it doesn't help your case for you to make broad and obviously false statements like that
It was a generalisation, granted. If I said "the content companies that make up 80%+ of revenue" would you feel better about it?
you decided instead to take the low road, spicing up a generalization with references to Palladium, DRM, and the DMCA.
The addendum to the article pointed to a GigaLaw article, in which a lawyer speculates about the legality of blocking ads.. the DMCA and DRM systems are a way to make it illegal for sure. I don't think I was straying too far off track.
Now, if you want to have a constructive dialogue on this,
I was addressing the parent article, which was concerned primarily with the poster's belief in his right to absolute control over his own browser.
we can speculate on what the effects might be of popular web sites denying access to users who employ ad filtering techniques or software
I think the online ad industry will continue it's downward spiral regardless. If ad blocking becomes popular we'll probably see an "arms race" which ends with a tiny minority not visiting some sites anymore.
Or we could talk about whether AOL has the right to include or exclude features in or from their software based on business decisions. (They do, by the way.)
Yes, they certainly do. And I never said they didn't.
Personally, I don't beleive www.somenewssite.com has permission to open windows on my computer any more than they have permission to launch my applications or download my files.
"Content" companies don't believe you should have control over the device you use to access web pages (or movies, or music..). For the user to grant or deny "permission" is a ludicrous concept to them.
I think "Trustworthy Computing", Palladium etc will go some of the way towards addressing this - you will slowly have less and less control over the viewing platform. If you choose to use an alternate viewing platform (eg a pre-Palladium PC), you simply won't be able to view a lot of things. If you attempt to get your old computer to display new content, or to wrest back control of a computer that implements Digital Restriction Management, you'll be in violation of the DMCA (or your local equivalent).
Approximately 1 in 10,000 households and businesses in the US get their power from people other than their local government-approved grid. Given a population of 260 million, and assuming that one household or business exists for every 2 people, that's 13000 establishments within the US that aren't giving us money!
Now, since if these people would probably chew through $10,000 per year in electricity. That's $130,000,000 that ends up in other people's pockets!
The sky is falling on this industry and we need laws to prevent this!
.. and I'll fork the project. The sole difference between my codebase and the original will be a lack of a clickthrough.
Seriously, if a new license springs up requiring a click through, that could work on a desktop, but what about when I rip out the program's optimised hashtable implementation for use in an embedded controller? How is a clickthrough supposed to work then?
If a new input paradigm springs up for desktops, will code licensed under explicit clickthrough terms that aren't satisfied by it be left to rot?
If you're that afraid of people using your stuff, and you don't feel that copyright gives you adequate protection, then you probably shouldn't open the code.
You have a physical edge on the screen, so it would be easy for the user to hit this.
Sitting in a chair, yes. However, PDA users want to be able to hit it with their thumbnail, whilst walking to their office with a cup of coffee in their other hand.
I use LWM. It's ultra small and provides a bare minimum of features. The only thing I miss (but not enough to bother hacking it in myself:) is the ability to just get a WM-drawn border when dragging a window around, rather than having the entire window drawn again and again and again..
andrew@endor:~> ls -l `which lwm` -rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23952 Jan 23 2002/usr/X11R6/bin/lwm
Don't get me wrong , I'm all for X on a desktop. But where in these devices is there a need for remote displays ?
Development work. With platforms like the Palm or Windows CE, you generally need to choose between working on an emulator (which is slower than the device) or the device (which gets irritating when you've been testing a UI for hours and would really, really like to be able to enter text quickly).
Being able to run the app on the handheld, but manipulate it on the desktop, would be very handy. I think recent Windows CE devices have this ability. (Most devices don't have enough bandwidth between the handheld and the desktop for it to be viable).
Remember that when X was first invented, your average Unix workstation was less powerful than today's PDAs (permanent storage and display size aside). I don't think it's too much overhead.
