Push content (notification of contact request) worked fine over email
Until major email services' spam blockers started treating them as unwanted by default.
and could even be sent as a SMS.
Which costs a lot more to send (as in cents per) than a push over the platform's notification server.
Sites like forums, where all the heavy lifting is done server-side, belong in a web browser.
Long-time users of Usenet would disagree with you. They want forums to be available through NNTP, a protocol specifically designed for threaded discussions that has been around since 1986.
Don't give me an app with alerts that drains battery life and CPU performance 24/7. Just let me bookmark two pages for hourly and 10-day (maybe a third page for the current weather radar)
When Weather.com got all bloated, I switched to Weather.gov.
Why the hell do I need to sacrifice ANY space on my device (aside from maybe a few kb for cookies etc) to do something on my phone/tablet that I do from a browser on my desktop/laptop?
This may happen when a web application uses HTML5 features that Apple has deliberately left out of Apple WebKit, which is the only web browser engine allowed to run on iOS. On an iMac or MacBook, an affected user can switch to a browser that runs Gecko (such as Pale Moon, IceDragon, or Firefox) or Blink (such as Vivaldi, Dragon, or Google Chrome). On iOS, on the other hand, Firefox and Chrome are wrappers around Apple WebKit.
Even Apple who is the most overcharged of overchargers only took $100 to upgrade my iPhone SE from 16GB to 64GB, which makes app space a total non-issue
Except Apple isn't "the most overcharged of overchargers" next to U.S. ISPs. If you have to cut home Internet from your budget in order to afford your cell phone bill, you have to make the best use of a connection that may cost 5 to 10 per GB, and it's impractical for app updates to consume the majority of your monthly data transfer quota.
any restrictions you impose upon it such as requiring specific UI gestures to activate videos could very easily wind up hampering innovation as well.
Internet access subscribers with a high price per gigabyte of data transfer want to hamper what the advertisement industry has referred to as "innovation".
Fundamentally, it's not an entirely dissimilar attitude from those of certain politicians that would suggest that no "normal person" would ever want to use end-to-end encryption
The difference is that politicians want to ban end-to-end encryption in all applications. People who want to block automatic playback of streaming video from web applications, by contrast, do not want to block automatic playback of downloaded video from native applications. There are two differences: the user makes the user gesture when downloading a native application in the first place, and the user can arbitrage the download of a video, downloading it over a connection with a low price per GB and using it later while away from that connection.
What do you plan to do when all of the top 10 results for a particular Google search are pay sites? Would you find it reasonable to pay $4 each, or $40 in all, for a month's subscription to each site just to read one page on each?
How many different domains have you visited in the past 30 days of browser history? Multiply that by $4 for how much each site would expect you to pay per month even for a first page view.
Not at $5 to $10 per GB for a satellite or cellular last mile. [...] Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas.
They're also not served by a lush economy of widely-available, high-subscribership satellite and 4G LTE Internet.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Once subscribership increases, sat and cell carriers tend to make caps even tighter so as not to crowd out new subscribers.
It's possible that they'll get more people like me with text ads
When AdWords first appeared, it was all text ads all the time. The format was effective at first because of its novelty, but banner blindness eventually set in for it. In the long term, the only way to get text ads noticed is to make them "native", or nigh-indistinguishable from the part of a document that isn't advertisement. Lately, Google Search has done this by putting them directly above search results with no distinctive styling other than a discreet "(Ad)" before the URL.
a lot of people will actually stop to ingest an ad for a few dedicated seconds if it's there
The featured article states that the new feature of Google Chrome will block ads that appear for "a few dedicated seconds" before allowing the user to dismiss them.
I mean, why bother having a Turing complete language at all if you are just going to end up restricting what the developer is allowed to do?
First, Turing completeness makes no claim about I/O capability. Second, unlike a computer in the physical world, a Turing machine has unbounded memory and execution time, which are resources that a user may want to conserve.
It's an Intel processor, why can't you put Linux on it? Will Linux not support the Surface hardware?
"Restricted Boot" is a term used by the Free Software Foundation to refer to UEFI Secure Boot shipped in a configuration that a PC's owner cannot disable or customize. A PC with Restricted Boot will refuse to even load GRUB.
