Like it or not, not everyone wants to use an ancient text browser with fixed-width fonts and no images or colours whatsoever. There is plenty of multimedia content on the Internet that is useful, not just banner ads.
Or use an ad-busting proxy.
This takes time to download and install the proxy software, set up your browser, and spend hours upon frustrating hours tuning Junkbuster to fit your needs. Not everyone is inclined to run a whole other piece of software just so they can browse without ads.
Or just ask daddy for a little extra money this week and pay the damn $5.
Cute, but don't you think it's just the slightest bit slimy and underhanded of VA to abuse their most popular asset (and that's all Slashdot is to VA, a cash cow) in order to annoy people into giving them money? Pissing off your users is NOT a valid business plan.
I used to love Slashdot too, but their newest money-making scheme quite frankly pisses me off. I'd much rather see Taco and Hemos throw in the towel than betray the ideals of freedom from corporate oppression that Slashdot once embodied. I hope that you will open your eyes and join me in showing them that we're not going to take it.
If you're like me, you're probably wondering just why the hell anyone would
pay for Slashdot, let alone want to support it. As it turns out, Slashdot
already has all the features you need to completely disable all
advertisements without paying those greedy slobs at VA Software a cent. All
you need is a DOM-compliant browser, such as Mozilla or Konqueror, and the
User Slashbox. With disgustingly-placed new full-page ads now arriving, the time has come to show
that we users will not let ourselves be advertised into submission.
Follow these five easy steps and never see another Slashdot ad again:
(click here to download the adkiller javascript code and put it on your own webspace, in case you don't trust me:-)
Scroll down the list of slashboxes, and make sure the "User Space" checkbox (inexplicably located between "MP3.com" and "Myther.com") is checked.
Return to the front page, and your Slashbox should be there, quietly zapping all iframes and banner-shaped images on the page.
There is no step 5!! It's that easy.
There are a few problems, however:
Opera doesn't seem to work with this at all.
Internet Explorer won't automatically remove the ads, but by appending the following to the above code:
<a href="javascript:delAds()">Click to delete ads</a>
and clicking the new link in your Slashbox, the ads will go away.
The User Slashbox only shows up on index.pl and articles.pl pages, so
comment and user pages will still have ads. Luckily, the article pages
seem to be the only ones running the obnoxious new full-page ads, so this shouldn't be too annoying.
If you are a Javascript wizard and know how to make this script work on Opera
or IE, please tell me. Ad-free Slashdot should be available to everyone!
I'm honoured that you chose my piece for inclusion in your little project, but I heartily recommend that you use the extended version in future postings of this crapflood. Also, get the data URL right! It's all fucked up.
There's a huge split. If you ask the "Slashdot Community" what makes good web design, you'll hear... a lot of noise.
There's the progress camp: www.webstandards.org, that wants everyone to upgrade their browsers and live on the bleeding edge of style sheets (how ironic is it that their bleeding edge stance has been replaced with an "under construction" sign).
Then there's the compatibility camp: anybrowser.org that wants every web page to work in the old browsers.
There are probably a few things everyone can agree on, like Flash being worthless at best and extremely annoying most of the time.
Personally, I say: look at the successful dynamic sites. Google, Yahoo, Slashdot. Light HTML, very light images, strong dynamic backend. Don't get too caught up in the format details; it's the power of what's driving the web page, and the content, that matters.
Ads more than likely come in a playlist, where they are displayed as a clip before the actual media.
Ads pay for them to actually stream media for you. If everyone was like smelly GNU hippies are and tried to subvert the content provider by disabling their ads, the content being provided would cease to exist, because there's no one to pay for their bandwidth.
I agree with this completely. I fail to see why you're angry at me. I was warning these people that if they were attempting to steal content, then they might find themselves in hot water.
read what this plugin ACTUALLY does and get a clue before posting
Just because they didn't reverse engineer the plugins doesn't mean that by bridging them they can't grant extra functionality. Remember, under the DMCA, the extent of circumvention is loosely defined. If you write a wrapper that allows a user to capture or slow the output of streaming video, you're circumventing.
