Your co-workers let you stay with them? You must have been quite close... even my friends didn't let me stay with them when I was thrown out of my parents' house when I turned 21.
I think it's partially a cultural thing: the coworkers I were staying with were either folks I went to school with, or part of the California digerati (and happy to host -- and guide the formation of -- a promising youngster in their field), or temporarily transported Austinites (more socially liberal than most Texans, more genuinely friendly than most Californians; these are the folks who persueded me to move to.tx.us. They hosted a number of other houseguests as well from time to time as well).
As for public transit... it's really not an option where I live.
That sucks. Considered moving? Most of the country is considerably cheaper to live in; NYC, like the Bay Area, is something of an outlier. If you decide to come to Austin, look me up -- I don't hide my email address. My wife has veto power on all housemates, but so long as that goes unused we've got a guestroom open. Expect around $400-450/mo for a share of the bills, including food and utilities, with a reasonable grace period (say a month or so) while you're making a serious and concerted effort to look for work.
"Accepted scientific fact", eh? Perhaps you should read Crichton's article on consensus science (link found in a post by Rob Kaper). "Accepted scientific facts" aren't always right -- or established through objective means.
I'm still not too fond of the use of "evil", just because it's so darned fuzzy. Is it the intolerant bigots who are evil, or the liberals who are trying to destroy traditional family values in the name of their unproven ideals of political correctness? Depends on who you're talking to.
I personally support a number of economic policies that would have me labeled "heartless" by a significant number of groups -- heck, I even agree with them on occasion (as to the heartlessness bit, not as to their opposition to said policies), but think that such policies are likely to lead to better results for society in the long run, even if they deny assistance to people in the short run, some of whom will be in need of such assistance soley by operation of chance. Evil? Pragmatic? It's all just a bunch of labels, and "evil" is a mighty charged (and relative) one. Worse, though, is the extent to which a labeling a group as "evil" can lead to actions which aren't thought through -- because they're The Enemy, and seriously considering why they might be taking the actions they are is lending them support.
If you've given up and decided to label your opponensts as "evil", you obviously don't understand where they're coming from. There aren't very many "evil" people in this world: Though there are a lot of people who support Bad Things, that doesn't mean they're bad people; rather, they have a worldview which emphasizes different elements than the ones you're accustomed to thinking in. If the elements that are deemphasized are things like human rights, that can make for some decisionmaking on their part which results in severely undesirable actions being taken -- but it doesn't mean they're evil.
I'm not saying that it's reasonable to expect to be able to change your opponents' minds -- this research demonstrates pretty clearly why that's not straightforward -- but it's worthwhile to understand how they rationalize (and potentially how they initially came to hold) their present beliefs.
Right... but it means that someone else is *not* owning it and receiving the benefits thereof.
Whenever anyone owns anything exclusively it means nobody else is owning it -- but whether there's still value to the economy is a completely separate matter. Remember, the argument I'm opposing is that this kind of action is somehow an economy-damaging "loophole", removing value which could otherwise be used productively, which government can and should be rightly used to fight.
Consider the case where the land is rented or leased out (to some entity presumably getting value from it): The income from said rent or lease is going to go into investments, which feed the economy by making funds available for business use... [same argument as in the earlier post in this thread goes here].
Where do you live that the cheapest available studio apartment's rent costs as much as my mortgage (after extra principal) on a house not ten minutes from downtown?
There's a reason I left *.ca.us for austin.tx.us. (Actually, there are cheapish parts of California too, but the ones I know either don't have good jobs [Chico] or suck to live in [Taft]; Austin has the friendly-small-town culture thing going on (like Chico), is cheap to live in (like Taft), and has good jobs -- not as good as the Bay Area, but nothing to complain about either).
That said, it's all relative -- the native Texans largely think Austin's expensive.
Work is misery that keeps you from starving, and a roof over your head. Any other definition is wishful thinking.
You're justifying your own misery, with an attitude like that. I've never been well-paid (within the standards of my profession), but I do something I enjoy and am paid well enough -- indeed, I've had better-paying jobs offered and turned them down because I don't want my work to be a "misery that keeps [me] from starving".
I started off doing part-time work for small businesses and people I met through my LUG; one of those just happened to be a student who had an internship at a Bay Area tech company (doing interesting work) he recommended me to; and things have been up from there. If I'd been working food service or retail (because getting a chance to get paid for doing what I have fun with is "wishful thinking") instead of networking with small businesses and the local Linux community to find small system administration and programming jobs, I never would have gotten started and never would have made that connection.
