Hey.. I didn't say it was easy, I just posted a way that you can protect yourself from most ActiveX-related problems while keeping the ability to use Windows Update.
I typically do that when I am asked to clean spyware from a computer. I also install FireFox and tell them to use that, but that's another story. I wouldn't expect a regular user to know how to do it, nor would I bother to try and walk them through it.
For reference, I haven't had many problems with talking users through adding new sites to their trusted sites list when they want to access a site in IE that has an ActiveX control. Also, that gives me the opportunity to try and figure out if the control is really something that they want to have installed.
It's also worth noting - in this post but not in the one before - that Vista reportedly has a separate program for Windows Update, so you should be able to disable ActiveX completely in IE on Vista. Maybe Grandma won't have so much trouble with that (or she'll already have a Mac).
He does show a bias towards Linux, though. He also ignores the reports that you can disable all the eye candy in Vista and will be able to run it that way on current entry-level video cards.
"extortion: to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power"
You're saying that you don't think the statement, "Pay us or we'll make your content crawl for our users." is forceful, intimidating, and potentially undue or illegal?
Think of it this way: The internet is a website's path to its front door. How would you feel if the government sold the sidewalk leading to your front door and told you that you'd have to have your customers use the back entrance unless you started paying $50 a month?
Yeah, but sometimes it makes a good project for a student who wouldn't have been paid anyway. Then they get a grade, get to say they won the contest on their resume, and get some free stuff. I bet if they really were giving beer as pay that college students would be all over this.
"And less code than "classic" ASP, PHP, or JSP? Not once when I worked with ASP.NET for 2 years did I find reduction of code compared to other options. Maybe there are some cases I didn't see, but a blanket statement like that is just wrong."
Well, what they're not saying is that it's less code but more markup. If you use their controls then you put all the properties in the.aspx file as an XML object, but you're hardly saving time by setting properties in there vs setting them in code like you used to.
Also, with Atlas you have less of your own code but more of theirs, because you have to use their libraries for all the AJAX functionality. Most people that I know who've been doing things with AJAX already have their own libraries of js written to re-use.
I'll fill you in: This was a PR stunt. It was meant to generate buzz about the possible return of Futurama so that there would be a higher likelihood that it would be picked up.
I think the buzz was there, but they just didn't pick it up. At least fans get the movies, though.
Anyway, I was pretty clear about it when I read the previous report about Futurama that it was speculation and hearsay. Fortunately, some of us know how to take a source into context and realize that this is a quasi-news site, not a courtroom. Speculation and hearsay, presented as such, is and should be welcome... so long as it's newsworthy to someone.
Don't get me wrong. It's not that I think Google won't continue to invest in R&D in areas outside of the immediate ad revenue market. I know they will. In fact, when the time comes that they need a boost in their bottom line, I think one of the big products that people speculate about them creating will probably be well into development. My statement is that I don't think they'll want to release anything on that scale until their ad revenue starts to level off.
Everyone thinks Google can take on Microsoft, but Google has no real incentive right now. If their incentive is that they've truly become the Microsoft of online advertising then they'll have to expand into other markets in order to achieve any sort of growth. That's the point that I would put my money on Google doing something huge like releasing an OS with their name on it or trying to take on MS Office. Before that there's no real point, they'd just excite investors and cause analysts to flip out saying that there's no way they can topple the MS giant. All of that for products that would have little chance of being successful if they can't throw a large chunk of time, money, and talent at it.
To make it short: I just wouldn't count on Google Office or Google OS anytime soon.
I doubt that Google will really make a run into another major market (like office software or operating systems) until they've exhausted the growth of ad revenue. After that we may see something big in order to make a new revenue stream, because they'll find that sitting idly by and watching the ad revenue come in won't make investors happy.
"Your pages do not have any adds..." now while it's still Beta. Just wait and it will be filled with Google Ads, as we see today in Gmail...
