I wish I had mod points right now, as I would mod up the parent AC post.
It grows irritating to have the Mozilla crowd peer down their noses and make ivory-tower statements about adhering to this W3C standard, or that other standard.
Out in the real world where real users live, there are such things as de-facto standards, ones that occur, say, because a player in the marketplace has a 95% share. While it may be true that IE has deficiencies with cascading style sheets and PNG files, but at the end of the day your browser has to just work, regardless of anything else.
Haughtily hiding behind W3C standards and demanding that the world change for you is not a plan for success.
For bookmarks, I have had good success by not saving them to any particular machine. Instead, using Backflip has been a really great option - kind of a "bookmark respository in the sky." No matter what machine I am on, it is a simple matter of getting them over the network. No more multiple copies (each slightly different) across multiple machines.
And they do allow you to download all your bookmarks in a format suitable for import to the major browsers.
Backflip - highly recommended. (Not affiliated with them.)
You gotta get out more.:)
Lots of companies are behind load-balanced proxy servers. To a server, requests for a particular session are coming from a small number of IP addresses of the proxies.
What I don't like about it is that it doesn't use SSL after you log in.
...which is important, because I want to read my mail over an encrypted link even though it travelled through several ISPs' data centers, many networks, a backbone or two, and probably even the FBI's scanners, IN THE CLEAR!!!
No, Mr. Funny Guy, it means that the mail really did originate by the user BUYYYY_CH33P_M3DZ@gmail.com and did not contain a faked From: header. But I suspect you knew that.
All of these spam identification methods merely provide reliable authentication of the sender's domain. The rest is up to you. You still have the responsibility to maintain spam filters.
Having reliable identification is a first step. A very important first step.
When I go to the store, the workers are there to serve ME, the customer, NOT the other way around.
When it is time to check out, I will choose the method that gets me out of there the fastest. As I am technically competent to navigate on-screen menus and move my merchandise past the scanner, frequently I find it will be faster for me to go through the automated checkout line instead of waiting through the line for the clerk to get around to checking my order out.
Same thing with the pay-at-the-pump gas places. If I stop at a gas station that does not have pay-at-the-pump, then I get in my car and keep on going. I don't want to have to run in and deal with some unmotivated part-timer behind the cash register. I will choose what is convenient for me.
By your logic, car drivers should be buying buggy whips so that the buggy whip makers won't have to be laid off.
You've pretty much proven my point. Rather than looking at a corporation as a monolithic entity, you can look at it as a collection of individuals to influence one-by-one.
Diversion. This is a false distinction. As one who has tried the product and who has felt burned each and every time, I and many others have a valid beef with the product, and by extension the company. This monolithic company versus collecton of individuals is just straw-man nonsense.
So, before continuing to prove my point by comparing a company to an individual, and then using the word "you" in a sloppy way as to possibly indicate you are making a personal attack on me, just think a little bit.
<sigh> First of all, no personal attack was inteneded to you, by which I mean Mr. Rob of robla.net. As you, Mr Rob of robla.net, have volunteered yourself as a representative of Real, it is completely fair and by no means "sloppy" to use the word "you" to refer to both Mr. Rob of robla.net as well as the company he purports to represent, Real Networks of Seattle. As someone who claims to have been around Slashdot for so long, you (Mr. Rob of robla.net, not Real Networks of Seattle) should already know that that nitpicking about pronoun selection traditionally indicates the dying gasps of a weak argument. But whatever, enough diversions, that isn't the main point.
You are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't obligated to share it.
...unless it agrees with yours? Gimme a break.
I think you either missed my point -- unlikely -- or have just chosen to respond in a diversionary way -- very likely -- with this monolithic vs collection of individuals nonsense, and asking what I have done to make the world a better place. The point here is that after 10 years of treating your customers with contempt, you can't expect us to join hands with you and sing Kumbaya.
So again, you sound like you are starting to do the right thing, but for
Keep this thought in mind: are the words you write really making the world a better place?
Keep this thought in mind: Stay on topic.
One more question: Does your new music service sell Kumbaya? <ducks>
When you sow bad karma, you can't complain that people remember all the bad stuff. When you burn your bridges for so long, you have to expect that it will take at least as much time to repair the damage. You are not there yet.
Methinks you protest too much. I see a kind of corporate parallel to that old loser Sanford Wallace, remember him? Back in the early days, he was an unabashed spammer, unapologetic, and completely full of himself. But it didn't all that much time before the collective 'net at large figured him out, blocked him, and ran him out of town.
A short time later, he arrives back on the scene trying to trumpet himself as an anti-spammer expert. But we remember. We know that this rebirth is just a little too convenient.
I see the same thing here. Years of spyware, hijacking users machines, difficult to uninstall, free version hidden, always having to "upgrade"... And all of a sudden you are the good guys now?
I have a long memory. I wish you luck, but RealPlayer 10 will never see the inside of any machine of mine. Maybe I'll have a look at RealPlayer 13 in a few years time. That is, if the company has not died (from self-inflicted wounds, of course).
