With the public servant as unpaid **AA stop-loss personnel.
Sure, I'll send letters to my officials, but I'm at the point where I want to start billing hourly for all the publicly funded legislative and academic labor spent on the affairs of private, commercial concerns.
Do you have any kind of login-dependent features, from which to infer a user:IP ratio for the larger, no-cookie group? Is there any data on the relative IP diversity of users who login to a site versus those who don't?
To get a bigger set of sample data, hmmm... I suppose even if you have to allow for a % of cookie-blocking users, one could still code the more complex dynamic stuff against a server-side cache / session (to avoid forks), and then a noncritical "Uniqueness" cookie would probably still yield enough data for a meaningful estimate on the IP-count question.
(and with that, I'm off to go determine just how un-unique my visitors are...)
...in general, I can attest to the author's main thesis; at an early age, my schoolyard pusher came by the fence & gave me free Windows -- but you know how that story ends. Now I need treatment... rehab. Sure, I've been trying to do it on my own, toying with Linux on and off -- test driving it on virtual machines and boning up on hardware & distro compatibility & functional software availability to replace what's indispensable to me. In the end though, I usually run out of time. I know I can buy parts in the morning & usually have a new Win domain controller, web & SQL server, plus 3 workstations and a NAS unit built & running same day.
Seriously, the current state of DRM initiatives & the like has me motivated to get serious about migrating. But were it not for FOSS on Windows - and even moreso, cross platform apps - I probably wouldn't find Linux accessible enough to adopt. I don't think I'm lazy or a complete dolt when it comes to figuring stuff out, but I have my head in writing Windows software ~12 hours a day (okay, 7 after -=/. time), and a house and a wife and an albeit meager social life. You get out what you put in & all that, but nevertheless, time for indulging in new learning curves is finite.
Re: the points above, granted, simplicityMeasure != similarityToMicrosoft. I think "simplicity" in this context is more like the signal:noise involved in accompishing what one wishes to. And in that light, considering the IP, privacy & freedom issues of this moment in history, there's tremendous potential benefit - to the Linux community and beyond - in being mindful of the valid subset of reasons that Windows appears more accessible to the causal PC user. Contributing towards creating a similarly inviting and nonthreatening Linux experience for those folks = a bigger contingent that cherish the values of "open" and "free."
I'm only writing to ask someone to mod up your sig.
I usually have a delusion of having something more meaningful to say. Though if you think of it in the right way, it *is* meaningful in this context to try to draw attention to your sig, now isn't it?
...being ineffective (or more likely, counterproductive to their own interests in the long run), the various incarnations of **AAs' recent strategies just have to implode before long. I mean, here you have a whole industry -- arguably second only to jurisprudence advisory services in sheer disingenuousness -- and somehow we've let them get away with using one after another of our nation's institutions as their own little unpaid stop-loss departments.
It may take a while, but eventually they're going to run that tap dry. Being a fruitless-effort hobbyist myself, I'll try to hasten the day by pissing and moaning at my elected officials. Hey, someone has to, what with all the actual grown-up problems sitting on the back burner while public servants pour ever more time, money & former constitutional rights into legislating a perfect digital Fort Knox for the entertainment industry.
Other meaningful differences wrt: (FF+Google) cf. (IE+MSN) include the fact that FireFox is predominantly installed by user choice rather than manufacturer default, that Google does not own FireFox, that FireFox's uninstall actually does something...
Come to think of it, what other search engine would be a more sensible choice for a general-purpose FF default? I mean, I mostly use RollYo and Furl myself (yanno, to filter out the content-siphons & parking lots & to easily find the crap I vaguely remember the jist but not the source of...), but those would hardly be better choices for the FF neophyte.
Unless an efficient, comprehensive, open-source, not-for-profit, community driven search service rises up & gains the necessary mindshare, I think Google's earned its place in FF's search box.