Not to scare you guys (no web site, just a mailing list?), but - did any of you ask Microsoft about this before you wrote it?
I'm not implying that you did anything wrong, but in today's insane world, the DMCA can pretty much be wielded like a baseball bat. People like CNN who use WMP to distribute their advertisements before their content in a streaming manner expect their ads to be preserved. If you've added an extra functionality in here, or any method whatsoever to bypass ads, save streaming video, or otherwise do anything but sit in your chair and watch what they send you, you might get hit by the eager-beaver Microsoft Legal Team. In fact, just making this functionality user modifiable (i.e., open source) might be enough for you to become a "circumvention device".
"people who liked X also liked Y..." I haven't used Kazaa (sp?) or any P2P file-sharing system but do any of them work like this?
No, none of them work like this. In fact, in every single P2P program, you must know the name of the artist you are searching for before you can search for them. Great for downloading Metallica. Terrible for downloading DistroThorque, the metal band down the street desperately trying to be heard.
Imagine instead a system that didn't store the name of the song or artist. You'd know the name once you got the file, but you wouldn't be allowed to search by it. What would you be able to search by? Assosciated METADATA. Any user could add non-title related MetaData to the song, like: "Punk", "If you liked X(opaqueid) you'll like this", "heavy tempo", "new york scene", etc.
What are the advantages of this system?
It puts major labels and underground on a level playing field
The RIAA would have to track down copyrighted music by listening to every song on the network (if the network contains any stolen music at all). Good luck.
It allows people to actually discover new music instead of copying what MTV tells them they should hear
To me, that's the promise of P2P. Now I should just go write it (-;
Well, a LOT. Not if you're deeply involved technically in the project, but if you back out and take the perspective of someone who's never used a VPN, plenty.
A lot of people don't even think about the fact that there's a separate protocol field in IP, or that people run any IP protocol but UDP or TCP. Getting 50/51 through your existing firmware firewall can be a real trick. FreeSWAN requires you to be able have the GNU Multi-Precision library installed for the crypto calculations before you compile it. Unless your distro can with FreeSWAN, you have to recompile your kernel with modifications.
And, like many tools, there's no single graphical GUI; unlike SAMBA's excellent SWAT, there's nothing to lead you to ipsec.conf or ipsec.secrets. There's a LOT of reading to be done.
Ok, so, for you or me, it's easy. Maybe a day of reading tops. But compare that to the commercial world where an application must install and be configured from a GUI in a few hours, and FreeSWAN is... nearly a toy. It's unusable in a business environment. As soon as you say "compile", a CTO is going to turn down your volume.
It's cool, but don't call it uncomplicated. That's part of it's coolness (-;
First off, thanks for taking the time to write a real Editorial. It's nice to see some actual value-added besides linking a tidbit of news.
Second, I personally believe that both the record industry and yourself are guilty of confusing correlation with causality. You wrote:
"At this point last year, with Napster in full swing, record sales were up 8 percent from the previous year. This year, sales of new albums -- not including established catalog titles -- are down 8 percent. That's quite a pendulum swing."
So, we have a correlation. Let me give you another one. Men who shave with electric razors are 17% more likely to develop facial cancer. There happens to be no causal relationship between the two. Men who shave with electric razors usually have more money and live in cities, where all cancer rates are higher. But when you hear that statistic, you can get all kinds of bad ideas. If you mistake correlation with causality.
I think the record industry's attempts at hand waving and implying causality are shameful. Let's not be party to the same offense. CD sales could be entirely fluctuating based on the amount of disposable income consumers have. Which, given the recent trend for unemployment and financial collapse, is going down. The truth is, no one has researched the causality behind the trend, so we don't really know.
The one thing we can say for certain is that Napster did not in any discernible "cause & effect" way effect total revenue for the recording industry before it was destroyed.
