RSS supports a system called "clouds." Just like in Soviet Russia, the feed polls you, not the other way around.
It's a shame nobody uses it. It's not multicast, but it would still scale better than constant polling by the masses does. I think part of the problem is that the spec isn't clear in certain parts.
Advertising IS extraneous crap. Yes, but it also pays the bills. If the web content companies don't advertise, what business model should they use?
They corrupt and poison the very infrastructure of the web itself with their "replace key words in content with div-pops and links to advertising in a way that obfuscates the fact that is advertising until you have already been exposed to it" technology. Are you claiming this is Google's idea? I've seen this, but never in association with Google. You later put a name to it - "IntelliText [sic]" - but IntelliTXT is run by Vibrant Media, which doesn't appear to have any ties with Google. Please provide a counterexample.
They'll just refuse support unless the hardware is apple hardware...
I hope so, because the rarity of DRM (I won't be using iTMS), product activation, and other copy protection silliness was the main reason I was going to switch to Mac.
They have no realistic way to police how the affiliates promote their program
They could spider the blog spam and block any affiliate links they find. It wouldn't be very difficult to do this.
Of course, all this effort would accomplish is to reduce the number of links to their web site, thus making it fall in ranks in the search engines. Somehow, I don't see these sites as ethical businesses who would voluntarily lower their Google rank because their conscience demanded it.
By the way, if this is so impossible, why is nobody spamming Amazon.com affiliate links? (Note: I said "spamming," not "linking in legitimate comments.")
IANAL, but there's at least two problems with your brilliant plan:
1. If you're composing that e-mail on a company computer using company bandwidth on company time, you're probably creating a work-for-hire and therefore the company owns the copyright, not you.
2. There's innumerable ways to figure out what's in an e-mail without breaking encryption. Off the top of my head, they could have keyloggers and screen capture software installed.
Perhaps because they feel there are too many people out there...misappropriating...their content?
That makes perfect sense if you sell CDs and DVDs, but not if you sell computers. Take Dell. They don't create intellectual property, they create tools to use it. Their products are valuable because of their versatility, and voluntarily integrating DRM serves to reduce that versatility.
Shareware authors, who used to release fully functional versions of their applications, no longer do so, even though that change in tactics may have reduced their income (IANASWA).
I would argue that the best software sold under the shareware concept is still uncrippled, except possibly for a nag screen. At the moment, I have no shareware installed except for mIRC and WinRAR. Both are uncrippled except for nag screens, and I've purchased both of them. WinZip is another great example of this.
I would argue that the cream-of-the-crop shareware has morphed not into crippleware or adware, but an evolution of the shareware concept I'm going to call "personalware." Examples of this genre are Ad-Aware, ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall, AVG Free, and much more. Each of these programs comes with a license that says "feel free to download and install me, but for personal use only. If you're a business, pony up." You can tell that these programs are polished and that a lot of work went into them. The missing features in these free versions are so minor that most businesses could do without them, if they were so inclined to cheat. The companies behind these products seem to be in good shape, if the fact that their web sites are still up is any indication.
You now have to put money in the box to get a newspaper, whereas before, you could just take one and then deposit your money. That additional machinery contributes to the extra cost of your newspaper.
And yet, these boxes still have a relatively lightweight door that could be forced open without too much trouble, and a design that permits a dishonest person to easily take more than one copy. If we were to "DRM-ize" these boxes, they would be more like a soda machine: you put in your credit card and one copy of a newspaper (printed on special fast-fading paper to ensure you don't share it with somebody else) rolls out.
I'm kind of getting of track, so I'm going to stop here, but I just wanted to point out that in each of these instances, putting further restrictions on the product doesn't translate into more revenues.
I don't understand the answer to this, and perhaps somebody more knowledgable can explain it to me.
Why are the electronics and software people so keen to add DRM? It's an added expense in research and development (especially if they're after secure DRM, which would presumably require much more development). Unlike the television analogy, the general public is the customer in all of these cases - they're paying for the computer, processor, and/or Windows.
Are these companies getting kickbacks or something? It seems to me that the logical thing to do if you were a lobbiest for the electronics industry is to tell the PDTAA (Public Domain Theft Associations of America) to go shove it, and tell the manufacturers you represent to boycott DRM so their customers don't raise a big stink when they realize their new purchase is crippled.
