesn't help that my opinion of marketers and the marketing profession is only slightly higher than my opinion of spammers.
the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Right, and it will be replaced with content that doesn't require advertising to support it.
If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall.
Have you considered why people block ads in the first place? Historically ads have been both obtrusive and have degraded the user experience in terms of performance. Advertisers do not have a good record of restraining themselves, if they can get a neon ad to appear in the middle of your screen and shake around until you respond to it, that's what they're going to do. Now that the public has the ability to restrain ads it's up to the advertisers to figure out how to structure their ads so that they are not a problem for users. It would be pretty easy to gauge how well they're doing by the number of people who choose to block ads. It's not up to the public to support an obnoxious business model, if advertisers want money they need to figure out how to not be obnoxious. Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool.
If the long-term consequences involve removing ads from the internet, that's not a bad thing. Even if a lot of content goes with it, in time the content will come back and there will always be people willing to post content without expecting a paycheck from it. The internet doesn't exist to put money in your account.
The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
No it's not, it's far more robust then you give it credit for. Information will always be available online, as long as there are people willing to spread their message without being paid for it. That's the backbone of the internet, advertisers and people selling content are just along for the ride. If you don't believe me, look at Wikipedia, or take a poll here and figure out how many posters got paid to comment.
The beautiful irony is that Apple will reject an app that duplicates the functionality of the device, but they're happy to let in several hundred apps that do the same stuff.
The quantity of apps on the app store suggest that you're mistaken... Regardless, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of developers prove you wrong - it's not that difficult to get an app approved.
You can't really come to that conclusion without knowing the ratio of rejected apps to allowed apps. It could be that ten million apps have been submitted, and only about 1% approved. Or, it could be that 125,000 apps have been submitted and 80% have been approved. Only knowing the number that have been approved is not sufficient to make the claim that it's easy to get approved.
I can understand why IBM dissented, but why did Intel? If they have hardware support for the existing spec why would they dissent? Is it over another issue?
Is that how JSON took hold? By being easy to parse using eval?
No, it took hold because it's Javascript's native object notation. And, as you can imagine, if you have a string of code you use eval to convert it. There are several JSON parsers which do some validation before using eval to ensure that it contains only an object definition and no statements. It would be nice if that validation was standardized and built-in.
they could have just used XML instead
Developers have a choice between XML and JSON (XML is already well supported), but many developers choose JSON instead of XML. Among other things, a JSON structure is typically smaller than a comparable XML structure, and when it's decoded you don't need to use anything special to use it.
instead of inventing a new serialized object format.
They didn't really invent this so much as realize that the native object format can easily be used to transfer arrays and objects between languages. It's very easy to create an associative array in PHP, encode it and send it to Javascript, and end up with virtually the exact same data structure in Javascript. Working with an associative array in PHP (or Javascript) is obviously a lot easier than working with an XML structure. Virtually any language you would use on a server has support for associative arrays or generic objects, so it makes a lot of sense to pass those structures around in a way where you lose no meaning and each language natively supports it.
How about detaining all Iranian diplomats until all jounalists are freed.
All Iranian diplomats huh? Since there aren't any in the US (except occasionally at the UN, and I don't think the UN would approve), should we fly over to Switzerland and kidnap the diplomats working there? Where else should we kidnap people from? Surely this will get our point across.
Slashdot Mirror
If Adobe manages to do as well of a job with this latest enterprise as they've done with Flash CS4, then Amazon should be handed the entire market on a platter. Flash CS4 is the single most painful, unresponsive program I've ever had the displeasure of using, and I'm shocked how the same engineers that can produce a program as high-quality as Photoshop can't manage to catch repetitive 10-20 second UI freezes in Flash during testing.
No I don't complain about Apple, I just choose avoidance. Avoiding anything with their logo on it is a lot easier than getting upset every time they treat their customers poorly.
What? I'm being lazy? Listen, here's my usage of "content" that people are so eager to sell:
When I want to read news, I load news.google.com. I've got it set up to load my local news also. I browse through the various sections, customized as I like, and look for stories that interest me. When I see one story I'll usually click on several sources to try to find different accounts or pictures (turns out much of it is syndicated anyway).
So I'm going to whatever random sites Google has in their index for that story at that point in time. I don't pick and choose sites based on advertising. I go to a site, if it doesn't load in my chosen browser or is a pain to read I'll close that tab and try the next result. Every web site is competing against every other. If someone wants to "sell" me their content, they better not make it difficult for me or else I'll close them and go to the next guy. It's not a matter of avoidance vs. acceptance, it's about finding a decent delivery mechanism for the content I'm looking for. I don't care what your business model is as long as it doesn't impact my experience. When your business model makes it a pain for me to do what I want, then I'll avoid it.
