My point is that obfuscating the email address on the web version won't help, because the whois information is available from the command line. Breaking whois would probably break a whole lot of systems that depend on it. I can't see the spam issue is important enough to warrant that.
Perhaps for public betas of web apps like these there should be a signifer in the provisional version number to show that it has been slashdotted:
Google Groups 2 beta 0,/.
Anyway, I kept getting 500 errors. I'll have to try back when the first rush has died down. Or maybe someone could mirror a sample page / grab a screenshot to show the rest of us...
Interesting read.
I guess this might be a reason for the current resurgence of interest in 'retro' games.. after the initial novelty of 3D wore off, a lot of people realised they preferred the simplicity of the older, less realistic games; since they were less lifelike, the brain is perhaps more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and suspend disbelief, rather than being like "Look at that sprite walking, that's ridiculous, no one walks like that".
This is also perhaps another reason people didn't buy into a full CGI film like Final Fantasy, whereas, for instance, Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies is a huge success: he's sufficiently far removed from a real human that, although a creepy character, doesn't have the shudder-factor of the almost-human.
Actually this macabre effect can work positively too. I remember, in the days when I would waste countless hours playing a certain popular 3D shooting game in head-to-head mode, the faces of the characters (including my friends' avatars that I was trying to kill) would have that same uncanny almost-human look about them. I think the loathing I felt towards these creatures made me play the game better.
Did anyone else catch the show - mighta been Scientific American Frontiers - where they profiled a guy who had a head injury and now believes his family have been replaced by clones?
Yeah, I saw that, it was a great documentary. Fascinating. As I recall it went on to show an example of the other extreme: a white woman who was raped by a black man, and later swore in court that she recognised the attacker -- actually she wrongly identified someone else who happened to have the same skin colour; after about ten years in jail, they were able to do DNA testing and the poor guy was finally released.
She was horrified of course, that she had made such a mistake. But she had honestly believed she was right in her testimony. They put up photos of the two men (the real rapist and the unfortunate guy she 'identified'). They didn't look even vaguely similar to me. But apparently this woman had very little contact with black people in her daily life; and to her, these two guys looked sufficiently alike for her to mix the one up with the other.
I'm not trying to make a point about attitudes to race here. The interesting thing in this for me was it seems to confirm a vague, unscientific theory I've had for some time: that we recognise people's faces by ways in which they differ from some prototypical 'neutral' or generic human face. So our recognition-pattern for someone could maybe be represented in the brain by a series of specific variations (wider-than-average eyes, more-feminine-than-gender-neutral hips); kind of like how CVS stores diffs between versions rather than storing a full copy of every version.
So in this woman's case, black men in general are all so far from her mental prototype of a 'regular' person that the differences are too marked in one direction -- the racial differences in features, etc -- that more subtle variations that allow us to differentiate between people were lost. You hear examples of this all the time when people come into contact with new ethnic groups: "All these Asians look the same" etc... until of course they get to know a few people from that group, their mental prototype adapts to cope with the new data. I remember my father, soon after arriving in the UK from Bangladesh, often mixing people up, even those that looked very different: "These white people all look alike" he would joke. I wonder, is there a proper scientific theory that explores this idea with some academic rigour? Anyone? I'd like to read about it and see if I'm right...
There's something about seeing a neutered, paid-for-only Napster window inside Windows Media Player that makes me cringe. That it should come to this. I'll be sticking to SoulSeek.
My own introduction to programming was through Macromedia Flash. I learnt about HTML later (and thence JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Java, C, C++..)
I think this was the ideal introduction because I was able to do animations immediately (instant gratification), just by dragging things around, using non-code skills. As time went on, I learnt to add little bits of code to buttons and so on. Then I realised I could make things happen just with code. As time went on I outgrew it and moved on to greater things. But without the gentle learning curve, I don't think I could have got a handle on why it would be a good thing to know how to write code, and so I'd never have bothered ('Hello world', so what, I could say that myself).. and coding whole apps seemed way too remote. Flash provided a great first step.
P.S.: I'm sure I'll get flamed for this. But who gives a monkeys.
It finally made it so that BSD had to remove every bit of code that was related to Unix. This turned into a near fatal blow to BSD, one that they never recovered from.
Eh? I think you'll find *BSD is alive and well. Via Darwin (Mac OS X's open-source kernal, a close sibling to FreeBSD) it's reached a far more significant section of the desktop market than any other Unix flavour, including Liunx.
I'll only count a digital medium as immortal when it can stand up the punishment my 2-year old regularly inflicts on my CD collection. Titanium platter maybe?...
