Note: this is only worth doing if you're having trouble with Xft-using apps, and not otherwise. This means, say, the GNOME v2.x gaim (and pretty much any app with antialiased text). It doesn't affect, anything in, say, xemacs or xterm.
My guess is that your DPI is wrong. It took me a while to figure out what was going on on my own system.
Check the output of xdpyinfo|grep inch, and see if you have anything other than 75x75 dots per inch (or 100x100). In at least FC2 with fontconfig, the system determines font sizes based on resolution (this is new), and X occasionally decides on some weird resolutions for your monitor, which makes everything quite unappealing.
If it's some oddball size, like 85 dpi, add the line "Xft.dpi: 100" or "Xft.dpi: 75" to your ~/.Xresources file, and xrdb ~/.Xresources, and reopen the application in question. If this fixes your problem, have your system run xrdb ~/.Xresources each time you log into X, before anything else runs (I use.xsession to run it, but my understanding is that in this era of GNOME and KDE, distros don't seem to use.xsession any more).
What offended me was his strong implication that the two -- PHP/MySQL programming and real DB development -- are mutually exclusive. It's an attitude that I see a lot on Slashdot, and it pisses me off.
Just:
*) Ensure that your company blows inordinate amounts of money on software with expensive support to cover your ass. It doesn't matter whether it works better, but you should be able to point at someone else to blame if something goes wrong. This also means that you don't actually have to understand the product, and can trust your DBMS vendor's salesmen for all your information, which will chew it up into bite-size pieces and spoon-feed it to you.
*) Act very self-important, talk down your nose to anyone that *doesn't* waste as much money as you, and treat your money-wasting as a mark of pride ("I have a $N million dollar budget this year!")
*) Place "real" before every class of software you work with, and vaguely insinuate that there are technical (especially reliability) failings in any cheaper product than the one you use. It worked marvelously for "real UNIX admins" for years.
*) Mention "Fortune X" frequently. For example "Fortune 500 DBAs with $5M budgets like me use *real* database software -- *we* can't afford downtime".
*) Avoid, if at all possible, knowing anything about software or computers other than database interfaces and possibly a scripting language or two. It's also good to choose a single OS, learn only that, and then slip occasional comments about how other OSes are unreliable.
*) Slowly begin slipping corporate acronyms into your speech. Use "ROI" whenever it's appropriate, and even when it isn't, to make it sound like other people are just slipshod and guessing numbers. "Enterprise class" is also good, since it implies, with only very vague factual requirements, that you work at a larger and more stodgy company that the person that you're trying to put down.
You'll be well on your way to doing "real" database work in no time.:-)
Programmer: "Wow, kewl, we should do it all in Perl."
I don't like reading perl much, but it's not bad to the point that you should just throw it out.
Programmer: "MySQL rules man! Besides, it is free."
Division Manager: "Hmm, free is good. Can you manage the data in MySQL?"
DBA: "Well, actually MySQL doesn't do..."
Programmer: (interrupts DBA) "We don't need any of that relational integrity crap, that's just marketroid speak for Oracle, dude! All we need are a bunch of tables. I can wrap all of the SQL in a Perl package."
I've used MySQL very little, so I can't speak with authority about it's features. However, I do know that it supports transactions. I can't figure out how a DBMS could have transaction support and be missing any features required to guarantee data integrity. I'd be facinated to hear what you're thinking of.
DBA: "Then you will have dirty data, and we can only write apps in Perl if we have to use that library for access. This is really putting all of our eggs in one..."
They can't interface code to Perl? I mean, yeah, there might be some overhead, but the DBA is seriously stretching the truth.
A) Why are you writing code nine hours a day? Is it worth the (presumably significant) additional pay that you're getting working longer than 9 to 5 hours -- at most (with lunch factored in) 7.5 hours?
B) I actually have trouble writing code if I don't have anything happening at all -- I need to get into a "work mood". So it's not all completely bad.
The problem arises when you want a program which accomplishes task x and you go googling for an answer, you'll find a program in notime flat.
Well, here's pretty much the process I recently followed. Way back in the day, I used to use yafc -- it supports sftp and a large number of authentication protocols that I use. Yafc was discontinued by the author. I'm not a huge fan of ncftp, which has been Red Hat's standard "enhanced" CLI ftp program for a long time. I googled around, and read a list of CLI ftp clients and found lftp. I read its feature list, and found that it did what I wanted. I typed apt-get install lftp. My system downloaded and installed all the software I needed.
