now the original url points nowhere and the original comments link has been replaced with a new one that was showing no comments...
i suspect this is nothing more than the consequences of editing the original article to remove a paragraph defending aim against being called adware (sorry, i could find no cache of the original article, you'll just have to take my word for it that said paragraph existed) combined with the vagaries of how blogspot handles edits and how haloscan (the comment service provider there) handles changes to the article's permalink... i haven't checked to see if blogspot really changes the url when you edit an already published article, but i do have some articles where the permalink has a number at the end like the new link for the sunbelt article in question...
just in case the original comment link goes on walkabout as well, here's a quote of what i posted to it:
i'm going to both agree and disagree...
i agree that pam's got it all wrong - adware is more than just ad-supported software... it's got to actually DISPLAY ads, not just be supported by them... there are plenty of ad supported programs out there that leave the ad serving up to a completely different program...
i disagree about aim (and others) not being adware, however... the qualifier you use to justify that distinction is that the 'primary purpose' of adware is to display ads, but i contend that trying to determine the 'primary purpose' of an application is a subjective property... it's a bad defining quality and ruins what could otherwise be a perfectly good *functional* definition...
for example, say someone comes along and makes an instant messaging service that's functionally identical to aim, but they do it not to provide the world with yet another instant messaging application but rather to deploy a platform which not only serves ads but baits users into looking at the ad serving window by putting useful functionality on it... this is still all functionally identical to aim, but it's purpose is to display ads and the instant messaging is just to keep people looking in the direction of those ads... something doesn't stop being adware just because you shoe-horn useful functionality into the ad serving client, and there's really no way to know if the functionality is there to help the ads or if the ads are there to pay for the functionality...
of course, it's not necessary to go through that convolution... aim, like most of the mainstream instant messaging clients, has at various times erected barriers to interroperability both with other im services and with 3rd party clients... the only purpose interroperability barriers serve is to guard a captive audience, which are themselves only good practicing various types of persuasion (like advertising)... so the idea that aim's primary purpose is not providing advertising is questionable at best...
moreover, if the anti-adware/anti-spyware industry persists in using such a definition (yes, i noticed that the anti-spyware coalition's definition shares the same 'feature') the adware industry could easily just port their technology into dlls and activex controls that are bundled by way of integrating them into the 3rd party's application... they'd still be capable of doing all the bad things that people hate about adware but they'd no longer be separate from the programs they're bundled with and the 'primary purpose' of the main app would then exclude such a hybrid from the adware set...
as i said before, i don't think there was any funny business going on here, i think it was probably just an edit to correct an already published article which in turn had some interesting side effects...
and now you know why i don't provide for comments on this blog - if i should happen to edit something (and there are some things i can see myself modifying on occasion, like adding citations to my definition posts) i wouldn't want to have to deal with the consequences...
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