Microsoft Announces Adoption of Gecko!
on
Netscape 6
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· Score: 3
Thursday, March 30, 2000
Redmond, Washington: In a surprise move, Microsoft today announced that it would make available a preview release of its new web browser and that it would feature the so-called "Gecko" technology.
"We kept hearing about this Gecko thing," said Ben Dover, Microsoft Spokesperson. "We had no choice but to include it ourselves, with some minor modifications."
When asked to elaborate, Dover explained, "Well, we felt that as good as Gecko was, it couldn't hurt to fix some 'bugs.' So we fooled around with it for a while. When we were done, we realized that nothing worked any more. But we had to have Gecko. Because we lacked in-house talent to do it correctly, we eventually just renamed MSHTML.DLL to GECKO.DLL. All better now!"
Dover went on to explain that the new browser would be a svelte 55 MB download. When reminded that the new Netscape browser was a mere 5.5 MB, Dover responded, "Hey, you get what you download. The Microsoft browser is obviously ten times better."
<RANT>I could argue either way on this coke.ch situation, but this QuePasa.com vs. WhatsHappenin.com lawsuit was revolting. Any human being who might confuse these two domain names probably lacks the cognitive and motor skills necessary drool, let alone operate a computer (even an iOpener;).</RANT>
Microsystems also asked the judge to order the Swedish Internet company where the bypass utility is published to turn over records identifying everyone who visited the Web site or downloaded the program.
Second, stricter enforcement of the domain name policy, based on what entity a registrant represents. A for-profit corporation can only register.com, a non-profit organization only gets.org, and most importantly an individual can only get.sum if they're using the site for non-commercial purposes.
Ah, yes, a return to basics. But that brings up a very interesting problem: who enforces such divisions? The last time I checked (which I will admit was well over a year ago), NSI was only verifying.edu applications, which could not be processed through their website anyway. They had, in effect, given up on trying to enforce the original intentions of the domain names.
A tragedy, to be sure, but done for two very good reasons: 1)Rake in three times the money by removing the restrictions; 2)The world started registering ten thousand web sites each day (probably an exaggeration, but close).
If one were truly interested in reestablishing the strict divisions between TLDs, I can only think of one good solution: only allow a registrar to register a single TLD. BobsBigDomains gets to register.com; connect-u-net.net gets to register.net; and so on and so forth.
The personal TLD is needed so incredibly badly. But I don't see it happening any time soon -- too many McDonald's in the world. (That was a joke, son.) Seriously, though, opening up a personal TLD would lead to just as many disputes, unless you're lucky and have a rare surname. Which Smith gets to register the smith.sum domain? The first one to click on the submit button? Capitalistic, yes, but really not much better than what we already have.
Yes, I too got a good chuckle over that. Then I started formulating ways in which college sysadmins would restrict access anyway. Granted, I'm not a sysadmin, I know nothing about sysadmining, but I got into college, right?
Okay, AFAICT with this you can escape the dangers of having specific IPs blocked, specific ports blocked, specific hosts blocked, etc. So much so that sysadmins would pretty much have to block access to the entire freakin' net to stop it all.
Why do people assume they won't do this? Bad publicity for the college? News flash: all publicity is good publicity in the long run. Even horrible, life-ending publicity will be good for the institution five, ten years down the line. People will forget the cause and nature of the bad publicity and only remember that there was publicity at all. It's hard for people to remain upset for long periods of time. Even if a college eliminated network access to the internet, within a few years everyone would forget about it. Especially if they were not the only college that did it. Trust me on this one.
Oh, boo hoo, they've taken my access to the internet away. Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just double their modem pool and make everyone dial in. Maybe, like was the case not so long ago, you would have to specifically request network access, and then would be strictly monitored for so-called abuses.
Or maybe they don't take away network access at all. Maybe they just put insane restrictions on it. Here at USC, the solution was to place restrictions on bandwidth. But those restrictions are still fairly liberal. Who is to say that a college couldn't place a restriciton of, say 10 MB total network traffic per ethernet port ber 24 hour period? Exceed it, and your ethernet port is automatically shut down for, say, 72 hours as punishment. Light web browsing, checking your email, etc., wouldn't be impeded, but it sure would make trading files (any type of file, be it mp3s, warez, whatever) extraordinarily difficult.
Just some thoughts. People who post challenges like gnullsoft has done should be prepared for people to take them up on it.
Okay, so I can't copy music onto my computer because the RIAA didn't get a kickback... er, I mean modest royalty... on my computer's CD-R. But if I play the music on my computer, there's a good chance that it'll be cached at some point somewhere on my hard drive. Oops, that's a copy (at least according to the software industry). So I can only listen to music if I have disk caching turned off. But wait! Even then, it will most likely be cached into RAM, either in whole or in part! And a copy is a copy, whether it's the whole thing or just part of it! So now I can't even play music on my computer, because at some point a so-called copy is made somewhere inside my computer! Yippee! RIAA wins!
An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC can be found here.
Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!
Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)
So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.
Okay, I'm not on ResNet here at USC, and dialup 53k isn't exactly the prime medium for trading around MP3s so I mostly don't, but... I do read the campus newspaper, so I know what's going on regarding Napster here on campus.
According to this Daily Trojan article, USC is planning to limit bandwidth rather than block any particular site. The really great thing about this is that after ISD (dept. in charge of network) let it be known that Napster was going to be banned outright, they actually paused to listen to the students (who were admittedly outraged) and sought the advice of the university's legal counsel. Not only did they listen, they changed their position and relaxed a bit, took a deep breath, and reevaluated why they were trying to ban Napster. The final decision was to:
automatically shut off the ethernet connections of students who use more than 40 percent of their allotted bandwidth - 500 kilobytes per second - for more than two consecutive hours
It is difficult to argue against that. I mean, really, when do you need that much continuous bandwidth? The only things I can think of are for uses that ISD probably bans already (like personal web servers).