I think the big problem with your theory is that you can't copy toothbrushes. Nor are "street corner merchants" like Kaaza making cheaper toothbrushes; they're copying other people's toothbrushes.
If we created a P2P tool that had a real referral system and a way of promoting new music, that would be one thing. Instead, we have a system where you must know what you're looking for before you find it. We still learn what music we want to hear from the Radio and from MTV; we just use P2P technology to get it cheaper/for free.
P2P should be replacing the advertising channels. Instead it's trying to replace the retail channels.
Kind of like Honda shipping riced up Civics by default, it's pretty funny that the industry is following the overclockers. To take a look at the roots of water cooling, check out the definitive hobbyist on the subject, complete with alternate designs, plans, technical faq - the works.
Personally, I'll buy it when it's packaged and done for me, and not until then.
Of course Jack Valenti wants this. This is the same guy who once said "The VCR is to the Movie Industry what the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone". He's not exactly a visionary.
The question the semi-intelligent people who listen to Jack have to solve now is this: how can we force consumers to buy something they don't want?
Do you think consumers really wanted to buy DVD players with region coding and Macrovision? Was that a feature? The total ownership of the DVD standard presents a second way to force unwanted hardware down the customer's throats: patent a standard, license keys, and use the DMCA to enforce the keyring.
The infamous SSSCA is their attempt at bring approach #1, and they may also (in parallel) try approach #2. If there's any word I can use to describe the actions of the Movie Industry right now, it's "desperate". They know that the precedents set right now will last for hundreds of years, and they are fighting for what they believe is their very survival.
The question is, will consumers keep buying Dell and ignore the EFF? And if so, what's the most effective way to raise awareness...
As I understand it, this is for the short-reach side of fiberoptics, not the long haul (100km +) or even metro (sub 50km) markets, but for very short reach, i.e. C.O. to home (sub 4,000 feet). Instead of running glass fiber, you can actually use plastic fiber in some very short reach applications. Bringing the cost of the transcievers required in the actual customer prem would be very cool indeed.
But let's not kid ourselves. Fiberoptic Ethernet Cards sell for under $100. Reducing this cost would help, but it won't solve the problem that there's no fiber in the ground to 99% of houses in America.
Patel, who called both sides "dirty," said that Napster's misguided attempts to build a business using illegally obtained music paled in comparison to what could be massive misuse and heavy-handed tactics by the recording industry.
Please tell me that the future of digital music on the Internet is not being decided by someone who is arbitrating the decision based on which side is more morally repugnant.
What about applying old standards? Interpreting existing law to a new medium?
Patel has not impressed me with her keen wit and insight. Sorry.
This is the death of competitive FPS games as we know it. No longer will we be able to change our jump direction in midair, jump 7 feet through windows, run tirelessly carrying 750 rounds of ammunition, and get hit by blast damage through walls.
On the upside, the blood & guts is going to look a lot cooler.
Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system, defeating the whole purpose of introducing open standards like Linux.
Running Linux on an IBM mainframe doesn't defeat the entire purpose of using open standards like Linux. You still get the man years of free testing, free software, interoperability, and speed. Or rather, IBM gets them. And by tying software you can't charge for to hardware you can, IBM will have come up with a business model for selling Linux systems for incredible sums of money. Quite an ingenious plan - selling Free Software.
As long as IDSoftware uses OpenGL, there will be life left for it on the games industry.
Rarely do you see something on Slashdot that contains as much truth as that statement. Microsoft focuses their best development efforts into free products designed to crush other people's standards. OpenGL has been a continuing thorn in their side, and their ferocious work on Direct3D is aimed at obtaining the complete dominance they're used to in the gaming market. Jon Carmack has (almost singlehandedly) prevented them from doing this, and the ensuing competition has left consumers and game developers with... two really good standards. I could almost feel good about this, if it weren't for the fact that iD is competing with a monopoly, and is succeeding only because they remain privately owned and hold their market presence through sheer programming prowess.
