These are valid queries for ANY company, of ANY size, public or private.
I take your point - what I meant was more along the lines of whether a company would even consider putting it's bottom line ahead of customer-well being. (I don't just mean in a "get what they pay for" sense, but in the "this could actively hurt them, but we can afford it" sense.)
For instance, in my own (admittedly small) company, my partners would look at me like I was from Mars if I suggested something so unethical. When you're private you can enforce your own ethical standard. When you're public, there are laws that can actively encourage you to behave unethically.
Of course, as you point out, there's a large component of short term thinking involved, but there's also a transparency issue. If people don't know about the flaw, they can't make a judgement based on it, and you can get away with some really shady actions without it impacting your bottom line, even long term. Unfortunately, it's just not possible for people to be up on every aspect of every company they interact with.
Overall, I'd just like to see people taking more responsibilty for their actions, and thinking about more than the next quarter or election term. (Yeah, had to make the political connection. Sorry...;) )
As for me, I'm convinced that if anyone will ever knock off Microsoft, it will be an OS that gets game developers behind them.
It's hard to say, as we're in a different place with computers and operating systems than we were, say, ten years ago, but I find that unlikely.
People use what they want to at home, and what they have to at work or school. What they want is likely what they're used to. In short, people aren't usually the decision makers when it comes to what OS they use on their own time.
Operating systems in the past have come to prominence because of work (CP/M, Windows) or education (Apple). I can't think of an example where gaming was the driving force for adoption, and a couple (Atari ST, Amiga*) where it lost out.
* I know, multi-media was arguably more what those were about, especially Amiga, but they were perceived as recreational machines.
I don't think google == bad, but I think you're right aobut the general reasons for it. For me, once they had an IPO, I did start to think more cricitally about them. This just because when you're a private company, you can pretty much do you want, as long as you stay solvent. You have the freedom to be a good guy. Once you have stockholders to answer to, a whole list of rules start governing what you do. And for public companies, one of those rules is "if you have to be evil to make more money, then you have be evil." For a public company, questions like "Is it cheaper to make non-exploding cars, or deal with lawsuits?" or "is it cheaper to enforce pollution controls or deal with fines?" are valid queries. Kind of spine chilling, and the source of much of my distrust of the corporate world.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't Governors have basically the same power?
Go digging through any nation's laws, and you're going to find some that are weird, questionable or outright wrong. The United States has some that send chills down my spine, but I'm not going to imply that because of that I think your country is unfit to live in, populated by gun-toting, loose-cannon cowboys.
I think both our nations (I'm Canadian, if you hadn't already guessed) would benefit greatly from less of the "You should stop, kneel down, and kiss the ground you're about to walk on" kind of rhetoric in your other post in this thread, and more frank discussions about what we can learn from each other.
(Ordinarily I don't sound like such a peace-loving hippy, but the strained relations across the 49th really starts to annoy me somedays. Damnit, now I need a beer.)
(sorry, been away from slashdot for a few days, or I would have replied sooner).
You got me on that one - I never did this myself. A friend way back in the day claimed to have jacked his TRS-80 up to 1MB. Now, this was many years ago, when people actually used the TRS-80 for other than geek nostalgia value, so I may be misremembering (or have been outright duped. I was young. It could happen....) He bragged to me about it 'cause I was stuck with the standard 32KB.
A bit of googling didn't turn up anything that would substantiate the viability of the claim. And now I have an unresolved mystery from my youth to contend with. Thanks a lot;)
Damned cranky ACs. I was glad to hear about this;)
Have you worked with MTASC much? I'm in the middle of developing a web app right now using more standard dHTML + XMLHTTPRequest (can't quite bear to use the Ajax moniker yet, but I'll give in soon enough. It's easier to type). We very nearly went with some kind Flash thing instead. It wasn't the only reason, but lack of a non-sucky way of editing code in Flash was a consideration. The Macromedia IDE makes me want to gouge my eyes out. (And, also, I'd have to give up my beloved linux environment, which wasn't gonna happen.)
