It's really none of your business either, but I'm willing to admit that I use RealPlayer to listen to wrestling related content. For that matter, I use WMP for the same purpose too, on a different site.
If I was listening to or watching more questionable material, perhaps I would not feel this way, which is why I suggested that companies that wish to collect data about their users ask in a more open way than the license agreement, and give you the opportunity to disable the data collection if you wish to do so.
Because they can use that make compile a profile of you?
Adam's Realplayer Profile: Listens to wrestling shows for approximately 3 hours each week.
Send in the market droids! I watch and listen to wrestling, and I'm not afraid to admit it! Quick, shill those posters at me, those PPV videos, the collectors edition of Mick Foley's Mr Socko!
Oh, wait. They already do that during the commercials, and I don't mind a bit.
Because the security of that profile is not mentioned, much less proven?
This bothers me little. I've admitted it on Slashdot. Now Everyone Knows.
I've said it in previous posts, and I'll say it again: If this sort of information could be gathered and used to customize the type of advertising I see, I wouldn't mind one bit.
I know that's going against the common publicly stated (Vocal Minority, perhaps?) opinion here, but that's my opinion.
Why don't we instead ask them to be open about their data collection, and give us the option of disabling it if we wanted? It seems to make more sense to me than launching attacks on their servers and forcing them to take more secretive measures.
If RealNetworks wants to know that I listen to LiveAudioWrestling every Sunday evening or Monday afternoon, and throughout the week listen to commentaries in RealAudio by some individual wrestlers, why do I care? If it can improve the quality of the service (And I'm skeptical about whether it can, but this is a hypothetical situation), I don't see any problem with letting them know what I'm listening to.
(And yes, I'm aware that RealPlayer isn't the program in question, but it's the only software from RealNetworks that I use.)
Retro-actively open-sourcing dead or dying commercial software packages has absolutely no value at all to the open source community
Nothing else you posted supports this. True, some of it is more for the good publicity than anything else, but you can't say that nobody will gain anything from this release. And while the "community" (Whatever that is) may not benefit greatly from it, people who are current users of the software certainly will.
However, I would agree that retro-actively creating open source projects with such a restrictive license is not the most best way to do things for the potential hacker, but it's better than nothing.
I like email to appear in the standard fonts and layout *I* want, not what somebody on the other end of the line thinks is cool. I don't want to waste the time downloading the extra bloat for HTML. I don't want this bloat replicated to the hundreds of people that subscribe to the mailing lists I run. I don't want the PINE users who subscribe to the lists bitching endlessly at me because they're getting HTML attachements.
Comformity to standards brings efficiency.
If something needs formatting, that's what attachments are for.
Adam
Re:How Metallica found so many users on napster.
on
Product Placement
·
· Score: 3
If you want to connect to a particular Napster (Or OpenNap) server - and you run windows - you could always try Napigator.
Your web page lists you as being "somewhat agnostic" towards bootlegs - what is your opinion and stance on MP3s of bootlegs or other live performances that you wouldn't claim any sales or royalties on anyways?
The main problem with this is it's much less of a "push" system and more of a "pull" system. In the cases where people need the info right away, or can't be allowed to ignore something, mailing lists are superior.
I think if the majority of employees are used to using email and are comfortable with it, mailing lists are probably the wiser choice. But if the shop is primarily a bunch of computer gurus, they might appreciate the flexability of newsgroups.
Perhaps important/time sensitive material could go out via mailing lists, and newsgroups could be used for the rest.
As for it being hard or impossible to remember which groups exist, I suppose it depends on the list software - Mailman generates a HTML page with the names of all the public lists, descriptions, and links to the subscription/options pages. And the web interface is plenty handy, although the admin web interface leaves something to be desired, especially for larger lists.
I don't think I own any CDs that have only "one good song". In fact, I rarely skip ANY songs when listening to a CD. If you're continually buying CDs with only a couple "good songs".. well.. who the hell are you listening to? Or do you only like something if it has video and radio airplay?
