Since you can create multiple refractions inside a hologram, you can create a much better lense than with diffraction gratings. So while both are basically flat lenses, the holographic version is much more efficient.
10x increase for the holographic cell may sound bad compared to 100x-1000x for mirrors/lens. But in the installations I know that use mirrors or lenses they take up most of the area. If 10% of the whole surface was PV cells and 90% were e.g.. mirrors (a very conservative assumption, I think the PV cells will cover less then 1%) you would gain an effective increase of 100x instead of 10x. (This is not entirely true, since these new PV cells are only part energy creating silicon, most of their surface is just the holographic lense. But still a massive space saver compared to classical mirrors.)
Plus you will usually have to place mirrors on the ground due to their weight and the weight of the motors attached to them to make them follow the sun. In contrast you can place PV cells on almost any surface, although you will loose a lot of efficiency if you can not orient them towards the sun.
If you completely ignore that there are theoretically more efficient methods of concentrating the energy onto PC cells, you still get a 10x improvement over the typical installation (on a roof, with no fancy mirrors at all). And then 10x is huge.
During this years CeBIT I talked to some projects from German universities that were trying to measure stress levels from several biosignals and adapt system behavior accordingly. One of the systems was used in computerized telephone systems. They try to determine your stress level from changes in your voice. If your stress level rises, you get a higher priority to talk to a person instead of the machine. They told me that German Telekom was already using their system and this feature for their hotlines.
This is not only relevant to web design but to any programming at all.
Shouldn't the only be stricken as in This is not relevant to web design, but to any other kind of programming?
One of the big advantages of HTML is that it usually scales down nicely. I admit that once you start to rely on Javascript/DHTML/AJAX etc. exclusively you will run into problems, but if you care in any way about search engines being able to crawl your site you will most likely have at least a site map that can be handled by googlebot as well as lynx, links, w3m and any revision of Netscape or IE, however old they are. The pages will possibly look like crap if you rely on advanced CSS like hiding DIVs on demand, but will most likely still be useful. [This wont apply if you just cashed in 10 millions from a VC to build an MS Office clone in JS].
This usually will not require a second development tree, just keeping your design clean and based on standards. I consider this a mayor sales point to management. As a nice extra you will even be able to handle requests from the future mobile web crowd, reaching your side from their smart phone, or even the millions of kids Nicolas Negroponte intends to provide with $100 laptops.
For non-web platforms: as long as it pays.
This may be cruel, but if you invest into older technology that will not generate any new sales, this money cannot be put into offering better service and features or price cuts for the new versions. It will be hard to determine how long something pays, e.g. customers may buy the newer version because they have learned from experience that the product will be supported for a long time, so not supporting W95 might actually be the wrong move. Try to determine how many support request you get from users with older versions and if they are returning customers. Determine the cost (in money and new features that cannot be implemented due to support for the old platform) for keeping the old version on board. If the costs are higher, kick it. Beneath other things you are responsible to stay in business, so you actually can support the current version for your customers.
The cigarette brand West sponsored the russian cosmonaut training center in the 90s.
When the Russians delivered the supply module for the ISS, the rocket carrying the module had a "Pizza hut" logo on the side.
When MIR dropped into the ocean, Taco Bell placed a 40*40 feet large floating target in the supposed drop zone and claimed free Taco Bell for all US citizens if parts of MIR hit the target.
I think we can assume that there may be thousands of good reasons for something, but reaching for peoples wallets will convince them much easier. Stopping smoking will make you healthier, driving a beetle instead of an SUV will slow down further global warming, switching to open source will increase security and flexibility.
But Norway reduced the number of smokers by massively increasing tobacco tax, people demand more efficient cars now the oil prices are way up and the main reason for OSS adaption is cost saving.
It's interesting that the article mentions another study by IDC in Europe (instead of one by Optaros and InformationWeek querying American companies) with different results:
The results of this survey contrast sharply with the results of a similar survey conducted in Europe by IDC. According to the results of the IDC survey, which used data collected from over 600 companies, quality and flexibility (rather than cost savings) are driving open source adoption in Europe.
