It won't happen, this is just fodder. Plenty of things get "investigated" at the European Parliament. All it really tells us is that some representatives don't really understand things very well -- but we knew that anyway. Is it just me or is this just a pointless opportunity for some misdirected, ill-informed, pro-American, anti-European slashdot reader commentary?
Define "Slashdot".
The text is word-for-word my submission. I certainly don't see anything wrong with the project, wasn't trying to skew it, and am in favour of digitisation pretty much whatever. I only added the last couple of sentences in the hope of riling some people into discussion.
Ah cummon, can't a submitter have fun these days?
I agree, it is a good thing, but watching Slashdotters squirm over a tedious question is much more fun than you give it credit for.
Of course, the Indian Govt. never bows to corporate interests--"what only the rich and powerful want"--on any important issues like IT and software, only on incredibly minor ones like generic drugs that help AIDS sufferers and the World's poor.
Indeed, ignoring the gratuitous reference to a "social contract": put simply, AdBlock is not in any way "unethical" because advertisers pay on the assumption that they'll make money. If they don't think a certain type of advertising will generate revenue, they won't use it. Why won't advertisers mount megaphones on the top of cars screeching "NIVEA HAND CREAM!" in residential areas? Because it would piss people off, make them less likely to buy Nivea hand cream; or, more importantly, just be ignored. I use AdBlock not primarily because I don't like having to see advertising per se, but (A) because busy, moving, flashing ads interrupt my browsing experience and (B) because I have never clicked on an ad in my decade-plus internet experience. Most advertisers pay on clickthrus, and I bet that most AdBlock users, like me, would never clickthru anyway. Indeed, if I didn't use AdBlock I'd end up making more corporate enemies than I do by using it--"Eugh! That Pepsi Flash ad is horrendous! I'm never buying Pepsi again!"
If AdBlock use affects advertising revenues, then advertisers will come up with a better way to sell their product. If it doesn't, they won't. Somewhere in the middle, they'll make advertising even more pernicious; but Mozilla's development platform means they'll always be someone around to program a way to get around their get around. Isn't OSS great?
It should be noted that this only works on google.com; doing the same thing on google.co.uk (which you may like me innocently redirected to) will not work.
Good point well made. And Google Scholar isn't the only 'free' option trying to make it's mark. getCITED [or see my summary/criticisms], for example, is a collaborative project along similar lines struggling (imho) to get off the ground.
Slashdotters might also not forget that, for all Google Scholar's techie coolness and wide range, the services it links to--mainly e-journal sites in my usage--are not free; so it's not all free vs. unfree.
And this also means that just cos people like the ACS might suffer, academic publishing itself won't.
Re:While game magazines may be going downhill...
on
New Games Journalism
·
· Score: 1
However happy I am with the contetion that games magazines are going down hill, I'm not sure that the State Wiki article really solves the problem: namely, print media is trying just as hard to come to terms with the fact of the internet. If what makes the distinction between good and bad journalism is its similarity to the specialised press, then its really about professionalism. And as far as I'm aware, the author of "Bow, Nigger" is not a professional journalist. Therefore, in meiner Meinung, the point should surely be that as we become aware of the increasing diversity and (often) prolificacy of sources of journalism--across all genres--we're going to keep finding great writing like this around, and a lot of bad writing. But people are becoming as skilfull with their own filtering out of this information as any aggregator, using various tools and reading techniques. I think it calls for celebration of this, rather than industry-specific worrying.
The results also appear to be very close aesthetically to Yahoo Mail's "AutoComplete," but are cleverer in that they don't need additional client-side software/plugins. And Yahoo! haven't been clever enough to add this to their search frontend...
A prediction:
So often when an idea comes around, one player emerges as disproportionately successful, and in that early charge it's very difficult to achieve competitive diversity. Paypal was a market leader in an emerging market. But we've seen this happen time and time again, especially in technology: just when we think Paypal's monopoly has become a fait accompli will be the time when people become most open to competition. I figure that only once we start to get *really* annoyed with Paypal (as sure we are already) and frustrated by the lack of options, will those competitors start to look so very attractive.
Just to clarify my reasons for submitting the story: it was not to engage in a pro-UN propaganda exercise. Nor was it to promote the extremely good work by the people at Software Freedom Day. It was more to raise interest and debate in this particular instance of an international organisation's role in free software/oss, and the exponential number of issues which radiate out from that fact. Apologies for any confusion;)
Cotse have recently been experimenting with some fun in the realm of tunnelling of the SSH kind. Unfortunately they don't have a lot of available documentation on it but scrolling down the notes on the login page should give you a fair idea of what's going on. It's neat and secure and could, with the proxy they've set up, enable an unusually private way of accessing internet services. Other ISPs take note..
Well, for people like me, who work between different locations (home, student house, university), that kind of access if pretty important. I mean sure, there's IMAP, but it's not exactly perfect. And of course we can't all have remote logins...
Definitely worth checking out Danny O'Brien's (NTK) "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" speech (given for O'Reilly and at NOTCON '04), in which he argues on the basis of research that the most prolific programmers/hackers/geeks organise themselves via... text-based todo lists!
