What happens if we skip all banners is that ad-supported sites will have little choice but to become paid sites or to close down. To be a paid site requires a little bit of infrastructure, so, you can expect a lot of smaller sites to shut down before larger ones. Popular special interest sites (that have a high bandwidth fixed cost and a high incentive to advertise because of the selected public) will go first.
I would rather have an ad-supported web than a pay-before-you-see one.
Another option, that requires some infrastructure, is to have a hybrid model where you pay not to see banners or you agree to see banners in order to get free access. It requires some smart template work and not everyone will want to do it.
Unfortunately, some very vocal anti-ad people would still want to have their cake and eat it to - see no ads and not pay for the content.
What these tools will bring, in the end, is more and more annoying advertizing practices that will be necessary to offset the decreasing revenue brought by the less annoying ones. When the ad revenue of standard in-page banners was not enough was the time the pop-up ad, the musical banner and the intersticial were born.
Didn't Motorola/Freescale have a dual-core G4 (MPC8641D, IIRC) processor somewhere?
It could be a very nice speed-bump for the Mini, Powerbook and eMac families and make all Apple computers multiprocessors (the marketing people would love to be able to claim that against those poor PC people)
That explains why they want the Last Remaining Copy of that April '65 issue of Electronics... They plan to destroy all evidence the Moore Law ever existed and then invoke the DMCA agains anyone who mentions it when their next processor is not twice as fast as the previous release...
I like the ability to "pack and move" my whole IM experience from one machine to the other. Using the same IM client under Windows and Linux makes this quite easy.
I tried a very early version of Miranda, back when it was the current one;-), but it never quite convinced me.
But, anyway, FOSS is almost synonymous with diversity, so, if you like Miranda and I like Gaim, let's celebrate we have choices.
Just like anything that's already said, this one seems quite obvious.
Any FOSS product will be popular if:
- It is easy or easier to use than alternatives - It gets the job done - It gives something alternatives don't - It provides as little as possible disruption
I would like to point out a couple examples:
I use Gaim on Windows XP (and under Linux - under OSX I prefer AdiumX, which is libgaim-based anyway) all the time. I have converted some people to it, but most of the non-conversions are due to lacking features like video or voice (I know it will be solved soon, if not already). It gives something MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM don't: having more than one account logged on at the same time. Lacking features, tough, limit adoption. Running under Windows is a must - anything else limits adoption to, at most, 10% of the market.
My girlfriend was sold on Firefox because of the tabbed browsing. RSS is great and being able to import bookmarks is very convenient (But I am not very happy to lose the standard RSS links when I do so)
Similarly, OpenOffice.org Calc could win some users if it did something Excel would not do, like Monte Carlo analysis (I would love this one) or more than 256 columns on a single sheet (A client of mine would have switched from Excel just because of this). As it is, OOo Calc does neither. As a whole, OOo not being able to run natively under MacOS's GUI is also a problem.
I love to be able to export OOo Impress presentations as Flash movies, but I would like to add, forgive-me, more flashy features, like animated transitions. I would be very happy if I could export it as.fla instead so someone could edit the presentation and make it, well, flashier.
Please note that ease of use means "it's easy to make it do what I want it to". Apache may be devilishly hard to use by a casual user, but a trained professional can make it do things IIS cannot, will not and would not even dare to try.
Smaller computer makers, who can't get a good deal with Microsoft, would love to be able to customize the browser well beyond what they can do with IE. They must also be considering selling their stuff to the likes of Linspire, who have no problem with including proprietary extensions with their products.
The end-user is way below their radar.
And, if I were them, I would stay away from that layer.
One idea that worries me is that in addition to allowing software patents, an FTAA-like agreement could make patents reciprocal. Local (I live in Brazil) companies have no reason (and are not allowed) to build their own portfolios and, if foreign patents become enforceable, they would be probably driven out of business.
Does anyone here know how are European software-patent advocates dealing with the reciprocity issue?