But then most European countries signed the Kyoto treaty.
If Disney is worth 60 bill and buys pixar for 7 billion then they will still be worth 60 billion.
If Disney is worth 60 billions before and after the aquisition, and Pixar is worth 7 billions before and does not exist anymore afterwards, where did the 7 billion go?
It's funny that most speculation is about how well Apples digital media distribution would fit to Disneys movie and merchandising franchise, when Disney is considering Pixar, not Apple. And there are a number of interesting things Disney could gain from Pixar besides the movie franchise. People.
When Apple went looking for a new operating system to replace the classic Mac OS, they ended up (after looking inhouse and at BeOS and even WinNT) with NeXTSTEP from Steve Jobs new company NeXT. They did not license NeXTSTEP (or the OpenStep Specification NeXT developed in corporation with Sun), instead they bought NeXT for $US 400 million. Steve Jobs came onboard as a consultant, but shortly after that replaced Gibert Amelio as CEO of Apple. He was not the only one, NeXTs Avi Tevanian became President of Software technology (I think), in charge of Apples OS development, other NeXT employees (Jon Rubinstein, Bud Tribble etc) got top positions at Apple. A lot of people considered this Apple paying money NeXT to take over Apple.
Disney is worth about 60 billion. If they buy Pixar for seven, the new Disney + Pixar should be worth about 67 billion (mind my non-existent knowledge about company evaluation), about 5% of which would belong to Steve Jobs (he owns 50% of Pixar). Apple was worth more than 20 times the $400 million they payed for NeXT when they bought it, they had seven billion in cash reserve alone, and they payed in cash, not stocks.
So maybe we will see another reverse takeover. I do not believe that Steve Jobs would want to become CEO (but will most likely join the board), but Edwin Catmull could become head of the animation and feature film branch or John Lasseter could become Disneys "creative director". He already worked there before joining Pixar (than Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group). The quality of Disneys productions could only go up.
Basically: a symbol is a variable and can hold any value. If a system knows that Dolly is a sheep and that sheeps are animals and that animals eat, it can guess that Dolly eats. But it cannot tell if Dolly is a plane, unless someone somewhere made that relation (planes are machines, machines are not living beings, animals are living beings, so Dolly can't be a plane). They would need an unlimited amount of rules.
A human "knows" about the meaning (semantic) of the symbol "sheep". Although this has never been discussed, he could answer that a sheep will not stand still if set on fire. The question is how the human is able to tell this. He does not need a sharp line of arguments.
But maybe he simply uses an enormous amount of small rules that seem to form something more complex called semantic in the sense of the article. The OpenCyc project assumes this and tries to teach a machine millions of small rules (assertions and concepts) to create sort of common sense based on a real world view (requiring to "know" about the world) in software.
Steve Jobs during the keynote at MacExpo when presenting Photoshop running on Rosetta:
While the performance of Photoshop is not gonna be strong enough in Rosetta for a professional that spends hours per day in photoshop, it's gonna be great for most of us who use photoshop occasionally.
Speed is a marketing issue. Real world performance not surprisingly lower.
It fixes the problem by MARKETING. The trick is the definition of the problem.
Version numbers obviously will never fix technical problems. But they are important for perception. Originally anything before 1.0 was considered alpha or beta and usually not released to public. Today several open source products are used in production for years before reaching 1.0. This basically moves the responsibility to the user. If his production system fails, it is his fault, because he used "unfinished" software. No company (besides Google) could afford to have user work with beta versions for years. And even Google only gets away with it because their betas are really 1.0 version for which they have not yet found a way how to make money with. The version schemas below 1.0 are basically pointless for users and should be reserved for developer releases only.
You seem to be a bit touchy this morning. To much coffee?
Coffee? Me? NEVER! Pepsi, actually. But I think this is not really related to my caffein level. I keep it at a very high level, so my brain adapted.
