1) clicked on the link 2) got "can't find server" 3) clicked back button 4) got some weird gibberish in the window and 5) PRESTO! got minesweeper.
there was *no* user interaction except clicking the link and then the back button. there were *no* warnings, much less dialogs with "cancel" options.
this sucks, especially since "back" would be my default response in such a situation, to check what the link was that resulted in server not found (i often do that to check if there was bad javascript or something in the link).
i agree with you in principle, but as a net.artist i see one exception: if you go to a site expecting to find a net.artwork, and that includes sound on the entry page, it's another story.
so maybe the point is that you should not have auto-playing sounds if that sort of thing is not what the site is about.
in which case, i'd include *anything big* on the list of things you shouldn't have at the entry point of a "normal" sort of website. i hate it when the front page takes 2 mins to load; fat content should go deeper.
is this a repeat? anyone remember?
on
Tandys Never Die
·
· Score: 2, Redundant
i could swear i read another/. post on almost exactly the same topic, but my searches come up bare.
anyone else remember this? it was about the same tandy computers, and someone in the comments said s/he was using them for some kind of rugged research purposes, maybe marine...
...or maybe i'm smoking too much crack. but i'm allllmost sure...
...because he was obviously trying to match the style of the linked article:
"Makes Car Smarter", yes, SmartVehiclePC.com has worked out an intelligent vehicle PC system for solving worldwide solution of how to make automobile more vivid.
seems like the fish has been used too much on this one;-P
according to the article:
the lawyers are working for adobe - they just aren't saying whether they were specifically ordered to send the Abmahnung or did it of their own volition.
destroying the "packages" should be understood in the normal-product sense, ie if they printed any CD's or boxes or whatever.
the lawyers' bill is based on the "Streitwert" which is what they would be suing for if they really were suing.
the article doesn't say anything about them suing for 1M DM if the bill is not paid; rather we could infer that they might sue for that much if the desist declaration is not signed. the max. they could sue for on an unpaid bill is the bill value itself plus legal fees for that suit, which as another poster pointed out would be quite small.
anyway, IANAL either but it seems to me the best way to reduce the bill is to challenge the "Streitwert" because it has been set arbitrarily by the lawfirm. maybe adobe could talk to them in order to save face (remember, it's not based on normal billable hours like in the US) and set a lower value, with a lower bill.
or, like another poster mentioned, make payment but deliver it in coin (1Pf) and insist on a receipt.
hey, i think matáv here in hungary is doing some kind of net.phone thing where you use a special card from a regular pay phone and it switches you over to an IP network.
i saw an ad somewhere... but i can't find it now, so i'm not sure. any magyar/.ers with more info?
IANAL and i haven't actually tried this (yet), but it seems that the following should work:
get yourself an offshore company (or use a friend's), preferrably in gibraltar. you should then be able to perform work in europe for an EU company, but you yourself would not be a resident or need a work permit, rather the company would be doing the work and you would be there on its behalf, just like any other visiting businessperson.
of course this is not a long-term solution, but i believe it is legal as long as you declare the income in your home country. and if you're doing this more for the experience than for the profit, the situation might be very attractive to small and medium sized shops, since they will save a bundle on taxes by hiring your company.
'course, the reason they save is that you won't get any health insurance or any other employees' rights (just like contracting in the states, ie you will have a lot less perks and protections than even a normal contractor in the EU). so if you're in for the long haul, better to find something more standard.
there's a lot of info on offshores on the net, but unfortunately most of it is scam-oriented. there are a lot of perfectly legitimate uses for them though.
i just remembered that about a month ago here in budapest i saw some adverts on a bus... the text went something like
imagine: you don't have to buy software, and yet all your computer systems are legal!
(piracy is very common among small businesses in central europe)
dunno if they're really doing the subscription thing over here, but i'd be curious to know whether it was advertised in the states.
Can the Server Biz Subsidize Desktop Dev?
on
Ask Robert Young
·
· Score: 4
Let's be optimistic and assume that RedHat will achieve profitability through its support services for businesses running RedHat Linux.
Would it then make sense for RedHat to use some of its resources to help intensify the struggle towards desktop-readiness for Linux?
