Most serious sites got rid of those annoying popups long ago. CNN.com seems to be an exception, it shoves me a popup asking me if I prefer the "international" or the "censored^Wamerican" version, depending on which location on this planet I try to access their site.
Billboards are difficult beasts to get rid off. Most billboards are situated on land owned by/leased to the advertising company and are subjected to local rules and permits.
a) Did the creepy king ads appeal to you? I rather go for plastic kings than plastic clowns with a craze for little children.
b) How much do you weigh? Somewhere around 180 lbs/83 kg at a height of about 73" / 189 cm. You also want to know other sizes? Do you prefer them in imperial or metric?
Maybe they should licence their uber-UAC to *nix and MacOS X; including a "defunct office-assistant-theme-pack" with just one addition: Klippy, the one-legged, one-eyed penguin that can fly 5 ft while being thrown off a cliff of 5000 ft.
Another nice take at security from Microsoft, throw a warning for everything. If it breaks anyway, you cannot claim you haven't been warned!
Maybe it would be more interesting to see why they failed:
Ad cards bound into paperback books. That was tried in the 1980s, and customers were so angry publishers stopped that, and it didn't come back.
Is this because the people that received those books already paid for them? For most people, books are things to stay, things to collect and having ads in them destroys the perception of value.
Ads during telephone ring. Yes, little blipverts between each ring. Tried around 2000. That came and went so fast few ever heard one.
If I'm paying for this call per minute, I'm not going to forgive anybody trying to get a cent extra out of me by pushing advertisements to me.
Fast food table clutter. Little stand-up things with ads on every table. The fast food industry has mostly backed off from that since the 1990s; not many sales and too much hassle.
You still see them in almost any Burger King restaurant I know of. Altough they seem to contain mostly propaganda for their own brand.
The big one - sound trucks. 1930s idea, around the time amplifiers started really working. Trucks driving around blaring ads. That was so obnoxious it was made a criminal offense in most US states.
I'm not asking for this sound truck to drive trough my street. Most advertisement can be easily avoided if you don't want to be hit by it. You can switch off your TV, not visit that spammy web site, etc. You cannot just turn off this sound truck. This is also why e-mail spam is becomming increasingly illegal in countries all over the world.
To be honest, I don't see any reason why advertising-based music downloads are not going to work. Commercial radio and TV has an abundance of advertising, yet those forms of media are still quite viable. User-acceptance will rely on how easy this service is to use and how many artificial limitations there will be (like downloading a maximum of 5 songs/hour/day/from the same artist).
The question I have is whether or not advertisers are really getting any real advantage out of those advertisements. So I think the gamble will be more on advertiser-acceptance than on user-acceptance.
There really is no monopoly for Windows in mobile devices. Microsoft has a market share of under 5% in the worldwide mobile market. So Ballmer should really focus on this other big player, called Symbian, because this ships on over 70% of all "smart phones" worldwide. Looking at the future of computing, wouldn't you say that the mobile phone will become more and more important in your daily live and might even become more important than your workstation or notebook?
It is really questionable whether Apple can reach a large market share with a device that costs $500. Although you might also wonder whether Apple really cares? Apple is doing quite well with their current market share in Personal Computers and as long as it stays "small", it will not be considered as evil as Microsoft.
Something that will be interesting to notice is how high the conversion rate between iPod and iPhone users will be. If I need a new phone and also want to upgrade my portable music player, this iPhone thingy gets interesting once again.
Retail business, no matter if it's online or "offline" depends on such things as visibility. Some of this visibility can be bought, but this requires advertising and usually quite a lot of money. Some other visibility comes "for free" or is gained progressively. So you can earn your online visibility in a legitimate way. Loosing this visibility, because of one stupid mistake can hurt massively and can even cost jobs.
If you're running a website selling $3M worth of stuff/year, you probably make a nice profit margin, but nothing that can be compared to Amazon and the likes, so you depend on worth-of-mouth and search engines. A lot of those businesses have grown quite naturally, so has their Google rating. In the case in TFA, the business model isn't just "get traffic from good Google rating", since his sales have "only" fallen by about 1/6th of his yearly revenue.
So, although it is probably true that your business model should not solely depend upon "Google", most business models somehow depend upon marketing and so probably also does your own paycheck somehow depend upon marketing. For everything online, Google is the center of the marketing universe and nothing is more valuable than a good "natural" ranking on the keywords your businesses depend upon. Even the most expensive AdWords do not compare to the value of a good ranking.
