I dont know why porn sites get a bad rap. The one's I'm familiar with usually want my cash, not my browsing history. Its fairly common in the web porn industry to have some kind of monthly "adult pass" option payable by credit card.
The worst offenders I've seen are:
1. Download.com : probably the biggest spyware vector out there. Yes, I heard they are now zero-tolerance, but thats about 2 years too late.
2. P2P apps. Bearshare, limewire, Kazaa, etc.
3. Free crappy apps: stuff you coworkers run like "Wallpaper of the day" or "Kitten cursor!" Sofware written pretty much just to get those spyware installers on your machine.
This is the Old batman. Christ, its the same story over and over again. Why not touch upon something like the Dark Knight Returns? Would moral ambiguity confuse the movie-goers?
Good vs. Evil, man becomes bat, blah blah. Burton did this very well back in what? 90?
This is completely understandable, the cover of the book is pretty much saying I, Con Artist. No wonder Apple doesnt want a book on its shelves more or less calling its CEO a con man. I doubt the average passerby is going to get a positive impression from that sitting on the shelves while they're contemplating buying a $2,000 laptop from a company run by a "con."
Whatever "savvy" marketers decided to go with that title should be feeling the brunt of this decision. Last I checked Apple was a private company with no obligation to carry anything. If I told Microsoft press I was writing a bio of Gates and later told them it was going to be called "Convicted Monopolist" then I wouldnt be surprised if they dropped me.
At the end of the day Apple is a company just like any other. They'll act in a predictable fashion when it comes to protecting their property and image. Look at what one con artist has recently done to Wendy's restaurant. Bad image and rumors hurt business.
"All the people on TV say Bush does a good job!" "My teacher said judges are activists nowadays*"
*heard in a classroom recently.
There will always be that kind of young idealism you seem to be decrying in your post, but the shift to the right under all things "anti-terror" in the teen community seems pretty damn real to me. Remember the "patriotic hackers" back when the war started? Wonder how old they were. I'm sure they're all college republicans now.
Call me crazy, but I like it this way. Previously people complained that no one cared about space and that all these missions. This was a very valid complaint. I've heard way too many people say stuff like "What are we wasting our taxes on?"
And no, I'm not saying that its lucky that NASA lost another batch of astronauts as much as I'm saying space-travel is dangerous and these kinds of things will happen. We do space-travel and space mission because they are important. The important of space means risk taking and spending money.
Not to mention, when events are in the news frequently they become more important to people. They talk about them. They might get a better understanding of the issues, the science, etc. Considering space isn't very politicized outside of missile defense, you can usually get some decent information from the mainstream media.
Thanks to things like Hubble, the Mars rovers, the Chinese manned orbit, Rutan, etc space certainly feels more real and important to me, and I assume to many others. I hope it never goes back to page 10 of the World section.
Standards and implementations are a funny thing. I went to the w3.org page, downloaded Amaya (their browser) and ran the test.
It ran beatifully, right? Wrong. It looked nothing like a smiley face, it fact it was a lot of junk that covered the screen. If you don't see it make sure to scroll down. FF is mostly there.
Acid5 kinda targets elements browsers tend to get wrong, so no one is going to pass it perfectly. At least for a long while.
This does bring up a good point - is there a reference browser? Obviously Amaya is a mess (it renders most pages like crap). There is no reference browser, really. Just code validators.
Now please explain this simple concept my professor who keeps saying "Modern cell-phones have 100x the processing power of the space shuttle!" I feel like I deserve a 10% refund for the class everytime he tries to shock me with that statement.
Not to mention, the IQ drop is a government myth. The cherry-picked studies which show this have some seriously flawed methodology like graduate students tested against off-the-street stoners. If you can keep producing results that show marijuana in a negative light you can some nice grants from the government.
