Instead of AdBlock Plus and it's built-in subscription service, you can use (regular, non-Plus) AdBlock with the "Filterset.g Updater" extension, which pulls down copies of filterset.g and loads them.
I think it's a horrible kludge, and I really don't understand why ABP and filterset.g can't work together (apparently there is some sort of a personality conflict between the ABP maintainer and the filterset.g one), but it might be something to look into if you want to get rid of EasyList, which is the preferred subscription service for ABP in the US.
Personally I'm sticking with ABP and EasyList for the time being, but I'm not entirely pleased about this.
Can you use HTTP pipelining and Adblock? It doesn't seem like there's any reason why the two would be incompatible. Or is that not what you were implying?
After all, it's your computer that sends out the requests for the ads, and it can only do that once it receives the actual page... so it seems like there's no reason why you can't install an ad-block and just prevent the requests for the ads entirely, but allow all the requests for the other page elements to be pipelined. Right?
I've never really paid much attention to how often the EasyList thing is updated, but basically AdBlock Plus pulls down a block list from a server periodically, that contains new regexps that it uses for blocking. (Mostly they are just site domains.)
However, the latest copy of the list -- or some fairly recent version, because I never noticed it until today -- must have contained a new addition. It's a segment at the bottom of the blocklist file called "Firefox/ABP slander filter" and contains one entry: "whyfirefoxisblocked.com#body".
It's trivial to disable once you know it's there, but I don't think something like that should be on by default. I also really don't think they should be slipping something like that silently into people's blocklists. And beyond that, it caused me to waste a fair bit of time and look like a bit of an idiot because I was trying to figure out how the whyfirefoxisblocked people managed to stop the page from rendering on Firefox but not on IE... it never occurred to me that the problem was on my end.
If you aren't subscribed to the EasyList (USA) blocklist, then you might not have gotten it, or it might not be enabled. In particular, people using the filterset.g list (dunno if that works with ABP), or a static list of their own creation, won't be affected.
Yeah that was what I was getting at. However, I was wrong. As it turns out, AdBlock Plus had actually censored the site... that's why it wasn't rendering.
I was giving the site way too much credit for being clever (taking advantage of rendering differences would be a more effective way to block a browser than using the USER_AGENT response, and it's not like it's hard to go out and find little bits of code that test to see which browser a user is running... there are lots of them around, usually relying on CSS), and I never stopped to think that ABP would actually censor a site for "slanderous" content.
I'm actually somewhat unhappy with ABP for doing that, as ridiculously sleazy as the Block Firefox people are.
I think it's considered infringing, or it's at least a grey area, to record a program, cut out all the commercials, and then distribute it. (Similarly, last year it was ruled infringing to edit a movie and then distribute the edited version, even if it came with the original copy.)
I don't think there's ever been a ruling on whether it's infringing to just fast-forward through commercials when watching recorded TV, or to record TV for personal use that won't be distributed, while stopping and starting the VCR so as to remove the commercials. (My family used to always do that back when VCRs were new and tape was expensive... you could fit a lot more to a tape if you were quick with the remote.)
I didn't even think to check for that. I was giving these guys a lot more credit than they deserve (see my comment above). I thought that they were using some difference in the rendering engine between IE and FF to produce a page that rendered (correctly) to white in FF but because of an IE quirk, showed content when viewed with IE.
It never occurred to me to check AdBlock and see if it was actually being *blocked*...
That's actually rather troubling. I use EasyList USA, like most AdBlock users, and I'm not particularly sure I like the idea of them slipping a "Firefox/ABP Slander" filter into the ad-blocking list. That doesn't seem quite kosher, as obnoxious as I find the "Why Firefox is Blocked" fools.
But lo and behold, when I disabled that line on the ABP list, the page shows up.
I still think that the "Why Firefox is Blocked" people are a bunch of assholes, but that's not a particularly good showing from the ABP/EasyList people either.
Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?
Also... does anyone think this may just be a troll / hoax? I've learned never to question the stupidity of people, particularly people on the Internet, but this seems like it's just a bit of a stretch. It kind of reminds me of an Adequacy.org post.
The blocking that they seem to be advocating that others use is pretty standard "HTTP_USER_AGENT" querying using a PHP script, so it's not like it would be hard to get around. (Incidentally, I've always felt that the USER_AGENT header was something of a bad idea; maybe it's time to kill it, or at least disable replying to it by default?)
