malware, zombie spam networks, massive and continual and widespread attacks, phishing, nigerian scams
Those aren't commercial. Those are criminal. I'm not going to argue that criminals are not doing damage to the internet and it's users. I think you missed the point.
The internet was forever changed for the worse when commercial interests moved in.
I doubt you really believe this. The big money is what brought the innovation. I'm sure there will be people lined up to tell me about how great it was when they used baud or Mosaic or whatever, or how anything new is just "fluff" (I'll agree with the "fluff" thing to some extent), but most reasonable people will agree that the internet has vastly improved. You can still do all the things you used to love "way back when". So many non geeks can do what they want now, too.
As you mentioned, you can dump nearly all trace of the advertising junk that exists now.
Non-geeks in oppressed countries that now have the tools to post, read, and exchange information online; they may not have been able to do this before the big cash brought the big innovation. Housewives with a coughing child can look online to see information that can help them decide if they need to take their child to the hospital.
So many of these things are supported by advertisements or other corporate interests. I'm not one of the "don't block ads" people, I block anything that blinks or slows browsing, but you have to acknowledge the benefit the capitalist interest brought - I'll certainly admit the harm it's brought. But overall, the good outweighs the bad.
Wow, no kidding. If that was an original idea, it's the best one I've heard in a long while. Mozilla, OOo, Firefox, Thunderbird would be great. But I'm betting that if AOL was going to distribute a stand-alone browser with their ISP poop it would be the new Netscape.
Are there any licensing concerns with any of that stuff being distributed with AOL software?
I don't understand your point, Francis. Crappy products don't do well in a free market (is that really it)? No entrepreneur starts a company thinking his product sucks; they try to make everything line up in their favor to be successful. How and when a new company and product are presented is certainly among the top 10 most important factors to consider.
I don't see why this kind of discussion is "pointless".
I didn't realize it when I submitted the story, but yubnub was created by Jon Aquino who recently appeared in/. for his K'nexis Keyboard. Also yubnub is developed in the/. darling Ruby on Rails and was Jon's entry into the 2004 Rails Day.
"Newsflash: You do not need to run the other desktop. You just need to install some base libraries."
No doubt! Asking about good software for bibliographys is a good enough question, but why didn't "Cliff" edit out the part about Kile and Latex not working on GNOME?
"give subscribers a new, Microsoft-formatted version of any song they've purchased from the iTunes store so those songs can be played on devices other than an iPod."
Thank God we have Microsoft to save us from vendor lock-in!
"Google may be able to prevent commercial use of the images..."
That's the point. The webmasters are lifting images and using resources from Google without their permission. Google makes money by showing visitors ads. These tools do not show Google's ads to end users - Google can claim they lose money by having their resources taken without the chance to earn income.
Their product is being offered to users in ways they did not intend, did not authorize, and are unable to monitize.
Google's TOS allows people to use this service for personal use. The Chicagocrime site is using Google's info and displaying it to the public.
From TFTOS:" The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales.
I don't think the Chicagocrimes site has any ads there right now, so it is non-commercial, but it still not "personal use".
It all comes down to "What's a geek?". You try to label something and without doubt the label gets "misused" (according to someone).
Ask 10 random people on the street what a "hacker" is and you can guess what their answer will be. Ask 10/.ers and again, you can guess what the answer will be.
So what defines a geek? Intelligence, interest in computers, science, math, reclusiveness? What is the opposite of a geek? Teenage Brittany Spears-loving girls maybe, but they are likely proficient at instant messaging, posting to their blog, and circumventing their parent's Parental Controls. Old men? I don't think so every grandfather I've ever known had some kind of trade or skill like electricians or auto repair which suggests an inclination towards "how's this work, I'm going to take it apart", and even geeks eventually get old. Maybe soccer Moms are the anti-geeks.
Anyway, my point is that like labeling music (or other art) "Alternative", "Rock", "R&B", "Pop" looses its meaning after a while, the "geek" label does too. How many Libraries of Congress/VWs does it take to make a geek?
It would seem a surprisingly large percentage of computer entheusists like Japanese-style animation, but it does not follow that "geeks" are a homogeneous group whose likes and dislikes can be easily predicted.
I know a "geek" who listens to country music. He loves the shit. The definition of "jarring to the brain" is seeing/hearing Merle Haggard on amaroK.
After saying all that, the comments about the parent not beeing a "real" geek were, as I'm sure you know, jokes.