If only we had someone like Carmack to write Office software for Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
Or you could just browse with Lynx.
Like it or not, not everyone wants to use an ancient text browser with fixed-width fonts and no images or colours whatsoever. There is plenty of multimedia content on the Internet that is useful, not just banner ads.
Or use an ad-busting proxy.
This takes time to download and install the proxy software, set up your browser, and spend hours upon frustrating hours tuning Junkbuster to fit your needs. Not everyone is inclined to run a whole other piece of software just so they can browse without ads.
Or just ask daddy for a little extra money this week and pay the damn $5.
Cute, but don't you think it's just the slightest bit slimy and underhanded of VA to abuse their most popular asset (and that's all Slashdot is to VA, a cash cow) in order to annoy people into giving them money? Pissing off your users is NOT a valid business plan.
I used to love Slashdot too, but their newest money-making scheme quite frankly pisses me off. I'd much rather see Taco and Hemos throw in the towel than betray the ideals of freedom from corporate oppression that Slashdot once embodied. I hope that you will open your eyes and join me in showing them that we're not going to take it.
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Follow these five easy steps and never see another Slashdot ad again:
- Go into your Homepage
Preferences.
- Scroll down to the "User Space" textarea, and paste the following four
lines of HTML in there:
(click here to download the adkiller javascript code and put it on your own webspace, in case you don't trust me
:-)
- Scroll down the list of slashboxes, and make sure the "User Space" checkbox (inexplicably located between "MP3.com" and "Myther.com") is checked.
- Return to the front page, and your Slashbox should be there, quietly zapping all iframes and banner-shaped images on the page.
- There is no step 5!! It's that easy.
There are a few problems, however:If you are a Javascript wizard and know how to make this script work on Opera or IE, please tell me. Ad-free Slashdot should be available to everyone!
-F
There's a huge split. If you ask the "Slashdot Community" what makes good web design, you'll hear... a lot of noise.
There's the progress camp:
www.webstandards.org, that wants everyone to upgrade their browsers and live on the bleeding edge of style sheets (how ironic is it that their bleeding edge stance has been replaced with an "under construction" sign).
Then there's the compatibility camp:
anybrowser.org that wants every web page to work in the old browsers.
There are probably a few things everyone can agree on, like Flash being worthless at best and extremely annoying most of the time.
Personally, I say: look at the successful dynamic sites. Google, Yahoo, Slashdot. Light HTML, very light images, strong dynamic backend. Don't get too caught up in the format details; it's the power of what's driving the web page, and the content, that matters.
Ads more than likely come in a playlist, where they are displayed as a clip before the actual media.
Ads pay for them to actually stream media for you. If everyone was like smelly GNU hippies are and tried to subvert the content provider by disabling their ads, the content being provided would cease to exist, because there's no one to pay for their bandwidth.
I agree with this completely. I fail to see why you're angry at me. I was warning these people that if they were attempting to steal content, then they might find themselves in hot water.
You're mighty uptighty...
read what this plugin ACTUALLY does and get a clue before posting
Just because they didn't reverse engineer the plugins doesn't mean that by bridging them they can't grant extra functionality. Remember, under the DMCA, the extent of circumvention is loosely defined. If you write a wrapper that allows a user to capture or slow the output of streaming video, you're circumventing.
Sorry that you were confused.
Not to scare you guys (no web site, just a mailing list?), but - did any of you ask Microsoft about this before you wrote it?
I'm not implying that you did anything wrong, but in today's insane world, the DMCA can pretty much be wielded like a baseball bat. People like CNN who use WMP to distribute their advertisements before their content in a streaming manner expect their ads to be preserved. If you've added an extra functionality in here, or any method whatsoever to bypass ads, save streaming video, or otherwise do anything but sit in your chair and watch what they send you, you might get hit by the eager-beaver Microsoft Legal Team. In fact, just making this functionality user modifiable (i.e., open source) might be enough for you to become a "circumvention device".
