Let's say you have a current cable package for $40/mo and you get 80 channels
The new system will only bundle the less popular channels in the cable package and the popular channels will be separate. Want FX? Extra. Want Comedy Central? Extra. Want Cartoon Network? Extra.
So now your cable package is still $40/mo, but you only get 50 channels, and not any good ones. Each of the other 30 channels are now an extra $1-5/mo each.
So you might not have to subsidize sports channels, outdoor channels, christian channels, and so forth if you don't care about them, but the de-bundling will end up costing you more.
At first they may lull you in with a discount on the basic bundles to make the a la carte seem like a better deal, but give them a year or two and you will be paying out the nose, and if you complain about it then people will defend the cable companies by saying that cable prices would have gone up anyways, maybe even more-so, if they still did the old bundle method. There would be no way to absolutely prove price gouging due to a la carte.
I always preferred "private beta" and "public beta" vs. "closed beta" and "open beta", but both are correct. I agree that nobody should be confusing this with closed- vs. open-source in this context.
If used as a replacement for Neilsen Ratings then I would actually be all for this, as long as the data was properly anonymized (or only searchable/exported with an obscure TV ID or Viewer ID, and not easily identifiable information). I don't mind advertisers knowing which shows are more popular, but I'd rather that neither they or any other entity tracks all my TV viewership for the sake of either custom-tailoring ads/junk/spam at me or monitoring me specifically.
Judging by what is on TV right now, I think we need to try an alternative to Neilsen Ratings to see if that fixes anything... or at least confirms that humanity isn't worth saving.
Google+'s biggest strength is that it puts circles front-and-center so that you can control who sees your posts on a per-post basis. Yes you can do the same in Facebook, but it is a tedious workflow in Facebook.
I am starting to think this may be Google+'s biggest weakness as well. Now that people can share posts with sub-sets of their friends list with ease, Google+ overall feels less active. I wonder how much of that feeling of inactivity has to do with not being aware of private, walled off conversations between members of your circles. Honestly, how many close friends do you have on Facebook or Google+? It is more than likely that the bulk of your friends lists / circles are acquaintances or friends of friends and those are the people that you are less likely to share posts with... and vice-versa.
They were referring to about:troubleshooting in the mozilla.dev.usability discussion linked in the article summary. I think it is the "Help > Troubleshooting Information" page (about:support in Firefox 5). Either they have plans to rename about:support to about:troubleshooting or add a new about:troubleshooting in the future... or they misspoke in the conversation.
I'd rather they add some easy way to let users install addons that say, "Does not support Firefox x.x". They can put a big disclaimer/warning/alert to make sure the user knows what they are doing, but with the Firefox rapid release schedule I am tired of having my addons break because of version string issues.
One example is the Stylish addon. I am using the Firefox 6 beta in Ubuntu 11.10 alpha and Stylish refuses to install due to the version string. The addon info says it supports Firefox 3.6 - 6.0a2 (key part being "6.0.a2"). That tells me that it should work in later alpha/beta version 6 builds.
Firefox really needs to address the issue of how addons determine whether or not they are out-of-date. The browser version is no longer a useful metric for that.
Chromium is open-source, which is what Chrome is built upon. I haven't paid close enough attention to know the differences between Chromium and Chrome, though.
I am not a lawyer, but if ISPs go this route then won't they lose common carrier status? Will they open themselves up to lawsuits if illegal content is found to be traversing their infrastructure? If a guy gets caught uploading or downloading child porn, then can family-focused or religious organizations sue his ISP for allowing child porn to be transmitted on their network? The ISPs will be monitoring traffic, so they can't play ignorant about what is being sent across it.
I use self-signed certificates on pages hosted on my intranet and all the major browsers throw a major fit about them. If I ever have guests over that want to utilize my intranet web apps then they have to approve and add exceptions for my self-signed certs. The browsers act like my certs are shady or suspicious and if I didn't re-assure my guests then they wouldn't have added the exceptions.
