From the sound of it, the displaced IT workers of the US should come to Australia. They could lower your workload and create a demand for better hardware and customer service.
They put an an awful lot of effort into saying something that could be summed up in just a few words:
Malicious software can make money now, that which makes money attracts sellers.
It's that simple, whereas in the past malware was mostly out of a quest for fame or percieved revenge, the malware of today is business malware, the nasty programs of old all dressed up in suit and tie and making someone filthy rich.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that nearly everyone runs Windows XP these days and Microsoft wasn't very attentive to security when they designed it. The sheer number of critical vulnerabilities that the operating system has is mind boggling. Recently, it was stated by some firm or another that Linux had released more patches than any other OS this year. Now, aside from the obvious problem with that statement (the patches weren't patches for Linux itself but for software in common Linux distributions, which is vastly greater in number than that of a Windows installation) if you look at the things patched, they aren't terribly dangerous. They are things like "potentially vulnerable to DNS attack" or "Local user can gain partial root privileges" and such, they are not like "Someone on the other side of a planet can send you a magic packet that makes your computer their bitch permanently," which is what the vast majority of Windows vulnerabilities allow.
In short, malware has grown because malware is like any pathogen, it lies in wait until conditions are optimal for its growth and when they are it takes over quite rapidly. Remove one of its primary growth factors, and you'll slow it down. Remove more, and you'll potentially kill it.
This is hardly revolutionary, wireless credit card processors have existed for quite some time, and are used by many other mainstream retailers, as well as at restaurants, flea markets, and pretty much anywhere else where they don't want to have to run land lines to all the checkout-stations. The only difference is that Apple caches your recept instead of giving it to you up front. Don't ask me why unless they are trying to cut costs on thermal paper or something as it takes very little time to print a recept for the customer. In fact, the only thing that would really be time saving about it would be the fact that the customer doesn't have to sign anything, the effectiveness of which is arguable.
I've noticed a number of comments stating concern about the security of wireless credit card verification, and I'd like to clarify on that. This is not at all uncommon, the devices operate on the cell (CDMA) network, not WiFi, and encorporate the same encryption that is used in land-line credit card processing. This is really no security issue. The only issue exists in the fact that you being identified by a credit card and an e-mail address which is something easily obtained. Some would argue that it's no more insecure than online transactions, but this doesn't require an account password, nor does it involve a shipping address. For that matter, it's no more insecure than any of your other credit card transactions. When was the last time someone checked your signature on the back of your card? It rarely happens, and in fact, these days many retailers don't even allow the clerk to handle your card in order to avoid liability.
Well, considering wireless credit card processors use CDMA as opposed to WiFi, I'm guessing it's going to be pretty damn difficult for your run of the mill skript kiddie to intercept.
The articles I posted don't prove your point, they show that stem cells have promise that needs to be explored, not throw to the wayside.
My signature has to do with the fact that politicians from Utah often propose unworkable and impractical laws to enforce content protection that should be done by the parents, not by the government. But that is a whole other discussion for a different time.
As for fundamentalism goes, fundamentalism is an extreme, and an extreme is harmful no matter which end of the spectrum it is on. Often times, the extreme ends of a given social spectrum produce similarly negative results in spite of the fact that they state diametrically opposite viewpoints. (An example, pure capitalism (with no government regulation) versus pure communism (with no chance for private gains) produce similarly dismal results for those within the system. But again, another discussion, for another time.)
Your distrust of academic studies that achieve exactly what they meant to prove is somewhat justified, but I intentionally chose articles that met somewhere in the middle. They demonstrated that stem cell treatments have a potential that needs to be studied and developed.
Stem cell research will provide a cure for cancer, however I was speaking of genetic research in general.
I am by no means a fundamentalist. Religious or otherwise. Stem cells show great potential, and contrary to what some may think, they are not going to destroy society, or devalue human life. As it stands, human life isn't that high on the list of values for most people anyway.
And if you comb the news, you will see that stem-cell research is a pretty un-popular subject among the more outspoken of our population, regardless of their biological source. Because of this, private funding for such products coming from the corporate sector is diminishing out of fear of a tarnished image.
Furthermore, there isplenty of research showing that stem cells are showing some definite positive results in clinical tests. Bear in mind, stem cells are a new field of research that has not yet had time to develop to its full potential. While we may not see amazing cures just yet, without adequate research, we'll never know their full potential.