If you mean nerdy in the sense of "no social skills", then, yes, I'd have to agree. If you mean nerdy as in "soldering 1MB of RAM into your TRS-80", then, no, it's not. This is just fratboy humour with a thin gaming-geek patina.
....ooh, yeah. That's never a good thing. Believe it or not, I do get a fair bit of my tech news from slashdot. That I also get some other bits of space or gaming news is a nice distraction. I like the variety. If I actually worked in an office with co-workers, and this article was up on my browser, I think I'd be losing my "Hey, this site helps keep me up to date!" justification mighty quick.
I'm replying to an AC, but only because what you say is very funny - I'm a loooong way from puritan, and I work from home, so work safe (as I mentioned) is a total non-issue for me. It's certainly not the phrase "female orgasm" that bugs me. It's the utter idiocy of the story. This is the kind of thing you expect to hear in a locker room, not a site with fun geek stuff. Even for the games section, this is a new low in content quality.
That sums it up pretty well. I could care less about not-safe-for-work stories, and my crass-o-meter goes to eleven most days, but this is juvenile.
Given the stories that have been getting posted lately, I'm wondering if Zonk isn't someone's 14 year old kid brother, or maybe some/. editor meta-troll joke being played on us.
I've never complained about stories or editors here before. There are all those handy checkboxes that mean I don't need to see what I don't want to be bothered with. But I think the senior editors need to figure out if they want Slashdot to be an interesting source of news and ephemera, or if they'd rather just watch it degrade to another fanboy site. With stories like this, that's where it's going.
I'm sorry, that makes no sense. DHTML has nothing to do with browser pissing contests (those just made it hell to implement.) DHTML is the aggregation of (X)HTML/Javascript/CSS to make a page less static.
The lack of standards has made pretty much anything implementing DHTML a steaming pile, but DHTML itself is just a technique. And if you're willing to ignore four year old browsers, the state of affairs has gotten to the point that you can write decent code properly separated from your presentation.
...or is it just that there are more inexperienced people writing PHP code out there...
Bingo...PHP has a very low barrier to entry. Add to that that it's mainly used in a networked environment, and you're going to have problems. You could code up this exact same problem in perl - the only difference is that by the time you knew enough to get input from the network into your script and passed to eval, you'd probably have had it beaten into you that it's a crime punishable with flogging.
There may be cultural differences at work here as well. XML-RPC is in PEAR and often recommended as a good way of implementing this kind of functionality. This isn't a bug-free guarantee, but there should be some minimal level of quality implied by that. Passing untrusted input directly to eval is gross negligence, and it sort of amazes me that no one noticed this before. I've read a lot of PHP and a lot of perl. It's easy to find crap, bug-riddled code in both. The main difference seems to be that crappy perl code isn't tolerated near so quickly. Crappy PHP code becomes a flagship application.
I probably wasn't entirely clear in my frustration-powered, near-trollish ranting;) It's not that I don't think the web is a good way to learn stuff (considering that I just finished helping build an online distance learning course, that would be awful silly of me.) It's just that while I think php.net is a good resource for certain kinds of information, such as "why doesn't this function work?" or "what are the other five functions that do almost the exact same thing, but not quite?", I don't think it's a good format for learning how to program effectively with PHP.
(I might be entirely misunderstanding your point here, too. If I am, my apologies.)
What I was trying to get at is that php.net doesn't really have context. You can learn the syntax of the language there. This is usually how I get my feet wet with a language - pull up a reference and start reading. I've done it enough times that I can get a feel pretty quickly this way.
But it's not a good way to learn how to be effective with the language. For someone new to programming (much of the new-to-PHP audience), it teaches you nothing about best practices. For the experienced programmer, it doesn't provide traction for questions like "what features are useful in implementing an MVC architecture" or "How can I kludge together a singleton?" (Kludge referring to doing that in PHP4. I haven't spent any time with 5 yet, but I suspect you can do it The Right Way now.)
Anyway, thanks for your reply. I do agree that people learn best in different ways. I just wish there were better information available on how to program well with PHP, not just how to program with PHP. Maybe as it becomes taken more seriously, these will start to crop up.