Wha? Sorry, I just don't see how GMail is "filled" with ads. They show up in two or three locations, but they're easily ignored text. In the case of the Web Clip bar they tend to be understated, yet they're labelled as advertisements so you can still tell. The most intrusive thing about them is that Google searches the contents of your email to display them. Unless maybe you're in a pool of users that's getting significantly more ads put on their page, or I'm in a pool that's getting significantly less, I just don't think that the word "filled" is appropriate. Maybe "sprinkled" or "peppered". Who knows, GMail is still in Beta, so maybe you are seeing more or maybe they'll put more on there before they release it (if ever).
I would expect a similar peppering of ads rolled out sometime during the beta of Google pages.
Q. What players currently support Theora?
Major players like mplayer,
xine, helix player and VideoLAN supports Theora.
Directshow filters
are also available for use on Windows platform.
See the problem is that Yahoo! is doing business in China as an American company. This means that they are operating under the control of multiple sovereigns and must tread carefully. To continue to do business in China they must obey Chinese laws, even if those laws may appear contradictory to American law. However, because they are an American company they must still follow the laws of our sovereign. This typically means added limitations without added freedoms.
For instance, you may be able to sleep with little children by law in certain Asian countries, but you can't by our laws. The reverse is true about your freedom of speech in some Asian countries. You may be guaranteed freedom of expression by our laws, but if you go to China and start a pro-democracy campaign then you may find yourself in a Chinese prison. The best our country could do is to try and secure your release. With the under-aged prostitutes you'll find that we have a task force that investigates Americans who go to areas where that is legal and brings charges against them in the US.
Certainly it's much easier to enforce an action that happens within your own physical region than it is one that occurs elsewhere but is covered by your laws. I believe that is the reason why you're noticing such a discrepancy in enforcement.
In this case they followed the appropriate set of laws. Someone who is not protected by the laws of our sovereign violated the laws of theirs. This appears contradictory to our laws, but our laws only apply to our people. It might not be morally or socially just, especially by our standards, but it follows the laws that they must abide by. Otherwise they will end up blocked from the Chinese internet users.
Re:I can't justify that sort of monthly expense
on
MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 1
What -I- would like to see, and maybe it's just me, is a MMORPG that you could still play locally on your computer if you didn't want to pay the subscription fee... it just would be lacking the MMO part. Maybe it's just me, but I find server lag deaths and disconnections to be a pain in the neck.
I had a discussion about offline data with a friend who's been playing MMORPGs for years the other day. His explanation of why all the information is online is what keeps me from wanting the same thing as you suggest. It requires a little history, though.
Apparently earlier MMORPGs had some or all of the player's information on their local machine. The problem is that people would reverse engineer the data files and/or the executable in order to cheat the game. This would ruin the economy and give cheaters a huge advantage, hurting the game play for all others. That's why all of your information is stored on the server in modern MMORPGs.
The problem with what you suggest is that it would have the same vulnerabilities as before. The player would disconnect and work offline, getting an unknown number of drops and XP, and then when they come back online the server would have to honor that information.
I think an acceptable alternative would be for the server to keep your place for five minutes or so. That way if you're in the middle of a mission and you get kicked you could reconnect and join in wherever you were before. This would save a lot of frustration (like when you're at the end of a 2 hour mission and the monk gets kicked from the game and can't join back in) but it would protect against the cheating of old.
Re:I can't justify that sort of monthly expense
on
MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 1
Mmm, speaks volumes about how fun that game is, doesn't it. That's one of the reasons i never got into MMORPGs - they become a chore, sooner or later.
I can't argue that sometimes it becomes a chore. However, I think that I should clarify my comment about incentive. The problem isn't that the game isn't fun, the problem is that people get busy with life.
Maybe it's silly to suggest that life is getting in the way of gaming, but that's basically the case. When you aren't paying an arm and a leg for the privilege to play a game then you tend to treat it as just that, a game. This is a problem when you're playing a team game where every online player can be an asset. By allowing your account that doesn't have a monthly fee to sit idle you're not hurting your pocket book, but you're potentially hurting your teammates by not being available.