And lastly, I would appreciate it if you wouldn't make assumptions about me any my life. It's fine for you to say that I might be lacking compassion in a single instance, but do not assume that you "have more compassion than [I] will ever know" because you have no basis for that statement.
Yep, your single case completely invalidates all stem cell research. You're totally right.
I'm sorry this stuff happened to you and your family, but it is a single case. For every one case like yours, there are a number children who take a blow to the head at an early age and and are reduced to vegetables.
Furthermore, I don't know if you've watched the news, but thanks to the incredibly damaging upsurge in fundamentalist religion, the government has pulled funding for such things, and private companies are afraid to mention things like Darwin and stem cells. Simply put, stem cell research is NOT a way to get funding, in fact, it's almost a death sentence for research.
Finally, I am completely and totally sick of people pretending to know about or understand these topics. The vast majority of the population knows next to nothing about stem cells, cloning, and genetic research. They simply recall every science-fiction movie they've ever seen in which a man-made monster runs amok. These things are fiction. The reality of the situation is that stem cell and theraputic cloning research could bring about cures to stuff like cancer, MS, parkinsons, head and neck injuries, and a whole host of others. You need have a little compassion for those who aren't as lucky as you.
Is not desktop environments, it's the OS as a whole. I run XFCE, my friends who are completely computer illiterate can sit down with no explanation and be running Firefox and Gaim in no time. GUIs are largely intuitive, that's the whole point. Installing software, for instance, would be a whole other issue. Imagine trying to explain how to compile an application that requires three or four obscure libraries to someone who doesn't even really understand how a windows installer works... These are the sorts of things your friend should address rather than superficial differences like the appearance of the desktop.
Not to sound as though I'm pontificating (which I probably am) but in my humble (yet informed) opinion, desktop Linux needs these things to happen before it will have much of a hope at mainstream:
#1 Drivers
Yes, Linux obviously has drivers for most everything, and an experienced user can get that obscure USB WiFi adapter that you bought up and working in "no time." But the thing is, not everybody has a friend who is an experienced Linux user. If Linux development needs to pull together some kind of social/financial influence in order to bully manufacturers into giving up hardware specs for development, then so be it. I would be happy for even closed-source drivers. I understand some within GNU would consider that blasphemy, but closed source software isn't wrong it's just suboptimal by our standards. Your average desktop user couldn't possibly care less about whether or not the source code for their drivers is open source or not, they just want it to be easy.
#2 Unified Configuration
Control panel in Windows scares most end-users. If you tell them that they have to edit a configuration file full of nothing but cryptic (to them) text, they will want nothing to do with it and for good reason. Imagine if you had to jack up your car and unbolt the gas tank just to refuel. (Those of you who are mechanically inclined, I don't really care if you're an exception; hush) To your average end-user, hunting down a configuration file in some (again, to them) obscure location and then having to change values which may or may not be case-sensitive is just too much for them. Give them a unified location for configuration files, and some means of editing them. This could be done as an addition to the existing configuration system as opposed to a rewrite of it.
Conceptually, an application could be written that would use a simple markup language of some kind to describe what the configuation screen should look like (not a regedit/gconf sort of interface, one with checkboxes, comboboxes, etc) This would allow developers to create a configuration definition file and on install, a symlink to that file, as well as the relevant configuration files allowing the program to be extensible for new programs.
#3 Installation
I understand that everybody is up in arms about distribution and package schemes, Debian users want.deb, Red Hat wants RPM, Slackware wants.tgz. Let's all just sit down and decide already. Let's decide on a format that A. allows users to install software quickly and easily and B. is aware of what libraries it needs and C. (the most important) WILL FIND THOSE LIBRARIES. Again, an experienced user can hunt down that an elusive library and get it installed properly, but an end user cannot and, more importantly, doesn't even want to know it exists. Let's keep a central Linux package repository where these install packages can grab what they need to run automatically over an internet connection and be done with it. Simply telling a user that they need wxWidgets or libExo does them no good, in fact, it scares them more than those "Illegal Operation" errors in Windows. None of this will do away with the ability to install from source, it will just make the process of installing software easier which is what end-users need.