I don't trust everybody to be capable of sticking with such rules... but they're going to have to either learn or be removed from society
I think the increased transparency will eventually lead to more tolerance. Most bigotry stems from fear and misunderstanding; for instance, most people that hate non-heterosexuals and blacks are raised in a little isolated sphere of straight (or afraid, in the closet) white people. These isolated social spheres are under threat as a direct result of increased social transparency. The world is getting smaller.
Apparantly, when cultures clash, you usually have an initial period of unrest and upheaval followed, in the longer term, by an assimilation of the different cultures into a more tolerant whole. I can see that happening here.
A lot of people seem to be terrified of the concept that in 20 years time, anyone with access to search/archival services and the inclination will be able to access all of the stuff they've said and published. Everything. Not quoted in part or paraphrased, but an exact copy as it came from the horse's mouth.
People want to be able to hide this information away, to disown it, to take their name off it, to dismiss it as a fabrication or a misquote.
I think it stems from the fact that nobody's perfect, but for some reason society has some mean doublethink happening - we know nobody's perfect but we still expect them to appear to be perfect! It used to be that if you were judicious about where you said things, and to who, your mistakes could be quickly retracted and covered up before they were preserved in some indelible form. This isn't the case when you put something on a web page.
Personally, I'm looking forward to where this is heading.. "people aren't perfect" won't just be the theory, it will be the practice. Mistakes will be more quickly admitted, rather than denied then covered up.
A while back, I was under the misconception that the Linux kernel odd-even unstable-stable scheme applies to minor version numbers (eg 2.4.13) as well as major version numbers. I stated this on Slashdot. Foot in mouth, I was wrong, I can never erase that and anyone can find it on Google. That I'm imperfect is harder to hide than before. Accept it.
We need standard api's, so if you like GTK, acrobat calls a function - drawToolbar() - you get a GTK toolbar.
If you switch to QT, then acrobat calls drawToolbar(), QT draws a toolbar.
No way. For the most part, projects use QT or GTK because it's what the coder is comfortable with. Unfortunately, they tend to look rather different, so when you have a GTK app and a KDE app side by side, they may as well be running on different systems.. imposing a single different API on developers which in turn map down to GTK and QT would (a) piss them off and (b) remove the point of GTK and QT in the first place - why not have your single API talk directly to XLib?
A better approach is to get the same themes behind GTK and QT. This way, side by side they'll look slightly different (which is okay... look at toolbars in different Windows apps) but mostly the same. Colors at the least should match!
I once used a utility which took my GNOME config and generated X resources for Motif apps, it made Netscape 4 fit in nicely with my GNOME desktop. Something similar for GTK and QT should be made to work..
Not to mention the fact that it'd be a bitch to machine-count.
I don't see a need for machine counting. Here in Australia, vote counting is done by hand, and we get definite results within 6 hours of polls closing. America's got 15 times as many people, but that's potentially 15 times as many counters...
Scrutineers (as representatives of the candidates on the ballot) are constantly looking over the shoulders of the people doing the counting. I trust this far more than any audit of a complex machine.
Works well pretty much everywhere else. Clearly written numbers, or ticks, are unambiguous (no "chads") and leave a concrete paper trail that can be audited with ease.
This sort of effort would be better invested in making payment easier. I'm not in the US (rules out direct transfer, paypal etc) and I don't have a credit card (because I don't want credit. I spend money I have already). Give me a way to send you money!
When you send me ads, you're telling me to fuck off. They're annoying, and they subtract from my most valuable resources when sitting in front of my computer (time, and screen real estate).
I don't think they should have acquired them in the first place.
incorporation in DirectX ?
That doesn't make me feel much better. The entire reason Direct3D came into being was to give Microsoft more control, and discourage code that can be easily ported to non-MS platforms.
Every hear of something called an appeal? It means that maybe Microsoft had an unfair disadvantage and that the conviction could be overturned.
I believe that the findings of fact were upheld by the appeals court. What's now being debated in the courts isn't whether Microsoft is anticompetitive or not, but rather the sanctions that will be imposed.
