If you're paying for metered bandwidth, why are you accepting ads in the first place? AdBlock+ solves that problem very quickly. Because accepting ads are part of the unwritten contract that you have when you visit a site that relies on advertising to provide you, the user, with free content?
Full disclaimer - I work for a company that runs sites that are dependent on ad companies for revenue. We actually are pretty strict about what advertising we tolerate - we go more for branding and simple things, although I confess we do the occasional page take over and some other slightly intrusive things, because a) we get paid a lot for them and it allows us to do things like give away Xbox 360s to our regular users and b) they apparently have a very high success rate, which mean users actually click on them and it turns into revenue for our advertisers.
We are investigating (cheap) subscription options to make sure users have an alternative to ads, but in the meantime we don't think its a lot to ask that people absorb a few ads.
I see this attitude a lot on Slashdot and I'll be honest - it shits me to tears, because as a happy user of sites like this that manage to provide me with awesome services, I don't want to have to start paying for it - I'll happily cop a few ads, especially when they're hilarious Microsoft ones trying to pimp to a crowd that clearly hates them.
I can guarantee you that eventually ad blocking is going to just lead to better ad delivery technologies that will probably be even more invasive. Encouraging people to use AdBlock means more chance of less free services that survive on ad revenues.
I won't deny that some sites have terrible ad policies. Rather than block their ads and deny them revenue, I simply stop going there and find an alternate site. If you visit a site that has really crappy ad policies, STOP GOING THERE.
Re:It makes a lot of sense, surprised people notic
on
Acer Bets Big On Linux
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· Score: 1
It might have something to do with..... their customers not wanting it. Heh, tell that to ASUS. How many eeePCs have they sold already?
I know they're making XP available on the new models (something that is hilarious in itself given Microsoft's obvious desire to push Vista), but they're still releasing them with Linux and they're still cheaper with Linux (afaik).
Might not be what you're after but I think cinepaint (a GIMP-derivative software package used in film mostly, I believe) has some HDR support. Don't know enough about it to be sure, but saw it referenced in some other thread about GIMP.
As a cyborg myself, I don't see any sane person adding a computer to his brain for non-medical uses.
I was going to say that sane people don't undergo surgery for trivial reasons, then I thought of liposuction and botox for rich morons, and LASIK for baseball players without myopia. I don't see any ethical surgeons doing something as dangerous as brain surgery for anything but the most profound medical reasons, like blindness or deafness. I don't know - if adding a computer to my brain was as consumer-ised as getting botox I'd certainly consider it, because it'd mean it had passed the point where it was reasonably safe to do it.
I don't know enough about brain surgery to know if this is ever possible (I'm sure brain surgery is always going to be a hard, complicated thing with some associated risk given the fact that our skull is there to stop things from tinkering with your brain), but I would love to have a computer plugged directly into my brain, if only for data storage/recall.
We've got this same system in Australia with even harsher pricing ($1/gig is nothing, we're paying like AU$0.20/MB). Noone has died yet. I'm on a 40gb a month plan that gets shaped if I hit my limit. I have never hit my limit (came close last month though) and I don't restrain my downloading habits.
I suggest you leave your "Cave of Freedom" to realize that the oppressors are not after you. I'm not sure why you think that - there's a lot of evidence that people that develop or use p2p software are under ever-increasing scrutiny, largely because of the corporate overlords that appear to be able to dictate to the US what laws they want to be able to enforce their copyrights.
You should be wary of the government stepping in to try and control the Internet in any form. They're trying to do it here in Australia.
It's only a matter of time before they figure out a way to equate p2p with terrorism and then - what? Oh, they already have.
Would I go over to Comedy Centrals website? SpikeTV? MTV? No, because these sites are cluttered with garbage and intrusive AD supported video players. I usually get lost at these sites anyway. I used to be like that - Daily Show/Colbert Report is hard to come by (legally) in Australia, so I'd head to youtube - until viacom started killing all the youtube links.
I gave up for a while, then realised that all the Daily Show and Colbert stuff is available online from the CC site.
Sure, its a bit lame, and its largely Flash which sucks - I'd certainly like a lightweight nerd-friendly site with just a video player and some clips (Daily Show isn't too bad).
I don't even mind the ads at all - because they mean I can access the content when I want for free.
It's not HOW I'd want to get it - I'd rather download an xvid or something and watching it on my Xbox through XBMC - but it's a pretty good compromise for now - for me at least.
At worst, someone else's government wasted some taxpayer dollars on science instead of market distorting business subsidies. I suppose the issue is whether or not they've given the money for an idea that isn't going anywhere because this guy is good at selling bad ideas, at the expense of other people out there that might have other awesome ideas they need funding for and can't get it because they don't know how to do it.
Some of the comments to this article (particularly this one make me believe this guy might not know what he's doing.