Everquest, MUDS, etc are all skinner boxes. You eventually get a reward for lots of work and it becomes compulsive. Toss in the social aspect and it can be serious. MUDs had me for a while, hurt grades I guess but not by too much, but it certianly was compulsive, and to the outsider completely and utterly weird.
First off, the blurbs and images are clearly fair use. Not to mention it drives traffic to articles listed at the "top" of each google news section. Its like being slashdotted x1000.
It actually doesnt cost the newspapers bandwidth. Google resizes and hosts its news images.
Lastly, its going to be the kiss of death for AP, Reuters, online newspapers, etc if they went all RIAA on everyone. People will just shift to competitors.
What youre missing is that when film companies market blockbusters like these they make different trailers for different audiences. Obviously, these are for kids and parents, while the longer trailer was more for teens, adults, and fans.
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business not an art house theater. Want good film? Try your local indie theater. Expecting Lucas to make you feel 8 years old again is a pretty high expectation and a fairly ridiculous thing to demand from anyone.
Re:The question every firefox user is asking
on
Opera 8 Released
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· Score: 1
You can block ads system-wide by editing your hosts file. It doesnt matter what app I'm using, there will be no connection to doubleclick.net and a few hundred other ad servers.
Exactly. The argument we dont hear when it comes to state or municipal wifi is the censorship one. Not that I'm going to root for private enterprise (Im rather apathetic about the whole thing), but if my city is going to roll out wireless (they are planning) I want to see some damn anti-filter legislation first. Sadly, even if they did this the feds could step in with some "incentive" program or threaten pulling funds from an unrelated project to push the Federal Filter®, like the kind in every library in the US.
This is not the "answer in the windows world." Its user-error if there are multiple AV and anti-spyware apps running at the same time. What's next, "A user brought in a PC with a tiger inside and it killed the support staff! The lack of an MS anti-tiger program is killing the industry, literally!!!"
You are literally complaining about having choice it seems. Either its user error or there should only be one anti-spyware and AV app in the windows world. You tell me.
If someone compiled the libraries for both ipv4 and ipv6 for their mail server and the thing suddenly stopped responding I would say user error, not "Well, if this is how things work in the UNIX world then..." blah blah FUD.
>I wouldn't mind making that standard for cell phone and PDA browsing
Its not a standard, but proxies are old news. My Treo650 is on Sprint's proxy and the Blazer(the browser) requests compressed pages (gzip). Sprint's proxy compresses images too. It looks terrible if you use your treo as a wireless modem for your laptop, but looks good on the handheld.
The sidekick has a much more restrictive proxy system in which only certain elements are send to the client instead of the html of the page (text, basic tables, no css but supports colored text). It also compresses images like Sprint does, but I dont think it can handle animated gifs. Or at least it didnt when I still had one.
Netzero, AOL, Earthlink and others have this type of service for their dial-up users. They call it speed-up or somesuch.
There's also a lot you can do on the the client side. For instance, I run and ad blocking hosts file. Its just a blacklist of ad servers which get resolved to 127.0.0.1. Ta da, instant speed-boost and no more annoying ads. This kind of thing could easily be implemented on the server side too.
Also, Firefox has extentions that let you customize how plug-ins act. Like the "click here to run the flash embed" extension.
What I would like to see is some kind of bandwidth designator in the User Agent field. Something like narrow, low, medium, high, and very high. Then the site can generate the proper page, instead of the "click here for the html version of the site" half-fix.
1. Statistical lag. It is only the recent surveys that have caught those newer users. The older data and surveys, many of which are linked to 3rd party cookies and web bugs which FF usually blocks, were probably under-representing FF usage.
2. Statistical method. Every "survey" has its ups and downs. You'll get a definitive answer when the top 5000 or so websites give up all their access log files. This, of course, will never happen. So tomorrow you may read a study about how FF usage has fallen. Look into the method and see if you trust it. Keep in mind the 3rd party cookies/web bug issue which might over or under represent FF usage.