Otherwise, I think this is a very good article on Forbes, indicating the huge damage you can create by bad SEO and the liability to yourself that comes with a good Google ranking. Forbes is also being read by people that do not know anything about the bad consequences that SEO can bring. I've tried to convince many businesses not to do business with shady SEO optimalization and have seen many of them go to Google Hell and back. Remember, Google is not only being used for pure online stuff, a lot of people search for their traditional "offline" stuff via Google, slowly replacing the yellow pages and lots of other traditional indexes.
Also: if it requires a special client, it is not (repeat not) a web-based app. I don't fucking care how it's delivered. The web is browsed with a web browser - see how that works?
GravityZoo never claimed to be a web app, it's just that Zonk needs to get his glasses realigned. There is a huge difference between bringing something to the browser and to "the net". The latter can be done with all kinds of technologies. GravityZoo is a much more generic approach than most standard client-server based technologies.
Most people those days seem to have forgotten the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet. Even bittorent is considered a "Web 2.0" application, it even doesn't use the HTTP protocol, maybe except the first download of the application. So maybe we do not only need to get Zonks glasses realigned;)
FreeNX is a "terminal based" solution. This means running your application on a server and getting your screen output over-the-wire. It's a cheap alternative to Citrix, Terminal Server and works a bit better than plain-old-X.
GravityZoo isn't based on "terminal technology", it's based on "distributed objects". A plain-old terminal based solution would never scale beyond a limited number of clients.
Sure there is: you just increase the total bandwidth! That's a better solution anyway. That's only a temporary solution at best. Increasing bandwith also means increasing usage. In the end, there will always be bottlenecks. In a moving market, we will always see demand for more bandwith. But there will never be enough bandwith. So it is better to the available bandwith wisely.
DDOSs don't have well-defined "sources;" that's why they're called "distributed."
Every packet on the Internet has a source. Distributed only means they come from many sources. Most networks today are smart enough to avoid routing spoofed packets. A future "IP protocol" could totally elimitate spoofed packets. I know of no legit use for spoofed packets anyway.
In a DDoS situation, you can often identify the sources quite easily, but filtering them helps you nothing. The packets still fill up your pipe(s). In a "better world", you could block those packets to you, much more closely to the source, eliminating most of the damage.
DDoSes are a serious problem now and will become even more serious in the future. There are quite some people that already lost ther jobs due to some scriptkiddies playing with the latest DDoS tools.
In other words, better support for introducing favoritism between ISPs and content providers, so that (for example) AT&T can extort money from Google and shut down BitTorrent. No thanks; I prefer the "dumb," route-everything-equally, neutral Internet we have now. Do you really think the Internet is this "neutral" right now? I've worked for several ISPs and know all about routing traffic the cheapest, yet still acceptable way. In the end, I always was the techie and only wanted to get my traffic to the destination in a way the least users would complain about "speed" without violating traffic commitments from our upstreams.
This "net neutrality" is only politically . I'm a big ISP and I want money from Google? I just route all my traffic to Google to this already filled-up-to-the-max transit link and let Google pay for a direct peering with me. The way this works in practice? The ISP's helpdesk will get flooded by complaints and this "upgrade" will be undone within a few days, until the next manager comes by with yet another great idea to make some more money.
Being an somewhat honest ISP, better QoS support from end-to-end will give me much more possibilities to deliver services to my customers in a more reliable way. I could, for example, avoid customers line filling up with bitorrent while using Skype. There is no way of doing this right now. So better QoS support across the Internet is really a cornerstone for reliable services delivered across the Internet, especially for a neutral net.
And much better protection against free speech, anonymity, etc. Again, no thanks. In an Internet without any protection against those kinds of attacks, the one with the biggest botnet wins? There are many ways to implement this kind of protection right into the protocol, without losing any kind of anonymity. Detecting and mitigating DDoSes more close to the source for example. Also, when I don't want to receive your traffic, why do I have to block it on the receiving end?
How anonymous do you think you really are? Everything you do leaves traces. Posting on slashdot leaves your IP and your IP can always be traced back to your ISP. Your ISP will probably retain some logfiles, like from which DSL line did it come, from which dialup bank, etc.
Public WiFi hotspots or some "anonymity services" might give you some anonymity, they will probably also do so in a "DDoS protected" environment.
Yeah, that "somebody" being AT&T or Microsoft, who would undoubtedly screw it up with Treacherous Computing, built-in "micropayment" toll booths, and assorted other bullshit. Still sound like a great idea? Many of the not-so-evil standards we use today were originally conceived by private or public companies. Sometimes you cannot rely on "standards organisations", because they just are so damn slow and have a tendency to come up with standards that are to much of a compromise. Fortunately, not all companies think they can rule the world alone. For the remaining companies, let's hope they see their quasi-monopolies erode in the end.
