That'd be in their interests then, according to what they're saying. Losing a handful of high-usage customers and keeping their "core" customer base would be awesome for them.
You are spot on. We recently evaluated Zimbra; it's good, but a) it's not all OSS (the fucking Outlook connector, dammit, is a must have) and b) it's a bit fiddly sometimes.
I've tested a stack of different calendaring apps and have found them all inferior to Outlook in almost every respect. It's just so easy to use. I'm trying really, really hard to prevent us going to Exchange, but I'm running out of reasons.
I'm really, really hoping Thunderbird 3.0 / Sunbird 1.0 will make an impact here. If there's one market that OSS will really make a difference in its the groupware market.
We do not have that problem. We have huge amounts of bandwidth and the content is mostly coming from right here. Australia is strangled for bandwidth by the Pacific. The US is not.
Right, but hauling bandwidth from ANYWHERE off-network costs money to someone at some point - whether you're moving bits from NY to SF over a long cable or two networks are connected within the datacentre - someone is paying, someonwhere, for the flow of bits.
Keeping traffic on an ISPs local network should be of massive interest to them - because it means their costs to pull data from other networks will be reduced.
Distance is, of course, a big factor in the pricing for these peering arrangements - but having data local to your ISPs network is win-win for everyone.
Probably should be noted that this is the model that Akamai and other big CDN-types pursue because it offers the best performance and (for an ISP) means they can keep that massive bolus of Akamai data on their own networks.
Well, in Australia, you just pick a different ISP that/does/ cater to the things that you like. I realise (as I pointed out in my original post) that this is not always an option for people in the USA because of monopoly situations in certain areas.
Why on earth do you want to have a company pick your media for you? You think they have your best interests at heart?
Their interests are making money - I think its clear that the long-term draw for ISPs is going to be acting as dumb pipes, and whoever has the most customers is going to win - it's been proven here time and time again that customers WILL NOT ACCEPT having content forced down their throats. Our success as a company came from recognizing this in day zero and catering to what users WANT, rather than what some megacorp thinks they want. As a result, there are a large number of customers that have chosen to stay with the parent ISP rather than going off to one of the other options.
If your companies had spent more time and money building infrastructure to increase the size of the links to the rest of the world instead of screwing you guys over for so long, you'd have better service would you not?
Well, not really. If I had 1gbit link to my home, but there was only a tiny heavily congested international link, I would find it hugely difficult to do things like update my games in Steam or download the latest Ubuntu. ISPs that provide local mirrors are doing a lot of things that I think are hugely helpful to the Internet as a whole.
So explain to me again how having Time Warner decide if I'm allowed to watch stuff on Netflix or Tivo is a good idea. I know I sure to enjoy $10 PPV that I can't pause or rewatch.
"allowed to watch" implies a violation of Net Neutrality, which I also addressed in my OP. If they decided you're "allowed" to watch something, or interfere with it in any way, you're clearly already fucked. But if they partner with Netflix to host servers locally with all their content and make it not count towards your cap, a) you'll get unmetered download from your ISP b) you'll get the best possible experience as the content will be coming directly from your local network, c) you won't be sharing bandwidth with users from other loser ISPs, and d) the Internet as a whole benefits because you're not pulling bits from across the ocean or something.
In the US you guys are at much, much greater risk of getting screwed though (until Net Neutrality becomes a fact), so I understand your skepticism:)
But, if you have not been to the US you do not know what you are talking about. And, honestly, because of the distances between cities in the US things here are rather uncivilized compared to large parts of the EU.
I have been to the US. In fact, I got back from there 8 days ago; I was in San Francisco for 2 weeks for GDC. I have lived in San Francisco for a year (when I was a kid, to be fair) but I have spent more time there than the average Australian.
You should also note that Australia is roughly the size of the USA, so the distances between cities are as vast, with a significantly reduced population density. I don't know what relevance that has though.
I don't see what half your comments have to do with what I'm saying, so I'll just address what I can make sense of, which is the following sentence:
The content you are bragging about caching in Australia mostly originates in the US and Europe.
