"This is just a book advertisement. It's not even a review."
His argument about bandwidth is certainly justified. Your browser only downloads an external stylesheet after the page has loaded. When someone loads a page on my site, it's rendered in blue/black on white first, and only when that's done does the client get the formatting information in a separate download. Compare that to yahoo, where you have to download all the font tags and embedded tables before you can even start to read the page.
It's not broken websites which turn away most customers though, it's user-agent-blocking ones, which is one point missed in the article. If your page looks crap but is still readable, job-done! Information gets transferred! Customer's happy! But if you block them on the premise that "your shoes aren't good enough for our carpet" (equiv.) then you've just lost a customer, and any hope of a reccommendation from them.
No, you probably don't need to read the book, neither do I: The information is readily available on the web, and we can easily check our pages with the validator. Perhaps the book is aiming at the gift market: give it to someone with an awful page. Perhaps it's aimed at corporate execs, who don't know as much as we do about usability.
Regardless, no point in slating the book because he published the first chapter. Good for him; I like to see people publish paper-editions on the net also. Let's point people to the article when we need to illustrate usability problems with their site, or point them to the book if they want to know how to fix it.
"Print these [pyramid-scams] out and send a copy to Postmaster, their city/zip"
Does 5 seconds of time to report such crimes not cost enough? Why would I want to buy a postage stamp, a sheet of paper, and £0.05 of printer-ink to send these emails to police who would likely not take any action, and would certainly not thank me.
If it's a suitable police matter, I trust the FTC will have appropriate means to forward copies to the relevant postal, police, or commerce departments. They also have the advantage of being able to send a thousand copies of the same email in one envelope, as they aggregate spam from worldwide.
I have forwarded illegal emails directly to the sender's local police department, but those tend to be in australia or canada, where it's easier to find contact names.
"Essentially these ads are inserted via a channel change without the viewer realizing it."
Right, so that's only the same as a banner-server on any typical websites? It knows which ads you watch, and which annoy you so much as to make you switch channel.
I can't watch advertising-supported television at all, but if I did, it would be an awful lot easier if there was some evolution of adverts shown. There are only so many times you can watch womens' hygiene adverts before you sell the TV and buy a video-player instead.
So they have the space (channel | image area), the ID-tag (set-top-box number | cookie), and they need to decide what to show (advert | banner). Well, you can only show one advert per channel, so if you want to substitute different adverts, you need another channel.
So now you're left with (assume two channels): Program 1: Channel 1 Program 2: Channel 2 Adverts for leg-shavers: Channel 1 Adverts for fast cars: Channel 2
With the advertising-breaks synchronised, you can mix the 4 combinations for different users.
Of course, the privacy claims is a big stinking pile of lies, but I'd be interested to see the cable companies prove they're not cheating by having the set-top-boxes choose a random ID tag when they're installed.
"The speeds listed by the manufacturers are 100% accurate. It's just that those are the page-per-minute ratings for blank sheets of paper being pushed through the printer. It doesn't include any actual printing."
That's marked as funny, but I believe it is actually the standard rating used (so says tom's hardware anyway)
so...
Why do you need the printer at all? If your aim is to get blank pages as fast as possible, I can do a thousand pages per second just by lifting the ream of paper. Will someone please explain the irony?
I've always ignored the crap, and just forwarded spams which are obviously illegal to uce@ftc.gov, under the premise that they do investigate a few, and it's all evidence against the spammer. Pyramid-schemes with peoples' real addresses are a good example of things to forward.
"Humans cost a lot more $$ than a phone system. Unfortunately that seems to be the bottom line"
Depends if you're smart, or if you're a beancounter. It might appear cheaper to replace people with computers. Beancounters might never know the real effects.
The smart companies will think a little further ahead, to the "damn P.O.S. company, why can't they answer their damn phones" response of a customer who would otherwise earn them a lot of money.
I don't think I know anyone who wouldn't switch companies (bank, phone, utilities, hardware...) after a bad experience on the phone to them.
Do you look at the total business costs of machine-phones, or do you do a 0th-approximation calculation, and just deduct the cost of the people from your budget?
echo "Any other argument is pure bullshit, even if the perpetrators have lied to themselves, self-brainwashed, I would call it, to justify their theft." > news:alt.flame
'Peter Jackson, and his hundreds of cast and crew members who spent years laboring to make this film' have nothing whatsoever to fear from people making copies of it, for one very good reason:
They've made a film which they can be proud of, and people will pay them accordingly - the LotR crew can be confident in their artwork, as opposed to the paranoid losers peddling overpriced shitty music, who have every reason to believe the public would like to screw them over.