What I'm slightly more interested in is how they're blocking the main page. It's not the same as the script that they're pushing; the page actually loads (you can view the source in FF), but it seems to take advantage of some rendering quirk in IE to produce a blank screen when rendered on Firefox. That actually strikes me as a little more subtle, although it's still dumb.
The story I've heard in reference to the creation of the CD and have always found fascinating is about the 74 minute length. For those who haven't heard it already:
Apparently (so the story goes), the discs were originally designed to hold 60 minutes of music. But the VP of Sony decided this was unacceptable, since it would not be long enough to allow uninterrupted playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a disc change -- the piece as usually performed is a little less than 1:15, or about 74 minutes.
According to Wikipedia, there was probably more than just a love for classical music in here; the demand for 74 minutes as opposed to 60 (which necessitated 120mm discs instead of 115) was strategic. Polygram (one of Sony's major competitors) already had an experimental facility set up to make 115mm discs, Sony didn't, and therefore it was advantageous to force 120mm in order to start the playing field off level.
Still, I've always gotten a kick out of the idea that the now-standard size of the CD (and DVD, and BluRay/HDDVD) could have been influenced by a piece of music written in 1824.
I wasn't implying that the drop in prices was charity or "doing the right thing" on their part -- I'm not stupid. That was just competition.
What I was getting at was that they could have easily just kept my monthly rate the same, and sent me a note saying "hey, guess what, we've given you a FREE UPGRADE" to a better plan. While that wouldn't have caused me to get all that angry, I think what they really did (keeping me on my current plan and charging me less per month) was significantly classier.
It was specifically that decision -- not to try and switch me to another plan as a 'freebie', but instead just making the service cheaper -- that I thought was "the right thing to do."
I was just glad that they made an OS X native version. I don't know about other people, but I have a *lot* of old ClarisWorks and AppleWorks documents sitting around, and they are not something that you can easily batch-convert. (Or at least I don't know of a way to easily batch convert them; if anyone knows how to do that, please feel free to let me know.) I probably go in and open up an old Claris WP document every few weeks or so.
Will the new iWork suite open old Claris/Appleworks documents? It would be nice if they did. I haven't played with the new iWork apps at all (I realized that I don't need a word-processor for most of what I now do, and just use TextMate to butcher ASCII instead).
Yes, but nothing's stopping these people from forming a new company and doing the same thing again. Except that they just lost everything they had in the old company when it collapsed.
Don't forget who the Board of Directors of most companies are -- they're the major investors. They have a lot of wealth tied up in that company's stock (sometimes also its debt). If the company goes bankrupt, they're the last ones to get anything. Generally, their shares just turned into toilet paper.
However much they had invested in the corporation, that's how much they're now out. That's a major disincentive against just firing it up and doing it again.
Get rid of the notion of limited liability for corporate officers. Simply alter corporate law so that corporate officers can be held directly accountable, so that when Mega-Chemical Corporation spills toxins into public drinking water, not only is the corporation taken to the cleaners, but the officers of the company are also taken to the cleaners. Thus, even if Mega-Chemical Corporation folds, we can still get our pound of flesh out of the officers. Right. So then, the people who actually have the money -- the actual investors -- all find a few chumps from the street to put in the Board of Directors chairs, and pull the strings from behind the scenes.
There are lots of people who'd step on each other to get a job like that. Think of it as 'economic bodyguarding.' They get a fat paycheck for sitting there and doing what their master says, unless things go bad and then they take the bullet. I could think of ways to set it up so that they'd never even really know who they were representing.
You'd get someone to carve your pound of flesh from, but it probably wouldn't ever be the person you really want.
That's idiotic. The "limited liability thing" is what lets corporations raise capital. It's why they work. If there is a key concept that can be said to have driven the economic development -- not to mention wealth generation -- of the last 150 years, that's probably it.
You're talking quite literally about dismantling the cornerstone of modern civilization. Talk about a cure that's worse than the disease.
Without limited liability you couldn't have stock ownership and equities trading. You wouldn't have investment. The activities currently undertaken by corporations would only be done by the most wealthy of private individuals. You would create, overnight, an aristocracy of people rich enough to control large-scale enterprises without investment, and everyone else who would be unable to do anything with their money except stuff it in a mattress. The economy -- which is the beating heart of our society -- would collapse.
--You know, stuff like this actually makes me want to go out of my way to *support* NetFlix -- for doing the Right Thing(TM) for their CUSTOMERS. Definitely; I'm proud to be a Netflix customer and happy to recommend them to anyone.