...follows naturally from your pet peeves (& some of the posts above). Don't promote strategies with a specific intention of frustrating IE users; just create compliant markup like you would in the better world of tomorrow. But when you do, display a "Page doesn't look right?" banner that informs visitors that their browser (i.e. IE) doesn't support standard HTML, and that it'd probably only take 2-3 minutes for them to try viewing the site with one of the superior, faster, fuller featured, more customizablier;-), free, standards-compliant browsers that are available.
I earn my living on the MS stack, and I was an IE-only user from early in my PC experience. Still, I was a permanent convert to Firefox on my first trial of it -- and pretty early in the beta process at that. The hook that got me to try it? When I saw that despite > features than IE's set, it was only a ~4.5mB download (compared to a ~60mB base IE package). The $$$ to go from 4 to 8 to 24 to (gasp!) 48 megs of ram to run Windows at any kind of reasonable clip had me pretty ticked. FF appealed to my impatient nature, as it promised a much quicker download & install than what I was used to. What's more, from what I'd heard it promised not to frak up my OS or hose other apps by putting tentacles way down into system stuff. IE had done that a plenty.
If FF advocates want to evangelize Win+IE folks (and do so more effectively than they've done with Linux so far), the key dictum is: Remember the audience. They require some coddling. Their food needs to be pre-chewed a bit at first. Stay on-message with a simple one-two mantra: 1) "It's SIMPLER... Just try it!" 2) Those who have tried it would never go back.
The Joe & Jane 6-packs who don't know or care about standards compliance can still understand a simple "We're sorry, but IE has known bugs that prevent it from properly displaying official, compliant HTML. Fortunately, nearly every other browser on the planet can display it just fine. It only takes two minutes, and we highly recommend you try viewing this site in FF. Those who have tried it are glad they did!" (Maybe a table graphic with red Xs and green check marks for browsers that support HTML would be better than a list. Shiny pictures is go.) More detail for those who want it: "It used to be that more webmasters could accomodate Internet Explorer's handicaps by just writing their sites using IE's unique, special language instead of real HTML. Now, however, IE's declining popularity forces us to make our sites with real HTML, so they can be properly read by the browsers that more people are switching to today. (Second graphic: Estimated Number or % of people switching TO each browser FROM another.)
I make a conscious effort to entice friends and associates into trying FF. In my experience, FF downloads & installs in about 3 minutes. It prevents malicious code execution a hell of a lot better than IE, and it doesn't mess up anything else on my system. Everyone I know personally who has tried it loves it. That's the message that works best for me in person-to-person interaction, at least in the absence of some specific problem someone has that FF (or an FF extension) would solve in a jiffy.
Now, go ye all and spread this gospel to people of all nations, tribes, tongues, and bit orderings....
If there was a FireFox extension or DNS filter service with user-tweakable lists of domain types to avoid - or parked domains, or domains possessing whatever other qualitative attribute happens to cheese someone off - that'd satisfy me. I think the AdBlock Filterset Updater extension (https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/1136/) has the platform most suited to grow somethig like that on.
Unfortunately, the only offering I've seen on this front so far is the Typo-Patrol utility from MS... http://research.microsoft.com/Typo-Patrol/.
What I really want, though, is a *server side* option to remove domains from my search results if they meet certain criteria of my choosing. Google personalized has taken a step in this direction, but it falls far short of what's needed IMHO.
When I was your age, the model name wasn't the most interesting thing about new game consoles. No siree, wii were getting real improvements, like more pixels and stuff, and after a long day carrying my brother to school on my back through six feet of snow, uphill both ways, I was *happy* to play video football with players modeled after stacks of Legos...
They're preoccupied with the war on *Privacy*, but no worries, they're still plodding their way backwards through the alphabet with all the speed of a... er, bureaucracy. Shiver me timbers if they won't be comin' for us, er... those damn pirates, before long...