[From the article: "Linder said the patent could even be broad enough to cover single links that would simply go from an affiliate to Amazon's home page, instead of to specific items."]
I'm hoping and praying to all that is good and right in this world that this guy is just smoking crack or something. If not, the implications are both absurd and frightening: amazon.com is the only ecommerce site that can be linked to. Right? 'Cause if you have a link anywhere on your page that just points to bn.com (for example), that violates amazon's patent (according to Linder).
Any judge who let such an absurd interpretation stand should be removed from office by any means necessary. That would effectively shut down the internet. Only Amazon.com could exist on the internet unless your website was 100% noncompetitive -- personal pages, edu/gov/mil sites, and the like.
Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
> Wasnt there some noise on AOL and their page with much about the same thing?
Yes and no. From what I was able to distill from the rants (some of them my own), and especially from the slashdot interview with the people who were suing, the issue was not so much that the AOL website was not accessible as the software itself. There is a subtle difference: if AOL's website is not accessible, then it's poor design, people should complain, and if AOL is smart they'll fix it. Lawsuits over web site accessibility are going to be extremely difficult to win (IMHO, but IANAL). But when the very software needed to access AOL's site is not accessible -- I seem to remember the complaint being that all of the fancy buttons are graphics, none of which have anything resembling ALT text -- that's when you start messing with the good ol' ADA. You have sold a product (service, whatever) to a customer who is prevented from using it because of some disability that you should have considered. It would be the same thing if, for example, to check if You've Got Mail you had to simultaneously right-click while pressing the z-key: pretty hard to do if you only have one arm, and thus a (potential) violation of the ADA. (And I know that's a bizarre example, but we are talking about AOL here...)
As far as the website in question here: I have to agree with posts elsewhere that the irony of a major pharmaceutical company posting a site that can't be viewed by the visually impared is just too great to pass by unnoticed. I'd recommend contacting your local newspaper to see if the tech writer would be interested in running an article. 8^)
Now, I'm not terribly certain about this, but didn't the last (failed) try at an injunction take place in California (9th Circuit)? You always hear about how ultra-liberal the 9th is. Kinda makes it obvious then that the megacorps would hop across the country to New York -- a wee bit more conservative and "sympathetic to the cause," neh?
Okay, a few things to get started: in the future, the OS will be largely irrelevant to everyday use. All programs will be accessed through some kind of web browser from multiple remote servers. The operating system will not matter because everything will be run through the browser (or, to look at it from a different way, the browser will become the GUI, and as long as it at least looks and feels the same across platforms, it will not matter which platform it is on -- which is the same to say that no one will be willing to pay excessive fees for an OS).
Granted, OS upgrades will continue. But thanks to free global efforts, new updates will be available on a daily basis. Thus, you may be running "Windows" as the OS -- or "linux" or "BSD" or "MacOS" -- but they will all be essentially the same thing. And with the rapid pace of updating, the version number will actually be the release date: Windows June 8, 2012. For a small fee ($36/year?), you get daily subscriptions to the OS updates. Instantly recognizable if you're running the latest version... check today's date!
Of course, this is assuming a certain company's so-called updates don't muck up the system instead...
I have real-world experience with what happens if you try to overprotect a child from violence. (Well, it's not first-hand experience, but let's just say that I have known this person from birth and he's now in his mid-teens.)
When he was born, his parents -- his mother, really, I don't think his father ever actually bought into it -- decided that he would not be exposed to anything related to violence. (I suppose this was a reaction to seeing me grow up several years earlier playing with GI Joes and the like, and (IMNSHO) wholly unrelated discipline problems at school. (Come on, I'm a geek, who didn't get picked on when they were young?))
Anyway, when he finally started walking around and talking, they went to great pains to ensure that he was in a positive, nurturing environment. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good thing. However, they went out of their way to censor anything resembling violence in his life. I don't know how many five-year-old boys think the Care Bears are the coolest thing in the world, but it just seemed weird to me.
So he continues to grow up. He learns how to cook and sew -- again, these are good skills to have, especially for later in life when one is living on one's own. But everything he did in play time had violent undertones. He would routinely fashion clubs or ray guns out of Legos and the like and go around hitting imaginary foes. Ghostbusters came out about this time, and he got hooked on it. His mother lightened up a bit, but only a bit -- it was sort of violent, but it was entirely directed against ghosts and other things that don't exist.
So when he got the Ghostbuster gun for his birthday, what was his first act? To run around shooting at his baby sister. Heh.
About the time he was eight-or-so, something weird happened. One day his grandmother bought him a cap gun and some caps! You would have thought the world was coming to an end. (His father couldn't have been happier. 8^) ) When the caps ran out, he was still running around with the cap gun shooting at everything -- and I mean everything, people, animals, cars, appliances, rocks, you name it.
Later that year, his mother finally loosened her reigns on the poor kid and let him get GI Joes for his birthday. As it turns out, he had been going over to friends' houses for a few years and playing with violent toys anyway. His play-acting of violence increased slightly thereafter, but now, in his mid-teens, he is a perfectly well-adjusted kid. He just reached the level of Eagle Scout.
Moral of the story: kids, especially boys, are hardwired to express themselves actively and (in a limited fashion) violently. Stop trying to suppress this genetic feature and start spending efforts towards directing this output in creative fashions. I know from personal experience (of the first-hand variety) that violent video games and violence-based toys (like GI Joe) provided a release for all of my built-up aggression toward the world. (Nothing's better than coming home after being beat up at school and blowing away some demons in the dark... 8^) ) But would I ever go out and actually kill anyone in real life? No. Why? Because I learned early on that that was just something you didn't do. I'm not sure if it was my parents who taught me that -- I think the only thing my parents actually gave me (in the heredity sense) was common sense, which says that taking a gun to school and killing the bullies is wrong. Why? It's wrong. Plain, simple.
