The news story is out of Boulder Colorado, it seems.
Based on this, The Boulder Valley school district web page is here. The public officials have all sorts of contact information, etc. Some even have email addresses.
Now remember that we would want intelligent discussion about this, so make sure that if you choose to communicate with them, to cite the original web page, and to use nice words. Personal attacks should be avoided, since most of these folks likely do not have a government issued flame retardant Web suit yet.
yes, the School has a web site as well, but it seems better that you send any comments to the Public officials, since it is part of their job description to occasionally be on the hot seat.
There are quite a few places that run the old style BBSs online. You acess them via telnet. A common one that gets mentioned from time to time is at ufies.bbs.org, associated with Userfriendly
If you go there via http, there is a simple web page with some info, etc. and some links to see who is looged into the board, etc. Telnetting to the url gets you the board itself.
And they do have tradewars, along with other things. (Now watch them get/.ed)
One of the many rather informative site on camputer history can be found here, complete with pictures, and something of a context of the start of the industry. I'm sure that a search using your favorite search engine will pop up more.
On the other hand, I can (and do) saturate my domestic bandwidth contantly - whether downloading the latest from LinuxISO.org, game demos, kernel updates - and all within the T&C's of the service.
What the Korean company is looking at is multiple PCs connecting to the net vs one PC. I personally think that your complete personal use argument wins hands down. and unless you have storage approaching a terabyte or two, you are not saturating the bandwidth 24/7 - you probably have heard of this curse called sleep even if you avoid it as much as possible.
But what they are complaining about is IP sharing, multiple PCs via one DSL or whatever pipe.
Again, while I can sympathise, I can just imagine a house hold full of teens with their own boxen hooked up to a fat pipe, running music videos 24/7, etc like a fancy thousand dollar radio or whatever. That certainly approcahes the bandwidth of business use.
It is a difficult question. Is there as reasonable metering solution out there some place? I would love to have something like that for inside the house so that you could bill the teens for the 24/7 video junky feeds.
in a weird way I can understand the differances between personal use of bandwidth, and Commercial use.
When I am personally using dsl or better bandwidth, I am certainly not taking full advantadge of the pipe. So If I use 10% of the pipe or 20% of the pipe, or whatever, the service provider can charge me one third of what he charges a business customer, and still make a profit. Even If I use 30 or 40%, unlikely unless I streaming video 24/7, and doing other things, The average usage for most people probably is around 5 or 10% (all numbers are speculative) and so based on this the service can be priced accordingly.
Now if I suddenly have dozens or hundreds of computers using this line, the bandwidth can max out. If I am the provider, I am possibly charged by the number of bits that go overthe wire. This is where it gets alarming, since I had made my profit calculations based an average usage of 10% and charged appropriately. No suddenly I have bunches of people who want to use the personal private lines for their business without paying the businnes rates. Instead of 10% the usage soars to 50% or higher. This is not a good thing.
The options are either to just charge everyone business rate (no private rates) or to crack down on abusers. The personal rates are offered with this balance between business use and personal use understood, at least internally.
Now some people do not understand this. I suppose when it was only one or two ubergeeks doing this, they could let it slide. But when you start promoting this for everyone, then it messes up the business model.
I supposed you could have some sort of metered service, but I do not know how easy it would be to set that up. Even so metering is an added cost, and might not be practical for someone cutting costs a little thin in the above scenario. (price competition and all)
I am wondering about the concept of Prior art in regard to the Symantec Patents.
For Example, there is this Story about the war of DirectTV against hackers. Direct TV for the past FOUR YEARS did incremental upgrades to their systems to try to stop hackers from stealing their signal. They finally inmplemented a gradually update program that convertly set up a complete system upgrade, sort of like a digital jigsaw puzzle, with the last piece shuffling and re-compiling the pieces, and locking the pirates out when they pulled the final trigger.
So in any case, just the idea of online upgrades before this little bit of coding is demonstrated prior art by DirectTV
To many games companies these days suffer from the illusion that a good game depends on good programming, when in fact it should depend on good design. In these professional days, we can take good programming for granted, more or less.
I don't know about this. I certainly do not take good programing for granted.