I was sleeping at the office for a while (and then staying with coworkers -- the Bay Area isn't a cheap place to live, but lots of tech company offices there have shower facilities and such), but it got me through. Sure, I wouldn't have been able to afford it if I'd tried to live there on my own -- but living with friends isn't such a bad thing. Also, I didn't drive -- I took light rail or carpooled to work, and only later bought a motorcycle.
40 hours a week is nothing -- I used to work 12-hour days, 6 days a week on a regular basis, but enjoyed it because I was doing what I like. (Over this last year I've picked up a family and a home life and all that jazz, and become a little more detached from my work... which is unfortunate; I'm enjoying it less -- but still, it's anything but misery).
I don't know your circumstances well enough to offer concrete advice -- but being resigned to where you are is no way to improve, and living expenses are something that can be managed.
If he isn't at least renting out the land he owns for the hundred years he's dead, then he's stupid (or at least making suboptimal use of his resources).
Some software of that variety takes the approach of acting as an iSCSI device. So long as the OS has native iSCSI support, the application need not install its driver.
I'm considerably more worried about the impact on projects like OpenVPN.
The assets are still earning interest, though -- certainly, the trustees might be avoiding higher-risk inventments, but they're invested nonetheless. Investments by their nature incur a risk to receive that return -- and the (variably) risky activities activities they fund go into the regular economy. Think government bonds (which *are* used to do things, and the companies and individuals paid to do those things spend money in the regular economy), index stocks (which go into the pool of funds used to raise money for businesses via stock offerings, and to the regular economy via other approaches as well), and so forth.
Nothing to see here, move along. Heck, more long-term investment is a good thing!
...and darned disappointing, at that. Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.
That the units are prototypes -- yes, I agree, no real suprise there.
It would be "sucked out of the economy" if he stuck it under his mattress. He has it invested. Money that's invested is funding companies that pay taxes, produce products, and do all those other useful things that money that's part of the economy does.
You're going to have to try a lot harder if you want to convince me that IP address logs aren't cross-referenced with cookie databases on a regular basis.
So what if they are? The resulting mash is too ambiguous to pull hard data out of.
Tracking an IP address is one thing; tracking a user is another. The tie between an IP and a user is tenuous in these days of pervasive NAT and dynamic IP assignment.
Other industries have figured it out without tagging every man woman and child who walks the street.
I'm not sure if you're still misunderstanding the limited scope of what PING requests allow, or if you're just using an overexpansive metaphor for effect. Unless PING requests allow cookies to be attached to them (which they shouldn't -- it would be a yet another cheap loophole to the "cookies are local to the server you're getting your page from" rule), there's no tagging.
From my view, as the client user, I'm not concerned with adding code, which has no purpose other than tracking, for the sake of the mass of humanity.
Well, maybe you're not.
So long as you appreciate the scope of what we're talking about here, though -- and how far it really is from something like a Linux ActiveX implementation -- I think I can walk away from this thread thinking that some sort of progress has been made, even if we still don't see completely eye-to-eye.
This is the world's smallest violin playing just for the web admins who can't figure out how to get their collective acts together and cooperate.
It's one thing to work with folks who aren't particularly cooperative. It's another thing to be engaging in financial transactions with a self-selected group of folks who have monetary incentive to be dishonest. In these cases, checks, balanaces and auditing are necessary to be in the business at all.
Do you have any problem with double-book accounting? How about 3rd-party audits of investment companies? Allowing the logs of a client hit on a site to go to two places instead of one is a necessary safety measure to prevent companies who are buying ad space from being defrauded as easily -- and it's done as a matter of course anyhow. Supporting the PING tag will simply let it happen without adding an extra tenth of a second or so to the user's page load time.
On an individual basis, it absolutely is. Spread out over the whole mass of web-browsing humanity, though, it can add up to a substantial amount of time. (Yes, I'm using the Steve Jobs argument: "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?").
Since all of this can be done server side so darned easily then why has it become accepted fact that client applications must support this crap?
Because if Google worked by analyzing server logs handed to them by every Joe Blow who runs their own web page to accurately count hits, they would be taken for a ride by dishonest server operators handing them fake logs. How isn't this a valid reason? I did point it out in the post you're responding to.
Don't try to make any more arguments about improving the user's experience.
Why not? Just because something benefits the sysadmins doesn't mean it can't also benefit the user.
I can't think of a single page, in the last year, where I've grumbled "darnit I just wish this hit counter pic would finish downloading".