In closing: with all of this BS over censoring violent video games and such, has anyone actually watched the evening news lately? I see more so-called Bad Stuff on the news that in a Jackie Chan movie...
I am becoming resigned to the fact that the operating system, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless. I use a limited number of programs on a day to day basis; the three that I use the most are:
- AutoCAD 14 - form*Z 3.1 - Photoshop 5.5
(I am an architecture geek, if this wasn't obvious.) I have found that (at least in the case of Photoshop and form*Z) it matters next-to-none what OS I am on -- both run equally well and without any major differences on either platform. I'm stuck using a Windows machine for AutoCAD: Autodesk (its makers) decided after Release 12 (?) that it was no longer financially worthwhile to support two versions for platforms that made up less than 10% of the marketplace combined (namely, Mac and Unix). But I guess I'm okay with that, because it has allowed some nice CAD programs to flourish, at least on the Mac platform.
So, the point: I hate Windows; I specifically hate all the little crap that it does, its bugs, its "helpful features" that are anything but. However, due to my field of study and the choice of programs available, I'm rather stuck on a Windows machine. How I long to use Linux, Be, or *anything* other than Windows! Alas, I cannot. I was literally a few hours away from installing linux when I found that WINE cannot even run *older* versions of AutoCAD and form*Z and Photoshop, let alone execute the latest versions.
(I realize, and have heard arguments to the like before, that there are "similar" programs available on the linux platform. But is that really the solution you want to promote? "Don't like your OS? Switch and relearn all of the programs you use!" Harumph. For example: I've seen Gimp, I've dabbled with Gimp, I still vastly prefer the look, feel, and features of Photoshop. Sorry.)
I welcome anyone who wants to create the ability to escape the curse of Windows, even if it is MS itself at the heart of it. Remember what I said at the beginning: the OS is irrelevant. There are Holy Wars being faught over Mac vs. Win vs. Linux vs. Be vs. BSD vs. etc. Why? To me, operating systems are the roads of the world; programs are the cars. No one fusses about the roads they drive on (well, almost no one), but few people miss an opportunity to fuss about their car.
Okay, a fuzzy analogy, I apologize. (A wee bit tired right now...) Now, I'm an architecture geek, remember, not a computer geek; but try this: How much of what you do with your computer, productivity-wise, actually has anything directly to do with the operating system? I've examined my habits, and the answer is almost none. With few exceptions, almost everything I do on a computer involves programs that run on the OS, even telnet and plaintext editing. It seems to me that programs are where the money really is, not the OS.
Now, I am *NOT* advocating a "one world, one OS" system; rather, I'm envisioning a world in which there are multiple vendors for your OS, all of which are essentially the same. Think of it as the gas you put in your car -- with some minor performance variations, the gas from Shell will get you where you're going just as good as the gas from Mobil. What gas you put in your car doesn't matter nearly as much as where you are going.
Okay, to summarize: OS, irrelevant; programs, reason for having a computer; anything that blurs the distinction between one OS and the next (or makes the OS distinction a distant second to program usability), good news indeed.
Okay, so I'm NOT a CS major or anything (nine months left in architecture...), and 99% of everything I know about computers I got from dinking around with them in my spare time. </DISCLAIMER>
A lot of people have mentioned alternative browsers, alternative protocols, parallel webs, and the like. That's great, but is any of those realistic? (Maybe the new generation of browsers, but I don't see a parallel web sprouting any time soon.)
What about using text-only browsers to bypass rating filters? I know everyone gets all excited about being able to see pictures on their browsers, but people lasted decades content with binaries that had to be downloaded and decoded separately. And most complaints about the rating proposals/censorship issues revolve around the impediment of ideas. Now we can get into a long philosophical argument whether or not pictures are ideas, but for now let's just stick with text, okay? (Besides, pictures are just formatted text anyway.)
My point is: your school/business/whatever using [insert censorware]? As long as you can get a telnet connection to a shell account, it seems that you could just use lynx (or some other UNIX-based text-only browser) to bypass all that junk. You don't get to look at pretty pictures (at least not right away), but the information (read: text) is all still there.
Of course (and here's where the disclaimer comes in), none of this really matters if it is your company's/school's firewall (or equivalent) that is blocking the information, or if you can't get telnet access.
Not that that has ever been a problem for me. Most places I've worked, even the people who knew what they were doing were clueless on blocking telnet access while still providing web access.
By that do you mean the article by Mr. Moody, or your post?
I do disagree with his estimate of a two-hour recovery time, but I would be happy if Windows only crashed once per day. As it turns out, when I actually am working in Windows, it tends to crash every few hours.
Why, you ask, do I "tolerate MS siftware"? Because the programs I need to run don't exist on other platforms. (Maybe I can get away with WINE in the future, but right now it doesn't run the last few versions of the programs I use on a daily basis.) "Complain! Write to the company making the program and tell them to support other platforms!" Well guess what? They used to support other platforms (specifically Macintosh), but after those OS's shares of the market dropped below 10% combined, they wisely saw the cost-benefit ratio disappear and dropped everything except Windows 9x/NT. (The company of which I speak is Autodesk, maker of AutoCAD -- but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, as far as I have heard from company reps Autodesk hasn't supported MacOS for at least five releases now.)
If you truly get uptimes with Windows that amount to months on end, I applaud you. I'd also like to know how you do it, since even the "robust" NT OS seems to crash on me every few days.
By clicking on the preceding link, you hereby agree to send me US$10.00. (Of course, collecting my money is going to be rather difficult...)
