Yeah... but with that rule in place someone will create filter software that detects certain stuff on the net, and then the government will push it as a "strongly suggested piece of software" before making it mandatory to run it on any open services. They'll probably also make it mandatory to keep logs of activity in open networks...... perhaps I'm being to paranoid, but it seems to me that even with that wording, that's a law you don't want to have hanging over your head. It's a step (even a baby step) in a very bad direction.
Proprietary formats: Mow much effort is lost in "Resend that as a *** file?" Or "How do I open that file?" We have some decent standards like Post Script, Latex, HTML, and OOXML. But everybody is intent on using that newfangled version of MSOffice, in which each version is intentionally incompatible with the previous.
I'm all for open and better formats, but I really can't agree with you:
- I had COUNTLESS problems getting the PS output of certain printer drivers to render without errors in Ghostscript (either render or convert to other format, such as TIFF or PDF). I've used PS extensively in a couple of systems and it was a big headache.
- I never got to using Latex... not beyond my skills, but I had formatting needs very different from research papers and it seemed like I needed to download and test specific macros for certain effects. It seemed like a big hassle, even though I was really fond of the idea of a non-WYSIWYG editor (since I do all my editing in Word using Styles just as it was CSS).
- I don't need to mention than as much as HTML is a standard, there are huge incompatibilities between browsers, and AFAIK there aren't many 100% compliant ones (Opera, Firefox 3, what else?)
- I use Open Office daily at work (I don't have MS Word installed here) and as open as it is, it's a huge download (which you have to repeat for each update). I always save my output to PDF when sending it to customers, because I can't even think of asking them to download and install OO... even there, I'm counting in them having a recent version of Acrobat since output tuned for Acrobat 6 or 7 will sometimes not render right if they're using an old version (4 or 5), and I also had problems with how Ghostscript or other alternative readers render PDFs.
On the other hand:
- I NEVER sent someone a.DOC or.RTF and been asked to send it back in a different format. If I were using Office 2007 I'd probably have to be careful to save in the old (Office 2000) format instead of the latest... but that's it.
Of course, if there were 100 Word-compatible word processors, there'd be tons of compatibility problems... such as those I get when I try using the OO-Word conversion.
There are many problems with closed solutions and monoculture... but format compatibility isn't one.
"Addressing SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE ISSUES" doesn't mean "Improving general performance". A SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE ISSUE could be, for instance, that thing where Gigabit networks slowed down when playing MP3 files.
I'd like to know if any industry professionals are using Gimp, just like professional programmers use open source development tools. I've never heard of such a thing... and I'm sure that the professional graphic designers I know with pirated copies of Photoshop would buy it legally if forced to, just like they bought an expensive monitor, mac, drawing tablet, etc. It's not worse than that.
A lot of people use Photoshop when they need much less than that, but much more than the Paint program included in Windows. But it's easier to pirate it than to search for a Shareware or Open Source replacement for the functionality they need... specially when Photoshop training books and courses abound, and tutorials, plug-ins and effects abound on the web.
- Constant updates - Multiplatform (Photoshop for Linux, finally) - Ability to run from any machine, not only those where you installed it. - Ability to access any plug-in in existance... you preview the results, and pay for use if you need/like the effect. - Ability to access any font in existance (likewise) - Same thing with actions, clip art, stock material, etc. - Ability to use the program a single time (eg: once a year you need Adobe Illustrator for a couple of hours, so you pay for a single use instead of buying the whole thing). - Probably easier to do cooperative work... even though MS Word has great support, I find Google Docs very nice for this kind of thing. In Photoshop case you could send a link to a full layered document or various "views" (i.e. snapshots) of the document (with different effects, croppings, etc. applied) viewable though a read-only free version of PS. - Probably easier to interact with printing studios, presses, etc. You just choose their profile (loaded and updated on-line) and your document is adjusted to it.
No way... I've been using Open Office since the start (used Star Office before) and have good reasons not to trust the office compatibility (haven't tried the last version of Open Office, and it might have gotten better, but it'll be a while before I trust it with my information or with my commercial information exchanges).