Um, if you're so worried about it, why don't you just keep using a pop client?
I will, of course, and so will the g(uy|al) you're replying to. I would never want an inbox, no matter how big, that comes equipped with marketing spyware. But to prevent these spybots from reading my mail, I would have to make sure I convince everyone to whom I am likely to write an email, to do the same. But unless I refuse to communicate with anyone using Gmail, my mail will still be read in someone's else inbox. I object to that.
Ideally, it would be no more than anyone gives away by clicking ads in the search results
How do you figure that? Gmail explicitly says that they are using the content of your email to 'deliver targetted related information' (adverts). That is a world away from tracking clicks and open-rates on emails. I never use the paid-for Google ad-links. But I can and do write all kinds of things to all kinds of people, some of which probably reveals a fair bit about what things I'm into.
Email contents and usage. The contents of your Gmail account also are stored and maintained on Google servers in order to provide the service. Google's computers process the information in your email for various purposes, including formatting and displaying the information to you, delivering targeted related information (such as advertisements and related links), preventing unsolicited bulk email (spam), backing up your email, and other purposes relating to offering you Gmail. Because we keep back-up copies of data for the purposes of recovery from errors or system failure, residual copies of email may remain on our systems for some time, even after you have deleted messages from your mailbox or after the termination of your account.
I am surprised that you don't see the critical difference between what Google is planning and the more usual form of behaviour-tracking that goes on all the time, with or without our consent, by DoubleClick and their ilk, which is common as mud -- in fact I myself once developed a system for a client that had a behaviour tracking component. (Not proud of it, but just pointing out how ubiquitous it has become.)
The crucial difference is that -- at least from the terms described above in the MSN agreement -- these other services are not reading your mail. They are just watching what you click on, examining your behaviour, etc. I don't really approve of this, but it's an order of magnitude less of an infringement than a system that actual parses my mail and searches for keywords... and as someone mentioned before, I don't have to be a Gmail user for this to happen; I just have to write an email to one. And if gmail takes off, that could end up being a high proportion of the email I send.
The assurance that no human being is going to read my mail is an insult to the intelligence. What is a parser if it's not the tool of its human designer?... And in any case, what do I care if a (human) marketing drone assesses my email for targetting possibilities, or if it's a bot doing the same job? The bot is worse because it is way more efficient. The point here is not that I am afraid my data will be used for some illegitimate purpose. It is the expressly stated purpose that I am concerned about: of the use of my email to allow targetted marketing to identify me a potential market for Product X.
It seems to me that there may well be innovation in Gmail: but as far as I can tell, it's all aimed at the real Gmail customers, the advertisers, and none of it to the email user. The offer of 1G is in itself pretty outrageous. They are in effect saying: We will generously allow you file up to 1073741824 bytes of data which we will then regularly comb through and see how much crap we can sell you. Thanks Google, but no thanks.
Great answer. You came to a similar conclusion to me (see my post below yours in the main discussion).
I would also like to add that we should have seen this coming after the policy directions of the last couple of decades. (I say we although I'm not from America, but I grew up in the UK, which usually acts as a time-delayed mirror of US political trends anyway). The destruction of the manufacturing base was the obvious outcome of the push to a version of globalisation that promotes free movement of capital but keeps labour firmly in one place. It started with manufactured goods -- should be no surprise that's moved to the high tech industry.
The industry as a whole won't do anything about it because it is run as a top-down concern, not on behalf of programmers. Unfashionable thought it may be to say it, there are only two things that can improve the situation for First World programmers: (1) a strong labour movement with worker representation through unions, or (2) government intervention.
Anything else is just wishful thinking: the bottom line is that companies don't give a toss unless it's about money. And that's not a criticism of the people that run the big companies. If it wasn't them making those decisions, they would quickly be trampled down by other companies willing to employ the most efficient tactics to succeed.
Although it's unthinkable in this age of free market orthodoxy, laissez-faire economics and the constant preference for business over democracy (they call this 'small government' -- small only on action for the people, of course, while big on tanks, planes and bombs), my suggestion would be a system of punitive tarrifs against countries that lack statutory decent worker's protection. (Oh, except that would include you guys in the States -- whoops;)
We'll migrate the thousands of web pages to the new website. It's a big and costly job, but we'll do our best to minimize the impact to you.
Eh? Logos aside, why would the 'thousands of web pages' need any change at all (beyond a couple of simple DNS changes) unless their web designers were so utterly dumb as to hardcore references to the domain name throughout their website?
