"Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property."
You didn't really check then did you because this is false.
" Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free.XXX domain)?"
No..XXX is supposed to siphon off porn traffic out of the other tlds in the same way alt.sex took porn out of other usenet groups. It worked for the most part.
"Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't."
It IS voluntary. If people get used to.xxx names they'll get used to them and stuff will have a greater incentive to move out of.com.
If it was a fact it would be a track standard. It's not, it's Don Eastlake's opinion which is why it says "informative". In other words it's not a spec (like say, RFC822) it's an editorial comment. And it's a stupid one filled with FUD.
A lot of his points concern the semanitcs of ".sex" and do not apply to ".xxx"; for example his whining thart birth control may be moved into this "red light district".
Don has his own wacky ideas about TLDS shot down a decade ago and he's just pissed, that's all.
"But what is interesting is who else is against the proposal. I had lunch yesterday with the Communications Director of the trade association of the adult entertainment industry. And they are not in favour of.xxx but very much against it."
There is more than one trade association. One is for it one is against it. Why do you think there is more than one trade association? They don't agree on much.
"Their fears are the opposite of the US Government. They fear.xxx TLD may end up becoming compulsory for adult entertainment websites, with governments then legislating to make it mandatory for such sites to be in.xxx TLD. They also believe credit card companies might refuse to provide services to adult sites which are not in the.xxx TLD which will give the sponros of that TLD de facto control over the entire industry."
This is a GLOBAL DNS. If the US decides to outlaw porn it will not be easy to do, nor relevant to the rest of the world.
One of my clients is a credit card processor and I can tell you with authority you will not have a problem getting credit card services for.xxx domains. In the worst case we simply do it offshore, but currently and I'M SURE most of you are aware, you can buy porn with a credit card in the US.
When you can't buy Penthouse in a 7-11 with a credit card then there might be a problem. Until then, don't pay this FUD any mind.
"We have too many TLDs now. Remember all those stupid TLDs from the last round, like ".museum"? Nobody uses them. "
Once you understand that ICANN was captured by the trademark communiny it becomes cleat why they picked the absolute lamest of TLDs to go forward. So people like you would come to the conclusion you did. Of course the names they picked were stupid. The good ones still sit there. Oh, no, sorry, they don't according to ICANN they don't exist. Never mind they existed before ICANN did.
ICANN's mandate is to preseeve "stability of the Internet". Whenever a dictator assumes power the reason given is always "to preserve stability". That's really what they say. Check it out for youself.
That isn't the issue. Can ICANN get it into the US Government controlled root servers, THAT'S the issue.
They can't.
Here's what really happened..XXX has been around for a very very long time. The prehistory can be told later, but the point is it was proposed to ICANN, they approved it and they submitted it to the Department of Commerce to rubber stamp as ICANN only makes "recommendations". The DoC said no. Why?
Wellll, turns out a right wing group who had the ear of Bush had trundled into Karl Rove's offifce about that time and had three "action items": 1) No gay marriage, 2) No stem cell research and 3) no.XXX.
Rove read the list and said "anout that third one", made a phone call and the newly appointed head of DoC stepped on it.
ICANN bullshitted and suggested it needed fruther study by world governments.
Because as everybody knows, the naming of hosts on the network has to be ratified if all the worlds governments. Never mind the DNS apparantly worked ok for over a decade without any world governments knowing the network even existed.
ICANN is a very expensive single-point-of-failure. A choke-hold on the entire net. And now you're watching it in action. Or inaction.
The US governemnt will never let go of it's control of the root, ever. When it came dangerously close to looking like the warring facitons of the DNS wars of 1996 would actually agree to settle their differences and cooperate, that movement was torpedod by the man who would later be the head of ICANN. Old military officers never really retire it seems.
You might ask why the US government still has control of the Internet domain name system. Good question.
Recall that it was the genius of Steve Wolff that the NSF backbone was turned over to private industry and the commercial internet was born. I did ask him why he didn't do the DNS and IP space as well. "I forgot about that; it didn't seem important at the time" was the answer.
It's long been joked that the seventh layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack is the "political layer" and it's no longer a joke. The technical administration of Internet names and numbers should not have any politicians in the loop.