The terms under which Microsoft licensed Windows RT to OEMs required devices to use Restricted Boot. Windows 10 S is seen as a spiritual successor to Windows RT because like Windows RT, Windows 10 S can run only applications from Windows Store. I haven't tried any Windows 10 S devices myself, but I'd be surprised if Microsoft allowed GNU/Linux to boot on a PC that ships with Windows 10 S, as opposed to having to pay $50 for an upgrade to Windows 10 Pro to use WSL.
Nowadays, ads even on text articles are often video, which is much larger than that. I'm glad that you agree that they need to die, but they haven't yet.
160MB per month, which is pretty significant at per-GB costs like that, but not for your standard broadband at all (you know, the stuff that keeps getting 200GB caps).
I'll answer that once "your standard broadband" becomes more widely available out in the country. Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas. If everybody living in the country were to move to the city for "your standard broadband", nobody would be left to grow the food that city dwellers eat.
What we need are more text ads.
In theory, I agree. In practice, the banner blindness effect is likely to depress the click-through rate (CTR) of text ads, which diminishes the achievable cost per thousand impressions (CPM).
Then you would be forcing absolutely anything that wanted to play videos into using that gesture... disallowing any kind of custom controls.
After the user has activated the video using the standard gesture, the custom controls would begin to work for the specific video that the user had activated.
What if the video was simply a cut-scene in a game that the person was playing on the website? Should the user be forced to use this "standard" gesture every time the game is playing some video?
First, why is the cut scene a video, as opposed to being made in the game engine? Second, why is a game with FMV cut scenes a web application, as opposed to being a native, downloadable, installable, offline application for Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and whatever other platforms to which the game's fans can crowdfund ports? Third, yes, as this gives the user the opportunity to instead activate "skip" in case the user is behind an ISP that bills for data transfer at the $5 to $10 per GB typical of the satellite and cellular markets.
the play functionality could be activated under program control, and if you simply disallowed that as well, then even when a user *tries* to play a video and clicks an on-screen button to start it, the js code that would otherwise start the video playing would not be able to do so.
Then gate a site's play function behind the same "user gesture" that pop-up blocking uses. I concede that I've seen misuses of "user gesture" where any click on a page will pop up the ads. So don't allow video to start unless the video's center is within the screen and within half a screen size of the center of the control on which the gesture was activated.
The majority of sane people would rather put up with some well-behaved ads
So long as ads remain well-behaved, the banner blindness effect will continue to ensure that their revenue is not sufficient to fund writing and editing articles and serving them to readers.
What workaround for banner blindness would you recommend?
Last I checked, Chrome Web Store extensions ran in Google Chrome for Windows desktop, Google Chrome for macOS, and Google Chrome for GNU/Linux, not Google Chrome for Android/Linux.
If I like a site enough that I value it, I'll give them money if they set up a convenient way for me to do it.
And back in the late 1990s, there was such "a convenient way": federated subscription networks. Back then, they were called "adult verification systems", on the theory that grown-ups can pay for nice things. Someone could subscribe to (say) Adult Check and get access to thousands of participating publishers' sites for $10 per month, with much of that going to the publishers. But now, without any sort of cross-site subscription, a user would end up having to pay $4 or more per month times the number of domains in his browsing history for the past 30 days.
If the HOA contract is written anything like the Director's Rules in Seattle, it probably takes 60 percent of property owners to approve construction, where abstention counts as a no vote, as does a property being vacant.
I asked because I was recently discussing Discord bot hosting with someone who didn't believe me that home server bans were being enforced anywhere. Where can I find instances of "Enough to matter"?
Satellite and cellular often don't count because 10 GB per month is still a slow sustained connection, even if it does happen to be burstable to 10 Mbps or more. It's too slow, for example, to support three PCs in a household automatically downloading a feature update for Windows 10 in the month of its release.
Slashdot Mirror
Push content (notification of contact request) worked fine over email
Until major email services' spam blockers started treating them as unwanted by default.
and could even be sent as a SMS.
Which costs a lot more to send (as in cents per) than a push over the platform's notification server.
Sites like forums, where all the heavy lifting is done server-side, belong in a web browser.
Long-time users of Usenet would disagree with you. They want forums to be available through NNTP, a protocol specifically designed for threaded discussions that has been around since 1986.
