At the risk of a big ol' karma hit (which I'm sure I can afford), let me just say that almost anyone can look through slashdot comments and come up with the exact same thing written.
Sounds like an opportunity for propagandizing. Take a few thousand cheap USB keys, fill them with american media, put them in a water tight enclosure and drop them off outside cuban waters.
Or just hand them to a citizen of any other country in the world, who can put them in a suitcase and bring them over on the plane.... 8^)
I've been working with some people trying to come up with a cheap solar mesh router. now this guy comes along and says it can be done for $35, so no one is going to pay more. he obviously has no idea of what is involved in making a solar mesh router that is the least bit reliable. but people aren't going to know that.
Erm, I think you're confusing routers with repeaters. TFA talks about cheap repeaters, and though the price sounds optimistic, it's not inconceivable that you could produce them in volume around AUD 35.
In fact, though, I can tell you that in the pre-Windows days, electricity had outages, television had outages, telephone service had outages, gas service had outages...
I was born in 1964. I have no recollection of POTS telephone service ever being unavailable.
Electricity was expected to drop out a few times every summer, and until someone figures out how to tell lightning where to go, I expect it will continue to happen. In my part of Canada, however, power is continuously available from October to April no matter what. Even if you don't pay your bill. The only winter power outage of note I can think of offhand was the great Ice Storm of 1998, one of the most spectacular cases of force majeure I've witnessed in my life.
In my part of the world, at least, power and telephone were life-and-death services and legislation mandated their reliability.
I have played with the shared folder feature, but never saw any real advantage over just using standard networking (SMB, NFS etc.) Is there some advantage to VMware's shared folder feature that I am too blind to see?
Yes. 8^)
I'm a little conservative about security, so I run a snapshotted Windows XP under VMWare with the network interface disabled unless I absolutely need it. Shared folders allow me to access and save all the files I work on in this environment.
... Needless to say, I'll be re-evaluating my approach once I've had a chance to look at exactly how this directory traversal exploit works.
I'm curious what the/. community thinks... what if a company such as Comcast were to offer two plans:
$30/mo - The internet as we know it today without any preference to content providers, advertising, etc
2) $15/mo - An internet where some content providers get preference, subsidizing the lower monthly bill.
If companies offered a choice would we still care?
Effectively, it would be no choice at all. It would, in fact, be disastrous.
The effects described in George Akerlof's 1970 paper, The Market for 'Lemons' come into play in such a scenario. In a nutshell, the paper states that certain markets (like used cars) favour the sale of 'lemons' over quality. The reason is that it's easier to simply wax and buff a lemon (and trust the buyer's ignorance) than it is to do the right thing and service it properly before re-selling.
The reason this approach works is because buyers can't see what's under the hood and, generally speaking, wouldn't know what to look for even if they could. So instead of paying well for quality, they tend to buy the cheapest item, regardless of its condition. The same is true of Internet service. People just don't know what's possible. Worse still, they don't have the ability to recognise whether they're getting what they're supposed to or not.
So if the telcos were to foist a divided offering on their customers, they could rely on ignorance to invoke a market for 'lemons'. People see no extra value in buying the better service, so they flock en masse to the cheaper one. Telco then discontinues the more expensive one, citing lack of consumer interest.
Minimum operating standards such as Network Neutrality were put into place to protect consumers and the market itself. Absent Net Neutrality, the potential for abuse of control over traffic by carriers is far too great. No compromise is possible in this regard, because degradation of Net Neutrality is a degradation of the market itself.
I found it quite interesting that the methodology of the research doesn't even bother to check sites with Mac OS X or Linux operating systems. But on the server side, Apache websites running outdated versions of PHP were singled out for comment.
In all there were twice as many compromised IIS servers as Apache, but fully 50% of all compromised Apache servers were running some version of PHP.
It was also interesting to note that computer-related websites ranked second only to social networking sites as most likely to be compromised with redirections to malware sites. Seems we might want to tone down our holier-than-thou rhetoric. 8^)
Most people just don't have the time/energy to do everything they're told so they ignore most advise.
I would interpret that to mean that you need to choose your advice carefully. The best thing my dental hygienist ever said to me was, 'Floss while you're watching TV.' It was a perfectly simple and eminently practical piece of advice, and made me a flosser for the first time in my life.