Another thing they did recently... they reduced their prices. Sent me a letter in the mail, said 'hey, the plan you're on is now $14.95/mo instead of $19.95, congrats.'
I was really surprised. Most companies I would have expected to just bump me up one level of service (to the 4-at-a-time plan or something) while keeping me at the same price level, making me call them up to downgrade to my old level of service in order to save money. They didn't; they just dropped the price, and I didn't have to do a thing.
It's a little ridiculous that I get surprised by a company doing what ought to be the right and obvious thing, but that's how things work these days. Anyway, kudos to Netflix and whoever is in charge there. Hope they can keep it up.
I'd like to hear more ballsy politicians make ultimatums like JFK did.... I just want to see some visionaries at the head of our country. Really? That's funny, because I know this guy who's just chock full of 'ballsy ultimatums,' and even a 'vision' or two, and he could really use your support these days.
Also I think the discontinuation of analogue will free up a good bit of bandwidth. It definitely would, but I don't think that it's going to happen in a hurry. As far as I've heard to date, nothing the FCC is doing would require the cable companies to discontinue analog service.
If anything, the discontinuation of analog broadcast may actually raise the demand for analog service on cable systems, as people look for service that they can access using their old TV (and don't want to use a DTV -> analog converter). The cable companies aren't going to pass up the opportunity to attract a few new customers due to the ease of hooking up -- just plug in your analog "cable ready" TV to the wall and go.
It's going to be a very long time before cable companies switch off the analog channels from the low end of the band. Frankly I think it would be easier for them to just pull more coax, at least where it's all aboveground. Keep traditional analog NTSC-cable on one for "basic cable" customers, and push new services (HDTV, switched/VOD TV, HSI, VoIP) on the other. If there's anyone out there deploying new cable infrastructure who isn't pulling multiple pieces of coax at a time, I'd say they're insane, given the small fraction of the deployment costs made up by the actual cable and distribution hardware. (Heck, even when I worked on my college's campus CATV system, we used to always pull two or three runs of coax through difficult sections just as a precaution, and that was without any thought of using them for data.)
But you're right that analog cable wastes a ridiculous amount of bandwidth; eventually it's going to go, but it won't be in a hurry.
I pity you, your state and everyone else using Access.
Yeah, Access is a piece of shit. Unfortunately, it's a lot better than using Excel as a database, which is in many cases the alternative that I've witnessed.
There are also a lack of alternatives: you have FileMakerPro, which is neat (I like it) but not very appealing to some because it has a significant learning curve compared to Access and is also proprietary and expensive; aside from that you have OO.org's Base, which is still immature; and then you've got custom SQL+webforms, which is usually the right choice for non-trivial projects, but requires users to realize the scope of their project at the outset.
And as crummy as Access is, at least it gives you a path towards a separate frontend/backend. You don't get that when each employee is keeping their own critical information on a massive spreadsheet on their workstation's hard drive. And in more places than I'd like to think about, that's the way things work -- it's the dark side of giving every employee an actual computer as opposed to a dumb terminal.
Satellites are good for some things. They're pretty handy out in the desert, for instance. You can see a cargo van in an otherwise trackless desert using a satellite pretty easily; or if a few vehicles had driven the same route, you'd be able to clearly see the hard-packed trail they'd leave. That's pretty useful in terms of border security.
Might also be handy to watch the same area over time, looking for changes that you might not notice if you were there in person. It might not be economically feasible to run aerial photography over a location more than a few times per year, but a satellite might overfly it every day -- that would give you a lot of imagery to look at differences in. And it might let you fly over areas that are just too remote or uninteresting for aerial flyovers. Things like illegal logging or toxic dumping would be the obvious uses.
Overall I can only think of limited scenarios where it would really be all that handy. Your average bank robbery, car chase, or drug deal? Not so much. It's not like these satellite capabilities are that new; police departments haven't exactly been begging the NSA for satellite coverage, probably because they realize it's of limited usefulness.
Idiot intern nonwithstanding, should that really have been possible? I thought that any decent router would see that a loop had occurred and shut down the port connected to it, rather than forwarding all the broadcast storm packets.
After all, preventing layer 2 loops is what Spanning Tree is all about, and I thought Cisco had some similar system for figuring out if a link was unidirectional (if you're sending packets down to something and not getting anything back, it can shut it down, to keep it from just sending out lots of bogus requests).
I doubt that crappy consumer switches do STP, but the upstream Cisco one should have... shouldn't it?
Do these people hire idiots with no training or experience or what? Probably they do to some extent, but if it's like other places I've worked, they probably hire people who have a clue, but then tell them to do little bits and pieces, and never give them enough resources to actually do the job right.