Stop treating me like a criminal and I'll buy your crap. Until then, get bent. I actually wrote an article after reading about the Atari guy's comments. Not a lot of people know about Trusted Computing.
I find the technical issues of the TPM interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the fact that these things are going out there so these companies can decide for us who we should trust and who we shouldn't, because they don't trust us to make that decision - despite the fact that they're in this position because of the money we've given them.
P2P is NOT inherently to be used to spread copyrighted information. Download a popular linux distribution with bittorrent and you'll max out your pipe (at least with residential broadband, 6MB down here), proving conclusively that P2P isn't remotely 'evil' no more than a gun is evil (in fact it would be LESS so, if both weren't EVIL==0). Just to be pedantic, Linux distros and the software they're comprised of are typically also copyrighted.
Concur; I looked at this after reading about it on Slashdot, tracked down the Australian distributor, and fell off my chair when I saw the price (~AUD$1000).
I'm currently reading ebooks on a 3-4 year old HP iPaq that I got for around $200. It's not awesome - screen res is only 320x200 and Microsoft Reader seems to be the worst-designed application in terms of fitting # of words on screen (not as bad w/ HTML ebooks).
But - it's backlit, can read any format, has wifi and web browser, takes SD cards - it's a pretty awesome flexible device, so much so that I'm considering upgrading to a more recent model so I can take advantage of bigger SD cards, newer Windows Mobile, etc.
Unfortunately the base new iPaq classic still is only 320x200 - the higher-end model does 640x480 but costs almost 3 times as much.
I am definitely keen to get an eInk one but just can't justify the cost at the moment.
Just last night I was trying to uninstall Norton Internet Security from my Dad's laptop, which for some reason was HDD chunking mysteriously. I just assumed it was Norton and tried to uninstall it via Control Panel.
As soon as I hit uninstall I got the Windows dialog telling me that the program had done something wrong and would be closed. The UNINSTALLER wouldn't even run.
With that sort of quality why anyone would want to run the whole application is beyond me.
Thanks for mentioning the Norton Removal Tool; I'll give that a crack.
"Friendly" meaning, of course, that the customer pays the ISP extra for it. Well, I'd guess that in this context "friendly" would mean the p2p traffic only goes to Comcast customers - meaning it wouldn't cost Comcast anything as no traffic would leave or enter their network.
I am wondering if this might be the start of the evolution of US-based ISPs to follow the model we have here in Australia - more content made available locally on each network.
The motto is not "do no evil," it is "don't be evil." Perhaps it should be qualified:
Do no evil*
* Evil may be done in accordance to local laws where such laws are evil.
I suspect (for better or for worse), at the end of the day it'll be a number-balancing question for Google: will they lose more money doing the "right" thing and refusing to comply with local laws/providing Google services in locations where their laws conflict greatly with "Western" laws and morality, OR will they lose more money from the loss-of-face that results when they do something like this.
I would guess taking a moral stand would impact shareholder value negatively.
If they continually ACT as if they are responsible for the content that's connected by them, then they are going to be continually TREATED that way. Because of the shitty original summary I'm not really sure which one you're referring to - I'll assume the second though because it clearly specifically refers to Orkut.
In this case it's not a case of Google merely pointing to content and connecting people via search. They're actually hosting the offending content on one of their own managed services.
If the T&Cs for that service say "don't break local law" and someone does so then it makes a little more sense that they're doing this.
It's really a shame for F/OSS that, time and time again, there is such a huge duplication of effort and half-assed half-finished projects lying around in the junkyard of the Open Source cemetery. Also, I think I read that same comment when Ubuntu was announced
I wrote a massive reply to this but Slashdot ate it.
The short version is, I know exactly how many users they have and I can extrapolate the requirements. Our site (http://www.ausgamers.com) has spent the last 9 years mirroring gaming content for Australians - working with Blizzard to spread the load for War3 and Starcraft patches).
We'd happily help do this for WoW, and we know there's many other sites that would do it internationally to absorb the bandwidth load.
I recently wrote an article on this issue which you can find here which explains some of the difficulties Australians face; Americans should probably gear up to face them as well if/when your major ISPs start enforcing monthly limits.
Obviously noone wants to pay the bandwidth costs for this, but you're acting like Blizzard should get some sort of free pass. It's their game, the responsibility is on them to make sure their customers can get patches, and they've passed the distribution buck onto the customers.
I clicked on the link to find out what the basic unit of information was (an informatron?) and saw the bit about Hawking changing his mind about how black holes work (I assume based on new evidence).