I think if Microsoft turned themselves around, a lot of good could come from them. For example, I've really tried to get into OpenOffice.org, and I can't because it's so sluggish and unresponsive for me. On my Windows XP system, it takes 7.75 seconds to open OpenOffice.org Writer 1.9.79 compared to 1.55 to open Microsoft Word 2002. (That's with the MS Office preloader disabled, and the second time both programs were opened in this login session. The difference was just as substantial the first time, though I didn't think to time it.)
If Microsoft changed their behavior (particularly by eliminating DRM and Product Activation, and licensing their patents in an open source-compatible way), I would be a lot less hesitant to upgrade Office.
On the other hand, I'm likely going to have to purchase Office when I buy my next computer (a Mac) because there isn't a better alternative from the FOSS people right now.
I would imagine it was a double-blind study: everbody was spritzed with something and nobody knew whether it was real or not (not even the technicians).
However, I wonder if that might describe why the computers weren't trusted.
It's a shame Microsoft won't be using the recently-standardized OpenDocument format, which would mean exisiting products could read it. It also saves the XML file and all included data files (images, etc) within a ZIP file.
(Disclaimer: They might be using it, but TFA doesn't mention it and it wouldn't fit with their MO.)
The question I would like to raise is whether they would actually be successful (or how successful they might actually be); especially given that there are now deep pockets behind Open Source?
The strength of Microsoft's patent portfolio is inversely proportional to the balance of its opponents' legal funds.
It depends on where you live, and some other factors. There's no tax in the U.S. on blanks (yet), though Canada and some other countries have it.
"Music CD-Rs" are more expensive than "data CD-Rs" because the music versions include a royalty paid to the recording industry, and a corresponding bit on the CD somewhere that confirms this. Many standalone audio CD recorders, particularly from Philips and Pioneer, won't burn onto data CDs.
anything you can access via AppleScript or a shell script can be accessed via Konfabulator. Ditto for Dashboard. osascript can be used to run scripts from the OS X shell.
With Dashboard, you can either display your widgets, or display your active applications; you cannot do both. With Konfabulator, you can have any number of widgets and active applications on your screen as you want. I concede your point, but humbly suggest that some people like this fact.
You can't force a malicious widget upon a user under Konfabulator. This is a bug in Safari, not a feature. I'm sure it will be fixed shortly. Mac users who run Firefox or other alternative browsers will be prompted before running the widget. In any case, Dashboard widgets run under more restricted permissions than Konfabulator. A Dashboard widget has to show you a dialog box to get permission to access the network. Running a Konfabulator widget provides no prompts or other warnings.
Dashboard doesn't run under Windows. Conceded.
Konfabulator not only runs under Windows, but 99% of the widgets are platform-neutral and can be run on either Windows or Mac without any modification. Konfabulator's widget gallery shows 569 Windows widgets and 1,024 Mac widgets - slightly more than a 1% difference. Windows users cannot easily download.dmg files, meaning "modification" is required.
Konfabulator can interact with COM objects. Dashboard can interact with OS X however it chooses (with user permission).
A Konfabulator 2-seat license costs only $19(US), even less if you don't mind nagware. Dashboard comes bundled in with a software package that'll cost you $140(US) per seat. Even then, it still won't run native on Windows. Unregistered shareware is a violation of the terms of the license, hence illegal. I could just as easily argue that Tiger is free if you don't mind spending some time to find the torrents. That $140 is not exclusively paying for Dashboard. There are plenty of alternative licensing arrangements, including a family pack that drops the price to $40 per seat. One could also argue that Dashboard comes with the computer, while Konfabulator is an extra you have to pay for.
Now, let me ask you: 1) Which software do you think has more installed seats, Konfabulator or Tiger? Which has more brand recognition among the target audience? Which is more likely to gain developer support (hence more widgets) due to the larger installed base?
2) It's dirt-simple to develop a Dashboard widget: it's a web page bundled with a simple instruction file. Konfabulator won't render HTML for you. You have to use their format and their JavaScript objects.