I haven't tried going to a site with a domain mis-match or expired cert, but I would assume browsers throw a fit about those too.
In Thunar (or Nautilus) you can click on "Go" and "Open Location" and type in "smb://..." and it will browse to remote shares. I have never tried "fish://..."
Gnome 3 and Unity both have a hard-on for tablets. It is as if the people behind the projects think desktops and laptops will disappear within the next couple years and everybody will either be using tablets or smart phones instead.
I switched to Xfce because Ubuntu is switching to Unity and ditching Gnome 2.x in the next release.
I must say that Xfce is really nice, and isn't much of a step down from Gnome 2.x
In fact, I managed to style Xfce to look nearly identical to Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x in 11.04. The one missing feature in Xfce 4.8 is the ability to manually sort taskbar buttons, but they have added that back in to 4.8.5 (I'll wait for Ubuntu 11.10 for this feature, as I don't want to hassle with getting 4.8.5 on 11.04 and end up in dependency hell)
Xfce could be a little more customizable, but it is not bad and I'd rather they keep doing what they are doing and not try to please everybody and end up with a lot of cruft.
KDE is getting their groove back, but I ultimately think Xfce will be the big winner of Gnome refugees.
Google Instant Pages sounds like it will be rendering the entire page, including images and other external resources. I wouldn't be surprised if it also executed JavaScript, fetched embedded iframes, and anything else that the page would normally do if you clicked on that link. I wonder if it would even follow redirections?
What is to stop a malevolent webmaster from performing redirects to nasty trojan or malware-infected pages if it detects the page is being pre-rendered? If that page contains flash objects, java apps, or other attack vectors on it, I'd think you'd be just as at risk as if you actually visited the site directly.
I could be wrong, though. I haven't thoroughly researched Google Instant Pages, but from what little I've found it seems it will be performing a full page render in anticipation of you clicking on the link to the page.
Well, it is worth being called an idiot if it means I no longer have to keep track of the mail.google.com/hosted/* URLs and I can just use the generic Gmail login URL for everything.
I added a simple check to my scripts long ago that detected Firefox prefetching and thew a HTTP 403 Forbidden status with a "Prefetching not permitted" message. It was straightforward to detect and block.
Hopefully Chrome either makes it easy to detect and block, or at least easy to detect.
The first issue is this is going to play havoc with traffic analytics and tracking. I'm sure Google Analytics will handle Chrome's Instant Pages just fine, but everybody else will have to figure out how to ignore Chrome pre-loads. I did some searching and they are adding a Visibility API to Chrome to allow authors of other traffic reporting packages to handle the difference. Hopefully the Visibility will be pretty straightforward and not require a lot of extra work.
The other issue is that this is going to eat up more hosting bandwidth. Popular websites that appear near the top are going to incur bandwidth usage that may never actually be actively used by the potential visitor.
Yes it does, at least for me. My Gmail-hosted work address is @mycompanyname.com
However, you have to log in to your @somethingnotgmail.com email account first, and THEN switch to your @gmail.com email address(es). So we're both right, in that you can do it, but Google really needs to improve the functionality to allow you to log in to @somethingnotgmail.com as one of your other email addresses when trying to switch. I also have noticed that when I log out of my @mycompanyname.com email address that Gmail now takes me to the generic @gmail.com login form, so I can not quickly log out and then back in which is lame.
Theoretically it should be an easy fix. All they would have to do is allow you to enter your full whatever@notsomethinggmail.com in the Username field and use behind-the-scenes logic to log you in to right account. For completeness and consistency, the Username field would also accept whatever@gmail.com and just ignore the "@gmail.com" portion of the username and log you in to your regular, generic Gmail address. Why it doesn't already work like that is beyond me.
I have both a Facebook account and G+ account, and more often than not I still use Facebook for the majority of my online interactions with friends and family. Most of my G+ circles are technical people (no family members, old school friends, or tech-illiterate friends yet).