It's true that as recently as Red Hat 8, there were serious breaks in the packaging coverage, but there are really few packages these days that aren't covered by the major packagers.
Your reading me backwards, they do NOT include those dependencies, they simply require them. A properly made rpm doesn't have dependencies. As any experienced rpm packager will tell you;)
You'd advocate static linking of all packages?
Takes me 5 minutes to find something not in those repositories, how about you?
I'm sure that something I use isn't in rpm format -- yeah, for instance, there's a script called "cvs2cl.pl" that generates GNU-style changelogs from CVS history logs. But, that's also just one perl script -- I dump it in ~/bin, chmod +x it, and I'm done. It's not something that one would screw up instealling.
At one point, I remember mldonkey not being packaged, though it is now.
And, of course, for anything that I'm hacking on I'm using copies from CVS (mutt, wine, etc), but if I'm doing that, I think it's reasonable for me to be familiar with the software.
I'm afraid I fail to understand the logic behind an argument that it's ok to ignore parts of what constitute a complete project because you assume that the magic rpm fairy will take care of it all for you.
Just WRT installation stuff, though I had to look way back in the thread to remember what we were originally talking about. Really, the magic RPM fairy *does* usually take care of me these days.
So you mean he makes $10/yr now? His salary at Apple is $1.
Uh, no. That was a gimmick to market himself as being in the trenches during his early time back at Apple. Even back then, he was getting pricy perks like a $90 million dollar Gulfstream luxury jet from Apple. Jobs was, in 2003, the highest paid CEO in California, and the second-highest paid CEO anywhere.
* Computers would not interoperate. There would probably be one big vendor -- still IBM -- who charges lots of money for each machine. Extremely lucrative for IBM, yes. Good for society, no.
* Cars would not be repairable by anyone but the original manufacturer.
* You'd be forced to use Sears nails with a Sears hammer.
You do realize that if your "nobody should be able to make products compatible with anyone else's products" rationale was in place, we'd all be doing something in a world without personal computers, and IBM would still be charging millions of dollars for the huge computers for which *they* are the sole vendor?
Apple tried to get a monopoly. Real pointed out that we live in a free market econonmy. Apple's not going to get the monopoly. Nothing more to see here.
Ipod and apple name and reputation is at stake here and Real is going under anyway, so its like a i'm dragging u down to hell with me situation here. Shame on you real!
You could just as easily say that with any product -- "the manufacturer of the first should have a monopoly over any products that interoperate because maybe the new products will otherwise operate differently!"
No. Not a chance. Our econonmy wouldn't even exist, much less function, with that kind of a rationale.
Apple wanted a monopoly. They aren't going to get it.
That has nothing to do with the legality of you playing whatever music you like on a device.
I'm amazed that *anyone*, even the most ardent Apple apologist, is defending Apple on this point. Yes, Apple made a GUI for a POSIX environment that idiots can use, and Real made a lousy media player. That doesn't mean Apple has a halo and Real carries a pitchfork. Apple's trying to wedge themselves into a monopoly, and Real is telling them "Nope, this here is a free-market econonmy."
Real is probably in a lot of trouble here since they obviously reverse engineered some code from the iPod for their benefit without Apple's permission. I would hate to be a lawyer for Real at this point because it's basically like saying, "Yes we did violate the Terms and Conditions of the iPod, but we had a good reason to" - this generally doesn't stand up too well in court!
The hell they are. "As a condition of reading this post, you need to shove a pencil up your nose." You didn't feel all that compelled to do so, did you? Apple has the same degree of legal hold over Real.
Especially when it comes to reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons, which is generally explicitly protected by the courts.
The DMCA can be applied if Real circumvented Apple's copyright protection mechanisms - regardless of whether it was for interoperability.
Case law goes against Apple here. Remember when Lexmark tried using the DMCA to prevent printer ink cartridge interoperability?
That hasn't been a correct HTTP request since HTTP 0.9.
Which all newer HTTP specifications require backwards compatibility with.
Try actually reading the protocol specification. It uses HTTP.
Try actually using the servents. The document does not reflect how the GnutellaNet operates. Given the way the GDF operates (mostly trying to formalize existing practices rather than coming up with new protocol specs from scratch), it is unlikely that it ever will.
Not in any browser I know of; it's usually provided as a supplementary toolbar.
Okay, you've piqued my interest. Which browser have you used that provides separate buttons specially for use of this tag, be it in a separate toolbar or what? I don't see any such controls in Firefox, Konqueror, or Mozilla, which is all that I have installed on my system.