#4 X
X is a terribly fickle piece of software. A user could go in to simply try t
I tend to be more of a console guy, for the most part the only non-console tools I use are TV Time, GAIM, and Firefox, everything else is pretty much done with the console. The XFCE tools are all pretty nice, and like the WM itself they have very small footprints and load very quickly. (Interesting that you mention being able to run Matlab, I am able to run my laptop for a full hour or more longer than I would be able to with Windows, and about 45 minutes longer than with KDE) The XFCE file manager is a little strange, it actually resembles to me the file manager from BeOS Max and while it's functional, it could be better. (Not that it matters all that much anyway since my file manager is rxvt)
It's good to see that people who aren't like me ("Thinks window managers are just a way to show lots of terminal windows") also find use in XFCE, it really is a nice app.
I use Slackware, they cut support for Gnome a while back because the project is so poorly managed.
...I know that just made me a lot of enemies, but I'll say it, Gnome is poorly managed. So are a lot of other projects, it's not that uncommon in the Linux world, but Gnome is definitely part of that group.
I think it's safe to say that the reason most of the Slackware community wasn't upset by the fact that Gnome was cut is that most of us didn't use it in the first place. I would say that, on the whole, the Slackware userbase isn't one that needs/wants things to be dumbed down for them. I personally know a number of Slack users who treat window managers as a way to display a lot of terminals and a firefox instance.
As for me, XFCE does the trick for me. It's fast to configure, it improves the appearance of both GTK and QT applications (GAIM, for instance, looks very pretty... amazingly) and it displays things at a sane font size. (I spent a long time trying to get everything a uniform size in KDE, it never really worked) And did I mention it starts much faster than KDE or Gnome?
Firstly:
You are not going to experience that degree of latency from a server with a decent amount of bandwidth. And it takes a second or two to open an e-mail on an AJAX client, so the time difference doesn't concern me. "Precise scrolling" is an amusing term to use here; you are not tuning a radio, you're selecting something from a list. A page at a time isn't any harder to use.
Secondly:
Yes, text-only programs CAN provide the same functionality and more. Being pretty is not a function, it's aesthetic and aesthetic is negligible in importance. Text-only can provide more functionality in that while graphically something might require a slew of buttons, check boxes, and input fields, it can be acomplished with a single command that takes a fraction of the time to input. Ease and efficiency of use vastly outweighs visual aesthetic in my mind.
I am not saying that SSH is a replacement for AJAX, I'm saying that web-based services are all broken and I'm remembering back to the "good ol' days" when the internet was mostly just a lot of text. We have spent so much time and effort into trying to make web pages into applications instead of pages and in the process created a lot of half-baked methods to facilitate it. AJAX won't last any longer than any of the other methods, and 90% of the things implemented with it will be poorly done just like 90% of Java for websites is poorly done, and 90% of DHTML is poorly done... I'm simply advocating that we either decide on a very strict standard for web-based applications (and, even then, I fear what people will attempt to do) OR we scrap the whole idea of using HTTP for hosting applications and come up with a new protocol specifically tunde to perform the task.
Complete lack of graphical abilities doesn't concern me.
SSH is plenty swift, and you don't need low-latency to read your e-mail. The idea that a good interface has to involve a lot of pretty colors is a rather new, and rather ill-conceived. A text-only program can have the exact same functionality as a graphical one and often times more. The learning curve for the software isn't any harder than that of graphical software, people are just daunted by text. People should get over their fear of reading.
I remember the Internet. It was great, it contained tomes of information, right there in plain black and white and anyone with sufficient knowledge and a little money could contribute. It was glorious.
But then corporate interest came into the picture, soon there were people making money advertising on the Internet, soon after that every major company, and most minor ones had an internet presence. Not long after that, their money started to influence the Internet, making it no longer a hub of information, but a hub of money for companies already too rich for their own good.
Those companies did to the internet and especially http, the same thing they did with so many other things, they took it too far, stretched it too much. They expected it to perform in the place of other systems in the interest of saving themselves money on distribution in exchange for functionality and customer satisfaction.
Now days the internet is full of web-based applications that attempt to mimic the functionality of local applications, with very few succeeding.
I think, perhaps, it's time for us to stop trying to make the internet something it's not. Are animated drop-down menus and interactive widgets really that important? What is so wrong with saving application functionality for protocols designed to handle it like SSH and Telnet? Nothing.
In addition to being nearly incomprehensible, this review is also fairly useless. You told us that a NAS device attaches to the network and stores things.
