For those that can't be bothered to read it, in short, PDF's are designed for printing documents whilst preserving the original formatting as the author intended. Jacob therefore asserts that they're "unfit for human consumption" if you try and use them for something different to their intended purpose, in this case, online reading.
Next week Jacob will be telling us how washing machines are great for keeping your clothes clean but not very good for making cups of tea.
Of course, once you have no net connection, it becomes a little difficult to download all the latest Microsoft patches and virus updates to clean your machine so you can get back on the internet.
Thats not to say it isn't impossible, but it wouldn't surprise me that taking a laptop/ipod/some other storage device big enough around to another friends house and getting all the updates is going to be beyond most people.
Also, last time I checked, I can't download all the updates that have been developed after XP SP2 was released from a machine running Windows 2000.
(side note: I'm on a 56k modem at home and therefore don't have a spare 3 weeks to get the several hundred megabytes of updates - and autopatcher xp hasn't been updated after sp2 was released)
After reading the article I had several questions:
How will the IFPI "encourage" ISP's to sign up to this code of practice given that it does nothing to improve the ISP's relationship with the people that matter, that being the paying customers of their service?
How on earth did they manage to get the French ISP's to sign up to this? Was that "encouragement" really so good for them?
Who will decide which websites hold substantial infringing content? What metric will be used? Who will ratify this and how does it take into account the possibility that there could be other downloads available (possibly significantly more) that are legal?
How will they define the threshold
of bandwidth consumed that seperates a legitimate consumer with that of someone who is supposidly engaging in illegal downloadings?
There are many more questions but I don't have time to write them all down. The mind boggles.
It's a pity that most 3G phones that are offered these days (at least in the UK) are restricting surfing to the service provider's homepage.
Not quite. Most (if not all, I don't know) phones on the 3 network restrict you to their own walled garden.
However, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange networks give you access to the whole internet. I don't know about O2 but I'm sure someone else can confirm what the status with them is.
Given this, the fact they have less base stations than T-Mobile and the switch from 3G to 2.5G is often reported as more problematic rather than seamless - I'd recommend switching to a better network.
Okay, given that my 2.5 ghz machine won't be up to this - are there any alternative expansion packs I can download and play that are in a 90% finished state?
Whilst I have no doubt that this is a very nice, it would be interesting to know if Google plan on extending any of their newer services to people who don't live in the USA (eg. a rollout to the United Kingdom would be a nice next step).
Does anyone have any information? Or are we going to frequently see cool new Google stuff which we can't really use to the fullest?
(If they have no plans, it might be nice for Slashdot to drop the practially dead Apache section and change this to Google so at least us non-Americans can filter it out).
From my experience with it, it does do this, and it does it well. It puts a big "This message may not be from who it seems to be from" message at the top of the screen, and doesn't load any images.
Agreed, it does do this (and pretty well, only today did I see one manage to evade having it's links stripped) - however I would prefer it if they moved them to the spam folder automatically.
Filtering has got a lot better too, I have not recieved a single spam with my gmail account.
I've only received one or two. However gmail is completely useless at tagging phishing emails as spam.
I've just removed 6 ebay, 2 paypal and 1 wells fargo that have appeared over the weekend. It would be nice if their spam filter did this automatically for me.
One of the ebay ones managed to get around gmails phishing checks and so the links were still active.
Not sure about you, but I don't really have the time to try every single distribution available in the hope that one of them will work with everything on my laptop.
He also makes a good point about closed source drivers. As much as it pains people here to hear it, I (as a user) don't really care how the driver was developed if it turns into a simple difference between having a laptop with something working or not working.
When your DVD player tells you "This operation is not allowed" when you try to skip commercials, it becomes pretty clear that DRM really stands for Digital Restrictions Management.
The best example of this is the DVD of "Master and Commander". It forces you sit through 10 minutes of advertising of other films before you get to the main menu!
I found this requirement to be shockingly obnoxious.
Don't want to spoil everyones fun but you should read the comments posted below before you install it.
In short, it doesn't work particulary well. However, adot has responded and says that those issues will be worked on.
Having suffered one of those "new generation" of pop ups only about 10 minutes ago, I look forward to seeing this functionality when it's in a more finished state.