It's a lot of "we'll pay you to come out and install this." They don't want to hear 'well, you should really re-think the architecture of your whole network' as a response. They just want the new piece grafted on, and if you don't do the job, they'll just find somebody who will.
That's how these horrible abortions of big systems / networks happen. They usually don't start off like that. They just grow and evolve without much in the way of a central plan until they finally keel over and die. Nobody wants to spend the time, money, or downtime to tear things down and rebuild them until they actually fail. So they just grow out of control.
They probably had a flat network (or a switched one without any subnets) because that was the only way to keep everything working as it grew; as different contractors came in and tacked on this or that, they just added it on to whatever was there.
Would you think that LAX is running anything that out-of-date or crappy? I assume that they're running everything with spit, duct tape, wishful thinking, ancient custom software, near-fossilized hardware, and Excel spreadsheets... just like pretty much everything else in the public sector.
I've seen what's running some government agencies, and it's frightening.
For example, read up on the ongoing attacks on AACS. The black hats (and yes, they are black hats) working on breaking AACS have exploited all kinds of software and hardware bugs and shortcomings in order to gather more information and cryptographic secrets. They have the upper hand because they are not fully disclosing their work. If they were to fully disclose the bugs in various tabletop HD-DVD players and software tools that they use to garner keys, you can bet that the problems would be fixed. As is, though, they are still ahead of the AACSLA. I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that. DRM is a poor example for any security model, because there's no real security there, just obscurity. In the long term, it doesn't really matter what the hackers release, because there's no long-term way for the AACSLA to stop them (well, aside from putting them all in jail, which is doubtless what they'd love to do). You can't give someone both enciphered information, and the key to the cipher, and expect them to not be able to combine the two -- that's exactly what DRM does. It's fundamentally a shell game.
The reason the attackers are keeping their work secret is usually for two reasons (1) they want an advantage over other attackers, to be the first to break it really thoroughly, and (2) they don't want the AACSLA to plug any holes before they can find a break that will be impossible to plaster over.
Also, that's a poor example because a lot of the AACS hacking goes on in the open. When a break is found it's usually documented (at least if you go to the right forums). They're not sending it to the AACSLA to fix, but it's not really all that 'secret,' it's more like academic research where the research is conducted behind closed doors, but the findings get published when there's something significant.
Do you think the MS developers that are spending so much time and effort (read: blood, sweat, and tears - as the developers here are well aware) to work on making Silverlight work with Mono will really want to stop making their project as good as it can be? Do you think Microsoft has the loyalty from their programmers to tell them, "OK, stop adding features that work cross platform and change direction!", and have them give up on what they've been working on? Yes.
It's really not that hard. They just kill the project. Eliminate its funding, reassign all the developers, break up the group of people who did it, destroy all the internal documentation. Once you've scattered all the people involved, the project is pretty much dead and buried.
Projects get canceled all the time. If it's a particularly interesting project, some of the developers might be attached enough to it to keep a checkout of the source, maybe fiddle with it from time to time, but the chances of them doing anything significant are pretty small, when they'll have something else to do and aren't getting paid to work on it anymore.
And to be honest, I don't know that many developers who get that attached to their work once they've had a few projects canceled out from under them. Sure, a few people might, particularly if it's the first time it's happened to them, but if you work for a big corporation you just get used to the idea that at any time, some jackass in a suit with an MBA might decide your work isn't ever going to pay for itself and shitcan it. That's life, either you go crazy, you get used to it and enjoy your paycheck, or you quit programming, get an MBA and become the jackass.
Yeah, every once in a while you hear about some project that's been canceled that's kept alive by the programmers afterwards, but they're exceptions, not the rule.
I'm not saying that I'm for this decision at all (I'd be SOL as well since I run Fedora at home...) but does that TV tax actually cover television programs distributed over the Internet? I'm not sure, and I think the answer probably depends a lot on how the BBC handles its finances internally and how much firewalling there is between divisions in terms of funding sources, but I also don't think it's totally relevant.
The cost of distributing the content has to be a small fraction of the cost of actually creating it, and I'm nearly positive that the TV tax monies do assist with that. So arguing that "well, the internet distribution isn't funded by tax dollars" as a justification for putting DRM on the content is pretty thin.
