What I don't get is why the newspaper in question didn't just throw up a robots.txt file, blocking Google's news spiders, and then ask politely for Google to remove all existing content from their indexes.
I guess they'd just rather flex some highly paid lawyer muscle and deal with the expenses of a court battle than get some web monkey sat in a broom cupboard somewhere to take 10 minutes out of their busy schedule and do this...
My only point was you're just a statistic until someone broadly analyses those statistics, singles you out (for whatever reason) and then decides to analyse your records specifically. At this point you cease to become a drop in the statistical pond.
I think it stems from the fact that most perceive 'meeting' and making friends with people online as a somehow 'cheap' or 'easy' way of doing so. And indeed it is.
Friends, like anything else, can seen superficially by some as something you possess. The more you have the higher your social stature and, lets face it, everyone wants to be loved, have lots of friends and have that feeling reciprocated.
If your friends (i.e. online buddies) are easy to come by however, it only makes sense for the natural reaction to be to devalue them as a form of compensation. For example, consider person X who has 3 or 4 real friends and snubs person Y who only has say 5 or 6 or so online buddies. IMO, person X is jealous, a sense of doubt and inadequacy about their own social life regardless of whether person Y is truly content with their social life. Person X devalue's person Y's relationships because they are either comfortable and confident with their own social standing or simply can't resist the (natural) temptation to label themselves as 'better' than person Y.
Of course there are other factors, like how easy it is to deceive others online or the lack of more personal interchange.
Those are my thoughts on the matter anyway. I would invite you over to my blog for tea but I only do that with friends.:P
The those that don't know, the HTTP "Etag" response header is a unique key (most of the time a hash) that identifies (and verifies) data sent across HTTP. This means the tracking website wouldn't even need to use a 747rhf28r.png garbage filename meaning such tracking could be accomplished in something as mundane as a website's corporate logo.
However, this alone wouldn't tell the tracking website anything the couldn't find out from decent analysis of web server logs, essentially just how often you hit a page in which the said image is imbedded. To do proper visitor *tracking* you would have to leverage the "referer" header which would actually reveal the url of the website in which the image is imbedded.
The referer header of course can be blocked with a Firefox extension such as RefControl (you can choose to block 3rd part (cross-site) referrals or all referrals)
Another approach to try and prevent this might be to get the browser not to send conditional GET requests *at all* and to just reload silently from cache.
This however would of course mean that everyone has to make sure their webpages are properly cacheable with reasonable (perhaps dynamically generated) expiry dates.
The nature of HTTP and the web make it very difficult to remain totally untrackable all you can really do is prevent the worst of it.
Assumptions: 1. For a dialog to be coming up it has to be iniatated by a process. 2. Mystery process most likely isn't part of Windows
Action: 1. Disable all startup programs with msconfig 2. Reboot 3. If problem is gone re-enable startup processes one at a time.
If the problem is back/still there go to step 5 4. Goto step 2 5. Visit Slashdot. Scroll past this comment and proceed to next proposed solution, one which, hopefully, won't waste your time like this one just did.
<I find I still prefer the folder mentality, as compared to Gmails "everything in one spot and search" philosophy.
Me too. But then again I still use SquirrelMail on a paid IMAP provider (with personal bayes and sieve filtering and more features than you can shake a stick at) and love it.
You should be able to run Vista on that, I have a 3500+ (venice), 1GB and a shitty integrated nVidia 6150 and it runs Aero under Vista Pre-RC1 (build 5536) just fine. I'd be lying if I said it was as fast as XP though (XP Pro x64 Edition is excellent by the way).
There was also "Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4" which, presumeably because of all the resources going into XP SP2, came out of the Redmond machine as a cumulative hotfix roll-up.
Hard drive space aside, i've found Vista x64 build 5536 to perform just about as well as XP. Shame about the underwhelming UI and it's extreme level of suck though.
> You need to use adblock plus, adblock was discontinued a long time ago.
Shame, I prefer the classic Adblock UI. Infact I hate the new Firefox 2 visual refresh, IMO on a Linux Gnome desktop I think it looks aweful. What is it with new software and sucky UI's recently?
I guess i'll stick with Firefox 1.5 until they stop releasing bugfixes for it or they release a modified 1.5 chrome for 2.0. Fortunately for me 2.0 is still using the same rendering engine branch as 1.5.
I think the parent was referring to a phenomenon known as "Rip off Britain" (bonus: Wikipedia entry) in which things cost more here in the UK than in the US for no apparent reason.