It seems to me that would be a good thing to do, since it could help expand the RedHat user community, ergo the customer base for RedHat's services... especially if Linux could become a viable desktop OS for larger enterprises, in which case RedHat, as the leading distro brand, would probably get the lion's share of support contracts.
in silicon valley i pay approx. US$90 per month for 1Mbps downstream and 384Kbps upstream. i've tested the upstream and it is actually often higher than that, but the provider (speakeasy) doesn't make any guarantees.
over here in budapest, it's a bit more expensive for that much DSL bandwidth, but the entry point is still quite cheap, and there's some fierce competition between the telco monopoy (whose monopoly expires soon) and two cable modem companies. a friend of mine uses one cable outfit and another, the other; one says everything screams and is great, the other has clocked his downstream at 20KBps (bytes not bits) but he's still not complaining, since it's always on and about US$40/mo, and local telephone time is metered here.
i on the other hand can't get DSL or cable, even though i live very near the center of town... and even though there is a cable TV building three blocks away and a telephone exchange two blocks away. apparently the general demographic of my neighborhood doesn't support the investment just yet...
i hear they're laying a lot of fiberoptic over in romania....
comin' through at 45.2Kbps, i can still read/. at least %)
actually, sorta. i can't remember whether it was google (i think it was) or maybe a link somewhere else (which is maybe link-of-mouth), but i definitely had never heard of slashdot when i first stumbled upon it last year.
and i guess i'm a medium-geek, not a real guru or anything, but i do know a _lot_ of hard-core geeks in various disciplines (CS, aerospace, biotech, etc) and none of them clued me in to it.
sure am glad i stumbled though... this is my third main news feed, after the reuters/AP feed on yahoo and, of course, freeB92.net;-)
I consider steady erosion of rights by incompetents in power "real".
ok, i agree with this completely, but.....
when i was in university in the late 80's, i had the pleasure of working for The Man (The Woman actually) in the capacity of hired day-to-day organizer/administrator of a "theme" dorm (read: small, clean, nice, most people with similar majors). what i learned from my interactions with the university housing administration was Frightening in the Extreme - and this long before the campus/student/hacker/gamer/geek paranoia had reached any kind of critical mass.
anyway, my point is: i learned quickly that the 4th-amendment (and other) rights of students living in university dorms are, shall we say, very limited.
the solution?
live off-campus, where you are a citizen like everyone else.
PS, it was a public university in california.
PPS, before anyone yells "but that's expensive," i should mention that my own experience and very informal (word-of-mouth) research indicates that dorm living is a colossal rip-off perpetrated in the interest of parents' feeling you are protected and, in some cases, in the interest of the socially incompetent actually meeting a few fellow students out of class. but unless you live in manhattan, you're spending too much if you live in a dorm (in the US anyway).
Just to mention another angle: in Romania you can go to an internet "cafe" (usually just workstations, no coffee) and for the equivalent of around 30 cents US an hour you can work on a decent Windoze machine with a fast internet connection. If you need to, you can also print, scan, burn CD's, whatever. Here in Hungary they have the same thing, but it's much more expensive.
This kind of thing is immensely popular with university students- people who definitely aren't in the same group as the "poor" but who, at that point in their lives, definitely don't have the cash for a computer or a private phone line.
So maybe these cheap Brasilian computers, in the hands of community groups or (better yet) small-time entrepeneurs, could create some kind of favela.net.cafe revolution.
But: will the government also be setting up or subsidizing some kind of ISP to support these things?
yeah, thanks to venture capital frenzy and stock options for barely literate indexers...
i love the my.yahoo news (etc) feeds because they're more compact than the rest, but as an index i'll take DMOZ or a machine anyday. and outside the cute neon billboards in SF they don't do anything you couldn't do for 1/100th (1000th?) the dough.
ok, now all the former indexers living in fat beach houses in hawaii 'cause of the IPO can flame me, i asked for it....
OK, this is just a rumour, but what i heard from a filmmaker pal about a year ago was:
Halfway through Eyes Wide Shut Kubrick realized the film was not going to be very good and, while he had to finish the project, he started devoting a LOT of attention to AI. (let's face it, if the poor guy hadn't died, serious critics would have torn EWS into little bitty pieces)
Part of this AI effort was that Kubrick had a well-known video director (I think Chris Cunningham, not sure about the name) design some "robots" for him.
Both parties were very, very happy with the results.
After Kubrick died, the robot designs were in limbo, and the video director wanted to do something with all that effort, and maybe make a buck or two in the proccess...