Anyway, that's only one of the problems with iPlayer; the other, and probably more significant one, is that the iPlayer they're using (the crummy Windows-only, DRMed one) uses P2P in order to distribute the content. Consumer broadband ISPs aren't really thrilled with this, and see it as basically a way of making them bear the BBCs bandwidth costs.*
* For the record I think this is a bullshit argument, but that's what they're saying. Of course, what they hate to talk about is that they're rampantly overselling their capacity, and this is the real source of the problems.
Where is that information? Can I trust the Diebold editing an article about themselves? Or can I not? I don't think that there's one answer to that for everyone. I suspect that most people would say "no," but doubtless there are some people -- probably who work at Diebold themselves -- who would say "yes." Thus, there isn't a single answer.
The benefit of Wikipedia, when combined with tools like the one described in TFA, is that it lets you actually look at what various people are contributing, if you want to. So rather than just looking at the Diebold article, knowing that Diebold probably contributed to it, and having to decide whether to believe the article or discredit it in toto, you can look at exactly what Diebold might have added, or view the version that caused them to decide to change things. That gives you a lot of information -- indirectly, it can tell you a lot about Diebold, and by reading between the lines it might let you infer a lot about the situation that's not going to be written anywhere.
The Diebold article probably isn't the best example of this, because it's pretty clear what Diebold wants, but the benefit of the editing process is more clear when you walk into a disputed article that you don't know anything about. I'll often click on the Discussion page on a WP article just out of curiosity, and it's surprising the number of articles that conceal fairly vehement disputes (sometimes over seeming trivialities, but sometimes not). The ability to see the discussion and edit history of a page give much more insight into the development of an article than you get out of most traditional publications, and ultimately that allows the reader to decide for themselves what they want to believe.
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Instead of AdBlock Plus and it's built-in subscription service, you can use (regular, non-Plus) AdBlock with the "Filterset.g Updater" extension, which pulls down copies of filterset.g and loads them.
= 64&t=1142
I think it's a horrible kludge, and I really don't understand why ABP and filterset.g can't work together (apparently there is some sort of a personality conflict between the ABP maintainer and the filterset.g one), but it might be something to look into if you want to get rid of EasyList, which is the preferred subscription service for ABP in the US.
Personally I'm sticking with ABP and EasyList for the time being, but I'm not entirely pleased about this.
If anyone is interested, here is the thread on the AdBlock EasyList Forum (the maintainer site for EasyList) discussing whyfirefoxisblocked:
http://www.richsterling.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f
Can you use HTTP pipelining and Adblock? It doesn't seem like there's any reason why the two would be incompatible. Or is that not what you were implying?
... so it seems like there's no reason why you can't install an ad-block and just prevent the requests for the ads entirely, but allow all the requests for the other page elements to be pipelined. Right?
After all, it's your computer that sends out the requests for the ads, and it can only do that once it receives the actual page
I've never really paid much attention to how often the EasyList thing is updated, but basically AdBlock Plus pulls down a block list from a server periodically, that contains new regexps that it uses for blocking. (Mostly they are just site domains.)
... it never occurred to me that the problem was on my end.
However, the latest copy of the list -- or some fairly recent version, because I never noticed it until today -- must have contained a new addition. It's a segment at the bottom of the blocklist file called "Firefox/ABP slander filter" and contains one entry: "whyfirefoxisblocked.com#body".
It's trivial to disable once you know it's there, but I don't think something like that should be on by default. I also really don't think they should be slipping something like that silently into people's blocklists. And beyond that, it caused me to waste a fair bit of time and look like a bit of an idiot because I was trying to figure out how the whyfirefoxisblocked people managed to stop the page from rendering on Firefox but not on IE
If you aren't subscribed to the EasyList (USA) blocklist, then you might not have gotten it, or it might not be enabled. In particular, people using the filterset.g list (dunno if that works with ABP), or a static list of their own creation, won't be affected.
Yeah that was what I was getting at. However, I was wrong. As it turns out, AdBlock Plus had actually censored the site ... that's why it wasn't rendering.
... there are lots of them around, usually relying on CSS), and I never stopped to think that ABP would actually censor a site for "slanderous" content.
I was giving the site way too much credit for being clever (taking advantage of rendering differences would be a more effective way to block a browser than using the USER_AGENT response, and it's not like it's hard to go out and find little bits of code that test to see which browser a user is running
I'm actually somewhat unhappy with ABP for doing that, as ridiculously sleazy as the Block Firefox people are.
I think it's considered infringing, or it's at least a grey area, to record a program, cut out all the commercials, and then distribute it. (Similarly, last year it was ruled infringing to edit a movie and then distribute the edited version, even if it came with the original copy.)