I use the free Word 97 Viewer (available in MS's site) to view.docs sent to me, and save in propietary formats for storage, and PDF to send over email to other people. When I needed to do colaborative editing of documents (which is not often) I managed to do it with copies of Microsoft Office installed elsewhere or the new Google Docs. If it came to that, I'd install MS Word (which is not *that* expensive by itself) and be done with it.
A friend of mine who also had to use Open Office when he worked with me once figured out that most compatibility problems we had in terms of document layout were due to Open Office assuming different defaults than MS Word for certain things... so, if you explicitly set certain properties you wouldn't normally bother with, your document would look the same when opened in MS Word. However, it's not worth neither the effort nor the risk to do this.
"Gabriel Knight: Sins of the fathers" has a great story and is a very immersive experience. Graphics are a bit dated by now, since it's a DOS/Win3.1 game... but it can still be enjoyed today.
In my experience, 90% of webcam owners are guys who assume that 50% of webcam owners are women. Having a webcam readily available is a good indication of probable masculinity.
And yet, advertising is bigger and more invasive every day. Companies want to get your eyes, and they have money to spend on it... so if people start ignoring TV ads they'll take their money elsewhere... like sponsoring school programs in exchange for vending machines and such... or covering part of the screen with their ads while you watch a show (heavily used in sports events, at least here in Argentina) or doing more and more obvious product placements in movies and TV programs (which can have ugly consequences when they start meddling with the script, or choosing which movies they give their money to based on content, which then creates pressure from the studio to the scriptwriter or director).
But yet, we want/need some amount of advertising... it keeps us informed about new products and services which we might find useful. It gives us a very subjective and imperfect sense of "quality" which is immensely useful when we're in the supermarket and have to pick a product from 30 different offerings.
I find myself blocking a lot of advertisements daily, blocking spam, and rejecting every single "information newsletter" when signing up in sites which use some sort of sponsoring. And yet, I want to be more informed (not less) about certain products, alternatives, offers, and such. I can assume the same of many slashdotters that like me get their daily dose of rumor and hype about new video games, gadgets, computer products, etc. through this site.
So I'd rather accept some sort of not-so-invasive advertising if advertisers are willing to stay off my content, off my schools, off my streets, and so on.
Well... I should do the same, but since I installed adBlock I configured it with subscription to filter lists (as advised everywhere).
If "power users" were the only one blocking ads we probably wouldn't have this article... but the problem is with widespread usage of adBlock, which is only likely with filter lists since otherwise you have to know how to create decent URL filter patterns, which is no big science but probably beyond the possibilities of the average user.
Someone could come up with "bad ad servers" list, but we know how this kind of thing usually goes...
Yeah, but when we use AdBlock we block ALL ads, whether they're obnoxious or not.
What this might cause, eventually, is for ads to be served through the same server and directories as content (to avoid URL pattern matching), for content to be served through the ads (like a flash file that provides both the ad and text content) or that ads sneak inside content (which they already do, in the form of sponsored articles, sponsored tv shows, on-screen banners during shows, etc.)
It'd probably be in the best interest of consumers to find a good middle ground.
I'd never claim the SRD covers character creation because it clearly doesn't. Just that the OGL doesn't forbid character creation rules...
Not all OGL rules are in the SRD, by the way... lots of players and companies have published OGL materials, many of which include custom character creation rules. You want OGL character creation rules? Try Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Mutants & Masterminds, True 20, and lots of other games.
- OGL: Open Game License, by virtue of which you can use anything in the SRD in your own OGL product.
- d20 License: License to put the d20 logo in your product on certain conditions: no PC creation rules, no level advancement, no digital products, etc.
You can use the OGL without subscribing to the d20 license... which is exactly what products like "Arcana Evolved" and "Iron Heroes" do, since both include PC creation rules.
But the ISP would just need to alter the header with the new hash for the adulterated page (which he can calculate as easily as the browser can). Also, this is no good for Ajax...