I mean, there is the obvious free shot at Microsft. I just heard on the TV (just as I am typing this), that Microsoft is making a move into the Cellular phone market. Now I do not know if this if part of an investment scheme, or if you will see MS cell phones Real Soon Now. Honestly, how many would be skeptical of an MS phone? (someone go look this up and submit it please)
Now there are an awful lot of good programmers out there. But the fundamentals of design are so important, that if you do not have it, you can multiply your time and have lots of late projects and missed deadlines. Like that has never happened before.
How many games have even shipped on time? How long did you wait for (insert title here)?
Depends on how cynical you are. I can see two people who are good friends actually sharing something that is a golden nugget in their lives. But you'd have to have a really good friend.
Perhaps. I used to be an optimist. Then I turned 4. Surely you can't think it's cynical to belive realism==cynicism?:-)
Well, most people are mostly good most of the time, pending minor mishaps like a painful education process, or whatever.
One of the tricks is to *not* be personally insulted just because the other guy is a jerk, a cheat, or a fraud, etc. You put a red tag on his ear labelling him dangerous, radioactive, or whatever; and take appropriate action to cover yourself. But after that it is just a waste of good emotion.
an example of this is when you have given your two week notice at a place that sucks. Suddenly alot of BS does not matter anymore, and you have a bit more freedom, etc.
You generally do not get cynical about potholes, etc. - So for me, being cynical has an edge of paranoia in that it is easy to view everyone with suspicion, when you merely need to label them appropriately and not get hung up on it or freak on it.
The sales people will push anything in retail stores. So it is merely a bit of marketing hype
but Joe sixpack will gripe about it. He can see a monthly fee for AOL, similar to his cable bill, etc. He can put up with this.
But a monthly fee to use his own computer that he just bought?He will choke on this.
Joe Sixpack has signed of on software licenses for a long time, blissfully ignorant of what it means. But to sit there with this same thing applying to his hardware will provide a rude awakening.
Expect lawsuits all over the place. Or laws passed in Congress at this point.
Consumers do not like getting raped in the wallet. It just ticks them off, and you wind up with short term gain of profits, and the long term gain of their hostility.
Are we supposed to be impressed by your inability to read through to the end of the article? Words are hard!
Exactly. Words can be hard. I am tired and it is late, and the article actually deserves being bright eyed and awake and alert with both brain cells functioning at full power.
So I will sleep first, and then give a proper answer when I have the time, possibly tomorrow night.
Not everyone lives in the California time zone, you know. Or stays up to 3 am, shocking as that may seem.
Looks like there are more and more businesses getting into the privacy business:
The number of newly registered privacy-related trademarks and patents has risen dramatically in the past few years; they include everything from banking services and computer technologies to window treatments and even an independent software agent ("for protecting consumers' privacy") called Privacy Just Got Cool. Anonymous Web-browsing and e-mailing services are available from companies called Anonymizer, Hushmail, IDcide, PrivacyX, and ZipLip. An outfit called Disappearing has developed an e-mail system that allows users to send messages that permanently unwrite themselves after a previously specified amount of time. Sales of personal paper shredders are up. Personal bodyguards are increasingly in demand. American Express has just unveiled a system called Private Payments, which generates a random, unique card number for each online purchase. A California law firm now offers to prepare something it calls The Privacy Trust, which, it claims, "successfully conceals ownership of bank and brokerage accounts, the family home, rental properties, and interests in other entities." Money may soon begin to be "minted" solely in electronic form, creating "digital cash" that could make credit cards (and the data gathering they make possible) obsolete. There is serious talk of building privacy protection into the infrastructure of the Internet, and of using such protection, paradoxically, to make the flow of information freer than ever before.
The extensive five page article definitely requires the ability to read and understand complex thoughts without the use of pictures. Those who are educationally impaired will not make it through the article, but will be only confused by it.
And the snippet I gave above is only the smallest fraction of the content of the article. It isn't even a primary point. It is just a part of the introduction.
I'm going to have to bookmark this mag, just because it helps excercise my brain cell.
Something I have heard of being done in the past is to convenioently forget to give them the signed document. It gets lost in the shuffle. "HR must have messed up", etc. And if there is any problem, you can say send me a copy of the docs.