Regardless, the war is pretty much over. The big fear was MS taking over the web. Well, that's not going to happen with at least 10% of users using non-IE browsers. The second big fear was developers giving up cross-browser work. And lets face it, its a pain in the ass to do with even semi-complex projects, but theyre doing it because of the vocal FF user-base and smart managers who know losing 8% of their customers (or making them fire up a different browser) is bad business.
If you read the article you'll see it includes information about celebrities and politicians, which is fair game.
The problem here is people. The American mindset is far, far from the ideals of freedom. Remember the outcomes of surveys for torture? Or rounding up Muslims(or Japanese not too long ago)? Or using nuclear weapons in Iraq? etc? I do.
Drop the land of the free defense and just accept that fact that Americans (and other nationalities of course) care very little about Western Enlightenment, decentralization of power, erring of the side of caution, hands off government and more interested in vengeance, biblical (or whatever religion is local) laws, fear, persecution, etc.
There's a fair assumption here that they would re-encode it for their needs. For instance they may go with real, windows media, QT,etc but they wanted a quality source. Instead they got whatever codec at whatever bitrate that WMV file used. Very unprofessional for a video company.
Yes, but is the leather jacket intergrated with the pot? That's all these guys seem to be selling, is handly applets and extensions. 10 bucks to see weather.com data or whatever on your browser? Why pay when you can visit weather.com or use weatherfox?
People are surprisingly stingy when it comes to a lot of things, finding out what they want and what they will pay for it is the heart of business. Throwing up a laundry list of items and saying "L@@K people buy stuff" to justify any new business is pretty silly. But it does get you mod points at slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
over at rotten tomatoes
Currently 62% positive
>browse hardcore-porn and warez sites.
I dont know why porn sites get a bad rap. The one's I'm familiar with usually want my cash, not my browsing history. Its fairly common in the web porn industry to have some kind of monthly "adult pass" option payable by credit card.
The worst offenders I've seen are:
1. Download.com : probably the biggest spyware vector out there. Yes, I heard they are now zero-tolerance, but thats about 2 years too late.
2. P2P apps. Bearshare, limewire, Kazaa, etc.
3. Free crappy apps: stuff you coworkers run like "Wallpaper of the day" or "Kitten cursor!" Sofware written pretty much just to get those spyware installers on your machine.
This is the Old batman. Christ, its the same story over and over again. Why not touch upon something like the Dark Knight Returns? Would moral ambiguity confuse the movie-goers?
Good vs. Evil, man becomes bat, blah blah. Burton did this very well back in what? 90?
dont forget "this is a 1099 temporary 2 month position."
>Pulling Wiley's books does not uphold this in any way
Err, if I walked into a store and the books they were selling were calling the CEO a "con" I'd probably walk right out.
This is completely understandable, the cover of the book is pretty much saying I, Con Artist. No wonder Apple doesnt want a book on its shelves more or less calling its CEO a con man. I doubt the average passerby is going to get a positive impression from that sitting on the shelves while they're contemplating buying a $2,000 laptop from a company run by a "con."
Whatever "savvy" marketers decided to go with that title should be feeling the brunt of this decision. Last I checked Apple was a private company with no obligation to carry anything. If I told Microsoft press I was writing a bio of Gates and later told them it was going to be called "Convicted Monopolist" then I wouldnt be surprised if they dropped me.
At the end of the day Apple is a company just like any other. They'll act in a predictable fashion when it comes to protecting their property and image. Look at what one con artist has recently done to Wendy's restaurant. Bad image and rumors hurt business.
Cuts both ways:
"All the people on TV say Bush does a good job!" "My teacher said judges are activists nowadays*"
*heard in a classroom recently.
There will always be that kind of young idealism you seem to be decrying in your post, but the shift to the right under all things "anti-terror" in the teen community seems pretty damn real to me. Remember the "patriotic hackers" back when the war started? Wonder how old they were. I'm sure they're all college republicans now.