<obShamelessSelfPromotion>I've been writing a series of columns about the issue of online privacy in a local weekly newspaper. Living as I do in a developing nation, I need to put things as simply as possible. Here are the last three:
The problem can be summarized in one word: complexity. The approach to building software has largely been based on traditional engineering principles and approaches. Traditional engineering projects never reached the level of complexity that software projects have. As it turns out humans are not very good at handling and predicting complex system.
I was about to say that I couldn't agree more, but the truth is, I could.
When you say 'complexity', I believe you're speaking about design complexity. There are, however, any number of complex systems at work within the world of technology. You're absolutely right that they are not monolithic, designed systems, though. And your point that AI researchers will continue to bang their heads against this wall is well made.
A good example of the problems facing software developers is Microsoft's new operating system Windows Vista. It took half a decade to build and cost nearly 10 billion dollars. At two orders of magnitude higher costs than the previous incarnation it featured relatively minor improvements - almost every single new radical feature (such as a new file system) that was originally planned was abandoned. The reason for this is that the complexity of the code base had become unmanageable. Adequate testing and quality assurance proved to be impossible and the development cycle became painfully slow. Not even Microsoft with its virtually unlimited resources could handle it.
And yet, there are computer operating environments of equal (and, in some cases, greater) complexity that are thriving and healthy, adapting and even - dare I say it - evolving at a remarkable rate.
How many technical staff does Canonical have, do you think? In spite of being extremely few in numbers, they manage to produce a remarkably complex operating system, upgraded every six months. Of course, we all understand how this is possible. They rely on simple, organic human systems to resolve immensely complex issues. I find it fascinating that it works at all, and would likely argue against the premise if I weren't faced daily with the outputs of these systems.
I think that AI is perfectly achievable, but probably not in ways that most AI researchers might desire. I think it's possible to build extremely complex organic systems with very simple rule sets. I do not, however, think it's reasonable to expect to be able to operate these systems in a jar, as it were. The limitations of classical logic and computer hardware make the emulation of such a system effectively impossible. As others have rightly pointed out earlier in this discussion, that's not going to change.
Nonetheless, AI will become commonplace before too very long. We probably won't recognise it as anything new or unusual, though. It will consist largely of human inputs and interactions, after all.
Here's the issue. I'm all for net neutrality, myself. But a legitimate argument against it is that it would eliminate the ability of ISPs to block port 25 egress, which would lead to a multiplication of the number of spam bots out there. So do we say that ISPs must be net-neutral except for TCP port 25? It's the camel's nose.
Net Neutrality has exactly nothing to do with port blocking.
Net Neutrality does not stop a carrier from blocking certain traffic. It only says that traffic rules cannot be applied with prejudice i.e. You can't single out individual sites/customers for 'special treatment'.
Everybody does QoS and transparent proxying, and the Net is better for it.
We need to be clear about the problem, and we're not being. So let's try to keep this topic simple:
The Net Neutrality Debate [sic] is about letting carriers decide which sites and services get preferential service, based either on corporate allegiance or on the service's ability to pay whatever the extortion rate du jour is.
...experience tells me that 80% likely involves IE at 90 percent or better.
How is that a troll? He's stating the observation based on his experience. It's a Troll because anecdotal evidence boils down to pretty much this: "That's what my personal experience leads me to *feel* is true, and here are some numbers (I made up) that *feel* right to quantify my *feelings*."
That is as far from the definition of a troll as can be imagined. Re-read the moderator guidelines about the difference between 'Flamebait', 'Troll', and 'Factually Incorrect'. Attitudes like yours make meta-moderation necessary.
On top of everything else, it's not necessarily even wrong. I can give you 'anecdotal' evidence based on servicing computers for a local user community of about 40,000 people. My observations haven't been formalised or codified in any way, so I can't make any claim to scientific observation, but I can tell you that what I see on a day-to-day basis is relevant and significant.
This is valid and useful information in my professional context. You're implication that anecdote is always based on feeling is, ironically, based on a hunch informed by your own bias.
The linked pdf showed that Firefox had 36 critical security issues versus IE's 28.
If you're so bent on getting good data, by the way, you should know better than to blindly add up vulnerability announcement totals and call that analysis.