Don't give me an app with alerts that drains battery life and CPU performance 24/7. Just let me bookmark two pages for hourly and 10-day (maybe a third page for the current weather radar)
When Weather.com got all bloated, I switched to Weather.gov.
Why the hell do I need to sacrifice ANY space on my device (aside from maybe a few kb for cookies etc) to do something on my phone/tablet that I do from a browser on my desktop/laptop?
This may happen when a web application uses HTML5 features that Apple has deliberately left out of Apple WebKit, which is the only web browser engine allowed to run on iOS. On an iMac or MacBook, an affected user can switch to a browser that runs Gecko (such as Pale Moon, IceDragon, or Firefox) or Blink (such as Vivaldi, Dragon, or Google Chrome). On iOS, on the other hand, Firefox and Chrome are wrappers around Apple WebKit.
Even Apple who is the most overcharged of overchargers only took $100 to upgrade my iPhone SE from 16GB to 64GB, which makes app space a total non-issue
Except Apple isn't "the most overcharged of overchargers" next to U.S. ISPs. If you have to cut home Internet from your budget in order to afford your cell phone bill, you have to make the best use of a connection that may cost 5 to 10 per GB, and it's impractical for app updates to consume the majority of your monthly data transfer quota.
any restrictions you impose upon it such as requiring specific UI gestures to activate videos could very easily wind up hampering innovation as well.
Internet access subscribers with a high price per gigabyte of data transfer want to hamper what the advertisement industry has referred to as "innovation".
Fundamentally, it's not an entirely dissimilar attitude from those of certain politicians that would suggest that no "normal person" would ever want to use end-to-end encryption
The difference is that politicians want to ban end-to-end encryption in all applications. People who want to block automatic playback of streaming video from web applications, by contrast, do not want to block automatic playback of downloaded video from native applications. There are two differences: the user makes the user gesture when downloading a native application in the first place, and the user can arbitrage the download of a video, downloading it over a connection with a low price per GB and using it later while away from that connection.
What do you plan to do when all of the top 10 results for a particular Google search are pay sites? Would you find it reasonable to pay $4 each, or $40 in all, for a month's subscription to each site just to read one page on each?
How many different domains have you visited in the past 30 days of browser history? Multiply that by $4 for how much each site would expect you to pay per month even for a first page view.
Your bandwidth is enormous
Not at $5 to $10 per GB for a satellite or cellular last mile. [...] Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas.
They're also not served by a lush economy of widely-available, high-subscribership satellite and 4G LTE Internet.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Once subscribership increases, sat and cell carriers tend to make caps even tighter so as not to crowd out new subscribers.
It's possible that they'll get more people like me with text ads
When AdWords first appeared, it was all text ads all the time. The format was effective at first because of its novelty, but banner blindness eventually set in for it. In the long term, the only way to get text ads noticed is to make them "native", or nigh-indistinguishable from the part of a document that isn't advertisement. Lately, Google Search has done this by putting them directly above search results with no distinctive styling other than a discreet "(Ad)" before the URL.
a lot of people will actually stop to ingest an ad for a few dedicated seconds if it's there
The featured article states that the new feature of Google Chrome will block ads that appear for "a few dedicated seconds" before allowing the user to dismiss them.
I mean, why bother having a Turing complete language at all if you are just going to end up restricting what the developer is allowed to do?
First, Turing completeness makes no claim about I/O capability. Second, unlike a computer in the physical world, a Turing machine has unbounded memory and execution time, which are resources that a user may want to conserve.
Surface Pro, yes. Surface Laptop, not so much.
It's an Intel processor, why can't you put Linux on it? Will Linux not support the Surface hardware?
"Restricted Boot" is a term used by the Free Software Foundation to refer to UEFI Secure Boot shipped in a configuration that a PC's owner cannot disable or customize. A PC with Restricted Boot will refuse to even load GRUB.
The terms under which Microsoft licensed Windows RT to OEMs required devices to use Restricted Boot. Windows 10 S is seen as a spiritual successor to Windows RT because like Windows RT, Windows 10 S can run only applications from Windows Store. I haven't tried any Windows 10 S devices myself, but I'd be surprised if Microsoft allowed GNU/Linux to boot on a PC that ships with Windows 10 S, as opposed to having to pay $50 for an upgrade to Windows 10 Pro to use WSL.