Thank you....just checking out hudzilla now, and it looks like a good resource. I can deal with not having flippy pages if I've got good data;)
I've spent a fair bit of time at PHPpatterns (I think that's phppatterns.com, if anyone else is reading.) Too bad it doesn't seem to be seeing updates lately. I owe that man a beer.
I'm big on books for learning and reference. I like to read, and I like to read on paper. I almost always prefer to grab something from my bookshelf and flip through the index than dig through a website. And I really want to emphasize that the PHP site is not, not, not a good way to learn the language. It's great when you want to find out why something doesn't work as documented (it's probably in the reader comments), but it is entirely useless as a way to learn how to effectively use the language.
And that's ok - that's not it's intent. All of this "you don't need a book, just go to php.net!" is really doing a disservice to those new to the language, or those that would like to actually learn good programming technique. Regarding the latter, the reader comments are generally abysmal and show the ignorance common in a (relatively) young community. For those just starting out, random access to > 3000 functions is not useful. At all.
With that little rant out of the way, I'd love a recommendation for a PHP book similar to Thinking in Java, or Advanced Perl Programming. I've looked, but all I've found are Dick and Jane Learn PHP, or dead tree dumps of the documentation.
Bingo. No language can make up for bad coding. PHP happens to be a) ubiquitous, b) easy to get started with, leading to c) lots of crap code. PHP can be criticized for a lot of things, but the ability of those that use it isn't one of them. (Although maybe we can lay a bit of blame at the feet of publishers that won't put out a book that talks about applying good programming practices to PHP? We have more "Dick and Jane Learn PHP" books than we know what to do with already.)
Beats me, but I would be satisfied with just one good PHP book that dealt with some more advanced topics. Something like "Design Patterns in PHP", or "How to Architect a PHP Web Application That Isn't 5 Thousand Unmaintainable Spaghetti Files."
I've been doing web app development almost exclusively with PHP for the last four years. I pretty much hate the language, but there are a lot of solid, pragmatic reasons to use it. The funny thing is, almost all of the "PHP suxor!" posts that I see here would be easily refuted by one solid book on how to apply good programming practices to the language. (And namespaces. The one thing I really, really wanted out of PHP5, and they cut it. Bastards.)
I would also just like to say that the online PHP documentation is not the reason for the dearth of good PHP books. The online documentation is handy for finding out that (insert one function of 3000) doesn't actually implement the functionality it claims to, and here's a really slow algorithm for faking it.
I'd happily put down a half dozen PHP fanboys for an equivalent to Thinking in Java. If I've missed it, and someone can recommend it, send me your postal address, and I'll make sure you get their heads. Just my way of saying thanks.
The biggest problem is that the IT industry was flooded with fucking asshats interested in it only for the money. I recall quite clearly a former friend who was a landscaper. I didn't see him for a couple of years and then ran into him downtown where he told me he was learning C++ and Java, at which point I suddenly felt the urge to vommit.
Let's see...he's not afraid of hard work, he's taking the initiative to learn on his own, and he has the smarts and the drive to do it? I'm assuming he's held the job for a while, so it sounds like he can be relied on.
Tell him to send me his resume. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
I'm not anti-advertising by any means, and I'd like to jump in here before the hordes rip you a new one.
I'm assuming that you have an opt-in only list, with addresses collected from people that knew exactly what they were opting in to? Otherwise it's unsolicited, and it's spam. Full stop. I don't htink there's anything wrong with opt-in lists, but if I get email I'm not expecting from someone selling something, I'm going to be right pissed. There's no way you can tell me that ditching email I receive without reading it is stealing; certainly no more than tossing the grocery store flyers I get in the recycling.
As for online advertising, there's a fine line. I don't generally block ads, because I do like to support the sites that I read. Content and bandwidth don't come free, and I'm more than happy to see an ad or two to support it. Slashdot and Boing Boing are two good examples of doing this right.