Some people don't realize that Net Neutrality doesn't even exist today. Try this: If you have email at, say, your office and you host it on your own domain, Telnet into port 25 on your email server. No response? That's because your ISP is filtering you RIGHT NOW.
This has nothing to do with Net neutrality.
a) Net Neutrality applies to backbone carriers, not individual service providers.
b) Net Neutrality does not stop a carrier from blocking certain traffic. It only says that traffic rules cannot be applied with prejudice i.e. You can't single out individual sites/customers for 'special treatment'.
If they stop reporting, then people won't ask politicians for statements and they won't need to stuff both feet (plus those of an advisor) in their mouth.
Um, that's not the advisor's foot....
...But then again, that's not the politician's mouth.
No, I think a lot of/.er's a missing just how big of a fiscal impact this would truely represent. Which is understandable. Most/.er's are techies, we spend our days writing code, punching wires, setting up beowulf clusters, etc... Accounting is not a strong suit of the/. crowd.
You're right in general, but wrong in this particular case. I have more reason than many to pinch pennies, working as I do in a developing nation, supporting exactly the kind of clients that you're describing.
I know the situation you're talking about quite well, having supported customers like this - as well as some very big ones - since the mid '90s. I have worked really hard to educate web developers about these issues. If you google my real name, you'll see comments from me in the newsgroups on exactly this issue dating back to those times. In 1998 I was even quoted in the New York Times, railing about the lack of standards compliance in the Netscape browser.
I'm not saying this by way of self-promotion; I just need to be clear that this is not an opinion I'm just tossing off at the first jerk of a knee. With more time, I could explain the economics of it all, emphasising the fact that saving money in the short term - no matter the budget - is often the wrong response. In my experience, wise investment always trumps short-term savings.
Living as we do in the real world, of course, we often make compromises we're not comfortable with. Sometimes this means spending less and getting less. But sometimes the compromise has to run the other way. This particular situation is clearly a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later scenario. People can pony up now and adhere to standards they should have adhered to in the first place, or they can make it clear that their sites are not compliant (which is what is being proposed here).
The suggestion that MS is making, however, relieves the guilty parties of any cost whatsoever, and puts it square on the shoulders of those who are trying to do the right thing. Worse still, they're demanding that we abuse the existing specification in order to do it, and furthermore, they would perpetuate browser-sniffing, the bane of every web developer's existence!
In a nutshell, the reason I reject your conclusions (in spite of the fact that I accept many of the arguments you put forward) is precisely because the people being asked to pay for MS' sins are those who bear the least responsibility for the problem.
Small, non-IT companies do face a burden making even the smallest changes, true. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't reap what they've sown. More to the point, others who are guiltless in this should not be forced to bear the cost. That just encourages inertia and irresponsibility.
All that would be required to insert an 'I'm Not Compliant' tag on tag-soup websites is a single HTTP header from the web server. No need to update a single page. Anyone billing more than half an hour for that is being greedy. As far as my business is concerned, I'd do it free of charge, and treat is as nothing more than a maintenance issue.
For the love of all things, none of this is hard for ME. There are thousands of organizations in the world that have websites that don't have web admins. It's not a matter of "hard" for them. They won't even know that a problem exists until one of the employees goes to the site from a home computer.
I will grant you that it is unfortunate that there are so many organisations and people who have been suckered into thinking that a random blodge of tag soup is good enough for them. While I despise the condition, I agree that it's really not the website owner's fault for actually believing what he's told. But my sympathy only extends so far.
I've been writing HTML since the very first days of the mosaic browser. I have objected to, and opposed, tag soup for about as long as it existed. In spite of my efforts, there was always someone there to say, 'But this way is easier!'. Every time someone bought that argument, I'd explain to them that someday the chickens would come home to roost. Some of the time, my clients listened to me, and I developed sites that worked in all browsers back then and still work in all browsers today.
The issue is of all of the legacy websites out there that may be effected by this change. If any of those sites are effected in a way that effects their visitors experience, it is bad for users. If the changes in the user's experience changes their service requests from the web site's owner, it is bad for the organization. If it causes a financial hardship to the organization, what is to keep that company from suing MS? Sure, the lawsuit might not go far, but it would take resources to fight or pay to go away.
I fail to see anything wrong with what you're describing.