It's about the header: Apple Breaks RSS with Photocasting. I read it, but sort of didn't believe, because this would be contrary to Apples former behavior. So I read the article, which is somewhat sensational by itself, but in the end gives the clear impression that this about a bad implementation, not about an intended design. Barry Norton took the most sensational parts of the article, added some conspiracy and got it posted on slashdot
So maybe the thing I should be really annoyed about is me still being naive and believing that there is a connection between a sensational post on slashdot and reality. Unfortunately, sometimes there is, so I wont simply stop reading slashdot.
BTW, I agree with you that Apple should not have delivered an unfinished version. But I'm not surprised they did. Maybe they didn't realize it, because it works with most RSS readers (the article says some readers don't work). If the post would be titled "Apples Photocasting incompatible with some RSS readers" I would have simply ignored it. But most likely it would never have been posted on slashdot in the first place. Bad "journalism" works.
Is it a case of just doing things wrong, or a case of doing things wrong and expecting the world to follow these changes?
Do you thing the world will change its way of handling RSS due to Apples implementation of photocasting? I guess some readers will accept Apples RSS misbehavior as an alternative to be compatible, like web browsers accept shitty HTML pages. But most will not. If they even care (Apple is still a dwarf in the RSS world), they will simply wait if this will not be fixed in a couple of weeks. Apples own RSS reader is Safari, used by 2%-3% of all surfers. Not really something you worry about being picked up by users as an alternative to your RSS reader temporarily without photocasting compatibility.
Strictly speaking Apple is not doing anything wrong. RSS is not an official standard governed by a standards body, and anybody can make changes and introduce new elements and extensions.
and
But early tests showed that the feature fails to work with some feed readers because it deviates from common RSS practices.
Apple fucked up the implementation of photocasting. Technically they didn't break it, but didn't use it in a way some feed readers expected. This seems to be the result of incompetence, not an attempt to create their own proprietary RSS version.
This looks like a case of a 1.0 version. Common wisdom is that commercial software sucks before 2.0. iPhoto 1.0 was dog slow when you had more than a coupe of hundreds of pictures in your library. Aperture 1.0 messed up some image correction parameters. All this was fixed in the following releases. Open Source software avoids this by staying below 1.0 for a decade. Since Steve Jobs made a big point about photocasting being compatible with existing readers during the MacExpo keynote and there being no sign of intended "embrace and extend", we can assume that this will fixed with the next iPhoto update.
Nothing to be seen here besides another sensational Apple bashing report. Please move along.
There has been talk about applying extra fees for "higher quality network" for a long time. In the beginning it sounded like a great idea: data that needs to be transported in realtime (phone calls, stock ticker) would be charged more then data where in time or even in order delivery would be unimportant (ftp transfers etc.)
But something else happened: transfer and bandwidth exploded. I think I remember predictions that by 2008 (????) the average internet user will transfer about 600MB per day. At the same time the bandwidth needed for voice transfer (and even video conferencing) is decreasing. So even if the carriers would charge ten times more for a high "Quality of Service", the data transfered for these services is neglectable and would not justify the extra cost for providing networks with different levels of QoS or even the extra cost for billing it.
So if you want to maintain the idea of "extra charges", you have to look for important data services with "high importance", maybe not being just in time, but being always accessible. There was an outcry a couple of days ago, when (I think) del.icio.us wasn't accessible for some time, the same would be true for ebay or amazon. So the idea is economically right, if you still believe in QoS.
But in reality bandwidth the amount of bandwidth made reserving part of it for special purposes less necessary, other problems can be solved by technology, like caching for video streaming. And since those all work on raw IP networks, there is no big challenge to make a better offer than the bells, once they increase their operating costs by adding technology to enable delivery of QoS network transfers and their billing. I'm sure the carriers know that, so this will never happen. I think it is more PR and demanding "protection" from the market. Usually followed by lobbying to change some law to protect the poor companies from the non existing harm they just created themself.
Ah, you changed it. Thank you! I apologize for impugning your motives.
Things going wrong most of the time isn't the result of people being malintended, but of people being ignorant/uninformed/stupid. Like in this case. I had not realized that the sig cannot be filtered from the comment. Some users clued me in. Complaining works:-)
I have not, but Triumph of the nerds is based on accidental empires
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
So you're saying that I should buy products from companies advertised in banner ads, not because I want them, but because I feel that it is my duty to sustain the market for banners?