I hardly see how you can be mourning the loss of Jackson's pension over internet swapping? Who shall we sue? These thousands of P2P nodes? Surely not the very same people who will be queuing around the block to see the film three times when it's released? Yes, the very same. The type of people who love the story enough to want to watch it 4 months early
And let's not forget that Tolkien has already got the money from this film: it paid off his mortgage decades ago. So the artists won't be starving.
Great idea. Take every single bit of crap sent across port 25 of a library computer, or anything posted to mail.yahoo.com/send.pl (oops, did i just reveal their super-secret algorithm?) and forward it to a policeman. Yeah, I can just imagine being that policeman.
G'morning Steve: 31,242 new emails, listing page 1 of 822
Free software was never about making money, free software was about making software.
Time and again, we have seen that linux development neither requires, nor generates money, yet people still assume capitalist values.
What I believe the author was suggesting is a massive, collaborative effort to produce an online game for linux. If it works for kernels, why not for games also?
Many, many computer platforms in the past have been sold on the basis of a single game which makes it worth buying the computer. Even now, Quake3 comes with a free copy of linux included.
If a game were created which makes it worth a gamers' time to install linux to play it, then gamers start to use linux. Sure, they dual-boot even as today, but that doesn't concern us. People see linux used for games, and are aware of its existance when deciding whether to make their next game portable or not.
Go for it! Put up a simple text protocol that allows anyone to write game-editing clients. Publish a perl server that anyone can run to browse the game. Make the rules extensible so that anone can suggest new features, and let the world be built. Let the clients evolve from text to graphic to 3d to accelerated as new programmers write their own clients on the protocol, and let the worlds evolve as thousands add to it.
Better than a port of Myth4? Probably not, but certainly more interesting.
Could anyone else find where Sarah Deutsch "argues against the [DMCA]?" I couldn't.
They thought that the DMCA would be enough to appease the 'copyright community', and were unprepared for new legislative attacks on the internet. They thought 'the war was over' when they agreed to DMCA, whereas they are still being attacked with requests to act as public censor.
Blockquoth Vader: "I have changed the deal. Pray I do not decide to change it further"
Re:Perl as a "scripting" or a "programming" langua
on
Ask Larry Wall
·
· Score: 1
What could be done to market Perl as a cross-platform GUI-interfaced language, suitable for creating pretty* interfaces in windows, gnome, and kde?
( * i.e. not like TK. Perhaps something mozilla or GTK based.)
Even while such applications are possible, it's not seen as a 'normal' way to use perl, and people have to put up with inferior languages for such apps.
"Does anyone actually support the war on drugs anymore? If so, what are they smoking?"
Fighting the war on the war on drugs... since when did war become a euphamism? Lately, we've heard it used to describe everything from routine police operations ("war on drugs") to civil servants at the tax office ("war on fraud and cheating")
Is there not a ring of mountains around the outside of the Antarctican continent, with flat ice covering the entire region inside?
A highly-directional antenna atop one of those mountains could be powered using a cable from the coast (which would survive better than fiber, being (a) thicker, and (b) very slightly heated)
Would the south pole still be "over the horizon" from the top of such a mountain? Would they still have snow-fade problems with a radio link?
"I think he might be in for a surprise performance test just one week later."
Not really. It's only bloated sites written in frontpage and photoshop by clueless graphic designers which are affected by lots of readers. It's hard to imagine how many visitors you'd need to take down a small text-only page with CSS.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is just a book advertisement. It's not even a review."
His argument about bandwidth is certainly justified. Your browser only downloads an external stylesheet after the page has loaded. When someone loads a page on my site, it's rendered in blue/black on white first, and only when that's done does the client get the formatting information in a separate download. Compare that to yahoo, where you have to download all the font tags and embedded tables before you can even start to read the page.
It's not broken websites which turn away most customers though, it's user-agent-blocking ones, which is one point missed in the article. If your page looks crap but is still readable, job-done! Information gets transferred! Customer's happy! But if you block them on the premise that "your shoes aren't good enough for our carpet" (equiv.) then you've just lost a customer, and any hope of a reccommendation from them.