Call me crazy, but I like it this way. Previously people complained that no one cared about space and that all these missions. This was a very valid complaint. I've heard way too many people say stuff like "What are we wasting our taxes on?"
And no, I'm not saying that its lucky that NASA lost another batch of astronauts as much as I'm saying space-travel is dangerous and these kinds of things will happen. We do space-travel and space mission because they are important. The important of space means risk taking and spending money.
Not to mention, when events are in the news frequently they become more important to people. They talk about them. They might get a better understanding of the issues, the science, etc. Considering space isn't very politicized outside of missile defense, you can usually get some decent information from the mainstream media.
Thanks to things like Hubble, the Mars rovers, the Chinese manned orbit, Rutan, etc space certainly feels more real and important to me, and I assume to many others. I hope it never goes back to page 10 of the World section.
I've got a solution in mind. Rent Superman III or Office Space for the details. You'll thank me later from your private island.
Standards and implementations are a funny thing. I went to the w3.org page, downloaded Amaya (their browser) and ran the test.
It ran beatifully, right? Wrong. It looked nothing like a smiley face, it fact it was a lot of junk that covered the screen. If you don't see it make sure to scroll down. FF is mostly there.
Acid5 kinda targets elements browsers tend to get wrong, so no one is going to pass it perfectly. At least for a long while.
This does bring up a good point - is there a reference browser? Obviously Amaya is a mess (it renders most pages like crap). There is no reference browser, really. Just code validators.
Now please explain this simple concept my professor who keeps saying "Modern cell-phones have 100x the processing power of the space shuttle!" I feel like I deserve a 10% refund for the class everytime he tries to shock me with that statement.
>And legalize pot
Not to mention, the IQ drop is a government myth. The cherry-picked studies which show this have some seriously flawed methodology like graduate students tested against off-the-street stoners. If you can keep producing results that show marijuana in a negative light you can some nice grants from the government.
Everquest, MUDS, etc are all skinner boxes. You eventually get a reward for lots of work and it becomes compulsive. Toss in the social aspect and it can be serious. MUDs had me for a while, hurt grades I guess but not by too much, but it certianly was compulsive, and to the outsider completely and utterly weird.
I wouldnt be so dire.
First off, the blurbs and images are clearly fair use. Not to mention it drives traffic to articles listed at the "top" of each google news section. Its like being slashdotted x1000.
It actually doesnt cost the newspapers bandwidth. Google resizes and hosts its news images.
Lastly, its going to be the kiss of death for AP, Reuters, online newspapers, etc if they went all RIAA on everyone. People will just shift to competitors.
What youre missing is that when film companies market blockbusters like these they make different trailers for different audiences. Obviously, these are for kids and parents, while the longer trailer was more for teens, adults, and fans.
At the end of the day, Hollywood is a business not an art house theater. Want good film? Try your local indie theater. Expecting Lucas to make you feel 8 years old again is a pretty high expectation and a fairly ridiculous thing to demand from anyone.
You can block ads system-wide by editing your hosts file. It doesnt matter what app I'm using, there will be no connection to doubleclick.net and a few hundred other ad servers.
Easy.
1. Dont do autocomplete (or make this a default off option) on ssl forms.
2. Credit card #'s are 16 digits with known prefixes. Detecting them isnt a difficult problem. Same with social security numbers.
Exactly. The argument we dont hear when it comes to state or municipal wifi is the censorship one. Not that I'm going to root for private enterprise (Im rather apathetic about the whole thing), but if my city is going to roll out wireless (they are planning) I want to see some damn anti-filter legislation first. Sadly, even if they did this the feds could step in with some "incentive" program or threaten pulling funds from an unrelated project to push the Federal Filter®, like the kind in every library in the US.
Torrents down. Never, ever run your tracker on the same server as your full download mirror.
