Add University of Oklahoma to this list of already LAN'd. Not only that, but we were one of the first colleges to require a laptop in their engineering departments. WHOA! STOP THE PRESSES!
I often wonder WHO determines posts to be post-able. Like what criteria they have for judging its postability. I submitted some very important very nerdy news stories about such things as the current direction of MPEG-4 that were just completely passed by. And somehow this is more important?
- WrexSoul \/.
vvv
Imagine, if you would, buying a book that cost less to print than conventional books, and that you could plug into any phone line anywhere to recieve reviews, links to discussion forums, or even advertisements for future releases. With this kind of thing it would also take up the size of a single sheet of paper.
If you had two parts to this idea of viewing any assortment of books, magazines, newspapers, or even photo albums, one being a client, which could take the shape of anything from a classic novel to a small pocket guide. You simply take this reusable client, and any time you wanted to read a new book, you just buy a card that had the book's text and illustrations stored in it, as well as a possible number to call and list of links that your client could access. Then you just plug the book into a slot in the client, much like a game boy plugs in new games.
And the client itself could be much more useful than static books. You could have an automatic touch-sensitive table of contents or scalable fonts, and much smaller and thinner than paper volumes would be.
And the expansion would be limitless- You could plug in today's headlines, an R.A. Salavatore book, or the lates issue of Time. Then just throw the card into a drawer for later, or away if you don't really plan on reading it again.
The following article was sent to the deeply buried Netscape Product Suggestion form:
Perhaps in light of the recent attention dealing with cookies and security, dealing with large user databases and ad servers (see the Slashdot article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/22/024921 2&mode=nocomment for the concerns/problems people have), I condsidered a possibly feasable alternative to the cookie-attached-to-a-gif problem. Instead of changing HTTP, and removing a widely (mis)used function, you could offer partial Do Not Accept ability for cookies. In other words, you could have Netscape save a list, in an external importable text list, of servers you don't want to accept cookies from. Then pages that use cookies for USEFUL things (e-shopping, user prefs, etc.) don't lose their functionality, while pages with possibly imposing or veiled intentions (ad.doubleclick.net) won't be able to read a thing. And while the obvious solution for most banner services with directed marketing would be to take out as many servers as they can to get around the loophole, you could have several more options, such as "ban all except certain servers" or "ban all selected servers" or "ban from IP range" and disable all on an IP of any number of codes (such as any coming from 207.X.X.X or just 207.28.42.1). Also, I'm sure some overconcerned zealots would have a regularly updated composite ad-banner server list that you could easily use the (previously mentioned) import feature to update.
I'm sure this would be relatively easy to implement, since it's all just scanning and comparing, but I didn't suggest this to mozilla.org because it's not a bug, I'm no C guru, and it's not implemented in the binaries. And I'm sure if this were implemented in a certain form, it would let several power users and paranoids and privacy buffs sleep better at night, while not interrupting their slashdot user prefs.
And it would also evade the other current solution of turning "confirm cookies" on, and getting swamped by little confirmation boxes every time you load any page with an ad on it (most professional sites).
Slashdot Mirror
I just need to stop reading all news sources on April 1st. Otherwise my Dumbassmeter might malfunction and I'll make quite an idiot of myself.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
... is it just me or does this entire thing sound like a big joke?
Especially when they start talking about "sqed" "squello" and "squanty." And smells. And yeah.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
Add University of Oklahoma to this list of already LAN'd. Not only that, but we were one of the first colleges to require a laptop in their engineering departments. WHOA! STOP THE PRESSES! I often wonder WHO determines posts to be post-able. Like what criteria they have for judging its postability. I submitted some very important very nerdy news stories about such things as the current direction of MPEG-4 that were just completely passed by. And somehow this is more important?
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
Imagine, if you would, buying a book that cost less to print than conventional books, and that you could plug into any phone line anywhere to recieve reviews, links to discussion forums, or even advertisements for future releases. With this kind of thing it would also take up the size of a single sheet of paper.
If you had two parts to this idea of viewing any assortment of books, magazines, newspapers, or even photo albums, one being a client, which could take the shape of anything from a classic novel to a small pocket guide. You simply take this reusable client, and any time you wanted to read a new book, you just buy a card that had the book's text and illustrations stored in it, as well as a possible number to call and list of links that your client could access. Then you just plug the book into a slot in the client, much like a game boy plugs in new games.
And the client itself could be much more useful than static books. You could have an automatic touch-sensitive table of contents or scalable fonts, and much smaller and thinner than paper volumes would be.
And the expansion would be limitless- You could plug in today's headlines, an R.A. Salavatore book, or the lates issue of Time. Then just throw the card into a drawer for later, or away if you don't really plan on reading it again.
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv
Perhaps in light of the recent attention dealing with cookies and security, dealing with large user databases and ad servers (see the Slashdot article http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/10/22/024921 2&mode=nocomment for the concerns/problems people have), I condsidered a possibly feasable alternative to the cookie-attached-to-a-gif problem. Instead of changing HTTP, and removing a widely (mis)used function, you could offer partial Do Not Accept ability for cookies. In other words, you could have Netscape save a list, in an external importable text list, of servers you don't want to accept cookies from. Then pages that use cookies for USEFUL things (e-shopping, user prefs, etc.) don't lose their functionality, while pages with possibly imposing or veiled intentions (ad.doubleclick.net) won't be able to read a thing. And while the obvious solution for most banner services with directed marketing would be to take out as many servers as they can to get around the loophole, you could have several more options, such as "ban all except certain servers" or "ban all selected servers" or "ban from IP range" and disable all on an IP of any number of codes (such as any coming from 207.X.X.X or just 207.28.42.1). Also, I'm sure some overconcerned zealots would have a regularly updated composite ad-banner server list that you could easily use the (previously mentioned) import feature to update.
I'm sure this would be relatively easy to implement, since it's all just scanning and comparing, but I didn't suggest this to mozilla.org because it's not a bug, I'm no C guru, and it's not implemented in the binaries. And I'm sure if this were implemented in a certain form, it would let several power users and paranoids and privacy buffs sleep better at night, while not interrupting their slashdot user prefs.
And it would also evade the other current solution of turning "confirm cookies" on, and getting swamped by little confirmation boxes every time you load any page with an ad on it (most professional sites).
Thank you,
- WrexSoul
\/.
vvv