> Oh, so according to your sig you would love to have Gore as your president.
Your reading comprehension skills are deficient.
Please write us two short paragraphs: one explaining what my.sig says, and one explaining what it doesn't say. Please try to keep your knees from jerking when you re-read it.
Hint: You'll be happy to know that I did not vote for Gore, neither in the primaries nor in the general election.
> When is a computer no longer the same computer, after swapping out parts?
FYI, philosophers have been asking essentially the same question for at least 25 centuries. The original version that we have runs something like "How many planks can you change out on Jason's ship Argos before it isn't the Argos any more?"
> Not only did he advocate building a stadium at the public expense, he made a shitload of money off it happening, when he sold his team with a shiny new stadium.
References to Goober Bush aside, I think it is an outrage, the way teams have been blackmailing cities with the "buy me a new stadium or I'll go somewhere else" scam.
> Yeah, I know a lot of stadiums are funded by public money, and I think that's a monstrosity. I think you underestimate fiscal conservatives. Maybe 30% are the sort you describe, but certainly not 99.9%.
Yeah, perhaps I underestimate, perhaps there are genuine regional differences, or perhaps I spend too much time listening to the loudmouthed activists on the internet rather than getting out in the real world and seeing what normal people believe.
It just chapped me to no end to hear the election returns at the height of the anti-big-government movement, and see win after win for candidates/issues that focus on spending cuts that affect the poor, and win after win for stadium spending in the same damn election.
I can tolerate a variety of political views; hypocrisy -- including invoking high ideals when it benefits \self and not otherwise -- I cannot tolerate at all.
And if he would get down off his soapbox long enough to do the recommended Web search, he would also discover that lots of routes are subsidized at the state and local levels, too.
> Fact: Good engineering is EXPENSIVE. Building, testing, and operating a manned spacecraft is a tad more complex than writing a perl script or configuring a linux kernel.
What makes it remarkable is how well the software works. This software never crashes. It never needs to be re-booted. This software is bug-free. It is perfect, as perfect as human beings have achieved. Consider these stats: the last three versions of the program - each 420,000 lines long-had just one error each. The last 11 versions of this software had a total of 17 errors. Commercial programs of equivalent complexity would have 5,000 errors.
Compare that error rate to privately owned ventures, where the competitive pressure to turn a buck is routinely cited as if it were a legitimate excuse to produce crappy software.
> Alas, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that modern American culture is probably incapable of supporting a serious and useful space program, and I can only hope that I am still alive, and useful, when other nations get their act together to pick up where we left off.
No problem; China will launch a manned lunar mission some day, and the public will suddenly decide that men on the moon are even more important than tax cuts, and we'll be back to the space race again.
> > "Graphic design costs money and enough people want "flashy" as part of their web experience."
> In my experience, it's the owners of the site rather than the visitors that want cheezy flashy stuff. Most visitors simply want easily navigated, easily read content.
That describes me to a "T". All the images and crap not only obfuscate the content, they also increase the page-load time by 1-2 orders of magnitude over my phone link. And their overuse generally means the content that was once on a single page is now spread out over several, I get to pay that 1-2 OOM download time penalty several times rather than just once.
I generally turn off automatic image downloads, flash, and javascript. Some sites are crippled without them, but that's no problem... there are about 28,000,000 other sites eagerly awaiting my visits, and some of them are still more interested in informing me than in dazzling me.
> If you want to fund a private, non-profit, pure science space agency, be my guest. But don't force ME to pay for it.
Just curious... Do you ever go to events in stadiums funded by issues of public bonds?
The reason I ask is because I have found that 99.99% of the people posturing as fiscal conservatives -- especially the most vocal ones -- are actually merely "me-firsters", and are more than happy to see the poor taxed to fund entertainment for the middle and upper-middle classes, however outraged they might be when it comes to having to fund programs that they themselves don't like.
Of course, you might be part of that 0.01% of genuine fiscal conservatives. If so, here's a tip of the hat to your spartan philosophical ideals, however much I might disagree with them.
If not, you should think about these things a bit.
> It'd be fun to see how motorola (add many other companys to this) would handle this with international cases?
Exactly half the spam I get is from.tw -- and about half of that is in a language I can't even read.
If I bust a USA spam source with spamcop I generally never hear from them again, but when I bust.tw sources it doesn't slow it down in the least. I assume the upper-level ISPs over there think spam is cool.
At any rate, I'm sure there will be laws passed against it in some countries, but the spammers will just migrate to spam havens and keep on spamming away. (Maybe we'll get a SeaLand-like spam haven with its own domain? Is.sh, "SpamHaven", already taken?)