I don't really think anyone in the slashdot crowd expected it to not do that.
Generally, a hardware review contains at least some sort of benchmarks or some gauge of performance. The closest you came to this was "I kicked it and it didn't break" and "It was kind of easy to use."
If you're going to review hardware, why don't you look up some other reviews for related hardware and try to structure yours in a similar manner. That way, you might actually offer some useful information.
How about we... do absolutely nothing at all.
Filters, "kid-nets", and legislative propositions from Utah are no substitute for parenting. When I was growing up, pornography wasn't difficult to get, there was a Latin grocery down the street that sold magazines that would be kept under the counter in any other store, the FCC knew their goddamned place (allocating frequencies, not patrolling morality) so TV was full of near-nudity, my dad had a collection of playboys hidden in his room that I both knew of and the location of, and lets not forget the internet...
Didn't hurt me, didn't reduce me into some kind of sexual vagrant. I'm not a porn-addled deviant, in fact, I really just don't care. Pornography, like anything, can be harmful to the weak-minded and easily-addicted, but just because you can't handle it, or your cult religion forbids it, doesn't mean that it ought to be outlawed. Freedom of speech is more important than your inability to control yourself.
Not really, no. These are not spam, they are optional bots that can be removed from ones buddy list as one would remove anyone else. There is an informative message about the bots for those wondering where they came from when they are removed, but they are one-time-only messages.
While they are mostly useless, they are a minor irritance.
I think it would be rather cool if AOL had created some kind of useful AIMBOT instead of these relatively pointless ones. I could see a use for a spellcheck bot, a dictionary bot, or a calculator bot, but a shopping bot and movie bot? Those are things that are easier to accomplish via google.
Furthermore, I find it deeply troubling that the bots use broken internet letter substitutions such as "4", "U", "R", et cetera. If I don't cut people any slack for that, I'm certainly not going to cut a bot that doesn't physically type anything slack.
I use GAIM on Linux and they were added to my buddy list as well.
AOL has stored buddy lists on their server for quite some time so it's completely independent of your client.
This is an interesting suggestion, and if it can potentiallly coax more developers into providing drivers for their hardware *cough*BROADCOM*cough*EVERYSOUNDCARDEVER*cough* then I can't see how it would be a bad thing.
I block ads for a couple of reasons: 1. Most ads are bullshit. I'm not interested in any "free" iPods, "free" iBooks, "free" Xboxes, PS2's, PS3's or PSP's, red hot milf action, ringtones, pink phones, internet lovers, neutered napsters, mortgages, gambling, or meeting married women.
Nobody in their right mind with a half ounce of common sense would fall for any of these things, these aren't ads, they are the internet equivalent of someone opening their trenchcoat to reveal a bunch of fake rolexes. If these "businesses" go belly up, I'll consider it a good day.
2. I am an active consumer. If I want to buy something, I actively seek it. The only ads that I heed anything to are the ones that actually inform me about a specific product. If they just tell me how "awesome" it is, that's not enough. I need whitesheets and specifications. I'm an informed consumer who puts some work into my shopping. The chances of me clicking on any sort of ad that I see on the internet are very, very small.
Slashdot Mirror
From the sound of it, the displaced IT workers of the US should come to Australia. They could lower your workload and create a demand for better hardware and customer service.
Malicious software can make money now, that which makes money attracts sellers.
It's that simple, whereas in the past malware was mostly out of a quest for fame or percieved revenge, the malware of today is business malware, the nasty programs of old all dressed up in suit and tie and making someone filthy rich.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that nearly everyone runs Windows XP these days and Microsoft wasn't very attentive to security when they designed it. The sheer number of critical vulnerabilities that the operating system has is mind boggling. Recently, it was stated by some firm or another that Linux had released more patches than any other OS this year. Now, aside from the obvious problem with that statement (the patches weren't patches for Linux itself but for software in common Linux distributions, which is vastly greater in number than that of a Windows installation) if you look at the things patched, they aren't terribly dangerous. They are things like "potentially vulnerable to DNS attack" or "Local user can gain partial root privileges" and such, they are not like "Someone on the other side of a planet can send you a magic packet that makes your computer their bitch permanently," which is what the vast majority of Windows vulnerabilities allow.