...I think the Trusted Computing Deities will mod your Computer Health Karma -2 for each insecure drive. Sure, you're thinking that's no great loss, but then Windows web servers will roll out the non-overridable +3 threshhold for serving pages; if you ain't got the 4,096 signed-bits in your binary FEDERAL-TRUSTED-GLOBALLY-UNIQUE-PERSON-MACHINE-DCM A-ID portion of the request header, you only see 403s.
That means you won't be able to see 11.28% of the web, you realize...
Sure, I'm not saying that your average 4:3 SD analog-sourced picture looks like your average 16:9 High Def; it depends on many factors, especially the source. (I wouldn't have bought a HD set if there wasn't any discernable difference, after all.)
What I am saying is that many commercial DVDs -- even viewed through plain ol' S-Video -- can look deceptively close to HD at times, and that if done right, a good recording from a clean digital 16:9 source -- though still only 480i for ~99.987614% of us -- still isn't enough of a step down to get the $4.99 a month DPVR fee out of me at the moment.
Yes, even with all the above I have to fess up that I'd pay a couple decades worth of that $4.99 fee to get *liberated* 720p content, but even that's more of a hassle/aggravation issue than a quality thing for me: The DVDR -> PC -> Edit IFO flags -> Back to DVD to watch thing is a major PITA. Any unencumbered set-it-and-forget-it anamorphic / corner-to-corner recording would satiate my upgrade urges for quite some time.
I'm personally hesitant to bet any real money on the outcome of this, for all the reasons you mention & the possibility of the right marketing campaign doing the unexpected. I mean, I didn't think a crippled, proprietary, DRM-encumbered & vendor lock-in creating digital music player would become the BigMac of consumer electronics, and yet there are these swarms of limping, listing Pod people all around me now. Yikes!
For all the well articulated reasons though, I sure hope that folks of the/. ilk do their part to kill this thing.
Here's an idea... we all have relatives & acquaintances who love forwarding alarmist & dramatic tin-foil-hat emails, right? How 'bout a little informal "Best alarmist subject line" contest right here for HD-DVD & BluRay's furtherance of HDCP, DRM & Trusted Computing? "New DVD format will let Bill Gates lock you out of your computer!" "Hidden codes on new DVD format lets Sony secretly make new DVD players 'expire' & stop working!" "New media won't play on old monitors or TVs!"
(I'm still trying to decide if the fingers of innuendo should point towards the Trilateral Commission, the Free Masons, Scientology, the Skulls, or the Catholic church. I'm leaning towards the Skulls, but open to other opinions...)
The winner is... me! I get to hang onto the dollars in my gadgets & toys budget, because, well, why the hell would I plunk it into either one of these?
(a) A 1.5TB Raid and virtual drives makes any storage gains irrelevant,
(b) Even on a 56" 1080i native DLP set, from 10' away I'm hard pressed to tell a clean 16:9 anamorphic recording at 480i from a 720p or 1080i picture (and I just got an A minus on my last vision checkup 2 weeks ago),
(c) Damned if I'm going to help fund or expand the market penetration of a trojan horse for "Trusted Computing" or expanded DRM. Sorry, CE market, but the accompanying step towards SuperAdmin powers that nameless bureaucrats would consequently be gaining over my hardware is a no go.
My take... say "no thanks" to both and encourage those who look to you for Electronic Wisdom and Wizardry to do the same; the more of these things that get stuck on the shelves, the better for all of us.
VLC looks like it's set to become the media foundation for the next generation of videocentric apps. I've been using it for the past year, but almost exclusively for file & stream based video, and mainly because its codec set & format handling are more robust than anything else I've come across. Will definitely give it a whirl as a DVD player.
Much as I hate to say it, I find myself sympathizing more and more with the pirates' point of view. I'm tempted to create or acquire unencumbered digital copies of all my legitimately owned entertainment media, past, present and future.
