I think it's great. My laptop is not very portable, and my PDA is from the stone ages. It'd be cool to see where the hotspots are, whether I've got a device with me or not -- just for future reference. =)
What would be really neat is if hotspots were visible on a map that I could access from anywhere. Does anything like that exist yet?
I don't. More choices is better, as far as I'm concerned, but honestly, I think that the importance of the GPL has been diminished by creative commons.
What I'd like to see more than a GPL revision is a set of CC licenses designed specifically for software licensing.
It's fairly trivial for a website to offer a public key that can be used to create a unique login key for every site you visit, based on your own secret key.
You might still feed salt that is used in combination with the key that is stored on your USB device (or software), so even if somebody manages to steal your physical key, they won't be able to log in to your accounts without first cracking your password.
The scheme would simplify logins (login once, and you're automatically authenticated everywhere you go), and provide better security than the current password system. It would be a major step forward, and IMO, it's overdue.
There are lots of alternatives to passwords that have really been around a long time. Lots of companies, for instance, offer products like USB security keys. IMO, what the world needs is a really good key standard to get behind, and a killer ap to champion it. If MSN, Yahoo! and Google all supported a new key standard for authentication, it would go a long way towards universal adoption.
You think so? The truth of it is this: Most websites are not well thought out. Many websites don't even include important keywords anywhere in their page title, heading tags, or even the page content itself!
It's so easy to blow past 90% of your competition on most keywords, it's silly. Only a small fraction of the hottest search buzz keywords are difficult to optimize for, and even in areas with heavy competition, there is a long tail that's fairly easy to grab.
You want to optimize your site, here's the whitehat way, and it's a piece of cake:
Know which keywords your potential customers are using, and include them in your page titles, headings, and content -- you don't have to do any spamming, just be sure that your landing page is exactly tuned to your customer's searches.
Develop a site that is worth linking to! Hire a decent designer. Make sure the site works on more than one browser. Provide quality content. Offer a good value.
Run a blog (update it frequently), provide an RSS feed, and send out pings. Be sure your blog is something that people will actually want to read. Obvious spam doesn't attract inbound links.
Make sure your site is listed in all the obvious directories, including the local listings like superpages and Yahoo! Local.
Make it easy for people to link to you. Provide a "link to us" page with (valid) sourcecode.
Run an AdWords campaign, and be sure to target a wide variety of keyword variations.
Link to your customers, and ask them to link back to you. Happy customers are an easy way to get hundreds of great inbound links -- more than enough to put your site at the top of most search results.
You don't have to be a blackhat or break the bank to get results.
Let's hope so. In any case, no victory will be permanent. People will still want to protect their "intellectual property" -- this fight is far from over.
I agree that big labels will continue to resist distribution without DRM -- for a time, but that emperor has no clothes. It's only a matter of time before the whole world is aware that DRM doesn't work the way it's supposed to work, and actually breaks things for consumers.
In the mean time, I think there's plenty of space for a site that's focussed on independent artists. The original mp3.com built an impressive audience, and I'm sure Michael has learned a few tricks since then.
I don't think this is a good solution at all. A lot of comments are not spam, and actually contribute cool links. The owners of those sites deserve their pagerank rewards.
Better solutions have been proposed, and implemented, including human interactive tests.
Alternatively, it might be nice if blog software would let the site administrator remove the rel="nofollow" code easily on comments that are not spam.
Slashdot itself is a fairly good example of comment moderation. You could automatically add the rel="nofollow" attribute to low-scoring comments. That would work on high traffic blogs.
It's amazing to me that so many bright people could be so stubborn and blind to possibilities. I know as well as anybody that electronic systems can be insecure. I was a system administrator for a large web hosting company.
I also know that there are ways to secure electronic systems, and that paper voting is certainly not immune to tampering and corruption.
For example. Make the code for the voting systems open-source, and make the data feed in real-time to a wide array of systems designed to collect and validate the data. Each system could be monitored by different watchdog groups, political parties, news organizations, you name it.