Here in Argentina lots of people got broadband as soon as it was available, and I think one of the main reasons was the possibility of downloading music and movies (illegally of course, we hardly have any legal downloadable content offerings and CDs and DVDs have a very high price compared with the average income). That's the reason I don't think ISPs can start blocking illegal traffic... it'd remove one of the main reasons driving demand.
Of course there's people that occasionally turn on e-mule and download a CD or a movie, and there's the few power users seeding torrents 24/7... but the problem there is the consumed bandwidth and not the legality of the payload.
I mostly agree with you, except I think this stuff you mention should eventually not be illegal, or embarrassing. The good part about absolute surveillance is that it'll force us to come to terms with who we really are. There's just too many hypocritical laws sustained only by our "privacy".
I had a problem with spam bots in phpBB and tried this solution... it didn't work (it blocked some, but not enough bots). Problem was there is a standard mod already that does this, so checking for this trick is standard now for some bot scripts.
In a forum I administer we were having a spam bot problem. I tried setting up the standard captcha (the forum soft is phpBB) and installed a number of anti-spam mods, all to no avail. What fixed the problem for us was doing a custom mod that involves asking new users straight up to type a certain word in a field, without obscuring the word in any way (it's HTML even, not an image).
Since it's a custom mod, standard phpBB bots don't even try working around it...
Of course, this would never work for a large site like Google or Yahoo.
No, it's not a problem with office programs, it's a problem with the idea that "What you see is all there is". I remember a while back someone attempted to blank out portions of a PDF document by giving lines of black text a black background... which of course didn't remove the confidential data from the file, just prevented naive users from seeing it.
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Yes... I agree... ... you're not developing for standards if you neglect the de-facto standards (as bad as that situation may be).
You can install multiple versions of IE and also install IE7 in standalone mode alongside your IE6.
Yeah... but with that rule in place someone will create filter software that detects certain stuff on the net, and then the government will push it as a "strongly suggested piece of software" before making it mandatory to run it on any open services. They'll probably also make it mandatory to keep logs of activity in open networks... ... perhaps I'm being to paranoid, but it seems to me that even with that wording, that's a law you don't want to have hanging over your head. It's a step (even a baby step) in a very bad direction.
I'm all for open and better formats, but I really can't agree with you:
- I had COUNTLESS problems getting the PS output of certain printer drivers to render without errors in Ghostscript (either render or convert to other format, such as TIFF or PDF). I've used PS extensively in a couple of systems and it was a big headache.
- I never got to using Latex... not beyond my skills, but I had formatting needs very different from research papers and it seemed like I needed to download and test specific macros for certain effects. It seemed like a big hassle, even though I was really fond of the idea of a non-WYSIWYG editor (since I do all my editing in Word using Styles just as it was CSS).
- I don't need to mention than as much as HTML is a standard, there are huge incompatibilities between browsers, and AFAIK there aren't many 100% compliant ones (Opera, Firefox 3, what else?)
- I use Open Office daily at work (I don't have MS Word installed here) and as open as it is, it's a huge download (which you have to repeat for each update). I always save my output to PDF when sending it to customers, because I can't even think of asking them to download and install OO... even there, I'm counting in them having a recent version of Acrobat since output tuned for Acrobat 6 or 7 will sometimes not render right if they're using an old version (4 or 5), and I also had problems with how Ghostscript or other alternative readers render PDFs.
On the other hand:
- I NEVER sent someone a
Of course, if there were 100 Word-compatible word processors, there'd be tons of compatibility problems... such as those I get when I try using the OO-Word conversion.
There are many problems with closed solutions and monoculture... but format compatibility isn't one.
"Addressing SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE ISSUES" doesn't mean "Improving general performance". A SPECIFIC PERFORMANCE ISSUE could be, for instance, that thing where Gigabit networks slowed down when playing MP3 files.
No, "fair use" as a protection is based on the length of the extracts use from the original, and in how much monetary value it takes from it.
