Adblocking is stealing, Just like skipping TV commercials.
Where did you make the idea up that commercial skipping is the same as putting the five finger discount on hard property? Is someone using a text mode browser like elinks stealing since they can't see those javascript and rich media ads? No. Reality is that if a visitor to a site blocks ads, they are using the web as it was designed. That a business model fails to account for the fact that http and html make it a snap for people to selectively load content (i.e. filter ads, adult content, etc...) simply isn't anyone other than website publisher's problem. In reality people aren't "blocking" ads, they are simply not loading and displaying content from their computer.
By blocking ads, you are preventing them from getting paid, while taking up their bandwidth and other resources.
FAIL. Reality: a publisher getting CPM money who doesn't do so in a way that gets clicks is a genuine fraud. Web visitors pay for bandwidth, too. The publisher and website reader are both paying - but the reality is that someone who filters ads out is simply wasting less bandwidth as is their right to do. It's high time that web publishers started to realize that they have to take the good with the bad with the media they publish. The web gives 100% control to the reader and unless you make your whole site into a giant bitmap, you really can't do a damn thing about it. Nor should you. Get off the my visitors are thieves because they don't let me get my CPM pennies from heaven kick and understand that you are getting paid by advertisers to get willing participants in the advertising game, not to force feed ads no one wants to see let alone click on down peoples throats. If anyone is stealing, it's the web publisher who is getting CPM money and not delivering the clicks to the advertisers because no one sees the ads as adding value to the content of the site. Publishers have a responsibility to deliver for advertiser and their compensation is in the end tied to results. No clicks = cancel. Bad clicks = cancel. Ad blocking is stealing = SCO/RIAA/MPAA STUPID
So really, LOGO wasn't all that "good". Why then does it have a "following"?
In the 80s Logo was about as good as it gets to teach kids some simple computer programming principals. For a lot of kids, Logo was enough to get them to understand that they liked computers. At least back in the day we were trying to teach people how to really use a computer instead of teaching how to talk to Mr. Paperclip into doing your presentation or essay. For teaching kids to program nowdays, Squeek is fairly interesting and there are some neat possibilities with tools like Flash. What matters is showing kids how we program computers to do things step by step and use simple logic to make decisions about the next step. Squeek and Flash let kids do a lot more visual stuff and make it easy to learn how things work.
In this case the "hack" isn't anything like installing a different OS on a laptop. It's making the iPhone behave like any other phone which takes a SIM.
Agreed. It's simply modifying a product and making it more useful to the owner. We went through this with cars in the 60's and 70's where manufacturers tried to control how people repaired and serviced their vehicle. The consumer won that, and probably will win in the end on cell phones. Think where cell phones would go if they were more open and hackable - some incredibly useful software would quickly emerge.
If you hack the firmware one the phone, it's pretty obvious that you won't be able to get warranty support if you bring in your phone with the hacked firmware on it. So if you have a physical problem, restore the factory firmware! I've hacked my TiVo, and I kept the original hard drive available to swap in, in case I need a repair, for just this reason. Anyone who doesn't understand this sort of thing shouldn't be hacking their electronics.
At the risk of angering some of the priests and devout members of evangelical church of the bulbous fruit: While it's clear that Apple would do something like this, it does not mean it is fair to customers or legal. I hate to see an true innovator like Apple go to court, but someone needs to answer if changing software actually can void the warranty of a general purpose computer. Used to be that changing firmware required ROM burners and other expensive and non-consumer easy gadgets. Now most of us store our data in firmware in the form of USB flash drives. It's also not clear that manufacturers can sell you a device and still retain control or virtual shared ownership of that device? There are many questions still to be worked out - chief among these is the model inherently unconscionable and unfair?
LOL - my Ubuntu on this laptop is fine, and in fact does far better than windows with respect to nearly everything the author tried to trash linux for. I think these articles challenging linux on the desktop are so 2002.
People don't like change. Microsoft has been very brave to make this big a change for this widely used an office suite, but I think for the most part it has paid off well.
Change has little to do with the dislike of the ribbon in our office - all our users are fairly advanced users who customize their applications so they get their job done faster. As an owner, I like that. When software slows productivity for my knowledge workers and speeds up the $7/hour people, I don't like that. What the developer says of their own design, who gives a rat's ass. Mom and dad are the last ones to catch on to the fact their baby is ugly.
I received no payment for playing but I watched customers repeatedly purchase drinks sometimes resulting in $1, $2 or even $3 transactions!