Doubtless you haven't -- but you have almost certainly, without knowing it, run into cases where your rendering would have been at least a few deciseconds faster if that hit counter pic hadn't existed at all. Adding yet another item to be rendered in-time does slow rendering down, especially if its size isn't specified in the HTML (so the browser has to either hold off on figuring out how to render the things around it until it has the image header or render with a guessed, placeholder size until it's got the header). Further, images like page load counters frequently load considerably slower than everything else because they have a DNS lookup in their critical path which isn't there for images local to the server.
Anyhow -- sure, it may be "weak" inasmuch as it isn't an especially compelling feature in and of itself, but there it is -- that's the gain; it's small, but sometimes it's measurable. Now, tell me: Given that the gain exists, even if it's miniscule and barely noticable, where's the drawback?
How much demand is there for this feature to be implemented on the server side? ie. I load a page with a ping request, my client forwards the request to the server which gave me the page and the server then makes the ping to the address inside the request?
If one wanted the server to do a HTTP PING itself, and didn't mind writing a little server-side code, one could just do that as a CGI or something pretty darned easily -- without even needing to bounce the request between the server and the client (which is just unnecessary traffic and lag). However, this tag is going to be used largely by folks who do mind writing a little server-side code: Maybe they just have static hosting and can't run arbitrary code serverside; maybe it's not worth the trouble to them compared to a little HTML that makes the client do the request; maybe it's for advertising purposes and the advertisers won't trust a notification that's coming via a server owned by the folks who are receiving money on a per-click basis. (I sure wouldn't).
Will Slashdot moderators be notified when I wake up in the morning and check Sourceforge if the sf.net page has a ping for something like user-track-for-moderator-awareness.slashdot.org?
Hmm... that depends on whether they're allowing cookies to be attached to this PING (which they can be with IMG HREFs); I'd need to read the spec to determine if it's possible (and if I wasn't so tired, I'd go do that right now -- but I need to be getting to bed). It's a valid question -- but again, this isn't something that couldn't be done with preexisting techniques; HTTP PING is just another approach, but it isn't in the rendering path and can be turned off with a switch in the browser.
Will e-mails read on Gmail be able to request pings so that we can get subpoenas in e-mail?
Since gmail (like all responsible mail clients which use a general-purpose HTML rendering engine for display of incoming messages) sanitizes the HTML that's included in email messages, this shouldn't be possible. If they didn't support such sanitization, existing methods (yadda yadda).
So why is it so necessary above and beyond what's already available?
Because what's already available is requests that feed into the rendering engine -- so the rendering engine waits for those requests to be complete before it calls the page completely loaded.
This way, a page can make a request that doesn't feed into the rendering engine (as even a 0-width frame or a 1x1 transparent GIF still needs to be loaded before the browser considers the page completely rendered), and thus isn't part of the critical path for when-the-page-is-loaded
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I think it's partially a cultural thing: the coworkers I were staying with were either folks I went to school with, or part of the California digerati (and happy to host -- and guide the formation of -- a promising youngster in their field), or temporarily transported Austinites (more socially liberal than most Texans, more genuinely friendly than most Californians; these are the folks who persueded me to move to .tx.us. They hosted a number of other houseguests as well from time to time as well).
That sucks. Considered moving? Most of the country is considerably cheaper to live in; NYC, like the Bay Area, is something of an outlier. If you decide to come to Austin, look me up -- I don't hide my email address. My wife has veto power on all housemates, but so long as that goes unused we've got a guestroom open. Expect around $400-450/mo for a share of the bills, including food and utilities, with a reasonable grace period (say a month or so) while you're making a serious and concerted effort to look for work.
Attacking the messenger rather than the message, eh?
"Accepted scientific fact", eh? Perhaps you should read Crichton's article on consensus science (link found in a post by Rob Kaper). "Accepted scientific facts" aren't always right -- or established through objective means.
Yes.
I'm still not too fond of the use of "evil", just because it's so darned fuzzy. Is it the intolerant bigots who are evil, or the liberals who are trying to destroy traditional family values in the name of their unproven ideals of political correctness? Depends on who you're talking to.
I personally support a number of economic policies that would have me labeled "heartless" by a significant number of groups -- heck, I even agree with them on occasion (as to the heartlessness bit, not as to their opposition to said policies), but think that such policies are likely to lead to better results for society in the long run, even if they deny assistance to people in the short run, some of whom will be in need of such assistance soley by operation of chance. Evil? Pragmatic? It's all just a bunch of labels, and "evil" is a mighty charged (and relative) one. Worse, though, is the extent to which a labeling a group as "evil" can lead to actions which aren't thought through -- because they're The Enemy, and seriously considering why they might be taking the actions they are is lending them support.