From professorhojo's FA:"In addition to all the cafes, there is a "cosplay izakaya" (small Japanese-style bar) called Little BSD (Little Beauty's Satanic Dining)...One of the Little Beauty Satans will bring you some rice and seaweed."
Is this a *BSD reference? Or is the devil/BSD thing just a coincidence? I'm not up on popular easter culture so I have no idea.
I hate it when I hit "submit" instead of "Preview". That should have been broken into paragraphs...sorry for the decreased lifespan to your eyes.
I was also going to add that I wouldn't focus too much XHTML, sophisticated CSS, or JavaScript. Using HTML will give them a base for XHTML, should they decide to pursue it, the CSS they pick up from a CMS is a good introduction, and the concepts behind Javascript can be learned through most scripting languages, and since PHP is a required component of the curriculum, I would not try to bog them down with learing two languages at once.
I would walk the class through the planning, implementation, customization, and maintainence, of an existing PHP/MySQL CMS. PHPNuke, Mambo, and Drupal come to mind as good bases.
The advantage to using an existing CMS as a platform is that students would be able to focus on adding additional custom functionality instead of the base which might involve concepts they should already be familiar with. Hacking existing code gives you a a good look at what the developers have done right and what the student might have done differently.
Their assignments could involve building new modules that meet certain criteria, improving load times, and streamlining code. The modules could then be released into the CMS' community. The students won't be able to just make obvious improvements because most of those trivial improvements will have already been made by the exisitng community.
It would be a great way to introduce (or further enhance) the students' appreciaton of OSS concepts as they apply to web development.
I partly agree with this. Certainly, who would be surprised by businesses taking advantage of cheap or free assets like the code the OSS community produces? Companies are there to make money, they are going to find the shortest distance between their bank and their clients' wallets; if they don't their competitors will.
Further, who would be surprised to learn that the companies that benefit from these F/OSS projects try to steer them in the direction most advantageous for them? The businessman/owner/investor who isn't assertive to some degree won't last long.
But companies mentioned in TFA can't just tell Jack Crack in his basement where he should focus his efforts in his code. He'll work on what he finds interesting or those features he needs. The companies gain influence in the direction of the projects by hiring developers and otherwise supporting the project (hardware donations, bandwidth, cash, facilities, etc.).
These companies are not getting something for nothing; they're getting something for cheap. Developers and users also benefit.
Looking back over this, I guess pretty much just summed up how corporate-sponsored OSS projects work - a summary the parent nor anyone else on/. needs. But it seems like an obviously balanced system that TFA just doesn't seem to get.
I've never heard of JesÃs Villasante before, but I'm willing to admit that he likely knows more about this stuff than I do. He just did a very poor job of making his point. Or the author of TFA just did a bad job of relaying it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, that's the dumb-ass planet next-door, "L@veetra". Outlanders get us confused us all the time.
I, on the other hand, am SMIDA EAHOU of the planet Levitra!
Those aren't commercial. Those are criminal. I'm not going to argue that criminals are not doing damage to the internet and it's users. I think you missed the point.
Maybe you're into that kind of thing though.
Snide comment. Nice touch.
I doubt you really believe this. The big money is what brought the innovation. I'm sure there will be people lined up to tell me about how great it was when they used baud or Mosaic or whatever, or how anything new is just "fluff" (I'll agree with the "fluff" thing to some extent), but most reasonable people will agree that the internet has vastly improved. You can still do all the things you used to love "way back when". So many non geeks can do what they want now, too.
As you mentioned, you can dump nearly all trace of the advertising junk that exists now.
Non-geeks in oppressed countries that now have the tools to post, read, and exchange information online; they may not have been able to do this before the big cash brought the big innovation. Housewives with a coughing child can look online to see information that can help them decide if they need to take their child to the hospital.
So many of these things are supported by advertisements or other corporate interests. I'm not one of the "don't block ads" people, I block anything that blinks or slows browsing, but you have to acknowledge the benefit the capitalist interest brought - I'll certainly admit the harm it's brought. But overall, the good outweighs the bad.
Well, the "Winnipeg Sun" just got crossed off my list of respectable news sources.
So what. Chess is so one-diminsional. I wonder how good that machine would do at a real skill game, like Rock, Paper, Scissors.
Are there any licensing concerns with any of that stuff being distributed with AOL software?
Did we run out of adjectives?
I don't see why this kind of discussion is "pointless".
You can see some more of Jon's gadgets here.
No doubt! Asking about good software for bibliographys is a good enough question, but why didn't "Cliff" edit out the part about Kile and Latex not working on GNOME?