I never thought I'd see this. I wonder if Bill Gates will fly in and offer massive discounting for govt depts, like he did for Telstra?
A very good point.
I want Governments to be driving Open Source adoption in their departments because they realise the benefits that it gives, not pretending to do so in the hope that they can get better discounts out of Microsoft.
It it is the latter, then we still have a very long way to go since the masses will equate Linux as being a barganing tool rather than a serious alternative.
Can someone please explain to me how having an LCD with dead pixels (even one) is considered "normal"?
I'm sure there is an obvious reason, but unfortunately the only way I see it is that I've paid good money for a good display and if one pixel has failed within the warrenty period then I consider it to be malfunctioning and therefore not doing what it was originally intended for.
So is this a classic case of manufacturers trying to get us to accept mediocrity?
This part 2 of an article on/. redesign shows how/. renders on a mobile device currently (well, at least when the article was written), and how a CSS version would gracefully degrade in a portable browser.
Until then, we're stuck using something like AvantSlash which actually formats the page in a way that is not only readable on an offline client but on a PDA and WAP browser.
The quicker Slashdot moves to XHTML+CSS, the quicker we can get away from crufty hacks like this to get handheld friendly content.
Whilst it might be true, let us not forget that the majority of internet browsers for PDA's and phones really do suck.
For example, PocketIE is shockingly terrible. It crashes on overly complex content and doesn't handle javascript. Netfront is better, standards-wise, but renders the text completely unreadable.
Palm's didn't, until recently, even come with a web-browser. I can't comment on how good it is because I've never tried it, but a friend of mine was reported as being "underwhelmed" by it.
In fact, the only decent browser I can think of is Opera for mobiles - and even that has only come out in the last couple of years and suffers from the odd navigational and rendering quirk.
So, yes, flash does cause major problems - but there are plenty of problems with sites that don't use flash that could be easily solved with a half-decent browser.
That's the bottom line... do you think your customers are trying to steal from you or do you trust them?
Unfortunately, the millions of song files, applications and games traded on Kazaa every day just show that actually, your customers are quite happy to shaft you out of the money that you (probably) deserve.
Essentially, time and time again it has been shown that if people can get something for free, then they generally will. I've seen first hand kids who have purchased games for their mobile phones, sit there on the bus and bluetooth them across to their mates. Thats not because they're making a socio-political stand against the fascism of corporates trying to restrict their freedom of expression - thats getting something for free because they can.
And for those that say that if the cost is the factor then I should point out that PC games at £39.99 are pirated just as much as Amiga games were (which were at £19.99) and even ZX Spectrum games (which were only £2.99). Remember all those C90 tapes traded?
Fact is, that people will go a long way to not pay money for things.
So there is a debate going on? If that is the case, a link to where it is going on so we can see the arguments would be nice.
For all we know, there could be a very valid reason why they haven't released all of it. I'm not sure what that reason could be, but given that we don't have anything to go on, we're stuck to just guessing.
Here in the UK we're now moving to Chip and Pin which is a great idea if it wasn't for the fact that the idiots who designed the machines didn't consider the fact that someone might be looking over your shoulder.
As such, you get this box thrust into your hands and you're asked to type in your PIN in full view of all the people around you.
Sometimes you can cover it up with the other hand, but this gets a little difficult if you are actually holding the machine with one of those hands.
Unsurprisingly Chip and Pin fraud is still climbing although the banks are spinning it by claiming it would be worse if we didn't have it. Hardly the end to card fraud that they originally claimed.
Since the Napster songs go away as soon as you stop subscribing I need to pay $15 a month for the next 80 years. That folks, is $14,400.
...and for the same amount on iTunes, you could get 14,400 tracks which is 985,600 tracks less than you would have got with Napster.
Oh, and if you spend more than 80 dollars a month on iTunes at the moment, then after 80 years you'll have spent more with iTunes for less music.
This of course assuming that everything stays static which it obviously won't but I'm assuming that iTunes and Napsters prices will rise by the same percentage year on year and so won't factor into it.
if by "adheres quite reasonably" you mean "enough errors on the main page that the w3c validator gave up and stopped counting after the first 50", then yes, slashdot adheres quite reasonably to HTML 3.2.