Slashdot Mirror
It won't happen, this is just fodder. Plenty of things get "investigated" at the European Parliament. All it really tells us is that some representatives don't really understand things very well -- but we knew that anyway. Is it just me or is this just a pointless opportunity for some misdirected, ill-informed, pro-American, anti-European slashdot reader commentary?
Define "Slashdot". The text is word-for-word my submission. I certainly don't see anything wrong with the project, wasn't trying to skew it, and am in favour of digitisation pretty much whatever. I only added the last couple of sentences in the hope of riling some people into discussion.
Ah cummon, can't a submitter have fun these days? I agree, it is a good thing, but watching Slashdotters squirm over a tedious question is much more fun than you give it credit for.
YES! WHAT A FANTASTIC IDEA!
Of course, the Indian Govt. never bows to corporate interests--"what only the rich and powerful want"--on any important issues like IT and software, only on incredibly minor ones like generic drugs that help AIDS sufferers and the World's poor.
Indeed, ignoring the gratuitous reference to a "social contract": put simply, AdBlock is not in any way "unethical" because advertisers pay on the assumption that they'll make money. If they don't think a certain type of advertising will generate revenue, they won't use it. Why won't advertisers mount megaphones on the top of cars screeching "NIVEA HAND CREAM!" in residential areas? Because it would piss people off, make them less likely to buy Nivea hand cream; or, more importantly, just be ignored. I use AdBlock not primarily because I don't like having to see advertising per se, but (A) because busy, moving, flashing ads interrupt my browsing experience and (B) because I have never clicked on an ad in my decade-plus internet experience. Most advertisers pay on clickthrus, and I bet that most AdBlock users, like me, would never clickthru anyway. Indeed, if I didn't use AdBlock I'd end up making more corporate enemies than I do by using it--"Eugh! That Pepsi Flash ad is horrendous! I'm never buying Pepsi again!" If AdBlock use affects advertising revenues, then advertisers will come up with a better way to sell their product. If it doesn't, they won't. Somewhere in the middle, they'll make advertising even more pernicious; but Mozilla's development platform means they'll always be someone around to program a way to get around their get around. Isn't OSS great?
It should be noted that this only works on google.com; doing the same thing on google.co.uk (which you may like me innocently redirected to) will not work.
In the UK, this has been the case for years. When I moved into Halls, there wasn't even a land-line phone available.
Good point well made. And Google Scholar isn't the only 'free' option trying to make it's mark. getCITED [or see my summary/criticisms], for example, is a collaborative project along similar lines struggling (imho) to get off the ground.
Slashdotters might also not forget that, for all Google Scholar's techie coolness and wide range, the services it links to--mainly e-journal sites in my usage--are not free; so it's not all free vs. unfree.
And this also means that just cos people like the ACS might suffer, academic publishing itself won't.
However happy I am with the contetion that games magazines are going down hill, I'm not sure that the State Wiki article really solves the problem: namely, print media is trying just as hard to come to terms with the fact of the internet. If what makes the distinction between good and bad journalism is its similarity to the specialised press, then its really about professionalism. And as far as I'm aware, the author of "Bow, Nigger" is not a professional journalist. Therefore, in meiner Meinung, the point should surely be that as we become aware of the increasing diversity and (often) prolificacy of sources of journalism--across all genres--we're going to keep finding great writing like this around, and a lot of bad writing. But people are becoming as skilfull with their own filtering out of this information as any aggregator, using various tools and reading techniques. I think it calls for celebration of this, rather than industry-specific worrying.
The results also appear to be very close aesthetically to Yahoo Mail's "AutoComplete," but are cleverer in that they don't need additional client-side software/plugins. And Yahoo! haven't been clever enough to add this to their search frontend...
Humans in the Republican party 25 days ago?! Amazing!
A prediction: So often when an idea comes around, one player emerges as disproportionately successful, and in that early charge it's very difficult to achieve competitive diversity. Paypal was a market leader in an emerging market. But we've seen this happen time and time again, especially in technology: just when we think Paypal's monopoly has become a fait accompli will be the time when people become most open to competition. I figure that only once we start to get *really* annoyed with Paypal (as sure we are already) and frustrated by the lack of options, will those competitors start to look so very attractive.
Just to clarify my reasons for submitting the story: it was not to engage in a pro-UN propaganda exercise. Nor was it to promote the extremely good work by the people at Software Freedom Day. It was more to raise interest and debate in this particular instance of an international organisation's role in free software/oss, and the exponential number of issues which radiate out from that fact. Apologies for any confusion ;)
Cotse have recently been experimenting with some fun in the realm of tunnelling of the SSH kind. Unfortunately they don't have a lot of available documentation on it but scrolling down the notes on the login page should give you a fair idea of what's going on. It's neat and secure and could, with the proxy they've set up, enable an unusually private way of accessing internet services. Other ISPs take note..
Well, for people like me, who work between different locations (home, student house, university), that kind of access if pretty important. I mean sure, there's IMAP, but it's not exactly perfect. And of course we can't all have remote logins...
As long as we can send Outlook Express back to that accursed decade as part of the package. I mean, it only seems fair.. ;)
Definitely worth checking out Danny O'Brien's (NTK) "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" speech (given for O'Reilly and at NOTCON '04), in which he argues on the basis of research that the most prolific programmers/hackers/geeks organise themselves via... text-based todo lists!
Check out
A summary or shorter summary