Actually, they currently do offer support contracts for $29 a year IIRC. I don't think they want to go OSS, but they say they will make the money off of partners and support.
I'm also not sure that Opera Software feels they'd gain anything from going OSS that they didn't already get from going free as in beer. And I think they may really want to keep their code secret so they don't give away how they do the mobile aspect where much of their money comes from.
I really think that there are an equal number of people who use Opera precicely because there aren't extensions, and who don't want to deal with the issues with those.
As to the IE marketshare, I would argue there are also an equal number of people who wouldn't know an extension if it bit them in the @ss, so it's not a feature for them either.
I personally think that there are more than enough users who either actively don't want extensions, or who are ambivilent regarding them that Opera can have a viable marketshare without extensions.
I'm pretty sure it's still a business decision - how do they get any revenue from ad based profit sharing via google etc, if the users all block the ads?
That said, even if Opera won't make a right click ad blocker, AdMuncher makes a great one, and there is a user made one in the forums as well.
I just wish more of the pre-installed stuff was useful rather than crap. Now, I don't have much experiance with dells, but I do work with most retail PCs in the US, doing setups for customers. And the HPs are nuts - they have AOL AntiSpyware, Norton Internet Security with antispyware, McAffee AV + AntiSpyware and sometimes another antispyware program all installed and running on first boot - and all 30-60 day trials no less.
How the machine even works right with so many conflicting resident AV and AS I don't know. Anyway, we end up having to take about 30 minutes uninstalling them all (as Norton doesn't upgrade right to retail discs (which is the only preinstalled AV we also sell retail for install) to then install whatever retail AV they want (Usually NAV or Trend Micro) and Anti-Spyware (usually SpySweeper).
Now, it's great to bundle software, but I wish they'd actually bundle software rather than a bunch of trials that will make people think they have a product, but actually dies in a month or two.
Software used to be a selling point on PCs, I wish the software bundles were again. Instead they are mostly crap that slows down the PC or expires quickly.
That is an interesting issue I've talked about before.
Logically, there seems to be a finite amount of work needed to be done in the world. The day the equivelent of the replicator becomes available, when physical production becomes as easy and cheap as digital production currently is, it seems to me that capitalism will fail.
At that point, there seem to be enough phianthripists that money would become irrelevent. There would seem to be no need to buy anything save land. That would likely put us back to some sort of fudalism...
When the only thing that is scarce is space, then that would have to become money...
Anyway, beyond that - if you could get anything physical you wanted with the same effort many slashdotters can get music or movies today, then there will be a major shift.
But worse, there are more and more people being born all the time - but the productivity enhancements keep multiplying as well. One person can (using modern technology) easily do the job of 5 or more people of 50 years ago. This is not even taking into consideration the robotic issue above, where machines make human workers unnecessary. When say 1,000 people plus machines can do all the work needed to provide anyone anything they want (save land I would think) then how does capitalism function?
What do you do when there is no work that needs to be done?
Yeah, when compressing files, I'm basically limited to.zip for most people, cause WinXP will handle that. For the savvy, I might get to use.rar for a little better compression.
Has anyone heard of WinUHA yet? That is supposed to be pretty good, and I'd not mind testing out other archivers, as long as the time savings on transferring smaller files aren't overtaken by the compression/decompression time. Though, again, all these things are useless if no one can uncompress them.
I'm sorry, but 18-23 movies isn't even one movie a night. And there are at least some users (like my DAD) who are retired, and like to have something to do during the day when everyone else is at work/school/out whatever. The 5 out a month barely supplies enough to keep him in stuff to watch unless he gets the TV series discs which have ~5hrs of content, so 2-3 days per disk rather than one for movies.
And for many rural people (who seem to be a large market segment) we don't get much over TV, and the quality is random - sometimes quite snowy. Also, like many others I prefer no commercials, so I like to watch DVDs of a show vs broadcast. And watching one TV episode a night can eat up the slack (I mean, with several people in a household - you might need 2 discs at a time, due to different tastes and more than one TV/DVD player in a house).