However, if you intentionally abuse my goodwill and make your site hard to use by flashy, blink, whizzy, poppy things, yes, I'm going to block them. I don't think there's anything wrong with enhancing the usability of what is a poorly designed site.
The real problem right now is greedy, clueless advertisers that are driving people to use adblockers. They're busily destroying any future market for themselves. It's the kind of short sighted business tactics we're getting all too used to seeing. "Leave a little salt for the bread" and all that.
I can't tell from your post, but I have to say it sounds an awful lot like you should be lumped in with these people. Maybe I'm wrong, but you really should be donning that asbestos underwear about now.
(Spyware and malware are a whole other evil kettle, I agree. You are 100% wrong, though, that advertising has always been an accepted part of the internet. Maybe if you came on after the Endless September, but before that it was seriously frowned on.)
Personally, I don't like the overuse of Flash, but then again, most people out there don't care if their sites look good in eLinks. (yes, it actually bothers me when a site looks funny in eLinks... go figure)
Not so strange...I always test in links. It gives me an idea how things will look to search engines, and is also a decent first pass at testing text-to-speech browsers. If it's an ungodly mess in links, it's going to be unintelligible when the computer reads it out loud. Glad I'm not the only one;)
Preach it, brother! If they fixed they're goddamned PNG handling, my life would be simpler, and our sites would look better. It's inexcusable that the only way to get PNGs to almost work right in IE is with a bleeding javascript hack.
The one thing I want even more, though, is a proper box model. CSS hacks (which only work because of other bugs in IE) remind me of the bad old days of v4 browsers and table layouts. Of course, it will still be two or three years before we can safely ignore IE6, but at least I'd have something to look forward to. (And if they fix the box model without fixing things like * html { } I'll be ranting for days...)
Neither of these things are really a big deal. I have no idea why they're so resistant to fixing them, except that it might confuse their FrontPage users.
Fix those two things, and suddenly almost all of the crappy hacks we currently have to use go away. Sure, I'll find something else to bitch about, like missing selectors or something, but I'll deal. PNGs and a box model. Tiny requests, and they seem to be the things that piss off the web development community the most. I wish they'd get over it and just commit to the damned things.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for that painful reminder. I have no handy strong drink.
I take your point - what I meant was more along the lines of whether a company would even consider putting it's bottom line ahead of customer-well being. (I don't just mean in a "get what they pay for" sense, but in the "this could actively hurt them, but we can afford it" sense.)
For instance, in my own (admittedly small) company, my partners would look at me like I was from Mars if I suggested something so unethical. When you're private you can enforce your own ethical standard. When you're public, there are laws that can actively encourage you to behave unethically.Of course, as you point out, there's a large component of short term thinking involved, but there's also a transparency issue. If people don't know about the flaw, they can't make a judgement based on it, and you can get away with some really shady actions without it impacting your bottom line, even long term. Unfortunately, it's just not possible for people to be up on every aspect of every company they interact with.
Overall, I'd just like to see people taking more responsibilty for their actions, and thinking about more than the next quarter or election term. (Yeah, had to make the political connection. Sorry...;) )
It's hard to say, as we're in a different place with computers and operating systems than we were, say, ten years ago, but I find that unlikely.
People use what they want to at home, and what they have to at work or school. What they want is likely what they're used to. In short, people aren't usually the decision makers when it comes to what OS they use on their own time.
Operating systems in the past have come to prominence because of work (CP/M, Windows) or education (Apple). I can't think of an example where gaming was the driving force for adoption, and a couple (Atari ST, Amiga*) where it lost out.
* I know, multi-media was arguably more what those were about, especially Amiga, but they were perceived as recreational machines.
I don't think google == bad, but I think you're right aobut the general reasons for it. For me, once they had an IPO, I did start to think more cricitally about them. This just because when you're a private company, you can pretty much do you want, as long as you stay solvent. You have the freedom to be a good guy. Once you have stockholders to answer to, a whole list of rules start governing what you do. And for public companies, one of those rules is "if you have to be evil to make more money, then you have be evil." For a public company, questions like "Is it cheaper to make non-exploding cars, or deal with lawsuits?" or "is it cheaper to enforce pollution controls or deal with fines?" are valid queries. Kind of spine chilling, and the source of much of my distrust of the corporate world.