Why not sue Microsoft for fscking things up? I think that's a perfectly rational response. The situation is very clearly of their making, so if anyone's got to pay, it might as well be them.
This would at least have the effect of un-fscking the situation somewhat, while the alternative being proposed by Microsoft is the opposite. Effectively, they're saying, 'We've fscked up the web due to our pseudo-random tag parsing goop that we mis-labeled HTML in order to buy some credibility. Now we're proposing to make our stuff work again by fscking things up even more.'
I say no. I say damn the torpedoes and let some sites look ugly (that is the worst-case, after all). I say as well that the cost to individual website owners will not be nearly as calamitous as you seem to think, and further that it's a worthwhile exercise in preparing the ground for a more properly organised and more easily parsed World Wide Web. You say that organisations spending money to make things right is somehow wrong. On this and the rest of your conclusions, we'll just have to respectfully disagree.
Sutor is correct that it's quite possible that the OOXML that comes out of ISO will not be compatible with the OOXML that Office currently saves. But do keep in mind that Sutor works for IBM and has long been a vocal opponent of OOXML.
Ah, so what you're saying is that he has an agenda... to tell the truth?
the tag should instead be a tag to go into "Legacy" mode. There's the problem... WHO is going to go through all of the Legacy websites to update that HTML?
The webmaster will, by adding a single default HTTP header to the web server hosting those crappy, non-compliant sites.
The HTML being suggested is actually a substitute for an actual HTTP header: <META HTTP-EQUIV='foo'... >. So actually adding the header itself to the server, either once for all your sites, or once for each non-compliant site, is far less work than updating the HTML.
One line change. Works for every site hosted. Still too hard for you?
And to think that I was thinking about switching to Time-Warner, however now I will not.
Why, because of the absurd notion that you should get what you pay for - and vice versa? Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
Since when is paying for megabytes downloaded 'getting what you pay for'? Or, more to the point, the backbone carriers' costs don't change if I download more, so why should they charge me more?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I have yet to see a compelling reason to charge for megabytes downloaded at all, ever. Capital costs, which cover the base amount of bandwidth available to everyone, are relative to the size of the pipe, not how it's used. Operating costs, which cover maintenance and repair etc., do not scale with usage either. So why, then, do we get charged by megabyte downloaded?
The only answer I've seen to this question is, 'Backbone carriers charge that way, so everyone else has to.'
I don't want to discount the challenges of managing a shared resource, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we could have a fare regime (pun intended) that charges for available bandwidth, and which is perfectly manageable for all concerned.
To flesh this out a little, there's nothing to stop a provider from offering a base level of service - say, 5 Mbps - and allowing higher burst rates, but charging extra for the time the user operated at the higher rate.
I realise that this is pie in the sky at this point in time, because it would require that the entire price model be revised, but I'm certain enough that it will work that I'm willing to try it out when our company starts offering connectivity services. I have the luxury of living in a very small nation whose market is really underdeveloped, so we can realistically hope to set a precedent.
This fee structure is workable, and it's desirable because it serves the customer better than any other I can think of. It's also good for business, because it means that costs don't scale with usage, and efficiency is rewarded. If you can push more data with less bandwidth, then you save money, and so does the carrier. That means that people are encouraged to use the service as much as possible, which builds reliance, which in turn contributes to network effects that increase demand. And most importantly, it encourages sensible use of a shared resource.
I honestly wonder why corporations don't see that what's good for the customer is good for them? Maybe I need to get a Harvard MBA in order to un-learn all these naive assumptions....
I'm tired of the whole OOXML/ODF pissing match. Who cares? I mean, really, they both do almost exactly the same thing, in almost exactly the same way.
Absolutely, one of them strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, the other strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, so long as it's Microsoft.
Almost exactly the same.
The only real difference is the XML schema, and do I really, either as a consumer or as a programmer, care about that?
Agree 1000%. It's just a schema! I mean who cares what it does or where it comes from. I say the same about books, too. My literature prof wanted to fail me because I read Mein Kampf instead of War and Peace, but I was all like, dude, what's the problem? They're both books!
They're both open standards which any party can use. Well, open enough -- do I really care who who controls modifications to it?
Word! How come we keep getting our shorts in a knot about who controls our information? Next thing you know, some shirty, smelly little ACLU pinko is going to come along and start complaining about access to information and whining about data interchange and what will our grand-children say about us when they see the mess we made of everything just so we could keep some corporate fat cat in his limo for another few years!