No, you probably don't need to read the book, neither do I: The information is readily available on the web, and we can easily check our pages with the validator. Perhaps the book is aiming at the gift market: give it to someone with an awful page. Perhaps it's aimed at corporate execs, who don't know as much as we do about usability.
Regardless, no point in slating the book because he published the first chapter. Good for him; I like to see people publish paper-editions on the net also. Let's point people to the article when we need to illustrate usability problems with their site, or point them to the book if they want to know how to fix it.
Now available in an easy-to-digest comic form:
http://www.stallman.org/images/cartoon-3f.jpg
"Print these [pyramid-scams] out and send a copy to Postmaster, their city/zip"
Does 5 seconds of time to report such crimes not cost enough? Why would I want to buy a postage stamp, a sheet of paper, and £0.05 of printer-ink to send these emails to police who would likely not take any action, and would certainly not thank me.
If it's a suitable police matter, I trust the FTC will have appropriate means to forward copies to the relevant postal, police, or commerce departments. They also have the advantage of being able to send a thousand copies of the same email in one envelope, as they aggregate spam from worldwide.
I have forwarded illegal emails directly to the sender's local police department, but those tend to be in australia or canada, where it's easier to find contact names.
"Essentially these ads are inserted via a channel change without the viewer realizing it."
Right, so that's only the same as a banner-server on any typical websites? It knows which ads you watch, and which annoy you so much as to make you switch channel.
I can't watch advertising-supported television at all, but if I did, it would be an awful lot easier if there was some evolution of adverts shown. There are only so many times you can watch womens' hygiene adverts before you sell the TV and buy a video-player instead.
So they have the space (channel | image area), the ID-tag (set-top-box number | cookie), and they need to decide what to show (advert | banner). Well, you can only show one advert per channel, so if you want to substitute different adverts, you need another channel.
So now you're left with (assume two channels):
Program 1: Channel 1
Program 2: Channel 2
Adverts for leg-shavers: Channel 1
Adverts for fast cars: Channel 2
With the advertising-breaks synchronised, you can mix the 4 combinations for different users.
Of course, the privacy claims is a big stinking pile of lies, but I'd be interested to see the cable companies prove they're not cheating by having the set-top-boxes choose a random ID tag when they're installed.
"The speeds listed by the manufacturers are 100% accurate. It's just that those are the page-per-minute ratings for blank sheets of paper being pushed through the printer. It doesn't include any actual printing."
That's marked as funny, but I believe it is actually the standard rating used (so says tom's hardware anyway)
so...
Why do you need the printer at all? If your aim is to get blank pages as fast as possible, I can do a thousand pages per second just by lifting the ream of paper. Will someone please explain the irony?
"Paper dispenser. 12 pages per minute. £150"
"they will be making the CVS server pay-to-play. "
Only one person needs pay. Others mirror the first copy.
I've always ignored the crap, and just forwarded spams which are obviously illegal to uce@ftc.gov, under the premise that they do investigate a few, and it's all evidence against the spammer. Pyramid-schemes with peoples' real addresses are a good example of things to forward.
"As if though .net's "standard" as dictated by Microsoft isn't about as 'vendor tied in' as it gets."
ActivePerl?
"Humans cost a lot more $$ than a phone system. Unfortunately that seems to be the bottom line"
Depends if you're smart, or if you're a beancounter. It might appear cheaper to replace people with computers. Beancounters might never know the real effects.
The smart companies will think a little further ahead, to the "damn P.O.S. company, why can't they answer their damn phones" response of a customer who would otherwise earn them a lot of money.
I don't think I know anyone who wouldn't switch companies (bank, phone, utilities, hardware...) after a bad experience on the phone to them.
Do you look at the total business costs of machine-phones, or do you do a 0th-approximation calculation, and just deduct the cost of the people from your budget?
It blends in in the same way as R2D2 with a cocktail tray... trojan, anyone?
Yeah we're hypocrytes. You say one thing and I do another. What type of borg are we becoming?
echo "Any other argument is pure bullshit, even if the perpetrators have lied to themselves, self-brainwashed, I would call it, to justify their theft." > news:alt.flame
'Peter Jackson, and his hundreds of cast and crew members who spent years laboring to make this film' have nothing whatsoever to fear from people making copies of it, for one very good reason:
They've made a film which they can be proud of, and people will pay them accordingly - the LotR crew can be confident in their artwork, as opposed to the paranoid losers peddling overpriced shitty music, who have every reason to believe the public would like to screw them over.