In the end it's a minor issue, but it is a benefit that monthly fee games seem to enjoy. I may not play monthly fee games, but most of my guildmates also play WoW and others. I've notice that they are still attached to their accounts there simply because they feel that they've put so much into them. They still go and play every now and then, even the ones that say they prefer Guild Wars. This is something that Guild Wars doesn't have, and when the time comes that they decide to move on to another game they will surely dump this one with little regret.
Re:I can't justify that sort of monthly expense
on
MMOGs Branch Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They only mention it in sales table, but Guild Wars is one of the best selling MMORPGs because it has no monthly fee. That's the reason why it's the only MMORPG I've ever owned. I'm with you on the high monthly fee for other service front, I refuse to buy a game I have to pay to play.
I would consider a game, were it truly fun to play, that was free to download but has a monthly fee, though. The big problem with no monthly fee is that there's not as much incentive to play. That's why I have guildmates that haven't logged in in a month.
You either listen to NPR or you're just on the same page as Google is. I say this because they said basically the same thing yesterday as what you just did.
Just to clarify, these are "secret ballots", yes? No, the officials are *not* supposed to be able to tell how an individual votes. They *are* supposed to verify that the voter is registered, the voter is in fact that person, and that the ballots have not been tampered with. Then comes the correct counting
Who said anything about linking the vote to the individual? The votes merely need to be verifiable. Adding a paper printout that does not link the vote to the voter not only ensures privacy, but accuracy. This would simply be an electronic interface to the same system that has generally worked for us for years.
At the very least that's how it worked in Ohio, where I've worked the polls on several occasions. An id number on the punch card is recorded, assigning it to the voter on the list of registered voters in that district. The voter then goes into the booth and records their vote, they are free to verify that they filled it out correctly and may request a replacement card if they need one. The voter then returns the punch card to an election official who detaches the part with the id number from the ballot. After the poll is closed the ballots are gathered and both the id tabs and the ballots are counted and the totals must match. The bag is then sealed and the presiding judge (I did that a few times, you get an extra $40) takes the bag to the county's election offices.
Notice how everything was done very carefully? Notice how everything is well documented, yet privacy is kept? That's there for a reason. It makes it difficult to throw an election, it keeps people from being bullied into voting a particular way, and it allows the voters to know that their vote actually counts because it will be counted. This is the standard that electronic voting should exceed. Instead it managed to turn the elections back in time where the public has to believe what one person says and has no way to ever recount their votes. It turned our process into a NASCAR race, whatever the results are at the end are what the people get, even if there's a reason that they should have been different.
You can't allow people to check back on their vote -- it would allow people to sell their vote in a way that could be verified later.
Right. That's why the voter shouldn't be able to verify it, but the voting officials should be able to.
As for the paper trail idea: Why make someone vote on a computer screen to produce a paper ballot? Keep It Simple, Stupid applies to methodologies and processes beyond programming and interfaces.
Wrong. Keep It Simple, Stupid applies to design, not requirements. The requirements that your machine must meet may be as complicated as they need to be in order to get the job done and do it right. In this case our entire voting system absolutely depends on the ability to verify that votes are tallied correctly. It is imperative that the votes are recorded correctly and that a recount can be performed if needed.
In this case there needs to be some way that a voter can verify that their vote was counted correctly, but not be able to take that outside of the polling location. Some solutions have already been thought up, such as printing a piece of paper that lines up to a key where the voter can verify that the paper matches their vote, and the paper would just be a few random boxes without the key. This allows for recounts and lets the voter verify their data, but it allows for an easy to use interface with no hanging chads.
I think the more convincing theory on the failure of Betamax was copyright issues and the bad blood that resulted in The Betamax Case.
As I understand it, the high quality of recordings on Betamax caused worry with the content creators that infringement would run rampant. In turn, content creators boycotted Beta to try to keep the format from gaining ground. The poor quality of VHS, it's degradation over time, and it's limited dubbing ability made it safe from the industry's wrath.