In short, malware has grown because malware is like any pathogen, it lies in wait until conditions are optimal for its growth and when they are it takes over quite rapidly. Remove one of its primary growth factors, and you'll slow it down. Remove more, and you'll potentially kill it.
I've noticed a number of comments stating concern about the security of wireless credit card verification, and I'd like to clarify on that. This is not at all uncommon, the devices operate on the cell (CDMA) network, not WiFi, and encorporate the same encryption that is used in land-line credit card processing. This is really no security issue. The only issue exists in the fact that you being identified by a credit card and an e-mail address which is something easily obtained. Some would argue that it's no more insecure than online transactions, but this doesn't require an account password, nor does it involve a shipping address. For that matter, it's no more insecure than any of your other credit card transactions. When was the last time someone checked your signature on the back of your card? It rarely happens, and in fact, these days many retailers don't even allow the clerk to handle your card in order to avoid liability.
Well, considering wireless credit card processors use CDMA as opposed to WiFi, I'm guessing it's going to be pretty damn difficult for your run of the mill skript kiddie to intercept.
Ya got that right.
My signature has to do with the fact that politicians from Utah often propose unworkable and impractical laws to enforce content protection that should be done by the parents, not by the government. But that is a whole other discussion for a different time.
As for fundamentalism goes, fundamentalism is an extreme, and an extreme is harmful no matter which end of the spectrum it is on. Often times, the extreme ends of a given social spectrum produce similarly negative results in spite of the fact that they state diametrically opposite viewpoints. (An example, pure capitalism (with no government regulation) versus pure communism (with no chance for private gains) produce similarly dismal results for those within the system. But again, another discussion, for another time.)
Your distrust of academic studies that achieve exactly what they meant to prove is somewhat justified, but I intentionally chose articles that met somewhere in the middle. They demonstrated that stem cell treatments have a potential that needs to be studied and developed.
I am by no means a fundamentalist. Religious or otherwise. Stem cells show great potential, and contrary to what some may think, they are not going to destroy society, or devalue human life. As it stands, human life isn't that high on the list of values for most people anyway.
And if you comb the news, you will see that stem-cell research is a pretty un-popular subject among the more outspoken of our population, regardless of their biological source. Because of this, private funding for such products coming from the corporate sector is diminishing out of fear of a tarnished image.
Furthermore, there is plenty of research showing that stem cells are showing some definite positive results in clinical tests. Bear in mind, stem cells are a new field of research that has not yet had time to develop to its full potential. While we may not see amazing cures just yet, without adequate research, we'll never know their full potential.
And lastly, I would appreciate it if you wouldn't make assumptions about me any my life. It's fine for you to say that I might be lacking compassion in a single instance, but do not assume that you "have more compassion than [I] will ever know" because you have no basis for that statement.
I'm sorry this stuff happened to you and your family, but it is a single case. For every one case like yours, there are a number children who take a blow to the head at an early age and and are reduced to vegetables.
Furthermore, I don't know if you've watched the news, but thanks to the incredibly damaging upsurge in fundamentalist religion, the government has pulled funding for such things, and private companies are afraid to mention things like Darwin and stem cells. Simply put, stem cell research is NOT a way to get funding, in fact, it's almost a death sentence for research.
Finally, I am completely and totally sick of people pretending to know about or understand these topics. The vast majority of the population knows next to nothing about stem cells, cloning, and genetic research. They simply recall every science-fiction movie they've ever seen in which a man-made monster runs amok. These things are fiction. The reality of the situation is that stem cell and theraputic cloning research could bring about cures to stuff like cancer, MS, parkinsons, head and neck injuries, and a whole host of others. You need have a little compassion for those who aren't as lucky as you.
Not to sound as though I'm pontificating (which I probably am) but in my humble (yet informed) opinion, desktop Linux needs these things to happen before it will have much of a hope at mainstream:
#1 Drivers
Yes, Linux obviously has drivers for most everything, and an experienced user can get that obscure USB WiFi adapter that you bought up and working in "no time." But the thing is, not everybody has a friend who is an experienced Linux user. If Linux development needs to pull together some kind of social/financial influence in order to bully manufacturers into giving up hardware specs for development, then so be it. I would be happy for even closed-source drivers. I understand some within GNU would consider that blasphemy, but closed source software isn't wrong it's just suboptimal by our standards. Your average desktop user couldn't possibly care less about whether or not the source code for their drivers is open source or not, they just want it to be easy.