There is nothing easier for a spammer to defeat then a RBL; they just set up a server in their closet and run their own SMTP server. Most DSL and cable connections use temporary IP addresses and you can't RBL Verizon. No spammer is going to co-lo a server to send spam from.
There are services (sorbs, for instance) that list dynamic IP ranges. At first it may sound like a good idea, but it's not. I had whole lot of trouble while trying to de-list my office's IP address because sorbs tought it was dynamic, probably because a reckless "investigator" tought so.
And we still can't send e-mail to @aol.com because AOL still thinks (and won't listen to the ISP technical staff) we have a dynamic IP.
Well... The Concorde was French-British, used afterburners, guzzled fuel like a Saturnm V (not really) and is grounded forever (and it's sad). The X-15 flew only a handful of times and the shuttle... well... never mind.
Reliability is also a major show-stopper. It you have the present airplane catastrophic failure rate multiplied a thousand times flying over our heads in any major city, you can easily see the point why a flying car is a very bad idea. Add to that the fact that most car owners are very sloppy with proper maintenance and you can see an even worse scenario. Do you really want them flying over your house?
Increased reliability means increased cost. Every tiny little bit of reliability planes get costs a lot of money.
He3 is not a very good idea - you would have to process hundreds of tons of rock to extract just a tiny little bit. And we still don't know how to do it. Solar + fission makes more sense on the Moon. Energy-efficience plus safer fission and Deuterium fusion make more sense here. Perhaps solar transported by hydrogen (solar electrolysis of water and using hydrogen as a storage/transport medium) also makes sense.
The far side of the moon seems a natural place to put radiotelescopes that would not suffer any interference from Earth sources. Optical telescopes also could be assembled on the Moon and the lunar poles are a natural place to put infrared telescopes.
Assuming we could build automated self-contained raw-material processing factories, we could use local materials to build most parts of them (at least structures). This would be a big incentive to develop such things and could enormously reduce the costs of assembling and launching spacecraft both to the outer solar system or to Earth orbit.
Optical and radio interferometry also could easily be done with ground-based equipment. If the equipment is within a reasonable distance from a settlement, it is far easier to fix and upgrade. Just imagine having a dozen Hubble telescopes working in concert and that could be serviced on a next-day basis.
Other side benefit would be the development of the technologies and procedures required for a successful Mars mission. If something goes awfully wrong on the Moon, a rescue mission could be there in a week. Nothing can go wrong in a Mars mission as a rescue mission would only be there to pick up the corpses a couple years after the mishap.
Most important of all, it increases our very remote chances of spending some time there.
And, perhaps for the current US administration, making people look to the Moon may avoid having them look to Afghanistan, Iraq, the soon-to-be-done mistakes on Iran and the mistakes already not done in North Korea. It's just... convenient.
I would never encourage an increase in complexity for a limited-time benefit (OOo, as every other open-source application, will be 64-bit clean with time - I am surprised it's not yet). Two years from now, I doubt you will be able to buy a 32 bit x86 processor. Having 32 and 64 bit libraries coexisting in the same system is somewhat of a kluge.
That said, I would consider AMD64 as a different platform that can emulate 32 bit x86 with hardware assistance. I would not advise relying on x86 software running on it.
And, in Intel and AMD's shoes, I would funnel some money into making some important stuff (browser/email/office/IM/multimedia) 64-bit clean as soon as possible.
Slashdot Mirror
It should not be a problem. They lift off from Florida
What happens if we skip all banners is that ad-supported sites will have little choice but to become paid sites or to close down. To be a paid site requires a little bit of infrastructure, so, you can expect a lot of smaller sites to shut down before larger ones. Popular special interest sites (that have a high bandwidth fixed cost and a high incentive to advertise because of the selected public) will go first.
I would rather have an ad-supported web than a pay-before-you-see one.
Another option, that requires some infrastructure, is to have a hybrid model where you pay not to see banners or you agree to see banners in order to get free access. It requires some smart template work and not everyone will want to do it.
Unfortunately, some very vocal anti-ad people would still want to have their cake and eat it to - see no ads and not pay for the content.