Who needs this Open shit, anyways, huh? Sharing? Highly over-rated.
Hopefully soon the OLPC will be available to buy here in the UK. It seems to fill a niche of being ultraportable (7 inch screen), good battery life (9-10 hours, 2-3W consumption, long life NiMH battery) and low cost ($200, dropping towards $100 in the future perhaps).
They're lovely machines, to be sure. I was given a late prototype to test back in August, and when my normal laptop ceased to function, I started using the OLPC exclusively. I found it was dead easy to learn the interface, and for casual purposes the beta interface was slow but useable.
The keyboard, however, is designed to by suitable for children - or, more to the point unsuitable for adults. The idea is to make it less likely that dad (or big brother) will come home, crack open a beer and say, "C'mere kid, gimme the laptop for a few minutes..." and then spend the rest of the evening using it to browse pr0n while the child sits helplessly by.
In short, the XO is a close-to-ideal laptop in so many ways, but it's been designed to be most useful for children only. You may find it possible to accommodate yourself to this (I did), but don't expect too much assistance from the OLPC project in this regard.
The XO mesh can forward packets while the motherboard is sleeping. Arguably, this can be done if the Classmate adopts the same Marvell radio and firmware. Similarly, e-book mode can also run without the motherboard awake, because the framebuffer is powered independently. I'm not sure if any of the G1G1 people tried it but I think the e-book battery life should be around 24hr.
I tested a B2 prototype for about a month in a Least Developed Country. I can attest that effective battery life in continuous heavy use was about 3-4 hours, while in e-book mode I never had the patience to actually reach the end of the charge. The diminution in battery charge over time for a more or less idle machine was hardly noticeable.
YMMV, of course; don't trust anecdotal evidence from a beta and all that.... Still waiting for official news (and numbers) from a pilot of more than 20 XOs in a neighbouring country.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. 8^)
The phrase itself goes back to 1997, too.
Or just hand them to a citizen of any other country in the world, who can put them in a suitcase and bring them over on the plane.... 8^)
Erm, I think you're confusing routers with repeaters. TFA talks about cheap repeaters, and though the price sounds optimistic, it's not inconceivable that you could produce them in volume around AUD 35.
I was born in 1964. I have no recollection of POTS telephone service ever being unavailable.
Electricity was expected to drop out a few times every summer, and until someone figures out how to tell lightning where to go, I expect it will continue to happen. In my part of Canada, however, power is continuously available from October to April no matter what. Even if you don't pay your bill. The only winter power outage of note I can think of offhand was the great Ice Storm of 1998, one of the most spectacular cases of force majeure I've witnessed in my life.
In my part of the world, at least, power and telephone were life-and-death services and legislation mandated their reliability.
Yes. 8^)
I'm a little conservative about security, so I run a snapshotted Windows XP under VMWare with the network interface disabled unless I absolutely need it. Shared folders allow me to access and save all the files I work on in this environment.
... Needless to say, I'll be re-evaluating my approach once I've had a chance to look at exactly how this directory traversal exploit works.
- $30/mo - The internet as we know it today without any preference to content providers, advertising, etc
- 2) $15/mo - An internet where some content providers get preference, subsidizing the lower monthly bill.
If companies offered a choice would we still care?Effectively, it would be no choice at all. It would, in fact, be disastrous.
The effects described in George Akerlof's 1970 paper, The Market for 'Lemons' come into play in such a scenario. In a nutshell, the paper states that certain markets (like used cars) favour the sale of 'lemons' over quality. The reason is that it's easier to simply wax and buff a lemon (and trust the buyer's ignorance) than it is to do the right thing and service it properly before re-selling.
The reason this approach works is because buyers can't see what's under the hood and, generally speaking, wouldn't know what to look for even if they could. So instead of paying well for quality, they tend to buy the cheapest item, regardless of its condition. The same is true of Internet service. People just don't know what's possible. Worse still, they don't have the ability to recognise whether they're getting what they're supposed to or not.
So if the telcos were to foist a divided offering on their customers, they could rely on ignorance to invoke a market for 'lemons'. People see no extra value in buying the better service, so they flock en masse to the cheaper one. Telco then discontinues the more expensive one, citing lack of consumer interest.