This whole deal is not at all even remotely new or even new at all. This isn't about the record industry, either. Its about composers! This is not at all like the RIAA who wants you to buy that damn AC/DC album you bought when you were 10 years old 15 times more in your lifetime. Unlike RIAA who sues grandmas and students who basically gain nothing from their alleged piracy, this is about getting composers paid by venues that use their music to make money. BMI/ASCAP/SESAC have been doing this exact shakedown for years and years - and it is very much a legal and fair situation given that often times the music being played is actually MAKING MONEY for the venue or band who is playing it. The system is even extra cool to musicians - the VENUE pays for the license, not the musician.
Case law goes back forever on this. Basically, if you perform music in a commercial setting (i.e. it's part of the ambiance or a promotion for you business), you owe the composer a royalty for using his or her work. It's not about the recording labels at this level. It's about the actual composers... and it's about people using their work to make money (e.g. cover band sells out small bar who pockets a cool $8,500 in sales for the night plus tips).
The exceptions are: band plays only their own music, you play live off the public airwaves or you use a service like Muzak (it's not just bad instrumental covers) for in store music. The live off the public airwaves doesn't work out because competitors advertise there. Services... well... it works sometimes.
What sucks is that the coffee house people didn't see this coming.
It isn't the horizontal tabs that are the important part, it's the organisation, the layout and the entire concept behind it that works.
It's a tabbed toolbar with the glassy look applied. It is predated by Corel's adaptive toolbars (Better idea anyway, one strip stays the same the other changes based on context - not sure if it was in WP Office, but the Draw products use it) and is a tremendous waste on 1280x800 laptop screens as it takes nearly 1/4th of the screen for GUI chrome. Most users at our company have demanded Office 2003 back or switch to Open Office after we upgrade them to Office 07.
I'm sorry, OpenOffice guys, but compared to MS Office, your product is so 1995.
Aside sharepoint extensions, the insidious smart tag, terrible GUI changes and the removal of Mr. Paperclip, how has the core of MS Office changed since Office 97?
What the OSS groups need to do is embrace and extend and borgify MS until all the MS tools are extensions of the movement.
Why the need? Adding tools that enable interoperability makes sense, so Sun did this one right. Extending Office? Why sell more product for MS, and why develop for MS when they'll take my extension, reimplement it as a new feature in the next version and put me out of business? I think you misunderstand OpenOffice: it's not about competing with Office on features. It's about getting things done.
I'm surprised that so many people think Linux isn't ever going to put a dent in the desktop market. Having lived through four changes in the prevailing desktop system (Apple ][, CP/M, DOS, Windows) what is going on feels like a fundamental shift in the market. It's not about Linux, it's about abandoning the one user, one CPU model of the 80s and shifting to the power, simplicity and flexibility that *nix type multiuser operating systems deliver. See, the real fear in Redmond has always been the commoditization of the software they sell. You can't make the basically the same widget for 20 years and hope to have the same price tag on it as when you started (Windows 1.0, $89.95, Windows Vista Home, $199).
Commodotization has started! The first piece of software to go was Redmond's overpriced darling: Windows Server! Now the desktop OS is being reduced to a freebie by Linux. Using Mach and BSD enabled Apple to regain the advantage they lost to the PC business when Apple was a ground up hardware and from the first bit software company. Open Office is doing the same to MS Office... MySQL, Java, Apache, and the P languages have put an incredible hurt on the Microsoft development stack... Nearly every category of software MS is now facing a competing model: open source communites delivering free (as in freedom) software and vendors that sell expertise, not licenses and boxes of disks with manuals in them (well... at least the manuals used to come with boxed software). Now MS will either be torn to shreds by the market or will have to start actually innovating. I have never been so excited about the future!
Microsoft is lowering the price because Open Office is a much better fit for the college student budget? Or maybe that Google Apps stuff... No.. couldn't be that at all...
It's about pursuing a Geek fantasy that has no relation to the reality of the mass consumer market.
Dell does not manufacturer 1000's of PCs at a time for shipment to retailers. They are the poster boy for mass custom configuration direct from the manufacturer - so offering a no OS option should not be a big deal for them.
This whole thing isn't about selling with Linux installed. It's about selling hardware without a selling a bundled, pre-installed OS at all. It's about offering choices to customers so they can buy what they want. It's about a computer manufacturer selling *computers* and not selling a license distribution system for content providers and software vendors.
It's all about what you do with your experience. You can go to less prestigious school - say a Purdue vs. a MIT. If you do realize the advantage is the size and diversity of the school. Make sure you do things that matter during your study. Participate in projects with some stature. Intern with innovative start ups. Most importantly, network with people - especially people who are going into your profession, business, finance and accounting. Network with faculty. Never waste an opportunity to tour a business or work on projects outside the school. *Have a social life.* Later on, the network of people you create will have greater value than your degree itself does anyway. And those networking skills will turn into leadership skills.