So the idea that 18-23 DVDs a month is for piracy is certainly not necessarily the case, especially for a household of 4. Now if you are a single guy with a full time job, and you're doing that you either have no life beyond work and DVDs, or you are pirating them as fast as you can.
But there are many reasons you could turn around 18-23 DVDs in a month as listed above. Especially if one family member (if not all) are somewhat TV addicted(not unusual in the US).
Oh, I don't know - it's considered wrong to read satallite transmissions that penetrate your house just because they are sent by DirectTV... And apparently it's "hacking" to use an open wireless access point, even though it's radiating out into the street...
With that logic, Gieger counters, Thermal imaging and really anything aside from listening without technical assistance would be a no-no.
Well, how about heurestics - has anyone tested them in various AV programs? I know that NOD32 is supposed to have very effective heurestics. And what about plain old frequent updates, like KAV? I mean, 8 or more updates a day means you're never really 0d, and might get 0hr...
Interestingly enough, they could also likely just *license* presto from Opera for far less than attempting a hostile takeover. Again, I can't necessarily see why they'd want to, but it'd be interesting if they did some sort of presto based internet renderer for security, and Trident based render for local apps... Sort of like Netscape 8.
Well, to fan the flames: 1) IE7 blogs have already said to webmasters - get the beta, fix your sites, because it will *break* if you just use IE6 rendering as a test. To they already will be breaking IE6 only sites. Sometimes massively.
2) MS hates opensource. If they used FF, they would not be able to do any lock in / embrace and extend. They can't control the source code, and worse - if they change it, they have to give that back.
3) Finally, has MS ever really cared if some change they makes creates problems for other people?
All that said, I can't see MS buying Opera. First, I don't think Opera would sell, second, MS really really believes in there being no boundry in the UI between the web and your PC. Stupid as that seems to me, it has gotten them huge market share, and created lots of jobs for AV companies and the like.
Well, this may be unpopular - but I find that not clearly separating certain tasks leads to confusion and helps people be phished.
For instance, many people aren't aware that typing www.foobar.com is fundamentally different than typing c:\mystuff in the explorer address bar. One is local, and entirely contained on your machine - no one else is involved. The other involves contacting remote machines run by unknown persons with unknown motives.
The way IE and Konqurer work, there is not an obvious UI difference between going to the computer analog of your living room, and going to the analog of Times Square. So people can be phished because of this.
Beyond the conceptual issues, there are some security issues. Having the filemanager also be an HTML renderer (or able to call those code blocks) opens you to issues where an exploit in the HTML renderer will allow "expected" dll calls to the filesystem manager and have allowed local file access via websites. Moreso, it allows *write* access.
I'm a big fan of sandboxing though - limiting everything to read/write access to just what they need.
What about for personal e-mail servers running via DynDns.org for DNS? Currently I can run my e-mail server for free, and get the benefits of IMAP and other features without paying extra fees to various organizations. I do have to relay outgoing mail through my ISPs mail servers, but otherwise it works fine.
Personally, I think limiting to two browsers is as bad as one. Just write a site to standards, and let the users use the browser and UI they like. I hate web sites telling me I can't use the UA of my choice.
As long as there is no protectionist policies - what's wrong with people refusing to do business with a private company? I mean, if people are willing to pay more because they dislike Wal-mart for whatever reason, isn't that basically capitalism in action?
Either Wal-Mart will write off those people, change some things they do, or do some different marketing to try and get them back.
A company is not a country. When you work for a company, you're making a free exchange of your services for their money, and either of you is fully entitled to stop that relationship whenever you want, unless there are additional contract terms that apply.
The problem with that is really two fold. One, you have employees who *don't care* about the company. They are more likely to cut corners, or tell potential customers that they might get a better deal elsewhere, or just slack off.
Heck, where I currently work, I do what is in my contract by the letter. It's a retail position, so it often means my standing around in my department, even when nearby departments are swamped. I'm happy to stand there and be paid, and otherwise just talk with other employees or watch other employees work.
Heck, it's not in my contract to help them in another department. And, my manager is fine with this, because it's what his contract stipulates...
Now, if I cared about the company, felt that it succeeding meant anything to me, I might go help out the other employees - and make the company do better as a result. When it's slow, I might do other work so the company doesn't need to, say, hire another person to do stocking or something.