Facebook has Friends Lists, which are pretty much the same as Google Circles. All Facebook has to do is make it more streamlined and easy to share posts only with certain Lists. The functionality is already there, but you have to click a few menus deep and then type in the names of the Lists (yes, you actually have to type out the List names... heh). If they made a dropdown box off of the share post control that allows you to click on which Lists to share a post with then bam... G+ loses one of its biggest advantages).
You do not need two separate browsers if you use the multi-signon feature in your Google accounts. That gotcha is you can't have both open at the same time, but you can quickly switch between them.
I have a Gmail-hosted work address and also a personal Gmail address.
When in Gmail, click on your email address on the top Google bar and select "Account Settings" and on that page under the "Personal Settings" section you will see a "Multiple sign-in" option. Set this option to "On". Do the same for all Gmail accounts that you want to switch between.
Then, when ever you are using Gmail you can click on your email address in the top Google bar and next to "Sign out" will be a link that says, "Switch Account". You use that to switch between your 2 or more Gmail accounts.
It isn't as cumbersome as my wall of text above would have you believe, and the only real drawback is that you can't view more than one inbox at the same time like you could in the old Gmail (I used to have each Gmail account in separate Firefox tabs before Google changed to the new mechanism).
Slashdot Mirror
This is how it will play out in the end:
Let's say you have a current cable package for $40/mo and you get 80 channels
The new system will only bundle the less popular channels in the cable package and the popular channels will be separate. Want FX? Extra. Want Comedy Central? Extra. Want Cartoon Network? Extra.
So now your cable package is still $40/mo, but you only get 50 channels, and not any good ones. Each of the other 30 channels are now an extra $1-5/mo each.
So you might not have to subsidize sports channels, outdoor channels, christian channels, and so forth if you don't care about them, but the de-bundling will end up costing you more.
At first they may lull you in with a discount on the basic bundles to make the a la carte seem like a better deal, but give them a year or two and you will be paying out the nose, and if you complain about it then people will defend the cable companies by saying that cable prices would have gone up anyways, maybe even more-so, if they still did the old bundle method. There would be no way to absolutely prove price gouging due to a la carte.
I always preferred "private beta" and "public beta" vs. "closed beta" and "open beta", but both are correct. I agree that nobody should be confusing this with closed- vs. open-source in this context.
There is a counterpoint to your link: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4658/its-not-qualcomms-fault-dispelling-touchpad-myths/2
If Android does get ported to the TouchPad then the performance being a hardware vs. software issue may finally be answered.
If used as a replacement for Neilsen Ratings then I would actually be all for this, as long as the data was properly anonymized (or only searchable/exported with an obscure TV ID or Viewer ID, and not easily identifiable information). I don't mind advertisers knowing which shows are more popular, but I'd rather that neither they or any other entity tracks all my TV viewership for the sake of either custom-tailoring ads/junk/spam at me or monitoring me specifically.
Judging by what is on TV right now, I think we need to try an alternative to Neilsen Ratings to see if that fixes anything ... or at least confirms that humanity isn't worth saving.
Google+'s biggest strength is that it puts circles front-and-center so that you can control who sees your posts on a per-post basis. Yes you can do the same in Facebook, but it is a tedious workflow in Facebook.
I am starting to think this may be Google+'s biggest weakness as well. Now that people can share posts with sub-sets of their friends list with ease, Google+ overall feels less active. I wonder how much of that feeling of inactivity has to do with not being aware of private, walled off conversations between members of your circles. Honestly, how many close friends do you have on Facebook or Google+? It is more than likely that the bulk of your friends lists / circles are acquaintances or friends of friends and those are the people that you are less likely to share posts with ... and vice-versa.
They were referring to about:troubleshooting in the mozilla.dev.usability discussion linked in the article summary. I think it is the "Help > Troubleshooting Information" page (about:support in Firefox 5). Either they have plans to rename about:support to about:troubleshooting or add a new about:troubleshooting in the future ... or they misspoke in the conversation.