HR can be relied on to mess up paper work from time to time, and they assume that it is always in there.
If they are really sharp they'll say "oops, this seems to be missing" and touch bases with you before there is a problem.
Mind you, IANAL, and you are responsible for your own karma.
I'm as much a fan of technology as the next geek, but just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. There should be some limits to what can be done.I imagine that if/. was around 150 years ago, there would be all sorts of articles like "New strip mining technic allows greater recover of metals for telegraph industry."
And since that was the beginning of the "gilded age" I can see enviromental types, other people with politcal concerns, etc being moderated down as trolls.
maybe not. Since these are the guys that inspire Bill Gates.
In any case, this is stretching the analogy a little bit. As I see it there are three elements:
1) Strip mining is enviromental destruction for corporate profit on a massive scale.
2) Making a body mold from fiberglass is personally dangerous, requires talent, and requires assistants who you trust, and who are not prone to very bad timing in practical jokes.
3) Environmental damage is limited in magnitude, and is probably less that the damage caused by average use of an automobile for a year.
The comparison is of things that are only slightly similar. Not similar enough for my taste.
I can see this as something that someone brain damaged by Starwars might do for conventions.
Just to keep this clear, the main point here not being about Bush or Clinton, but that the over all trend of things keeps turning on the little red warning lights in the back of the skull.
In response to your comments, there is a bit about how Prescott Bush made the family fortune. For example, there is this:
Interesting details on the financing of Hitler and dealings with the Nazi regime are in the book George Bush, The Unauthorized Biography (1992) by Webster Griffin Tarpey and Anton Chaikin. Published by the Executive Intelligence Review, P. O. Box 17390, Washington, DC 20041-0390. ISBN # 0-943235-05-7.
659 pages. Price $20.00.
Quoted without omissions from pages 33 and 34: "On March 19, 1934, Prescott Bush (father to George Snr) - then director of the German Steel Trust's Union Banking Corporation -initiated an alert to the absent Averell Harriman about a problem which had developed in the Flick partnership.
Note the connection to a major German company, not a sin in its' day, but in the larger context it presents a possible problem.
In that context, some folks can't get out of the thinking of like Father, like son.
That being said, there were a large number of companies that tried to play boths sides for profit. The most recent news story on this had to do with IBM, but there are plenty of others that would like to string up some of the Rockerfellers for treason, etc. (for example)
Mind you I am generally not a conspiracy theorist. but these guys keep coming up with so many little details that it is hard to track every thing down. And of course, if certain folks were that bad, then they would be busy all of the time, doing things.
I am starting to think that fascism wears the face of a bean counter, and is generally otherwise apolitical (ie, not democratic or republican)
I am sure that you can bring up the infamous dead friends of Clinton list, now rather incredibly long.
As I said, the main point here not being about Bush or Clinton, but the over all trend of things keeps turning on the little red warning lights in the back of the skull
I have this friend who is convinced that we are on the road to Nazi Amerika.
Personally I think we'll be all zoned out first with our little borg implants.
There are plenty of sites out there that connect the Bush family to the Nazis. Search for all words "nazi bush", and do NOT forget your ultra large grain of salt.
That all said, given all of the chipping away at personal freedoms on the basis of commercial advantadge and so on, it is bothersome, scary, and in my darkest moments, it certainly looks like something is going on.
Of course the psychs will have a pill for that disease, being "Hyper Attentive Political Activism" or some such thing. Remember that you being stressed out at work is "your" fault.
This sounds whacked, of course. But then, so do alot of the kids in HellMouth. What happens when this grows and is magnified into the political system, and it is adults who are reacting?
"More to the point, the poster I was replying to called CU "conservative", which is what I was trying to correct."
Actually, I was thinking conservative as in a conservative approach to testing, etc. not conservative politics.
While I have not really seen a copy of the mag in a while, my first impression of the magazine is not political, but testing. I certainly can see their political views as mild, given the example. They do not go over the top in politicizing their results, that I know of. Given the consumer advocacy element of their message, I suppose you could position them as liberal, but this might not be quite right. And some folks get polarized by anything they see that does not line up with their views.
But the bottom line is that they say the software is basically junk, producing 20% or more of the time undesirable results.