No, you should not buy anything you do not want. And its not your duty to sustain the market for banners.
But if you want to buy a product advertised for by a banner you should not NOT buy it because it was advertised on a banner. And it would actually help to sustain the market for banners if you would not decide to ignore all banners by principle.
This is not a question of right or wrong behavior of a single person, its about the average behavior of a large group of people. Its like voting: You are aware that your single vote will most likely not change the complete vote. So in theory it does not matter whether you vote or not. But you know that the whole voting process only works because a lot of people do not think of it in terms of their single vote, but in terms of the votes of all the people.
Banners are similar. Blocking banners will not kill the banner market any more than not voting will disrupt democracy. But this is only true as long as the people blocking ads or not voting are a minority.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
But the idea that I somehow owe someone a look and a few clicks on their advertisements because I'm looking at their website is ridiculous.
This is not about owing anybody, its about common goods. Nobody can force you to drive an environmental friendly car and you owe it to nobody, but it is obviously good if you act in a way that keeps the environment intact, even if there are only long term benefits and maybe short term reduction of convenience. At least as long as you have no proven alternative to the current environment.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Adblock has a setting that will let you download the ad but not display it so you still support the site.
Regarding the big picture, this does not solve the problem. Websites can finance themselves by placing banner ads because people actually see (and click) those ads and purchase something, giving the ad publisher revenue which he can invest in banner ads. If you make banner ads inefficient by downloading, but never displaying them, there will be no more initiative to place any ads, therefore removing support from the website again. And I honestly do not believe that T-shirts and donations are a business model for more than a very small number of fan sites.
Of course all this only applies in an "if most people act that way" scenario, but this is how economy actually works.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
the picture is displayed because it is an attached image, not a remote one
I don't see a line (Thunderbird 1.0.5 MacOSX), but I see a base64 encoded GIF in the source, so that's it. Any way to get Thunderbird to also ask about these inline pictures first?
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Ok, suppose he just made you a foe without telling you why - giving you no explanation and no chance to change anything. What would be the point?
If he had just made me foe without telling why, this would have been a wasted opportunity for me. But he would not be annoyed anymore due to improper signature handling. He actually told me, I changed it, since he had made me foe he could not read it, so I mailed him about the misunderstanding and the fix, he mailed back, now he is a fan. I collected five other foes, most likely due to the same reason without realizing it. They will never learn about it.
I am a very firm believer in diplomacy and discussion.
Re:Maybe not declining, but simply changing
on
Spam is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Copy-and-paste is more likely
Automatic appending, actually. But no more, since I have been enlightened about the proper application of signatures on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
Since you can create multiple refractions inside a hologram, you can create a much better lense than with diffraction gratings. So while both are basically flat lenses, the holographic version is much more efficient.
10x increase for the holographic cell may sound bad compared to 100x-1000x for mirrors/lens. But in the installations I know that use mirrors or lenses they take up most of the area. If 10% of the whole surface was PV cells and 90% were e.g.. mirrors (a very conservative assumption, I think the PV cells will cover less then 1%) you would gain an effective increase of 100x instead of 10x. (This is not entirely true, since these new PV cells are only part energy creating silicon, most of their surface is just the holographic lense. But still a massive space saver compared to classical mirrors.)
Plus you will usually have to place mirrors on the ground due to their weight and the weight of the motors attached to them to make them follow the sun. In contrast you can place PV cells on almost any surface, although you will loose a lot of efficiency if you can not orient them towards the sun.
If you completely ignore that there are theoretically more efficient methods of concentrating the energy onto PC cells, you still get a 10x improvement over the typical installation (on a roof, with no fancy mirrors at all). And then 10x is huge.
During this years CeBIT I talked to some projects from German universities that were trying to measure stress levels from several biosignals and adapt system behavior accordingly. One of the systems was used in computerized telephone systems. They try to determine your stress level from changes in your voice. If your stress level rises, you get a higher priority to talk to a person instead of the machine. They told me that German Telekom was already using their system and this feature for their hotlines.