Too many people going for one key? Disable that key.
In theory, this sounds like a reasonable approach. But then there is practice.
The question I have for you then is how do you identify a single person? Can't do it based on IP address since most clients these days are on DHCP addresses. Can't necessarily do it by querying some property on the machine (CPU Id, owner's name), as you could have legitimate users who have reinstalled the application on a new machine, or fat-fingered their owner registration information.
Short of providing something like a hardware dongle (which we all know can be hacked, disabled, simulated), how can you ever really know that the person claiming to be "Mr. Registered User" with license number abc-123 really is who he claims to be? (...and without forcing users to obtain signed PKI certificates and all of the complexity and incomprehensibility for typical end users that would entail.)
This issue here is that people are giving them information, but its faked information. So if its invalid information, how good is it? Why even have registration anymore if there is nothing for publishers to gain from it?
Your points are valid. Certainly the quality of infomation that they collect is likely not very good, and as more folks become savvy, the quality will diminish further.
But that really isn't the issue. The publishers own the content, and can put up whatever barriers around that content that they want. As you have pointed out, the barriers don't necessarily have to make sense. And even when it doesn't make sense, it remains the sole prerogative of the publisher to conclude that their barriers don't make sense, or are alienating customers, or whatever, and make changes.
Hopefully the availability of less-intrusive alternatives, such as seeing the same content on Yahoo News, will bring sufficient competition to make accessing content less annoying and invasive.
This sounds a lot like the big Supreme Court case several years ago, where the rap band 2 Live Crew did a potty-mouthed remake of Roy Orbison's "Oh Pretty Woman."
If I recall correctly (and I know y'all will step up and correct me:), the Supreme court sided with 2 Live Crew saying that they had to err on the side of parody.
The screenshots are very interesting to look at, but I can't imagine working like this all day long. This looks like it would work really well in a Hollywood movie, where the super geek at the high tech company is reading his e-mail, or improbably cracking the the password for the missles, or "hacking" into the evil corporation that is after him.
1. SCO announces new products.
2. Linus announces new kernel updates.
It's all the more strange now that we are between Easter and Christmas, which means that both the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus have extra cycles to spin on new kernel code.
How they ever got to be so popular I have no clue.
Simple, really. They do one thing, e-mail, and do it well. Very well. Better than anyone else. It is easy to use. They have the common use case down cold.
E-mail is the golden nugget. PDAs, even wirelessly enabled PDAs, are a dime a dozen. Heck, even cell phones are a commodity - cell providers have to give away the product in order to get people to buy the service.
Having a Blackberry will save you an hour a day. The competion is clunkier and harder to use. They don't call 'em "Crackberry" for nothing.
Freedom of speech is good, freedom to make yourself heard even better.
One of these is constitutionally protected, and one is not. Sadly, many well-intentioned folks here think that freedom of speech is somehow interchangeable with a requirement to be heard.
Slashdot Mirror
It grows irritating to have the Mozilla crowd peer down their noses and make ivory-tower statements about adhering to this W3C standard, or that other standard.
Out in the real world where real users live, there are such things as de-facto standards, ones that occur, say, because a player in the marketplace has a 95% share. While it may be true that IE has deficiencies with cascading style sheets and PNG files, but at the end of the day your browser has to just work, regardless of anything else.
Haughtily hiding behind W3C standards and demanding that the world change for you is not a plan for success.
And they do allow you to download all your bookmarks in a format suitable for import to the major browsers.
Backflip - highly recommended. (Not affiliated with them.)
put more emphasis on usability if you don't want linux to fall in a few years
Define user friendly.
Do0d - If you can't do the time, don't do the crime.
$ cat /usual/ slashdot/ copyright/ violation/ rationalizations > /dev/null
You gotta get out more. :)
Lots of companies are behind load-balanced proxy servers. To a server, requests for a particular session are coming from a small number of IP addresses of the proxies.
All of these spam identification methods merely provide reliable authentication of the sender's domain. The rest is up to you. You still have the responsibility to maintain spam filters.
Having reliable identification is a first step. A very important first step.
When I go to the store, the workers are there to serve ME, the customer, NOT the other way around.
When it is time to check out, I will choose the method that gets me out of there the fastest. As I am technically competent to navigate on-screen menus and move my merchandise past the scanner, frequently I find it will be faster for me to go through the automated checkout line instead of waiting through the line for the clerk to get around to checking my order out.
Same thing with the pay-at-the-pump gas places. If I stop at a gas station that does not have pay-at-the-pump, then I get in my car and keep on going. I don't want to have to run in and deal with some unmotivated part-timer behind the cash register. I will choose what is convenient for me.
By your logic, car drivers should be buying buggy whips so that the buggy whip makers won't have to be laid off.
August 21, 1986 at Lake Nyos in Cameroon.
OMG! He's got a goat link right on the front page.
Diversion. This is a false distinction. As one who has tried the product and who has felt burned each and every time, I and many others have a valid beef with the product, and by extension the company. This monolithic company versus collecton of individuals is just straw-man nonsense.