Perhaps I'm mistaken, but don't Governors have basically the same power?
Go digging through any nation's laws, and you're going to find some that are weird, questionable or outright wrong. The United States has some that send chills down my spine, but I'm not going to imply that because of that I think your country is unfit to live in, populated by gun-toting, loose-cannon cowboys.
I think both our nations (I'm Canadian, if you hadn't already guessed) would benefit greatly from less of the "You should stop, kneel down, and kiss the ground you're about to walk on" kind of rhetoric in your other post in this thread, and more frank discussions about what we can learn from each other.
(Ordinarily I don't sound like such a peace-loving hippy, but the strained relations across the 49th really starts to annoy me somedays. Damnit, now I need a beer.)
(sorry, been away from slashdot for a few days, or I would have replied sooner).
You got me on that one - I never did this myself. A friend way back in the day claimed to have jacked his TRS-80 up to 1MB. Now, this was many years ago, when people actually used the TRS-80 for other than geek nostalgia value, so I may be misremembering (or have been outright duped. I was young. It could happen....) He bragged to me about it 'cause I was stuck with the standard 32KB.
A bit of googling didn't turn up anything that would substantiate the viability of the claim. And now I have an unresolved mystery from my youth to contend with. Thanks a lot ;)
Damned cranky ACs. I was glad to hear about this ;)
Have you worked with MTASC much? I'm in the middle of developing a web app right now using more standard dHTML + XMLHTTPRequest (can't quite bear to use the Ajax moniker yet, but I'll give in soon enough. It's easier to type). We very nearly went with some kind Flash thing instead. It wasn't the only reason, but lack of a non-sucky way of editing code in Flash was a consideration. The Macromedia IDE makes me want to gouge my eyes out. (And, also, I'd have to give up my beloved linux environment, which wasn't gonna happen.)
If you mean nerdy in the sense of "no social skills", then, yes, I'd have to agree. If you mean nerdy as in "soldering 1MB of RAM into your TRS-80", then, no, it's not. This is just fratboy humour with a thin gaming-geek patina.
....ooh, yeah. That's never a good thing. Believe it or not, I do get a fair bit of my tech news from slashdot. That I also get some other bits of space or gaming news is a nice distraction. I like the variety. If I actually worked in an office with co-workers, and this article was up on my browser, I think I'd be losing my "Hey, this site helps keep me up to date!" justification mighty quick.
I'm replying to an AC, but only because what you say is very funny - I'm a loooong way from puritan, and I work from home, so work safe (as I mentioned) is a total non-issue for me. It's certainly not the phrase "female orgasm" that bugs me. It's the utter idiocy of the story. This is the kind of thing you expect to hear in a locker room, not a site with fun geek stuff. Even for the games section, this is a new low in content quality.
That sums it up pretty well. I could care less about not-safe-for-work stories, and my crass-o-meter goes to eleven most days, but this is juvenile.
Given the stories that have been getting posted lately, I'm wondering if Zonk isn't someone's 14 year old kid brother, or maybe some /. editor meta-troll joke being played on us.
I've never complained about stories or editors here before. There are all those handy checkboxes that mean I don't need to see what I don't want to be bothered with. But I think the senior editors need to figure out if they want Slashdot to be an interesting source of news and ephemera, or if they'd rather just watch it degrade to another fanboy site. With stories like this, that's where it's going.
I'm sorry, that makes no sense. DHTML has nothing to do with browser pissing contests (those just made it hell to implement.) DHTML is the aggregation of (X)HTML/Javascript/CSS to make a page less static.
The lack of standards has made pretty much anything implementing DHTML a steaming pile, but DHTML itself is just a technique. And if you're willing to ignore four year old browsers, the state of affairs has gotten to the point that you can write decent code properly separated from your presentation.
