Afaik explicit consent is not explicitly demanded by the EU. UK opted in to require this in their law. IANAL, currently in Austria it says that the user decision already happens through the browser settings. If the browser accepts cookies, so does the user and the government sees the problem solved.
I second that about the reviews, I see currently two problems:
1) Reviews by people not having bought this product on Amazon
Really, wtf? Why should I care about someone reviewing it who hasn't bought it *there*? Doesn't make sense to me. If I want to get a general review of a product, I need to got somewhere else, ideally where you don't buy it, period.
2) Reviews of similar items mixed together
Search for some random DVDs with BluRay counterparts. Or VHS. You'll suddenly find people reviewing/rating the product (e.g. I'm looking at the BluRay entry of the movie), the talk about the bad quality or something about the content and it's only until later you realize: they talk about the DVD or VHS version. Wtf? Again, IMHO that's complete BS to me.
Using such an URL minifier service effectively prevents automated software to properly gain information about relations on the web. So increasing using tinyurls will increase relations to the tinyurl service, but the real destination is actually cut off from the source. This, and the problem of a single point of failure, would certainly tell my common sense not to use this service.
I'm really glad this topic comes up. Just a short glimpse on my job and the people I work with: we provide health care information in Austria. To all people. For free. No registration. No paying for any user. But wait, you can get the health care information elsewhere? Probably. What about Wikipedia? Wikipedia is the source, no doubt. But we aim to produce information people actually can understand. Easy language. For the masses. Wikipedia aims for perfection, for hard facts. So, what about the fuzz I'm spraying here? No money involved, though we got: editors, to grab the latest news from the health environment, check the facts, enhance existing articles or write new ones; we got our hoster who we have to pay monthly; we got a technical department to enhance our platform; we got our mindmaster, designer and creativity team. We don't want to get rich. We all believe strongly we're wearing the white hat in our business. Unfortunately this doesn't bring money.
Advertisement does.
So we got this fullbanner, skyscraper, content add, buttons. All over the place. Now guess what. If I disable all this advertisement stuff, I get page loads < 500ms. That is good, if you still have fancy graphical stuff and JS stuff going on. This are not and cannot be static pages, unfortunately, or we would have < 100ms of course.
Now with the ads enable, I get roughly 1,5 to 2s. Great. Sometimes even without ads served. Even greater. Some ads aren't absolute positioned or they cannot be. the must be within the flow of the content. Guess what? Loading them externally even creates visual breaks when page is built in front of the user.
I've had already multiple meetings with our Adserver fighting about the performance. Since we've already switched to another ad hoster in the past due to corporation strategies and stuff, I know that one ad hoster is like another. IMHO when you know what your ob is performance and experience wise for the user, having an adserver is the worst thing which can happen. And there's no way around it. They day we switch off ads I get move to another company; sadly. But health care information needs to be free. So that's the trade off: we believe in what we do and how we provide it but therefore our user experience will never be what we would like to have for them.
Chello, one of the main cable provider in Vienna/Austria is exactly doing this: blocking port 135 (or whatever is needed to stop windows from accessing other clients resources).
.. nice cams around. But no good pictures today. In the midst of summer the only thing is for sure that this week is, that it's is raining (?!?!): Vienna Cams (German)
Some time ago there's was radio cam installiert in the Donauturm (sp?) which you were able to control via a java applet. Unfortunately I can't find the link again (maybe it doesn't exist anymoer), but if someone knows.
Slashdot Mirror
IANAL from Austria.
Afaik explicit consent is not explicitly demanded by the EU. UK opted in to require this in their law. IANAL, currently in Austria it says that the user decision already happens through the browser settings. If the browser accepts cookies, so does the user and the government sees the problem solved.
I second that about the reviews, I see currently two problems:
1) Reviews by people not having bought this product on Amazon
Really, wtf? Why should I care about someone reviewing it who hasn't bought it *there*? Doesn't make sense to me. If I want to get a general review of a product, I need to got somewhere else, ideally where you don't buy it, period.
2) Reviews of similar items mixed together
Search for some random DVDs with BluRay counterparts. Or VHS. You'll suddenly find people reviewing/rating the product (e.g. I'm looking at the BluRay entry of the movie), the talk about the bad quality or something about the content and it's only until later you realize: they talk about the DVD or VHS version. Wtf? Again, IMHO that's complete BS to me.
Using such an URL minifier service effectively prevents automated software to properly gain information about relations on the web. So increasing using tinyurls will increase relations to the tinyurl service, but the real destination is actually cut off from the source. This, and the problem of a single point of failure, would certainly tell my common sense not to use this service.
I'm really glad this topic comes up. Just a short glimpse on my job and the people I work with: we provide health care information in Austria. To all people. For free. No registration. No paying for any user. But wait, you can get the health care information elsewhere? Probably. What about Wikipedia? Wikipedia is the source, no doubt. But we aim to produce information people actually can understand. Easy language. For the masses. Wikipedia aims for perfection, for hard facts.
So, what about the fuzz I'm spraying here? No money involved, though we got: editors, to grab the latest news from the health environment, check the facts, enhance existing articles or write new ones; we got our hoster who we have to pay monthly; we got a technical department to enhance our platform; we got our mindmaster, designer and creativity team.
We don't want to get rich. We all believe strongly we're wearing the white hat in our business. Unfortunately this doesn't bring money.
Advertisement does.
So we got this fullbanner, skyscraper, content add, buttons. All over the place. Now guess what. If I disable all this advertisement stuff, I get page loads < 500ms. That is good, if you still have fancy graphical stuff and JS stuff going on. This are not and cannot be static pages, unfortunately, or we would have < 100ms of course.
Now with the ads enable, I get roughly 1,5 to 2s. Great. Sometimes even without ads served. Even greater. Some ads aren't absolute positioned or they cannot be. the must be within the flow of the content. Guess what? Loading them externally even creates visual breaks when page is built in front of the user.
I've had already multiple meetings with our Adserver fighting about the performance. Since we've already switched to another ad hoster in the past due to corporation strategies and stuff, I know that one ad hoster is like another. IMHO when you know what your ob is performance and experience wise for the user, having an adserver is the worst thing which can happen. And there's no way around it. They day we switch off ads I get move to another company; sadly. But health care information needs to be free. So that's the trade off: we believe in what we do and how we provide it but therefore our user experience will never be what we would like to have for them.
Chello, one of the main cable provider in Vienna/Austria is exactly doing this: blocking port 135 (or whatever is needed to stop windows from accessing other clients resources).
.. nice cams around. But no good pictures today. In the midst of summer the only thing is for sure that this week is, that it's is raining (?!?!): Vienna Cams (German)
Some time ago there's was radio cam installiert in the Donauturm (sp?) which you were able to control via a java applet. Unfortunately I can't find the link again (maybe it doesn't exist anymoer), but if someone knows.