Porn wasn't the main driving factor, it was that few works (porn or not) were released on Betamax. That hurt the reputation of the format and made it less desirable, especially since this was all pretty new to everyone and only a few people were concerned with the improved quality. It seems to me that porn is just the driving factor behind media-related rumors. "Porn, and Al Gore, invented the Internet.", "Without Porn we'd all be watching movies on reel to reel", etc..
Oh for christ's sake, put it in context! Read the article, read the description, read the posts.
The GPL doesn't make you disclose that. I know that, you know that, anyone who's read this website more than five times knows that. Sarbanes-Oxley is what forces the company to disclose this. That's what this entire discussion was about.
I apologize if those who take my post out of context, or don't consider it carefully, might think that I'm saying that the GPL requires this. I should have put Sarbanes-Oxley somewhere in that sentence, but when I was writing it I knew the context was there and it seemed perfectly clear what I was saying.
That's still not an IP holding. You don't own the copyright, you only own a copy. You have to explicitly buy the copyrights in order to own them, and buying a copy of Windows does not constitute Microsoft selling their copyrights. GP was right, no matter how McDonald's buys their copy of Windows they do not suddenly own the copyright unless Microsoft has sold the copyright and not a copy.
Aside from that, your argument seems to have very little to do with what I said. I said that GPL gives you license to modify the code, not ownership of the copyrights. This is still true, and it will continue to be true as the GPL *is* a license, so all it can do is to license.
Slashdot Mirror
No, no, no... It's $37,500,000 per second. ($125,000 per infringement)
Remember that the MPAA thinks in dollars.
I typically do that when I am asked to clean spyware from a computer. I also install FireFox and tell them to use that, but that's another story. I wouldn't expect a regular user to know how to do it, nor would I bother to try and walk them through it.
For reference, I haven't had many problems with talking users through adding new sites to their trusted sites list when they want to access a site in IE that has an ActiveX control. Also, that gives me the opportunity to try and figure out if the control is really something that they want to have installed.
It's also worth noting - in this post but not in the one before - that Vista reportedly has a separate program for Windows Update, so you should be able to disable ActiveX completely in IE on Vista. Maybe Grandma won't have so much trouble with that (or she'll already have a Mac).
He does show a bias towards Linux, though. He also ignores the reports that you can disable all the eye candy in Vista and will be able to run it that way on current entry-level video cards.
ActiveX really should only run from trusted sites anyway.
You're saying that you don't think the statement, "Pay us or we'll make your content crawl for our users." is forceful, intimidating, and potentially undue or illegal?
Think of it this way: The internet is a website's path to its front door. How would you feel if the government sold the sidewalk leading to your front door and told you that you'd have to have your customers use the back entrance unless you started paying $50 a month?
Yeah, but sometimes it makes a good project for a student who wouldn't have been paid anyway. Then they get a grade, get to say they won the contest on their resume, and get some free stuff. I bet if they really were giving beer as pay that college students would be all over this.
Well, what they're not saying is that it's less code but more markup. If you use their controls then you put all the properties in the .aspx file as an XML object, but you're hardly saving time by setting properties in there vs setting them in code like you used to.
Also, with Atlas you have less of your own code but more of theirs, because you have to use their libraries for all the AJAX functionality. Most people that I know who've been doing things with AJAX already have their own libraries of js written to re-use.
I think the buzz was there, but they just didn't pick it up. At least fans get the movies, though.
Anyway, I was pretty clear about it when I read the previous report about Futurama that it was speculation and hearsay. Fortunately, some of us know how to take a source into context and realize that this is a quasi-news site, not a courtroom. Speculation and hearsay, presented as such, is and should be welcome... so long as it's newsworthy to someone.
Everyone thinks Google can take on Microsoft, but Google has no real incentive right now. If their incentive is that they've truly become the Microsoft of online advertising then they'll have to expand into other markets in order to achieve any sort of growth. That's the point that I would put my money on Google doing something huge like releasing an OS with their name on it or trying to take on MS Office. Before that there's no real point, they'd just excite investors and cause analysts to flip out saying that there's no way they can topple the MS giant. All of that for products that would have little chance of being successful if they can't throw a large chunk of time, money, and talent at it.