It's a bit pre-emptive when we are hanging Microsoft just for having the patents
Not really. Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations by a court of law. In case you didn't catch that, Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations by a court of law. Just so that everyone is sure to see it:
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations by a court of law.
Integration across markets isn't safe when these guys are involved. Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again that when they have any sort of leverage, the rest of the market suffers.
They didn't gain these patents in the course of research, they bought them from SGI for $62.5 million. Microsoft doesn't develop graphics hardware, so what could they have in mind for these patents that makes them worth $62.5 million?
Re:I'm disappointed with their choice of OPN
on
DotGNU Meet-a-thon
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry to see this sort of comment. It contains a number of untruths.
Some individual facts are off, I'll agree. And this was probably deliberately done. That said, IMO the crux of the matter is reflected truly.
I've recently been trolled a fair amount on OPN..... Nobody is trying to eject me from OPN other than some trolls and some folks who are listening without asking a lot of questions
I really wish you'd stop labelling everybody that disagrees with you a troll. Many people that threw themselves wholeheartedly into OPN in the past fall into that category, based entirely upon their own experiences. Some server owners, and many opers (note that they aren't the same thing, on either OPN or OFTC) have jumped ship.
You also keep stating that many would like to "eject" you from OPN. This isn't the entire picture. Many people would be happy for you to maintain responsibilities with OPN, but feel some aspects of your behaviour should change, and that OPN should be restructured so that less power resides with one single person.
I feel that your constant misrepresentation of the the size and nature of the complaints reflects a lack of will and/or ability to address them properly.
Re:I'm disappointed with their choice of OPN
on
DotGNU Meet-a-thon
·
· Score: 1
In other words: you're spamming.
"Trolling" is probably a more appropriate description.
I noted elsewhere that the character of the anti-lilo faction can be known by its behaviour. Thanks for helping me prove my point:).
The idea that there is one coherent "faction" which behaves in the same way is ridiculous. The behaviour of one person is not representative of such a broad group, and proves nothing.
Re:I'm disappointed with their choice of OPN
on
DotGNU Meet-a-thon
·
· Score: 2
I'm pretty sure that's true*. However, I don't see why people would have a problem with that, and even if they did, it doesn't have anything to do with the current debate.
* (of lilo; personally, I haven't, but I'm still young, so plenty of time to fix that if I ever feel the need:)
Re:I'm disappointed with their choice of OPN
on
DotGNU Meet-a-thon
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I would also like to point out that lilo is not asking for a salary
AFAIK, Lilo's always felt that receiving a significant chunk of income from OPN is an appropriate goal. It's not on the current version of the page (last modified today, according to the footer), but an older copy of an openprojects.net page at archive.org states:
The intent was to find a sponsor to pay his salary so that he could work on the network fulltime.....
OPN will continue to grow. At some point it will become large enough that one or two full-time salaries can be paid out of voluntary contributions by users.
Slashdot Mirror
It was a generalisation, granted. If I said "the content companies that make up 80%+ of revenue" would you feel better about it?
The addendum to the article pointed to a GigaLaw article, in which a lawyer speculates about the legality of blocking ads.. the DMCA and DRM systems are a way to make it illegal for sure. I don't think I was straying too far off track.
I was addressing the parent article, which was concerned primarily with the poster's belief in his right to absolute control over his own browser.
I think the online ad industry will continue it's downward spiral regardless. If ad blocking becomes popular we'll probably see an "arms race" which ends with a tiny minority not visiting some sites anymore.
Yes, they certainly do. And I never said they didn't.
"Content" companies don't believe you should have control over the device you use to access web pages (or movies, or music..). For the user to grant or deny "permission" is a ludicrous concept to them.