What these tools will bring, in the end, is more and more annoying advertizing practices that will be necessary to offset the decreasing revenue brought by the less annoying ones. When the ad revenue of standard in-page banners was not enough was the time the pop-up ad, the musical banner and the intersticial were born.
Didn't Motorola/Freescale have a dual-core G4 (MPC8641D, IIRC) processor somewhere?
It could be a very nice speed-bump for the Mini, Powerbook and eMac families and make all Apple computers multiprocessors (the marketing people would love to be able to claim that against those poor PC people)
I just wanted a hard disk with an audio jack, a volume control and a couple buttons for forward/back/suffle. Can't be that hard.
That explains why they want the Last Remaining Copy of that April '65 issue of Electronics... They plan to destroy all evidence the Moore Law ever existed and then invoke the DMCA agains anyone who mentions it when their next processor is not twice as fast as the previous release...
Ingenious indeed...
I like the ability to "pack and move" my whole IM experience from one machine to the other. Using the same IM client under Windows and Linux makes this quite easy.
;-), but it never quite convinced me.
I tried a very early version of Miranda, back when it was the current one
But, anyway, FOSS is almost synonymous with diversity, so, if you like Miranda and I like Gaim, let's celebrate we have choices.
How much would you bet that Microsoft would prefer if people got pirate versions of Windows "Less-Crippled Edition" instead of trying, say, Linux?
I know I would, if I was in their shoes.
Just like anything that's already said, this one seems quite obvious.
.fla instead so someone could edit the presentation and make it, well, flashier.
Any FOSS product will be popular if:
- It is easy or easier to use than alternatives
- It gets the job done
- It gives something alternatives don't
- It provides as little as possible disruption
I would like to point out a couple examples:
I use Gaim on Windows XP (and under Linux - under OSX I prefer AdiumX, which is libgaim-based anyway) all the time. I have converted some people to it, but most of the non-conversions are due to lacking features like video or voice (I know it will be solved soon, if not already). It gives something MSN, Yahoo, ICQ and AIM don't: having more than one account logged on at the same time. Lacking features, tough, limit adoption. Running under Windows is a must - anything else limits adoption to, at most, 10% of the market.
My girlfriend was sold on Firefox because of the tabbed browsing. RSS is great and being able to import bookmarks is very convenient (But I am not very happy to lose the standard RSS links when I do so)
Similarly, OpenOffice.org Calc could win some users if it did something Excel would not do, like Monte Carlo analysis (I would love this one) or more than 256 columns on a single sheet (A client of mine would have switched from Excel just because of this). As it is, OOo Calc does neither. As a whole, OOo not being able to run natively under MacOS's GUI is also a problem.
I love to be able to export OOo Impress presentations as Flash movies, but I would like to add, forgive-me, more flashy features, like animated transitions. I would be very happy if I could export it as
Please note that ease of use means "it's easy to make it do what I want it to". Apache may be devilishly hard to use by a casual user, but a trained professional can make it do things IIS cannot, will not and would not even dare to try.
Well. My US$ 0.02...
They must be aiming towards OEMs.
Smaller computer makers, who can't get a good deal with Microsoft, would love to be able to customize the browser well beyond what they can do with IE. They must also be considering selling their stuff to the likes of Linspire, who have no problem with including proprietary extensions with their products.
The end-user is way below their radar.
And, if I were them, I would stay away from that layer.
This is an example of how much money the private space industry can make. This guy made US$ 180,000 without even leaving the planet...
Amazing
One idea that worries me is that in addition to allowing software patents, an FTAA-like agreement could make patents reciprocal. Local (I live in Brazil) companies have no reason (and are not allowed) to build their own portfolios and, if foreign patents become enforceable, they would be probably driven out of business.
Does anyone here know how are European software-patent advocates dealing with the reciprocity issue?
In a word
Yes
Even if the odds are of about one stranded crew over one hundred launches, the odds of it happening to any two specific crews is one in 10 thousand.
This is about the same odds of being born with a spare chromosome.
And remember, if something goes wrong with the main tank, there will be nobody to be rescued.
