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. . . maybe I'm cursed . . .

You're not.

And NetBEUI/LAN Manager was supposed to be the end of TCP/IP.

And lets not forget how Microsoft decided that 'The Internet' was a good plan, but that TCP/IP was not the right way to do it. They tried very hard to kill the internet, and they pushed 'The Microsoft Network' as a twisted alternative. Remember trumpet winsock and all the bullshit you would have to go through just to get a windows box talking TCP/IP ??

There developed a big fight that was dragged on over at least a year or two. Every print publication absolutely poured rubbish all over TCP/IP and 'The Internet', and this was all funded by Microsoft advertisting dollars, and those of their allies in this battle. (At the time, IBM was a very close ally of MS, and IBM was all out to kill Unix before it grew any bigger. This was in the days before MS pulled the big double cross on IBM over OS/2, effectively creating the enormous IBM Linux monster we see today)

Anyway, the 'Battle for the Internet' was won in the end by the 'geeks' who ran the backend machines. The hand that rocks the cradle and all that.

And as soon as it was obvious to even Microsoft that they were not going to win that one, they cut their loses, buried 'The Microsoft Network' deeply away with their other failures, and then jumped on the TCP/IP bandwagon. Shortly after that, they purchase spyglass, rebrand it as IE, and then turn up the marketting machine. (They pulled the launch of Windows95, and hit back with 'Windows95 with Internet Explorer' as a rushed facelift)

As a result, 99% of the public today, and no small number of 'techs' who dont know their history very well - believe that Windows IS the internet, or at least that Microsoft has been a strong supporter of this whole internet thing, and the standards that surround it.

The truth of the matter is that for a period of several years, Microsoft WAS at the head of a desperate battle to KILL the internet before it really took off. They spent a fortune, and used every dirty trick in their play book to kill it. They failed ...

They obviously still dont like TCP/IP because of all this - since there are so many leftovers of their alternate tools making up the networking framework in every windows box out there today, including Vista ...

See http://www.faughnan.com/netbios.html for a good rundown on the crap in their stack.

It is very sad that they dont teach TECHO HISTORY in schools. We came VERY CLOSE to never having an internet at all, thanks to the determined efforts of MS. Losing that fight pretty much marked the end of the road for MS - they have been on a downward slide ever since.

I think that out of a sense of spite, MS goes around just trying its damndest to mess with standards, so it can at least win ONE little battle, since it lost the real big one years ago. Everything they do it seems - OOXML, WMV, .doc files, kerberos, DHTML, MS-Java, IE css 'standards', etc, etc, etc - seems to be motivated by pure spite.

Oh lord, how I hope you are wrong. My opinion is no guide to the market, but I'll venture it as an opinion of one.

Caveat: Faughnan's Law says that if I have a defined need, marketers should run screaming in the opposite direction. I am representative of a less than tiny sliver of the market. So I'm not exactly contradicting Danielrm. On the other hand, if a vendor produces a clone of Word, we might as well stick with Word.

So a better solution than Word, even if the market is only 1% of the total world of computer users, might still be more successful than a Word clone -- esp. if the measure of success is the ability to sell a very end-user friendly low cost OS X hardware/software bundle.

That said, I despise Microsoft Word. Here's why.

Oh, there are good things to Microsoft Word. It's a great grammar and spelling checker. It handles fonts well. The tables could be worse. Overall, though, it really is an awful piece of software. The collision between the inline formatting and object-oriented formatting models is a horrid mess. I think Word is tolerated primarily because most people use it as a slightly fancier version of TextEdit/WordPad -- and because only a few of us are old enough to remember MORE 3.1, FullWrite, AmiPro, even WordPerfect/DOS. (Frankly, in some ways WordPad is a better wordprocessor than Word.)

Word wasn't always bad. Until 1995 (97?) it really was excellent. Around that time though, it ran into the Product Manager from heck. That person is probably fairly senior at Microsoft now -- they ought to be pelted with something smelly.

I read (Joel on Software) that Microsoft, disgusted with Word's bleeding mess of a code base, once tried a full rewrite. That effort failed.

My biggest complaint with OpenOffice is that it's TOO MUCH like Word. Of course that may make sense from a marketing perspective, but I don't like it.

Mellel has a very closed and very proprietary file format. I won't risk it. In the OS X world Nisus Writer Express is the most promising option -- it uses an RTF derived file format. If Apple does release iWorks Pages I'll compare it to Nisus Writer Express. I may end up with both, as I would not be at all surprised if iWorks Pages is a resource hog.

This borders on the apocryphal.

Why would Bill Gates even have a credit card in his own name?

And why in hell would he use it online, instead of a one-time electronic transaction instrument?

And just what was he buying?

I can imaging that post-human entities might have good reasons not to run such simulations, and I think post-human entities are more likely to be descendants of our machines than ourselves; both of which suggest we are not simulations (Bostrom considers these possibilities.). On the other hand, a simulation of human existence might be one way to nurture and grow a post-singularity human-like "child". The simulation scenario might also explain the Fermi Paradox -- we are alone in the universe because the existence of a non-human civilization does not serve the purposes of the simulation.

For a science-fictionalized context, you may enjoy the second book Space in Stephen Baxter's excellent Manifold trilogy.

mind you, if they only took a few cents from each credit card account, they COULD buy a Ferrari ...

There are ongoing frauds where small amounts in fraudulent "service fees" or subscriptions to porn sites are being charged on hundreds of thousands of cards every month. The charges are small enough that most card holders don't bother to track them down and get hit up month after month for years.