I think "Trustworthy Computing", Palladium etc will go some of the way towards addressing this - you will slowly have less and less control over the viewing platform. If you choose to use an alternate viewing platform (eg a pre-Palladium PC), you simply won't be able to view a lot of things. If you attempt to get your old computer to display new content, or to wrest back control of a computer that implements Digital Restriction Management, you'll be in violation of the DMCA (or your local equivalent).
Approximately 1 in 10,000 households and businesses in the US get their power from people other than their local government-approved grid. Given a population of 260 million, and assuming that one household or business exists for every 2 people, that's 13000 establishments within the US that aren't giving us money!
Now, since if these people would probably chew through $10,000 per year in electricity. That's $130,000,000 that ends up in other people's pockets!
The sky is falling on this industry and we need laws to prevent this!
Seriously, if a new license springs up requiring a click through, that could work on a desktop, but what about when I rip out the program's optimised hashtable implementation for use in an embedded controller? How is a clickthrough supposed to work then?
If a new input paradigm springs up for desktops, will code licensed under explicit clickthrough terms that aren't satisfied by it be left to rot?
If you're that afraid of people using your stuff, and you don't feel that copyright gives you adequate protection, then you probably shouldn't open the code.
Sitting in a chair, yes. However, PDA users want to be able to hit it with their thumbnail, whilst walking to their office with a cup of coffee in their other hand.
I use LWM. It's ultra small and provides a bare minimum of features. The only thing I miss (but not enough to bother hacking it in myself :) is the ability to just get a WM-drawn border when dragging a window around, rather than having the entire window drawn again and again and again..
andrew@endor:~> ls -l `which lwm`-rwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 23952 Jan 23 2002
Development work. With platforms like the Palm or Windows CE, you generally need to choose between working on an emulator (which is slower than the device) or the device (which gets irritating when you've been testing a UI for hours and would really, really like to be able to enter text quickly).
Being able to run the app on the handheld, but manipulate it on the desktop, would be very handy. I think recent Windows CE devices have this ability. (Most devices don't have enough bandwidth between the handheld and the desktop for it to be viable).
Remember that when X was first invented, your average Unix workstation was less powerful than today's PDAs (permanent storage and display size aside). I don't think it's too much overhead.
I think so, is it something from the olden days?
I think the increased transparency will eventually lead to more tolerance. Most bigotry stems from fear and misunderstanding; for instance, most people that hate non-heterosexuals and blacks are raised in a little isolated sphere of straight (or afraid, in the closet) white people. These isolated social spheres are under threat as a direct result of increased social transparency. The world is getting smaller.
Apparantly, when cultures clash, you usually have an initial period of unrest and upheaval followed, in the longer term, by an assimilation of the different cultures into a more tolerant whole. I can see that happening here.
Pretty please? Somebody?
A lot of people seem to be terrified of the concept that in 20 years time, anyone with access to search/archival services and the inclination will be able to access all of the stuff they've said and published. Everything. Not quoted in part or paraphrased, but an exact copy as it came from the horse's mouth.
People want to be able to hide this information away, to disown it, to take their name off it, to dismiss it as a fabrication or a misquote.
I think it stems from the fact that nobody's perfect, but for some reason society has some mean doublethink happening - we know nobody's perfect but we still expect them to appear to be perfect! It used to be that if you were judicious about where you said things, and to who, your mistakes could be quickly retracted and covered up before they were preserved in some indelible form. This isn't the case when you put something on a web page.
Personally, I'm looking forward to where this is heading.. "people aren't perfect" won't just be the theory, it will be the practice. Mistakes will be more quickly admitted, rather than denied then covered up.
A while back, I was under the misconception that the Linux kernel odd-even unstable-stable scheme applies to minor version numbers (eg 2.4.13) as well as major version numbers. I stated this on Slashdot. Foot in mouth, I was wrong, I can never erase that and anyone can find it on Google. That I'm imperfect is harder to hide than before. Accept it.