I've never had a problem grabbing CD singles of recently released songs, and even singles up to a year old can be found at any decent store.
The policy for conduct on the mailing lists must be clear. Your workplace probably already has some sort of acceptable use policy - no downloading porn on company time, no racial jokes, etc. Someone I know got fired for sending a single off-colour joke over the company network to another employee, and that's a lousy way for someone to lose a job and a company to lose an employee. If the mailing lists that you spearheaded end up causing problems like that, it's going to be egg on your face.
Having each list tagged as Formal or Informal as David suggested is a good idea - the Formal lists are for work related materials only, and the Informal lists allow a bit of chatter, discussion about the upcoming paintball games, whatever, as long as it doesn't violate the companies electronic conduct policy.
Something else that bears mention: The staff has to be aware of these lists. They have to know when a new one is started, they have to know where they can read the logs, they have to have a reference for the common commands, etc.
They have to know how to UNSUBSCRIBE. Anyone who's run a mailing list knows that getting people who can't be bothered to remember the unsubscribe command - or save the "Welcome to the list, here's the commands you'll need" email - is one of the most requested things, and also a hassle.
If the lists are going to have a wide range of overlapping subjects - threads from one list being relevant to the other lists, I'd say go with one larger list. It might be a hassle for some people - and some will resent dealing with 50 emails a day when only 3 are of any importance to them - but on the other hand you don't want relevant information being passed around on a list that the person who needs to see it isn't subscribed to.
This is the case where subject keywords can be a big help. As long as users remember to put the right keyword in the subject of their posts, filtering and skimming becomes alot easier. This does necessitate some level of clueful users, however.
If the lists will have very little or no overlapping subjects, I say the best way to do them is to split them up. This also helps ensure that people will be reading stuff that is relevant and interesting to them, and therefore it's more likely to be useful and stay focused and productive.
All major mailing list software allows you to keep online archives, so you can keep those on a sensible place on the Intranet for users who might want to casually browse other lists or go back and re-read threads from days past.
Also, you haven't mentioned doing this yet, but it would be a good idea to ask the staff what they think, too:-)
I'd love customized commercials. No anti-smoking commercials (I'm a non-smoker). No feminine hygiene product commercials. No Pepsi commercials. No commercials for Larry King Live.
Honestly, if you're choosing to vote by hitting the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" button, what sort of invasion of privacy is it? Unless you/have/ to vote, it's no invasion at all - no different from an Open Source author/asking/ you to submit comments and feedback. The automatically taping of something is rather forward, but as long as it's smart enough to not fill all my hard drive space before I record RAW is WAR, who cares? It can be deleted, and the unit has already made the computations that I might also like WCW Nitro, even without recording it.
The ebook IS a PDF file, but you can't read it in Acrobat because Glassbooks uses a plugin that it doesn't install into Acrobat (I tried it in Acrobat proper, I don't have Reader installed on this machine). So it's a PDF file, but you can't read it in the standard PDF reader, unless you can manually install the Glassbook plugin into Acrobat.
Also, Riding the Bullet has printing disabled. Wonderful.:P
I've done some thinking and note-taking about this concept too. It actually started out because I wanted to allow people to comment on articles posted to a website I run in a sort of "BugZilla" way, allowing the author of the document to sift through them based on what the comment was classified as (Typo-grammar-spelling/content/structure/etc), "Close" comments as necessary, and generally provide a structured approach towards commentary on documents. Anyone who's been on a mailing list where documents are edited knows how time consuming it can be to dig through multiple comments on an article and integrate them into the article. From this concept, it became obvious to me that it would be beneficial for the authors to be able to edit documents right from the web, so they don't need to be uploaded via FTP or sent to another human, then uploaded. I haven't really accounted for a document having multiple authors, but that shouldn't be a problem. Different permission levels would allow some people to only comment on the article, while authors could comment, edit the articles they're listed as author for, and edit/remove comments for those articles. I've started working towards a partial implementation of this on the website in question, but I'm hampered by lack of time at the moment, so there's nothing to show for it yet. FWIW, I'm mostly an amatuer at this kind of stuff - this would be my first big web based coding project. The files I'm dealing with are plain HTML files with minimal formatting, and I'm planning on using PHP and mySQL, with the entire (Admin and public) interface being web-based. It would, of course, be Open Source:-) Adam
They must start a club or after school group for programmers that work on OSS. One of the side benefits of OSS is how useful it is to teach up and coming programmers. Continue to donate your time to foster the skills of this up and coming group.