Data can be encrypted and signed with a public-key system with a large bit-depth. This by itself doesn't provide perfect security, but combine it with many other layers of security, and I'm sure it would be at least as safe as paper ballots, and less immune to sleight of hand.
I assert that it can be done. Of course I have my concerns -- who doesn't? But I have just as many (more, in fact) with paper ballots.
With a distributed, peer-review system, any attempt at tampering could be discovered early and dealt with. For the super-paranoid, keep the paper ballots as a back-up.
The advantages are clear: More voters, and a wider cross-section of voters. Giving more people voices is what democracy is all about. E-voting should happen.
If people could vote from the comfort of their own computers, there would be a lot more people voting. Those votes would represent a broader cross-section of the population. Hackers are lazy. We all see the problems with e-voting, and want to take the easy road (paper and pens).
The truth is, electronic voting could be more secure than ten witnesses and a secretary counting paper ballots. It's our job as hackers to solve the problem to encourage a better democracy.
What broke down? How many people have reported the same? Where are their reports? Got any good links to back up your claim? So far, it's pretty content-free.
Choices like that should be made based on usability tests. I understand that scientific usability tests can be quite expensive (a good test for the best button order might cost ~$1700), but it would be well worth the money spent.
The trouble with open source UI development is that nobody has stepped up and really put their money where their mouth is to fix desktop usability problems that have plagued us for years.
I'm glad somebody else really cares about linux desktop usability, but this is too little, too late, IMO. We should have had a better solution than Mac's Aqua/Quartz open on linux long ago... all with a consistent user experience. Friendly defaults for newbies, but simple option settings for power users.
We should be innovating. We're several years behind on the desktop now and playing catch-up. I think most of the communitiy is apathetic.
Still dreaming of the day...
Note to geeks: Design Matters. Usability Matters. Make it a mantra. Live it.
Uh... how is the sheet fed? Looks like a usability nightmare to me. I'd rather see a telescoping slim-line printer. I'll bet you could get it to fit into a pocket.
You're absolutely right that this is not a new idea, and research has been conducted for other types of solutions, as well, including one technology that might hit the public someday that will essentially beam your own private audio stream, tailored to your exact 3d audio needs, directly to your own ears, even in a crowded theater.
I say beam, because it's actually a very concentrated, narrow band of audio, much like a laser is a concentrated, narrow band of light. I personally don't understand how that technology works too well, but I read about it in an issue of Mix Magazine (a trade publication for audio engineers) a few years ago.
My understanding is that there was a working prototype at the time the article was published, but my memory is a bit foggy, so I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, back to the phased array plan -- there has already been a lot of discussion in the audio geek world about making phased-array wallpaper, or even paints and fabrics that are essentially wall-coverings designed to create a realistic 3D audio experience.
Personally, I think most of the world will skip right over the 300 speakers in their living room phase and wait for the paint. Exciting stuff, anyway.
...is a desktop client that will let me download my mail to my own computer (including all the neat features like search and conversations, of course!)
If it offered that, gmail would be about as good as today's obsolete e-mail system could get.
What it really needs to be even better than the current obsolete system can get, is public-key based encryption and authentication to fight spam and preserve a little privacy.
Thank you for the clarification. This post is more informative than the original article. Incidentally, I think MTA authentication is a good idea, but I also think that all e-mail should be authenticated at every step, and encrypted using public-key encryption.
Validation, encryption, and a great anti-spam measure all in one. Is my logic flawed?
It is absolutely essential that standards like this are open and available to everyone (including microsoft's competition). I haven't read the microsoft license yet, but if it indeed creates any type of obstruction for open-source (or any other) software, it should be soundly rejected.
It isn't clear to me from this story or the comments exactly how Microsoft would claim any type of control here. Can somebody clue me in?
I'm sure this was meant as a joke, but we should be careful not to underestimate the sweeping importance of these issues. These arguments about mp3 downloads, movies, books, and other content might seem like a geek issue at first glance, but they really do have profound implications on the direction and development of general politics, commerce and culture in the present and very near future.