Enter: Björk - same director did a video for her featuring very humanlike robots (I have seen the video, it's gorgeous).
These robots were the ones designed for Kubrick's film.
due to bandwidth limitations i haven't been able to view the trailer yet, so i don't know if these robots were the ones from the video. but this is the story i heard from someone in the film/music-video biz, and it's pretty interesting anyway.
anybody know anything more specific or contradictory or...?
I think one of the reasons people who watch TV accept the commercials (often even on channels they are paying for) is that, although the ads are intrusive/disruptive, they don't affect the way you consume the rest of the content.
You see the ad, you pay attention to something else or run to the kitchen for a drink, or whatever - or, maybe you really watch it, if it is visually compelling (as many good TV ads are).
And although there are certainly those ads that want you to make a phone call and order a Widge-o-Matic or Sonny Bono's Greatest Hits, it seems to me that the majority, and certainly the best/most-expensive of the TV ads aren't really asking you to do something immediately. Buy a car, get a hamburger, order Pepsi instead of Coke, quit smoking, what have you -- but generally not in the middle of the show you're watching.
Internet ads, however, seem very much stuck in the world of asking for (sometimes even forcing) some immediate consumer action, such as the "clickthrough" or, in the case of those annoying popup ads, at least closing the window. And to make matters worse, they very often _do_ change the rest (non-ad) part of the experience... and when they at least try to be non-intrusive (like banner ads or google's text ads) then they are extremely easy to ignore. At least with TV ads, the advertiser can expect that, no matter how banal the advertisement is, some percentage of viewers will simply be too lazy to divert their attention, so the ad content will at least get some basic exposure.
So where else might we go with net.adverts? I know a lot of people would disagree, but I think the TV ad model would simply work better and be less annoying. Say, you click on the link and you go to the page but there is some kind of introduction ad. And linking around within a site would not give you a new ad every time, but every once in a while, or maybe when you left the site. Since it's the net, you would probably have the opportunity to click something and go buy some widgets, but the focus would be on compelling ads to build brand identity, etc.
Of course this makes little sense for mostly text-informational sites like/. I'm thinking much more about that portion of the web, coming at us pretty soon I think (or at you in the US anyway), that is very rich-media and very high-bandwidth, and which I think will be where Jane Average Consumer spends a lot more of her time than on static-info pages.
So maybe print advertising (magazines, newspapers) is the better analogy for today's web and/.'s future. But even then, I think people should get into better design and less "click click click" mania. After all, magazine ads are extremely easy to ignore, even the full-page ones, but it's still a highly effective form of advertising, and one that attracts both higher-ticket and higher-quality advertisers.
I'm actually pretty optimistic about advertising as a source of revenue for web sites, but I think it's going to be a very tough couple of years before the advertisers and the content providers find a way of fine-tuning existing (effective) models to the web (of which project both banner and popup ads are dismally incompetent examples).
And finally: I rarely watch TV (once every couple months), but not because of the ads - rather because of the low-quality content.
Slashdot Mirror
alas, there is a real exploit.
i just tried it (2Kpro/ie5.5) and:
1) clicked on the link
2) got "can't find server"
3) clicked back button
4) got some weird gibberish in the window and
5) PRESTO! got minesweeper.
there was *no* user interaction except clicking the link and then the back button. there were *no* warnings, much less dialogs with "cancel" options.
this sucks, especially since "back" would be my default response in such a situation, to check what the link was that resulted in server not found (i often do that to check if there was bad javascript or something in the link).
i agree with you in principle, but as a net.artist i see one exception: if you go to a site expecting to find a net.artwork, and that includes sound on the entry page, it's another story.
so maybe the point is that you should not have auto-playing sounds if that sort of thing is not what the site is about.
in which case, i'd include *anything big* on the list of things you shouldn't have at the entry point of a "normal" sort of website. i hate it when the front page takes 2 mins to load; fat content should go deeper.
i could swear i read another /. post on almost exactly the same topic, but my searches come up bare.
anyone else remember this? it was about the same tandy computers, and someone in the comments said s/he was using them for some kind of rugged research purposes, maybe marine...
...or maybe i'm smoking too much crack. but i'm allllmost sure...