I recall some articles or comment here on slash some months back, where some guys' customers on his free hosting service got wierded out because he insisted that the sites be netscape compatible. They didn't want to be bothered. Since he was providing the free hosting, guess who lost?
But this gets to the issue of how many people are using which versions of which browsers. I am of the opinion that you should support the browsers that make up a large enough portion of the market that it is not worth it to. Would you want to throw away ten or twenty percent of your market?
The problem is that this type of argument sounds like pre-emptive marketing on the part of some. Similar to saying "well boys and girls, we have already won the game, so why don't you all go home"
Tallies from many stat counter sites vary widely from audience to audience. For example, sites frequented by readers of Slashdot would likely have many more users of netscape than the AOL chatroom. It is difficult to assess the actual market share.
I am not sure wher I would want to go with this, but I would probably want to encourage truly universal non biased standards, without forcing the market. This is a difficult question. My own practical experience would suggest that ie4 and ns 4.5 as a practical low end, but your milage may vary.
The point here is that this is a referance from a source that they both know and trust. They have a heavy reputation for being unbiased, and they work at it. Mind You, it is oriented to Adults with children, but they do approach the matter in a factual manner. Here is their take on some of the more "controversial" aspects of the censorware debate.
Prominent filters like Cyber Patrol and Cybersitter 2000 may make some people suspect that value judgments come into play because their makers refuse to divulge the blocked-site lists. In October 2000, the Library of Congress ruled that such lists could be made public by anyone who could decipher the data files in which they are stored.
To see whether the filters interfere with legitimate content, we pitted them against a list of 53 web sites that featured serious content on controversial subjects.
Results varied widely. While most blocked only a few sites, Cybersitter 2000 and Internet Guard Dog blocked nearly one in five. AOL's Young Teen control blocked 63 percent of the sites. According to AOL, its staff and subscriber parents choose the sites kids are allowed to see using this control, with an emphasis on educational and entertainment sites. Our test sites may have been blocked because they didn't meet AOL's criteria, not because they were controversial.
Our results cast doubt on the appropriateness of some companies' judgments. Perhaps the most extreme example of conflicting judgments: the ones applied to the site of Peacefire, an anti-filtering site that provides instructions on how to bypass filtering products. AOL, Cyber Patrol, and Cybersitter 2000, which keep their blocked-site lists secret, blocked Peacefire. Net Nanny, which makes its list public, didn't block it.
Bottom line, if you as a kid go in and protest, well "duh", you tend to get ignored. But if you go in with a nice conservative magazine not known for politics, but trusted for sensible judgement, and they support you, then it tends to cut through the BS a little. Of Course, there will still be certain defense mechanisms, but it opens a chink in the armor.
Not surprisingly, the censorware companies are incensed by the report.
Given this story earlier this morning here on slash about the existence of an Internet free Movie Archive, does anyone know of the existence of an Internet Free Music Archive?
With everything that is going on, if such at thing does not it exist, it is something that should. And it represents a wonderful opportunity.
Time to add more chlorine to the gene pool, me thinks.
You know what this means:
1) opportunities for people who like to post satire and political speech sites like "stupidreferee.com". (Go Team Go!) 2) Tremendous headaches for the public officers and reporters of Referee Magazine with all of the people who like to telephone, mail, or email folks like that. Although their contact information page is minimal, they do have an 800 number for subsriptions.
Just be polite to the Customer Service folks (we have all been through tech support hell), and call from a payphone.
Referee Magazine is owned by Referee Enterprises, of Racine, Wisconsin.
Their phone number is public, and very easy to find.
Given how Microsoft has recently spouted some verbiage about how Open Source "Threatens the American Way", (as seen in this Slash article), this kind of stuff has got to drive them crazy.
It sort of have proves their point, since it is something done by "foreigners". It also drives home the point that they do *not* own the world, not nearly as much as they would like to think they do. It also drives home the point that the rest of the world is likely to not take very kindly to them, especially if they start wrapping themselves up in this jingoistic political claptrap.
Let's face it, alot of the planet gets rather irritated by imperialistic mutterings like that. And so would embrace the efforts folks like this.