This is fine - if the person in question has the time to donate to help out with it. If the person in question doesn't have the time, it hinges on the person who will be coordinating the 'Computing Club' to have enough of an understanding of Open Source to be able to represent it right, and make the people in the club understand what Free Software is about..
I would have been more than happy if my high school had offered a computer club of any sort, but due to a teacher who didn't want to donate his free time to it (And I can't blame the man, he was past retirement age and was only still teaching because the school basically begged him to.), nothing like that was offered for us.
Donating to a local school isn't a bad idea, but I think that donating Time would be a far better thing to do in this case, if possible.
As for other ideas - I agree that documentation project would be a good place to donate some money. As would going through the list of software that you use and sending a small donation to the primary authors of said software, while it not be a great financial help to them, would be more than appreciated by almost anyone, I'm sure.
A little story, if I may (As a whopping 4 people will read this, being that it's a day after the story is posted..;) ). I edit/compile/publish a electronic magazine, as well as do some writing and helping out with other websites. I once reviewed a net.book that somebody had created for the roleplaying game Shadowrun. A month or so later, the compiler of said net.book sent me a printed and bound copy of the book.
That was cool. Sure, it probably only cost him 10-15 bucks to get printed, but that's not the important thing. He spent his time and money getting this book printed - even though he had NO need to, because I'd already published this review, and any good/bad effects from it had already taken effect.
That's cool. That's what keeps people who do things for the community (Whatever community you may belong to, I'm not speaking of the Open Source community) doing the things that they may do. For the pat on the back after a job well done.
I couldn't in the time of my life understand the acrobat format. The size is 3 time of the zipped html files. Any one care to explain that to me?
Quite simply, PDF is a binary format that preserves exact layout - HTML can't do that. You use a HTML file when you want to get something across with minimal fuss, and a PDF file when you want exact layout to be displayed, such as a book/magazine/advertisement/etc.
A few months back, I was reading a newsgroup devoted to a singer, and somebody was offering email accounts at a few domain names with her name in it. I believe he was charging 10 bucks a month, which is pretty high for a vanity email account.. so he got a few minor flames, especially as he wasn't someone who was recognized in the newsgroup.
So after this, he said something to the extent of "Fine! You people don't know what this costs me, you're all ungrateful, and I'm selling the domains on Amazon, via auction!" I checked into it, and it turns out that this guy didn't even own the domain names to start with! I sent a message to the abuse department at the auctions service at Amazon, and posted a message to the newsgroup saying that he didn't even own this domains, and explained that anyone could buy these without going through his auction.
Nobody did buy them, although I believed he registered them midway through the auction. Turns out he did the same thing with another female singer (Who mostly has fans not old enough to use a credit card...), and I would assume that if I kept following his progress he does the same thing fairly frequently.
Unloading a domain name you don't use is fine. Gobbling up domains and auctioning them off is lame. Trying to sell things that you don't even own - or don't have a guarantee of owning - is criminal.
WWF- Wrestlers from all over the world flex and grunt in the WWF. They come here because only in the US is this art form appreciated:)
Damn. Someone better tell the 60,000 Japanese people that attend single events that they aren't supposed to be there..;-) (Same sport, but vastly different styles, I'll give you that. Still, you see more North American wrestlers going to Japan than Japanese to NA..)
Adam J TSS Productions Posting Quality Off-Topic to Slashdot for the first time!
Slashdot Mirror
It's really none of your business either, but I'm willing to admit that I use RealPlayer to listen to wrestling related content. For that matter, I use WMP for the same purpose too, on a different site.