This is not the "answer in the windows world." Its user-error if there are multiple AV and anti-spyware apps running at the same time. What's next, "A user brought in a PC with a tiger inside and it killed the support staff! The lack of an MS anti-tiger program is killing the industry, literally!!!"
You are literally complaining about having choice it seems. Either its user error or there should only be one anti-spyware and AV app in the windows world. You tell me.
If someone compiled the libraries for both ipv4 and ipv6 for their mail server and the thing suddenly stopped responding I would say user error, not "Well, if this is how things work in the UNIX world then..." blah blah FUD.
>I wouldn't mind making that standard for cell phone and PDA browsing
Its not a standard, but proxies are old news. My Treo650 is on Sprint's proxy and the Blazer(the browser) requests compressed pages (gzip). Sprint's proxy compresses images too. It looks terrible if you use your treo as a wireless modem for your laptop, but looks good on the handheld.
The sidekick has a much more restrictive proxy system in which only certain elements are send to the client instead of the html of the page (text, basic tables, no css but supports colored text). It also compresses images like Sprint does, but I dont think it can handle animated gifs. Or at least it didnt when I still had one.
Netzero, AOL, Earthlink and others have this type of service for their dial-up users. They call it speed-up or somesuch.
There's also a lot you can do on the the client side. For instance, I run and ad blocking hosts file. Its just a blacklist of ad servers which get resolved to 127.0.0.1. Ta da, instant speed-boost and no more annoying ads. This kind of thing could easily be implemented on the server side too.
Also, Firefox has extentions that let you customize how plug-ins act. Like the "click here to run the flash embed" extension.
What I would like to see is some kind of bandwidth designator in the User Agent field. Something like narrow, low, medium, high, and very high. Then the site can generate the proper page, instead of the "click here for the html version of the site" half-fix.
A couple thoughts:
1. Statistical lag. It is only the recent surveys that have caught those newer users. The older data and surveys, many of which are linked to 3rd party cookies and web bugs which FF usually blocks, were probably under-representing FF usage.
2. Statistical method. Every "survey" has its ups and downs. You'll get a definitive answer when the top 5000 or so websites give up all their access log files. This, of course, will never happen. So tomorrow you may read a study about how FF usage has fallen. Look into the method and see if you trust it. Keep in mind the 3rd party cookies/web bug issue which might over or under represent FF usage.
Regardless, the war is pretty much over. The big fear was MS taking over the web. Well, that's not going to happen with at least 10% of users using non-IE browsers. The second big fear was developers giving up cross-browser work. And lets face it, its a pain in the ass to do with even semi-complex projects, but theyre doing it because of the vocal FF user-base and smart managers who know losing 8% of their customers (or making them fire up a different browser) is bad business.
If you read the article you'll see it includes information about celebrities and politicians, which is fair game.
The problem here is people. The American mindset is far, far from the ideals of freedom. Remember the outcomes of surveys for torture? Or rounding up Muslims(or Japanese not too long ago)? Or using nuclear weapons in Iraq? etc? I do.
Drop the land of the free defense and just accept that fact that Americans (and other nationalities of course) care very little about Western Enlightenment, decentralization of power, erring of the side of caution, hands off government and more interested in vengeance, biblical (or whatever religion is local) laws, fear, persecution, etc.
There's a fair assumption here that they would re-encode it for their needs. For instance they may go with real, windows media, QT,etc but they wanted a quality source. Instead they got whatever codec at whatever bitrate that WMV file used. Very unprofessional for a video company.
Yes, but is the leather jacket intergrated with the pot? That's all these guys seem to be selling, is handly applets and extensions. 10 bucks to see weather.com data or whatever on your browser? Why pay when you can visit weather.com or use weatherfox?
People are surprisingly stingy when it comes to a lot of things, finding out what they want and what they will pay for it is the heart of business. Throwing up a laundry list of items and saying "L@@K people buy stuff" to justify any new business is pretty silly. But it does get you mod points at slashdot.