You do not need the overhead of a gui for a car computer. Only for the entertainment console, nav aids, etc, where it would be better to keep it embedded. and where size still counts.
sounds like these guys have an interesting future ahead of them
It almost seems that the casual copying is being treated as just as horrible as drug abuse.
Maybe the psychs can make up another disease to go with this (they have made up enough of them), so we can go after the recording companies like we do after drug cartels.
Musical Addiction Dependency, or some such thing.
These people need help with their music addictions!
Slashdot Mirror
Based on this, The Boulder Valley school district web page is here. The public officials have all sorts of contact information, etc. Some even have email addresses.
Now remember that we would want intelligent discussion about this, so make sure that if you choose to communicate with them, to cite the original web page, and to use nice words. Personal attacks should be avoided, since most of these folks likely do not have a government issued flame retardant Web suit yet.
yes, the School has a web site as well, but it seems better that you send any comments to the Public officials, since it is part of their job description to occasionally be on the hot seat.
If you go there via http, there is a simple web page with some info, etc. and some links to see who is looged into the board, etc. Telnetting to the url gets you the board itself.
And they do have tradewars, along with other things. (Now watch them get /.ed)
One of the many rather informative site on camputer history can be found here, complete with pictures, and something of a context of the start of the industry. I'm sure that a search using your favorite search engine will pop up more.
What the Korean company is looking at is multiple PCs connecting to the net vs one PC. I personally think that your complete personal use argument wins hands down. and unless you have storage approaching a terabyte or two, you are not saturating the bandwidth 24/7 - you probably have heard of this curse called sleep even if you avoid it as much as possible.
But what they are complaining about is IP sharing, multiple PCs via one DSL or whatever pipe.
Again, while I can sympathise, I can just imagine a house hold full of teens with their own boxen hooked up to a fat pipe, running music videos 24/7, etc like a fancy thousand dollar radio or whatever. That certainly approcahes the bandwidth of business use.
It is a difficult question. Is there as reasonable metering solution out there some place? I would love to have something like that for inside the house so that you could bill the teens for the 24/7 video junky feeds.
When I am personally using dsl or better bandwidth, I am certainly not taking full advantadge of the pipe. So If I use 10% of the pipe or 20% of the pipe, or whatever, the service provider can charge me one third of what he charges a business customer, and still make a profit. Even If I use 30 or 40%, unlikely unless I streaming video 24/7, and doing other things, The average usage for most people probably is around 5 or 10% (all numbers are speculative) and so based on this the service can be priced accordingly.
Now if I suddenly have dozens or hundreds of computers using this line, the bandwidth can max out. If I am the provider, I am possibly charged by the number of bits that go overthe wire. This is where it gets alarming, since I had made my profit calculations based an average usage of 10% and charged appropriately. No suddenly I have bunches of people who want to use the personal private lines for their business without paying the businnes rates. Instead of 10% the usage soars to 50% or higher. This is not a good thing.
The options are either to just charge everyone business rate (no private rates) or to crack down on abusers. The personal rates are offered with this balance between business use and personal use understood, at least internally.
Now some people do not understand this. I suppose when it was only one or two ubergeeks doing this, they could let it slide. But when you start promoting this for everyone, then it messes up the business model.
I supposed you could have some sort of metered service, but I do not know how easy it would be to set that up. Even so metering is an added cost, and might not be practical for someone cutting costs a little thin in the above scenario. (price competition and all)
For Example, there is this Story about the war of DirectTV against hackers. Direct TV for the past FOUR YEARS did incremental upgrades to their systems to try to stop hackers from stealing their signal. They finally inmplemented a gradually update program that convertly set up a complete system upgrade, sort of like a digital jigsaw puzzle, with the last piece shuffling and re-compiling the pieces, and locking the pirates out when they pulled the final trigger.
So in any case, just the idea of online upgrades before this little bit of coding is demonstrated prior art by DirectTV
I don't know about this. I certainly do not take good programing for granted.
I mean, there is the obvious free shot at Microsft. I just heard on the TV (just as I am typing this), that Microsoft is making a move into the Cellular phone market. Now I do not know if this if part of an investment scheme, or if you will see MS cell phones Real Soon Now. Honestly, how many would be skeptical of an MS phone? (someone go look this up and submit it please)
Now there are an awful lot of good programmers out there. But the fundamentals of design are so important, that if you do not have it, you can multiply your time and have lots of late projects and missed deadlines. Like that has never happened before.