It's either purely disingenous (and therefore an insult to the reader's intelligence) or they don't know it's an admission of incompetence (and therefore testament to their own stupidity).
Slashdot Mirror
My point is that obfuscating the email address on the web version won't help, because the whois information is available from the command line. Breaking whois would probably break a whole lot of systems that depend on it. I can't see the spam issue is important enough to warrant that.
Is that Red Hat Enterprise or Fedora?
And how will your images show up on my xterm window?
Hey, thanks for pointing that out about the drive labels (c: etc) .. I had been using /cygdrive/c/ this whole time ..
Screw The Fucking User?
Maybe they could integrate with Google's spyware app Gmail ... a CustomerRank like a credit rating, but based on totally subjective criteria.
Interesting read. I guess this might be a reason for the current resurgence of interest in 'retro' games .. after the initial novelty of 3D wore off, a lot of people realised they preferred the simplicity of the older, less realistic games; since they were less lifelike, the brain is perhaps more inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt and suspend disbelief, rather than being like "Look at that sprite walking, that's ridiculous, no one walks like that".
This is also perhaps another reason people didn't buy into a full CGI film like Final Fantasy, whereas, for instance, Gollum from the Lord of the Rings movies is a huge success: he's sufficiently far removed from a real human that, although a creepy character, doesn't have the shudder-factor of the almost-human.
Actually this macabre effect can work positively too. I remember, in the days when I would waste countless hours playing a certain popular 3D shooting game in head-to-head mode, the faces of the characters (including my friends' avatars that I was trying to kill) would have that same uncanny almost-human look about them. I think the loathing I felt towards these creatures made me play the game better.
Yeah, I saw that, it was a great documentary. Fascinating. As I recall it went on to show an example of the other extreme: a white woman who was raped by a black man, and later swore in court that she recognised the attacker -- actually she wrongly identified someone else who happened to have the same skin colour; after about ten years in jail, they were able to do DNA testing and the poor guy was finally released.
She was horrified of course, that she had made such a mistake. But she had honestly believed she was right in her testimony. They put up photos of the two men (the real rapist and the unfortunate guy she 'identified'). They didn't look even vaguely similar to me. But apparently this woman had very little contact with black people in her daily life; and to her, these two guys looked sufficiently alike for her to mix the one up with the other.
I'm not trying to make a point about attitudes to race here. The interesting thing in this for me was it seems to confirm a vague, unscientific theory I've had for some time: that we recognise people's faces by ways in which they differ from some prototypical 'neutral' or generic human face. So our recognition-pattern for someone could maybe be represented in the brain by a series of specific variations (wider-than-average eyes, more-feminine-than-gender-neutral hips); kind of like how CVS stores diffs between versions rather than storing a full copy of every version.
So in this woman's case, black men in general are all so far from her mental prototype of a 'regular' person that the differences are too marked in one direction -- the racial differences in features, etc -- that more subtle variations that allow us to differentiate between people were lost. You hear examples of this all the time when people come into contact with new ethnic groups: "All these Asians look the same" etc... until of course they get to know a few people from that group, their mental prototype adapts to cope with the new data. I remember my father, soon after arriving in the UK from Bangladesh, often mixing people up, even those that looked very different: "These white people all look alike" he would joke. I wonder, is there a proper scientific theory that explores this idea with some academic rigour? Anyone? I'd like to read about it and see if I'm right...
How is it trolling to say "It has nothing to do with Java"? Is it trolling to debunk marketing bullshit now? :S
Aren't you confusing closed source with closed standards? The Java standards are open -- that's why (for instance) J2EE has such broad vendor support.
There's something about seeing a neutered, paid-for-only Napster window inside Windows Media Player that makes me cringe. That it should come to this. I'll be sticking to SoulSeek.
That link to the article on freedesktop.org is the only piece of the information in this discussion really worth reading. Thanks :)
My own introduction to programming was through Macromedia Flash. I learnt about HTML later (and thence JavaScript, Perl, PHP, Java, C, C++ ..)
I think this was the ideal introduction because I was able to do animations immediately (instant gratification), just by dragging things around, using non-code skills. As time went on, I learnt to add little bits of code to buttons and so on. Then I realised I could make things happen just with code. As time went on I outgrew it and moved on to greater things. But without the gentle learning curve, I don't think I could have got a handle on why it would be a good thing to know how to write code, and so I'd never have bothered ('Hello world', so what, I could say that myself) .. and coding whole apps seemed way too remote. Flash provided a great first step.
P.S.: I'm sure I'll get flamed for this. But who gives a monkeys.
If you think you're going to be mugged, you're more likely to be. Chill out -- you'll be fine.