For me £249.99 seems like a likely retail price for a retail version of Vista Ultimate, or £199.99 if we (OK not me, i'm now a dedicated Linux user) are lucky.
Actually i've noticed alot of OEM Compaq's here in the UK have Python runtimes preinstalled on arrival...I suspect some of their help and support software is written in it but I never bothered to invenstigate
For those wondering where the source code is (the website isnt really your typical open source project breed), this app is written in Python. Something quite interesting the article failed to mention.
> Perhaps Windows would be easier to maintain and improve if things weren't tied-in as they are, the most famous case of which is perhaps IE.
Believe it or not, the unmangling of all kinds of Windows components *is* happening in Vista. The most hyped examples are IE7 being ripped out of the shell and Windows Update being made into a seperate application (Anyone else hate how while WU is checking for updates IE becomes unuseable?). This isn't the whole picture of course, there is supposedly also a lot of lower level untangling going on too. Services and their dependencies for example.
> I really don't see where hardware virtualization used to compartmentalize an OS is a better idea than correct modularization of the OS
I agree, I don't think virtualisation has any advantages in simplifying a monolithic project. Of course, if you go the whole hog and setup a *emulated* environment you don't have to worry so much about running on a wide variety of hardware... but then again at the end of the day *something* has to host the environment to start with. Overall virtualisation seems like a horribly expensive way to acheive abstraction and compartmentalization.
If anything the guys at MS Research on the Singularity project have shown how an interesting path to take might well be to simplify the hardware and do away with unsafe programming techniques, virtual memory spaces and make hardware protection optional. The author seems to be suggesting we access virtualisation as gospel simply because it's now in hardware and is now therefore the undeniable future, i'm not convinced.
Slashdot Mirror
Found it
Anyone got the direct link for the x64 version that doesn't require the akamai download manager?
What I don't get is why the newspaper in question didn't just throw up a robots.txt file, blocking Google's news spiders, and then ask politely for Google to remove all existing content from their indexes.
I guess they'd just rather flex some highly paid lawyer muscle and deal with the expenses of a court battle than get some web monkey sat in a broom cupboard somewhere to take 10 minutes out of their busy schedule and do this...
"better"? What are you referring to exactly?
My only point was you're just a statistic until someone broadly analyses those statistics, singles you out (for whatever reason) and then decides to analyse your records specifically. At this point you cease to become a drop in the statistical pond.
I think it stems from the fact that most perceive 'meeting' and making friends with people online as a somehow 'cheap' or 'easy' way of doing so. And indeed it is.
:P
Friends, like anything else, can seen superficially by some as something you possess. The more you have the higher your social stature and, lets face it, everyone wants to be loved, have lots of friends and have that feeling reciprocated.
If your friends (i.e. online buddies) are easy to come by however, it only makes sense for the natural reaction to be to devalue them as a form of compensation. For example, consider person X who has 3 or 4 real friends and snubs person Y who only has say 5 or 6 or so online buddies. IMO, person X is jealous, a sense of doubt and inadequacy about their own social life regardless of whether person Y is truly content with their social life. Person X devalue's person Y's relationships because they are either comfortable and confident with their own social standing or simply can't resist the (natural) temptation to label themselves as 'better' than person Y.
Of course there are other factors, like how easy it is to deceive others online or the lack of more personal interchange.
Those are my thoughts on the matter anyway. I would invite you over to my blog for tea but I only do that with friends.
you forgot --deep you n00b
> My irregular or perverse browsing habits are but a drop in the statistical pond.
I bet that's what AOL Searcher #4417749 or #927 thought...
The those that don't know, the HTTP "Etag" response header is a unique key (most of the time a hash) that identifies (and verifies) data sent across HTTP. This means the tracking website wouldn't even need to use a 747rhf28r.png garbage filename meaning such tracking could be accomplished in something as mundane as a website's corporate logo.
However, this alone wouldn't tell the tracking website anything the couldn't find out from decent analysis of web server logs, essentially just how often you hit a page in which the said image is imbedded. To do proper visitor *tracking* you would have to leverage the "referer" header which would actually reveal the url of the website in which the image is imbedded.
The referer header of course can be blocked with a Firefox extension such as RefControl (you can choose to block 3rd part (cross-site) referrals or all referrals)
Another approach to try and prevent this might be to get the browser not to send conditional GET requests *at all* and to just reload silently from cache.
This however would of course mean that everyone has to make sure their webpages are properly cache able with reasonable (perhaps dynamically generated) expiry dates.