But they don't pay me enough, or offer any benefits, or any real chance of advancement, so I really don't care. I can find hundereds of retail jobs, so if they go under, it really doesn't matter to me.
Two, if someone hired me at another retail store, I'd be more than happy to tell them some ideas based on where I currently work. Wal-Mart loses managers all the time to other stores and the other stores get the benefit of Wal-Mart training... None of this is against my contract, I don't have a non-compete in a line retail job...
The point is you won't get very much out of employees if all you want is by the contract, and you don't care about community or loyalty. You'll have a bunch of people who will stand around doing nothing for hours getting paid till the manager comes and tells them to go home early or the store closes. And you'll have people who do the minimum necessary to not be fired because they don't care.
And for all sorts of reasons I'd think you'd at least want your employees to care if your company stays in business.
Yea, but does this mean Linksys et al need to license the patents cause someone might check their e-mail over Wi-Fi? That doesn't make any sense to me.
I can see it being novel to develop a new network technology - but running an internet app over TCP/IP on any layer 0 technology just seems obvious to me... Certainly not any sort of deal.
Actually, it's not even that - once you have a data network, running any service that currently runs on a data network on that new data network seems obvious to me... I mean, e-mail over cat5 isn't really revolutionary compared to over phone line... How is this any different?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, they currently do offer support contracts for $29 a year IIRC. I don't think they want to go OSS, but they say they will make the money off of partners and support.
I'm also not sure that Opera Software feels they'd gain anything from going OSS that they didn't already get from going free as in beer. And I think they may really want to keep their code secret so they don't give away how they do the mobile aspect where much of their money comes from.
I really think that there are an equal number of people who use Opera precicely because there aren't extensions, and who don't want to deal with the issues with those.
As to the IE marketshare, I would argue there are also an equal number of people who wouldn't know an extension if it bit them in the @ss, so it's not a feature for them either.
I personally think that there are more than enough users who either actively don't want extensions, or who are ambivilent regarding them that Opera can have a viable marketshare without extensions.
I'm pretty sure it's still a business decision - how do they get any revenue from ad based profit sharing via google etc, if the users all block the ads?
That said, even if Opera won't make a right click ad blocker, AdMuncher makes a great one, and there is a user made one in the forums as well.
Also watch out for Google desktop search, as that caused a downloaded file to be run and exploited the machine.
S T(\1=(^/))" .WMF Extension Killed\k))"
.WMF [Kye-U]"
Kye-U also has released a filter for proxomitron that will block wmf file downloads:
[HTTP headers]
In = FALSE
Out = TRUE
Key = "URL-Killer: Kill WMF Connection [Kye-U] (Out)"
URL = "(^*=(^http://./^([a-z]+{2,4})(^/))))*.wmf(*)\1$T
Match = "*&($CONFIRM(.WMF FILE EXTENSION FOUND\n\nAllow connection to the URL below?\n\n\u\n\1)|$SET(1=URL with
Replace = "\1"
[Patterns]
Name = "Kill
Active = TRUE
Bounds = ""
Limit = 256
Match = "*.wmf*"
Replace = "$ALERT(.WMF Extension Killed on:\n\n\u)"
K for keyboard, C for chair.
I just wish more of the pre-installed stuff was useful rather than crap. Now, I don't have much experiance with dells, but I do work with most retail PCs in the US, doing setups for customers. And the HPs are nuts - they have AOL AntiSpyware, Norton Internet Security with antispyware, McAffee AV + AntiSpyware and sometimes another antispyware program all installed and running on first boot - and all 30-60 day trials no less.
How the machine even works right with so many conflicting resident AV and AS I don't know. Anyway, we end up having to take about 30 minutes uninstalling them all (as Norton doesn't upgrade right to retail discs (which is the only preinstalled AV we also sell retail for install) to then install whatever retail AV they want (Usually NAV or Trend Micro) and Anti-Spyware (usually SpySweeper).
Now, it's great to bundle software, but I wish they'd actually bundle software rather than a bunch of trials that will make people think they have a product, but actually dies in a month or two.