They have the laws of their own countried to do what they want - Jon Postel recognized this, hence the requirement that a cctld administrator be a resident of that country - but ICANN made a deal with the devil, in a nutshell "if we recognize you and your government will you recognize us as authoritative over the internet" an that was it, Pandoras box was opened. And now the goverments of the world hold the internet by the nuts.
My day in the sun was as the formation of the DNSO within ICANN in Berlin way back when. It was suggested by the ICANN board that a "Government Advisoty Baord" (GAC) was needed by consensus. When I got my 2.5 minutes at the mike I asked for a show of hands for who thought this was a good idea. Thirteen people (out of about 800) put their hands up and the ones I could see were all government poeple. There is a realvideo (sic) archive of this at the Berkman Centre for Law and Technology site.
The irony is ICANN is not supposed to set policy, it's supposed to measure "community consensus" and make recommendations. But, the way they change the bylaws to suit themselves that may not even be true any more.
" any non-arbitrary relationship between the proposed.xxx TLD and it's content"
This is probably the exception that proves the rule:-)
There are special cases where the syntas defines the semantics (.int comes to miond,.gov does not) but, still, it's not possible to strictly tie the two. What you say on your domain application to get a name may not be true an hour after you go live. And if somebody noticed there is at least one that breaks the "rule" of the TLD then for all intents and pusposes it's broken. Either a system, is consitant or it's not..xxx has a long long history. it's 5 years older than ICANN. It would make a great book.
" His solution would only work in a web that's fundamentally different to the one we're using"
Right. I'm interested in http over TCP/IP. Sir Tim can go make his own version of happynet and see who uses it.
""I don't think we've gained anything from the.biz or.info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"
at least someone realises this.
If i had my way i'd redo the whole domain system; the distinctions between TLDs are totally irrelevent these days. That or enforce the distinctions, so that only ISPs can have.nets, only charities.orgs, etc etc."
The purpose of a domain name is to make it easy for poeple. Computers don't care, they use IP addresses and the DNS is simpy a way to make easy to rememeber names that are automatically converted to IP addresses by software.
There is no taxonomy or more correctly, ontology, behind domain names. They're arbitrary strings of characters. There is no meaning whatsoever in the TLD, that's sad articfact of the way things were; they should not ideally have any meaning.
NSI under the original Internic cooperative agreement tried for many years to enforce the.NET rule of "internet infrastructural addresses only". It was impossible. Poeple who wanted to cheat the system always found ways and the harder NSI made it the more difficult it was for legitimate users to get.NET addresses.
TLDS should be meaningful, but arbitrary. And pretending any sort of classification system can me made out of it belies two decades of expereince with the way we name computers on the network.
Sir Tim may be a Sir but he's dead wrong about this expansion of tld space. Would you find it easier to remember (and yes, there are times you'll rememeber and type in, instead of looking something up in a search engine) company.biz or perhaps company.info because that was available when perhapes the only thing available in.COM was "i-my-e-companynicheproduct.com"?
Typically the internet solves problems of scarcity (.com names) by creating new resources, not by regulating old ones.
Trademark laws exist to protect the consumer, not the producer.
If you buy a brown fizzy beverage, and if it says "cocacola" you should have some sort of confidence you're buying CocaCola brand of fizzy soft drink.
Is there some consumer confusion that your "superhero" is not a DC or Marvel brand of superhero? To say nothing of the fact if don't activly protect your mark you lose it.
Goog sez: "Results 1 - 50 of about 7,330,000 for "superhero""
If Marvel and DC jointly own the trademark on "superhero" I'd be saying the words "Anti trust". A LOT. And ignoring the C&D letter.
I love FreeBSD and have used it for a decade exclusively. But the number of times the ports tree has worked... oy.
I install precompiled binaries... and pray. Then I may or may not compile from sources. Sometimes this is utterly flawless (msql) and sometimes it takes a) forever, b) a financial contribution to the authors current hangout and c) a lot of questions. I'm thinking of SSL here. I've had access to the sources to unix since it was born and they don't hold a candle to the complexity of the bitch that is SSL. Talk about learing experience. Although I do think it's cool that all browsers hide a large number of cert errors.