If you've given up and decided to label your opponensts as "evil", you obviously don't understand where they're coming from. There aren't very many "evil" people in this world: Though there are a lot of people who support Bad Things, that doesn't mean they're bad people; rather, they have a worldview which emphasizes different elements than the ones you're accustomed to thinking in. If the elements that are deemphasized are things like human rights, that can make for some decisionmaking on their part which results in severely undesirable actions being taken -- but it doesn't mean they're evil.
I'm not saying that it's reasonable to expect to be able to change your opponents' minds -- this research demonstrates pretty clearly why that's not straightforward -- but it's worthwhile to understand how they rationalize (and potentially how they initially came to hold) their present beliefs.
Whenever anyone owns anything exclusively it means nobody else is owning it -- but whether there's still value to the economy is a completely separate matter. Remember, the argument I'm opposing is that this kind of action is somehow an economy-damaging "loophole", removing value which could otherwise be used productively, which government can and should be rightly used to fight.
Consider the case where the land is rented or leased out (to some entity presumably getting value from it): The income from said rent or lease is going to go into investments, which feed the economy by making funds available for business use... [same argument as in the earlier post in this thread goes here].
Where do you live that the cheapest available studio apartment's rent costs as much as my mortgage (after extra principal) on a house not ten minutes from downtown?
There's a reason I left *.ca.us for austin.tx.us. (Actually, there are cheapish parts of California too, but the ones I know either don't have good jobs [Chico] or suck to live in [Taft]; Austin has the friendly-small-town culture thing going on (like Chico), is cheap to live in (like Taft), and has good jobs -- not as good as the Bay Area, but nothing to complain about either).
That said, it's all relative -- the native Texans largely think Austin's expensive.
You're justifying your own misery, with an attitude like that. I've never been well-paid (within the standards of my profession), but I do something I enjoy and am paid well enough -- indeed, I've had better-paying jobs offered and turned them down because I don't want my work to be a "misery that keeps [me] from starving".
I started off doing part-time work for small businesses and people I met through my LUG; one of those just happened to be a student who had an internship at a Bay Area tech company (doing interesting work) he recommended me to; and things have been up from there. If I'd been working food service or retail (because getting a chance to get paid for doing what I have fun with is "wishful thinking") instead of networking with small businesses and the local Linux community to find small system administration and programming jobs, I never would have gotten started and never would have made that connection.
I was sleeping at the office for a while (and then staying with coworkers -- the Bay Area isn't a cheap place to live, but lots of tech company offices there have shower facilities and such), but it got me through. Sure, I wouldn't have been able to afford it if I'd tried to live there on my own -- but living with friends isn't such a bad thing. Also, I didn't drive -- I took light rail or carpooled to work, and only later bought a motorcycle.
40 hours a week is nothing -- I used to work 12-hour days, 6 days a week on a regular basis, but enjoyed it because I was doing what I like. (Over this last year I've picked up a family and a home life and all that jazz, and become a little more detached from my work... which is unfortunate; I'm enjoying it less -- but still, it's anything but misery).
I don't know your circumstances well enough to offer concrete advice -- but being resigned to where you are is no way to improve, and living expenses are something that can be managed.
If he isn't at least renting out the land he owns for the hundred years he's dead, then he's stupid (or at least making suboptimal use of his resources).
Some software of that variety takes the approach of acting as an iSCSI device. So long as the OS has native iSCSI support, the application need not install its driver.
I'm considerably more worried about the impact on projects like OpenVPN.
The assets are still earning interest, though -- certainly, the trustees might be avoiding higher-risk inventments, but they're invested nonetheless. Investments by their nature incur a risk to receive that return -- and the (variably) risky activities activities they fund go into the regular economy. Think government bonds (which *are* used to do things, and the companies and individuals paid to do those things spend money in the regular economy), index stocks (which go into the pool of funds used to raise money for businesses via stock offerings, and to the regular economy via other approaches as well), and so forth.
Nothing to see here, move along. Heck, more long-term investment is a good thing!
...and darned disappointing, at that. Even as a Wintel type, I liked having Apple push for an even-higher-speed Firewire spec, in the hopes that it would filter down to the rest of the world eventually. That they're giving up now and going with strictly hardware Intel can provide... well, it's a disappointment.
That the units are prototypes -- yes, I agree, no real suprise there.
It would be "sucked out of the economy" if he stuck it under his mattress. He has it invested. Money that's invested is funding companies that pay taxes, produce products, and do all those other useful things that money that's part of the economy does.