If this makes it into the CE product mainstream, that's just waaaaaaaaaay over the line. Macrovision never bothered me - it seemed a reasonable protection measure, and never interfered with my legitimate use of VHS tapes. But now, given all the RIAA shenanigans, HDCP, 5C, unskippable sensitivity training sessions on purchased DVDs, the fact that I can't get a decent digital *or* analog recording of 16:9 programs without much fiddling to fix aspect ratios, and add to that all the additional encumbrances on purchased digital media as compared to surreptitiously acquired stuff (like audio that for all practical purposes "expires" when you make a major hardware change)...and no thanks. I'm done. I will restrict my home entertainment media purchases to that and only that which does not contribute to the erosion of my choice over what I want to do with it & what & when I want to listen to and watch.
Come to think of it, does forced advertising really *perform* anywhere near as well as that which gains its audience's attention without resorting to attention-rape?
Oh yeah, I forgot how the text-only-ad paradigm was utterly decimated by the animated-banner-ad revolution. My bad.
Though I'd be loathe to grant enough power to any regulatory body to fix the bigger issue -- parking is, sadly, lucrative -- domain registrars are intrinsically centralized. Some US states have laws that an establishment may be licensed for nude entertainment, or they may be licensed to sell liquor for on-premises consumption, but not both. Some sort of community-induced eradication of domain squatters would be sweet, but until that happens, I'll settle for the Powers-That-Be making a mutually exclusive thing out of registrars & parking-for-revenue providers.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, this comes first - mythtv users are the "dry run" exercise in preparation for the subsequent firearm seizure.
With the public servant as unpaid **AA stop-loss personnel. Sure, I'll send letters to my officials, but I'm at the point where I want to start billing hourly for all the publicly funded legislative and academic labor spent on the affairs of private, commercial concerns.
"IP addresses are so gullible"
To get a bigger set of sample data, hmmm... I suppose even if you have to allow for a % of cookie-blocking users, one could still code the more complex dynamic stuff against a server-side cache / session (to avoid forks), and then a noncritical "Uniqueness" cookie would probably still yield enough data for a meaningful estimate on the IP-count question.
(and with that, I'm off to go determine just how un-unique my visitors are...)
Seriously, the current state of DRM initiatives & the like has me motivated to get serious about migrating. But were it not for FOSS on Windows - and even moreso, cross platform apps - I probably wouldn't find Linux accessible enough to adopt. I don't think I'm lazy or a complete dolt when it comes to figuring stuff out, but I have my head in writing Windows software ~12 hours a day (okay, 7 after -= /. time), and a house and a wife and an albeit meager social life. You get out what you put in & all that, but nevertheless, time for indulging in new learning curves is finite.
Re: the points above, granted, simplicityMeasure != similarityToMicrosoft. I think "simplicity" in this context is more like the signal:noise involved in accompishing what one wishes to. And in that light, considering the IP, privacy & freedom issues of this moment in history, there's tremendous potential benefit - to the Linux community and beyond - in being mindful of the valid subset of reasons that Windows appears more accessible to the causal PC user. Contributing towards creating a similarly inviting and nonthreatening Linux experience for those folks = a bigger contingent that cherish the values of "open" and "free."
We want squid! We want squid!
I usually have a delusion of having something more meaningful to say. Though if you think of it in the right way, it *is* meaningful in this context to try to draw attention to your sig, now isn't it?
I'm overthinking this, aren't I? Sorry.
It may take a while, but eventually they're going to run that tap dry. Being a fruitless-effort hobbyist myself, I'll try to hasten the day by pissing and moaning at my elected officials. Hey, someone has to, what with all the actual grown-up problems sitting on the back burner while public servants pour ever more time, money & former constitutional rights into legislating a perfect digital Fort Knox for the entertainment industry.
...though he probably orchestrated this in the first place. http://www.jabootu.com/
Come to think of it, what other search engine would be a more sensible choice for a general-purpose FF default? I mean, I mostly use RollYo and Furl myself (yanno, to filter out the content-siphons & parking lots & to easily find the crap I vaguely remember the jist but not the source of...), but those would hardly be better choices for the FF neophyte.