If I was listening to or watching more questionable material, perhaps I would not feel this way, which is why I suggested that companies that wish to collect data about their users ask in a more open way than the license agreement, and give you the opportunity to disable the data collection if you wish to do so.
Because they can use that make compile a profile of you?
Adam's Realplayer Profile: Listens to wrestling shows for approximately 3 hours each week.
Send in the market droids! I watch and listen to wrestling, and I'm not afraid to admit it! Quick, shill those posters at me, those PPV videos, the collectors edition of Mick Foley's Mr Socko!
Oh, wait. They already do that during the commercials, and I don't mind a bit.
Because the security of that profile is not mentioned, much less proven?
This bothers me little. I've admitted it on Slashdot. Now Everyone Knows.
I've said it in previous posts, and I'll say it again: If this sort of information could be gathered and used to customize the type of advertising I see, I wouldn't mind one bit.
I know that's going against the common publicly stated (Vocal Minority, perhaps?) opinion here, but that's my opinion.
Adam
Why don't we instead ask them to be open about their data collection, and give us the option of disabling it if we wanted? It seems to make more sense to me than launching attacks on their servers and forcing them to take more secretive measures.
If RealNetworks wants to know that I listen to LiveAudioWrestling every Sunday evening or Monday afternoon, and throughout the week listen to commentaries in RealAudio by some individual wrestlers, why do I care? If it can improve the quality of the service (And I'm skeptical about whether it can, but this is a hypothetical situation), I don't see any problem with letting them know what I'm listening to.
(And yes, I'm aware that RealPlayer isn't the program in question, but it's the only software from RealNetworks that I use.)
Adam
Nothing else you posted supports this. True, some of it is more for the good publicity than anything else, but you can't say that nobody will gain anything from this release. And while the "community" (Whatever that is) may not benefit greatly from it, people who are current users of the software certainly will.
However, I would agree that retro-actively creating open source projects with such a restrictive license is not the most best way to do things for the potential hacker, but it's better than nothing.
Adam
And the flipside to this:
Why do we need more than plain text for email?
I like email to appear in the standard fonts and layout *I* want, not what somebody on the other end of the line thinks is cool. I don't want to waste the time downloading the extra bloat for HTML. I don't want this bloat replicated to the hundreds of people that subscribe to the mailing lists I run. I don't want the PINE users who subscribe to the lists bitching endlessly at me because they're getting HTML attachements.
Comformity to standards brings efficiency.
If something needs formatting, that's what attachments are for.
Adam
Adam
Your web page lists you as being "somewhat agnostic" towards bootlegs - what is your opinion and stance on MP3s of bootlegs or other live performances that you wouldn't claim any sales or royalties on anyways?
Adam
The main problem with this is it's much less of a "push" system and more of a "pull" system. In the cases where people need the info right away, or can't be allowed to ignore something, mailing lists are superior.
I think if the majority of employees are used to using email and are comfortable with it, mailing lists are probably the wiser choice. But if the shop is primarily a bunch of computer gurus, they might appreciate the flexability of newsgroups.
Perhaps important/time sensitive material could go out via mailing lists, and newsgroups could be used for the rest.
As for it being hard or impossible to remember which groups exist, I suppose it depends on the list software - Mailman generates a HTML page with the names of all the public lists, descriptions, and links to the subscription/options pages. And the web interface is plenty handy, although the admin web interface leaves something to be desired, especially for larger lists.
Adam
I don't think I own any CDs that have only "one good song". In fact, I rarely skip ANY songs when listening to a CD. If you're continually buying CDs with only a couple "good songs".. well.. who the hell are you listening to? Or do you only like something if it has video and radio airplay?
I've never had a problem grabbing CD singles of recently released songs, and even singles up to a year old can be found at any decent store.
Adam
Something that came to mind while reading this:
The policy for conduct on the mailing lists must be clear. Your workplace probably already has some sort of acceptable use policy - no downloading porn on company time, no racial jokes, etc. Someone I know got fired for sending a single off-colour joke over the company network to another employee, and that's a lousy way for someone to lose a job and a company to lose an employee. If the mailing lists that you spearheaded end up causing problems like that, it's going to be egg on your face.