"Makes Car Smarter", yes, SmartVehiclePC.com has worked out an intelligent vehicle PC system for solving worldwide solution of how to make automobile more vivid.
all your worldwide solution are solve by us!
uh... this is a resource for PERL programmers and the search engine is what you're complaining about?
seems to me anyone interested in buying this CD/book could write a good search engine in... PERL ... very quickly and have fun doing it.
seems like the fish has been used too much on this one ;-P
according to the article:
anyway, IANAL either but it seems to me the best way to reduce the bill is to challenge the "Streitwert" because it has been set arbitrarily by the lawfirm. maybe adobe could talk to them in order to save face (remember, it's not based on normal billable hours like in the US) and set a lower value, with a lower bill.
or, like another poster mentioned, make payment but deliver it in coin (1Pf) and insist on a receipt.
hey, i think matáv here in hungary is doing some kind of net.phone thing where you use a special card from a regular pay phone and it switches you over to an IP network.
i saw an ad somewhere... but i can't find it now, so i'm not sure. any magyar /.ers with more info?
get yourself an offshore company (or use a friend's), preferrably in gibraltar. you should then be able to perform work in europe for an EU company, but you yourself would not be a resident or need a work permit, rather the company would be doing the work and you would be there on its behalf, just like any other visiting businessperson.
of course this is not a long-term solution, but i believe it is legal as long as you declare the income in your home country. and if you're doing this more for the experience than for the profit, the situation might be very attractive to small and medium sized shops, since they will save a bundle on taxes by hiring your company.
'course, the reason they save is that you won't get any health insurance or any other employees' rights (just like contracting in the states, ie you will have a lot less perks and protections than even a normal contractor in the EU). so if you're in for the long haul, better to find something more standard.
there's a lot of info on offshores on the net, but unfortunately most of it is scam-oriented. there are a lot of perfectly legitimate uses for them though.
maybe some other /.ers have more info?
i just remembered that about a month ago here in budapest i saw some adverts on a bus... the text went something like
imagine: you don't have to buy software, and yet all your computer systems are legal!
(piracy is very common among small businesses in central europe)
dunno if they're really doing the subscription thing over here, but i'd be curious to know whether it was advertised in the states.
Let's be optimistic and assume that RedHat will achieve profitability through its support services for businesses running RedHat Linux.
Would it then make sense for RedHat to use some of its resources to help intensify the struggle towards desktop-readiness for Linux?
It seems to me that would be a good thing to do, since it could help expand the RedHat user community, ergo the customer base for RedHat's services... especially if Linux could become a viable desktop OS for larger enterprises, in which case RedHat, as the leading distro brand, would probably get the lion's share of support contracts.
Do you see this happening? Why or why not?
thanx.
- frosty
www.medienkunst.com
in silicon valley i pay approx. US$90 per month for 1Mbps downstream and 384Kbps upstream. i've tested the upstream and it is actually often higher than that, but the provider (speakeasy) doesn't make any guarantees.
/. at least %)
over here in budapest, it's a bit more expensive for that much DSL bandwidth, but the entry point is still quite cheap, and there's some fierce competition between the telco monopoy (whose monopoly expires soon) and two cable modem companies. a friend of mine uses one cable outfit and another, the other; one says everything screams and is great, the other has clocked his downstream at 20KBps (bytes not bits) but he's still not complaining, since it's always on and about US$40/mo, and local telephone time is metered here.
i on the other hand can't get DSL or cable, even though i live very near the center of town... and even though there is a cable TV building three blocks away and a telephone exchange two blocks away. apparently the general demographic of my neighborhood doesn't support the investment just yet...
i hear they're laying a lot of fiberoptic over in romania....
comin' through at 45.2Kbps, i can still read
actually, sorta. i can't remember whether it was google (i think it was) or maybe a link somewhere else (which is maybe link-of-mouth), but i definitely had never heard of slashdot when i first stumbled upon it last year.
;-)
and i guess i'm a medium-geek, not a real guru or anything, but i do know a _lot_ of hard-core geeks in various disciplines (CS, aerospace, biotech, etc) and none of them clued me in to it.
sure am glad i stumbled though... this is my third main news feed, after the reuters/AP feed on yahoo and, of course, freeB92.net
it played pong, pong doubles, and a few other variations.
ok, i agree with this completely, but.....
when i was in university in the late 80's, i had the pleasure of working for The Man (The Woman actually) in the capacity of hired day-to-day organizer/administrator of a "theme" dorm (read: small, clean, nice, most people with similar majors). what i learned from my interactions with the university housing administration was Frightening in the Extreme - and this long before the campus/student/hacker/gamer/geek paranoia had reached any kind of critical mass.
anyway, my point is: i learned quickly that the 4th-amendment (and other) rights of students living in university dorms are, shall we say, very limited.
the solution?
live off-campus, where you are a citizen like everyone else.