How many games have even shipped on time? How long did you wait for (insert title here)?
One of the tricks is to *not* be personally insulted just because the other guy is a jerk, a cheat, or a fraud, etc. You put a red tag on his ear labelling him dangerous, radioactive, or whatever; and take appropriate action to cover yourself. But after that it is just a waste of good emotion.
an example of this is when you have given your two week notice at a place that sucks. Suddenly alot of BS does not matter anymore, and you have a bit more freedom, etc.
You generally do not get cynical about potholes, etc. - So for me, being cynical has an edge of paranoia in that it is easy to view everyone with suspicion, when you merely need to label them appropriately and not get hung up on it or freak on it.
Depends on how cynical you are.
I can see two people who are good friends actually sharing something that is a golden nugget in their lives.
But you'd have to have a really good friend.
I think this interview actually qualifies as a golden nugget.
Or do you run into the situations when one company has patented nuts, and another company has patented bolts?
Sometimes it would be better if they left things alone, and had not patented things in the first place.
but Joe sixpack will gripe about it. He can see a monthly fee for AOL, similar to his cable bill, etc. He can put up with this.
But a monthly fee to use his own computer that he just bought?He will choke on this.
Joe Sixpack has signed of on software licenses for a long time, blissfully ignorant of what it means. But to sit there with this same thing applying to his hardware will provide a rude awakening.
Expect lawsuits all over the place. Or laws passed in Congress at this point.
Consumers do not like getting raped in the wallet. It just ticks them off, and you wind up with short term gain of profits, and the long term gain of their hostility.
Exactly. Words can be hard. I am tired and it is late, and the article actually deserves being bright eyed and awake and alert with both brain cells functioning at full power.
So I will sleep first, and then give a proper answer when I have the time, possibly tomorrow night.
Not everyone lives in the California time zone, you know. Or stays up to 3 am, shocking as that may seem.
And the snippet I gave above is only the smallest fraction of the content of the article. It isn't even a primary point. It is just a part of the introduction.
I'm going to have to bookmark this mag, just because it helps excercise my brain cell.
;-)
HR can be relied on to mess up paper work from time to time, and they assume that it is always in there.
If they are really sharp they'll say "oops, this seems to be missing" and touch bases with you before there is a problem.
Mind you, IANAL, and you are responsible for your own karma.
[smile]
And since that was the beginning of the "gilded age" I can see enviromental types, other people with politcal concerns, etc being moderated down as trolls.
maybe not. Since these are the guys that inspire Bill Gates.
In any case, this is stretching the analogy a little bit. As I see it there are three elements:
1) Strip mining is enviromental destruction for corporate profit on a massive scale.
2) Making a body mold from fiberglass is personally dangerous, requires talent, and requires assistants who you trust, and who are not prone to very bad timing in practical jokes.
3) Environmental damage is limited in magnitude, and is probably less that the damage caused by average use of an automobile for a year.
The comparison is of things that are only slightly similar. Not similar enough for my taste. I can see this as something that someone brain damaged by Starwars might do for conventions.
hmmm
bet we'll see thousands over the next year
In response to your comments, there is a bit about how Prescott Bush made the family fortune. For example, there is this:
Note the connection to a major German company, not a sin in its' day, but in the larger context it presents a possible problem.In that context, some folks can't get out of the thinking of like Father, like son.
That being said, there were a large number of companies that tried to play boths sides for profit. The most recent news story on this had to do with IBM, but there are plenty of others that would like to string up some of the Rockerfellers for treason, etc. (for example)
Mind you I am generally not a conspiracy theorist. but these guys keep coming up with so many little details that it is hard to track every thing down. And of course, if certain folks were that bad, then they would be busy all of the time, doing things.
I am starting to think that fascism wears the face of a bean counter, and is generally otherwise apolitical (ie, not democratic or republican)
I am sure that you can bring up the infamous dead friends of Clinton list, now rather incredibly long.
As I said, the main point here not being about Bush or Clinton, but the over all trend of things keeps turning on the little red warning lights in the back of the skull
Personally I think we'll be all zoned out first with our little borg implants.