I'd like to know if any industry professionals are using Gimp, just like professional programmers use open source development tools. I've never heard of such a thing... and I'm sure that the professional graphic designers I know with pirated copies of Photoshop would buy it legally if forced to, just like they bought an expensive monitor, mac, drawing tablet, etc. It's not worse than that.
A lot of people use Photoshop when they need much less than that, but much more than the Paint program included in Windows. But it's easier to pirate it than to search for a Shareware or Open Source replacement for the functionality they need... specially when Photoshop training books and courses abound, and tutorials, plug-ins and effects abound on the web.
Off the top of my head:
- Constant updates
- Multiplatform (Photoshop for Linux, finally)
- Ability to run from any machine, not only those where you installed it.
- Ability to access any plug-in in existance... you preview the results, and pay for use if you need/like the effect.
- Ability to access any font in existance (likewise)
- Same thing with actions, clip art, stock material, etc.
- Ability to use the program a single time (eg: once a year you need Adobe Illustrator for a couple of hours, so you pay for a single use instead of buying the whole thing).
- Probably easier to do cooperative work... even though MS Word has great support, I find Google Docs very nice for this kind of thing. In Photoshop case you could send a link to a full layered document or various "views" (i.e. snapshots) of the document (with different effects, croppings, etc. applied) viewable though a read-only free version of PS.
- Probably easier to interact with printing studios, presses, etc. You just choose their profile (loaded and updated on-line) and your document is adjusted to it.
No way... I've been using Open Office since the start (used Star Office before) and have good reasons not to trust the office compatibility (haven't tried the last version of Open Office, and it might have gotten better, but it'll be a while before I trust it with my information or with my commercial information exchanges).
.docs sent to me, and save in propietary formats for storage, and PDF to send over email to other people. When I needed to do colaborative editing of documents (which is not often) I managed to do it with copies of Microsoft Office installed elsewhere or the new Google Docs. If it came to that, I'd install MS Word (which is not *that* expensive by itself) and be done with it.
I use the free Word 97 Viewer (available in MS's site) to view
A friend of mine who also had to use Open Office when he worked with me once figured out that most compatibility problems we had in terms of document layout were due to Open Office assuming different defaults than MS Word for certain things... so, if you explicitly set certain properties you wouldn't normally bother with, your document would look the same when opened in MS Word. However, it's not worth neither the effort nor the risk to do this.
I had OS/2 Warp running on a 486SX as a dedicated 24 hour BBS (one phone line only)... I might have had 8 mb of RAM, but I'm not sure.
Anyway... yes... it ran a bit on the bloaty side, but it was OK for the BBS.
"Gabriel Knight: Sins of the fathers" has a great story and is a very immersive experience. Graphics are a bit dated by now, since it's a DOS/Win3.1 game... but it can still be enjoyed today.
In my experience, 90% of webcam owners are guys who assume that 50% of webcam owners are women. Having a webcam readily available is a good indication of probable masculinity.
And yet, advertising is bigger and more invasive every day. Companies want to get your eyes, and they have money to spend on it... so if people start ignoring TV ads they'll take their money elsewhere... like sponsoring school programs in exchange for vending machines and such... or covering part of the screen with their ads while you watch a show (heavily used in sports events, at least here in Argentina) or doing more and more obvious product placements in movies and TV programs (which can have ugly consequences when they start meddling with the script, or choosing which movies they give their money to based on content, which then creates pressure from the studio to the scriptwriter or director).
But yet, we want/need some amount of advertising... it keeps us informed about new products and services which we might find useful. It gives us a very subjective and imperfect sense of "quality" which is immensely useful when we're in the supermarket and have to pick a product from 30 different offerings.
I find myself blocking a lot of advertisements daily, blocking spam, and rejecting every single "information newsletter" when signing up in sites which use some sort of sponsoring. And yet, I want to be more informed (not less) about certain products, alternatives, offers, and such. I can assume the same of many slashdotters that like me get their daily dose of rumor and hype about new video games, gadgets, computer products, etc. through this site.