I am so not a lawyer, but my gut reaction is that placing conditions on an action that happened in the past is not really enforceable. (Were you born? Ever? Then you owe me twenty dollars. On top of the ten above.)
Of course, my impression of website "disclaimers" is usally along the same line; that is, the ones I've bothered reading basically say "by viewing this site, you agree to blah blah blah..." So just by loading the site -- any page -- you "agree" to a long list of restrictions etc. You didn't know that by loading the XYZ site you agree to have a $5.00 charge appear on your next phone bill? Well, gosh, it was right there in the disclaimer. Oh, that's right, you have to load the site to read the disclaimer in the first place. Don't ya just hate that?
Now I'm just rambling. Sleep deprivation will do that to you.
China seems to be doing a stellar job of blocking any and all content that it deems "illegal," which by my reckoning is just about any and all content not directly related to the positive side of the government in Beijing.
Of course, I just saw an interesting news brief on CNN (or something like that) about these new Chinese ISPs... so maybe there is progress being made?
Yeah, and I suppose George Bush or Bob Dole would have been so much more open to the whole concept of the Internet... puh-leeeze.
I'm not saying Clinton is perfect -- just better than the alternatives. (And I know there were/are some great third-party candidates out there, but be realistic: IIRC, Perot had the best third-party candidate showing in a *long* time, and he won what, half a state? Just pissing your vote away. So you pick the lesser of the two big evils and hope and pray for a better selection in four years.)
I apologize for not being clearer... What I meant was that MS can handle "losing money like crazy" because they have a host of other money-makers -- MSN is not their major source of income. They had to be bleeding like crazy when they started giving away IE -- but it's okay, cause it sucks people further into their little web where they'll begin to shell out money for other products. (Even Netscape, to an end, followed this method -- give away the browser 'cause the server software is where the money is.)
Unlike MSN, a start-up ISP can't afford to turn anything less than a profit. So whereas MS can stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Ma-n-Pa ISP can't afford to lose even a hundred dollars.
So what happens? MS(N) takes over the ISP industry by offering free/nearly free connections. Then they raise prices -- not by much, just a little at a time (like postage rates -- remember when it only cost a quarter?). Eventually you might be back to $9/month. Some start-up ISP hits the scene offering service for $8/month. MS drops their price to $5/month, the start-up ISP can't sign anyone up (who'd pay $3/month more for 56k instead of cable?). MS rules again.
The same thing always happens in a price war. Companies get killed and prices go down for the consumer. I fail to see how this could possibly be a bad thing.
In the short run, yes, you are correct. We get free or practically free internet access. That is, until Microsoft is the only widely available ISP left. Then what? What incentive will MS have to keep its "free" service when there is no competition?
It's easy to respond that "anyone" can set up a phone-access ISP, whatever, but how much would you have to charge to remain profitable? If MS had 25 million customers (probably an gross underestimation if they succeeded in taking over AOL's share), they could charge just $1/month and still make $300 Million each and every year. A drop in the bucket, you say, to the cost of maintaining such a huge operation, but how close is your start-up phone-based ISP going to come to that revenue? And what user base is going to pay even $5/month for 56k access when they can pay $1/month for cable access?
It's just another example of the classic Microsoft strategy: If we can't beat them on merits, we'll beat them by giving away a competing product. (Actually, that should probably read: Since we can't beat them on merits...)
I use a Mac at work, and it has both Arial and Helvetica. I don't know if it is just my Mac, but there are subtle differences between the two (kerning, letter shape, etc.). However, the two are close enough to be used interchangeably across platform. (Of course, since I have Arial on my Mac and most PCs don't have Helvetica, I tend to avoid Helvetica like the plague and stick with Arial.)
A larger issue here is the use of . I was skeptical at first, but the advantages of CSS over the FACE attribute far outweigh the drawbacks. I seem to remember it was M$ that had a hand in developing the tag, though I know Netscape was no less responsible.
I use a Mac at work (please don't hurt me). For what its worth:
Netscape 4.08 (Mac) -- garbled mess
Explorer 4.5 (Mac) -- "as intended" (though not really much better 8^)
lynx -- as good as one can expect (at least it loads)
I spend a lot of time reworking sites so that they will at least load in both major browsers... and I know I don't get paid nearly what the "genius" who put this site up gets. I know I should get around to learning the "new" DOM better, but my initial perusal leads me to suspect that is the problem.
What I would really like to see is this policy instituted on a national level. I have three "regular" email aliases (and about a dozen temporary ones): one is practically clear of spam (because I never give it out 8^), one gets about 50% spam, and the third is 100.00%. Yup, good ol' Yahoo seems to have made my MyYahoo address available to every spammer who has ever walked the face of the earth.
I figure, if there were a law like this in California, I could make $3900 each week.
If it is "open" then why won't they give Be the info they need to port BeOS to the new G3s? I don't see how it could be fear of competition because (and correct me here if I am wrong) they gave that very same information to the LinuxPPC people.
Don't get me wrong, I work on a Mac and I really like it. I just wish there were more options.
(And I really wish Jobs had not decided at the last minute to yank the theme functionality out of MacOS so I wouldn't have to shell out $25 to use Kaleidoscope (which is well worth the money)...)
Slashdot Mirror
Redmond, Washington: In a surprise move, Microsoft today announced that it would make available a preview release of its new web browser and that it would feature the so-called "Gecko" technology.
"We kept hearing about this Gecko thing," said Ben Dover, Microsoft Spokesperson. "We had no choice but to include it ourselves, with some minor modifications."
When asked to elaborate, Dover explained, "Well, we felt that as good as Gecko was, it couldn't hurt to fix some 'bugs.' So we fooled around with it for a while. When we were done, we realized that nothing worked any more. But we had to have Gecko. Because we lacked in-house talent to do it correctly, we eventually just renamed MSHTML.DLL to GECKO.DLL. All better now!"