Chriss
Shouldn't the only be stricken as in This is not relevant to web design, but to any other kind of programming?
One of the big advantages of HTML is that it usually scales down nicely. I admit that once you start to rely on Javascript/DHTML/AJAX etc. exclusively you will run into problems, but if you care in any way about search engines being able to crawl your site you will most likely have at least a site map that can be handled by googlebot as well as lynx, links, w3m and any revision of Netscape or IE, however old they are. The pages will possibly look like crap if you rely on advanced CSS like hiding DIVs on demand, but will most likely still be useful. [This wont apply if you just cashed in 10 millions from a VC to build an MS Office clone in JS].
This usually will not require a second development tree, just keeping your design clean and based on standards. I consider this a mayor sales point to management. As a nice extra you will even be able to handle requests from the future mobile web crowd, reaching your side from their smart phone, or even the millions of kids Nicolas Negroponte intends to provide with $100 laptops.
For non-web platforms: as long as it pays.
This may be cruel, but if you invest into older technology that will not generate any new sales, this money cannot be put into offering better service and features or price cuts for the new versions. It will be hard to determine how long something pays, e.g. customers may buy the newer version because they have learned from experience that the product will be supported for a long time, so not supporting W95 might actually be the wrong move. Try to determine how many support request you get from users with older versions and if they are returning customers. Determine the cost (in money and new features that cannot be implemented due to support for the old platform) for keeping the old version on board. If the costs are higher, kick it. Beneath other things you are responsible to stay in business, so you actually can support the current version for your customers.
The cigarette brand West sponsored the russian cosmonaut training center in the 90s.
When the Russians delivered the supply module for the ISS, the rocket carrying the module had a "Pizza hut" logo on the side.
When MIR dropped into the ocean, Taco Bell placed a 40*40 feet large floating target in the supposed drop zone and claimed free Taco Bell for all US citizens if parts of MIR hit the target.
Maybe Hoover could sponsor NASA expeditions.
I think we can assume that there may be thousands of good reasons for something, but reaching for peoples wallets will convince them much easier. Stopping smoking will make you healthier, driving a beetle instead of an SUV will slow down further global warming, switching to open source will increase security and flexibility.
But Norway reduced the number of smokers by massively increasing tobacco tax, people demand more efficient cars now the oil prices are way up and the main reason for OSS adaption is cost saving.
It's interesting that the article mentions another study by IDC in Europe (instead of one by Optaros and InformationWeek querying American companies) with different results:
But then most European countries signed the Kyoto treaty.Since Steve Jobs becomes the largest share holder of Disney, this seems to be a stock transaction, at least for the 50% of Pixar stock he holds.
If Disney is worth 60 billions before and after the aquisition, and Pixar is worth 7 billions before and does not exist anymore afterwards, where did the 7 billion go?
It's funny that most speculation is about how well Apples digital media distribution would fit to Disneys movie and merchandising franchise, when Disney is considering Pixar, not Apple. And there are a number of interesting things Disney could gain from Pixar besides the movie franchise. People.
When Apple went looking for a new operating system to replace the classic Mac OS, they ended up (after looking inhouse and at BeOS and even WinNT) with NeXTSTEP from Steve Jobs new company NeXT. They did not license NeXTSTEP (or the OpenStep Specification NeXT developed in corporation with Sun), instead they bought NeXT for $US 400 million. Steve Jobs came onboard as a consultant, but shortly after that replaced Gibert Amelio as CEO of Apple. He was not the only one, NeXTs Avi Tevanian became President of Software technology (I think), in charge of Apples OS development, other NeXT employees (Jon Rubinstein, Bud Tribble etc) got top positions at Apple. A lot of people considered this Apple paying money NeXT to take over Apple.
Disney is worth about 60 billion. If they buy Pixar for seven, the new Disney + Pixar should be worth about 67 billion (mind my non-existent knowledge about company evaluation), about 5% of which would belong to Steve Jobs (he owns 50% of Pixar). Apple was worth more than 20 times the $400 million they payed for NeXT when they bought it, they had seven billion in cash reserve alone, and they payed in cash, not stocks.