Having each list tagged as Formal or Informal as David suggested is a good idea - the Formal lists are for work related materials only, and the Informal lists allow a bit of chatter, discussion about the upcoming paintball games, whatever, as long as it doesn't violate the companies electronic conduct policy.
Something else that bears mention: The staff has to be aware of these lists. They have to know when a new one is started, they have to know where they can read the logs, they have to have a reference for the common commands, etc.
They have to know how to UNSUBSCRIBE. Anyone who's run a mailing list knows that getting people who can't be bothered to remember the unsubscribe command - or save the "Welcome to the list, here's the commands you'll need" email - is one of the most requested things, and also a hassle.
Adam
If the lists are going to have a wide range of overlapping subjects - threads from one list being relevant to the other lists, I'd say go with one larger list. It might be a hassle for some people - and some will resent dealing with 50 emails a day when only 3 are of any importance to them - but on the other hand you don't want relevant information being passed around on a list that the person who needs to see it isn't subscribed to.
:-)
This is the case where subject keywords can be a big help. As long as users remember to put the right keyword in the subject of their posts, filtering and skimming becomes alot easier. This does necessitate some level of clueful users, however.
If the lists will have very little or no overlapping subjects, I say the best way to do them is to split them up. This also helps ensure that people will be reading stuff that is relevant and interesting to them, and therefore it's more likely to be useful and stay focused and productive.
All major mailing list software allows you to keep online archives, so you can keep those on a sensible place on the Intranet for users who might want to casually browse other lists or go back and re-read threads from days past.
Also, you haven't mentioned doing this yet, but it would be a good idea to ask the staff what they think, too
Adam
http://www.broadcast.com/video/ ListenPages/ma/3471/ for an online version of the movie (RealPlayer G2 and Windows Media Player only).
Being a roleplayer I find the movie (and the book it was based on) lousy from a factual point of view, but it's amusing none the less.
Adam
I'd love customized commercials. No anti-smoking commercials (I'm a non-smoker). No feminine hygiene product commercials. No Pepsi commercials. No commercials for Larry King Live.
/have/ to vote, it's no invasion at all - no different from an Open Source author /asking/ you to submit comments and feedback. The automatically taping of something is rather forward, but as long as it's smart enough to not fill all my hard drive space before I record RAW is WAR, who cares? It can be deleted, and the unit has already made the computations that I might also like WCW Nitro, even without recording it.
Honestly, if you're choosing to vote by hitting the "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" button, what sort of invasion of privacy is it? Unless you
Adam
The ebook IS a PDF file, but you can't read it in Acrobat because Glassbooks uses a plugin that it doesn't install into Acrobat (I tried it in Acrobat proper, I don't have Reader installed on this machine). So it's a PDF file, but you can't read it in the standard PDF reader, unless you can manually install the Glassbook plugin into Acrobat.
:P
Also, Riding the Bullet has printing disabled. Wonderful.
Adam
It would also default to "Post as Plain Text".. *sigh*
Adam
Feeling blonde
I've done some thinking and note-taking about this concept too. It actually started out because I wanted to allow people to comment on articles posted to a website I run in a sort of "BugZilla" way, allowing the author of the document to sift through them based on what the comment was classified as (Typo-grammar-spelling/content/structure/etc), "Close" comments as necessary, and generally provide a structured approach towards commentary on documents. Anyone who's been on a mailing list where documents are edited knows how time consuming it can be to dig through multiple comments on an article and integrate them into the article. From this concept, it became obvious to me that it would be beneficial for the authors to be able to edit documents right from the web, so they don't need to be uploaded via FTP or sent to another human, then uploaded. I haven't really accounted for a document having multiple authors, but that shouldn't be a problem. Different permission levels would allow some people to only comment on the article, while authors could comment, edit the articles they're listed as author for, and edit/remove comments for those articles. I've started working towards a partial implementation of this on the website in question, but I'm hampered by lack of time at the moment, so there's nothing to show for it yet. FWIW, I'm mostly an amatuer at this kind of stuff - this would be my first big web based coding project. The files I'm dealing with are plain HTML files with minimal formatting, and I'm planning on using PHP and mySQL, with the entire (Admin and public) interface being web-based. It would, of course, be Open Source :-) Adam
This is fine - if the person in question has the time to donate to help out with it. If the person in question doesn't have the time, it hinges on the person who will be coordinating the 'Computing Club' to have enough of an understanding of Open Source to be able to represent it right, and make the people in the club understand what Free Software is about..