Thank God we have Microsoft to save us from vendor lock-in!
That's the point. The webmasters are lifting images and using resources from Google without their permission. Google makes money by showing visitors ads. These tools do not show Google's ads to end users - Google can claim they lose money by having their resources taken without the chance to earn income.
Their product is being offered to users in ways they did not intend, did not authorize, and are unable to monitize.
Google's TOS allows people to use this service for personal use. The Chicagocrime site is using Google's info and displaying it to the public.
From TFTOS:" The Google Services are made available for your personal, non-commercial use only. You may not use the Google Services to sell a product or service, or to increase traffic to your Web site for commercial reasons, such as advertising sales.
I don't think the Chicagocrimes site has any ads there right now, so it is non-commercial, but it still not "personal use".
I guess leotard-clad devil-women are more attractive than fat chicks in penguin costumes.
Ask 10 random people on the street what a "hacker" is and you can guess what their answer will be. Ask 10 /.ers and again, you can guess what the answer will be.
So what defines a geek? Intelligence, interest in computers, science, math, reclusiveness? What is the opposite of a geek? Teenage Brittany Spears-loving girls maybe, but they are likely proficient at instant messaging, posting to their blog, and circumventing their parent's Parental Controls. Old men? I don't think so every grandfather I've ever known had some kind of trade or skill like electricians or auto repair which suggests an inclination towards "how's this work, I'm going to take it apart", and even geeks eventually get old. Maybe soccer Moms are the anti-geeks.
Anyway, my point is that like labeling music (or other art) "Alternative", "Rock", "R&B", "Pop" looses its meaning after a while, the "geek" label does too. How many Libraries of Congress/VWs does it take to make a geek?
It would seem a surprisingly large percentage of computer entheusists like Japanese-style animation, but it does not follow that "geeks" are a homogeneous group whose likes and dislikes can be easily predicted.
I know a "geek" who listens to country music. He loves the shit. The definition of "jarring to the brain" is seeing/hearing Merle Haggard on amaroK.
After saying all that, the comments about the parent not beeing a "real" geek were, as I'm sure you know, jokes.
Is this a *BSD reference? Or is the devil/BSD thing just a coincidence? I'm not up on popular easter culture so I have no idea.
If you try to cp they su you.
I'm with you!
I was also going to add that I wouldn't focus too much XHTML, sophisticated CSS, or JavaScript. Using HTML will give them a base for XHTML, should they decide to pursue it, the CSS they pick up from a CMS is a good introduction, and the concepts behind Javascript can be learned through most scripting languages, and since PHP is a required component of the curriculum, I would not try to bog them down with learing two languages at once.
I would walk the class through the planning, implementation, customization, and maintainence, of an existing PHP/MySQL CMS. PHPNuke, Mambo, and Drupal come to mind as good bases. The advantage to using an existing CMS as a platform is that students would be able to focus on adding additional custom functionality instead of the base which might involve concepts they should already be familiar with. Hacking existing code gives you a a good look at what the developers have done right and what the student might have done differently. Their assignments could involve building new modules that meet certain criteria, improving load times, and streamlining code. The modules could then be released into the CMS' community. The students won't be able to just make obvious improvements because most of those trivial improvements will have already been made by the exisitng community. It would be a great way to introduce (or further enhance) the students' appreciaton of OSS concepts as they apply to web development.
Further, who would be surprised to learn that the companies that benefit from these F/OSS projects try to steer them in the direction most advantageous for them? The businessman/owner/investor who isn't assertive to some degree won't last long.
But companies mentioned in TFA can't just tell Jack Crack in his basement where he should focus his efforts in his code. He'll work on what he finds interesting or those features he needs. The companies gain influence in the direction of the projects by hiring developers and otherwise supporting the project (hardware donations, bandwidth, cash, facilities, etc.).
These companies are not getting something for nothing; they're getting something for cheap. Developers and users also benefit.
Looking back over this, I guess pretty much just summed up how corporate-sponsored OSS projects work - a summary the parent nor anyone else on /. needs. But it seems like an obviously balanced system that TFA just doesn't seem to get.
I've never heard of JesÃs Villasante before, but I'm willing to admit that he likely knows more about this stuff than I do. He just did a very poor job of making his point. Or the author of TFA just did a bad job of relaying it.
Jesus jumped up Christ. Can we get a +1 funny for parent over here? Funniest post on /. today.
I had the same reaction. Check this out.