Uh.. so what? It doesn't make any difference about where it originates from. It matters where you can get it from.
I can speak authoritatively about this because a significant number of our users are from the USA, indicating that the number of mirrors over there is not sufficient to meet the demand. I get more positive feedback from people in the USA than I do anywhere else when downloading from one of our sites (www.ausgamers.com).
Anyway, I don't really understand your point, so I'll shutup here.
"Which mirror should I select" should not be a user problem.
I would probably agree as a default, but would qualify this a little further by saying it should be a user/option/. We've had all sorts of problems in Australia with applications that try to helpfully select a mirror based on some criteria - instead of downloading from a local mirror you get forced to some random international site. Steam does this a lot.
I know you guys are scared to death of caps, but I just thought I'd take the time to point out a few reasons why they can be GOOD things, and not necessarily all bad. (I realise that it seems the US has been screwed by big telcos taking money from the govt and not investing it into infrastructure as it was intended, etc.)
[disclaimer: I work for a company that, for almost 10 years, has tried to provide Australian ISP subscribers with the content they want to have]
Here in Australia, we've had caps for a long, long time. The most common cap originally was 3 gigabytes - so imagine how lame it was for us. Of course this was pre-BitTorrent/YouTube/etc, so it wasn't as big a deal as that limit would be today.
Now, a common plan is 12GB (I say 'common' because while there are plenty of plans, the biggest ISP here, BigPond, has its 'default' plan around 12GB, or at least last time I checked - it's certainly what I'm typing this on at my parents place).
Because of these low data limits, there has been fierce competition between ISPs to provide "content" - mostly consisting of mirrors of popular stuff, such as files relating to gaming, open source, etc (more recently Creative Commons-licensed video like the Revision3.com stuff).
So anyway, some of the good things:
1) Many ISPs will maintain their own mirrors of popular content - meaning subscribers can get fast, local downloads (that typically don't count towards their monthly cap). Here in Australia we have a very high ratio of availability of Linux distributions vs # of customers, for example.
2) There's less congestion as users don't randomly leave their software connected and torrenting 24/7. This is good for people like me that prefer speed and responsiveness and don't want to have to worry about a heap of people torrenting last nights episode of Australian/American Idol chewing up all our links.
3) The above two cause lower congestion on our heavily-contested international links, helping keep costs lower overall for everyone (this is less of a big deal for the USA, but we're pretty far away from a lot of digital stuff people want).
4) Many ISPs will run their own local gaming services - even if its only a handful of game servers for popular games. This means fast pings and unmetered traffic - and more variety and competition.
5) Many ISPs will run their own unique content services. BigPond, for example, has a music channel (www.bigpondmusic.com), which offers discounts to subscribers. Internode, another ISP, provides free access to commerical USEnet services. iiNet provide Premier League video streams. All sorts of cool options.
Of course, all these are almost utterly dependent on network neutrality, which has (thus far) been maintained perfectly.
I obviously have a fairly biased perspective because of my involvement in the industry as a data-peddler, but I don't think capped plans are bad. The vast majority of people aren't going to notice.
I would say though that if they're going to/force/ all users to act like 'average' users in terms of bandwidth, there should be a general reduction in price across the board to match the savings they're going to make. Dropping the price for those users that are happy to stay on low plans and leaving it the same for those users that want to have a much higher cap would seem to be much fairer. However, given how big telcos operate, I'd say everyone is just likely to get screwed, and as I understand it many places in the US have a monopoly-type situation on broadband availability - so good luck:)
Building more dams would actually be much more useful for Australia at the moment given our extreme water shortages and continual droughts. I would honestly rather see our money going there instead of upgrading Internet connections.
I can't believe posts like this don't get more attention from Slashdot-types.
Governments spend squillions of dollars every year collecting all sorts of random data, most of which people will never hear about, let alone even see. This data is used to shape policies.
Knowing the data exists and having it available openly for public perusal (especially when put in more human-readable systems like the ones you've provided) will help people make more informed decisions as to who to vote for as they'll be able to more effectively validate their policies.