Minimum operating standards such as Network Neutrality were put into place to protect consumers and the market itself. Absent Net Neutrality, the potential for abuse of control over traffic by carriers is far too great. No compromise is possible in this regard, because degradation of Net Neutrality is a degradation of the market itself.
I found it quite interesting that the methodology of the research doesn't even bother to check sites with Mac OS X or Linux operating systems. But on the server side, Apache websites running outdated versions of PHP were singled out for comment.
In all there were twice as many compromised IIS servers as Apache, but fully 50% of all compromised Apache servers were running some version of PHP.
It was also interesting to note that computer-related websites ranked second only to social networking sites as most likely to be compromised with redirections to malware sites. Seems we might want to tone down our holier-than-thou rhetoric. 8^)
I would interpret that to mean that you need to choose your advice carefully. The best thing my dental hygienist ever said to me was, 'Floss while you're watching TV.' It was a perfectly simple and eminently practical piece of advice, and made me a flosser for the first time in my life.
<obShamelessSelfPromotion>I've been writing a series of columns about the issue of online privacy in a local weekly newspaper. Living as I do in a developing nation, I need to put things as simply as possible. Here are the last three:
I was about to say that I couldn't agree more, but the truth is, I could.
When you say 'complexity', I believe you're speaking about design complexity. There are, however, any number of complex systems at work within the world of technology. You're absolutely right that they are not monolithic, designed systems, though. And your point that AI researchers will continue to bang their heads against this wall is well made.
And yet, there are computer operating environments of equal (and, in some cases, greater) complexity that are thriving and healthy, adapting and even - dare I say it - evolving at a remarkable rate.
How many technical staff does Canonical have, do you think? In spite of being extremely few in numbers, they manage to produce a remarkably complex operating system, upgraded every six months. Of course, we all understand how this is possible. They rely on simple, organic human systems to resolve immensely complex issues. I find it fascinating that it works at all, and would likely argue against the premise if I weren't faced daily with the outputs of these systems.
I think that AI is perfectly achievable, but probably not in ways that most AI researchers might desire. I think it's possible to build extremely complex organic systems with very simple rule sets. I do not, however, think it's reasonable to expect to be able to operate these systems in a jar, as it were. The limitations of classical logic and computer hardware make the emulation of such a system effectively impossible. As others have rightly pointed out earlier in this discussion, that's not going to change.
Nonetheless, AI will become commonplace before too very long. We probably won't recognise it as anything new or unusual, though. It will consist largely of human inputs and interactions, after all.
"ICANN fails to find own ass with both hands."
Film at 11. If we can find it.
Net Neutrality has exactly nothing to do with port blocking.
Net Neutrality does not stop a carrier from blocking certain traffic. It only says that traffic rules cannot be applied with prejudice i.e. You can't single out individual sites/customers for 'special treatment'.
Everybody does QoS and transparent proxying, and the Net is better for it.
We need to be clear about the problem, and we're not being. So let's try to keep this topic simple:
The Net Neutrality Debate [sic] is about letting carriers decide which sites and services get preferential service, based either on corporate allegiance or on the service's ability to pay whatever the extortion rate du jour is.
...experience tells me that 80% likely involves IE at 90 percent or better. How is that a troll? He's stating the observation based on his experience. It's a Troll because anecdotal evidence boils down to pretty much this: "That's what my personal experience leads me to *feel* is true, and here are some numbers (I made up) that *feel* right to quantify my *feelings*."That is as far from the definition of a troll as can be imagined. Re-read the moderator guidelines about the difference between 'Flamebait', 'Troll', and 'Factually Incorrect'. Attitudes like yours make meta-moderation necessary.
On top of everything else, it's not necessarily even wrong. I can give you 'anecdotal' evidence based on servicing computers for a local user community of about 40,000 people. My observations haven't been formalised or codified in any way, so I can't make any claim to scientific observation, but I can tell you that what I see on a day-to-day basis is relevant and significant.
This is valid and useful information in my professional context. You're implication that anecdote is always based on feeling is, ironically, based on a hunch informed by your own bias.
If you're so bent on getting good data, by the way, you should know better than to blindly add up vulnerability announcement totals and call that analysis.