PS, it was a public university in california.
PPS, before anyone yells "but that's expensive," i should mention that my own experience and very informal (word-of-mouth) research indicates that dorm living is a colossal rip-off perpetrated in the interest of parents' feeling you are protected and, in some cases, in the interest of the socially incompetent actually meeting a few fellow students out of class. but unless you live in manhattan, you're spending too much if you live in a dorm (in the US anyway).
This kind of thing is immensely popular with university students- people who definitely aren't in the same group as the "poor" but who, at that point in their lives, definitely don't have the cash for a computer or a private phone line.
So maybe these cheap Brasilian computers, in the hands of community groups or (better yet) small-time entrepeneurs, could create some kind of favela.net.cafe revolution.
But: will the government also be setting up or subsidizing some kind of ISP to support these things?
they worked their way up.
yeah, thanks to venture capital frenzy and stock options for barely literate indexers...
i love the my.yahoo news (etc) feeds because they're more compact than the rest, but as an index i'll take DMOZ or a machine anyday. and outside the cute neon billboards in SF they don't do anything you couldn't do for 1/100th (1000th?) the dough.
ok, now all the former indexers living in fat beach houses in hawaii 'cause of the IPO can flame me, i asked for it....
due to bandwidth limitations i haven't been able to view the trailer yet, so i don't know if these robots were the ones from the video. but this is the story i heard from someone in the film/music-video biz, and it's pretty interesting anyway.
anybody know anything more specific or contradictory or...?
I think one of the reasons people who watch TV accept the commercials (often even on channels they are paying for) is that, although the ads are intrusive/disruptive, they don't affect the way you consume the rest of the content.
/. I'm thinking much more about that portion of the web, coming at us pretty soon I think (or at you in the US anyway), that is very rich-media and very high-bandwidth, and which I think will be where Jane Average Consumer spends a lot more of her time than on static-info pages.
/.'s future. But even then, I think people should get into better design and less "click click click" mania. After all, magazine ads are extremely easy to ignore, even the full-page ones, but it's still a highly effective form of advertising, and one that attracts both higher-ticket and higher-quality advertisers.
You see the ad, you pay attention to something else or run to the kitchen for a drink, or whatever - or, maybe you really watch it, if it is visually compelling (as many good TV ads are).
And although there are certainly those ads that want you to make a phone call and order a Widge-o-Matic or Sonny Bono's Greatest Hits, it seems to me that the majority, and certainly the best/most-expensive of the TV ads aren't really asking you to do something immediately. Buy a car, get a hamburger, order Pepsi instead of Coke, quit smoking, what have you -- but generally not in the middle of the show you're watching.
Internet ads, however, seem very much stuck in the world of asking for (sometimes even forcing) some immediate consumer action, such as the "clickthrough" or, in the case of those annoying popup ads, at least closing the window. And to make matters worse, they very often _do_ change the rest (non-ad) part of the experience... and when they at least try to be non-intrusive (like banner ads or google's text ads) then they are extremely easy to ignore. At least with TV ads, the advertiser can expect that, no matter how banal the advertisement is, some percentage of viewers will simply be too lazy to divert their attention, so the ad content will at least get some basic exposure.
So where else might we go with net.adverts? I know a lot of people would disagree, but I think the TV ad model would simply work better and be less annoying. Say, you click on the link and you go to the page but there is some kind of introduction ad. And linking around within a site would not give you a new ad every time, but every once in a while, or maybe when you left the site. Since it's the net, you would probably have the opportunity to click something and go buy some widgets, but the focus would be on compelling ads to build brand identity, etc.
Of course this makes little sense for mostly text-informational sites like
So maybe print advertising (magazines, newspapers) is the better analogy for today's web and
I'm actually pretty optimistic about advertising as a source of revenue for web sites, but I think it's going to be a very tough couple of years before the advertisers and the content providers find a way of fine-tuning existing (effective) models to the web (of which project both banner and popup ads are dismally incompetent examples).
And finally: I rarely watch TV (once every couple months), but not because of the ads - rather because of the low-quality content.