If you want to use my service and my resources, then you don't get to dictate your terms to me.
Out of interest, and a little off topic, but I'm interested in your perspective on advertising (and specifically, Adblock/blocking advertising) under that statement.
I recently had a good discussion with another Slashdot user in the comments of some other ad thread where I basically said exactly what you're saying (except not so succinctly:) in the context of advertising.
A brief response as I'm in an airport waiting for a plane, but:
If you can accept this as a different and valid perspective rather than a mere aberration of the norm by some freaks who use AdBlock because they don't understand how good it is to get free stuff, then we can agree to disagree.
Yep, I totally agree - it's worth reiterating that I totally understand your viewpoint and, as a website operator, I'm going to be doing whatever I can to try to make sure we cater to people like you who would prefer to make a (modest) payment and avoid getting ads.
The main reason we've avoided doing that so far is because I think it's a really big deal for people to do that, and I want to make sure that users who/do/ sign up to pay up front get more than just an ad-free experience by some other sort of value-add (I would expect only a tiny proportion of people to actually sign up due to the nature of our site, but I'm hoping we can change that if we can come up with some other clever ideas).
Build on real world interoperability, standards, and compatibility. IE8 shows Microsoftâ(TM)s commitment to an open and interoperable web. IE8 by default shows web pages in its most standards compliant mode. With IE8, weâ(TM)re delivering the most complete and correct implementation of CSS 2.1 available in any browser. To improve interoperability not just for IE but for all browsers, weâ(TM)ve contributed over 7,000 test cases to the W3C (and taken feedback along the way). This will make it easier for the people who build the web to develop with standards. Weâ(TM)ve started delivering on HTML5. Weâ(TM)ve also made the specifications for webslices, accelerators, and visual search available to the community (under the appropriate open licenses) for a more open, interoperable, and rich web. IE creates great opportunities for developers and sites to integrate themselves into their users workflow and make their experience stand out.
As for whether it's true... but I have been reading the IEBlog for a while and they have SEEMED to go to a lot of effort re: standards. I haven't tested it yet though.
If you advertised your party as "a party" then there'd be an expectation that they were attending to just drink and be merry, and not be expected to sit down and watch TV. Again, I'd argue your changing the social contract by changing the terms of it after people have accepted it (by attending your party). Anyway!
However, I would disagree with your assertion that "it's better for everyone if we don't have to charge them AND they don't block our ads"; that may be better for you and to those who enjoy or do not mind advertising, but as you may be aware, this is not everyone.
Well, using our service as an example, if it ceased to exist (and all other ad-supported services of our kind), people would have no choice but to use subscription services and pay for it. Which I would think would not be something many people would want to do.
. In fact, there used to be a time when people paid for everything, and yet the societies did not collapse. I'm not advocating the disolution of all advertising, it has its purpose and place in an industrialized nation. I'm merely stating that it is not a righteous gift to humanity.
Me either! I'm saying that if I had the choice, I'd rather get ad-supported stuff for free, than have to pay for it.
It just means that advertisers (and notice that I am generalizing, as I do not know you personally, nor your organization, enough to make judgement) feel entitled to some sort of privilege while, at least a sector of the population, disagrees.
Yep, and I think they disagree because they're blissfully unaware of what downloading something like Adblock might do to all the free content they're getting at the moment. There's a lot of sites that would instantly stop working if advertising dollars dried up overnight, and that would make me sad.
You could wish everybody liked advertising and agreed with your position, but this will not make it so.
They don't have to like advertising. They just have to hate it a little bit less than actually PAYING for something.
If I plan a party and invite a lot of people, I hope they come and I would expect that at least my friends and family come; but there is no "unwritten social contract" stipulating the requirement of invitees to attend by the mere act of me planning a party. It may seem rude to me if they don't attend after I invited them, but some people may just have other or even better things to do.
I would amend your analogy by saying the "unwritten social contract" part of it would be them bringing their own drinks, instead of just going to your fridge and raiding your beers!