3) Which interface is more polished? Flipping over widgets for configuration helps keep your attention on what you're doing, and it also provides an excuse for not updating the widget on-the-fly. I found myself wondering why the colors on widgets in Konfabulator didn't change as I tweaked the settings. The fact that I saw both the configuration and widget at the same time made me think that updating one should affect the other. On my computer, pressing F8 for Konspose took about a second to render - about the same time as the entire Dashboard animation - without the effect.
I think Apple was wrong to copy Konfabulator, but that's over and done with, and they clearly have the superior product now.
As the article title says, it was the term "AJAX" for me, and Adaptive Path's article on it. XmlHttpRequest may have been around for a while, but I hadn't heard about it until then. I suspect others may have similar stories.
One of my greatest complaints about JavaScript was always that talking to the server through a script was difficult, and that doing so through a frame or iframe was a kludge. In spite of all those complaints, nobody ever told me "shut up, that's easy and here's how."
I feel like JavaScript is inaccessible compared to other languages, like PHP, because the documentation is harder to find and follow. I think I'm just starting to grasp it now.
There's absolutely no legal precedent (IANAL) for that.
IANAL either, but do you believe the government does things if and only if it has the legal authority to? For example, do you think every action of the military in Guantanamo Bay is in complete compliance with U.S. law?
I think the only reason they had me send mine back was to ensure that I wasn't just getting a free power supply.
That's one possibility. Another is that Apple wants it so they can have their engineers do a post-mortem to figure out what went wrong. A relative called the toll-free number on a well-known brand of kitchen sponge and they asked her to send the defective one back postage-paid, which probably cost them more than the sponge did.
palmOne is also rumored to have been asking Tungsten C owners with a zeroed-out MAC address to send it back postage-paid, in exchange for a new (not refurbished or repaired) unit, because they didn't know what the problem was.
Slashdot Mirror
RSS supports a system called "clouds." Just like in Soviet Russia, the feed polls you, not the other way around.
It's a shame nobody uses it. It's not multicast, but it would still scale better than constant polling by the masses does. I think part of the problem is that the spec isn't clear in certain parts.
Advertising IS extraneous crap.
Yes, but it also pays the bills. If the web content companies don't advertise, what business model should they use?
They corrupt and poison the very infrastructure of the web itself with their "replace key words in content with div-pops and links to advertising in a way that obfuscates the fact that is advertising until you have already been exposed to it" technology.
Are you claiming this is Google's idea? I've seen this, but never in association with Google. You later put a name to it - "IntelliText [sic]" - but IntelliTXT is run by Vibrant Media, which doesn't appear to have any ties with Google. Please provide a counterexample.
They'll just refuse support unless the hardware is apple hardware...
I hope so, because the rarity of DRM (I won't be using iTMS), product activation, and other copy protection silliness was the main reason I was going to switch to Mac.
I hope somebody with power at Apple reads this.
They have no realistic way to police how the affiliates promote their program
They could spider the blog spam and block any affiliate links they find. It wouldn't be very difficult to do this.
Of course, all this effort would accomplish is to reduce the number of links to their web site, thus making it fall in ranks in the search engines. Somehow, I don't see these sites as ethical businesses who would voluntarily lower their Google rank because their conscience demanded it.
By the way, if this is so impossible, why is nobody spamming Amazon.com affiliate links? (Note: I said "spamming," not "linking in legitimate comments.")
IANAL, but there's at least two problems with your brilliant plan:
1. If you're composing that e-mail on a company computer using company bandwidth on company time, you're probably creating a work-for-hire and therefore the company owns the copyright, not you.
2. There's innumerable ways to figure out what's in an e-mail without breaking encryption. Off the top of my head, they could have keyloggers and screen capture software installed.
On a side note: Is Slashdot broken, or am I being punished? "It's been 42 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Deep Thought is on vacation. Slashdot is picking up the slack until it gets back.
It redirects you to sign in via HTTPS. If you first hit the site with HTTP, it will redirect you back, meaning your actual e-mail is unencrypted.
Perhaps because they feel there are too many people out there...misappropriating...their content?
That makes perfect sense if you sell CDs and DVDs, but not if you sell computers. Take Dell. They don't create intellectual property, they create tools to use it. Their products are valuable because of their versatility, and voluntarily integrating DRM serves to reduce that versatility.
Shareware authors, who used to release fully functional versions of their applications, no longer do so, even though that change in tactics may have reduced their income (IANASWA).