"How many people have lost more than $2500 (net) in, say, two years of gambling?"
Hahaha no.
In 85 or so I went to Lost Wages; my wife at the time had been there for a week for a national bridge tournament. I'm an *not* a card player. Coerced by the crow to gamble, I followed them and played blackjack. In half an hour I'd converted $60 to $120 and quit. Stopped right there. I'd made enough for dinner. Everybody said I was nuts to end in the middle of "a roll". I took that to mean "why are you stopping while you still have monye left?". That's almost as dumb a question as "why did you split those queens" which seemed to make sense to me (Two chances to win!) but to them, or the pit boss who came over to watch me. Closely. I won one lost the other.
I ate my free dinner that night, then next morning tried again. Lost $60 in about 5 minutes. I never gambled again.
More on topic, some guy in a neighboring burg had been trying to sell his place for 180K and got no nibbles. Seeme the planned mega farm for uh, pigs, had put a damper on real estate sales. A friend of his "sold his place on the internet" for 180K US not CDN (at a time when that actuallymeant something) and this couple from Atlanta got their idyllic cottage on a lake, lot trees. And uh, the know nothing about no steenking pig farm.
I believe the phrase theie grasping for is "due diligence"
Dosn't work in Opera. Ok, that happens. Tried (the latest) IE. IE spits up an error message ("web undefined") and then takes forever and doesn't do anything.
Do they actually try this stuff?
How freaking hard is it to have one searchbox return a page of text? Or did they misspell "lie.com".
Somebody regster "dysfunctinalpieceofshit.com" and alias to to live. Truth in advertising.
"You make it sound like being paperless is the goal."
Well, it does save on ink.
When I learned this stuff (c/unix) there were no books, except the K+R books so I'm used to learing by hacking. I find books tedious and annoyingly slow. I can learn things faster by doing than reading and have been doing this long enough that I'm generally aware of common pitfalls.
Other than K+R 1st edition I did buy an O'reilly book once, for one page had some answers that at the time google could not produce.
I realize the book is probbaly great for a lot of people. AJAX seems to be the current buzzword in job ads.
It's just call back functions for the web; most good programmers could pick this up in an hour. I looked at the 30 second tutiorial and only needed to understand the syntax, it's obvious what it does. That took 11 seconds not 30.
Gawd, no kidding. I'm typing this on a 19" panasonic monitor, 2 years old, at 1800 x whatever I got for $5 at goodwill. I bought a $4 really nice server with a P4-75 and put in modern guts I got for $100 at a used computer store, some $1 fans, some $2 video card with a fan on it and an ultra2-scsi3 raid array that set me back a whopping $70 off ebay.
$300 gets you a new computer all decked out in these parts, but the cases are so cheap and thin and razor sharo (ouch) I'd rather mod old stuff, where old is a relative thing.
$500. Make me laugh. I've bought running cosmetically near-perfect BMW's for that much.
"Ringer volume or DND on a phone. "Do not Disturb" or "Exit" in an IM client. Plain old leaving email until there is time... All of these emulate the closed office door. Not to say that these can always be used, but if you make yourself look busy, people tend to leave you to it. If you never let a call go to voicemail, leave your IM client Available and assign yourself a priority to respond directly to incoming email, rest assured you will be bothered."
None of these actually work. Never underestimate the persistance of people.
I was 13 in 1970 when I became a hard core computer freak (IBM 1130) and I hoped it would make life easier. All I see these days is people wasting time doing things they could have done by hand.
I got a book for xmas. It was $20 and I wanted a different one that was $22. I went to the counter with the two books and a receipt. I was told I had to pay another $5.73.
"That can't be right".
"The cash regsiter said so. It's right".
"Do the math in your head, that cannot be right"
"I don't know how".
"Do you have a calulator?"
"No"
"Pencil and paper"
"I don't know how to do that".
Now, this was in Beverly Hills and there was a certain expectation of a greater than room temperatue IQ here.
Finally she got pissed off at me, called the manager to have me ejected, explaied the problem to him and his words, shot back instantly, were "that can't be right", It should be two bucks and tax. Duh. Double duh.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been someplace tyring to buy something for $2 and have exact change in my hand, tax and all only to wait for five freaking minutes while they convincd the computer (cash regsiter) to tell them how much I owe. Like tax on two bucks is rocket science.