Of course, this will decrease your traffic (since you are no longer counting casual patrons whom did not meet your expectations), and affect the value you provide to your advertising clients. I suspect this is why they rather keep it quiet and view it as an "unwritten social contract": they can see themselves as victims and grandstand about their purported social value.
Well, I only see two outcomes really:
1) advertising dies and sites find new revenue models, like charging people. We're looking into this (not having our heads completely up our own assholes) as I'm sure many people are. I don't want to do it though - it's better for everyone if we don't have to charge them AND they don't block our ads, cuz we can keep providing them with a great service and they don't have to do practically anything to get it. We're selective about the ads we choose to run and I feel we're a lot less invasive than other sites.
2) advertisers figure out a way to work around blocking - then we have the spam/antispam war moved into the advertising space.
...is a cool article up on Wired (look for the printable link option so it's all on one page) detailing an interesting adventure around the world and some of the history of undersea cables. Definitely worth a read.
Is it? It's the same sort of thing that says you won't go into a bookshop and stand there reading an entire book. It's the same sort of thing that stops you from going to a food shop that has a free sample thing and eating the whole plate.
Sure, you/can/ do those things, but really - it makes you a bit of a dick.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around information that you don't feel is worth paying for, yet claim has value.
I phrased that poorly - I should have said "I'd rather have it for free and absorb the advertising than pay actual money for it".
I look forward to a day when more of the search results I pull up in Google are relevant, informative sites instead of marketing drivel simply because there are fewer worthless sites in the catalog to list.
There's a few of those around already - you Google them and see in the results a hit that looks like EXACTLY what you want. You get excited, then click the link, and get a signup page and then get depressed that you have to pay for the content:(
You are thoroughly incorrect. (Disclaimer: I work on a number of sites that are supported by advertising.)
Those "services" are being offered by companies of their own free will under the unwritten social contract that you will look at their ads in return for getting their content.
I don't want to get into the window washer analogy because I don't think the service they offer is comparable (at best it's slightly useful, saving you 10 seconds doing it yourself at the next gas station, at worst it's just annoying). But a lot of ad supported websites (LIKE SLASHDOT) offer heaps of valuable content that, frankly, I don't want to have to pay for.
But I am happy to look at the occasional ad. If it's targeted to me based on preferences and history, (LIKE GOOGLE ARE TRYING TO DO) that's even better for me as a consumer.
I don't encourage people to block ads. I support your freedom to do it, but just don't complain when more sites start shutting down or moving to subscription services or figure out new was to shove even more invasive ads down your throats as a result of promoting adblocking.
What that means is Firefox will forever be riddled with memory and resource leaks over time as each tab gets opened and close leaving crap behind
I solve this problem through the mind-bogglingly complicated method of closing and reopening my browser!
I see your point, but I'm not going to go hatin' on Firefox for technical reasons (I would have once, probably). But I would argue that Firefox has changed the web for the better and some relatively minor (at the moment) under-the-hood complaints are a small price to pay.
I have used Firefox all day every day as my primary browser of choice since about v1.0.7 and have not yet found a browser that matches it. I have probably had the thing lock up 3-4 times in all the years since, and it's crashed maybe 10 times in total (across all the machines I use it on). I'm pretty happy with it, especially for what I paid.
. If so, then man, am I glad I gave up Norton years ago! I mean seriously, what is so hard to understand about the concept that hiding things like directories is a security risk
Me too. Or I thought I had - my laptop came with Norton Somethingorother pre-installed. After a battle trying to remove it, I thought it had gone for good years ago, so I was hugely surprised last week when I got some application error/DrWatson sort of thing in some Norton service that I didn't even know was running!
My fault for not clearing the service list, but fuck me, trying to uninstall that thing is like trying to get rid of herpes. It just keeps coming back.
Slashdot Mirror
And lastly, I'm a -very- avid gamer and I had never heard of this game. Now it's on Slashdot's front page. You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.
advertising saying "look at this free, easily copyable-for-free game"?!
That'd be in their interests then, according to what they're saying. Losing a handful of high-usage customers and keeping their "core" customer base would be awesome for them.