ODF is not about web pages or word processing. It's a standard for office documents including spreadsheets, presentation and word processing. That's a big difference from what Opera's CTO is talking about. CSS/HTML might make a good format for one part of the suite (word processing) with a lot of work on the standard. The issue: that's not what is needed for a standard. It's about doing for office documents what HTML did for websites. ODF is actually an opportunity for opera - extend the browser to support ODF so people can post ODF documents, make dynamic applications render to ODF and so on. It takes the web to the next level and further erodes the big monopoly.
A lot of the Wikipedia bashers and nay-sayers have one unique problem: they don't get it. They want academic rigor and precise accuracy in something that is not edited exclusively by academics, experts and elites. Wikipedia is a look in to the hive mind of humanity - and reflects the daily winds of change in the common consensus and the fact that people perceive reality differently.
Wikipedia isn't broke and I hope it stays donation supported for a long time.
Lets be clear here, the two have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other. Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law.
By inference what the backlash is against is private parties FORCING bad contracts on consumers due to collusion. RIAA has effectively conspired with record companies to prevent online sales of non-DRMed products. Consumers want it that way. And if that's what the buyer wants, the drumbeat to give them that will be louder and louder by the day.
Incidentally, many DRM schemes are simply schemes to make people buy a license they've already paid for again and again. You can see this clearly with Microsoft's Plays for Sure -> Zune transition: hey consumer, pay us for the third time for that old Van Halen song you originally bought in 1986!
Thunderbird has a couple of very nice new features:
1. Threaded messages with your replies included in the thread! This alone is going to may 2.0 better 2. New filter rules: forward and reply with template! 3. A little better speed...
Now all we need to make thunderbird closer to perfect:
1. A way to view conversation by recipient. 2. Better template managemetn 3. something that can identify non-spam commercial email and newsletters and get them out of the inbox.
I can tell you that statement is actually quite often crap. Working extra hours and dropping all sense of personal life for your employer is like putting a giant sign on your forehead that says DOORMAT.
The problem: many companies have a culture that rewards doormats for being walked on. Time is all we really have. Use it wisely.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you make the idea up that commercial skipping is the same as putting the five finger discount on hard property? Is someone using a text mode browser like elinks stealing since they can't see those javascript and rich media ads? No. Reality is that if a visitor to a site blocks ads, they are using the web as it was designed. That a business model fails to account for the fact that http and html make it a snap for people to selectively load content (i.e. filter ads, adult content, etc...) simply isn't anyone other than website publisher's problem. In reality people aren't "blocking" ads, they are simply not loading and displaying content from their computer.
By blocking ads, you are preventing them from getting paid, while taking up their bandwidth and other resources.
FAIL. Reality: a publisher getting CPM money who doesn't do so in a way that gets clicks is a genuine fraud. Web visitors pay for bandwidth, too. The publisher and website reader are both paying - but the reality is that someone who filters ads out is simply wasting less bandwidth as is their right to do. It's high time that web publishers started to realize that they have to take the good with the bad with the media they publish. The web gives 100% control to the reader and unless you make your whole site into a giant bitmap, you really can't do a damn thing about it. Nor should you. Get off the my visitors are thieves because they don't let me get my CPM pennies from heaven kick and understand that you are getting paid by advertisers to get willing participants in the advertising game, not to force feed ads no one wants to see let alone click on down peoples throats. If anyone is stealing, it's the web publisher who is getting CPM money and not delivering the clicks to the advertisers because no one sees the ads as adding value to the content of the site. Publishers have a responsibility to deliver for advertiser and their compensation is in the end tied to results. No clicks = cancel. Bad clicks = cancel. Ad blocking is stealing = SCO/RIAA/MPAA STUPID
In the 80s Logo was about as good as it gets to teach kids some simple computer programming principals. For a lot of kids, Logo was enough to get them to understand that they liked computers. At least back in the day we were trying to teach people how to really use a computer instead of teaching how to talk to Mr. Paperclip into doing your presentation or essay. For teaching kids to program nowdays, Squeek is fairly interesting and there are some neat possibilities with tools like Flash. What matters is showing kids how we program computers to do things step by step and use simple logic to make decisions about the next step. Squeek and Flash let kids do a lot more visual stuff and make it easy to learn how things work.
In this case the "hack" isn't anything like installing a different OS on a laptop. It's making the iPhone behave like any other phone which takes a SIM.