Given the increasing "threat" of religious propaganda (if I was an American I'd be more worried about Intelligent Design getting taught in schools than I would be about terrorists), its so awesome to see a perfect example of how scientists operate: a new, better theory comes along and the old stuff is abandoned in favour of it.
speaking of losing control of your political system, how much is the fine for owning a freaking laser pointer in Australia again? I shall have to assume you're an American, because trying to score points off such a triviality as that while your own political system is rogering you every which way would be exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from one. We might not have laser pointers (note: that whole debacle was in one state, and it was only for laser pointers up to a certain level of dangerousness, and noone here even gives a shit about it anyway because we don't see the need to own laser pointers), but I'm glad we're not in the same spiraling descent into hell you guys are currently in.
If you're not American, then take the bits you want out of the above and consider me trolled.
Re:The real tragedy of the earthquake...
on
Earthquake In China
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Also, why the hell is this filed under Quake (the game) stories?
I can't recall the details, but my understand was that if you want a refund on an OEM copy of Windows, you have to go to the vendor. I seem to recall an issue with Dell whereby users found a way to get Dell to refund their Windows fee - then Dell changed their EULA to close that hole.
We have been doing this for ages for certain high-demand games file that we mirror. While offering torrents for some of our download mirrors is only mildly useful (as we're in Australia we're trying to keep bandwidth on-shore to cut down international traffic, and BT doesn't really help this), it is extremely helpful for the VAST amount of users that appear to either have massively crazy Internet problems or are simply unable to drive a HTTP based downloader and resume downloads.
When a large number of users are having problems downloading or resuming a particular file, I simply create a torrent for them and give them some vague instructions about how to resume it and then generally I never hear from them again. They're happy because they don't have to download a 4gb game client again from scratch, they don't have to worry about resuming/corrupt downloads, and because its a torrent it probably feels like they're getting something for free that they shouldn't be.
Slashdot Mirror
Full disclaimer - I work for a company that runs sites that are dependent on ad companies for revenue. We actually are pretty strict about what advertising we tolerate - we go more for branding and simple things, although I confess we do the occasional page take over and some other slightly intrusive things, because a) we get paid a lot for them and it allows us to do things like give away Xbox 360s to our regular users and b) they apparently have a very high success rate, which mean users actually click on them and it turns into revenue for our advertisers.
We are investigating (cheap) subscription options to make sure users have an alternative to ads, but in the meantime we don't think its a lot to ask that people absorb a few ads.
I see this attitude a lot on Slashdot and I'll be honest - it shits me to tears, because as a happy user of sites like this that manage to provide me with awesome services, I don't want to have to start paying for it - I'll happily cop a few ads, especially when they're hilarious Microsoft ones trying to pimp to a crowd that clearly hates them.
I can guarantee you that eventually ad blocking is going to just lead to better ad delivery technologies that will probably be even more invasive. Encouraging people to use AdBlock means more chance of less free services that survive on ad revenues.
I won't deny that some sites have terrible ad policies. Rather than block their ads and deny them revenue, I simply stop going there and find an alternate site. If you visit a site that has really crappy ad policies, STOP GOING THERE.
I know they're making XP available on the new models (something that is hilarious in itself given Microsoft's obvious desire to push Vista), but they're still releasing them with Linux and they're still cheaper with Linux (afaik).
Might not be what you're after but I think cinepaint (a GIMP-derivative software package used in film mostly, I believe) has some HDR support. Don't know enough about it to be sure, but saw it referenced in some other thread about GIMP.
I was going to say that sane people don't undergo surgery for trivial reasons, then I thought of liposuction and botox for rich morons, and LASIK for baseball players without myopia. I don't see any ethical surgeons doing something as dangerous as brain surgery for anything but the most profound medical reasons, like blindness or deafness. I don't know - if adding a computer to my brain was as consumer-ised as getting botox I'd certainly consider it, because it'd mean it had passed the point where it was reasonably safe to do it.
I don't know enough about brain surgery to know if this is ever possible (I'm sure brain surgery is always going to be a hard, complicated thing with some associated risk given the fact that our skull is there to stop things from tinkering with your brain), but I would love to have a computer plugged directly into my brain, if only for data storage/recall.
We've got this same system in Australia with even harsher pricing ($1/gig is nothing, we're paying like AU$0.20/MB). Noone has died yet. I'm on a 40gb a month plan that gets shaped if I hit my limit. I have never hit my limit (came close last month though) and I don't restrain my downloading habits.
You should be wary of the government stepping in to try and control the Internet in any form. They're trying to do it here in Australia.
It's only a matter of time before they figure out a way to equate p2p with terrorism and then - what? Oh, they already have.
I gave up for a while, then realised that all the Daily Show and Colbert stuff is available online from the CC site.
Sure, its a bit lame, and its largely Flash which sucks - I'd certainly like a lightweight nerd-friendly site with just a video player and some clips (Daily Show isn't too bad).
I don't even mind the ads at all - because they mean I can access the content when I want for free.