Dover went on to explain that the new browser would be a svelte 55 MB download. When reminded that the new Netscape browser was a mere 5.5 MB, Dover responded, "Hey, you get what you download. The Microsoft browser is obviously ten times better."
Already happened. Quepasa.com Settles Whatshappenin.com Lawsuit on /. not too long ago.
<RANT>I could argue either way on this coke.ch situation, but this QuePasa.com vs. WhatsHappenin.com lawsuit was revolting. Any human being who might confuse these two domain names probably lacks the cognitive and motor skills necessary drool, let alone operate a computer (even an iOpener ;).</RANT>
...To which the Swedish ISP replied:
Bork bork, borkity bork bork gebork!
Ah, yes, a return to basics. But that brings up a very interesting problem: who enforces such divisions? The last time I checked (which I will admit was well over a year ago), NSI was only verifying .edu applications, which could not be processed through their website anyway. They had, in effect, given up on trying to enforce the original intentions of the domain names.
A tragedy, to be sure, but done for two very good reasons: 1)Rake in three times the money by removing the restrictions; 2)The world started registering ten thousand web sites each day (probably an exaggeration, but close).
If one were truly interested in reestablishing the strict divisions between TLDs, I can only think of one good solution: only allow a registrar to register a single TLD. BobsBigDomains gets to register .com; connect-u-net.net gets to register .net; and so on and so forth.
The personal TLD is needed so incredibly badly. But I don't see it happening any time soon -- too many McDonald's in the world. (That was a joke, son.) Seriously, though, opening up a personal TLD would lead to just as many disputes, unless you're lucky and have a rare surname. Which Smith gets to register the smith.sum domain? The first one to click on the submit button? Capitalistic, yes, but really not much better than what we already have.
Aargh. I think my head just exploded.
Yes, I too got a good chuckle over that. Then I started formulating ways in which college sysadmins would restrict access anyway. Granted, I'm not a sysadmin, I know nothing about sysadmining, but I got into college, right?
Okay, AFAICT with this you can escape the dangers of having specific IPs blocked, specific ports blocked, specific hosts blocked, etc. So much so that sysadmins would pretty much have to block access to the entire freakin' net to stop it all.
Why do people assume they won't do this? Bad publicity for the college? News flash: all publicity is good publicity in the long run. Even horrible, life-ending publicity will be good for the institution five, ten years down the line. People will forget the cause and nature of the bad publicity and only remember that there was publicity at all. It's hard for people to remain upset for long periods of time. Even if a college eliminated network access to the internet, within a few years everyone would forget about it. Especially if they were not the only college that did it. Trust me on this one.
Oh, boo hoo, they've taken my access to the internet away. Well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe they just double their modem pool and make everyone dial in. Maybe, like was the case not so long ago, you would have to specifically request network access, and then would be strictly monitored for so-called abuses.
Or maybe they don't take away network access at all. Maybe they just put insane restrictions on it. Here at USC, the solution was to place restrictions on bandwidth. But those restrictions are still fairly liberal. Who is to say that a college couldn't place a restriciton of, say 10 MB total network traffic per ethernet port ber 24 hour period? Exceed it, and your ethernet port is automatically shut down for, say, 72 hours as punishment. Light web browsing, checking your email, etc., wouldn't be impeded, but it sure would make trading files (any type of file, be it mp3s, warez, whatever) extraordinarily difficult.
Just some thoughts. People who post challenges like gnullsoft has done should be prepared for people to take them up on it.
Okay, so I can't copy music onto my computer because the RIAA didn't get a kickback... er, I mean modest royalty... on my computer's CD-R. But if I play the music on my computer, there's a good chance that it'll be cached at some point somewhere on my hard drive. Oops, that's a copy (at least according to the software industry). So I can only listen to music if I have disk caching turned off. But wait! Even then, it will most likely be cached into RAM, either in whole or in part! And a copy is a copy, whether it's the whole thing or just part of it! So now I can't even play music on my computer, because at some point a so-called copy is made somewhere inside my computer! Yippee! RIAA wins!
Ouch. I think my head just exploded.
An unusually excellent article on the whole napster mess here at USC can be found here.
Basic summary: the folks at ISD (the network admins) issued a preliminary statement that they were going to ban napster due to bandwidth concerns and legal worries (even huge universities don't want to be sued). As you might expect, students expressed outrage at this proposed suppression of their so-called rights (this is a debatable issue, leave it for the next post). Then USC's legal department came back with their answer... and it was no!
Turns out that there is probably more chance of losing future lawsuits if USC starts censoring out certain websites, than if they just let students have free access to the entire net, no questions asked. (Think of all the problems that internet filters have.)
So, instead, ISD held a nice roundtable discussion with student groups and hammered out a compromise. The rule now stands that whatever site you want to access is open (the head of ISD was quoted as saying to the effect that he didn't really want to know where students were going!). The only limitation is on bandwidth: students who exceed 40% of their bandwidth allocation (about 500k/sec) for more than two consecutive hours will have their ethernet port shut down. It's a nice incentive, especially since they are really slow about reactivating ports. Everyone involved agreed that this was an acceptible outcome of the situation.
Okay, I'm not on ResNet here at USC, and dialup 53k isn't exactly the prime medium for trading around MP3s so I mostly don't, but... I do read the campus newspaper, so I know what's going on regarding Napster here on campus.