The problem of IPv6 is due to the fact that it just doesn't work besides IPv4. You essentially need to build and maintain two seperate networks. Yes, you can share the same equipment, but the amount of configuration involved almost never justifies the efforts in corporate environments.
In my opinion, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed for an "Internet for the future". One of the biggest hurdles of course is the address space shortage of IPv4, but there are a lot of other issues which need to be solved. Just to name a few: - More flexible routing of unique identifiers (let's call them IP numbers), so I can take my "identifier" with me (think mobile phones) - A solution to the ever growing "global routing table" (BGP4 as it is used today) - Better support for quality of service from end-to-end. - Better "multicasting" support, also end-to-end. (Let's avoid burning down networks during "cataclysmic" events) - Better redundancy. Although dynamic routing protocols should heal this problems, in practice they often fail to do this. Especially in cases where connections are semi-dead) - A much better built-in protection against DDoSes and other kind of abuses.
Unfortunately, IPv6 really fixes none of those problems, except the IP number shortage. IPv6 also comes at great costs, since you need to upgrade your whole infrastructure at once, or it isn't really usable.
So, IPv6 might have been a nice lesson for the next generation "IP protocol". IMHO this next generation should take the following things in mind:
- Transition only works if it plays nicely with the legacy stuff during the transition. - Transition has either to be cheap or must have so many advantages that you simply cannot refuse. - Vendors need to agree upon a single standard, or somebody with a large impact should "dictate" it in the worst scenario.
Reading TFA, I was quite disapointed, because anything about how this transition to this cleanslate network seems to be absent at this time. But it is still a research project and maybe somebody did learn something from the IPv6 "fiasco".
Slashdot Mirror
Most serious sites got rid of those annoying popups long ago. CNN.com seems to be an exception, it shoves me a popup asking me if I prefer the "international" or the "censored^Wamerican" version, depending on which location on this planet I try to access their site.
Billboards are difficult beasts to get rid off. Most billboards are situated on land owned by/leased to the advertising company and are subjected to local rules and permits.
a) Did the creepy king ads appeal to you? I rather go for plastic kings than plastic clowns with a craze for little children. b) How much do you weigh? Somewhere around 180 lbs/83 kg at a height of about 73" / 189 cm. You also want to know other sizes? Do you prefer them in imperial or metric?Maybe they should licence their uber-UAC to *nix and MacOS X; including a "defunct office-assistant-theme-pack" with just one addition: Klippy, the one-legged, one-eyed penguin that can fly 5 ft while being thrown off a cliff of 5000 ft.
Another nice take at security from Microsoft, throw a warning for everything. If it breaks anyway, you cannot claim you haven't been warned!
I'm not asking for this sound truck to drive trough my street. Most advertisement can be easily avoided if you don't want to be hit by it. You can switch off your TV, not visit that spammy web site, etc. You cannot just turn off this sound truck. This is also why e-mail spam is becomming increasingly illegal in countries all over the world.
To be honest, I don't see any reason why advertising-based music downloads are not going to work. Commercial radio and TV has an abundance of advertising, yet those forms of media are still quite viable. User-acceptance will rely on how easy this service is to use and how many artificial limitations there will be (like downloading a maximum of 5 songs/hour/day/from the same artist).
The question I have is whether or not advertisers are really getting any real advantage out of those advertisements. So I think the gamble will be more on advertiser-acceptance than on user-acceptance.
There really is no monopoly for Windows in mobile devices. Microsoft has a market share of under 5% in the worldwide mobile market. So Ballmer should really focus on this other big player, called Symbian, because this ships on over 70% of all "smart phones" worldwide. Looking at the future of computing, wouldn't you say that the mobile phone will become more and more important in your daily live and might even become more important than your workstation or notebook?
It is really questionable whether Apple can reach a large market share with a device that costs $500. Although you might also wonder whether Apple really cares? Apple is doing quite well with their current market share in Personal Computers and as long as it stays "small", it will not be considered as evil as Microsoft.
Something that will be interesting to notice is how high the conversion rate between iPod and iPhone users will be. If I need a new phone and also want to upgrade my portable music player, this iPhone thingy gets interesting once again.
Retail business, no matter if it's online or "offline" depends on such things as visibility. Some of this visibility can be bought, but this requires advertising and usually quite a lot of money. Some other visibility comes "for free" or is gained progressively. So you can earn your online visibility in a legitimate way. Loosing this visibility, because of one stupid mistake can hurt massively and can even cost jobs.