All that to the side, I really don't understand spammers. Most of them act like they are more interested in annoying you than they are in selling their products. Maybe it's just a special style of trolling?
> We pay our ISP to have access to the free stuff. If stuff is no longer free, we'll get it in a more convienent form from somewhere else.
Also, the myriad "old timers" who've been using the Web for more than, well, just a few years, still remember the Good Old Days (tm) when almost everything on the Web was free.
The neighborhood went to seed when the monster BBS sites that were already charging for content (AOL, MSN) moved over to the internet because they had to to stay in business. But they brought their business model with them, and lots of Venture Capital Sites (tm) adopted the same model, so we got the e-IPO frenzy and an expectation of big site revenues to go along with it. Ads aren't deemed to be paying off, so now everyone wants to charge for content, to keep that VC flowing.
Being charged to visit sites, or having ad-funded sites cluttered with so many ads that you can't find the information you went there to find, are viewed as an increase in price and/or decrease in quality, pure and simple.
It's kind of like visiting the junk food machine and seeing that the price went up and/or the candy bars got smaller. Who was ever happy to see that?
Frankly, I don't think the pay-for-content model is going to work any better thant the read-our-ads model did. Partly because of what I said above about prior expectations, and partly because of what you point out about free alternative sources.
One of three things is going to happen:
"pay per view" will be rejected per above, the pay sites will fail, and the Web will go back to being view-for-free, or...
someone will get an arm-lock on the internet that will let them extract the payment whether you want to pay or not, or...
enough sheep will pay for content from "brand name" sites (rather than visiting a search engine) that the system will keep limping on in some chaotic facsimile of "working", but nobody on any side will really be happy with it.
> T, MT, and TNE were all Game Designers Workshop products. GDW went down some years ago, when the collecting card games industry took off, roughly. Oweing a bunch of us for contributions, too, though not nearly as badly as IG screwed people.
I always thought GDW was the prince of wargaming companies, but unfortunately they started well, improved a bit, and then went through a long demise of dumbing down their games and/or not providing ongoing support for big series that they had launched. They also suffered quality-wise when they expanded, because some of the new developers they brought on board were not made of the same stuff the originals were.
However, what finally killed them is when they hired Gary Gygax to do an RPG game for them and foolishly named it "Dark Dimensions" or something to that effect, and gave his ex-wife-of-very-nasty-divorce, then owner of the latter-day D&D system, who had vowed that GG would never work in the gaming industry again, a pretty legitimate excuse for suing GDW on trademark infringement issues.
GDW was already in decline, but the suit killed them off. However, Frank Chadwick was able to announce a simple closing of the doors rather than going into bankruptcy.
> If you disable the advertising on a given site, that site stops earning money from that advertising, and either turns into a pay site, or closes it's doors.
Let's make a fine distinction between "content sites" and "commercial sites".
Sure, lots of content sites need ads to survive, just like newspapers and magazines. But they don't need to be obnoxious about it. If the ratio of obnoxiosity:value-of-content grows too high, they'll lose visitors. (We all vary in sensitivity to Web gimmicks -- or in the bandwidth to download them -- so they've got plenty of trade-off room to maneuver in.)
As for commercial sites... Why should they bother you with ads at all? You're there of your own free will, and if you want more info you can "ask a salesman" by clicking a link to more details.
Businesses, for the most part, have been incredibly st00pid about the Web. They should be delighted at the opportunity to expand their storefront for a billion people to see. Instead, they tend to see it as a contest for "who can generate the most annoyingly in-your-face ads?", or as a gold mine for harvesting customer info to sell to someone else.
> Option 1: Hack code to place a button on your menu bar (Mozilla, sorry about you IE users) that will toggle ALL Javashit on/off.
Galeon has per-site authorization for cookies and images. With the proper preferences set, the first time a site wants to set a cookie or download an image you get a prompt asking whether to allow it, and there's a checkbox on the prompt so you can mark "remember this decision". There is also an editor that lets you look at your saved decisions, and change them if you need to.
Eventually there will be a similar feature for site-specific control of Javascript, Flash, and any other conceptually cool technology that webmasters adopt for in-your-face advertising. (I know this claim is true, because if they don't do it within a year or so I'll go in and do it myself. Such is the true value of open-source applications.)
At any rate, this will give the functionality of the button you suggest, but it will simplify things by remembering your choices for you.
> I do this manually through the 2-3 menu-subtrees in Nutscrape 4, and I've found that I never miss Javashit, although it has the side effect of greatly reducing my tolerance for idiot webmasters that use Javashit buttons where a simple HREF would do. Thankfully, I don't go to many such sites on a regular basis.