According to this Daily Trojan article, USC is planning to limit bandwidth rather than block any particular site. The really great thing about this is that after ISD (dept. in charge of network) let it be known that Napster was going to be banned outright, they actually paused to listen to the students (who were admittedly outraged) and sought the advice of the university's legal counsel. Not only did they listen, they changed their position and relaxed a bit, took a deep breath, and reevaluated why they were trying to ban Napster. The final decision was to:
automatically shut off the ethernet connections of students who use more than 40 percent of their allotted bandwidth - 500 kilobytes per second - for more than two consecutive hours
It is difficult to argue against that. I mean, really, when do you need that much continuous bandwidth? The only things I can think of are for uses that ISD probably bans already (like personal web servers).
.[From the article: "Linder said the patent could even be broad enough to cover single links that would simply go from an affiliate to Amazon's home page, instead of to specific items."]
I'm hoping and praying to all that is good and right in this world that this guy is just smoking crack or something. If not, the implications are both absurd and frightening: amazon.com is the only ecommerce site that can be linked to. Right? 'Cause if you have a link anywhere on your page that just points to bn.com (for example), that violates amazon's patent (according to Linder).
Any judge who let such an absurd interpretation stand should be removed from office by any means necessary. That would effectively shut down the internet. Only Amazon.com could exist on the internet unless your website was 100% noncompetitive -- personal pages, edu/gov/mil sites, and the like.
Of course, that's just my opinion; I could be wrong.
> Wasnt there some noise on AOL and their page with much about the same thing?
Yes and no. From what I was able to distill from the rants (some of them my own), and especially from the slashdot interview with the people who were suing, the issue was not so much that the AOL website was not accessible as the software itself. There is a subtle difference: if AOL's website is not accessible, then it's poor design, people should complain, and if AOL is smart they'll fix it. Lawsuits over web site accessibility are going to be extremely difficult to win (IMHO, but IANAL). But when the very software needed to access AOL's site is not accessible -- I seem to remember the complaint being that all of the fancy buttons are graphics, none of which have anything resembling ALT text -- that's when you start messing with the good ol' ADA. You have sold a product (service, whatever) to a customer who is prevented from using it because of some disability that you should have considered. It would be the same thing if, for example, to check if You've Got Mail you had to simultaneously right-click while pressing the z-key: pretty hard to do if you only have one arm, and thus a (potential) violation of the ADA. (And I know that's a bizarre example, but we are talking about AOL here...)
As far as the website in question here: I have to agree with posts elsewhere that the irony of a major pharmaceutical company posting a site that can't be viewed by the visually impared is just too great to pass by unnoticed. I'd recommend contacting your local newspaper to see if the tech writer would be interested in running an article. 8^)
Now, I'm not terribly certain about this, but didn't the last (failed) try at an injunction take place in California (9th Circuit)? You always hear about how ultra-liberal the 9th is. Kinda makes it obvious then that the megacorps would hop across the country to New York -- a wee bit more conservative and "sympathetic to the cause," neh?
Okay, a few things to get started: in the future, the OS will be largely irrelevant to everyday use. All programs will be accessed through some kind of web browser from multiple remote servers. The operating system will not matter because everything will be run through the browser (or, to look at it from a different way, the browser will become the GUI, and as long as it at least looks and feels the same across platforms, it will not matter which platform it is on -- which is the same to say that no one will be willing to pay excessive fees for an OS).
Granted, OS upgrades will continue. But thanks to free global efforts, new updates will be available on a daily basis. Thus, you may be running "Windows" as the OS -- or "linux" or "BSD" or "MacOS" -- but they will all be essentially the same thing. And with the rapid pace of updating, the version number will actually be the release date: Windows June 8, 2012. For a small fee ($36/year?), you get daily subscriptions to the OS updates. Instantly recognizable if you're running the latest version... check today's date!
Of course, this is assuming a certain company's so-called updates don't muck up the system instead...
I have real-world experience with what happens if you try to overprotect a child from violence. (Well, it's not first-hand experience, but let's just say that I have known this person from birth and he's now in his mid-teens.)
When he was born, his parents -- his mother, really, I don't think his father ever actually bought into it -- decided that he would not be exposed to anything related to violence. (I suppose this was a reaction to seeing me grow up several years earlier playing with GI Joes and the like, and (IMNSHO) wholly unrelated discipline problems at school. (Come on, I'm a geek, who didn't get picked on when they were young?))
Anyway, when he finally started walking around and talking, they went to great pains to ensure that he was in a positive, nurturing environment. Don't get me wrong, this is a very good thing. However, they went out of their way to censor anything resembling violence in his life. I don't know how many five-year-old boys think the Care Bears are the coolest thing in the world, but it just seemed weird to me.
So he continues to grow up. He learns how to cook and sew -- again, these are good skills to have, especially for later in life when one is living on one's own. But everything he did in play time had violent undertones. He would routinely fashion clubs or ray guns out of Legos and the like and go around hitting imaginary foes. Ghostbusters came out about this time, and he got hooked on it. His mother lightened up a bit, but only a bit -- it was sort of violent, but it was entirely directed against ghosts and other things that don't exist.
So when he got the Ghostbuster gun for his birthday, what was his first act? To run around shooting at his baby sister. Heh.
About the time he was eight-or-so, something weird happened. One day his grandmother bought him a cap gun and some caps! You would have thought the world was coming to an end. (His father couldn't have been happier. 8^) ) When the caps ran out, he was still running around with the cap gun shooting at everything -- and I mean everything, people, animals, cars, appliances, rocks, you name it.
Later that year, his mother finally loosened her reigns on the poor kid and let him get GI Joes for his birthday. As it turns out, he had been going over to friends' houses for a few years and playing with violent toys anyway. His play-acting of violence increased slightly thereafter, but now, in his mid-teens, he is a perfectly well-adjusted kid. He just reached the level of Eagle Scout.