Kenya? You mean, collapsing into flaming rubble in the fight for power and resources?
This has nothing to do with Net neutrality.
a) Net Neutrality applies to backbone carriers, not individual service providers.
b) Net Neutrality does not stop a carrier from blocking certain traffic. It only says that traffic rules cannot be applied with prejudice i.e. You can't single out individual sites/customers for 'special treatment'.
HTH HAND
Cialis vincit disfunctio penilis!
Um, that's not the advisor's foot....
...But then again, that's not the politician's mouth.
You're right in general, but wrong in this particular case. I have more reason than many to pinch pennies, working as I do in a developing nation, supporting exactly the kind of clients that you're describing.
I know the situation you're talking about quite well, having supported customers like this - as well as some very big ones - since the mid '90s. I have worked really hard to educate web developers about these issues. If you google my real name, you'll see comments from me in the newsgroups on exactly this issue dating back to those times. In 1998 I was even quoted in the New York Times, railing about the lack of standards compliance in the Netscape browser.
I'm not saying this by way of self-promotion; I just need to be clear that this is not an opinion I'm just tossing off at the first jerk of a knee. With more time, I could explain the economics of it all, emphasising the fact that saving money in the short term - no matter the budget - is often the wrong response. In my experience, wise investment always trumps short-term savings.
Living as we do in the real world, of course, we often make compromises we're not comfortable with. Sometimes this means spending less and getting less. But sometimes the compromise has to run the other way. This particular situation is clearly a pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later scenario. People can pony up now and adhere to standards they should have adhered to in the first place, or they can make it clear that their sites are not compliant (which is what is being proposed here).
The suggestion that MS is making, however, relieves the guilty parties of any cost whatsoever, and puts it square on the shoulders of those who are trying to do the right thing. Worse still, they're demanding that we abuse the existing specification in order to do it, and furthermore, they would perpetuate browser-sniffing, the bane of every web developer's existence!
In a nutshell, the reason I reject your conclusions (in spite of the fact that I accept many of the arguments you put forward) is precisely because the people being asked to pay for MS' sins are those who bear the least responsibility for the problem.
Small, non-IT companies do face a burden making even the smallest changes, true. But that doesn't mean they shouldn't reap what they've sown. More to the point, others who are guiltless in this should not be forced to bear the cost. That just encourages inertia and irresponsibility.
All that would be required to insert an 'I'm Not Compliant' tag on tag-soup websites is a single HTTP header from the web server. No need to update a single page. Anyone billing more than half an hour for that is being greedy. As far as my business is concerned, I'd do it free of charge, and treat is as nothing more than a maintenance issue.
I will grant you that it is unfortunate that there are so many organisations and people who have been suckered into thinking that a random blodge of tag soup is good enough for them. While I despise the condition, I agree that it's really not the website owner's fault for actually believing what he's told. But my sympathy only extends so far.
I've been writing HTML since the very first days of the mosaic browser. I have objected to, and opposed, tag soup for about as long as it existed. In spite of my efforts, there was always someone there to say, 'But this way is easier!'. Every time someone bought that argument, I'd explain to them that someday the chickens would come home to roost. Some of the time, my clients listened to me, and I developed sites that worked in all browsers back then and still work in all browsers today.
I fail to see anything wrong with what you're describing.
Why not sue Microsoft for fscking things up? I think that's a perfectly rational response. The situation is very clearly of their making, so if anyone's got to pay, it might as well be them.
This would at least have the effect of un-fscking the situation somewhat, while the alternative being proposed by Microsoft is the opposite. Effectively, they're saying, 'We've fscked up the web due to our pseudo-random tag parsing goop that we mis-labeled HTML in order to buy some credibility. Now we're proposing to make our stuff work again by fscking things up even more.'
I say no. I say damn the torpedoes and let some sites look ugly (that is the worst-case, after all). I say as well that the cost to individual website owners will not be nearly as calamitous as you seem to think, and further that it's a worthwhile exercise in preparing the ground for a more properly organised and more easily parsed World Wide Web. You say that organisations spending money to make things right is somehow wrong. On this and the rest of your conclusions, we'll just have to respectfully disagree.
Ah, so what you're saying is that he has an agenda... to tell the truth?
The webmaster will, by adding a single default HTTP header to the web server hosting those crappy, non-compliant sites.