This stuff is really important. We shouldn't lose our sense of humor, of course, but we should still respect the subject matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Baby steps, man, baby steps. =)
I think it's great. My laptop is not very portable, and my PDA is from the stone ages. It'd be cool to see where the hotspots are, whether I've got a device with me or not -- just for future reference. =) What would be really neat is if hotspots were visible on a map that I could access from anywhere. Does anything like that exist yet?
I don't. More choices is better, as far as I'm concerned, but honestly, I think that the importance of the GPL has been diminished by creative commons.
What I'd like to see more than a GPL revision is a set of CC licenses designed specifically for software licensing.
It's fairly trivial for a website to offer a public key that can be used to create a unique login key for every site you visit, based on your own secret key.
You might still feed salt that is used in combination with the key that is stored on your USB device (or software), so even if somebody manages to steal your physical key, they won't be able to log in to your accounts without first cracking your password.
The scheme would simplify logins (login once, and you're automatically authenticated everywhere you go), and provide better security than the current password system. It would be a major step forward, and IMO, it's overdue.
There are lots of alternatives to passwords that have really been around a long time. Lots of companies, for instance, offer products like USB security keys. IMO, what the world needs is a really good key standard to get behind, and a killer ap to champion it. If MSN, Yahoo! and Google all supported a new key standard for authentication, it would go a long way towards universal adoption.
You think so? The truth of it is this: Most websites are not well thought out. Many websites don't even include important keywords anywhere in their page title, heading tags, or even the page content itself!
It's so easy to blow past 90% of your competition on most keywords, it's silly. Only a small fraction of the hottest search buzz keywords are difficult to optimize for, and even in areas with heavy competition, there is a long tail that's fairly easy to grab.
You want to optimize your site, here's the whitehat way, and it's a piece of cake:
You don't have to be a blackhat or break the bank to get results.
Let's hope so. In any case, no victory will be permanent. People will still want to protect their "intellectual property" -- this fight is far from over.
I agree that big labels will continue to resist distribution without DRM -- for a time, but that emperor has no clothes. It's only a matter of time before the whole world is aware that DRM doesn't work the way it's supposed to work, and actually breaks things for consumers.
In the mean time, I think there's plenty of space for a site that's focussed on independent artists. The original mp3.com built an impressive audience, and I'm sure Michael has learned a few tricks since then.
The fact that it's voluntary makes me a bit nervous. The fact that the suppliment was this long in coming makes me even more nervous.
I don't think this is a good solution at all. A lot of comments are not spam, and actually contribute cool links. The owners of those sites deserve their pagerank rewards.
Better solutions have been proposed, and implemented, including human interactive tests.
Alternatively, it might be nice if blog software would let the site administrator remove the rel="nofollow" code easily on comments that are not spam.
Slashdot itself is a fairly good example of comment moderation. You could automatically add the rel="nofollow" attribute to low-scoring comments. That would work on high traffic blogs.
I don't know about the US in general, but IT people in Utah seem to struggle with the market here.
I've been releasing all of the music on dilvie.com under the (cc) attribution license for about a year now. Over 100,000 downloads and counting!
6) Direct from artists -- 50%
3) Shareable sources -- 10%
4) Rips -- 38%
1) Unauthorized -- 2%
Where there is a will, there is a way.
It's amazing to me that so many bright people could be so stubborn and blind to possibilities. I know as well as anybody that electronic systems can be insecure. I was a system administrator for a large web hosting company.
I also know that there are ways to secure electronic systems, and that paper voting is certainly not immune to tampering and corruption.
For example. Make the code for the voting systems open-source, and make the data feed in real-time to a wide array of systems designed to collect and validate the data. Each system could be monitored by different watchdog groups, political parties, news organizations, you name it.
Data can be encrypted and signed with a public-key system with a large bit-depth. This by itself doesn't provide perfect security, but combine it with many other layers of security, and I'm sure it would be at least as safe as paper ballots, and less immune to sleight of hand.