Software used to be a selling point on PCs, I wish the software bundles were again. Instead they are mostly crap that slows down the PC or expires quickly.
That is an interesting issue I've talked about before.
...
Logically, there seems to be a finite amount of work needed to be done in the world. The day the equivelent of the replicator becomes available, when physical production becomes as easy and cheap as digital production currently is, it seems to me that capitalism will fail.
At that point, there seem to be enough phianthripists that money would become irrelevent. There would seem to be no need to buy anything save land. That would likely put us back to some sort of fudalism...
When the only thing that is scarce is space, then that would have to become money
Anyway, beyond that - if you could get anything physical you wanted with the same effort many slashdotters can get music or movies today, then there will be a major shift.
But worse, there are more and more people being born all the time - but the productivity enhancements keep multiplying as well. One person can (using modern technology) easily do the job of 5 or more people of 50 years ago. This is not even taking into consideration the robotic issue above, where machines make human workers unnecessary. When say 1,000 people plus machines can do all the work needed to provide anyone anything they want (save land I would think) then how does capitalism function?
What do you do when there is no work that needs to be done?
Yeah, when compressing files, I'm basically limited to .zip for most people, cause WinXP will handle that. For the savvy, I might get to use .rar for a little better compression.
Has anyone heard of WinUHA yet? That is supposed to be pretty good, and I'd not mind testing out other archivers, as long as the time savings on transferring smaller files aren't overtaken by the compression/decompression time. Though, again, all these things are useless if no one can uncompress them.
I'm sorry, but 18-23 movies isn't even one movie a night. And there are at least some users (like my DAD) who are retired, and like to have something to do during the day when everyone else is at work/school/out whatever. The 5 out a month barely supplies enough to keep him in stuff to watch unless he gets the TV series discs which have ~5hrs of content, so 2-3 days per disk rather than one for movies.
And for many rural people (who seem to be a large market segment) we don't get much over TV, and the quality is random - sometimes quite snowy. Also, like many others I prefer no commercials, so I like to watch DVDs of a show vs broadcast. And watching one TV episode a night can eat up the slack (I mean, with several people in a household - you might need 2 discs at a time, due to different tastes and more than one TV/DVD player in a house).
So the idea that 18-23 DVDs a month is for piracy is certainly not necessarily the case, especially for a household of 4. Now if you are a single guy with a full time job, and you're doing that you either have no life beyond work and DVDs, or you are pirating them as fast as you can.
But there are many reasons you could turn around 18-23 DVDs in a month as listed above. Especially if one family member (if not all) are somewhat TV addicted(not unusual in the US).
Oh, I don't know - it's considered wrong to read satallite transmissions that penetrate your house just because they are sent by DirectTV... And apparently it's "hacking" to use an open wireless access point, even though it's radiating out into the street...
With that logic, Gieger counters, Thermal imaging and really anything aside from listening without technical assistance would be a no-no.
Well, how about heurestics - has anyone tested them in various AV programs? I know that NOD32 is supposed to have very effective heurestics. And what about plain old frequent updates, like KAV? I mean, 8 or more updates a day means you're never really 0d, and might get 0hr...
Interestingly enough, they could also likely just *license* presto from Opera for far less than attempting a hostile takeover. Again, I can't necessarily see why they'd want to, but it'd be interesting if they did some sort of presto based internet renderer for security, and Trident based render for local apps... Sort of like Netscape 8.
Well, to fan the flames:
1) IE7 blogs have already said to webmasters - get the beta, fix your sites, because it will *break* if you just use IE6 rendering as a test. To they already will be breaking IE6 only sites. Sometimes massively.
2) MS hates opensource. If they used FF, they would not be able to do any lock in / embrace and extend. They can't control the source code, and worse - if they change it, they have to give that back.
3) Finally, has MS ever really cared if some change they makes creates problems for other people?
All that said, I can't see MS buying Opera. First, I don't think Opera would sell, second, MS really really believes in there being no boundry in the UI between the web and your PC. Stupid as that seems to me, it has gotten them huge market share, and created lots of jobs for AV companies and the like.
Well, this may be unpopular - but I find that not clearly separating certain tasks leads to confusion and helps people be phished.