The nature of HTTP and the web make it very difficult to remain totally untrackable all you can really do is prevent the worst of it.
Assumptions:
1. For a dialog to be coming up it has to be iniatated by a process.
2. Mystery process most likely isn't part of Windows
Action:
1. Disable all startup programs with msconfig
2. Reboot
3. If problem is gone re-enable startup processes one at a time.
If the problem is back/still there go to step 5
4. Goto step 2
5. Visit Slashdot. Scroll past this comment and proceed to next proposed solution, one which, hopefully, won't waste your time like this one just did.
<I find I still prefer the folder mentality, as compared to Gmails "everything in one spot and search" philosophy.
Me too. But then again I still use SquirrelMail on a paid IMAP provider (with personal bayes and sieve filtering and more features than you can shake a stick at) and love it.
"OO Writer tries to do everything on all platforms, and it became heavily bloated"
What about Abiword?
I'd like to know why you can view user passwords in plaintext anyway....
You should be able to run Vista on that, I have a 3500+ (venice), 1GB and a shitty integrated nVidia 6150 and it runs Aero under Vista Pre-RC1 (build 5536) just fine. I'd be lying if I said it was as fast as XP though (XP Pro x64 Edition is excellent by the way).
There was also "Update Rollup 1 for Windows 2000 SP4" which, presumeably because of all the resources going into XP SP2, came out of the Redmond machine as a cumulative hotfix roll-up.
Hard drive space aside, i've found Vista x64 build 5536 to perform just about as well as XP. Shame about the underwhelming UI and it's extreme level of suck though.
> You mean like the way that the Gnome project thinks the ability to have seperate wall papers on each virtual desktop is a "bad thing"?
:-/ I was hoping to see this in Gnome 2.16. No joy. Don't suppose you know of any patches that'll do this?
You're the fourth person in a week
> You need to use adblock plus, adblock was discontinued a long time ago.
Shame, I prefer the classic Adblock UI. Infact I hate the new Firefox 2 visual refresh, IMO on a Linux Gnome desktop I think it looks aweful. What is it with new software and sucky UI's recently?
I guess i'll stick with Firefox 1.5 until they stop releasing bugfixes for it or they release a modified 1.5 chrome for 2.0. Fortunately for me 2.0 is still using the same rendering engine branch as 1.5.
I think the parent was referring to a phenomenon known as "Rip off Britain" (bonus: Wikipedia entry) in which things cost more here in the UK than in the US for no apparent reason.
For me £249.99 seems like a likely retail price for a retail version of Vista Ultimate, or £199.99 if we (OK not me, i'm now a dedicated Linux user) are lucky.
Actually i've noticed alot of OEM Compaq's here in the UK have Python runtimes preinstalled on arrival...I suspect some of their help and support software is written in it but I never bothered to invenstigate
For those wondering where the source code is (the website isnt really your typical open source project breed), this app is written in Python. Something quite interesting the article failed to mention.
Oh only 300kb of HTML. Thats fine then..
> Perhaps Windows would be easier to maintain and improve if things weren't tied-in as they are, the most famous case of which is perhaps IE.
Believe it or not, the unmangling of all kinds of Windows components *is* happening in Vista. The most hyped examples are IE7 being ripped out of the shell and Windows Update being made into a seperate application (Anyone else hate how while WU is checking for updates IE becomes unuseable?). This isn't the whole picture of course, there is supposedly also a lot of lower level untangling going on too. Services and their dependencies for example.
> I really don't see where hardware virtualization used to compartmentalize an OS is a better idea than correct modularization of the OS
I agree, I don't think virtualisation has any advantages in simplifying a monolithic project. Of course, if you go the whole hog and setup a *emulated* environment you don't have to worry so much about running on a wide variety of hardware... but then again at the end of the day *something* has to host the environment to start with. Overall virtualisation seems like a horribly expensive way to acheive abstraction and compartmentalization.
If anything the guys at MS Research on the Singularity project have shown how an interesting path to take might well be to simplify the hardware and do away with unsafe programming techniques, virtual memory spaces and make hardware protection optional. The author seems to be suggesting we access virtualisation as gospel simply because it's now in hardware and is now therefore the undeniable future, i'm not convinced.
and why would that be a problem?
Firefox has very small incremental updates and quite frankly nobody targets Opera
See this blog post for what I assume is the same issue and hence that this was fixed :
"To ubuntu's credit, there was an update in apt within a few minutes of when I got to class, so I was able to fix it by apt-get'ing again."
I don't use Ubuntu but i'm sure the several hour fix assumption isn't too far off