... you could fit a lot more to a tape if you were quick with the remote.)
I don't think there's ever been a ruling on whether it's infringing to just fast-forward through commercials when watching recorded TV, or to record TV for personal use that won't be distributed, while stopping and starting the VCR so as to remove the commercials. (My family used to always do that back when VCRs were new and tape was expensive
The claim seems pretty bogus to me.
Whoa.
I didn't even think to check for that. I was giving these guys a lot more credit than they deserve (see my comment above). I thought that they were using some difference in the rendering engine between IE and FF to produce a page that rendered (correctly) to white in FF but because of an IE quirk, showed content when viewed with IE.
It never occurred to me to check AdBlock and see if it was actually being *blocked*...
That's actually rather troubling. I use EasyList USA, like most AdBlock users, and I'm not particularly sure I like the idea of them slipping a "Firefox/ABP Slander" filter into the ad-blocking list. That doesn't seem quite kosher, as obnoxious as I find the "Why Firefox is Blocked" fools.
But lo and behold, when I disabled that line on the ABP list, the page shows up.
I still think that the "Why Firefox is Blocked" people are a bunch of assholes, but that's not a particularly good showing from the ABP/EasyList people either.
I guess nobody's showed them AdBlock for Opera (or even Opera's built-in "content blocker", admittedly not quite as good as the real thing since it lacks regexps, though), or Ad Muncher for IE.
... does anyone think this may just be a troll / hoax? I've learned never to question the stupidity of people, particularly people on the Internet, but this seems like it's just a bit of a stretch. It kind of reminds me of an Adequacy.org post.
Maybe when they find out about those, they'll do the world a favor and just block everybody from their site?
Also
The blocking that they seem to be advocating that others use is pretty standard "HTTP_USER_AGENT" querying using a PHP script, so it's not like it would be hard to get around. (Incidentally, I've always felt that the USER_AGENT header was something of a bad idea; maybe it's time to kill it, or at least disable replying to it by default?)
What I'm slightly more interested in is how they're blocking the main page. It's not the same as the script that they're pushing; the page actually loads (you can view the source in FF), but it seems to take advantage of some rendering quirk in IE to produce a blank screen when rendered on Firefox. That actually strikes me as a little more subtle, although it's still dumb.
The story I've heard in reference to the creation of the CD and have always found fascinating is about the 74 minute length. For those who haven't heard it already:
Apparently (so the story goes), the discs were originally designed to hold 60 minutes of music. But the VP of Sony decided this was unacceptable, since it would not be long enough to allow uninterrupted playing of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without a disc change -- the piece as usually performed is a little less than 1:15, or about 74 minutes.
According to Wikipedia, there was probably more than just a love for classical music in here; the demand for 74 minutes as opposed to 60 (which necessitated 120mm discs instead of 115) was strategic. Polygram (one of Sony's major competitors) already had an experimental facility set up to make 115mm discs, Sony didn't, and therefore it was advantageous to force 120mm in order to start the playing field off level.
Still, I've always gotten a kick out of the idea that the now-standard size of the CD (and DVD, and BluRay/HDDVD) could have been influenced by a piece of music written in 1824.
I wasn't implying that the drop in prices was charity or "doing the right thing" on their part -- I'm not stupid. That was just competition.
What I was getting at was that they could have easily just kept my monthly rate the same, and sent me a note saying "hey, guess what, we've given you a FREE UPGRADE" to a better plan. While that wouldn't have caused me to get all that angry, I think what they really did (keeping me on my current plan and charging me less per month) was significantly classier.
It was specifically that decision -- not to try and switch me to another plan as a 'freebie', but instead just making the service cheaper -- that I thought was "the right thing to do."
I was just glad that they made an OS X native version. I don't know about other people, but I have a *lot* of old ClarisWorks and AppleWorks documents sitting around, and they are not something that you can easily batch-convert. (Or at least I don't know of a way to easily batch convert them; if anyone knows how to do that, please feel free to let me know.) I probably go in and open up an old Claris WP document every few weeks or so.
Will the new iWork suite open old Claris/Appleworks documents? It would be nice if they did. I haven't played with the new iWork apps at all (I realized that I don't need a word-processor for most of what I now do, and just use TextMate to butcher ASCII instead).
Don't forget who the Board of Directors of most companies are -- they're the major investors. They have a lot of wealth tied up in that company's stock (sometimes also its debt). If the company goes bankrupt, they're the last ones to get anything. Generally, their shares just turned into toilet paper.