That's because you keep coming back anyway
You are spot on. We recently evaluated Zimbra; it's good, but a) it's not all OSS (the fucking Outlook connector, dammit, is a must have) and b) it's a bit fiddly sometimes.
I've tested a stack of different calendaring apps and have found them all inferior to Outlook in almost every respect. It's just so easy to use. I'm trying really, really hard to prevent us going to Exchange, but I'm running out of reasons.
I'm really, really hoping Thunderbird 3.0 / Sunbird 1.0 will make an impact here. If there's one market that OSS will really make a difference in its the groupware market.
We do not have that problem. We have huge amounts of bandwidth and the content is mostly coming from right here. Australia is strangled for bandwidth by the Pacific. The US is not.
Right, but hauling bandwidth from ANYWHERE off-network costs money to someone at some point - whether you're moving bits from NY to SF over a long cable or two networks are connected within the datacentre - someone is paying, someonwhere, for the flow of bits.
Keeping traffic on an ISPs local network should be of massive interest to them - because it means their costs to pull data from other networks will be reduced.
Distance is, of course, a big factor in the pricing for these peering arrangements - but having data local to your ISPs network is win-win for everyone.
Probably should be noted that this is the model that Akamai and other big CDN-types pursue because it offers the best performance and (for an ISP) means they can keep that massive bolus of Akamai data on their own networks.
Where are you hosting that is offering you that, if you don't mind me asking? I'd love to check out their prices.
What if you don't want the same things they do?
Well, in Australia, you just pick a different ISP that /does/ cater to the things that you like. I realise (as I pointed out in my original post) that this is not always an option for people in the USA because of monopoly situations in certain areas.
Why on earth do you want to have a company pick your media for you? You think they have your best interests at heart?
Their interests are making money - I think its clear that the long-term draw for ISPs is going to be acting as dumb pipes, and whoever has the most customers is going to win - it's been proven here time and time again that customers WILL NOT ACCEPT having content forced down their throats. Our success as a company came from recognizing this in day zero and catering to what users WANT, rather than what some megacorp thinks they want. As a result, there are a large number of customers that have chosen to stay with the parent ISP rather than going off to one of the other options.
If your companies had spent more time and money building infrastructure to increase the size of the links to the rest of the world instead of screwing you guys over for so long, you'd have better service would you not?
Well, not really. If I had 1gbit link to my home, but there was only a tiny heavily congested international link, I would find it hugely difficult to do things like update my games in Steam or download the latest Ubuntu. ISPs that provide local mirrors are doing a lot of things that I think are hugely helpful to the Internet as a whole.
So explain to me again how having Time Warner decide if I'm allowed to watch stuff on Netflix or Tivo is a good idea. I know I sure to enjoy $10 PPV that I can't pause or rewatch.
"allowed to watch" implies a violation of Net Neutrality, which I also addressed in my OP. If they decided you're "allowed" to watch something, or interfere with it in any way, you're clearly already fucked. But if they partner with Netflix to host servers locally with all their content and make it not count towards your cap, a) you'll get unmetered download from your ISP b) you'll get the best possible experience as the content will be coming directly from your local network, c) you won't be sharing bandwidth with users from other loser ISPs, and d) the Internet as a whole benefits because you're not pulling bits from across the ocean or something.
In the US you guys are at much, much greater risk of getting screwed though (until Net Neutrality becomes a fact), so I understand your skepticism :)
But, if you have not been to the US you do not know what you are talking about. And, honestly, because of the distances between cities in the US things here are rather uncivilized compared to large parts of the EU.
I have been to the US. In fact, I got back from there 8 days ago; I was in San Francisco for 2 weeks for GDC. I have lived in San Francisco for a year (when I was a kid, to be fair) but I have spent more time there than the average Australian.
You should also note that Australia is roughly the size of the USA, so the distances between cities are as vast, with a significantly reduced population density. I don't know what relevance that has though.
I don't see what half your comments have to do with what I'm saying, so I'll just address what I can make sense of, which is the following sentence:
The content you are bragging about caching in Australia mostly originates in the US and Europe.