I would argue that the best software sold under the shareware concept is still uncrippled, except possibly for a nag screen. At the moment, I have no shareware installed except for mIRC and WinRAR. Both are uncrippled except for nag screens, and I've purchased both of them. WinZip is another great example of this.
I would argue that the cream-of-the-crop shareware has morphed not into crippleware or adware, but an evolution of the shareware concept I'm going to call "personalware." Examples of this genre are Ad-Aware, ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall, AVG Free, and much more. Each of these programs comes with a license that says "feel free to download and install me, but for personal use only. If you're a business, pony up." You can tell that these programs are polished and that a lot of work went into them. The missing features in these free versions are so minor that most businesses could do without them, if they were so inclined to cheat. The companies behind these products seem to be in good shape, if the fact that their web sites are still up is any indication.
You now have to put money in the box to get a newspaper, whereas before, you could just take one and then deposit your money. That additional machinery contributes to the extra cost of your newspaper.
And yet, these boxes still have a relatively lightweight door that could be forced open without too much trouble, and a design that permits a dishonest person to easily take more than one copy. If we were to "DRM-ize" these boxes, they would be more like a soda machine: you put in your credit card and one copy of a newspaper (printed on special fast-fading paper to ensure you don't share it with somebody else) rolls out.
I'm kind of getting of track, so I'm going to stop here, but I just wanted to point out that in each of these instances, putting further restrictions on the product doesn't translate into more revenues.
I don't understand the answer to this, and perhaps somebody more knowledgable can explain it to me.
Why are the electronics and software people so keen to add DRM? It's an added expense in research and development (especially if they're after secure DRM, which would presumably require much more development). Unlike the television analogy, the general public is the customer in all of these cases - they're paying for the computer, processor, and/or Windows.
Are these companies getting kickbacks or something? It seems to me that the logical thing to do if you were a lobbiest for the electronics industry is to tell the PDTAA (Public Domain Theft Associations of America) to go shove it, and tell the manufacturers you represent to boycott DRM so their customers don't raise a big stink when they realize their new purchase is crippled.
I'm using the stick now. I'll send them the carrot when I see the patent license.
Parent should be modded Insightful, not Funny.
I think if Microsoft turned themselves around, a lot of good could come from them. For example, I've really tried to get into OpenOffice.org, and I can't because it's so sluggish and unresponsive for me. On my Windows XP system, it takes 7.75 seconds to open OpenOffice.org Writer 1.9.79 compared to 1.55 to open Microsoft Word 2002. (That's with the MS Office preloader disabled, and the second time both programs were opened in this login session. The difference was just as substantial the first time, though I didn't think to time it.)
If Microsoft changed their behavior (particularly by eliminating DRM and Product Activation, and licensing their patents in an open source-compatible way), I would be a lot less hesitant to upgrade Office.
On the other hand, I'm likely going to have to purchase Office when I buy my next computer (a Mac) because there isn't a better alternative from the FOSS people right now.
I would imagine it was a double-blind study: everbody was spritzed with something and nobody knew whether it was real or not (not even the technicians).
However, I wonder if that might describe why the computers weren't trusted.
It's a shame Microsoft won't be using the recently-standardized OpenDocument format, which would mean exisiting products could read it. It also saves the XML file and all included data files (images, etc) within a ZIP file.
(Disclaimer: They might be using it, but TFA doesn't mention it and it wouldn't fit with their MO.)
The question I would like to raise is whether they would actually be successful (or how successful they might actually be); especially given that there are now deep pockets behind Open Source?
The strength of Microsoft's patent portfolio is inversely proportional to the balance of its opponents' legal funds.
It depends on where you live, and some other factors. There's no tax in the U.S. on blanks (yet), though Canada and some other countries have it.
"Music CD-Rs" are more expensive than "data CD-Rs" because the music versions include a royalty paid to the recording industry, and a corresponding bit on the CD somewhere that confirms this. Many standalone audio CD recorders, particularly from Philips and Pioneer, won't burn onto data CDs.
In Firefox mode:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050519 Netscape/8.0.1
In IE mode, it outputs exactly what my Internet Explorer does.
However, Lucas, now age 60, says he won't be captaining such a ship if it ever happens.
Thank the Force.
Check out Konfabulator 2.0. Performance has been improved.