Err... the whole point of this article is what we would do differently if we had a brand-new Internet to work on. Legacy code isn't an issue.
But we'd need to provide benefits for that rewrite.
The main issues I have are that it is far too tightly coupled with DNS and that it is something that web developers cannot rely upon or even not rely upon.
The issues you state are privacy issues, and deliberately chosen. The fact that websites other than the granting one generally may not retrieve state from the browser (I assume that's what you mean by "tied to DNS") is pretty much necessary to avoid data leakage about your browsing habits to other websites. I feel quite strongly that administrators of one website should not be able to monitor what users do off of their website. The other issue, that cookies may not be available, falls into the same category. I used to deny cookies and whitelist particular sites, because I did not like the privacy implications (a webmaster has no need to see me as anything other than a series of requests -- he can tack a CGI argument representing my ID onto the end of an URL, if he feels it necessary to maintain server-side state, like a shopping cart). I currently just blacklist some sites, and convert all permanent cookies into session cookies, which keeps me reasonably happy and makes it reasonably difficult for folks like DoubleClick to associate my different identities together. Should I have to give up this privacy because a webmaster feels that it is necessary to use cookies instead of embedded identifiers in URLs?
Yes, but the larger ones are becoming effectively so. I only very rarely use anything not packaged by Fedora or the associated repositories.
And short of random installation, you really never find things browsing through a list like you get with yast or synaptic.
[shrug] Maybe not, but you just type apt-get install [program name] if you want to install a program.
Even when the official site points to a 3rd party with rpms for instance. There is no quality control, nobody who works with the application is checking those packages.
This is why you use major third-party sources, not one-man random builds somewhere that aren't compatible. I use Fedora main, NewRPMS, Dag, ATrpms, and Dries.
Often those packages have numerous dependencies or are all in all crappy and useless.
Sure -- the dependencies are there for a reason -- so that you have all the software needed to use the package. You use something like apt (or yum, yup, emerge, or whatever your distro uses, I guess) and fetch and install all of it in one command.
But worst of all, if it's a popular project with a reputation, they can be considered a trusted source, but since they do no review of the 3rd party the rpms cannot be trusted.
A particular large, public archive of perl code that many people use as a resource.
SLOCOUNT?
It's not an acronym. It's a program to count lines of code and estimate cost to produce said lines.
Red Hate 6.2?
An older version of a full Linux distribution (OS, application software, etc) produced by Red Hat.
If lines, why is there a dollar amount in the headline?
Because sloccount estimates cost of development as well as giving lines, and half a billion dollars in development costs sounds particularly appealing.
So here's how the so called "FREE" sites (those that are remaining on the net anyway) work. They exist because of advertising. As "evil" as ads may be, they pay the bills for Slashdot, The Onion, IMDb, Yahoo, etc.
Yeah?
Google (with the *sole* exception of the fact that they require cookie usage to disable content filtering, which I view as pushing people towards maintaining permanent cookies on their machine) does not involve huge privacy issues. They even have procedures in place (only occasionally sampling which sites people go to from their pages) to eliminate the potential privacy threat that might be present by monitoring every link on Google that you click. Doubleclick is set up in such a way to tie where you surf to a global profile, and to then link this to your accounts on other websites. From a privacy standpoint, Doubleclick is a monster.
Doubleclick allows animated, disruptive ads.
Take a look at Google. They have text-based, *useful* ads. I don't mind Google's ads. I actually find them quite useful -- I've actually deliberately *clicked* on them, unlike Doubleclick's ads. They do not make for large, slow page downloads, they are convenient, and Google stays profitable.
Doubleclick is the exact opposite. They attack personal privacy, they greatly degrade the web-browsing experience, and they often slow page loading time. Their ads are often ugly, animated, and irritating.
Slashdot Mirror
Note: this is only worth doing if you're having trouble with Xft-using apps, and not otherwise. This means, say, the GNOME v2.x gaim (and pretty much any app with antialiased text). It doesn't affect, anything in, say, xemacs or xterm.
My guess is that your DPI is wrong. It took me a while to figure out what was going on on my own system.
.xsession to run it, but my understanding is that in this era of GNOME and KDE, distros don't seem to use .xsession any more).
Check the output of xdpyinfo|grep inch, and see if you have anything other than 75x75 dots per inch (or 100x100). In at least FC2 with fontconfig, the system determines font sizes based on resolution (this is new), and X occasionally decides on some weird resolutions for your monitor, which makes everything quite unappealing.