I hardly see how you can be mourning the loss of Jackson's pension over internet swapping? Who shall we sue? These thousands of P2P nodes? Surely not the very same people who will be queuing around the block to see the film three times when it's released? Yes, the very same. The type of people who love the story enough to want to watch it 4 months early
And let's not forget that Tolkien has already got the money from this film: it paid off his mortgage decades ago. So the artists won't be starving.
Columbian tech
For Gods sake, people, don't set Konq/Moz/Opera to say it's IE
Two words? Online banking.
Ironically, using Internet Explorer/SSL with banking would breach your agreement to keep the password secure.
"If a company employs potheads, then they deserve everything they get."
They deserve City of London bankers?
Great idea. Take every single bit of crap sent across port 25 of a library computer, or anything posted to mail.yahoo.com/send.pl (oops, did i just reveal their super-secret algorithm?) and forward it to a policeman. Yeah, I can just imagine being that policeman.
G'morning Steve: 31,242 new emails, listing page 1 of 822
1. Write brilliant game.
2. Exclude vast majority of potential buyers.
3. Profit!!
Free software was never about making money, free software was about making software.
Time and again, we have seen that linux development neither requires, nor generates money, yet people still assume capitalist values.
What I believe the author was suggesting is a massive, collaborative effort to produce an online game for linux. If it works for kernels, why not for games also?
Many, many computer platforms in the past have been sold on the basis of a single game which makes it worth buying the computer. Even now, Quake3 comes with a free copy of linux included.
If a game were created which makes it worth a gamers' time to install linux to play it, then gamers start to use linux. Sure, they dual-boot even as today, but that doesn't concern us. People see linux used for games, and are aware of its existance when deciding whether to make their next game portable or not.
Go for it! Put up a simple text protocol that allows anyone to write game-editing clients. Publish a perl server that anyone can run to browse the game. Make the rules extensible so that anone can suggest new features, and let the world be built. Let the clients evolve from text to graphic to 3d to accelerated as new programmers write their own clients on the protocol, and let the worlds evolve as thousands add to it.
Better than a port of Myth4? Probably not, but certainly more interesting.
Could anyone else find where Sarah Deutsch "argues against the [DMCA]?" I couldn't.
They thought that the DMCA would be enough to appease the 'copyright community', and were unprepared for new legislative attacks on the internet. They thought 'the war was over' when they agreed to DMCA, whereas they are still being attacked with requests to act as public censor.
Blockquoth Vader: "I have changed the deal. Pray I do not decide to change it further"
What could be done to market Perl as a cross-platform GUI-interfaced language, suitable for creating pretty* interfaces in windows, gnome, and kde?
( * i.e. not like TK. Perhaps something mozilla or GTK based.)
Even while such applications are possible, it's not seen as a 'normal' way to use perl, and people have to put up with inferior languages for such apps.
"Does anyone actually support the war on drugs anymore? If so, what are they smoking?"
Fighting the war on the war on drugs... since when did war become a euphamism? Lately, we've heard it used to describe everything from routine police operations ("war on drugs") to civil servants at the tax office ("war on fraud and cheating")
binary is to trinary as bits are to...?
10^6 GigaByte = 10^9 Megabyte = 10^15 Byte.
So the hard-disk manufacturers will tell you, but it's not actually true.
1Kb = 2^10 bytes = 1024 bytes
1Mb = 2^20 bytes = 1024^2 bytes
1Gb = 2^30 bytes = 1024^3 bytes
1Tb = 2^40 bytes = 1024^4 bytes
Is there not a ring of mountains around the outside of the Antarctican continent, with flat ice covering the entire region inside?
A highly-directional antenna atop one of those mountains could be powered using a cable from the coast (which would survive better than fiber, being (a) thicker, and (b) very slightly heated)
Would the south pole still be "over the horizon" from the top of such a mountain? Would they still have snow-fade problems with a radio link?
"I think he might be in for a surprise performance test just one week later."
Not really. It's only bloated sites written in frontpage and photoshop by clueless graphic designers which are affected by lots of readers. It's hard to imagine how many visitors you'd need to take down a small text-only page with CSS.