There are plenty of sites out there that connect the Bush family to the Nazis. Search for all words "nazi bush", and do NOT forget your ultra large grain of salt.
That all said, given all of the chipping away at personal freedoms on the basis of commercial advantadge and so on, it is bothersome, scary, and in my darkest moments, it certainly looks like something is going on.
Of course the psychs will have a pill for that disease, being "Hyper Attentive Political Activism" or some such thing. Remember that you being stressed out at work is "your" fault.
This sounds whacked, of course. But then, so do alot of the kids in HellMouth. What happens when this grows and is magnified into the political system, and it is adults who are reacting?
Sorry for ranting, just a bad day on the phones.
We are all bozos on this bus.
Actually, I was thinking conservative as in a conservative approach to testing, etc. not conservative politics.
While I have not really seen a copy of the mag in a while, my first impression of the magazine is not political, but testing. I certainly can see their political views as mild, given the example. They do not go over the top in politicizing their results, that I know of. Given the consumer advocacy element of their message, I suppose you could position them as liberal, but this might not be quite right. And some folks get polarized by anything they see that does not line up with their views.
But the bottom line is that they say the software is basically junk, producing 20% or more of the time undesirable results.
And they are positioned to make the point.
But this gets to the issue of how many people are using which versions of which browsers. I am of the opinion that you should support the browsers that make up a large enough portion of the market that it is not worth it to. Would you want to throw away ten or twenty percent of your market?
The problem is that this type of argument sounds like pre-emptive marketing on the part of some. Similar to saying "well boys and girls, we have already won the game, so why don't you all go home"
Tallies from many stat counter sites vary widely from audience to audience. For example, sites frequented by readers of Slashdot would likely have many more users of netscape than the AOL chatroom. It is difficult to assess the actual market share.
I am not sure wher I would want to go with this, but I would probably want to encourage truly universal non biased standards, without forcing the market. This is a difficult question. My own practical experience would suggest that ie4 and ns 4.5 as a practical low end, but your milage may vary.
The point here is that this is a referance from a source that they both know and trust. They have a heavy reputation for being unbiased, and they work at it. Mind You, it is oriented to Adults with children, but they do approach the matter in a factual manner. Here is their take on some of the more "controversial" aspects of the censorware debate.
Bottom line, if you as a kid go in and protest, well "duh", you tend to get ignored. But if you go in with a nice conservative magazine not known for politics, but trusted for sensible judgement, and they support you, then it tends to cut through the BS a little. Of Course, there will still be certain defense mechanisms, but it opens a chink in the armor.Not surprisingly, the censorware companies are incensed by the report.
With everything that is going on, if such at thing does not it exist, it is something that should. And it represents a wonderful opportunity.
You know what this means:
1) opportunities for people who like to post satire and political speech sites like "stupidreferee.com". (Go Team Go!)
2) Tremendous headaches for the public officers and reporters of Referee Magazine with all of the people who like to telephone, mail, or email folks like that. Although their contact information page is minimal, they do have an 800 number for subsriptions.
Just be polite to the Customer Service folks (we have all been through tech support hell), and call from a payphone.
Referee Magazine is owned by Referee Enterprises, of Racine, Wisconsin.
Their phone number is public, and very easy to find.
It sort of have proves their point, since it is something done by "foreigners". It also drives home the point that they do *not* own the world, not nearly as much as they would like to think they do. It also drives home the point that the rest of the world is likely to not take very kindly to them, especially if they start wrapping themselves up in this jingoistic political claptrap.
Let's face it, alot of the planet gets rather irritated by imperialistic mutterings like that. And so would embrace the efforts folks like this.
You do not need the overhead of a gui for a car computer. Only for the entertainment console, nav aids, etc, where it would be better to keep it embedded. and where size still counts.
sounds like these guys have an interesting future ahead of them
Maybe the psychs can make up another disease to go with this (they have made up enough of them), so we can go after the recording companies like we do after drug cartels.
Musical Addiction Dependency, or some such thing.
These people need help with their music addictions!
(not)
Well, true, although with a genuine bell curve in a very large normal population, the results are identical.
(I gotta fix this caffeine deficiency problem I have from time to time.)