There are services (sorbs, for instance) that list dynamic IP ranges. At first it may sound like a good idea, but it's not. I had whole lot of trouble while trying to de-list my office's IP address because sorbs tought it was dynamic, probably because a reckless "investigator" tought so.
And we still can't send e-mail to @aol.com because AOL still thinks (and won't listen to the ISP technical staff) we have a dynamic IP.
Well... The Concorde was French-British, used afterburners, guzzled fuel like a Saturnm V (not really) and is grounded forever (and it's sad). The X-15 flew only a handful of times and the shuttle... well... never mind.
Not only that.
Reliability is also a major show-stopper. It you have the present airplane catastrophic failure rate multiplied a thousand times flying over our heads in any major city, you can easily see the point why a flying car is a very bad idea. Add to that the fact that most car owners are very sloppy with proper maintenance and you can see an even worse scenario. Do you really want them flying over your house?
Increased reliability means increased cost. Every tiny little bit of reliability planes get costs a lot of money.
They can't send nice pictures to spice up press releases anymore...
Graphics mode or speaker?
H.323 is nearly firewall-proof
I tried very hard to make it work at home and gave up when MSN started offering video conference
Alter enduring that kind of pain, I would be sympathetic to the Java programmer that fears any other technology could invalidate his/her suffering
" There is a problem with the database that is preventing the site from working.
There is also a problem with the administrator's email account that prevents me from notifying them of the problem. Please try again later. "
The need for anonymity may exist, but hiding behind it in order to manifest your opinions only takes away from their meaning.
Not only you shouldn't need to hide, you shouldn't hide to express your opinions.
.us does not look like US government. .gov.us would look like that.
.gov and .mil
Also, I guess that the US could also play nice and give up on the TLDs
The need for anonymity is a symptom, not a problem. You shouldn't need to hide in order to freely express your opinions without fear.
He3 is not a very good idea - you would have to process hundreds of tons of rock to extract just a tiny little bit. And we still don't know how to do it. Solar + fission makes more sense on the Moon. Energy-efficience plus safer fission and Deuterium fusion make more sense here. Perhaps solar transported by hydrogen (solar electrolysis of water and using hydrogen as a storage/transport medium) also makes sense.
The far side of the moon seems a natural place to put radiotelescopes that would not suffer any interference from Earth sources. Optical telescopes also could be assembled on the Moon and the lunar poles are a natural place to put infrared telescopes.
Assuming we could build automated self-contained raw-material processing factories, we could use local materials to build most parts of them (at least structures). This would be a big incentive to develop such things and could enormously reduce the costs of assembling and launching spacecraft both to the outer solar system or to Earth orbit.
Optical and radio interferometry also could easily be done with ground-based equipment. If the equipment is within a reasonable distance from a settlement, it is far easier to fix and upgrade. Just imagine having a dozen Hubble telescopes working in concert and that could be serviced on a next-day basis.
Other side benefit would be the development of the technologies and procedures required for a successful Mars mission. If something goes awfully wrong on the Moon, a rescue mission could be there in a week. Nothing can go wrong in a Mars mission as a rescue mission would only be there to pick up the corpses a couple years after the mishap.
Most important of all, it increases our very remote chances of spending some time there.
And, perhaps for the current US administration, making people look to the Moon may avoid having them look to Afghanistan, Iraq, the soon-to-be-done mistakes on Iran and the mistakes already not done in North Korea. It's just... convenient.
I would never encourage an increase in complexity for a limited-time benefit (OOo, as every other open-source application, will be 64-bit clean with time - I am surprised it's not yet). Two years from now, I doubt you will be able to buy a 32 bit x86 processor. Having 32 and 64 bit libraries coexisting in the same system is somewhat of a kluge.
That said, I would consider AMD64 as a different platform that can emulate 32 bit x86 with hardware assistance. I would not advise relying on x86 software running on it.
And, in Intel and AMD's shoes, I would funnel some money into making some important stuff (browser/email/office/IM/multimedia) 64-bit clean as soon as possible.