Huh?
It's not that you can't combine them -- it's that you get too many false positives if you do.
Tracking an IP address is one thing; tracking a user is another. The tie between an IP and a user is tenuous in these days of pervasive NAT and dynamic IP assignment.
I'm not sure if you're still misunderstanding the limited scope of what PING requests allow, or if you're just using an overexpansive metaphor for effect. Unless PING requests allow cookies to be attached to them (which they shouldn't -- it would be a yet another cheap loophole to the "cookies are local to the server you're getting your page from" rule), there's no tagging.
Well, maybe you're not.
So long as you appreciate the scope of what we're talking about here, though -- and how far it really is from something like a Linux ActiveX implementation -- I think I can walk away from this thread thinking that some sort of progress has been made, even if we still don't see completely eye-to-eye.
It's one thing to work with folks who aren't particularly cooperative. It's another thing to be engaging in financial transactions with a self-selected group of folks who have monetary incentive to be dishonest. In these cases, checks, balanaces and auditing are necessary to be in the business at all.
Do you have any problem with double-book accounting? How about 3rd-party audits of investment companies? Allowing the logs of a client hit on a site to go to two places instead of one is a necessary safety measure to prevent companies who are buying ad space from being defrauded as easily -- and it's done as a matter of course anyhow. Supporting the PING tag will simply let it happen without adding an extra tenth of a second or so to the user's page load time.
Deciseconds... that's weak.
On an individual basis, it absolutely is. Spread out over the whole mass of web-browsing humanity, though, it can add up to a substantial amount of time. (Yes, I'm using the Steve Jobs argument: "Well, let's say you can shave 10 seconds off of the boot time. Multiply that by five million users and thats 50 million seconds, every single day. Over a year, that's probably dozens of lifetimes. So if you make it boot ten seconds faster, you've saved a dozen lives. That's really worth it, don't you think?").
Because if Google worked by analyzing server logs handed to them by every Joe Blow who runs their own web page to accurately count hits, they would be taken for a ride by dishonest server operators handing them fake logs. How isn't this a valid reason? I did point it out in the post you're responding to.
Why not? Just because something benefits the sysadmins doesn't mean it can't also benefit the user.
Doubtless you haven't -- but you have almost certainly, without knowing it, run into cases where your rendering would have been at least a few deciseconds faster if that hit counter pic hadn't existed at all. Adding yet another item to be rendered in-time does slow rendering down, especially if its size isn't specified in the HTML (so the browser has to either hold off on figuring out how to render the things around it until it has the image header or render with a guessed, placeholder size until it's got the header). Further, images like page load counters frequently load considerably slower than everything else because they have a DNS lookup in their critical path which isn't there for images local to the server.
Anyhow -- sure, it may be "weak" inasmuch as it isn't an especially compelling feature in and of itself, but there it is -- that's the gain; it's small, but sometimes it's measurable. Now, tell me: Given that the gain exists, even if it's miniscule and barely noticable, where's the drawback?
If one wanted the server to do a HTTP PING itself, and didn't mind writing a little server-side code, one could just do that as a CGI or something pretty darned easily -- without even needing to bounce the request between the server and the client (which is just unnecessary traffic and lag). However, this tag is going to be used largely by folks who do mind writing a little server-side code: Maybe they just have static hosting and can't run arbitrary code serverside; maybe it's not worth the trouble to them compared to a little HTML that makes the client do the request; maybe it's for advertising purposes and the advertisers won't trust a notification that's coming via a server owned by the folks who are receiving money on a per-click basis. (I sure wouldn't).
Hmm... that depends on whether they're allowing cookies to be attached to this PING (which they can be with IMG HREFs); I'd need to read the spec to determine if it's possible (and if I wasn't so tired, I'd go do that right now -- but I need to be getting to bed). It's a valid question -- but again, this isn't something that couldn't be done with preexisting techniques; HTTP PING is just another approach, but it isn't in the rendering path and can be turned off with a switch in the browser.
Since gmail (like all responsible mail clients which use a general-purpose HTML rendering engine for display of incoming messages) sanitizes the HTML that's included in email messages, this shouldn't be possible. If they didn't support such sanitization, existing methods (yadda yadda).Because what's already available is requests that feed into the rendering engine -- so the rendering engine waits for those requests to be complete before it calls the page completely loaded.
This way, a page can make a request that doesn't feed into the rendering engine (as even a 0-width frame or a 1x1 transparent GIF still needs to be loaded before the browser considers the page completely rendered), and thus isn't part of the critical path for when-the-page-is-loaded