#2 Unified Configuration
Control panel in Windows scares most end-users. If you tell them that they have to edit a configuration file full of nothing but cryptic (to them) text, they will want nothing to do with it and for good reason. Imagine if you had to jack up your car and unbolt the gas tank just to refuel. (Those of you who are mechanically inclined, I don't really care if you're an exception; hush) To your average end-user, hunting down a configuration file in some (again, to them) obscure location and then having to change values which may or may not be case-sensitive is just too much for them. Give them a unified location for configuration files, and some means of editing them. This could be done as an addition to the existing configuration system as opposed to a rewrite of it.
Conceptually, an application could be written that would use a simple markup language of some kind to describe what the configuation screen should look like (not a regedit/gconf sort of interface, one with checkboxes, comboboxes, etc) This would allow developers to create a configuration definition file and on install, a symlink to that file, as well as the relevant configuration files allowing the program to be extensible for new programs.
#3 Installation
I understand that everybody is up in arms about distribution and package schemes, Debian users want .deb, Red Hat wants RPM, Slackware wants .tgz. Let's all just sit down and decide already. Let's decide on a format that A. allows users to install software quickly and easily and B. is aware of what libraries it needs and C. (the most important) WILL FIND THOSE LIBRARIES. Again, an experienced user can hunt down that an elusive library and get it installed properly, but an end user cannot and, more importantly, doesn't even want to know it exists. Let's keep a central Linux package repository where these install packages can grab what they need to run automatically over an internet connection and be done with it. Simply telling a user that they need wxWidgets or libExo does them no good, in fact, it scares them more than those "Illegal Operation" errors in Windows. None of this will do away with the ability to install from source, it will just make the process of installing software easier which is what end-users need.
#4 X
X is a terribly fickle piece of software. A user could go in to simply try t
It's good to see that people who aren't like me ("Thinks window managers are just a way to show lots of terminal windows") also find use in XFCE, it really is a nice app.
I think it's safe to say that the reason most of the Slackware community wasn't upset by the fact that Gnome was cut is that most of us didn't use it in the first place. I would say that, on the whole, the Slackware userbase isn't one that needs/wants things to be dumbed down for them. I personally know a number of Slack users who treat window managers as a way to display a lot of terminals and a firefox instance.
As for me, XFCE does the trick for me. It's fast to configure, it improves the appearance of both GTK and QT applications (GAIM, for instance, looks very pretty... amazingly) and it displays things at a sane font size. (I spent a long time trying to get everything a uniform size in KDE, it never really worked) And did I mention it starts much faster than KDE or Gnome?
It stands for "Eh, you have no idea what we're talking about." ;)
Emacs is one of the canonical Unix programming editors.
You are not going to experience that degree of latency from a server with a decent amount of bandwidth. And it takes a second or two to open an e-mail on an AJAX client, so the time difference doesn't concern me. "Precise scrolling" is an amusing term to use here; you are not tuning a radio, you're selecting something from a list. A page at a time isn't any harder to use.
Secondly:
Yes, text-only programs CAN provide the same functionality and more. Being pretty is not a function, it's aesthetic and aesthetic is negligible in importance. Text-only can provide more functionality in that while graphically something might require a slew of buttons, check boxes, and input fields, it can be acomplished with a single command that takes a fraction of the time to input. Ease and efficiency of use vastly outweighs visual aesthetic in my mind.
I am not saying that SSH is a replacement for AJAX, I'm saying that web-based services are all broken and I'm remembering back to the "good ol' days" when the internet was mostly just a lot of text. We have spent so much time and effort into trying to make web pages into applications instead of pages and in the process created a lot of half-baked methods to facilitate it. AJAX won't last any longer than any of the other methods, and 90% of the things implemented with it will be poorly done just like 90% of Java for websites is poorly done, and 90% of DHTML is poorly done... I'm simply advocating that we either decide on a very strict standard for web-based applications (and, even then, I fear what people will attempt to do) OR we scrap the whole idea of using HTTP for hosting applications and come up with a new protocol specifically tunde to perform the task.
SSH is plenty swift, and you don't need low-latency to read your e-mail. The idea that a good interface has to involve a lot of pretty colors is a rather new, and rather ill-conceived. A text-only program can have the exact same functionality as a graphical one and often times more. The learning curve for the software isn't any harder than that of graphical software, people are just daunted by text. People should get over their fear of reading.