Remember when the old guy at the hardware store would tell you as soon as you walked to the counter how much you owe? Now look at who is waiting for who.
Next time you're waiting in a store, keep saying to yourself "computers have made our lives easier".
Don't get me wrong, they have for some things. But we have a long long way to go yet.
Although I'm a FreeBSD fascist I beleve Brian Reid's statement that it and Linux will converge. My observation is, from people I know that are Linux freaks but still use windows is because of, in every case, of the lack of a Photoshop for linux. That would, I think, render this whole discussion moot.
It would have to be free and it would have to be good. What's out there now does not seem to cut it.
Get to work you lazy pricks. That episode of DS9 will be on again. (and again and again and again)
Slashdot Mirror
"Last time I checked, domain names were treated like property."
.XXX domain)?"
.XXX is supposed to siphon off porn traffic out of the other tlds in the same way alt.sex took porn out of other usenet groups. It worked for the most part.
.xxx names they'll get used to them and stuff will have a greater incentive to move out of .com.
You didn't really check then did you because this is false.
" Suppose I own hotsweatymonkeysex.com (which I don't, unfortunately). Could they force me to give up my domain name without compensation (other than a free
No.
"Given the logistics of it, I could only see this working on a voluntary basis, which is to say that it wouldn't."
It IS voluntary. If people get used to
"Get the facts"
If it was a fact it would be a track standard. It's not, it's Don Eastlake's opinion which is why it says "informative". In other words it's not a spec (like say, RFC822) it's an editorial comment. And it's a stupid one filled with FUD.
A lot of his points concern the semanitcs of ".sex" and do not apply to ".xxx"; for example his whining thart birth control may be moved into this "red light district".
Don has his own wacky ideas about TLDS shot down a decade ago and he's just pissed, that's all.
"But what is interesting is who else is against the proposal. I had lunch yesterday with the Communications Director of the trade association of the adult entertainment industry. And they are not in favour of .xxx but very much against it."
.xxx TLD may end up becoming compulsory for adult entertainment websites, with governments then legislating to make it mandatory for such sites to be in .xxx TLD. They also believe credit card companies might refuse to provide services to adult sites which are not in the .xxx TLD which will give the sponros of that TLD de facto control over the entire industry."
.xxx domains. In the worst case we simply do it offshore, but currently and I'M SURE most of you are aware, you can buy porn with a credit card in the US.
There is more than one trade association. One is for it one is against it. Why do you think there is more than one trade association? They don't agree on much.
"Their fears are the opposite of the US Government. They fear
This is a GLOBAL DNS. If the US decides to outlaw porn it will not be easy to do, nor relevant to the rest of the world.
One of my clients is a credit card processor and I can tell you with authority you will not have a problem getting credit card services for
When you can't buy Penthouse in a 7-11 with a credit card then there might be a problem. Until then, don't pay this FUD any mind.
"We have too many TLDs now. Remember all those stupid TLDs from the last round, like ".museum"? Nobody uses them. "
Once you understand that ICANN was captured by the trademark communiny it becomes cleat why they picked the absolute lamest of TLDs to go forward. So people like you would come to the conclusion you did. Of course the names they picked were stupid. The good ones still sit there. Oh, no, sorry, they don't according to ICANN they don't exist. Never mind they existed before ICANN did.
ICANN's mandate is to preseeve "stability of the Internet". Whenever a dictator assumes power the reason given is always "to preserve stability". That's really what they say. Check it out for youself.
"Why do we need a .xxx domain anyway?"
.XXX has been around for a very very long time. The prehistory can be told later, but the point is it was proposed to ICANN, they approved it and they submitted it to the Department of Commerce to rubber stamp as ICANN only makes "recommendations". The DoC said no. Why?
.XXX.
That isn't the issue. Can ICANN get it into the US Government controlled root servers, THAT'S the issue.
They can't.
Here's what really happened.
Wellll, turns out a right wing group who had the ear of Bush had trundled into Karl Rove's offifce about that time and had three "action items": 1) No gay marriage, 2) No stem cell research and 3) no
Rove read the list and said "anout that third one", made a phone call and the newly appointed head of DoC stepped on it.