Really? I'd hate to see what 1.x was like...
If they didn't need the car for the conviction, why should they need the contents of the encrypted files?
anything you can access via AppleScript or a shell script can be accessed via Konfabulator.
.dmg files, meaning "modification" is required.
Ditto for Dashboard. osascript can be used to run scripts from the OS X shell.
With Dashboard, you can either display your widgets, or display your active applications; you cannot do both. With Konfabulator, you can have any number of widgets and active applications on your screen as you want.
I concede your point, but humbly suggest that some people like this fact.
You can't force a malicious widget upon a user under Konfabulator.
This is a bug in Safari, not a feature. I'm sure it will be fixed shortly. Mac users who run Firefox or other alternative browsers will be prompted before running the widget. In any case, Dashboard widgets run under more restricted permissions than Konfabulator. A Dashboard widget has to show you a dialog box to get permission to access the network. Running a Konfabulator widget provides no prompts or other warnings.
Dashboard doesn't run under Windows.
Conceded.
Konfabulator not only runs under Windows, but 99% of the widgets are platform-neutral and can be run on either Windows or Mac without any modification.
Konfabulator's widget gallery shows 569 Windows widgets and 1,024 Mac widgets - slightly more than a 1% difference. Windows users cannot easily download
Konfabulator can interact with COM objects.
Dashboard can interact with OS X however it chooses (with user permission).
A Konfabulator 2-seat license costs only $19(US), even less if you don't mind nagware. Dashboard comes bundled in with a software package that'll cost you $140(US) per seat. Even then, it still won't run native on Windows.
Unregistered shareware is a violation of the terms of the license, hence illegal. I could just as easily argue that Tiger is free if you don't mind spending some time to find the torrents. That $140 is not exclusively paying for Dashboard. There are plenty of alternative licensing arrangements, including a family pack that drops the price to $40 per seat. One could also argue that Dashboard comes with the computer, while Konfabulator is an extra you have to pay for.
Now, let me ask you:
1) Which software do you think has more installed seats, Konfabulator or Tiger? Which has more brand recognition among the target audience? Which is more likely to gain developer support (hence more widgets) due to the larger installed base?
2) It's dirt-simple to develop a Dashboard widget: it's a web page bundled with a simple instruction file. Konfabulator won't render HTML for you. You have to use their format and their JavaScript objects.
3) Which interface is more polished? Flipping over widgets for configuration helps keep your attention on what you're doing, and it also provides an excuse for not updating the widget on-the-fly. I found myself wondering why the colors on widgets in Konfabulator didn't change as I tweaked the settings. The fact that I saw both the configuration and widget at the same time made me think that updating one should affect the other. On my computer, pressing F8 for Konspose took about a second to render - about the same time as the entire Dashboard animation - without the effect.
I think Apple was wrong to copy Konfabulator, but that's over and done with, and they clearly have the superior product now.
so why this big burst of interest now?
As the article title says, it was the term "AJAX" for me, and Adaptive Path's article on it. XmlHttpRequest may have been around for a while, but I hadn't heard about it until then. I suspect others may have similar stories.
One of my greatest complaints about JavaScript was always that talking to the server through a script was difficult, and that doing so through a frame or iframe was a kludge. In spite of all those complaints, nobody ever told me "shut up, that's easy and here's how."
I feel like JavaScript is inaccessible compared to other languages, like PHP, because the documentation is harder to find and follow. I think I'm just starting to grasp it now.
Or, click on the address bar and hit Enter.
There's absolutely no legal precedent (IANAL) for that.
IANAL either, but do you believe the government does things if and only if it has the legal authority to? For example, do you think every action of the military in Guantanamo Bay is in complete compliance with U.S. law?
I bet the answer is in Cellphedia.
I think the only reason they had me send mine back was to ensure that I wasn't just getting a free power supply.
That's one possibility. Another is that Apple wants it so they can have their engineers do a post-mortem to figure out what went wrong. A relative called the toll-free number on a well-known brand of kitchen sponge and they asked her to send the defective one back postage-paid, which probably cost them more than the sponge did.
palmOne is also rumored to have been asking Tungsten C owners with a zeroed-out MAC address to send it back postage-paid, in exchange for a new (not refurbished or repaired) unit, because they didn't know what the problem was.