If it's some oddball size, like 85 dpi, add the line "Xft.dpi: 100" or "Xft.dpi: 75" to your ~/.Xresources file, and xrdb ~/.Xresources, and reopen the application in question. If this fixes your problem, have your system run xrdb ~/.Xresources each time you log into X, before anything else runs (I use
What offended me was his strong implication that the two -- PHP/MySQL programming and real DB development -- are mutually exclusive. It's an attitude that I see a lot on Slashdot, and it pisses me off.
:-)
Just:
*) Ensure that your company blows inordinate amounts of money on software with expensive support to cover your ass. It doesn't matter whether it works better, but you should be able to point at someone else to blame if something goes wrong. This also means that you don't actually have to understand the product, and can trust your DBMS vendor's salesmen for all your information, which will chew it up into bite-size pieces and spoon-feed it to you.
*) Act very self-important, talk down your nose to anyone that *doesn't* waste as much money as you, and treat your money-wasting as a mark of pride ("I have a $N million dollar budget this year!")
*) Place "real" before every class of software you work with, and vaguely insinuate that there are technical (especially reliability) failings in any cheaper product than the one you use. It worked marvelously for "real UNIX admins" for years.
*) Mention "Fortune X" frequently. For example "Fortune 500 DBAs with $5M budgets like me use *real* database software -- *we* can't afford downtime".
*) Avoid, if at all possible, knowing anything about software or computers other than database interfaces and possibly a scripting language or two. It's also good to choose a single OS, learn only that, and then slip occasional comments about how other OSes are unreliable.
*) Slowly begin slipping corporate acronyms into your speech. Use "ROI" whenever it's appropriate, and even when it isn't, to make it sound like other people are just slipshod and guessing numbers. "Enterprise class" is also good, since it implies, with only very vague factual requirements, that you work at a larger and more stodgy company that the person that you're trying to put down.
You'll be well on your way to doing "real" database work in no time.
Programmer: "Wow, kewl, we should do it all in Perl."
I don't like reading perl much, but it's not bad to the point that you should just throw it out.
Programmer: "MySQL rules man! Besides, it is free."
Division Manager: "Hmm, free is good. Can you manage the data in MySQL?"
DBA: "Well, actually MySQL doesn't do..."
Programmer: (interrupts DBA) "We don't need any of that relational integrity crap, that's just marketroid speak for Oracle, dude! All we need are a bunch of tables. I can wrap all of the SQL in a Perl package."
I've used MySQL very little, so I can't speak with authority about it's features. However, I do know that it supports transactions. I can't figure out how a DBMS could have transaction support and be missing any features required to guarantee data integrity. I'd be facinated to hear what you're thinking of.
DBA: "Then you will have dirty data, and we can only write apps in Perl if we have to use that library for access. This is really putting all of our eggs in one..."
They can't interface code to Perl? I mean, yeah, there might be some overhead, but the DBA is seriously stretching the truth.
A) Why are you writing code nine hours a day? Is it worth the (presumably significant) additional pay that you're getting working longer than 9 to 5 hours -- at most (with lunch factored in) 7.5 hours?
B) I actually have trouble writing code if I don't have anything happening at all -- I need to get into a "work mood". So it's not all completely bad.
The problem arises when you want a program which accomplishes task x and you go googling for an answer, you'll find a program in notime flat.
;)
Well, here's pretty much the process I recently followed. Way back in the day, I used to use yafc -- it supports sftp and a large number of authentication protocols that I use. Yafc was discontinued by the author. I'm not a huge fan of ncftp, which has been Red Hat's standard "enhanced" CLI ftp program for a long time. I googled around, and read a list of CLI ftp clients and found lftp. I read its feature list, and found that it did what I wanted. I typed apt-get install lftp. My system downloaded and installed all the software I needed.
It's true that as recently as Red Hat 8, there were serious breaks in the packaging coverage, but there are really few packages these days that aren't covered by the major packagers.
Your reading me backwards, they do NOT include those dependencies, they simply require them. A properly made rpm doesn't have dependencies. As any experienced rpm packager will tell you
You'd advocate static linking of all packages?
Takes me 5 minutes to find something not in those repositories, how about you?
I'm sure that something I use isn't in rpm format -- yeah, for instance, there's a script called "cvs2cl.pl" that generates GNU-style changelogs from CVS history logs. But, that's also just one perl script -- I dump it in ~/bin, chmod +x it, and I'm done. It's not something that one would screw up instealling.