So maybe we will see another reverse takeover. I do not believe that Steve Jobs would want to become CEO (but will most likely join the board), but Edwin Catmull could become head of the animation and feature film branch or John Lasseter could become Disneys "creative director". He already worked there before joining Pixar (than Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Group). The quality of Disneys productions could only go up.
Basically: a symbol is a variable and can hold any value. If a system knows that Dolly is a sheep and that sheeps are animals and that animals eat, it can guess that Dolly eats. But it cannot tell if Dolly is a plane, unless someone somewhere made that relation (planes are machines, machines are not living beings, animals are living beings, so Dolly can't be a plane). They would need an unlimited amount of rules.
A human "knows" about the meaning (semantic) of the symbol "sheep". Although this has never been discussed, he could answer that a sheep will not stand still if set on fire. The question is how the human is able to tell this. He does not need a sharp line of arguments.
But maybe he simply uses an enormous amount of small rules that seem to form something more complex called semantic in the sense of the article. The OpenCyc project assumes this and tries to teach a machine millions of small rules (assertions and concepts) to create sort of common sense based on a real world view (requiring to "know" about the world) in software.
If it breaks because you are incompetent, you will be fired. If it breaks because you decided it should break, you will be sued for sabotage.
Steve Jobs during the keynote at MacExpo when presenting Photoshop running on Rosetta:
Speed is a marketing issue. Real world performance not surprisingly lower.
It fixes the problem by MARKETING. The trick is the definition of the problem.
Version numbers obviously will never fix technical problems. But they are important for perception. Originally anything before 1.0 was considered alpha or beta and usually not released to public. Today several open source products are used in production for years before reaching 1.0. This basically moves the responsibility to the user. If his production system fails, it is his fault, because he used "unfinished" software. No company (besides Google) could afford to have user work with beta versions for years. And even Google only gets away with it because their betas are really 1.0 version for which they have not yet found a way how to make money with. The version schemas below 1.0 are basically pointless for users and should be reserved for developer releases only.
Coffee? Me? NEVER! Pepsi, actually. But I think this is not really related to my caffein level. I keep it at a very high level, so my brain adapted.
It's about the header: Apple Breaks RSS with Photocasting. I read it, but sort of didn't believe, because this would be contrary to Apples former behavior. So I read the article, which is somewhat sensational by itself, but in the end gives the clear impression that this about a bad implementation, not about an intended design. Barry Norton took the most sensational parts of the article, added some conspiracy and got it posted on slashdot
So maybe the thing I should be really annoyed about is me still being naive and believing that there is a connection between a sensational post on slashdot and reality. Unfortunately, sometimes there is, so I wont simply stop reading slashdot.
BTW, I agree with you that Apple should not have delivered an unfinished version. But I'm not surprised they did. Maybe they didn't realize it, because it works with most RSS readers (the article says some readers don't work). If the post would be titled "Apples Photocasting incompatible with some RSS readers" I would have simply ignored it. But most likely it would never have been posted on slashdot in the first place. Bad "journalism" works.
Do you thing the world will change its way of handling RSS due to Apples implementation of photocasting? I guess some readers will accept Apples RSS misbehavior as an alternative to be compatible, like web browsers accept shitty HTML pages. But most will not. If they even care (Apple is still a dwarf in the RSS world), they will simply wait if this will not be fixed in a couple of weeks. Apples own RSS reader is Safari, used by 2%-3% of all surfers. Not really something you worry about being picked up by users as an alternative to your RSS reader temporarily without photocasting compatibility.
This is stupid. And false. To quote TFU:
and
Apple fucked up the implementation of photocasting. Technically they didn't break it, but didn't use it in a way some feed readers expected. This seems to be the result of incompetence, not an attempt to create their own proprietary RSS version.
This looks like a case of a 1.0 version. Common wisdom is that commercial software sucks before 2.0. iPhoto 1.0 was dog slow when you had more than a coupe of hundreds of pictures in your library. Aperture 1.0 messed up some image correction parameters. All this was fixed in the following releases. Open Source software avoids this by staying below 1.0 for a decade. Since Steve Jobs made a big point about photocasting being compatible with existing readers during the MacExpo keynote and there being no sign of intended "embrace and extend", we can assume that this will fixed with the next iPhoto update.