Agreed. It's simply modifying a product and making it more useful to the owner. We went through this with cars in the 60's and 70's where manufacturers tried to control how people repaired and serviced their vehicle. The consumer won that, and probably will win in the end on cell phones. Think where cell phones would go if they were more open and hackable - some incredibly useful software would quickly emerge.
If you hack the firmware one the phone, it's pretty obvious that you won't be able to get warranty support if you bring in your phone with the hacked firmware on it. So if you have a physical problem, restore the factory firmware! I've hacked my TiVo, and I kept the original hard drive available to swap in, in case I need a repair, for just this reason. Anyone who doesn't understand this sort of thing shouldn't be hacking their electronics.
At the risk of angering some of the priests and devout members of evangelical church of the bulbous fruit: While it's clear that Apple would do something like this, it does not mean it is fair to customers or legal. I hate to see an true innovator like Apple go to court, but someone needs to answer if changing software actually can void the warranty of a general purpose computer. Used to be that changing firmware required ROM burners and other expensive and non-consumer easy gadgets. Now most of us store our data in firmware in the form of USB flash drives. It's also not clear that manufacturers can sell you a device and still retain control or virtual shared ownership of that device? There are many questions still to be worked out - chief among these is the model inherently unconscionable and unfair?
Does anyone know how Cha Cha is really different from other "guide" or answer services like Google Answers?
LOL - my Ubuntu on this laptop is fine, and in fact does far better than windows with respect to nearly everything the author tried to trash linux for. I think these articles challenging linux on the desktop are so 2002.
Change has little to do with the dislike of the ribbon in our office - all our users are fairly advanced users who customize their applications so they get their job done faster. As an owner, I like that. When software slows productivity for my knowledge workers and speeds up the $7/hour people, I don't like that. What the developer says of their own design, who gives a rat's ass. Mom and dad are the last ones to catch on to the fact their baby is ugly.
This whole deal is not at all even remotely new or even new at all. This isn't about the record industry, either. Its about composers! This is not at all like the RIAA who wants you to buy that damn AC/DC album you bought when you were 10 years old 15 times more in your lifetime. Unlike RIAA who sues grandmas and students who basically gain nothing from their alleged piracy, this is about getting composers paid by venues that use their music to make money. BMI/ASCAP/SESAC have been doing this exact shakedown for years and years - and it is very much a legal and fair situation given that often times the music being played is actually MAKING MONEY for the venue or band who is playing it. The system is even extra cool to musicians - the VENUE pays for the license, not the musician.
Case law goes back forever on this. Basically, if you perform music in a commercial setting (i.e. it's part of the ambiance or a promotion for you business), you owe the composer a royalty for using his or her work. It's not about the recording labels at this level. It's about the actual composers... and it's about people using their work to make money (e.g. cover band sells out small bar who pockets a cool $8,500 in sales for the night plus tips).
The exceptions are: band plays only their own music, you play live off the public airwaves or you use a service like Muzak (it's not just bad instrumental covers) for in store music. The live off the public airwaves doesn't work out because competitors advertise there. Services... well... it works sometimes.
What sucks is that the coffee house people didn't see this coming.
It's a tabbed toolbar with the glassy look applied. It is predated by Corel's adaptive toolbars (Better idea anyway, one strip stays the same the other changes based on context - not sure if it was in WP Office, but the Draw products use it) and is a tremendous waste on 1280x800 laptop screens as it takes nearly 1/4th of the screen for GUI chrome. Most users at our company have demanded Office 2003 back or switch to Open Office after we upgrade them to Office 07.
Is that what you call that total waste horizontal space for tabs that do nothing but glow when you mouse over
Aside sharepoint extensions, the insidious smart tag, terrible GUI changes and the removal of Mr. Paperclip, how has the core of MS Office changed since Office 97?
What the OSS groups need to do is embrace and extend and borgify MS until all the MS tools are extensions of the movement.Why the need? Adding tools that enable interoperability makes sense, so Sun did this one right. Extending Office? Why sell more product for MS, and why develop for MS when they'll take my extension, reimplement it as a new feature in the next version and put me out of business? I think you misunderstand OpenOffice: it's not about competing with Office on features. It's about getting things done.
I'm surprised that so many people think Linux isn't ever going to put a dent in the desktop market. Having lived through four changes in the prevailing desktop system (Apple ][, CP/M, DOS, Windows) what is going on feels like a fundamental shift in the market. It's not about Linux, it's about abandoning the one user, one CPU model of the 80s and shifting to the power, simplicity and flexibility that *nix type multiuser operating systems deliver. See, the real fear in Redmond has always been the commoditization of the software they sell. You can't make the basically the same widget for 20 years and hope to have the same price tag on it as when you started (Windows 1.0, $89.95, Windows Vista Home, $199).