At one point, I remember mldonkey not being packaged, though it is now.
And, of course, for anything that I'm hacking on I'm using copies from CVS (mutt, wine, etc), but if I'm doing that, I think it's reasonable for me to be familiar with the software.
I'm afraid I fail to understand the logic behind an argument that it's ok to ignore parts of what constitute a complete project because you assume that the magic rpm fairy will take care of it all for you.
Just WRT installation stuff, though I had to look way back in the thread to remember what we were originally talking about. Really, the magic RPM fairy *does* usually take care of me these days.
So you mean he makes $10/yr now? His salary at Apple is $1.
Uh, no. That was a gimmick to market himself as being in the trenches during his early time back at Apple. Even back then, he was getting pricy perks like a $90 million dollar Gulfstream luxury jet from Apple. Jobs was, in 2003, the highest paid CEO in California, and the second-highest paid CEO anywhere.
The entire name is not an acronym -- I was pointing out that "SLOCCOUNT" is not the right capitalization to use.
Speaking of Jobs being scum, I hear that Jobs just got a 1000% salary increase; not bad.
So, by your rationale:
* Computers would not interoperate. There would probably be one big vendor -- still IBM -- who charges lots of money for each machine. Extremely lucrative for IBM, yes. Good for society, no.
* Cars would not be repairable by anyone but the original manufacturer.
* You'd be forced to use Sears nails with a Sears hammer.
You do realize that if your "nobody should be able to make products compatible with anyone else's products" rationale was in place, we'd all be doing something in a world without personal computers, and IBM would still be charging millions of dollars for the huge computers for which *they* are the sole vendor?
Apple tried to get a monopoly. Real pointed out that we live in a free market econonmy. Apple's not going to get the monopoly. Nothing more to see here.
Ipod and apple name and reputation is at stake here and Real is going under anyway, so its like a i'm dragging u down to hell with me situation here.
Shame on you real!
You could just as easily say that with any product -- "the manufacturer of the first should have a monopoly over any products that interoperate because maybe the new products will otherwise operate differently!"
No. Not a chance. Our econonmy wouldn't even exist, much less function, with that kind of a rationale.
Apple wanted a monopoly. They aren't going to get it.
Yet, no one was ever forced to purchase an iPod.
That has nothing to do with the legality of you playing whatever music you like on a device.
I'm amazed that *anyone*, even the most ardent Apple apologist, is defending Apple on this point. Yes, Apple made a GUI for a POSIX environment that idiots can use, and Real made a lousy media player. That doesn't mean Apple has a halo and Real carries a pitchfork. Apple's trying to wedge themselves into a monopoly, and Real is telling them "Nope, this here is a free-market econonmy."
Wouldn't it be shorter to just say "Apple wants a lucrative monopoly over another hardware platform and isn't going to get it"?
Real is probably in a lot of trouble here since they obviously reverse engineered some code from the iPod for their benefit without Apple's permission. I would hate to be a lawyer for Real at this point because it's basically like saying, "Yes we did violate the Terms and Conditions of the iPod, but we had a good reason to" - this generally doesn't stand up too well in court!
The hell they are. "As a condition of reading this post, you need to shove a pencil up your nose." You didn't feel all that compelled to do so, did you? Apple has the same degree of legal hold over Real.
Especially when it comes to reverse-engineering for compatibility reasons, which is generally explicitly protected by the courts.
The DMCA can be applied if Real circumvented Apple's copyright protection mechanisms - regardless of whether it was for interoperability.
Case law goes against Apple here. Remember when Lexmark tried using the DMCA to prevent printer ink cartridge interoperability?
Perhaps he'll go start selling sugared water.
That hasn't been a correct HTTP request since HTTP 0.9.
Which all newer HTTP specifications require backwards compatibility with.
Try actually reading the protocol specification. It uses HTTP.
Try actually using the servents. The document does not reflect how the GnutellaNet operates. Given the way the GDF operates (mostly trying to formalize existing practices rather than coming up with new protocol specs from scratch), it is unlikely that it ever will.
Not in any browser I know of; it's usually provided as a supplementary toolbar.
Okay, you've piqued my interest. Which browser have you used that provides separate buttons specially for use of this tag, be it in a separate toolbar or what? I don't see any such controls in Firefox, Konqueror, or Mozilla, which is all that I have installed on my system.