ICANN bullshitted and suggested it needed fruther study by world governments.
Because as everybody knows, the naming of hosts on the network has to be ratified if all the worlds governments. Never mind the DNS apparantly worked ok for over a decade without any world governments knowing the network even existed.
ICANN is a very expensive single-point-of-failure. A choke-hold on the entire net. And now you're watching it in action. Or inaction.
The US governemnt will never let go of it's control of the root, ever. When it came dangerously close to looking like the warring facitons of the DNS wars of 1996 would actually agree to settle their differences and cooperate, that movement was torpedod by the man who would later be the head of ICANN. Old military officers never really retire it seems.
You might ask why the US government still has control of the Internet domain name system. Good question.
Recall that it was the genius of Steve Wolff that the NSF backbone was turned over to private industry and the commercial internet was born. I did ask him why he didn't do the DNS and IP space as well. "I forgot about that; it didn't seem important at the time" was the answer.
It's long been joked that the seventh layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack is the "political layer" and it's no longer a joke. The technical administration of Internet names and numbers should not have any politicians in the loop.
They have the laws of their own countried to do what they want - Jon Postel recognized this, hence the requirement that a cctld administrator be a resident of that country - but ICANN made a deal with the devil, in a nutshell "if we recognize you and your government will you recognize us as authoritative over the internet" an that was it, Pandoras box was opened. And now the goverments of the world hold the internet by the nuts.
My day in the sun was as the formation of the DNSO within ICANN in Berlin way back when. It was suggested by the ICANN board that a "Government Advisoty Baord" (GAC) was needed by consensus. When I got my 2.5 minutes at the mike I asked for a show of hands for who thought this was a good idea. Thirteen people (out of about 800) put their hands up and the ones I could see were all government poeple. There is a realvideo (sic) archive of this at the Berkman Centre for Law and Technology site.
The irony is ICANN is not supposed to set policy, it's supposed to measure "community consensus" and make recommendations. But, the way they change the bylaws to suit themselves that may not even be true any more.
" any non-arbitrary relationship between the proposed .xxx TLD and it's content"
:-)
.gov does not) but, still, it's not possible to strictly tie the two. What you say on your domain application to get a name may not be true an hour after you go live. And if somebody noticed there is at least one that breaks the "rule" of the TLD then for all intents and pusposes it's broken. Either a system, is consitant or it's not. .xxx has a long long history. it's 5 years older than ICANN. It would make a great book.
This is probably the exception that proves the rule
There are special cases where the syntas defines the semantics (.int comes to miond,
" His solution would only work in a web that's fundamentally different to the one we're using"
Right. I'm interested in http over TCP/IP. Sir Tim can go make his own version of happynet and see who uses it.
""I don't think we've gained anything from the .biz or .info domains - only that a few companies have benefited financially"
.nets, only charities .orgs, etc etc."
.NET rule of "internet infrastructural addresses only". It was impossible. Poeple who wanted to cheat the system always found ways and the harder NSI made it the more difficult it was for legitimate users to get .NET addresses.
.COM was "i-my-e-companynicheproduct.com"?
at least someone realises this.
If i had my way i'd redo the whole domain system; the distinctions between TLDs are totally irrelevent these days.
That or enforce the distinctions, so that only ISPs can have
The purpose of a domain name is to make it easy for poeple. Computers don't care, they use IP addresses and the DNS is simpy a way to make easy to rememeber names that are automatically converted to IP addresses by software.
There is no taxonomy or more correctly, ontology, behind domain names. They're arbitrary strings of characters. There is no meaning whatsoever in the TLD, that's sad articfact of the way things were; they should not ideally have any meaning.
NSI under the original Internic cooperative agreement tried for many years to enforce the
TLDS should be meaningful, but arbitrary. And pretending any sort of classification system can me made out of it belies two decades of expereince with the way we name computers on the network.
Sir Tim may be a Sir but he's dead wrong about this expansion of tld space. Would you find it easier to remember (and yes, there are times you'll rememeber and type in, instead of looking something up in a search engine) company.biz or perhaps company.info because that was available when perhapes the only thing available in
Typically the internet solves problems of scarcity (.com names) by creating new resources, not by regulating old ones.