What pisses me off the most is that I had to update AvantSlash because they changed the HTML slightly.
Granted, it turned out that it was a case change of the tr and td tags (why? it's not like it'll change anything) and I really should have coded to manage this (forgot the little i at the end).
However the reason I'm pissed is that if it was decent (x)html and css I wouldn't have to write something so it's reasonably viewable on my pocketpc.
If the googlebot scans the redirected page and assigns weights based on the end result page, but assigns the ranking to your original page, then you are essentially stealing pagerank from the proper host.
Since no physical property is involved don't you mean "you are essentially copyright infringing pagerank from the proper host"?
Slashdot Mirror
For those that can't be bothered to read it, in short, PDF's are designed for printing documents whilst preserving the original formatting as the author intended. Jacob therefore asserts that they're "unfit for human consumption" if you try and use them for something different to their intended purpose, in this case, online reading.
Next week Jacob will be telling us how washing machines are great for keeping your clothes clean but not very good for making cups of tea.
Thats not to say it isn't impossible, but it wouldn't surprise me that taking a laptop/ipod/some other storage device big enough around to another friends house and getting all the updates is going to be beyond most people.
Also, last time I checked, I can't download all the updates that have been developed after XP SP2 was released from a machine running Windows 2000.
(side note: I'm on a 56k modem at home and therefore don't have a spare 3 weeks to get the several hundred megabytes of updates - and autopatcher xp hasn't been updated after sp2 was released)
- How will the IFPI "encourage" ISP's to sign up to this code of practice given that it does nothing to improve the ISP's relationship with the people that matter, that being the paying customers of their service?
- How on earth did they manage to get the French ISP's to sign up to this? Was that "encouragement" really so good for them?
- Who will decide which websites hold substantial infringing content? What metric will be used? Who will ratify this and how does it take into account the possibility that there could be other downloads available (possibly significantly more) that are legal?
- How will they define the threshold
of bandwidth consumed that seperates a legitimate consumer with that of someone who is supposidly engaging in illegal downloadings?
There are many more questions but I don't have time to write them all down. The mind boggles.FWIW all the major networks give you full internet access via GPRS and CSD.
The only one I don't know about is 3, but I wouldn't consider them major :)
Not quite. Most (if not all, I don't know) phones on the 3 network restrict you to their own walled garden.
However, T-Mobile, Vodafone and Orange networks give you access to the whole internet. I don't know about O2 but I'm sure someone else can confirm what the status with them is.
Given this, the fact they have less base stations than T-Mobile and the switch from 3G to 2.5G is often reported as more problematic rather than seamless - I'd recommend switching to a better network.
Okay, given that my 2.5 ghz machine won't be up to this - are there any alternative expansion packs I can download and play that are in a 90% finished state?
Does anyone have any information? Or are we going to frequently see cool new Google stuff which we can't really use to the fullest?
(If they have no plans, it might be nice for Slashdot to drop the practially dead Apache section and change this to Google so at least us non-Americans can filter it out).
Agreed, it does do this (and pretty well, only today did I see one manage to evade having it's links stripped) - however I would prefer it if they moved them to the spam folder automatically.
Otherwise they just clutter up the inbox.
I've only received one or two. However gmail is completely useless at tagging phishing emails as spam.
I've just removed 6 ebay, 2 paypal and 1 wells fargo that have appeared over the weekend. It would be nice if their spam filter did this automatically for me.
One of the ebay ones managed to get around gmails phishing checks and so the links were still active.
Blast, I meant I'd pick the former.
Not sure about you, but I don't really have the time to try every single distribution available in the hope that one of them will work with everything on my laptop.
He also makes a good point about closed source drivers. As much as it pains people here to hear it, I (as a user) don't really care how the driver was developed if it turns into a simple difference between having a laptop with something working or not working.
I'll pick the latter any day.
The best example of this is the DVD of "Master and Commander". It forces you sit through 10 minutes of advertising of other films before you get to the main menu!
I found this requirement to be shockingly obnoxious.