Care to comment?
No, none of them work like this. In fact, in every single P2P program, you must know the name of the artist you are searching for before you can search for them. Great for downloading Metallica. Terrible for downloading DistroThorque, the metal band down the street desperately trying to be heard.
Imagine instead a system that didn't store the name of the song or artist. You'd know the name once you got the file, but you wouldn't be allowed to search by it. What would you be able to search by? Assosciated METADATA. Any user could add non-title related MetaData to the song, like: "Punk", "If you liked X(opaqueid) you'll like this", "heavy tempo", "new york scene", etc.
What are the advantages of this system?
To me, that's the promise of P2P.
Now I should just go write it (-;
What's complicated about FreeSWAN?
Well, a LOT. Not if you're deeply involved technically in the project, but if you back out and take the perspective of someone who's never used a VPN, plenty.
A lot of people don't even think about the fact that there's a separate protocol field in IP, or that people run any IP protocol but UDP or TCP. Getting 50/51 through your existing firmware firewall can be a real trick. FreeSWAN requires you to be able have the GNU Multi-Precision library installed for the crypto calculations before you compile it. Unless your distro can with FreeSWAN, you have to recompile your kernel with modifications.
And, like many tools, there's no single graphical GUI; unlike SAMBA's excellent SWAT, there's nothing to lead you to ipsec.conf or ipsec.secrets. There's a LOT of reading to be done.
Ok, so, for you or me, it's easy. Maybe a day of reading tops. But compare that to the commercial world where an application must install and be configured from a GUI in a few hours, and FreeSWAN is... nearly a toy. It's unusable in a business environment. As soon as you say "compile", a CTO is going to turn down your volume.
It's cool, but don't call it uncomplicated. That's part of it's coolness (-;
First off, thanks for taking the time to write a real Editorial. It's nice to see some actual value-added besides linking a tidbit of news.
Second, I personally believe that both the record industry and yourself are guilty of confusing correlation with causality. You wrote:
"At this point last year, with Napster in full swing, record sales were up 8 percent from the previous year. This year, sales of new albums -- not including established catalog titles -- are down 8 percent. That's quite a pendulum swing."
So, we have a correlation. Let me give you another one. Men who shave with electric razors are 17% more likely to develop facial cancer. There happens to be no causal relationship between the two. Men who shave with electric razors usually have more money and live in cities, where all cancer rates are higher. But when you hear that statistic, you can get all kinds of bad ideas. If you mistake correlation with causality.
I think the record industry's attempts at hand waving and implying causality are shameful. Let's not be party to the same offense. CD sales could be entirely fluctuating based on the amount of disposable income consumers have. Which, given the recent trend for unemployment and financial collapse, is going down. The truth is, no one has researched the causality behind the trend, so we don't really know.
The one thing we can say for certain is that Napster did not in any discernible "cause & effect" way effect total revenue for the recording industry before it was destroyed.
And that's a message worth getting out.
I think the big problem with your theory is that you can't copy toothbrushes. Nor are "street corner merchants" like Kaaza making cheaper toothbrushes; they're copying other people's toothbrushes.
If we created a P2P tool that had a real referral system and a way of promoting new music, that would be one thing. Instead, we have a system where you must know what you're looking for before you find it. We still learn what music we want to hear from the Radio and from MTV; we just use P2P technology to get it cheaper/for free.
P2P should be replacing the advertising channels. Instead it's trying to replace the retail channels.
And that really is illegal.
Kind of like Honda shipping riced up Civics by default, it's pretty funny that the industry is following the overclockers. To take a look at the roots of water cooling, check out the definitive hobbyist on the subject, complete with alternate designs, plans, technical faq - the works.
Personally, I'll buy it when it's packaged and done for me, and not until then.