However much they had invested in the corporation, that's how much they're now out. That's a major disincentive against just firing it up and doing it again.
There are lots of people who'd step on each other to get a job like that. Think of it as 'economic bodyguarding.' They get a fat paycheck for sitting there and doing what their master says, unless things go bad and then they take the bullet. I could think of ways to set it up so that they'd never even really know who they were representing.
You'd get someone to carve your pound of flesh from, but it probably wouldn't ever be the person you really want.
That's idiotic. The "limited liability thing" is what lets corporations raise capital. It's why they work. If there is a key concept that can be said to have driven the economic development -- not to mention wealth generation -- of the last 150 years, that's probably it.
You're talking quite literally about dismantling the cornerstone of modern civilization. Talk about a cure that's worse than the disease.
Without limited liability you couldn't have stock ownership and equities trading. You wouldn't have investment. The activities currently undertaken by corporations would only be done by the most wealthy of private individuals. You would create, overnight, an aristocracy of people rich enough to control large-scale enterprises without investment, and everyone else who would be unable to do anything with their money except stuff it in a mattress. The economy -- which is the beating heart of our society -- would collapse.
Another thing they did recently
I was really surprised. Most companies I would have expected to just bump me up one level of service (to the 4-at-a-time plan or something) while keeping me at the same price level, making me call them up to downgrade to my old level of service in order to save money. They didn't; they just dropped the price, and I didn't have to do a thing.
It's a little ridiculous that I get surprised by a company doing what ought to be the right and obvious thing, but that's how things work these days. Anyway, kudos to Netflix and whoever is in charge there. Hope they can keep it up.
Be careful what you wish for.
If anything, the discontinuation of analog broadcast may actually raise the demand for analog service on cable systems, as people look for service that they can access using their old TV (and don't want to use a DTV -> analog converter). The cable companies aren't going to pass up the opportunity to attract a few new customers due to the ease of hooking up -- just plug in your analog "cable ready" TV to the wall and go.
It's going to be a very long time before cable companies switch off the analog channels from the low end of the band. Frankly I think it would be easier for them to just pull more coax, at least where it's all aboveground. Keep traditional analog NTSC-cable on one for "basic cable" customers, and push new services (HDTV, switched/VOD TV, HSI, VoIP) on the other. If there's anyone out there deploying new cable infrastructure who isn't pulling multiple pieces of coax at a time, I'd say they're insane, given the small fraction of the deployment costs made up by the actual cable and distribution hardware. (Heck, even when I worked on my college's campus CATV system, we used to always pull two or three runs of coax through difficult sections just as a precaution, and that was without any thought of using them for data.)
But you're right that analog cable wastes a ridiculous amount of bandwidth; eventually it's going to go, but it won't be in a hurry.
I pity you, your state and everyone else using Access.
Yeah, Access is a piece of shit. Unfortunately, it's a lot better than using Excel as a database, which is in many cases the alternative that I've witnessed.
There are also a lack of alternatives: you have FileMakerPro, which is neat (I like it) but not very appealing to some because it has a significant learning curve compared to Access and is also proprietary and expensive; aside from that you have OO.org's Base, which is still immature; and then you've got custom SQL+webforms, which is usually the right choice for non-trivial projects, but requires users to realize the scope of their project at the outset.
And as crummy as Access is, at least it gives you a path towards a separate frontend/backend. You don't get that when each employee is keeping their own critical information on a massive spreadsheet on their workstation's hard drive. And in more places than I'd like to think about, that's the way things work -- it's the dark side of giving every employee an actual computer as opposed to a dumb terminal.
Satellites are good for some things. They're pretty handy out in the desert, for instance. You can see a cargo van in an otherwise trackless desert using a satellite pretty easily; or if a few vehicles had driven the same route, you'd be able to clearly see the hard-packed trail they'd leave. That's pretty useful in terms of border security.
Might also be handy to watch the same area over time, looking for changes that you might not notice if you were there in person. It might not be economically feasible to run aerial photography over a location more than a few times per year, but a satellite might overfly it every day -- that would give you a lot of imagery to look at differences in. And it might let you fly over areas that are just too remote or uninteresting for aerial flyovers. Things like illegal logging or toxic dumping would be the obvious uses.
Overall I can only think of limited scenarios where it would really be all that handy. Your average bank robbery, car chase, or drug deal? Not so much. It's not like these satellite capabilities are that new; police departments haven't exactly been begging the NSA for satellite coverage, probably because they realize it's of limited usefulness.