Yeah, I browse without Javascript too. About once a week I have to turn it on for a legitimate use, but for the most part I don't need it, and I certainly don't miss it. (And BTW, sites that require Javascript almost never give an informative error message when you visit with JS disabled, because they assume everyone mindlessly leaves it on all the time.)
In addition to the "idiot webmasters" you mention, there is a growing number of "fascist webmasters" that won't let you access their content if you don't have Javascript and cookies enabled. Not like that's a big problem for me: there are almost 30,000,000 other Web sites I can visit instead. Commercial Web sites need to wise up on this. Think what it would do to a brick&mortar business if they frisked you, thumbprinted you, and made you watch a couple of ads on their TV every time you went in to do a bit of windowshopping.
I use a simple PS1="{\u \W} " under bash, giving -
{username currentworkingdirectory}
I work almost exclusively under X, but I normally have 3-5 xterms open at a time. The \u reminds me who I am (e.g., "root" if I've su'd to become root), and the \W reminds me where I am in the directory tree. (It can be ambiguous since it only gives the local directory rather than the entire hierarchy, but I don't like the long prompts that would result otherwise.)
Also, since I very frequently use OpenSSH to connect to a few other systems, I change out the {} for (), [], etc on the various systems, so I can tell at-a-glance that the prompt is not coming from my home system. (It's surprising how well that little change catches the eye.) I rarely use ssh to connect to more than a couple of machines at a time, so I don't really need the hostname as part of my prompt.
Most of DEC's black-and-white VT terminals supported some kind of character-graphics display, where each "letter" was drawn as a little line or box or circle (etc) when you escaped into graphics mode. So people would use escape their prompt definitions and use strings that would result in images for their prompts.
> Change someone elses prompt to "". Drives them crazy
Wandering slightly off topic...
We used to set up a desktop with lots of application icons sprinkled all over it, take a full-screen screenshot of it, set people's un-attended computers to use that screenshot for wallpaper, and then sit back to watch them click on the wallpaper trying to make the applications pop up.
Slashdot Mirror
> Top 6 reasons to have computers in schools:
I suspect the real reason we have them is that they make more socially acceptable babysitters than televisions do.
It is not at all obvious (to me) that a computer teaches (say) how to multiply integers any better or more cost effectively than (say) flashcards do.
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> Oh, so according to your sig you would love to have Gore as your president.
.sig says, and one explaining what it doesn't say. Please try to keep your knees from jerking when you re-read it.
Your reading comprehension skills are deficient.
Please write us two short paragraphs: one explaining what my
Hint: You'll be happy to know that I did not vote for Gore, neither in the primaries nor in the general election.
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> When is a computer no longer the same computer, after swapping out parts?
FYI, philosophers have been asking essentially the same question for at least 25 centuries. The original version that we have runs something like "How many planks can you change out on Jason's ship Argos before it isn't the Argos any more?"
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> all I can say is ... "how many different levels of encryption and checking does MS need to do?"
At least one more level of encryption than they actually did.
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> I would have thought that all the Linux Zealots would be trying to discourage .NET, it being an MS effort.
Actually, it's a Micorsoft clone of a longstanding Sun effort.
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> Lawyers don't sue people. People sue people.
Yeah, but that's an oversubtle distinction for the scum who advertize their "sue their asses!" services on late night television.
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> Not only did he advocate building a stadium at the public expense, he made a shitload of money off it happening, when he sold his team with a shiny new stadium.
References to Goober Bush aside, I think it is an outrage, the way teams have been blackmailing cities with the "buy me a new stadium or I'll go somewhere else" scam.
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> Yeah, I know a lot of stadiums are funded by public money, and I think that's a monstrosity. I think you underestimate fiscal conservatives. Maybe 30% are the sort you describe, but certainly not 99.9%.
Yeah, perhaps I underestimate, perhaps there are genuine regional differences, or perhaps I spend too much time listening to the loudmouthed activists on the internet rather than getting out in the real world and seeing what normal people believe.
It just chapped me to no end to hear the election returns at the height of the anti-big-government movement, and see win after win for candidates/issues that focus on spending cuts that affect the poor, and win after win for stadium spending in the same damn election.
I can tolerate a variety of political views; hypocrisy -- including invoking high ideals when it benefits \self and not otherwise -- I cannot tolerate at all.
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> Airlines in the US do receive subsidies.
And if he would get down off his soapbox long enough to do the recommended Web search, he would also discover that lots of routes are subsidized at the state and local levels, too.