Uh.. so what? It doesn't make any difference about where it originates from. It matters where you can get it from.
I can speak authoritatively about this because a significant number of our users are from the USA, indicating that the number of mirrors over there is not sufficient to meet the demand. I get more positive feedback from people in the USA than I do anywhere else when downloading from one of our sites (www.ausgamers.com).
Anyway, I don't really understand your point, so I'll shutup here.
That does sound awesome, as long as you don't mind being a criminal, at least in the eyes of Apple.
"Which mirror should I select" should not be a user problem.
I would probably agree as a default, but would qualify this a little further by saying it should be a user /option/. We've had all sorts of problems in Australia with applications that try to helpfully select a mirror based on some criteria - instead of downloading from a local mirror you get forced to some random international site. Steam does this a lot.
I know you guys are scared to death of caps, but I just thought I'd take the time to point out a few reasons why they can be GOOD things, and not necessarily all bad. (I realise that it seems the US has been screwed by big telcos taking money from the govt and not investing it into infrastructure as it was intended, etc.)
[disclaimer: I work for a company that, for almost 10 years, has tried to provide Australian ISP subscribers with the content they want to have]
Here in Australia, we've had caps for a long, long time. The most common cap originally was 3 gigabytes - so imagine how lame it was for us. Of course this was pre-BitTorrent/YouTube/etc, so it wasn't as big a deal as that limit would be today.
Now, a common plan is 12GB (I say 'common' because while there are plenty of plans, the biggest ISP here, BigPond, has its 'default' plan around 12GB, or at least last time I checked - it's certainly what I'm typing this on at my parents place).
Because of these low data limits, there has been fierce competition between ISPs to provide "content" - mostly consisting of mirrors of popular stuff, such as files relating to gaming, open source, etc (more recently Creative Commons-licensed video like the Revision3.com stuff).
So anyway, some of the good things:
1) Many ISPs will maintain their own mirrors of popular content - meaning subscribers can get fast, local downloads (that typically don't count towards their monthly cap). Here in Australia we have a very high ratio of availability of Linux distributions vs # of customers, for example.
2) There's less congestion as users don't randomly leave their software connected and torrenting 24/7. This is good for people like me that prefer speed and responsiveness and don't want to have to worry about a heap of people torrenting last nights episode of Australian/American Idol chewing up all our links.
3) The above two cause lower congestion on our heavily-contested international links, helping keep costs lower overall for everyone (this is less of a big deal for the USA, but we're pretty far away from a lot of digital stuff people want).
4) Many ISPs will run their own local gaming services - even if its only a handful of game servers for popular games. This means fast pings and unmetered traffic - and more variety and competition.
5) Many ISPs will run their own unique content services. BigPond, for example, has a music channel (www.bigpondmusic.com), which offers discounts to subscribers. Internode, another ISP, provides free access to commerical USEnet services. iiNet provide Premier League video streams. All sorts of cool options.
Of course, all these are almost utterly dependent on network neutrality, which has (thus far) been maintained perfectly.
I obviously have a fairly biased perspective because of my involvement in the industry as a data-peddler, but I don't think capped plans are bad. The vast majority of people aren't going to notice.
I would say though that if they're going to /force/ all users to act like 'average' users in terms of bandwidth, there should be a general reduction in price across the board to match the savings they're going to make. Dropping the price for those users that are happy to stay on low plans and leaving it the same for those users that want to have a much higher cap would seem to be much fairer. However, given how big telcos operate, I'd say everyone is just likely to get screwed, and as I understand it many places in the US have a monopoly-type situation on broadband availability - so good luck :)
Building more dams would actually be much more useful for Australia at the moment given our extreme water shortages and continual droughts. I would honestly rather see our money going there instead of upgrading Internet connections.
Awesome stuff dude.
I can't believe posts like this don't get more attention from Slashdot-types.
Governments spend squillions of dollars every year collecting all sorts of random data, most of which people will never hear about, let alone even see. This data is used to shape policies.
Knowing the data exists and having it available openly for public perusal (especially when put in more human-readable systems like the ones you've provided) will help people make more informed decisions as to who to vote for as they'll be able to more effectively validate their policies.