Moral of the story: kids, especially boys, are hardwired to express themselves actively and (in a limited fashion) violently. Stop trying to suppress this genetic feature and start spending efforts towards directing this output in creative fashions. I know from personal experience (of the first-hand variety) that violent video games and violence-based toys (like GI Joe) provided a release for all of my built-up aggression toward the world. (Nothing's better than coming home after being beat up at school and blowing away some demons in the dark... 8^) ) But would I ever go out and actually kill anyone in real life? No. Why? Because I learned early on that that was just something you didn't do. I'm not sure if it was my parents who taught me that -- I think the only thing my parents actually gave me (in the heredity sense) was common sense, which says that taking a gun to school and killing the bullies is wrong. Why? It's wrong. Plain, simple.
In closing: with all of this BS over censoring violent video games and such, has anyone actually watched the evening news lately? I see more so-called Bad Stuff on the news that in a Jackie Chan movie...
I am becoming resigned to the fact that the operating system, for all intents and purposes, is meaningless. I use a limited number of programs on a day to day basis; the three that I use the most are:
- AutoCAD 14
- form*Z 3.1
- Photoshop 5.5
(I am an architecture geek, if this wasn't obvious.) I have found that (at least in the case of Photoshop and form*Z) it matters next-to-none what OS I am on -- both run equally well and without any major differences on either platform. I'm stuck using a Windows machine for AutoCAD: Autodesk (its makers) decided after Release 12 (?) that it was no longer financially worthwhile to support two versions for platforms that made up less than 10% of the marketplace combined (namely, Mac and Unix). But I guess I'm okay with that, because it has allowed some nice CAD programs to flourish, at least on the Mac platform.
So, the point: I hate Windows; I specifically hate all the little crap that it does, its bugs, its "helpful features" that are anything but. However, due to my field of study and the choice of programs available, I'm rather stuck on a Windows machine. How I long to use Linux, Be, or *anything* other than Windows! Alas, I cannot. I was literally a few hours away from installing linux when I found that WINE cannot even run *older* versions of AutoCAD and form*Z and Photoshop, let alone execute the latest versions.
(I realize, and have heard arguments to the like before, that there are "similar" programs available on the linux platform. But is that really the solution you want to promote? "Don't like your OS? Switch and relearn all of the programs you use!" Harumph. For example: I've seen Gimp, I've dabbled with Gimp, I still vastly prefer the look, feel, and features of Photoshop. Sorry.)
I welcome anyone who wants to create the ability to escape the curse of Windows, even if it is MS itself at the heart of it. Remember what I said at the beginning: the OS is irrelevant. There are Holy Wars being faught over Mac vs. Win vs. Linux vs. Be vs. BSD vs. etc. Why? To me, operating systems are the roads of the world; programs are the cars. No one fusses about the roads they drive on (well, almost no one), but few people miss an opportunity to fuss about their car.
Okay, a fuzzy analogy, I apologize. (A wee bit tired right now...) Now, I'm an architecture geek, remember, not a computer geek; but try this: How much of what you do with your computer, productivity-wise, actually has anything directly to do with the operating system? I've examined my habits, and the answer is almost none. With few exceptions, almost everything I do on a computer involves programs that run on the OS, even telnet and plaintext editing. It seems to me that programs are where the money really is, not the OS.
Now, I am *NOT* advocating a "one world, one OS" system; rather, I'm envisioning a world in which there are multiple vendors for your OS, all of which are essentially the same. Think of it as the gas you put in your car -- with some minor performance variations, the gas from Shell will get you where you're going just as good as the gas from Mobil. What gas you put in your car doesn't matter nearly as much as where you are going.
Okay, to summarize: OS, irrelevant; programs, reason for having a computer; anything that blurs the distinction between one OS and the next (or makes the OS distinction a distant second to program usability), good news indeed.
Okay, so I'm NOT a CS major or anything (nine months left in architecture...), and 99% of everything I know about computers I got from dinking around with them in my spare time.
</DISCLAIMER>
A lot of people have mentioned alternative browsers, alternative protocols, parallel webs, and the like. That's great, but is any of those realistic? (Maybe the new generation of browsers, but I don't see a parallel web sprouting any time soon.)
What about using text-only browsers to bypass rating filters? I know everyone gets all excited about being able to see pictures on their browsers, but people lasted decades content with binaries that had to be downloaded and decoded separately. And most complaints about the rating proposals/censorship issues revolve around the impediment of ideas. Now we can get into a long philosophical argument whether or not pictures are ideas, but for now let's just stick with text, okay? (Besides, pictures are just formatted text anyway.)
My point is: your school/business/whatever using [insert censorware]? As long as you can get a telnet connection to a shell account, it seems that you could just use lynx (or some other UNIX-based text-only browser) to bypass all that junk. You don't get to look at pretty pictures (at least not right away), but the information (read: text) is all still there.
Of course (and here's where the disclaimer comes in), none of this really matters if it is your company's/school's firewall (or equivalent) that is blocking the information, or if you can't get telnet access.
Not that that has ever been a problem for me. Most places I've worked, even the people who knew what they were doing were clueless on blocking telnet access while still providing web access.
........Joke collumn
By that do you mean the article by Mr. Moody, or your post?
I do disagree with his estimate of a two-hour recovery time, but I would be happy if Windows only crashed once per day. As it turns out, when I actually am working in Windows, it tends to crash every few hours.
Why, you ask, do I "tolerate MS siftware"? Because the programs I need to run don't exist on other platforms. (Maybe I can get away with WINE in the future, but right now it doesn't run the last few versions of the programs I use on a daily basis.) "Complain! Write to the company making the program and tell them to support other platforms!" Well guess what? They used to support other platforms (specifically Macintosh), but after those OS's shares of the market dropped below 10% combined, they wisely saw the cost-benefit ratio disappear and dropped everything except Windows 9x/NT. (The company of which I speak is Autodesk, maker of AutoCAD -- but feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, as far as I have heard from company reps Autodesk hasn't supported MacOS for at least five releases now.)