So I'd rather accept some sort of not-so-invasive advertising if advertisers are willing to stay off my content, off my schools, off my streets, and so on.
Well... I should do the same, but since I installed adBlock I configured it with subscription to filter lists (as advised everywhere).
If "power users" were the only one blocking ads we probably wouldn't have this article... but the problem is with widespread usage of adBlock, which is only likely with filter lists since otherwise you have to know how to create decent URL filter patterns, which is no big science but probably beyond the possibilities of the average user.
Someone could come up with "bad ad servers" list, but we know how this kind of thing usually goes...
Yeah, but when we use AdBlock we block ALL ads, whether they're obnoxious or not.
What this might cause, eventually, is for ads to be served through the same server and directories as content (to avoid URL pattern matching), for content to be served through the ads (like a flash file that provides both the ad and text content) or that ads sneak inside content (which they already do, in the form of sponsored articles, sponsored tv shows, on-screen banners during shows, etc.)
It'd probably be in the best interest of consumers to find a good middle ground.
ActiveState Komodo IDE is very good... and not expensive. It supports PHP, Python, JScript, Ruby, TCL, PERL, and many popular frameworks and APIs.
I find that many PHP developers don't use a debug tool (which Komodo includes), which is a disastrous way to develop.
I'd never claim the SRD covers character creation because it clearly doesn't. Just that the OGL doesn't forbid character creation rules...
Not all OGL rules are in the SRD, by the way... lots of players and companies have published OGL materials, many of which include custom character creation rules. You want OGL character creation rules? Try Arcana Evolved, Iron Heroes, Mutants & Masterminds, True 20, and lots of other games.
No, you're getting mixed up with the d20 license:
- OGL: Open Game License, by virtue of which you can use anything in the SRD in your own OGL product.
- d20 License: License to put the d20 logo in your product on certain conditions: no PC creation rules, no level advancement, no digital products, etc.
You can use the OGL without subscribing to the d20 license... which is exactly what products like "Arcana Evolved" and "Iron Heroes" do, since both include PC creation rules.
But the ISP would just need to alter the header with the new hash for the adulterated page (which he can calculate as easily as the browser can). Also, this is no good for Ajax...
IANB (I am not British) but as far as I know the drive around with vans that have some kind of gadgets that can catch the EM emissions of a TV set.
Is it really 5%?
Here in Argentina lots of people got broadband as soon as it was available, and I think one of the main reasons was the possibility of downloading music and movies (illegally of course, we hardly have any legal downloadable content offerings and CDs and DVDs have a very high price compared with the average income). That's the reason I don't think ISPs can start blocking illegal traffic... it'd remove one of the main reasons driving demand.
Of course there's people that occasionally turn on e-mule and download a CD or a movie, and there's the few power users seeding torrents 24/7... but the problem there is the consumed bandwidth and not the legality of the payload.
I mostly agree with you, except I think this stuff you mention should eventually not be illegal, or embarrassing. The good part about absolute surveillance is that it'll force us to come to terms with who we really are. There's just too many hypocritical laws sustained only by our "privacy".
I had a problem with spam bots in phpBB and tried this solution... it didn't work (it blocked some, but not enough bots). Problem was there is a standard mod already that does this, so checking for this trick is standard now for some bot scripts.
In a forum I administer we were having a spam bot problem. I tried setting up the standard captcha (the forum soft is phpBB) and installed a number of anti-spam mods, all to no avail. What fixed the problem for us was doing a custom mod that involves asking new users straight up to type a certain word in a field, without obscuring the word in any way (it's HTML even, not an image).
Since it's a custom mod, standard phpBB bots don't even try working around it...
Of course, this would never work for a large site like Google or Yahoo.
No, it's not a problem with office programs, it's a problem with the idea that "What you see is all there is". I remember a while back someone attempted to blank out portions of a PDF document by giving lines of black text a black background... which of course didn't remove the confidential data from the file, just prevented naive users from seeing it.