Err... the whole point of this article is what we would do differently if we had a brand-new Internet to work on. Legacy code isn't an issue.
But we'd need to provide benefits for that rewrite.
The main issues I have are that it is far too tightly coupled with DNS and that it is something that web developers cannot rely upon or even not rely upon.
The issues you state are privacy issues, and deliberately chosen. The fact that websites other than the granting one generally may not retrieve state from the browser (I assume that's what you mean by "tied to DNS") is pretty much necessary to avoid data leakage about your browsing habits to other websites. I feel quite strongly that administrators of one website should not be able to monitor what users do off of their website. The other issue, that cookies may not be available, falls into the same category. I used to deny cookies and whitelist particular sites, because I did not like the privacy implications (a webmaster has no need to see me as anything other than a series of requests -- he can tack a CGI argument representing my ID onto the end of an URL, if he feels it necessary to maintain server-side state, like a shopping cart). I currently just blacklist some sites, and convert all permanent cookies into session cookies, which keeps me reasonably happy and makes it reasonably difficult for folks like DoubleClick to associate my different identities together. Should I have to give up this privacy because a webmaster feels that it is necessary to use cookies instead of embedded identifiers in URLs?
Because no distro is all inclusive, NONE of them.
Yes, but the larger ones are becoming effectively so. I only very rarely use anything not packaged by Fedora or the associated repositories.
And short of random installation, you really never find things browsing through a list like you get with yast or synaptic.
[shrug] Maybe not, but you just type apt-get install [program name] if you want to install a program.
Even when the official site points to a 3rd party with rpms for instance. There is no quality control, nobody who works with the application is checking those packages.
This is why you use major third-party sources, not one-man random builds somewhere that aren't compatible. I use Fedora main, NewRPMS, Dag, ATrpms, and Dries.
Often those packages have numerous dependencies or are all in all crappy and useless.
Sure -- the dependencies are there for a reason -- so that you have all the software needed to use the package. You use something like apt (or yum, yup, emerge, or whatever your distro uses, I guess) and fetch and install all of it in one command.
But worst of all, if it's a popular project with a reputation, they can be considered a trusted source, but since they do no review of the 3rd party the rpms cannot be trusted.
[shrug] Hence the use of popular RPM sources.
CPAN?
A particular large, public archive of perl code that many people use as a resource.
SLOCOUNT?
It's not an acronym. It's a program to count lines of code and estimate cost to produce said lines.
Red Hate 6.2?
An older version of a full Linux distribution (OS, application software, etc) produced by Red Hat.
If lines, why is there a dollar amount in the headline?
Because sloccount estimates cost of development as well as giving lines, and half a billion dollars in development costs sounds particularly appealing.
Remember, what 3rd parties offer doesn't matter.
May I ask why you feel that this is the case?
So here's how the so called "FREE" sites (those that are remaining on the net anyway) work. They exist because of advertising. As "evil" as ads may be, they pay the bills for Slashdot, The Onion, IMDb, Yahoo, etc.
Yeah?
Google (with the *sole* exception of the fact that they require cookie usage to disable content filtering, which I view as pushing people towards maintaining permanent cookies on their machine) does not involve huge privacy issues. They even have procedures in place (only occasionally sampling which sites people go to from their pages) to eliminate the potential privacy threat that might be present by monitoring every link on Google that you click. Doubleclick is set up in such a way to tie where you surf to a global profile, and to then link this to your accounts on other websites. From a privacy standpoint, Doubleclick is a monster.
Doubleclick allows animated, disruptive ads.
Take a look at Google. They have text-based, *useful* ads. I don't mind Google's ads. I actually find them quite useful -- I've actually deliberately *clicked* on them, unlike Doubleclick's ads. They do not make for large, slow page downloads, they are convenient, and Google stays profitable.
Doubleclick is the exact opposite. They attack personal privacy, they greatly degrade the web-browsing experience, and they often slow page loading time. Their ads are often ugly, animated, and irritating.
I was using someone else's Windows machine with IE.
I'm still amazed that people browse the web on such a platform -- it's terribly unpleasant.
Have you ever used pdnsd, and if so, how do you feel that it compares to posadis?
I'll second the privoxy recommendation, and add the click-to-view Flash extension for Firefox as a recommendation.
4. Dumb pro-american sites that tell of the existence of 'terrorist training servers'
Since when is braindead Bushie propaganda "pro-American"?
Doing my level best to piss off the religious right wing...
Ever visited rightnation.us?