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The groaners might do well to read "They Write the Right Stuff", which includes this notable claim -Compare that error rate to privately owned ventures, where the competitive pressure to turn a buck is routinely cited as if it were a legitimate excuse to produce crappy software.
> Alas, I've pretty much resigned myself to the fact that modern American culture is probably incapable of supporting a serious and useful space program, and I can only hope that I am still alive, and useful, when other nations get their act together to pick up where we left off.
No problem; China will launch a manned lunar mission some day, and the public will suddenly decide that men on the moon are even more important than tax cuts, and we'll be back to the space race again.
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> > "Graphic design costs money and enough people want "flashy" as part of their web experience."
> In my experience, it's the owners of the site rather than the visitors that want cheezy flashy stuff. Most visitors simply want easily navigated, easily read content.
That describes me to a "T". All the images and crap not only obfuscate the content, they also increase the page-load time by 1-2 orders of magnitude over my phone link. And their overuse generally means the content that was once on a single page is now spread out over several, I get to pay that 1-2 OOM download time penalty several times rather than just once.
I generally turn off automatic image downloads, flash, and javascript. Some sites are crippled without them, but that's no problem... there are about 28,000,000 other sites eagerly awaiting my visits, and some of them are still more interested in informing me than in dazzling me.
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> If you want to fund a private, non-profit, pure science space agency, be my guest. But don't force ME to pay for it.
Just curious... Do you ever go to events in stadiums funded by issues of public bonds?
The reason I ask is because I have found that 99.99% of the people posturing as fiscal conservatives -- especially the most vocal ones -- are actually merely "me-firsters", and are more than happy to see the poor taxed to fund entertainment for the middle and upper-middle classes, however outraged they might be when it comes to having to fund programs that they themselves don't like.
Of course, you might be part of that 0.01% of genuine fiscal conservatives. If so, here's a tip of the hat to your spartan philosophical ideals, however much I might disagree with them.
If not, you should think about these things a bit.
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> We don't have cheap airline flight because of the government, my friend.
You might find some interesting reading if you fed "subsidize airline" into your favorite search engine.
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> It'd be fun to see how motorola (add many other companys to this) would handle this with international cases?
.tw -- and about half of that is in a language I can't even read.
.tw sources it doesn't slow it down in the least. I assume the upper-level ISPs over there think spam is cool.
.sh, "SpamHaven", already taken?)
Exactly half the spam I get is from
If I bust a USA spam source with spamcop I generally never hear from them again, but when I bust
At any rate, I'm sure there will be laws passed against it in some countries, but the spammers will just migrate to spam havens and keep on spamming away. (Maybe we'll get a SeaLand-like spam haven with its own domain? Is
All that to the side, I really don't understand spammers. Most of them act like they are more interested in annoying you than they are in selling their products. Maybe it's just a special style of trolling?
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Also, the myriad "old timers" who've been using the Web for more than, well, just a few years, still remember the Good Old Days (tm) when almost everything on the Web was free.
The neighborhood went to seed when the monster BBS sites that were already charging for content (AOL, MSN) moved over to the internet because they had to to stay in business. But they brought their business model with them, and lots of Venture Capital Sites (tm) adopted the same model, so we got the e-IPO frenzy and an expectation of big site revenues to go along with it. Ads aren't deemed to be paying off, so now everyone wants to charge for content, to keep that VC flowing.
Being charged to visit sites, or having ad-funded sites cluttered with so many ads that you can't find the information you went there to find, are viewed as an increase in price and/or decrease in quality, pure and simple.
It's kind of like visiting the junk food machine and seeing that the price went up and/or the candy bars got smaller. Who was ever happy to see that?
Frankly, I don't think the pay-for-content model is going to work any better thant the read-our-ads model did. Partly because of what I said above about prior expectations, and partly because of what you point out about free alternative sources.
One of three things is going to happen:
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> Female programmers account for only 1.7% of all programmers, yet they account for over 8.2% of all open source programmers.
Oh, great. Now Microsoft will accuse us as being cross-dressing communists rather than commies of the ordinary stripe.
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> T, MT, and TNE were all Game Designers Workshop products. GDW went down some years ago, when the collecting card games industry took off, roughly. Oweing a bunch of us for contributions, too, though not nearly as badly as IG screwed people.
I always thought GDW was the prince of wargaming companies, but unfortunately they started well, improved a bit, and then went through a long demise of dumbing down their games and/or not providing ongoing support for big series that they had launched. They also suffered quality-wise when they expanded, because some of the new developers they brought on board were not made of the same stuff the originals were.