Commodotization has started! The first piece of software to go was Redmond's overpriced darling: Windows Server! Now the desktop OS is being reduced to a freebie by Linux. Using Mach and BSD enabled Apple to regain the advantage they lost to the PC business when Apple was a ground up hardware and from the first bit software company. Open Office is doing the same to MS Office... MySQL, Java, Apache, and the P languages have put an incredible hurt on the Microsoft development stack... Nearly every category of software MS is now facing a competing model: open source communites delivering free (as in freedom) software and vendors that sell expertise, not licenses and boxes of disks with manuals in them (well... at least the manuals used to come with boxed software). Now MS will either be torn to shreds by the market or will have to start actually innovating. I have never been so excited about the future!
Microsoft is lowering the price because Open Office is a much better fit for the college student budget? Or maybe that Google Apps stuff... No.. couldn't be that at all...
It's about pursuing a Geek fantasy that has no relation to the reality of the mass consumer market.
Dell does not manufacturer 1000's of PCs at a time for shipment to retailers. They are the poster boy for mass custom configuration direct from the manufacturer - so offering a no OS option should not be a big deal for them.
This whole thing isn't about selling with Linux installed. It's about selling hardware without a selling a bundled, pre-installed OS at all. It's about offering choices to customers so they can buy what they want. It's about a computer manufacturer selling *computers* and not selling a license distribution system for content providers and software vendors.
Limits and free don't usually make sense when used to describe the same subject.
Here's the question: are you happy? If you are, then settle down. If not, then continue looking until you are.
It's all about what you do with your experience. You can go to less prestigious school - say a Purdue vs. a MIT. If you do realize the advantage is the size and diversity of the school. Make sure you do things that matter during your study. Participate in projects with some stature. Intern with innovative start ups. Most importantly, network with people - especially people who are going into your profession, business, finance and accounting. Network with faculty. Never waste an opportunity to tour a business or work on projects outside the school. *Have a social life.* Later on, the network of people you create will have greater value than your degree itself does anyway. And those networking skills will turn into leadership skills.
ODF is not about web pages or word processing. It's a standard for office documents including spreadsheets, presentation and word processing. That's a big difference from what Opera's CTO is talking about. CSS/HTML might make a good format for one part of the suite (word processing) with a lot of work on the standard. The issue: that's not what is needed for a standard. It's about doing for office documents what HTML did for websites. ODF is actually an opportunity for opera - extend the browser to support ODF so people can post ODF documents, make dynamic applications render to ODF and so on. It takes the web to the next level and further erodes the big monopoly.
an encyclopedia is a work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or treats comprehensively a particular branch of knowledge usually in articles arranged alphabetically often by subject. I'd say Wikipedia hits the nail on the head possibly more so that real encyclopedias do.
Human knowledge is lots of things, but accurate it often is not.
A lot of the Wikipedia bashers and nay-sayers have one unique problem: they don't get it. They want academic rigor and precise accuracy in something that is not edited exclusively by academics, experts and elites. Wikipedia is a look in to the hive mind of humanity - and reflects the daily winds of change in the common consensus and the fact that people perceive reality differently.
Wikipedia isn't broke and I hope it stays donation supported for a long time.
Lets be clear here, the two have absolutely NOTHING to do with each other. Digital rights management is essentially a technology mechanism to enforce (or hinder the breaking of) contract law.
By inference what the backlash is against is private parties FORCING bad contracts on consumers due to collusion. RIAA has effectively conspired with record companies to prevent online sales of non-DRMed products. Consumers want it that way. And if that's what the buyer wants, the drumbeat to give them that will be louder and louder by the day.
Incidentally, many DRM schemes are simply schemes to make people buy a license they've already paid for again and again. You can see this clearly with Microsoft's Plays for Sure -> Zune transition: hey consumer, pay us for the third time for that old Van Halen song you originally bought in 1986!
Thunderbird has a couple of very nice new features:
1. Threaded messages with your replies included in the thread! This alone is going to may 2.0 better
2. New filter rules: forward and reply with template!
3. A little better speed...
Now all we need to make thunderbird closer to perfect:
1. A way to view conversation by recipient.
2. Better template managemetn
3. something that can identify non-spam commercial email and newsletters and get them out of the inbox.
If you use POP3 this can easily be accomplished by simply setting delivery to Inbox in local folders. Not sure if this can be done for IMAP.
I can tell you that statement is actually quite often crap. Working extra hours and dropping all sense of personal life for your employer is like putting a giant sign on your forehead that says DOORMAT.
The problem: many companies have a culture that rewards doormats for being walked on. Time is all we really have. Use it wisely.