I would have been more than happy if my high school had offered a computer club of any sort, but due to a teacher who didn't want to donate his free time to it (And I can't blame the man, he was past retirement age and was only still teaching because the school basically begged him to.), nothing like that was offered for us.
Donating to a local school isn't a bad idea, but I think that donating Time would be a far better thing to do in this case, if possible.
As for other ideas - I agree that documentation project would be a good place to donate some money. As would going through the list of software that you use and sending a small donation to the primary authors of said software, while it not be a great financial help to them, would be more than appreciated by almost anyone, I'm sure.
A little story, if I may (As a whopping 4 people will read this, being that it's a day after the story is posted.. ;) ). I edit/compile/publish a electronic magazine, as well as do some writing and helping out with other websites. I once reviewed a net.book that somebody had created for the roleplaying game Shadowrun. A month or so later, the compiler of said net.book sent me a printed and bound copy of the book.
That was cool. Sure, it probably only cost him 10-15 bucks to get printed, but that's not the important thing. He spent his time and money getting this book printed - even though he had NO need to, because I'd already published this review, and any good/bad effects from it had already taken effect.
That's cool. That's what keeps people who do things for the community (Whatever community you may belong to, I'm not speaking of the Open Source community) doing the things that they may do. For the pat on the back after a job well done.
Adam J
Tlack of moderation to this comment raises another question. Do any Slashdot moderators have sex at all? AJ
http://www.broadcast.com/video/ ListenPages/ma/3471/ is a Realvideo and MS Streaming video of Mazes and Monsters, in full. The video quality is tiny, but the sound is okay.
I just wish you could download the darned thing, and not just stream it.
Adam
It's a *terrible* film, but I watch it whenever it comes on TBS, which it tends to do a couple times a year. The roleplaying scenes are amusing.
Adam
Much handier than printing out a couple dozen GIFs :-)
Best,
Adam
Adam
TSS Productions
Guess I shouldn't have deleted M9 :P
Adam
TSS Productions
Quite simply, PDF is a binary format that preserves exact layout - HTML can't do that. You use a HTML file when you want to get something across with minimal fuss, and a PDF file when you want exact layout to be displayed, such as a book/magazine/advertisement/etc.
Adam J
TSS Productions
So after this, he said something to the extent of "Fine! You people don't know what this costs me, you're all ungrateful, and I'm selling the domains on Amazon, via auction!" I checked into it, and it turns out that this guy didn't even own the domain names to start with! I sent a message to the abuse department at the auctions service at Amazon, and posted a message to the newsgroup saying that he didn't even own this domains, and explained that anyone could buy these without going through his auction.
Nobody did buy them, although I believed he registered them midway through the auction. Turns out he did the same thing with another female singer (Who mostly has fans not old enough to use a credit card...), and I would assume that if I kept following his progress he does the same thing fairly frequently.
Unloading a domain name you don't use is fine. Gobbling up domains and auctioning them off is lame. Trying to sell things that you don't even own - or don't have a guarantee of owning - is criminal.
Adam J
TSS Productions
Damn. Someone better tell the 60,000 Japanese people that attend single events that they aren't supposed to be there.. ;-) (Same sport, but vastly different styles, I'll give you that. Still, you see more North American wrestlers going to Japan than Japanese to NA..)
Adam J
TSS Productions
Posting Quality Off-Topic to Slashdot for the first time!