"Have you seen the members?"
Yeah. Some of them are quite nice in real life. Lotta bad pictures though.
Somebody needs to explain to the site owner why sending a login and password by email is clear text is a bad idea though. He doesn't get it.
'Course, for 10K a day I wouldn't fucking get it either.
I stull can't get live.com, their google-killer to work. At least I get to wait a year until I can't get their iPod killer to work.
Oh well. Back to trying to get windoze to work.
Why do I get the impression that if Microsoft invented sex then your genitals would simply exlode if you became aroused?
" Isn't the term "Super Hero" pretty generic"
Trademark laws exist to protect the consumer, not the producer.
If you buy a brown fizzy beverage, and if it says "cocacola" you should have some sort of confidence you're buying CocaCola brand of fizzy soft drink.
Is there some consumer confusion that your "superhero" is not a DC or Marvel brand of superhero? To say nothing of the fact if don't activly protect your mark you lose it.
Goog sez: "Results 1 - 50 of about 7,330,000 for "superhero""
If Marvel and DC jointly own the trademark on "superhero" I'd be saying the words "Anti trust". A LOT. And ignoring the C&D letter.
"Can someone tell me why laptops don't come with touch screens as standard equipment?"
Only if you tell me first how long you expect you LCD screen to last.
I love FreeBSD and have used it for a decade exclusively. But the number of times the ports tree has worked... oy.
I install precompiled binaries... and pray. Then I may or may not compile from sources. Sometimes this is utterly flawless (msql) and sometimes it takes a) forever, b) a financial contribution to the authors current hangout and c) a lot of questions. I'm thinking of SSL here. I've had access to the sources to unix since it was born and they don't hold a candle to the complexity of the bitch that is SSL. Talk about learing experience. Although I do think it's cool that all browsers hide a large number of cert errors.
"Obviously, not everyone agrees with you..."
I must be dense. I have no idea what point is being made here other than two closely related flavours of unix have some minor differences.
In related news, water is wet, air is free and the sun will come up tomorrow.
"How many people have lost more than $2500 (net) in, say, two years of gambling?"
Hahaha no.
In 85 or so I went to Lost Wages; my wife at the time had been there for a week for a national bridge tournament. I'm an *not* a card player. Coerced by the crow to gamble, I followed them and played blackjack. In half an hour I'd converted $60 to $120 and quit. Stopped right there. I'd made enough for dinner. Everybody said I was nuts to end in the middle of "a roll". I took that to mean "why are you stopping while you still have monye left?". That's almost as dumb a question as "why did you split those queens" which seemed to make sense to me (Two chances to win!) but to them, or the pit boss who came over to watch me. Closely. I won one lost the other.
I ate my free dinner that night, then next morning tried again. Lost $60 in about 5 minutes. I never gambled again.
More on topic, some guy in a neighboring burg had been trying to sell his place for 180K and got no nibbles. Seeme the planned mega farm for uh, pigs, had put a damper on real estate sales. A friend of his "sold his place on the internet" for 180K US not CDN (at a time when that actuallymeant something) and this couple from Atlanta got their idyllic cottage on a lake, lot trees. And uh, the know nothing about no steenking pig farm.
I believe the phrase theie grasping for is "due diligence"
Dosn't work in Opera. Ok, that happens. Tried (the latest) IE. IE spits up an error message ("web undefined") and then takes forever and doesn't do anything.
Do they actually try this stuff?
How freaking hard is it to have one searchbox return a page of text? Or did they misspell "lie.com".
Somebody regster "dysfunctinalpieceofshit.com" and alias to to live. Truth in advertising.
I hope they looked at DJBDNS and QMAIL.
All software should be that good.
If they found bugs in Bind, I'm not iterested in the rest of the report. That's just pork.
"You make it sound like being paperless is the goal."
Well, it does save on ink.
When I learned this stuff (c/unix) there were no books, except the K+R books so I'm used to learing by hacking. I find books tedious and annoyingly slow. I can learn things faster by doing than reading and have been doing this long enough that I'm generally aware of common pitfalls.