Bingo...PHP has a very low barrier to entry. Add to that that it's mainly used in a networked environment, and you're going to have problems. You could code up this exact same problem in perl - the only difference is that by the time you knew enough to get input from the network into your script and passed to eval, you'd probably have had it beaten into you that it's a crime punishable with flogging.
There may be cultural differences at work here as well. XML-RPC is in PEAR and often recommended as a good way of implementing this kind of functionality. This isn't a bug-free guarantee, but there should be some minimal level of quality implied by that. Passing untrusted input directly to eval is gross negligence, and it sort of amazes me that no one noticed this before. I've read a lot of PHP and a lot of perl. It's easy to find crap, bug-riddled code in both. The main difference seems to be that crappy perl code isn't tolerated near so quickly. Crappy PHP code becomes a flagship application.
sleep(10), how do I love thee, let me count the ways.
I probably wasn't entirely clear in my frustration-powered, near-trollish ranting ;) It's not that I don't think the web is a good way to learn stuff (considering that I just finished helping build an online distance learning course, that would be awful silly of me.) It's just that while I think php.net is a good resource for certain kinds of information, such as "why doesn't this function work?" or "what are the other five functions that do almost the exact same thing, but not quite?", I don't think it's a good format for learning how to program effectively with PHP.
(I might be entirely misunderstanding your point here, too. If I am, my apologies.)
What I was trying to get at is that php.net doesn't really have context. You can learn the syntax of the language there. This is usually how I get my feet wet with a language - pull up a reference and start reading. I've done it enough times that I can get a feel pretty quickly this way.
But it's not a good way to learn how to be effective with the language. For someone new to programming (much of the new-to-PHP audience), it teaches you nothing about best practices. For the experienced programmer, it doesn't provide traction for questions like "what features are useful in implementing an MVC architecture" or "How can I kludge together a singleton?" (Kludge referring to doing that in PHP4. I haven't spent any time with 5 yet, but I suspect you can do it The Right Way now.)
Anyway, thanks for your reply. I do agree that people learn best in different ways. I just wish there were better information available on how to program well with PHP, not just how to program with PHP. Maybe as it becomes taken more seriously, these will start to crop up.
Thank you....just checking out hudzilla now, and it looks like a good resource. I can deal with not having flippy pages if I've got good data ;)
I've spent a fair bit of time at PHPpatterns (I think that's phppatterns.com, if anyone else is reading.) Too bad it doesn't seem to be seeing updates lately. I owe that man a beer.
Ah, thank you. I'll pop down to my favorite book store this weekend and check that out. I'll be a happy man indeed if it's what I've been looking for.
Execute a function when a variable is accessed, like Perl's tie.
I'd be really happy to proven wrong on this. I'd love to have that bit of functionality.
I use PHP a lot, but I find it beginner-focused enough to be really frustrating sometimes.
I'm big on books for learning and reference. I like to read, and I like to read on paper. I almost always prefer to grab something from my bookshelf and flip through the index than dig through a website. And I really want to emphasize that the PHP site is not, not, not a good way to learn the language. It's great when you want to find out why something doesn't work as documented (it's probably in the reader comments), but it is entirely useless as a way to learn how to effectively use the language.
And that's ok - that's not it's intent. All of this "you don't need a book, just go to php.net!" is really doing a disservice to those new to the language, or those that would like to actually learn good programming technique. Regarding the latter, the reader comments are generally abysmal and show the ignorance common in a (relatively) young community. For those just starting out, random access to > 3000 functions is not useful. At all.
With that little rant out of the way, I'd love a recommendation for a PHP book similar to Thinking in Java, or Advanced Perl Programming. I've looked, but all I've found are Dick and Jane Learn PHP, or dead tree dumps of the documentation.
Bingo. No language can make up for bad coding. PHP happens to be a) ubiquitous, b) easy to get started with, leading to c) lots of crap code. PHP can be criticized for a lot of things, but the ability of those that use it isn't one of them. (Although maybe we can lay a bit of blame at the feet of publishers that won't put out a book that talks about applying good programming practices to PHP? We have more "Dick and Jane Learn PHP" books than we know what to do with already.)