In short, it doesn't work particulary well. However, adot has responded and says that those issues will be worked on.
Having suffered one of those "new generation" of pop ups only about 10 minutes ago, I look forward to seeing this functionality when it's in a more finished state.
A very good point.
I want Governments to be driving Open Source adoption in their departments because they realise the benefits that it gives, not pretending to do so in the hope that they can get better discounts out of Microsoft.
It it is the latter, then we still have a very long way to go since the masses will equate Linux as being a barganing tool rather than a serious alternative.
I preferred The Register's April 1st efforts with Steve Jobs joins IKEA.
I'm sure there is an obvious reason, but unfortunately the only way I see it is that I've paid good money for a good display and if one pixel has failed within the warrenty period then I consider it to be malfunctioning and therefore not doing what it was originally intended for.
So is this a classic case of manufacturers trying to get us to accept mediocrity?
Until then, we're stuck using something like AvantSlash which actually formats the page in a way that is not only readable on an offline client but on a PDA and WAP browser.
The quicker Slashdot moves to XHTML+CSS, the quicker we can get away from crufty hacks like this to get handheld friendly content.
For example, PocketIE is shockingly terrible. It crashes on overly complex content and doesn't handle javascript. Netfront is better, standards-wise, but renders the text completely unreadable.
Palm's didn't, until recently, even come with a web-browser. I can't comment on how good it is because I've never tried it, but a friend of mine was reported as being "underwhelmed" by it.
In fact, the only decent browser I can think of is Opera for mobiles - and even that has only come out in the last couple of years and suffers from the odd navigational and rendering quirk.
So, yes, flash does cause major problems - but there are plenty of problems with sites that don't use flash that could be easily solved with a half-decent browser.
Unfortunately, the millions of song files, applications and games traded on Kazaa every day just show that actually, your customers are quite happy to shaft you out of the money that you (probably) deserve.
Essentially, time and time again it has been shown that if people can get something for free, then they generally will. I've seen first hand kids who have purchased games for their mobile phones, sit there on the bus and bluetooth them across to their mates. Thats not because they're making a socio-political stand against the fascism of corporates trying to restrict their freedom of expression - thats getting something for free because they can.
And for those that say that if the cost is the factor then I should point out that PC games at £39.99 are pirated just as much as Amiga games were (which were at £19.99) and even ZX Spectrum games (which were only £2.99). Remember all those C90 tapes traded?
Fact is, that people will go a long way to not pay money for things.
For all we know, there could be a very valid reason why they haven't released all of it. I'm not sure what that reason could be, but given that we don't have anything to go on, we're stuck to just guessing.
As such, you get this box thrust into your hands and you're asked to type in your PIN in full view of all the people around you.
Sometimes you can cover it up with the other hand, but this gets a little difficult if you are actually holding the machine with one of those hands.
Unsurprisingly Chip and Pin fraud is still climbing although the banks are spinning it by claiming it would be worse if we didn't have it. Hardly the end to card fraud that they originally claimed.
Oh, and if you spend more than 80 dollars a month on iTunes at the moment, then after 80 years you'll have spent more with iTunes for less music.
This of course assuming that everything stays static which it obviously won't but I'm assuming that iTunes and Napsters prices will rise by the same percentage year on year and so won't factor into it.
Works both ways really.
What pisses me off the most is that I had to update AvantSlash because they changed the HTML slightly.
Granted, it turned out that it was a case change of the tr and td tags (why? it's not like it'll change anything) and I really should have coded to manage this (forgot the little i at the end).
However the reason I'm pissed is that if it was decent (x)html and css I wouldn't have to write something so it's reasonably viewable on my pocketpc.
Since no physical property is involved don't you mean "you are essentially copyright infringing pagerank from the proper host"?
Hang on a minute, that doesn't sound right ...
- I own a PC, games are £39 and people claim that if they were cheaper, piracy would be less rampant.
- I used to own an Amiga, games were £19 and people claimed that if they were cheaper, piracy would be less rampant.
- I also used to own a ZX Spectrum, games were £3 and people claimed that if they were cheaper, piracy would be less rampant.
You have a face the fact that a lot of people just aren't prepared to pay, whatever the price.