This isn't about ethics either. It's about usability.
If you could get your printer DMCA'd for distributing Office Space, I would consider that poetry.
how hard would it be to just check the article to see if what you're asking was covered, before running your mouth off and sounding like a retard?
Oddly enough, almost all of the information I got (aside from the printer story) came from what I understood from the article.
Sigh.. I'll try again tomorrow I suppose.
Ahh, I saw something on the Hormel site which indicated that the Hormel Foods International subsidiary exported to 40 countries. So don't worry, the nasty meat you don't want to eat is probably the same as the nasty meat I don't want to eat.
You know what, this is a discussion that I never, ever thought I would be having.
You know, all humor aside, you might be exactly right.
Yeah, I'm not sure about the technical details of the BitTorrent spec, but I do know that one fellow was able to register his printer's IP as a proof-of-concept. It could be that he assigned the IP to a computer temporarily, but I think that would defeat the purpose. He ended up receiving 9 takedown notices on his printer though.
What, you don't think it would be handy to be able to move a car without starting it?
From what I understand, the notices are not being sent because of traffic, but because of IP logs (which are not the same). Specifically, they look at the IP logs on the torrent tracker to identify which machines have the content. Any machine is able to register itself with the tracker and say it has any content, regardless of whether it does or not, and regardless of whether it's even running BitTorrent. That's how the guy got his printer DMCA'd - he manually registered his printer's IP address with one or more trackers.
Considering the fact that it's possible to do that, I am completely confused as to how it is possible that every single IP address that the RIAA, MPAA, Congress, or Senate uses has not been registered with as many trackers as possible. Sure, it would degrade BitTorrent performance on those trackers, but it would be worth it to have the RIAA flood the house or senate with takedown notices when no illegal activity has taken place. Then we might start to see that "under the penalty of perjury" clause get enforced.
If they aren't actually connecting to those machines and verifying that 1) they are receiving traffic and 2) they are distributing content, then they haven't exactly made a good-faith effort.
The frightening thing is that someone knowledgeable enough to use Tor still wants Britney Spears "music".
Just to continue the "missing the joke" thread, all 12 of Hormel's production facilities are in the US, which would mean that the US is the *only* source of SPAM.
XML is so much more of a pain to work with. When I'm processing a data structure I'm not interested in traversing through a bunch of child nodes in order to find what I'm looking for. It's much, much easier to refer to a specific property in an object than it is to traverse an XML structure looking for attributes or text nodes.
Like I said, developers are free to choose between XML and JSON. It's not just random chance or ignorance that so many people choose JSON over XML. People look at the pros and cons of each and decide that JSON is a better fit for their application. If I have an associative array in PHP that I want to return to a Javascript request, is it a better idea to choose one of the myriad PHP XML libraries, build my XML structure from the array, and output the markup, or just send my array to json_encode and be done with it?
I can agree with that, I would prefer to block content coming from specific ad servers instead of any other method.
I see. Just because there are 50-500 people who are willing to comment without reading TFA, we don't have to worry about the destruction of the business model that produces TFA.
I can only speak for myself, but I am in no way worried about the destruction of that particular business model. That is not something that keeps me awake at night.
There's no reason why both can't exist
That's true, and that's not to say that the only way professional content can exist is by pushing ads that users don't want to see.
I don't see why some anarchists should be able to dictate the terms for all of us
It sounds like you're trying to dictate a non-ad-blocking future. Most anarchists seem to be in favor of personal choice. If the majority of users online chose to block ads they wouldn't be anarchists, they would be the norm.
That being said, believe it or not but I don't block ads myself. Ads are rarely intrusive enough to make me want to block them and, if they are, I just leave the site. The only time I actually want to pro-actively block ads are when I'm looking at a blank page and see the status bar saying "Waiting for ads.xxx.xxx.com". Ironically enough, in that case the presence of the ads is actually stopping me from viewing the content, not allowing me to. If the ads weren't on the page it would have already loaded.