The HTML being suggested is actually a substitute for an actual HTTP header: <META HTTP-EQUIV='foo' ... >. So actually adding the header itself to the server, either once for all your sites, or once for each non-compliant site, is far less work than updating the HTML.
One line change. Works for every site hosted. Still too hard for you?
And to think that I was thinking about switching to Time-Warner, however now I will not.
Why, because of the absurd notion that you should get what you pay for - and vice versa? Flat pricing just means that someone like me - who isn't downloading movies all day - is helping pay the bills of people who are.
Since when is paying for megabytes downloaded 'getting what you pay for'? Or, more to the point, the backbone carriers' costs don't change if I download more, so why should they charge me more?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I have yet to see a compelling reason to charge for megabytes downloaded at all, ever. Capital costs, which cover the base amount of bandwidth available to everyone, are relative to the size of the pipe, not how it's used. Operating costs, which cover maintenance and repair etc., do not scale with usage either. So why, then, do we get charged by megabyte downloaded?
The only answer I've seen to this question is, 'Backbone carriers charge that way, so everyone else has to.'
I don't want to discount the challenges of managing a shared resource, but it seems perfectly reasonable to me that we could have a fare regime (pun intended) that charges for available bandwidth, and which is perfectly manageable for all concerned.
To flesh this out a little, there's nothing to stop a provider from offering a base level of service - say, 5 Mbps - and allowing higher burst rates, but charging extra for the time the user operated at the higher rate.
I realise that this is pie in the sky at this point in time, because it would require that the entire price model be revised, but I'm certain enough that it will work that I'm willing to try it out when our company starts offering connectivity services. I have the luxury of living in a very small nation whose market is really underdeveloped, so we can realistically hope to set a precedent.
This fee structure is workable, and it's desirable because it serves the customer better than any other I can think of. It's also good for business, because it means that costs don't scale with usage, and efficiency is rewarded. If you can push more data with less bandwidth, then you save money, and so does the carrier. That means that people are encouraged to use the service as much as possible, which builds reliance, which in turn contributes to network effects that increase demand. And most importantly, it encourages sensible use of a shared resource.
I honestly wonder why corporations don't see that what's good for the customer is good for them? Maybe I need to get a Harvard MBA in order to un-learn all these naive assumptions....
Absolutely, one of them strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, the other strives to provide a format useful and usable by any maker of office software, so long as it's Microsoft.
Almost exactly the same.
Agree 1000%. It's just a schema! I mean who cares what it does or where it comes from. I say the same about books, too. My literature prof wanted to fail me because I read Mein Kampf instead of War and Peace, but I was all like, dude, what's the problem? They're both books!
Word! How come we keep getting our shorts in a knot about who controls our information? Next thing you know, some shirty, smelly little ACLU pinko is going to come along and start complaining about access to information and whining about data interchange and what will our grand-children say about us when they see the mess we made of everything just so we could keep some corporate fat cat in his limo for another few years!
Who needs this Open shit, anyways, huh? Sharing? Highly over-rated.
There are about 5 billion of them. You've never met them, though.
They're lovely machines, to be sure. I was given a late prototype to test back in August, and when my normal laptop ceased to function, I started using the OLPC exclusively. I found it was dead easy to learn the interface, and for casual purposes the beta interface was slow but useable.
The keyboard, however, is designed to by suitable for children - or, more to the point unsuitable for adults. The idea is to make it less likely that dad (or big brother) will come home, crack open a beer and say, "C'mere kid, gimme the laptop for a few minutes..." and then spend the rest of the evening using it to browse pr0n while the child sits helplessly by.
In short, the XO is a close-to-ideal laptop in so many ways, but it's been designed to be most useful for children only. You may find it possible to accommodate yourself to this (I did), but don't expect too much assistance from the OLPC project in this regard.
I tested a B2 prototype for about a month in a Least Developed Country. I can attest that effective battery life in continuous heavy use was about 3-4 hours, while in e-book mode I never had the patience to actually reach the end of the charge. The diminution in battery charge over time for a more or less idle machine was hardly noticeable.
YMMV, of course; don't trust anecdotal evidence from a beta and all that.... Still waiting for official news (and numbers) from a pilot of more than 20 XOs in a neighbouring country.