To make it short: I just wouldn't count on Google Office or Google OS anytime soon.
I doubt that Google will really make a run into another major market (like office software or operating systems) until they've exhausted the growth of ad revenue. After that we may see something big in order to make a new revenue stream, because they'll find that sitting idly by and watching the ad revenue come in won't make investors happy.
I would reply to you in Yahoo!'s style of advertising, but this darned thing doesn't let me post flash and animated gifs.
Wha? Sorry, I just don't see how GMail is "filled" with ads. They show up in two or three locations, but they're easily ignored text. In the case of the Web Clip bar they tend to be understated, yet they're labelled as advertisements so you can still tell. The most intrusive thing about them is that Google searches the contents of your email to display them. Unless maybe you're in a pool of users that's getting significantly more ads put on their page, or I'm in a pool that's getting significantly less, I just don't think that the word "filled" is appropriate. Maybe "sprinkled" or "peppered". Who knows, GMail is still in Beta, so maybe you are seeing more or maybe they'll put more on there before they release it (if ever).
I would expect a similar peppering of ads rolled out sometime during the beta of Google pages.
For instance, you may be able to sleep with little children by law in certain Asian countries, but you can't by our laws. The reverse is true about your freedom of speech in some Asian countries. You may be guaranteed freedom of expression by our laws, but if you go to China and start a pro-democracy campaign then you may find yourself in a Chinese prison. The best our country could do is to try and secure your release. With the under-aged prostitutes you'll find that we have a task force that investigates Americans who go to areas where that is legal and brings charges against them in the US.
Certainly it's much easier to enforce an action that happens within your own physical region than it is one that occurs elsewhere but is covered by your laws. I believe that is the reason why you're noticing such a discrepancy in enforcement.
In this case they followed the appropriate set of laws. Someone who is not protected by the laws of our sovereign violated the laws of theirs. This appears contradictory to our laws, but our laws only apply to our people. It might not be morally or socially just, especially by our standards, but it follows the laws that they must abide by. Otherwise they will end up blocked from the Chinese internet users.
I had a discussion about offline data with a friend who's been playing MMORPGs for years the other day. His explanation of why all the information is online is what keeps me from wanting the same thing as you suggest. It requires a little history, though.
Apparently earlier MMORPGs had some or all of the player's information on their local machine. The problem is that people would reverse engineer the data files and/or the executable in order to cheat the game. This would ruin the economy and give cheaters a huge advantage, hurting the game play for all others. That's why all of your information is stored on the server in modern MMORPGs.
The problem with what you suggest is that it would have the same vulnerabilities as before. The player would disconnect and work offline, getting an unknown number of drops and XP, and then when they come back online the server would have to honor that information.
I think an acceptable alternative would be for the server to keep your place for five minutes or so. That way if you're in the middle of a mission and you get kicked you could reconnect and join in wherever you were before. This would save a lot of frustration (like when you're at the end of a 2 hour mission and the monk gets kicked from the game and can't join back in) but it would protect against the cheating of old.
I can't argue that sometimes it becomes a chore. However, I think that I should clarify my comment about incentive. The problem isn't that the game isn't fun, the problem is that people get busy with life.
Maybe it's silly to suggest that life is getting in the way of gaming, but that's basically the case. When you aren't paying an arm and a leg for the privilege to play a game then you tend to treat it as just that, a game. This is a problem when you're playing a team game where every online player can be an asset. By allowing your account that doesn't have a monthly fee to sit idle you're not hurting your pocket book, but you're potentially hurting your teammates by not being available.
In the end it's a minor issue, but it is a benefit that monthly fee games seem to enjoy. I may not play monthly fee games, but most of my guildmates also play WoW and others. I've notice that they are still attached to their accounts there simply because they feel that they've put so much into them. They still go and play every now and then, even the ones that say they prefer Guild Wars. This is something that Guild Wars doesn't have, and when the time comes that they decide to move on to another game they will surely dump this one with little regret.