The major thing that is really pushing me towards blocking ads are the stories that people spread out over several pages. I know that the only reason they do that is to maximize their ad revenue because they can get more ad impressions per story. So I feel like they're making my experience less friendly, less usable, and more time-consuming in order to increase their revenue, and in that case I'm more than willing to push back and not allow those ads to get delivered to me in the first place. Again, this goes back to advertisers needing to find a non-obnoxious way to spread their message. If they delivered an entire several-thousand word story on a single page and had ads going down the sidebar or something, I'm fine with that. I can focus on the story, I get the content, and they get their ad impressions. If they want to break up my experience to maximize ads then I don't want to support that decision. The same goes for the Javascript advertising that highlights keywords in a story to popup some ad when you mouse over it, that's also not something I want to see.
So I'm not all gung-ho about ad blocking, I just don't like people telling me how I should use the internet to allow them to sustain their business model, because the reason I use the internet is not to help people make money. It also probably doesn't help that my opinion of marketers and the marketing profession is only slightly higher than my opinion of spammers.
the long term consequence of your point of view seems to be that all ad supported content will either disappear entirely or run to hide behind a paywall.
Right, and it will be replaced with content that doesn't require advertising to support it.
If the content industry can't make money from ads, we'll either go out of business or put our information behind a paywall.
Have you considered why people block ads in the first place? Historically ads have been both obtrusive and have degraded the user experience in terms of performance. Advertisers do not have a good record of restraining themselves, if they can get a neon ad to appear in the middle of your screen and shake around until you respond to it, that's what they're going to do. Now that the public has the ability to restrain ads it's up to the advertisers to figure out how to structure their ads so that they are not a problem for users. It would be pretty easy to gauge how well they're doing by the number of people who choose to block ads. It's not up to the public to support an obnoxious business model, if advertisers want money they need to figure out how to not be obnoxious. Unfortunately for them, advertising is inherently obnoxious.
Please consider the long term consequences for building such a tool.
If the long-term consequences involve removing ads from the internet, that's not a bad thing. Even if a lot of content goes with it, in time the content will come back and there will always be people willing to post content without expecting a paycheck from it. The internet doesn't exist to put money in your account.
The information ecology is much more fragile than you can imagine.
No it's not, it's far more robust then you give it credit for. Information will always be available online, as long as there are people willing to spread their message without being paid for it. That's the backbone of the internet, advertisers and people selling content are just along for the ride. If you don't believe me, look at Wikipedia, or take a poll here and figure out how many posters got paid to comment.
The Tungsten W invented pinball and card games? I did not know that.
The beautiful irony is that Apple will reject an app that duplicates the functionality of the device, but they're happy to let in several hundred apps that do the same stuff.
Why would the developer refund money if the apps do what they were supposed to?
If the apps did what they were supposed to, why fake reviews?
The quantity of apps on the app store suggest that you're mistaken...
Regardless, thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of developers prove you wrong - it's not that difficult to get an app approved.
You can't really come to that conclusion without knowing the ratio of rejected apps to allowed apps. It could be that ten million apps have been submitted, and only about 1% approved. Or, it could be that 125,000 apps have been submitted and 80% have been approved. Only knowing the number that have been approved is not sufficient to make the claim that it's easy to get approved.
described in this article as "knock-offs of existing applications."
The Chinese producing knock-offs of existing things? Surely you jest!
I can understand why IBM dissented, but why did Intel? If they have hardware support for the existing spec why would they dissent? Is it over another issue?
Is that how JSON took hold? By being easy to parse using eval?
No, it took hold because it's Javascript's native object notation. And, as you can imagine, if you have a string of code you use eval to convert it. There are several JSON parsers which do some validation before using eval to ensure that it contains only an object definition and no statements. It would be nice if that validation was standardized and built-in.
they could have just used XML instead
Developers have a choice between XML and JSON (XML is already well supported), but many developers choose JSON instead of XML. Among other things, a JSON structure is typically smaller than a comparable XML structure, and when it's decoded you don't need to use anything special to use it.
instead of inventing a new serialized object format.
They didn't really invent this so much as realize that the native object format can easily be used to transfer arrays and objects between languages. It's very easy to create an associative array in PHP, encode it and send it to Javascript, and end up with virtually the exact same data structure in Javascript. Working with an associative array in PHP (or Javascript) is obviously a lot easier than working with an XML structure. Virtually any language you would use on a server has support for associative arrays or generic objects, so it makes a lot of sense to pass those structures around in a way where you lose no meaning and each language natively supports it.
How about detaining all Iranian diplomats until all jounalists are freed.
All Iranian diplomats huh? Since there aren't any in the US (except occasionally at the UN, and I don't think the UN would approve), should we fly over to Switzerland and kidnap the diplomats working there? Where else should we kidnap people from? Surely this will get our point across.