Nothing to be seen here besides another sensational Apple bashing report. Please move along.
There has been talk about applying extra fees for "higher quality network" for a long time. In the beginning it sounded like a great idea: data that needs to be transported in realtime (phone calls, stock ticker) would be charged more then data where in time or even in order delivery would be unimportant (ftp transfers etc.)
But something else happened: transfer and bandwidth exploded. I think I remember predictions that by 2008 (????) the average internet user will transfer about 600MB per day. At the same time the bandwidth needed for voice transfer (and even video conferencing) is decreasing. So even if the carriers would charge ten times more for a high "Quality of Service", the data transfered for these services is neglectable and would not justify the extra cost for providing networks with different levels of QoS or even the extra cost for billing it.
So if you want to maintain the idea of "extra charges", you have to look for important data services with "high importance", maybe not being just in time, but being always accessible. There was an outcry a couple of days ago, when (I think) del.icio.us wasn't accessible for some time, the same would be true for ebay or amazon. So the idea is economically right, if you still believe in QoS.
But in reality bandwidth the amount of bandwidth made reserving part of it for special purposes less necessary, other problems can be solved by technology, like caching for video streaming. And since those all work on raw IP networks, there is no big challenge to make a better offer than the bells, once they increase their operating costs by adding technology to enable delivery of QoS network transfers and their billing. I'm sure the carriers know that, so this will never happen. I think it is more PR and demanding "protection" from the market. Usually followed by lobbying to change some law to protect the poor companies from the non existing harm they just created themself.
Things going wrong most of the time isn't the result of people being malintended, but of people being ignorant/uninformed/stupid. Like in this case. I had not realized that the sig cannot be filtered from the comment. Some users clued me in. Complaining works :-)
I have not, but Triumph of the nerds is based on accidental empires
No, you should not buy anything you do not want. And its not your duty to sustain the market for banners.
But if you want to buy a product advertised for by a banner you should not NOT buy it because it was advertised on a banner. And it would actually help to sustain the market for banners if you would not decide to ignore all banners by principle.
This is not a question of right or wrong behavior of a single person, its about the average behavior of a large group of people. Its like voting: You are aware that your single vote will most likely not change the complete vote. So in theory it does not matter whether you vote or not. But you know that the whole voting process only works because a lot of people do not think of it in terms of their single vote, but in terms of the votes of all the people.
Banners are similar. Blocking banners will not kill the banner market any more than not voting will disrupt democracy. But this is only true as long as the people blocking ads or not voting are a minority.
This is not about owing anybody, its about common goods. Nobody can force you to drive an environmental friendly car and you owe it to nobody, but it is obviously good if you act in a way that keeps the environment intact, even if there are only long term benefits and maybe short term reduction of convenience. At least as long as you have no proven alternative to the current environment.
Regarding the big picture, this does not solve the problem. Websites can finance themselves by placing banner ads because people actually see (and click) those ads and purchase something, giving the ad publisher revenue which he can invest in banner ads. If you make banner ads inefficient by downloading, but never displaying them, there will be no more initiative to place any ads, therefore removing support from the website again. And I honestly do not believe that T-shirts and donations are a business model for more than a very small number of fan sites.
Of course all this only applies in an "if most people act that way" scenario, but this is how economy actually works.
I don't see a line (Thunderbird 1.0.5 MacOSX), but I see a base64 encoded GIF in the source, so that's it. Any way to get Thunderbird to also ask about these inline pictures first?
If he had just made me foe without telling why, this would have been a wasted opportunity for me. But he would not be annoyed anymore due to improper signature handling. He actually told me, I changed it, since he had made me foe he could not read it, so I mailed him about the misunderstanding and the fix, he mailed back, now he is a fan. I collected five other foes, most likely due to the same reason without realizing it. They will never learn about it.
I am a very firm believer in diplomacy and discussion.
Automatic appending, actually. But no more, since I have been enlightened about the proper application of signatures on slashdot.