If you're running a website selling $3M worth of stuff/year, you probably make a nice profit margin, but nothing that can be compared to Amazon and the likes, so you depend on worth-of-mouth and search engines. A lot of those businesses have grown quite naturally, so has their Google rating. In the case in TFA, the business model isn't just "get traffic from good Google rating", since his sales have "only" fallen by about 1/6th of his yearly revenue.
So, although it is probably true that your business model should not solely depend upon "Google", most business models somehow depend upon marketing and so probably also does your own paycheck somehow depend upon marketing. For everything online, Google is the center of the marketing universe and nothing is more valuable than a good "natural" ranking on the keywords your businesses depend upon. Even the most expensive AdWords do not compare to the value of a good ranking.
Otherwise, I think this is a very good article on Forbes, indicating the huge damage you can create by bad SEO and the liability to yourself that comes with a good Google ranking. Forbes is also being read by people that do not know anything about the bad consequences that SEO can bring. I've tried to convince many businesses not to do business with shady SEO optimalization and have seen many of them go to Google Hell and back. Remember, Google is not only being used for pure online stuff, a lot of people search for their traditional "offline" stuff via Google, slowly replacing the yellow pages and lots of other traditional indexes.
I've passed it over to the guy who created the stuff ;)
GravityZoo never claimed to be a web app, it's just that Zonk needs to get his glasses realigned. There is a huge difference between bringing something to the browser and to "the net". The latter can be done with all kinds of technologies. GravityZoo is a much more generic approach than most standard client-server based technologies.
Most people those days seem to have forgotten the difference between the World Wide Web and the Internet. Even bittorent is considered a "Web 2.0" application, it even doesn't use the HTTP protocol, maybe except the first download of the application. So maybe we do not only need to get Zonks glasses realigned
Why use a spelling checker if you can depend upon the affluant distributed yet powerful and informative intelligence of the Slashdot entity?
It has been corrected! Thank you!
FreeNX is a "terminal based" solution. This means running your application on a server and getting your screen output over-the-wire. It's a cheap alternative to Citrix, Terminal Server and works a bit better than plain-old-X.
GravityZoo isn't based on "terminal technology", it's based on "distributed objects". A plain-old terminal based solution would never scale beyond a limited number of clients.
Every packet on the Internet has a source. Distributed only means they come from many sources. Most networks today are smart enough to avoid routing spoofed packets. A future "IP protocol" could totally elimitate spoofed packets. I know of no legit use for spoofed packets anyway.
In a DDoS situation, you can often identify the sources quite easily, but filtering them helps you nothing. The packets still fill up your pipe(s). In a "better world", you could block those packets to you, much more closely to the source, eliminating most of the damage.
DDoSes are a serious problem now and will become even more serious in the future. There are quite some people that already lost ther jobs due to some scriptkiddies playing with the latest DDoS tools.
The problem of IPv6 is due to the fact that it just doesn't work besides IPv4. You essentially need to build and maintain two seperate networks. Yes, you can share the same equipment, but the amount of configuration involved almost never justifies the efforts in corporate environments.
In my opinion, there are a lot of things that need to be fixed for an "Internet for the future". One of the biggest hurdles of course is the address space shortage of IPv4, but there are a lot of other issues which need to be solved. Just to name a few:
- More flexible routing of unique identifiers (let's call them IP numbers), so I can take my "identifier" with me (think mobile phones)
- A solution to the ever growing "global routing table" (BGP4 as it is used today)
- Better support for quality of service from end-to-end.
- Better "multicasting" support, also end-to-end. (Let's avoid burning down networks during "cataclysmic" events)
- Better redundancy. Although dynamic routing protocols should heal this problems, in practice they often fail to do this. Especially in cases where connections are semi-dead)
- A much better built-in protection against DDoSes and other kind of abuses.
Unfortunately, IPv6 really fixes none of those problems, except the IP number shortage. IPv6 also comes at great costs, since you need to upgrade your whole infrastructure at once, or it isn't really usable.
So, IPv6 might have been a nice lesson for the next generation "IP protocol". IMHO this next generation should take the following things in mind:
- Transition only works if it plays nicely with the legacy stuff during the transition.
- Transition has either to be cheap or must have so many advantages that you simply cannot refuse.
- Vendors need to agree upon a single standard, or somebody with a large impact should "dictate" it in the worst scenario.
Reading TFA, I was quite disapointed, because anything about how this transition to this cleanslate network seems to be absent at this time. But it is still a research project and maybe somebody did learn something from the IPv6 "fiasco".
What you actually are looking for is something like this:
a mework_1_12.pdf
http://www.gravityzoo.com/support/TheGravityZooFr
A back-to-frontend solution which fixes both your UI problems, but also the state problems arising from such a rich UI.