If you truly get uptimes with Windows that amount to months on end, I applaud you. I'd also like to know how you do it, since even the "robust" NT OS seems to crash on me every few days.
By clicking on the preceding link, you hereby agree to send me US$10.00. (Of course, collecting my money is going to be rather difficult...)
I am so not a lawyer, but my gut reaction is that placing conditions on an action that happened in the past is not really enforceable. (Were you born? Ever? Then you owe me twenty dollars. On top of the ten above.)
Of course, my impression of website "disclaimers" is usally along the same line; that is, the ones I've bothered reading basically say "by viewing this site, you agree to blah blah blah..." So just by loading the site -- any page -- you "agree" to a long list of restrictions etc. You didn't know that by loading the XYZ site you agree to have a $5.00 charge appear on your next phone bill? Well, gosh, it was right there in the disclaimer. Oh, that's right, you have to load the site to read the disclaimer in the first place. Don't ya just hate that?
Now I'm just rambling. Sleep deprivation will do that to you.
China seems to be doing a stellar job of blocking any and all content that it deems "illegal," which by my reckoning is just about any and all content not directly related to the positive side of the government in Beijing.
Of course, I just saw an interesting news brief on CNN (or something like that) about these new Chinese ISPs... so maybe there is progress being made?
Yeah, and I suppose George Bush or Bob Dole would have been so much more open to the whole concept of the Internet... puh-leeeze.
I'm not saying Clinton is perfect -- just better than the alternatives. (And I know there were/are some great third-party candidates out there, but be realistic: IIRC, Perot had the best third-party candidate showing in a *long* time, and he won what, half a state? Just pissing your vote away. So you pick the lesser of the two big evils and hope and pray for a better selection in four years.)
I apologize for not being clearer... What I meant was that MS can handle "losing money like crazy" because they have a host of other money-makers -- MSN is not their major source of income. They had to be bleeding like crazy when they started giving away IE -- but it's okay, cause it sucks people further into their little web where they'll begin to shell out money for other products. (Even Netscape, to an end, followed this method -- give away the browser 'cause the server software is where the money is.)
Unlike MSN, a start-up ISP can't afford to turn anything less than a profit. So whereas MS can stand to lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year, Ma-n-Pa ISP can't afford to lose even a hundred dollars.
So what happens? MS(N) takes over the ISP industry by offering free/nearly free connections. Then they raise prices -- not by much, just a little at a time (like postage rates -- remember when it only cost a quarter?). Eventually you might be back to $9/month. Some start-up ISP hits the scene offering service for $8/month. MS drops their price to $5/month, the start-up ISP can't sign anyone up (who'd pay $3/month more for 56k instead of cable?). MS rules again.
Yeuch. And I just ate lunch.
The same thing always happens in a price war. Companies get killed and prices go down for the consumer. I fail to see how this could possibly be a bad thing.
In the short run, yes, you are correct. We get free or practically free internet access. That is, until Microsoft is the only widely available ISP left. Then what? What incentive will MS have to keep its "free" service when there is no competition?
It's easy to respond that "anyone" can set up a phone-access ISP, whatever, but how much would you have to charge to remain profitable? If MS had 25 million customers (probably an gross underestimation if they succeeded in taking over AOL's share), they could charge just $1/month and still make $300 Million each and every year. A drop in the bucket, you say, to the cost of maintaining such a huge operation, but how close is your start-up phone-based ISP going to come to that revenue? And what user base is going to pay even $5/month for 56k access when they can pay $1/month for cable access?
It's just another example of the classic Microsoft strategy: If we can't beat them on merits, we'll beat them by giving away a competing product. (Actually, that should probably read: Since we can't beat them on merits...)
I use a Mac at work, and it has both Arial and Helvetica. I don't know if it is just my Mac, but there are subtle differences between the two (kerning, letter shape, etc.). However, the two are close enough to be used interchangeably across platform. (Of course, since I have Arial on my Mac and most PCs don't have Helvetica, I tend to avoid Helvetica like the plague and stick with Arial.)
A larger issue here is the use of . I was skeptical at first, but the advantages of CSS over the FACE attribute far outweigh the drawbacks. I seem to remember it was M$ that had a hand in developing the tag, though I know Netscape was no less responsible.
I use a Mac at work (please don't hurt me). For what its worth:
Netscape 4.08 (Mac) -- garbled mess
Explorer 4.5 (Mac) -- "as intended" (though not really much better 8^)
lynx -- as good as one can expect (at least it loads)
I spend a lot of time reworking sites so that they will at least load in both major browsers... and I know I don't get paid nearly what the "genius" who put this site up gets. I know I should get around to learning the "new" DOM better, but my initial perusal leads me to suspect that is the problem.
What I would really like to see is this policy instituted on a national level. I have three "regular" email aliases (and about a dozen temporary ones): one is practically clear of spam (because I never give it out 8^), one gets about 50% spam, and the third is 100.00%. Yup, good ol' Yahoo seems to have made my MyYahoo address available to every spammer who has ever walked the face of the earth.
I figure, if there were a law like this in California, I could make $3900 each week.
If it is "open" then why won't they give Be the info they need to port BeOS to the new G3s? I don't see how it could be fear of competition because (and correct me here if I am wrong) they gave that very same information to the LinuxPPC people.
Don't get me wrong, I work on a Mac and I really like it. I just wish there were more options.
(And I really wish Jobs had not decided at the last minute to yank the theme functionality out of MacOS so I wouldn't have to shell out $25 to use Kaleidoscope (which is well worth the money)...)