But then corporate interest came into the picture, soon there were people making money advertising on the Internet, soon after that every major company, and most minor ones had an internet presence. Not long after that, their money started to influence the Internet, making it no longer a hub of information, but a hub of money for companies already too rich for their own good.
Those companies did to the internet and especially http, the same thing they did with so many other things, they took it too far, stretched it too much. They expected it to perform in the place of other systems in the interest of saving themselves money on distribution in exchange for functionality and customer satisfaction.
Now days the internet is full of web-based applications that attempt to mimic the functionality of local applications, with very few succeeding.
I think, perhaps, it's time for us to stop trying to make the internet something it's not. Are animated drop-down menus and interactive widgets really that important? What is so wrong with saving application functionality for protocols designed to handle it like SSH and Telnet? Nothing.
No, I'm afraid I'm not Maddox. I just happen to share with him a dislike of bad writing and Utah.
I don't really think anyone in the slashdot crowd expected it to not do that.
Generally, a hardware review contains at least some sort of benchmarks or some gauge of performance. The closest you came to this was "I kicked it and it didn't break" and "It was kind of easy to use."
If you're going to review hardware, why don't you look up some other reviews for related hardware and try to structure yours in a similar manner. That way, you might actually offer some useful information.
How about we... do absolutely nothing at all.
Filters, "kid-nets", and legislative propositions from Utah are no substitute for parenting. When I was growing up, pornography wasn't difficult to get, there was a Latin grocery down the street that sold magazines that would be kept under the counter in any other store, the FCC knew their goddamned place (allocating frequencies, not patrolling morality) so TV was full of near-nudity, my dad had a collection of playboys hidden in his room that I both knew of and the location of, and lets not forget the internet...
Didn't hurt me, didn't reduce me into some kind of sexual vagrant. I'm not a porn-addled deviant, in fact, I really just don't care. Pornography, like anything, can be harmful to the weak-minded and easily-addicted, but just because you can't handle it, or your cult religion forbids it, doesn't mean that it ought to be outlawed. Freedom of speech is more important than your inability to control yourself.
Not really, no. These are not spam, they are optional bots that can be removed from ones buddy list as one would remove anyone else. There is an informative message about the bots for those wondering where they came from when they are removed, but they are one-time-only messages. While they are mostly useless, they are a minor irritance.
I think it would be rather cool if AOL had created some kind of useful AIMBOT instead of these relatively pointless ones. I could see a use for a spellcheck bot, a dictionary bot, or a calculator bot, but a shopping bot and movie bot? Those are things that are easier to accomplish via google.
Furthermore, I find it deeply troubling that the bots use broken internet letter substitutions such as "4", "U", "R", et cetera. If I don't cut people any slack for that, I'm certainly not going to cut a bot that doesn't physically type anything slack.
I use GAIM on Linux and they were added to my buddy list as well. AOL has stored buddy lists on their server for quite some time so it's completely independent of your client.
You considered the 1960's to be the golden age of computing? Ouch. I'd have said the 80's, or even up to 1995.
This is an interesting suggestion, and if it can potentiallly coax more developers into providing drivers for their hardware *cough*BROADCOM*cough*EVERYSOUNDCARDEVER*cough* then I can't see how it would be a bad thing.
What is this word "raise" that you speak of? I know not your foreign language.
I block ads for a couple of reasons:
1. Most ads are bullshit.
I'm not interested in any "free" iPods, "free" iBooks, "free" Xboxes, PS2's, PS3's or PSP's, red hot milf action, ringtones, pink phones, internet lovers, neutered napsters, mortgages, gambling, or meeting married women.
Nobody in their right mind with a half ounce of common sense would fall for any of these things, these aren't ads, they are the internet equivalent of someone opening their trenchcoat to reveal a bunch of fake rolexes. If these "businesses" go belly up, I'll consider it a good day.
2. I am an active consumer.
If I want to buy something, I actively seek it. The only ads that I heed anything to are the ones that actually inform me about a specific product. If they just tell me how "awesome" it is, that's not enough. I need whitesheets and specifications. I'm an informed consumer who puts some work into my shopping. The chances of me clicking on any sort of ad that I see on the internet are very, very small.