However, what finally killed them is when they hired Gary Gygax to do an RPG game for them and foolishly named it "Dark Dimensions" or something to that effect, and gave his ex-wife-of-very-nasty-divorce, then owner of the latter-day D&D system, who had vowed that GG would never work in the gaming industry again, a pretty legitimate excuse for suing GDW on trademark infringement issues.
GDW was already in decline, but the suit killed them off. However, Frank Chadwick was able to announce a simple closing of the doors rather than going into bankruptcy.
--
> If you disable the advertising on a given site, that site stops earning money from that advertising, and either turns into a pay site, or closes it's doors.
Let's make a fine distinction between "content sites" and "commercial sites".
Sure, lots of content sites need ads to survive, just like newspapers and magazines. But they don't need to be obnoxious about it. If the ratio of obnoxiosity:value-of-content grows too high, they'll lose visitors. (We all vary in sensitivity to Web gimmicks -- or in the bandwidth to download them -- so they've got plenty of trade-off room to maneuver in.)
As for commercial sites... Why should they bother you with ads at all? You're there of your own free will, and if you want more info you can "ask a salesman" by clicking a link to more details.
Businesses, for the most part, have been incredibly st00pid about the Web. They should be delighted at the opportunity to expand their storefront for a billion people to see. Instead, they tend to see it as a contest for "who can generate the most annoyingly in-your-face ads?", or as a gold mine for harvesting customer info to sell to someone else.
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> Option 1: Hack code to place a button on your menu bar (Mozilla, sorry about you IE users) that will toggle ALL Javashit on/off.
Galeon has per-site authorization for cookies and images. With the proper preferences set, the first time a site wants to set a cookie or download an image you get a prompt asking whether to allow it, and there's a checkbox on the prompt so you can mark "remember this decision". There is also an editor that lets you look at your saved decisions, and change them if you need to.
Eventually there will be a similar feature for site-specific control of Javascript, Flash, and any other conceptually cool technology that webmasters adopt for in-your-face advertising. (I know this claim is true, because if they don't do it within a year or so I'll go in and do it myself. Such is the true value of open-source applications.)
At any rate, this will give the functionality of the button you suggest, but it will simplify things by remembering your choices for you.
> I do this manually through the 2-3 menu-subtrees in Nutscrape 4, and I've found that I never miss Javashit, although it has the side effect of greatly reducing my tolerance for idiot webmasters that use Javashit buttons where a simple HREF would do. Thankfully, I don't go to many such sites on a regular basis.
Yeah, I browse without Javascript too. About once a week I have to turn it on for a legitimate use, but for the most part I don't need it, and I certainly don't miss it. (And BTW, sites that require Javascript almost never give an informative error message when you visit with JS disabled, because they assume everyone mindlessly leaves it on all the time.)
In addition to the "idiot webmasters" you mention, there is a growing number of "fascist webmasters" that won't let you access their content if you don't have Javascript and cookies enabled. Not like that's a big problem for me: there are almost 30,000,000 other Web sites I can visit instead. Commercial Web sites need to wise up on this. Think what it would do to a brick&mortar business if they frisked you, thumbprinted you, and made you watch a couple of ads on their TV every time you went in to do a bit of windowshopping.
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Also, since I very frequently use OpenSSH to connect to a few other systems, I change out the {} for (), [], etc on the various systems, so I can tell at-a-glance that the prompt is not coming from my home system. (It's surprising how well that little change catches the eye.) I rarely use ssh to connect to more than a couple of machines at a time, so I don't really need the hostname as part of my prompt.
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> Use color !
Most of DEC's black-and-white VT terminals supported some kind of character-graphics display, where each "letter" was drawn as a little line or box or circle (etc) when you escaped into graphics mode. So people would use escape their prompt definitions and use strings that would result in images for their prompts.
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> Change someone elses prompt to "". Drives them crazy
Wandering slightly off topic...
We used to set up a desktop with lots of application icons sprinkled all over it, take a full-screen screenshot of it, set people's un-attended computers to use that screenshot for wallpaper, and then sit back to watch them click on the wallpaper trying to make the applications pop up.
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> And when things get really ugly, it takes over, walks straight home, and I'm in bed before I even know it.
Yeah, built-in blood alcohol level sensor.
And when Mark II comes out, the exo will just leave the frail human at home and go out drinking by itself.
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> > ...unless he can prove that he wrote the optimal code possible for each language
> Uh, how is this possible?
Thank you for reinforcing my point.
These benchmarks mean absolutely nothing.
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For real-world use, would you choose a language that compiled out to run 5% faster if it was also 20% harder to maintain?
IT has a misplaced fixation on speed.
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