I would consider a game, were it truly fun to play, that was free to download but has a monthly fee, though. The big problem with no monthly fee is that there's not as much incentive to play. That's why I have guildmates that haven't logged in in a month.
You either listen to NPR or you're just on the same page as Google is. I say this because they said basically the same thing yesterday as what you just did.
You may want to consider rephrasing that.
Who said anything about linking the vote to the individual? The votes merely need to be verifiable. Adding a paper printout that does not link the vote to the voter not only ensures privacy, but accuracy. This would simply be an electronic interface to the same system that has generally worked for us for years.
At the very least that's how it worked in Ohio, where I've worked the polls on several occasions. An id number on the punch card is recorded, assigning it to the voter on the list of registered voters in that district. The voter then goes into the booth and records their vote, they are free to verify that they filled it out correctly and may request a replacement card if they need one. The voter then returns the punch card to an election official who detaches the part with the id number from the ballot. After the poll is closed the ballots are gathered and both the id tabs and the ballots are counted and the totals must match. The bag is then sealed and the presiding judge (I did that a few times, you get an extra $40) takes the bag to the county's election offices.
Notice how everything was done very carefully? Notice how everything is well documented, yet privacy is kept? That's there for a reason. It makes it difficult to throw an election, it keeps people from being bullied into voting a particular way, and it allows the voters to know that their vote actually counts because it will be counted. This is the standard that electronic voting should exceed. Instead it managed to turn the elections back in time where the public has to believe what one person says and has no way to ever recount their votes. It turned our process into a NASCAR race, whatever the results are at the end are what the people get, even if there's a reason that they should have been different.
Correction:
That's why the voter shouldn't be able to verify it after they leave the polling location, but the voting officials should be able to.
Right. That's why the voter shouldn't be able to verify it, but the voting officials should be able to.
As for the paper trail idea: Why make someone vote on a computer screen to produce a paper ballot? Keep It Simple, Stupid applies to methodologies and processes beyond programming and interfaces.
Wrong. Keep It Simple, Stupid applies to design, not requirements. The requirements that your machine must meet may be as complicated as they need to be in order to get the job done and do it right. In this case our entire voting system absolutely depends on the ability to verify that votes are tallied correctly. It is imperative that the votes are recorded correctly and that a recount can be performed if needed.
In this case there needs to be some way that a voter can verify that their vote was counted correctly, but not be able to take that outside of the polling location. Some solutions have already been thought up, such as printing a piece of paper that lines up to a key where the voter can verify that the paper matches their vote, and the paper would just be a few random boxes without the key. This allows for recounts and lets the voter verify their data, but it allows for an easy to use interface with no hanging chads.
As I understand it, the high quality of recordings on Betamax caused worry with the content creators that infringement would run rampant. In turn, content creators boycotted Beta to try to keep the format from gaining ground. The poor quality of VHS, it's degradation over time, and it's limited dubbing ability made it safe from the industry's wrath.
Porn wasn't the main driving factor, it was that few works (porn or not) were released on Betamax. That hurt the reputation of the format and made it less desirable, especially since this was all pretty new to everyone and only a few people were concerned with the improved quality. It seems to me that porn is just the driving factor behind media-related rumors. "Porn, and Al Gore, invented the Internet.", "Without Porn we'd all be watching movies on reel to reel", etc..
The GPL doesn't make you disclose that. I know that, you know that, anyone who's read this website more than five times knows that. Sarbanes-Oxley is what forces the company to disclose this. That's what this entire discussion was about.
I apologize if those who take my post out of context, or don't consider it carefully, might think that I'm saying that the GPL requires this. I should have put Sarbanes-Oxley somewhere in that sentence, but when I was writing it I knew the context was there and it seemed perfectly clear what I was saying.
Aside from that, your argument seems to have very little to do with what I said. I said that GPL gives you license to modify the code, not ownership of the copyrights. This is still true, and it will continue to be true as the GPL *is* a license, so all it can do is to license.