Beats me, but I would be satisfied with just one good PHP book that dealt with some more advanced topics. Something like "Design Patterns in PHP", or "How to Architect a PHP Web Application That Isn't 5 Thousand Unmaintainable Spaghetti Files."
I've been doing web app development almost exclusively with PHP for the last four years. I pretty much hate the language, but there are a lot of solid, pragmatic reasons to use it. The funny thing is, almost all of the "PHP suxor!" posts that I see here would be easily refuted by one solid book on how to apply good programming practices to the language. (And namespaces. The one thing I really, really wanted out of PHP5, and they cut it. Bastards.)
I would also just like to say that the online PHP documentation is not the reason for the dearth of good PHP books. The online documentation is handy for finding out that (insert one function of 3000) doesn't actually implement the functionality it claims to, and here's a really slow algorithm for faking it.
I'd happily put down a half dozen PHP fanboys for an equivalent to Thinking in Java. If I've missed it, and someone can recommend it, send me your postal address, and I'll make sure you get their heads. Just my way of saying thanks.
Let's see...he's not afraid of hard work, he's taking the initiative to learn on his own, and he has the smarts and the drive to do it? I'm assuming he's held the job for a while, so it sounds like he can be relied on.
Tell him to send me his resume. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
I'm not anti-advertising by any means, and I'd like to jump in here before the hordes rip you a new one.
I'm assuming that you have an opt-in only list, with addresses collected from people that knew exactly what they were opting in to? Otherwise it's unsolicited, and it's spam. Full stop. I don't htink there's anything wrong with opt-in lists, but if I get email I'm not expecting from someone selling something, I'm going to be right pissed. There's no way you can tell me that ditching email I receive without reading it is stealing; certainly no more than tossing the grocery store flyers I get in the recycling.
As for online advertising, there's a fine line. I don't generally block ads, because I do like to support the sites that I read. Content and bandwidth don't come free, and I'm more than happy to see an ad or two to support it. Slashdot and Boing Boing are two good examples of doing this right.
However, if you intentionally abuse my goodwill and make your site hard to use by flashy, blink, whizzy, poppy things, yes, I'm going to block them. I don't think there's anything wrong with enhancing the usability of what is a poorly designed site.
The real problem right now is greedy, clueless advertisers that are driving people to use adblockers. They're busily destroying any future market for themselves. It's the kind of short sighted business tactics we're getting all too used to seeing. "Leave a little salt for the bread" and all that.
I can't tell from your post, but I have to say it sounds an awful lot like you should be lumped in with these people. Maybe I'm wrong, but you really should be donning that asbestos underwear about now.
(Spyware and malware are a whole other evil kettle, I agree. You are 100% wrong, though, that advertising has always been an accepted part of the internet. Maybe if you came on after the Endless September, but before that it was seriously frowned on.)
Not so strange...I always test in links. It gives me an idea how things will look to search engines, and is also a decent first pass at testing text-to-speech browsers. If it's an ungodly mess in links, it's going to be unintelligible when the computer reads it out loud. Glad I'm not the only one ;)
Preach it, brother! If they fixed they're goddamned PNG handling, my life would be simpler, and our sites would look better. It's inexcusable that the only way to get PNGs to almost work right in IE is with a bleeding javascript hack.
The one thing I want even more, though, is a proper box model. CSS hacks (which only work because of other bugs in IE) remind me of the bad old days of v4 browsers and table layouts. Of course, it will still be two or three years before we can safely ignore IE6, but at least I'd have something to look forward to. (And if they fix the box model without fixing things like * html { } I'll be ranting for days...)
Neither of these things are really a big deal. I have no idea why they're so resistant to fixing them, except that it might confuse their FrontPage users.
Fix those two things, and suddenly almost all of the crappy hacks we currently have to use go away. Sure, I'll find something else to bitch about, like missing selectors or something, but I'll deal. PNGs and a box model. Tiny requests, and they seem to be the things that piss off the web development community the most. I wish they'd get over it and just commit to the damned things.