I think I can explain some of this. Perth is fairly boring :P
No way. For the most part, projects use QT or GTK because it's what the coder is comfortable with. Unfortunately, they tend to look rather different, so when you have a GTK app and a KDE app side by side, they may as well be running on different systems.. imposing a single different API on developers which in turn map down to GTK and QT would (a) piss them off and (b) remove the point of GTK and QT in the first place - why not have your single API talk directly to XLib?
A better approach is to get the same themes behind GTK and QT. This way, side by side they'll look slightly different (which is okay... look at toolbars in different Windows apps) but mostly the same. Colors at the least should match!
I once used a utility which took my GNOME config and generated X resources for Motif apps, it made Netscape 4 fit in nicely with my GNOME desktop. Something similar for GTK and QT should be made to work..
I don't see a need for machine counting. Here in Australia, vote counting is done by hand, and we get definite results within 6 hours of polls closing. America's got 15 times as many people, but that's potentially 15 times as many counters...
Scrutineers (as representatives of the candidates on the ballot) are constantly looking over the shoulders of the people doing the counting. I trust this far more than any audit of a complex machine.
But writing numbers is something everyone does all the time. Punching holes in paper, on the other hand, they find unreasonably difficult.
Works well pretty much everywhere else. Clearly written numbers, or ticks, are unambiguous (no "chads") and leave a concrete paper trail that can be audited with ease.
This sort of effort would be better invested in making payment easier. I'm not in the US (rules out direct transfer, paypal etc) and I don't have a credit card (because I don't want credit. I spend money I have already). Give me a way to send you money!
When you send me ads, you're telling me to fuck off. They're annoying, and they subtract from my most valuable resources when sitting in front of my computer (time, and screen real estate).
I don't think they should have acquired them in the first place.
That doesn't make me feel much better. The entire reason Direct3D came into being was to give Microsoft more control, and discourage code that can be easily ported to non-MS platforms.
I believe that the findings of fact were upheld by the appeals court. What's now being debated in the courts isn't whether Microsoft is anticompetitive or not, but rather the sanctions that will be imposed.
Not really. Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations by a court of law. In case you didn't catch that, Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations by a court of law. Just so that everyone is sure to see it:
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations by a court of law.
Integration across markets isn't safe when these guys are involved. Microsoft has demonstrated time and time again that when they have any sort of leverage, the rest of the market suffers.
They didn't gain these patents in the course of research, they bought them from SGI for $62.5 million. Microsoft doesn't develop graphics hardware, so what could they have in mind for these patents that makes them worth $62.5 million?
Some individual facts are off, I'll agree. And this was probably deliberately done. That said, IMO the crux of the matter is reflected truly.
I really wish you'd stop labelling everybody that disagrees with you a troll. Many people that threw themselves wholeheartedly into OPN in the past fall into that category, based entirely upon their own experiences. Some server owners, and many opers (note that they aren't the same thing, on either OPN or OFTC) have jumped ship.
You also keep stating that many would like to "eject" you from OPN. This isn't the entire picture. Many people would be happy for you to maintain responsibilities with OPN, but feel some aspects of your behaviour should change, and that OPN should be restructured so that less power resides with one single person.
I feel that your constant misrepresentation of the the size and nature of the complaints reflects a lack of will and/or ability to address them properly.
"Trolling" is probably a more appropriate description.
The idea that there is one coherent "faction" which behaves in the same way is ridiculous. The behaviour of one person is not representative of such a broad group, and proves nothing.
I'm pretty sure that's true*. However, I don't see why people would have a problem with that, and even if they did, it doesn't have anything to do with the current debate.
:)
* (of lilo; personally, I haven't, but I'm still young, so plenty of time to fix that if I ever feel the need
AFAIK, Lilo's always felt that receiving a significant chunk of income from OPN is an appropriate goal. It's not on the current version of the page (last modified today, according to the footer), but an older copy of an openprojects.net page at archive.org states:
I realise this. However, I doubt my status and rights as a copyright holder will ever come into play if the RIAA or MPAA is involved.