Now people will think their addons break at random. I doubt the typical user will ever look at about:troubleshooting
Mozilla needs to rethink a lot of things about addon support before pushing their new release and version philosophy any further.
I'd rather they add some easy way to let users install addons that say, "Does not support Firefox x.x". They can put a big disclaimer/warning/alert to make sure the user knows what they are doing, but with the Firefox rapid release schedule I am tired of having my addons break because of version string issues.
One example is the Stylish addon. I am using the Firefox 6 beta in Ubuntu 11.10 alpha and Stylish refuses to install due to the version string. The addon info says it supports Firefox 3.6 - 6.0a2 (key part being "6.0.a2"). That tells me that it should work in later alpha/beta version 6 builds.
Firefox really needs to address the issue of how addons determine whether or not they are out-of-date. The browser version is no longer a useful metric for that.
Chromium is open-source, which is what Chrome is built upon. I haven't paid close enough attention to know the differences between Chromium and Chrome, though.
I am not a lawyer, but if ISPs go this route then won't they lose common carrier status? Will they open themselves up to lawsuits if illegal content is found to be traversing their infrastructure? If a guy gets caught uploading or downloading child porn, then can family-focused or religious organizations sue his ISP for allowing child porn to be transmitted on their network? The ISPs will be monitoring traffic, so they can't play ignorant about what is being sent across it.
I use self-signed certificates on pages hosted on my intranet and all the major browsers throw a major fit about them. If I ever have guests over that want to utilize my intranet web apps then they have to approve and add exceptions for my self-signed certs. The browsers act like my certs are shady or suspicious and if I didn't re-assure my guests then they wouldn't have added the exceptions.
I haven't tried going to a site with a domain mis-match or expired cert, but I would assume browsers throw a fit about those too.
In Thunar (or Nautilus) you can click on "Go" and "Open Location" and type in "smb://..." and it will browse to remote shares. I have never tried "fish://..."
Gnome 3 and Unity both have a hard-on for tablets. It is as if the people behind the projects think desktops and laptops will disappear within the next couple years and everybody will either be using tablets or smart phones instead.
I haven't used KDE lately, but I've heard that they are moving in the right direction again after taking a bad turn in the past.
Gnome 3 and Unity are currently in the middle of their bad turn. Whether or not they veer back out of lala land remains to be seen.
I switched to Xfce because Ubuntu is switching to Unity and ditching Gnome 2.x in the next release.
I must say that Xfce is really nice, and isn't much of a step down from Gnome 2.x
In fact, I managed to style Xfce to look nearly identical to Ubuntu's Gnome 2.x in 11.04. The one missing feature in Xfce 4.8 is the ability to manually sort taskbar buttons, but they have added that back in to 4.8.5 (I'll wait for Ubuntu 11.10 for this feature, as I don't want to hassle with getting 4.8.5 on 11.04 and end up in dependency hell)
Xfce could be a little more customizable, but it is not bad and I'd rather they keep doing what they are doing and not try to please everybody and end up with a lot of cruft.
KDE is getting their groove back, but I ultimately think Xfce will be the big winner of Gnome refugees.
Google Instant Pages sounds like it will be rendering the entire page, including images and other external resources. I wouldn't be surprised if it also executed JavaScript, fetched embedded iframes, and anything else that the page would normally do if you clicked on that link. I wonder if it would even follow redirections?
What is to stop a malevolent webmaster from performing redirects to nasty trojan or malware-infected pages if it detects the page is being pre-rendered? If that page contains flash objects, java apps, or other attack vectors on it, I'd think you'd be just as at risk as if you actually visited the site directly.
I could be wrong, though. I haven't thoroughly researched Google Instant Pages, but from what little I've found it seems it will be performing a full page render in anticipation of you clicking on the link to the page.