Idiot intern nonwithstanding, should that really have been possible? I thought that any decent router would see that a loop had occurred and shut down the port connected to it, rather than forwarding all the broadcast storm packets.
... shouldn't it?
After all, preventing layer 2 loops is what Spanning Tree is all about, and I thought Cisco had some similar system for figuring out if a link was unidirectional (if you're sending packets down to something and not getting anything back, it can shut it down, to keep it from just sending out lots of bogus requests).
I doubt that crappy consumer switches do STP, but the upstream Cisco one should have
It's a lot of "we'll pay you to come out and install this." They don't want to hear 'well, you should really re-think the architecture of your whole network' as a response. They just want the new piece grafted on, and if you don't do the job, they'll just find somebody who will.
That's how these horrible abortions of big systems / networks happen. They usually don't start off like that. They just grow and evolve without much in the way of a central plan until they finally keel over and die. Nobody wants to spend the time, money, or downtime to tear things down and rebuild them until they actually fail. So they just grow out of control.
They probably had a flat network (or a switched one without any subnets) because that was the only way to keep everything working as it grew; as different contractors came in and tacked on this or that, they just added it on to whatever was there.
I've seen what's running some government agencies, and it's frightening.
The reason the attackers are keeping their work secret is usually for two reasons (1) they want an advantage over other attackers, to be the first to break it really thoroughly, and (2) they don't want the AACSLA to plug any holes before they can find a break that will be impossible to plaster over.
Also, that's a poor example because a lot of the AACS hacking goes on in the open. When a break is found it's usually documented (at least if you go to the right forums). They're not sending it to the AACSLA to fix, but it's not really all that 'secret,' it's more like academic research where the research is conducted behind closed doors, but the findings get published when there's something significant.
It's really not that hard. They just kill the project. Eliminate its funding, reassign all the developers, break up the group of people who did it, destroy all the internal documentation. Once you've scattered all the people involved, the project is pretty much dead and buried.
Projects get canceled all the time. If it's a particularly interesting project, some of the developers might be attached enough to it to keep a checkout of the source, maybe fiddle with it from time to time, but the chances of them doing anything significant are pretty small, when they'll have something else to do and aren't getting paid to work on it anymore.
And to be honest, I don't know that many developers who get that attached to their work once they've had a few projects canceled out from under them. Sure, a few people might, particularly if it's the first time it's happened to them, but if you work for a big corporation you just get used to the idea that at any time, some jackass in a suit with an MBA might decide your work isn't ever going to pay for itself and shitcan it. That's life, either you go crazy, you get used to it and enjoy your paycheck, or you quit programming, get an MBA and become the jackass.
Yeah, every once in a while you hear about some project that's been canceled that's kept alive by the programmers afterwards, but they're exceptions, not the rule.
The cost of distributing the content has to be a small fraction of the cost of actually creating it, and I'm nearly positive that the TV tax monies do assist with that. So arguing that "well, the internet distribution isn't funded by tax dollars" as a justification for putting DRM on the content is pretty thin.
Anyway, that's only one of the problems with iPlayer; the other, and probably more significant one, is that the iPlayer they're using (the crummy Windows-only, DRMed one) uses P2P in order to distribute the content. Consumer broadband ISPs aren't really thrilled with this, and see it as basically a way of making them bear the BBCs bandwidth costs.*
* For the record I think this is a bullshit argument, but that's what they're saying. Of course, what they hate to talk about is that they're rampantly overselling their capacity, and this is the real source of the problems.
The benefit of Wikipedia, when combined with tools like the one described in TFA, is that it lets you actually look at what various people are contributing, if you want to. So rather than just looking at the Diebold article, knowing that Diebold probably contributed to it, and having to decide whether to believe the article or discredit it in toto, you can look at exactly what Diebold might have added, or view the version that caused them to decide to change things. That gives you a lot of information -- indirectly, it can tell you a lot about Diebold, and by reading between the lines it might let you infer a lot about the situation that's not going to be written anywhere.
The Diebold article probably isn't the best example of this, because it's pretty clear what Diebold wants, but the benefit of the editing process is more clear when you walk into a disputed article that you don't know anything about. I'll often click on the Discussion page on a WP article just out of curiosity, and it's surprising the number of articles that conceal fairly vehement disputes (sometimes over seeming trivialities, but sometimes not). The ability to see the discussion and edit history of a page give much more insight into the development of an article than you get out of most traditional publications, and ultimately that allows the reader to decide for themselves what they want to believe.