So, before continuing to prove my point by comparing a company to an individual, and then using the word "you" in a sloppy way as to possibly indicate you are making a personal attack on me, just think a little bit.
<sigh> First of all, no personal attack was inteneded to you, by which I mean Mr. Rob of robla.net. As you, Mr Rob of robla.net, have volunteered yourself as a representative of Real, it is completely fair and by no means "sloppy" to use the word "you" to refer to both Mr. Rob of robla.net as well as the company he purports to represent, Real Networks of Seattle. As someone who claims to have been around Slashdot for so long, you (Mr. Rob of robla.net, not Real Networks of Seattle) should already know that that nitpicking about pronoun selection traditionally indicates the dying gasps of a weak argument. But whatever, enough diversions, that isn't the main point.
You are entitled to your opinion, but you aren't obligated to share it.
I think you either missed my point -- unlikely -- or have just chosen to respond in a diversionary way -- very likely -- with this monolithic vs collection of individuals nonsense, and asking what I have done to make the world a better place. The point here is that after 10 years of treating your customers with contempt, you can't expect us to join hands with you and sing Kumbaya.
So again, you sound like you are starting to do the right thing, but for
Keep this thought in mind: are the words you write really making the world a better place?
Keep this thought in mind: Stay on topic.
One more question: Does your new music service sell Kumbaya? <ducks>
Methinks you protest too much. I see a kind of corporate parallel to that old loser Sanford Wallace, remember him? Back in the early days, he was an unabashed spammer, unapologetic, and completely full of himself. But it didn't all that much time before the collective 'net at large figured him out, blocked him, and ran him out of town.
A short time later, he arrives back on the scene trying to trumpet himself as an anti-spammer expert. But we remember. We know that this rebirth is just a little too convenient.
I see the same thing here. Years of spyware, hijacking users machines, difficult to uninstall, free version hidden, always having to "upgrade"... And all of a sudden you are the good guys now?
I have a long memory. I wish you luck, but RealPlayer 10 will never see the inside of any machine of mine. Maybe I'll have a look at RealPlayer 13 in a few years time. That is, if the company has not died (from self-inflicted wounds, of course).
You fooled me once. (Shame on you.)
You fooled me again. (Shame on me, and I learned my lesson- never again.)
How do I know that this time is any different?
In theory, this sounds like a reasonable approach. But then there is practice.
The question I have for you then is how do you identify a single person? Can't do it based on IP address since most clients these days are on DHCP addresses. Can't necessarily do it by querying some property on the machine (CPU Id, owner's name), as you could have legitimate users who have reinstalled the application on a new machine, or fat-fingered their owner registration information.
Short of providing something like a hardware dongle (which we all know can be hacked, disabled, simulated), how can you ever really know that the person claiming to be "Mr. Registered User" with license number abc-123 really is who he claims to be? (...and without forcing users to obtain signed PKI certificates and all of the complexity and incomprehensibility for typical end users that would entail.)
Steve
Your points are valid. Certainly the quality of infomation that they collect is likely not very good, and as more folks become savvy, the quality will diminish further.
But that really isn't the issue. The publishers own the content, and can put up whatever barriers around that content that they want. As you have pointed out, the barriers don't necessarily have to make sense. And even when it doesn't make sense, it remains the sole prerogative of the publisher to conclude that their barriers don't make sense, or are alienating customers, or whatever, and make changes.
Hopefully the availability of less-intrusive alternatives, such as seeing the same content on Yahoo News, will bring sufficient competition to make accessing content less annoying and invasive.
If you want the NY Times content without having to give up any information, then hustle down to the newsstand and actually buy a copy.
If I recall correctly (and I know y'all will step up and correct me :), the Supreme court sided with 2 Live Crew saying that they had to err on the side of parody.
I'd have to agree.
The screenshots are very interesting to look at, but I can't imagine working like this all day long. This looks like it would work really well in a Hollywood movie, where the super geek at the high tech company is reading his e-mail, or improbably cracking the the password for the missles, or "hacking" into the evil corporation that is after him.
2. Linus announces new kernel updates.
It's all the more strange now that we are between Easter and Christmas, which means that both the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus have extra cycles to spin on new kernel code.
Simple, really. They do one thing, e-mail, and do it well. Very well. Better than anyone else. It is easy to use. They have the common use case down cold.
E-mail is the golden nugget. PDAs, even wirelessly enabled PDAs, are a dime a dozen. Heck, even cell phones are a commodity - cell providers have to give away the product in order to get people to buy the service.
Having a Blackberry will save you an hour a day. The competion is clunkier and harder to use. They don't call 'em "Crackberry" for nothing.
So in other words, you reinvent updatedb and locate?
True, but that's a solveable problem.
Not really. Did you know that the air in Los Angeles is actually cleaner than it was 50 years ago?
I'll second the "out of Hurtubise's mind" part.
One of these is constitutionally protected, and one is not. Sadly, many well-intentioned folks here think that freedom of speech is somehow interchangeable with a requirement to be heard.