Unless an efficient, comprehensive, open-source, not-for-profit, community driven search service rises up & gains the necessary mindshare, I think Google's earned its place in FF's search box.
I earn my living on the MS stack, and I was an IE-only user from early in my PC experience. Still, I was a permanent convert to Firefox on my first trial of it -- and pretty early in the beta process at that. The hook that got me to try it? When I saw that despite > features than IE's set, it was only a ~4.5mB download (compared to a ~60mB base IE package). The $$$ to go from 4 to 8 to 24 to (gasp!) 48 megs of ram to run Windows at any kind of reasonable clip had me pretty ticked. FF appealed to my impatient nature, as it promised a much quicker download & install than what I was used to. What's more, from what I'd heard it promised not to frak up my OS or hose other apps by putting tentacles way down into system stuff. IE had done that a plenty.
If FF advocates want to evangelize Win+IE folks (and do so more effectively than they've done with Linux so far), the key dictum is: Remember the audience. They require some coddling. Their food needs to be pre-chewed a bit at first. Stay on-message with a simple one-two mantra: 1) "It's SIMPLER... Just try it!" 2) Those who have tried it would never go back.
The Joe & Jane 6-packs who don't know or care about standards compliance can still understand a simple "We're sorry, but IE has known bugs that prevent it from properly displaying official, compliant HTML. Fortunately, nearly every other browser on the planet can display it just fine. It only takes two minutes, and we highly recommend you try viewing this site in FF. Those who have tried it are glad they did!" (Maybe a table graphic with red Xs and green check marks for browsers that support HTML would be better than a list. Shiny pictures is go.) More detail for those who want it: "It used to be that more webmasters could accomodate Internet Explorer's handicaps by just writing their sites using IE's unique, special language instead of real HTML. Now, however, IE's declining popularity forces us to make our sites with real HTML, so they can be properly read by the browsers that more people are switching to today. (Second graphic: Estimated Number or % of people switching TO each browser FROM another.)
I make a conscious effort to entice friends and associates into trying FF. In my experience, FF downloads & installs in about 3 minutes. It prevents malicious code execution a hell of a lot better than IE, and it doesn't mess up anything else on my system. Everyone I know personally who has tried it loves it. That's the message that works best for me in person-to-person interaction, at least in the absence of some specific problem someone has that FF (or an FF extension) would solve in a jiffy.
Now, go ye all and spread this gospel to people of all nations, tribes, tongues, and bit orderings....
Unfortunately, the only offering I've seen on this front so far is the Typo-Patrol utility from MS... http://research.microsoft.com/Typo-Patrol/. What I really want, though, is a *server side* option to remove domains from my search results if they meet certain criteria of my choosing. Google personalized has taken a step in this direction, but it falls far short of what's needed IMHO.
That's all; it's back to stamping Logitech nameplates for me...
When I was your age, the model name wasn't the most interesting thing about new game consoles. No siree, wii were getting real improvements, like more pixels and stuff, and after a long day carrying my brother to school on my back through six feet of snow, uphill both ways, I was *happy* to play video football with players modeled after stacks of Legos...
They're preoccupied with the war on *Privacy*, but no worries, they're still plodding their way backwards through the alphabet with all the speed of a... er, bureaucracy. Shiver me timbers if they won't be comin' for us, er... those damn pirates, before long...
That means you won't be able to see 11.28% of the web, you realize...
Hip, Hip, Apache... hoard it while it's legal. ;-)
Adieu to innovative music and poetry too, I imagine. Now, how the hell do they go about structuring the double-blind trials on this?
What I am saying is that many commercial DVDs -- even viewed through plain ol' S-Video -- can look deceptively close to HD at times, and that if done right, a good recording from a clean digital 16:9 source -- though still only 480i for ~99.987614% of us -- still isn't enough of a step down to get the $4.99 a month DPVR fee out of me at the moment.