If you want to use my service and my resources, then you don't get to dictate your terms to me.
Out of interest, and a little off topic, but I'm interested in your perspective on advertising (and specifically, Adblock/blocking advertising) under that statement.
I recently had a good discussion with another Slashdot user in the comments of some other ad thread where I basically said exactly what you're saying (except not so succinctly :) in the context of advertising.
A brief response as I'm in an airport waiting for a plane, but:
If you can accept this as a different and valid perspective rather than a mere aberration of the norm by some freaks who use AdBlock because they don't understand how good it is to get free stuff, then we can agree to disagree.
Yep, I totally agree - it's worth reiterating that I totally understand your viewpoint and, as a website operator, I'm going to be doing whatever I can to try to make sure we cater to people like you who would prefer to make a (modest) payment and avoid getting ads.
The main reason we've avoided doing that so far is because I think it's a really big deal for people to do that, and I want to make sure that users who /do/ sign up to pay up front get more than just an ad-free experience by some other sort of value-add (I would expect only a tiny proportion of people to actually sign up due to the nature of our site, but I'm hoping we can change that if we can come up with some other clever ideas).
There actually is a bit about standards compliance on the IEBlog's launch announcement:
Build on real world interoperability, standards, and compatibility. IE8 shows Microsoftâ(TM)s commitment to an open and interoperable web. IE8 by default shows web pages in its most standards compliant mode. With IE8, weâ(TM)re delivering the most complete and correct implementation of CSS 2.1 available in any browser. To improve interoperability not just for IE but for all browsers, weâ(TM)ve contributed over 7,000 test cases to the W3C (and taken feedback along the way). This will make it easier for the people who build the web to develop with standards. Weâ(TM)ve started delivering on HTML5. Weâ(TM)ve also made the specifications for webslices, accelerators, and visual search available to the community (under the appropriate open licenses) for a more open, interoperable, and rich web. IE creates great opportunities for developers and sites to integrate themselves into their users workflow and make their experience stand out.
As for whether it's true... but I have been reading the IEBlog for a while and they have SEEMED to go to a lot of effort re: standards. I haven't tested it yet though.
Bit busy, but some quick responses:
After drinking my beer and eating my chips!
If you advertised your party as "a party" then there'd be an expectation that they were attending to just drink and be merry, and not be expected to sit down and watch TV. Again, I'd argue your changing the social contract by changing the terms of it after people have accepted it (by attending your party). Anyway!
However, I would disagree with your assertion that "it's better for everyone if we don't have to charge them AND they don't block our ads"; that may be better for you and to those who enjoy or do not mind advertising, but as you may be aware, this is not everyone.
Well, using our service as an example, if it ceased to exist (and all other ad-supported services of our kind), people would have no choice but to use subscription services and pay for it. Which I would think would not be something many people would want to do.
. In fact, there used to be a time when people paid for everything, and yet the societies did not collapse. I'm not advocating the disolution of all advertising, it has its purpose and place in an industrialized nation. I'm merely stating that it is not a righteous gift to humanity.
Me either! I'm saying that if I had the choice, I'd rather get ad-supported stuff for free, than have to pay for it.
It just means that advertisers (and notice that I am generalizing, as I do not know you personally, nor your organization, enough to make judgement) feel entitled to some sort of privilege while, at least a sector of the population, disagrees.
Yep, and I think they disagree because they're blissfully unaware of what downloading something like Adblock might do to all the free content they're getting at the moment. There's a lot of sites that would instantly stop working if advertising dollars dried up overnight, and that would make me sad.
You could wish everybody liked advertising and agreed with your position, but this will not make it so.
They don't have to like advertising. They just have to hate it a little bit less than actually PAYING for something.
If I plan a party and invite a lot of people, I hope they come and I would expect that at least my friends and family come; but there is no "unwritten social contract" stipulating the requirement of invitees to attend by the mere act of me planning a party. It may seem rude to me if they don't attend after I invited them, but some people may just have other or even better things to do.