Other than K+R 1st edition I did buy an O'reilly book once, for one page had some answers that at the time google could not produce.
I realize the book is probbaly great for a lot of people. AJAX seems to be the current buzzword in job ads.
Oh it's a shitty example. Maybe it's ad javascipt. That's ok I write terrible HTML. But it works. On all platforms in all browsers, even lynx.
It can't be that bad of a tutorial as I actually added Web 2.0 AJAX functionality leveraging legacy infrastructurte.
In other words I added a quick hack to an exising webware app of mine in under 5 minutes.
Sincerely,
Dilbert
"Call me an old fogie (I'm not THAT old!) but I prefer real books in a lot of circumstances.".
You're not old you just haven't gone paperless yet. It is difficult.
If you already know cgi programming and don't know ajax all you need is this:
Rasmus' 30 second AJAX tutorial.
It's just call back functions for the web; most good programmers could pick this up in an hour. I looked at the 30 second tutiorial and only needed to understand the syntax, it's obvious what it does. That took 11 seconds not 30.
Fixed in Web 2.1
Gawd, no kidding. I'm typing this on a 19" panasonic monitor, 2 years old, at 1800 x whatever I got for $5 at goodwill. I bought a $4 really nice server with a P4-75 and put in modern guts I got for $100 at a used computer store, some $1 fans, some $2 video card with a fan on it and an ultra2-scsi3 raid array that set me back a whopping $70 off ebay.
$300 gets you a new computer all decked out in these parts, but the cases are so cheap and thin and razor sharo (ouch) I'd rather mod old stuff, where old is a relative thing.
$500. Make me laugh. I've bought running cosmetically near-perfect BMW's for that much.
"Ringer volume or DND on a phone. "Do not Disturb" or "Exit" in an IM client. Plain old leaving email until there is time... All of these emulate the closed office door. Not to say that these can always be used, but if you make yourself look busy, people tend to leave you to it. If you never let a call go to voicemail, leave your IM client Available and assign yourself a priority to respond directly to incoming email, rest assured you will be bothered."
None of these actually work. Never underestimate the persistance of people.
I was 13 in 1970 when I became a hard core computer freak (IBM 1130) and I hoped it would make life easier. All I see these days is people wasting time doing things they could have done by hand.
I got a book for xmas. It was $20 and I wanted a different one that was $22. I went to the counter with the two books and a receipt. I was told I had to pay another $5.73.
"That can't be right".
"The cash regsiter said so. It's right".
"Do the math in your head, that cannot be right"
"I don't know how".
"Do you have a calulator?"
"No"
"Pencil and paper"
"I don't know how to do that".
Now, this was in Beverly Hills and there was a certain expectation of a greater than room temperatue IQ here.
Finally she got pissed off at me, called the manager to have me ejected, explaied the problem to him and his words, shot back instantly, were "that can't be right", It should be two bucks and tax. Duh. Double duh.
I've lost track of the number of times I've been someplace tyring to buy something for $2 and have exact change in my hand, tax and all only to wait for five freaking minutes while they convincd the computer (cash regsiter) to tell them how much I owe. Like tax on two bucks is rocket science.
Remember when the old guy at the hardware store would tell you as soon as you walked to the counter how much you owe? Now look at who is waiting for who.
Next time you're waiting in a store, keep saying to yourself "computers have made our lives easier".
Don't get me wrong, they have for some things. But we have a long long way to go yet.
"The significance of his remarks was missed because of his effusive and eccentric delivery... coming out on the Sybian and other devices."
Cann'tt yyoouu jjuusttt feeeeell tthhee lloovvee..
"It would look an awful lot like the internet we have now."
It's called UUCP.
The internet swallowed it whole.
(there is no cabal)
Although I'm a FreeBSD fascist I beleve Brian Reid's statement that it and Linux will converge. My observation is, from people I know that are Linux freaks but still use windows is because of, in every case, of the lack of a Photoshop for linux. That would, I think, render this whole discussion moot.
It would have to be free and it would have to be good. What's out there now does not seem to cut it.
Get to work you lazy pricks. That episode of DS9 will be on again. (and again and again and again)