Yes, even with all the above I have to fess up that I'd pay a couple decades worth of that $4.99 fee to get *liberated* 720p content, but even that's more of a hassle/aggravation issue than a quality thing for me: The DVDR -> PC -> Edit IFO flags -> Back to DVD to watch thing is a major PITA. Any unencumbered set-it-and-forget-it anamorphic / corner-to-corner recording would satiate my upgrade urges for quite some time.
For all the well articulated reasons though, I sure hope that folks of the /. ilk do their part to kill this thing.
Here's an idea... we all have relatives & acquaintances who love forwarding alarmist & dramatic tin-foil-hat emails, right? How 'bout a little informal "Best alarmist subject line" contest right here for HD-DVD & BluRay's furtherance of HDCP, DRM & Trusted Computing? "New DVD format will let Bill Gates lock you out of your computer!" "Hidden codes on new DVD format lets Sony secretly make new DVD players 'expire' & stop working!" "New media won't play on old monitors or TVs!" (I'm still trying to decide if the fingers of innuendo should point towards the Trilateral Commission, the Free Masons, Scientology, the Skulls, or the Catholic church. I'm leaning towards the Skulls, but open to other opinions...)
(a) A 1.5TB Raid and virtual drives makes any storage gains irrelevant,
(b) Even on a 56" 1080i native DLP set, from 10' away I'm hard pressed to tell a clean 16:9 anamorphic recording at 480i from a 720p or 1080i picture (and I just got an A minus on my last vision checkup 2 weeks ago),
(c) Damned if I'm going to help fund or expand the market penetration of a trojan horse for "Trusted Computing" or expanded DRM. Sorry, CE market, but the accompanying step towards SuperAdmin powers that nameless bureaucrats would consequently be gaining over my hardware is a no go.
My take... say "no thanks" to both and encourage those who look to you for Electronic Wisdom and Wizardry to do the same; the more of these things that get stuck on the shelves, the better for all of us.
Thanks, Cheers, etc.
... and when anyone figures out how to hack DVD players in the same manner, let me know!
Much as I hate to say it, I find myself sympathizing more and more with the pirates' point of view. I'm tempted to create or acquire unencumbered digital copies of all my legitimately owned entertainment media, past, present and future. If this makes it into the CE product mainstream, that's just waaaaaaaaaay over the line. Macrovision never bothered me - it seemed a reasonable protection measure, and never interfered with my legitimate use of VHS tapes. But now, given all the RIAA shenanigans, HDCP, 5C, unskippable sensitivity training sessions on purchased DVDs, the fact that I can't get a decent digital *or* analog recording of 16:9 programs without much fiddling to fix aspect ratios, and add to that all the additional encumbrances on purchased digital media as compared to surreptitiously acquired stuff (like audio that for all practical purposes "expires" when you make a major hardware change)...and no thanks. I'm done. I will restrict my home entertainment media purchases to that and only that which does not contribute to the erosion of my choice over what I want to do with it & what & when I want to listen to and watch. Come to think of it, does forced advertising really *perform* anywhere near as well as that which gains its audience's attention without resorting to attention-rape? Oh yeah, I forgot how the text-only-ad paradigm was utterly decimated by the animated-banner-ad revolution. My bad.
...this:
o g?entry_id=1460947
GoDaddy Swipes A Domain Name
http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/monkeybites/index.bl
Though I'd be loathe to grant enough power to any regulatory body to fix the bigger issue -- parking is, sadly, lucrative -- domain registrars are intrinsically centralized. Some US states have laws that an establishment may be licensed for nude entertainment, or they may be licensed to sell liquor for on-premises consumption, but not both. Some sort of community-induced eradication of domain squatters would be sweet, but until that happens, I'll settle for the Powers-That-Be making a mutually exclusive thing out of registrars & parking-for-revenue providers.
PCI Express to the rescue...e xpress
http://froogle.google.com/froogle?q=esata+%22pci+