Eh? I think you'll find *BSD is alive and well. Via Darwin (Mac OS X's open-source kernal, a close sibling to FreeBSD) it's reached a far more significant section of the desktop market than any other Unix flavour, including Liunx.
I'll only count a digital medium as immortal when it can stand up the punishment my 2-year old regularly inflicts on my CD collection. Titanium platter maybe? ...
... someone jogged the power cable! (Again!)
Ahh the nostalgia ...
I will, of course, and so will the g(uy|al) you're replying to. I would never want an inbox, no matter how big, that comes equipped with marketing spyware. But to prevent these spybots from reading my mail, I would have to make sure I convince everyone to whom I am likely to write an email, to do the same. But unless I refuse to communicate with anyone using Gmail, my mail will still be read in someone's else inbox. I object to that.
How do you figure that? Gmail explicitly says that they are using the content of your email to 'deliver targetted related information' (adverts). That is a world away from tracking clicks and open-rates on emails. I never use the paid-for Google ad-links. But I can and do write all kinds of things to all kinds of people, some of which probably reveals a fair bit about what things I'm into.
Take a look at an extract from the Gmail 'privacy policy (that's a joke in itself):
I am surprised that you don't see the critical difference between what Google is planning and the more usual form of behaviour-tracking that goes on all the time, with or without our consent, by DoubleClick and their ilk, which is common as mud -- in fact I myself once developed a system for a client that had a behaviour tracking component. (Not proud of it, but just pointing out how ubiquitous it has become.)
The crucial difference is that -- at least from the terms described above in the MSN agreement -- these other services are not reading your mail. They are just watching what you click on, examining your behaviour, etc. I don't really approve of this, but it's an order of magnitude less of an infringement than a system that actual parses my mail and searches for keywords ... and as someone mentioned before, I don't have to be a Gmail user for this to happen; I just have to write an email to one. And if gmail takes off, that could end up being a high proportion of the email I send.
The assurance that no human being is going to read my mail is an insult to the intelligence. What is a parser if it's not the tool of its human designer? ... And in any case, what do I care if a (human) marketing drone assesses my email for targetting possibilities, or if it's a bot doing the same job? The bot is worse because it is way more efficient. The point here is not that I am afraid my data will be used for some illegitimate purpose. It is the expressly stated purpose that I am concerned about: of the use of my email to allow targetted marketing to identify me a potential market for Product X.
It seems to me that there may well be innovation in Gmail: but as far as I can tell, it's all aimed at the real Gmail customers, the advertisers, and none of it to the email user. The offer of 1G is in itself pretty outrageous. They are in effect saying: We will generously allow you file up to 1073741824 bytes of data which we will then regularly comb through and see how much crap we can sell you. Thanks Google, but no thanks.
Great answer. You came to a similar conclusion to me (see my post below yours in the main discussion).
I would also like to add that we should have seen this coming after the policy directions of the last couple of decades. (I say we although I'm not from America, but I grew up in the UK, which usually acts as a time-delayed mirror of US political trends anyway). The destruction of the manufacturing base was the obvious outcome of the push to a version of globalisation that promotes free movement of capital but keeps labour firmly in one place. It started with manufactured goods -- should be no surprise that's moved to the high tech industry.
The industry as a whole won't do anything about it because it is run as a top-down concern, not on behalf of programmers. Unfashionable thought it may be to say it, there are only two things that can improve the situation for First World programmers: (1) a strong labour movement with worker representation through unions, or (2) government intervention.
Anything else is just wishful thinking: the bottom line is that companies don't give a toss unless it's about money. And that's not a criticism of the people that run the big companies. If it wasn't them making those decisions, they would quickly be trampled down by other companies willing to employ the most efficient tactics to succeed.
Although it's unthinkable in this age of free market orthodoxy, laissez-faire economics and the constant preference for business over democracy (they call this 'small government' -- small only on action for the people, of course, while big on tanks, planes and bombs), my suggestion would be a system of punitive tarrifs against countries that lack statutory decent worker's protection. (Oh, except that would include you guys in the States -- whoops ;)
In my last post i meant to say 'hardcode' not 'hardcore', pardon me. (Guess I shoulda used that Preview button!)
Check this out:
Eh? Logos aside, why would the 'thousands of web pages' need any change at all (beyond a couple of simple DNS changes) unless their web designers were so utterly dumb as to hardcore references to the domain name throughout their website?
It's either purely disingenous (and therefore an insult to the reader's intelligence) or they don't know it's an admission of incompetence (and therefore testament to their own stupidity).