For instance, many people aren't aware that typing www.foobar.com is fundamentally different than typing c:\mystuff in the explorer address bar. One is local, and entirely contained on your machine - no one else is involved. The other involves contacting remote machines run by unknown persons with unknown motives.
The way IE and Konqurer work, there is not an obvious UI difference between going to the computer analog of your living room, and going to the analog of Times Square. So people can be phished because of this.
Beyond the conceptual issues, there are some security issues. Having the filemanager also be an HTML renderer (or able to call those code blocks) opens you to issues where an exploit in the HTML renderer will allow "expected" dll calls to the filesystem manager and have allowed local file access via websites. Moreso, it allows *write* access.
I'm a big fan of sandboxing though - limiting everything to read/write access to just what they need.
When did IE for Mac come out? Cause Opera existed in 1996...
But aren't they killing lots of the bugs / backward compatibility in IE7 anyway? They have said lots of sloppy sites *won't work* in IE7.
Not that I want MS anywhere near Opera - but I think they are already throwing away backwards compatibility for standards complience (so some extent).
Or any filtering proxy like proxomitron or privoxy.
What about for personal e-mail servers running via DynDns.org for DNS? Currently I can run my e-mail server for free, and get the benefits of IMAP and other features without paying extra fees to various organizations. I do have to relay outgoing mail through my ISPs mail servers, but otherwise it works fine.
How would I set up SPF for this?
Maybe you shouldn't be doing financial transactions from a public terminal? For any number of reasons.
Personally, I think limiting to two browsers is as bad as one. Just write a site to standards, and let the users use the browser and UI they like. I hate web sites telling me I can't use the UA of my choice.
As long as there is no protectionist policies - what's wrong with people refusing to do business with a private company? I mean, if people are willing to pay more because they dislike Wal-mart for whatever reason, isn't that basically capitalism in action?
Either Wal-Mart will write off those people, change some things they do, or do some different marketing to try and get them back.
A company is not a country. When you work for a company, you're making a free exchange of your services for their money, and either of you is fully entitled to stop that relationship whenever you want, unless there are additional contract terms that apply.
The problem with that is really two fold. One, you have employees who *don't care* about the company. They are more likely to cut corners, or tell potential customers that they might get a better deal elsewhere, or just slack off.
Heck, where I currently work, I do what is in my contract by the letter. It's a retail position, so it often means my standing around in my department, even when nearby departments are swamped. I'm happy to stand there and be paid, and otherwise just talk with other employees or watch other employees work.
Heck, it's not in my contract to help them in another department. And, my manager is fine with this, because it's what his contract stipulates...
Now, if I cared about the company, felt that it succeeding meant anything to me, I might go help out the other employees - and make the company do better as a result. When it's slow, I might do other work so the company doesn't need to, say, hire another person to do stocking or something.
But they don't pay me enough, or offer any benefits, or any real chance of advancement, so I really don't care. I can find hundereds of retail jobs, so if they go under, it really doesn't matter to me.
Two, if someone hired me at another retail store, I'd be more than happy to tell them some ideas based on where I currently work. Wal-Mart loses managers all the time to other stores and the other stores get the benefit of Wal-Mart training... None of this is against my contract, I don't have a non-compete in a line retail job...
The point is you won't get very much out of employees if all you want is by the contract, and you don't care about community or loyalty. You'll have a bunch of people who will stand around doing nothing for hours getting paid till the manager comes and tells them to go home early or the store closes. And you'll have people who do the minimum necessary to not be fired because they don't care.
And for all sorts of reasons I'd think you'd at least want your employees to care if your company stays in business.
Yea, but does this mean Linksys et al need to license the patents cause someone might check their e-mail over Wi-Fi? That doesn't make any sense to me.
I can see it being novel to develop a new network technology - but running an internet app over TCP/IP on any layer 0 technology just seems obvious to me... Certainly not any sort of deal.
Actually, it's not even that - once you have a data network, running any service that currently runs on a data network on that new data network seems obvious to me... I mean, e-mail over cat5 isn't really revolutionary compared to over phone line... How is this any different?
Why I use proxomitron. Takes care of that for me.
They actually have 200 employees now.