I did some Googling and apparently Chrome will send the following header when prefetching:
X-Purpose: instant
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/webmasters-faq.html#instant
So it looks like it will be easy for me to block just as I have blocked Firefox prefetches.
Well, it is worth being called an idiot if it means I no longer have to keep track of the mail.google.com/hosted/* URLs and I can just use the generic Gmail login URL for everything.
They either added that functionality when they recently upgraded Gmail, or I somehow missed that functionality for all those years.
I just tested it and you are right. I swear it didn't used to work, though.
It looks like they are going to try to address that with the upcoming Visibility API:
http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibility.html
However, it seems to be JavaScript based which, at least to me, is not a desirable way to determine whether or not the page is being pre-loaded.
At least Firefox sent a "X-moz: prefetch" header which I used to ignore the traffic on those requests.
I added a simple check to my scripts long ago that detected Firefox prefetching and thew a HTTP 403 Forbidden status with a "Prefetching not permitted" message. It was straightforward to detect and block.
Hopefully Chrome either makes it easy to detect and block, or at least easy to detect.
The first issue is this is going to play havoc with traffic analytics and tracking. I'm sure Google Analytics will handle Chrome's Instant Pages just fine, but everybody else will have to figure out how to ignore Chrome pre-loads. I did some searching and they are adding a Visibility API to Chrome to allow authors of other traffic reporting packages to handle the difference. Hopefully the Visibility will be pretty straightforward and not require a lot of extra work.
The other issue is that this is going to eat up more hosting bandwidth. Popular websites that appear near the top are going to incur bandwidth usage that may never actually be actively used by the potential visitor.
Yes it does, at least for me. My Gmail-hosted work address is @mycompanyname.com
However, you have to log in to your @somethingnotgmail.com email account first, and THEN switch to your @gmail.com email address(es). So we're both right, in that you can do it, but Google really needs to improve the functionality to allow you to log in to @somethingnotgmail.com as one of your other email addresses when trying to switch. I also have noticed that when I log out of my @mycompanyname.com email address that Gmail now takes me to the generic @gmail.com login form, so I can not quickly log out and then back in which is lame.
Theoretically it should be an easy fix. All they would have to do is allow you to enter your full whatever@notsomethinggmail.com in the Username field and use behind-the-scenes logic to log you in to right account. For completeness and consistency, the Username field would also accept whatever@gmail.com and just ignore the "@gmail.com" portion of the username and log you in to your regular, generic Gmail address. Why it doesn't already work like that is beyond me.
I have both a Facebook account and G+ account, and more often than not I still use Facebook for the majority of my online interactions with friends and family. Most of my G+ circles are technical people (no family members, old school friends, or tech-illiterate friends yet).
Facebook has Friends Lists, which are pretty much the same as Google Circles. All Facebook has to do is make it more streamlined and easy to share posts only with certain Lists. The functionality is already there, but you have to click a few menus deep and then type in the names of the Lists (yes, you actually have to type out the List names ... heh). If they made a dropdown box off of the share post control that allows you to click on which Lists to share a post with then bam ... G+ loses one of its biggest advantages).
You do not need two separate browsers if you use the multi-signon feature in your Google accounts. That gotcha is you can't have both open at the same time, but you can quickly switch between them.
I have a Gmail-hosted work address and also a personal Gmail address.
When in Gmail, click on your email address on the top Google bar and select "Account Settings" and on that page under the "Personal Settings" section you will see a "Multiple sign-in" option. Set this option to "On". Do the same for all Gmail accounts that you want to switch between.
Then, when ever you are using Gmail you can click on your email address in the top Google bar and next to "Sign out" will be a link that says, "Switch Account". You use that to switch between your 2 or more Gmail accounts.
It isn't as cumbersome as my wall of text above would have you believe, and the only real drawback is that you can't view more than one inbox at the same time like you could in the old Gmail (I used to have each Gmail account in separate Firefox tabs before Google changed to the new mechanism).