There is a web page about one of these frauds here In this particular fraud the card numbers were taken from a shady bank that did CC transactions for porn sites. The con men would make charges under a variety of entities posing as subscription based porn sites so the card holder would not only be paying for his original porn purchase but other fraudulent ones besides - pretty smart because it wouldn't set of any alarms at the card company (the guy is already making legitimate purchases of that particular product) and the numbers are small enough that the guy wouldn't bother doing anything about it if he even notices. Since it's porn, and some of it he really *did* sign up for, he might be too embarassed to do anything about it even if he realises some of the charges are fraudulent. This particular fraud ended up making between $40 and $50 million dollars off of about 900,000 card holders.

Curiously, I almost never get anyone writing to me complaining about the spam. That used to happen, but I think most folks have figured out not to reply. I also don't seem to have been blacklisted anywhere (faughnan.com); the blacklist maintainers are apparently smart enough not to be fooled by spoofed fields.

Why did they pick me? I think they like to take addresses that are present in the registrar databases. Or maybe they picked me because I complained about spam and write about ways to stop it (not that hard really, we just need to authenticate the sending service rather than the harder task of authenticating the sender).

In any event, sadly this is old news. Good to know it's starting to make its way into the public consciousness though.

In 1998 I was one of thousands of victims in an international hundred million dollar credit card fraud. Some of the suspected principals of that case are said to be back in operation.

I had a few minutes of limited fame back then, including an appearance on Japanese tv. The story of that fraud, and a dicussion of cc fraud in general, is here. (Alas, the site is hosted by myhosting.com, and as on many Sunday mornings it is now down!)

Only the banks can fix the problem, but with the very notable exception of American Express they've done very little. I now use AMEX for all recurring internet transactions, and if they ever got their Quicken support working reliably (they've failed for 3 years) I'd use them for all online transactions. AMEX has the best attention to security, and the best response to fraud, and the most sustained interest in combating fraud.

Barring litigation, the VISA/MC franchise will only fix this problem if customers stop using their cards. So use AMEX instead.

john faughnan
jfaughnan@spamcop.net
www.faughnan.com

Eh, "we"? Who is "we"?

The problem, in the eyes of hackers and general Slashdot visitors

Why should we care about what criminals (i.e. "hackers") consider to be a "problem" (i.e. an impediment to their illegal activities)?

Why do you insist in speaking for the collective body of visitors to this site? Do you have mind-reading powers? Or do you just wish to usurp others' voices for your own ends?

The commercialization of the internet has given rise to free web page services that only give you 2MB of space and 300MB of bandwidth per month

Well, there's a lot that private individuals can do with that. So your objection is that it's not enough for heavy-duty warez trading?

cable modem services that will disconnect you if you run anything even remotely resembling a server

We already know why you want to run servers, right?

Anyway, did you stop to think that the people who pay for these cable modem services don't want an idiot on the same network as them creating a virtual traffic jam with his server? This is the exact online analogue to real estate zoning laws. People deserve to be protected from their neighbor setting up a big retail business right next to them, attracting tons of traffic and general degradation of life for the people who live there.

and a greater feeling among non-tech-heads that any site that isn't run by a multinational corporation that already owns fourteen newspapers and three TV stations "isn't trustworthy".

Yeah. They should trust tiny fly-by-night websites run by w4r3z d00dz in Slovakia, right?

The silencing of the average person for the sake of keeping internet speech under the control of multinational corporations because it is more profitable, however, is a bad thing.

Excuse me. I, contrary to what you seem to attribute to yourself, can't read minds. Would you explain to me which fruit (turd?) of your imagination you are talking about?

john

Fermi showed that, given reasonable assumptions, we ought to expect "ET" to be ubiquitous. Since extraterrestrials are not all about us, this suggests either technologic civilizations are exquisitely rare or that they rapidly lose behaviors like migration and radio communication. By rapidly I mean within two to three hundred years.

The Singularity is the kind of event that would do that. If technologic civilizations always progress to a Singularity they may well lose interest in minor details like reproduction and out migration. Among other things they would operate on very different time scales from pre-Singular civilizations.

See also http://www.faughnan.com/setifail.html.

john
--
John Faughnan

I've ended up relying on 3 different solutions, each with different strengths.

1. Trusted correspondents get my direct MindSpring (now, sigh, Earthlink owned) address. MindSpring has decent ISP spam filtering.
2. I pay a pittance every year for my spamcop redirector, and I use my spamcop address for non-trusted correspondents. SpamCop does very aggressive ISP level filtering; rejected correspondents get a SpamCop reply with an embedded URL. Correspondents can click the URL to send the message and bypass the filters. Unfortunately this step is too much for many users, and vendors have trouble with it to (security fears probably). If SpamCop had more subtle filtering options I would use only that address (and willingly pay more). SpamCop does use a form of positive filtering -- if you manually accept email from the SpamCop held box the sender is added to an "accepted" list.
3. On the client side I do a mixture of positive and negative filtering. Obvious spam goes directly to a spam box, addresses that do not match my accepted list go to a lesser garbage box.

John Faughnan

I've ended up relying on 3 different solutions, each with different strengths.

1. Trusted correspondents get my direct MindSpring (now, sigh, Earthlink owned) address. MindSpring has decent ISP spam filtering.
2. I pay a pittance every year for my spamcop redirector, and I use my spamcop address for non-trusted correspondents. SpamCop does very aggressive ISP level filtering; rejected correspondents get a SpamCop reply with an embedded URL. Correspondents can click the URL to send the message and bypass the filters. Unfortunately this step is too much for many users, and vendors have trouble with it to (security fears probably). If SpamCop had more subtle filtering options I would use only that address (and willingly pay more). SpamCop does use a form of positive filtering -- if you manually accept email from the SpamCop held box the sender is added to an "accepted" list.
3. On the client side I do a mixture of positive and negative filtering. Obvious spam goes directly to a spam box, addresses that do not match my accepted list go to a lesser garbage box.

John Faughnan