It's not HOW I'd want to get it - I'd rather download an xvid or something and watching it on my Xbox through XBMC - but it's a pretty good compromise for now - for me at least.
I wish I was $600,000 bad at selling my ideas!
Some of the comments to this article (particularly this one make me believe this guy might not know what he's doing.
I find the technical issues of the TPM interesting, but not nearly as interesting as the fact that these things are going out there so these companies can decide for us who we should trust and who we shouldn't, because they don't trust us to make that decision - despite the fact that they're in this position because of the money we've given them.
Concur; I looked at this after reading about it on Slashdot, tracked down the Australian distributor, and fell off my chair when I saw the price (~AUD$1000).
I'm currently reading ebooks on a 3-4 year old HP iPaq that I got for around $200. It's not awesome - screen res is only 320x200 and Microsoft Reader seems to be the worst-designed application in terms of fitting # of words on screen (not as bad w/ HTML ebooks).
But - it's backlit, can read any format, has wifi and web browser, takes SD cards - it's a pretty awesome flexible device, so much so that I'm considering upgrading to a more recent model so I can take advantage of bigger SD cards, newer Windows Mobile, etc.
Unfortunately the base new iPaq classic still is only 320x200 - the higher-end model does 640x480 but costs almost 3 times as much.
I am definitely keen to get an eInk one but just can't justify the cost at the moment.
Just last night I was trying to uninstall Norton Internet Security from my Dad's laptop, which for some reason was HDD chunking mysteriously. I just assumed it was Norton and tried to uninstall it via Control Panel.
As soon as I hit uninstall I got the Windows dialog telling me that the program had done something wrong and would be closed. The UNINSTALLER wouldn't even run.
With that sort of quality why anyone would want to run the whole application is beyond me.
Thanks for mentioning the Norton Removal Tool; I'll give that a crack.
I am wondering if this might be the start of the evolution of US-based ISPs to follow the model we have here in Australia - more content made available locally on each network.
Do no evil*
* Evil may be done in accordance to local laws where such laws are evil.
I suspect (for better or for worse), at the end of the day it'll be a number-balancing question for Google: will they lose more money doing the "right" thing and refusing to comply with local laws/providing Google services in locations where their laws conflict greatly with "Western" laws and morality, OR will they lose more money from the loss-of-face that results when they do something like this.
I would guess taking a moral stand would impact shareholder value negatively.
In this case it's not a case of Google merely pointing to content and connecting people via search. They're actually hosting the offending content on one of their own managed services.
If the T&Cs for that service say "don't break local law" and someone does so then it makes a little more sense that they're doing this.
I wrote a massive reply to this but Slashdot ate it.
The short version is, I know exactly how many users they have and I can extrapolate the requirements. Our site (http://www.ausgamers.com) has spent the last 9 years mirroring gaming content for Australians - working with Blizzard to spread the load for War3 and Starcraft patches).
We'd happily help do this for WoW, and we know there's many other sites that would do it internationally to absorb the bandwidth load.
I recently wrote an article on this issue which you can find here which explains some of the difficulties Australians face; Americans should probably gear up to face them as well if/when your major ISPs start enforcing monthly limits.
Obviously noone wants to pay the bandwidth costs for this, but you're acting like Blizzard should get some sort of free pass. It's their game, the responsibility is on them to make sure their customers can get patches, and they've passed the distribution buck onto the customers.
I actually meant "physical unit"
I clicked on the link to find out what the basic unit of information was (an informatron?) and saw the bit about Hawking changing his mind about how black holes work (I assume based on new evidence).
Given the increasing "threat" of religious propaganda (if I was an American I'd be more worried about Intelligent Design getting taught in schools than I would be about terrorists), its so awesome to see a perfect example of how scientists operate: a new, better theory comes along and the old stuff is abandoned in favour of it.
If you're not American, then take the bits you want out of the above and consider me trolled.
Also, why the hell is this filed under Quake (the game) stories?
I can't recall the details, but my understand was that if you want a refund on an OEM copy of Windows, you have to go to the vendor. I seem to recall an issue with Dell whereby users found a way to get Dell to refund their Windows fee - then Dell changed their EULA to close that hole.
We have been doing this for ages for certain high-demand games file that we mirror. While offering torrents for some of our download mirrors is only mildly useful (as we're in Australia we're trying to keep bandwidth on-shore to cut down international traffic, and BT doesn't really help this), it is extremely helpful for the VAST amount of users that appear to either have massively crazy Internet problems or are simply unable to drive a HTTP based downloader and resume downloads.
When a large number of users are having problems downloading or resuming a particular file, I simply create a torrent for them and give them some vague instructions about how to resume it and then generally I never hear from them again. They're happy because they don't have to download a 4gb game client again from scratch, they don't have to worry about resuming/corrupt downloads, and because its a torrent it probably feels like they're getting something for free that they shouldn't be.