I assert that it can be done. Of course I have my concerns -- who doesn't? But I have just as many (more, in fact) with paper ballots.
With a distributed, peer-review system, any attempt at tampering could be discovered early and dealt with. For the super-paranoid, keep the paper ballots as a back-up.
The advantages are clear: More voters, and a wider cross-section of voters. Giving more people voices is what democracy is all about. E-voting should happen.
If people could vote from the comfort of their own computers, there would be a lot more people voting. Those votes would represent a broader cross-section of the population. Hackers are lazy. We all see the problems with e-voting, and want to take the easy road (paper and pens).
The truth is, electronic voting could be more secure than ten witnesses and a secretary counting paper ballots. It's our job as hackers to solve the problem to encourage a better democracy.
Is anybody up to the challenge?
What broke down? How many people have reported the same? Where are their reports? Got any good links to back up your claim? So far, it's pretty content-free.
I, for one, am a very satisfied customer.
Choices like that should be made based on usability tests. I understand that scientific usability tests can be quite expensive (a good test for the best button order might cost ~$1700), but it would be well worth the money spent.
The trouble with open source UI development is that nobody has stepped up and really put their money where their mouth is to fix desktop usability problems that have plagued us for years.
I'm glad somebody else really cares about linux desktop usability, but this is too little, too late, IMO. We should have had a better solution than Mac's Aqua/Quartz open on linux long ago... all with a consistent user experience. Friendly defaults for newbies, but simple option settings for power users.
We should be innovating. We're several years behind on the desktop now and playing catch-up. I think most of the communitiy is apathetic.
Still dreaming of the day...
Note to geeks: Design Matters. Usability Matters. Make it a mantra. Live it.
Uh... how is the sheet fed? Looks like a usability nightmare to me. I'd rather see a telescoping slim-line printer. I'll bet you could get it to fit into a pocket.
The dyson vacuum cleaner.
Seriously.
You're absolutely right that this is not a new idea, and research has been conducted for other types of solutions, as well, including one technology that might hit the public someday that will essentially beam your own private audio stream, tailored to your exact 3d audio needs, directly to your own ears, even in a crowded theater.
I say beam, because it's actually a very concentrated, narrow band of audio, much like a laser is a concentrated, narrow band of light. I personally don't understand how that technology works too well, but I read about it in an issue of Mix Magazine (a trade publication for audio engineers) a few years ago.
My understanding is that there was a working prototype at the time the article was published, but my memory is a bit foggy, so I could be wrong about that.
Anyway, back to the phased array plan -- there has already been a lot of discussion in the audio geek world about making phased-array wallpaper, or even paints and fabrics that are essentially wall-coverings designed to create a realistic 3D audio experience.
Personally, I think most of the world will skip right over the 300 speakers in their living room phase and wait for the paint. Exciting stuff, anyway.
...is a desktop client that will let me download my mail to my own computer (including all the neat features like search and conversations, of course!)
If it offered that, gmail would be about as good as today's obsolete e-mail system could get.
What it really needs to be even better than the current obsolete system can get, is public-key based encryption and authentication to fight spam and preserve a little privacy.
Thank you for the clarification. This post is more informative than the original article. Incidentally, I think MTA authentication is a good idea, but I also think that all e-mail should be authenticated at every step, and encrypted using public-key encryption.
Validation, encryption, and a great anti-spam measure all in one. Is my logic flawed?
It is absolutely essential that standards like this are open and available to everyone (including microsoft's competition). I haven't read the microsoft license yet, but if it indeed creates any type of obstruction for open-source (or any other) software, it should be soundly rejected.
It isn't clear to me from this story or the comments exactly how Microsoft would claim any type of control here. Can somebody clue me in?
I'm sure this was meant as a joke, but we should be careful not to underestimate the sweeping importance of these issues. These arguments about mp3 downloads, movies, books, and other content might seem like a geek issue at first glance, but they really do have profound implications on the direction and development of general politics, commerce and culture in the present and very near future.
This stuff is really important. We shouldn't lose our sense of humor, of course, but we should still respect the subject matter.