Ads should be a few kilobytes.
They're not.
If the ad is a 32kB image
Nowadays, ads even on text articles are often video, which is much larger than that. I'm glad that you agree that they need to die, but they haven't yet.
160MB per month, which is pretty significant at per-GB costs like that, but not for your standard broadband at all (you know, the stuff that keeps getting 200GB caps).
I'll answer that once "your standard broadband" becomes more widely available out in the country. Rural areas are more likely to be unserved by fiber, cable, and DSL ISPs than people who live in more densely populated areas. If everybody living in the country were to move to the city for "your standard broadband", nobody would be left to grow the food that city dwellers eat.
What we need are more text ads.
In theory, I agree. In practice, the banner blindness effect is likely to depress the click-through rate (CTR) of text ads, which diminishes the achievable cost per thousand impressions (CPM).
Then you would be forcing absolutely anything that wanted to play videos into using that gesture... disallowing any kind of custom controls.
After the user has activated the video using the standard gesture, the custom controls would begin to work for the specific video that the user had activated.
What if the video was simply a cut-scene in a game that the person was playing on the website? Should the user be forced to use this "standard" gesture every time the game is playing some video?
First, why is the cut scene a video, as opposed to being made in the game engine? Second, why is a game with FMV cut scenes a web application, as opposed to being a native, downloadable, installable, offline application for Windows, GNU/Linux, Android, macOS, iOS, and whatever other platforms to which the game's fans can crowdfund ports? Third, yes, as this gives the user the opportunity to instead activate "skip" in case the user is behind an ISP that bills for data transfer at the $5 to $10 per GB typical of the satellite and cellular markets.
Of course a web without ads could be made to work. First, sites will start rearr...
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the play functionality could be activated under program control, and if you simply disallowed that as well, then even when a user *tries* to play a video and clicks an on-screen button to start it, the js code that would otherwise start the video playing would not be able to do so.
Then gate a site's play function behind the same "user gesture" that pop-up blocking uses. I concede that I've seen misuses of "user gesture" where any click on a page will pop up the ads. So don't allow video to start unless the video's center is within the screen and within half a screen size of the center of the control on which the gesture was activated.
The majority of sane people would rather put up with some well-behaved ads
So long as ads remain well-behaved, the banner blindness effect will continue to ensure that their revenue is not sufficient to fund writing and editing articles and serving them to readers.
What workaround for banner blindness would you recommend?
Your bandwidth is enormous
Not at $5 to $10 per GB for a satellite or cellular last mile. So technically, peak throughput may be "enormous", but not sustained throughput.
Last I checked, Chrome Web Store extensions ran in Google Chrome for Windows desktop, Google Chrome for macOS, and Google Chrome for GNU/Linux, not Google Chrome for Android/Linux.
If I like a site enough that I value it, I'll give them money if they set up a convenient way for me to do it.
And back in the late 1990s, there was such "a convenient way": federated subscription networks. Back then, they were called "adult verification systems", on the theory that grown-ups can pay for nice things. Someone could subscribe to (say) Adult Check and get access to thousands of participating publishers' sites for $10 per month, with much of that going to the publishers. But now, without any sort of cross-site subscription, a user would end up having to pay $4 or more per month times the number of domains in his browsing history for the past 30 days.
GitLab scales great in one respect: I can host a completely isolated instance of gitlab.
Case in point: Build your own GitLab appliance with a Raspberry Pi. I wonder if anyone else has built an appliance to run Savane, the SourceForge fork powering the GNU Savannah repository farm.
If the HOA contract is written anything like the Director's Rules in Seattle, it probably takes 60 percent of property owners to approve construction, where abstention counts as a no vote, as does a property being vacant.
I asked because I was recently discussing Discord bot hosting with someone who didn't believe me that home server bans were being enforced anywhere. Where can I find instances of "Enough to matter"?
When the US Patent and Trademark Office awarded TiVo the so-called time warping patent.
server-prohibition ISPs
To what extent is this actually enforced in the United States?
Satellite and cellular often don't count because 10 GB per month is still a slow sustained connection, even if it does happen to be burstable to 10 Mbps or more. It's too slow, for example, to support three PCs in a household automatically downloading a feature update for Windows 10 in the month of its release.