I would amend your analogy by saying the "unwritten social contract" part of it would be them bringing their own drinks, instead of just going to your fridge and raiding your beers!
Of course, this will decrease your traffic (since you are no longer counting casual patrons whom did not meet your expectations), and affect the value you provide to your advertising clients. I suspect this is why they rather keep it quiet and view it as an "unwritten social contract": they can see themselves as victims and grandstand about their purported social value.
Well, I only see two outcomes really:
1) advertising dies and sites find new revenue models, like charging people. We're looking into this (not having our heads completely up our own assholes) as I'm sure many people are. I don't want to do it though - it's better for everyone if we don't have to charge them AND they don't block our ads, cuz we can keep providing them with a great service and they don't have to do practically anything to get it. We're selective about the ads we choose to run and I feel we're a lot less invasive than other sites.
2) advertisers figure out a way to work around blocking - then we have the spam/antispam war moved into the advertising space.
...is a cool article up on Wired (look for the printable link option so it's all on one page) detailing an interesting adventure around the world and some of the history of undersea cables. Definitely worth a read.
Heh, interestingly AVS Video Converter is in there - I've seen that advertised on Slashdot a bunch lately
Is it? It's the same sort of thing that says you won't go into a bookshop and stand there reading an entire book. It's the same sort of thing that stops you from going to a food shop that has a free sample thing and eating the whole plate.
Sure, you /can/ do those things, but really - it makes you a bit of a dick.
I'm having trouble wrapping my head around information that you don't feel is worth paying for, yet claim has value.
I phrased that poorly - I should have said "I'd rather have it for free and absorb the advertising than pay actual money for it".
I look forward to a day when more of the search results I pull up in Google are relevant, informative sites instead of marketing drivel simply because there are fewer worthless sites in the catalog to list.
There's a few of those around already - you Google them and see in the results a hit that looks like EXACTLY what you want. You get excited, then click the link, and get a signup page and then get depressed that you have to pay for the content :(
You are thoroughly incorrect. (Disclaimer: I work on a number of sites that are supported by advertising.)
Those "services" are being offered by companies of their own free will under the unwritten social contract that you will look at their ads in return for getting their content.
I don't want to get into the window washer analogy because I don't think the service they offer is comparable (at best it's slightly useful, saving you 10 seconds doing it yourself at the next gas station, at worst it's just annoying). But a lot of ad supported websites (LIKE SLASHDOT) offer heaps of valuable content that, frankly, I don't want to have to pay for.
But I am happy to look at the occasional ad. If it's targeted to me based on preferences and history, (LIKE GOOGLE ARE TRYING TO DO) that's even better for me as a consumer.
I don't encourage people to block ads. I support your freedom to do it, but just don't complain when more sites start shutting down or moving to subscription services or figure out new was to shove even more invasive ads down your throats as a result of promoting adblocking.
What that means is Firefox will forever be riddled with memory and resource leaks over time as each tab gets opened and close leaving crap behind
I solve this problem through the mind-bogglingly complicated method of closing and reopening my browser!
I see your point, but I'm not going to go hatin' on Firefox for technical reasons (I would have once, probably). But I would argue that Firefox has changed the web for the better and some relatively minor (at the moment) under-the-hood complaints are a small price to pay.
I have used Firefox all day every day as my primary browser of choice since about v1.0.7 and have not yet found a browser that matches it. I have probably had the thing lock up 3-4 times in all the years since, and it's crashed maybe 10 times in total (across all the machines I use it on). I'm pretty happy with it, especially for what I paid.
. If so, then man, am I glad I gave up Norton years ago! I mean seriously, what is so hard to understand about the concept that hiding things like directories is a security risk
Me too. Or I thought I had - my laptop came with Norton Somethingorother pre-installed. After a battle trying to remove it, I thought it had gone for good years ago, so I was hugely surprised last week when I got some application error/DrWatson sort of thing in some Norton service that I didn't even know was running!
My fault for not clearing the service list, but fuck me, trying to uninstall that thing is like trying to get rid of herpes. It just keeps coming back.