Of course Jack Valenti wants this. This is the same guy who once said "The VCR is to the Movie Industry what the Boston Strangler is to the woman alone". He's not exactly a visionary.
The question the semi-intelligent people who listen to Jack have to solve now is this: how can we force consumers to buy something they don't want?
The proven formula for this is legislation. Government mandated airbags have killed more children than school shootings - and more importantly, they've created a precedent for how a corporation can incorporate non-features into consumer products.
Do you think consumers really wanted to buy DVD players with region coding and Macrovision? Was that a feature? The total ownership of the DVD standard presents a second way to force unwanted hardware down the customer's throats: patent a standard, license keys, and use the DMCA to enforce the keyring.
The infamous SSSCA is their attempt at bring approach #1, and they may also (in parallel) try approach #2. If there's any word I can use to describe the actions of the Movie Industry right now, it's "desperate". They know that the precedents set right now will last for hundreds of years, and they are fighting for what they believe is their very survival.
The question is, will consumers keep buying Dell and ignore the EFF? And if so, what's the most effective way to raise awareness...
As I understand it, this is for the short-reach side of fiberoptics, not the long haul (100km +) or even metro (sub 50km) markets, but for very short reach, i.e. C.O. to home (sub 4,000 feet). Instead of running glass fiber, you can actually use plastic fiber in some very short reach applications. Bringing the cost of the transcievers required in the actual customer prem would be very cool indeed.
But let's not kid ourselves. Fiberoptic Ethernet Cards sell for under $100. Reducing this cost would help, but it won't solve the problem that there's no fiber in the ground to 99% of houses in America.
Neat science project, though.
Patel, who called both sides "dirty," said that Napster's misguided attempts to build a business using illegally obtained music paled in comparison to what could be massive misuse and heavy-handed tactics by the recording industry.
Please tell me that the future of digital music on the Internet is not being decided by someone who is arbitrating the decision based on which side is more morally repugnant.
What about applying old standards? Interpreting existing law to a new medium?
Patel has not impressed me with her keen wit and insight. Sorry.
This is the death of competitive FPS games as we know it. No longer will we be able to change our jump direction in midair, jump 7 feet through windows, run tirelessly carrying 750 rounds of ammunition, and get hit by blast damage through walls.
On the upside, the blood & guts is going to look a lot cooler.
"an expensive, proprietary system" Like a Sun workstation?
Kind of, but orders of magnitude more expensive. So expensive they come with a repairman, know what I mean?
Running Linux on a mainframe doesn't change the fact that you must still maintain an expensive, proprietary system, defeating the whole purpose of introducing open standards like Linux.
Running Linux on an IBM mainframe doesn't defeat the entire purpose of using open standards like Linux. You still get the man years of free testing, free software, interoperability, and speed. Or rather, IBM gets them. And by tying software you can't charge for to hardware you can, IBM will have come up with a business model for selling Linux systems for incredible sums of money. Quite an ingenious plan - selling Free Software.
Sun's just pissed they didn't think of it first.
It's a classic scam. Build up a rep for being honest, upright, soforth. Once everyone trusts you, you can strike it big with little difficulty.
Right, there's a name for that scam. I can't remember. Hang on... thinking about it... oh ya!
Enron!
Ya, how about Operation Bullpen, the sports memoribilia bust that took on a whole ton of fake signature dealers on Ebay...
Rarely do you see something on Slashdot that contains as much truth as that statement. Microsoft focuses their best development efforts into free products designed to crush other people's standards. OpenGL has been a continuing thorn in their side, and their ferocious work on Direct3D is aimed at obtaining the complete dominance they're used to in the gaming market. Jon Carmack has (almost singlehandedly) prevented them from doing this, and the ensuing competition has left consumers and game developers with... two really good standards. I could almost feel good about this, if it weren't for the fact that iD is competing with a monopoly, and is succeeding only because they remain privately owned and hold their market presence through sheer programming prowess.
If only we had someone like Carmack to write Office software for Linux.