Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Blockage, Stripes, Upswings
Wait -- I thought we were already on the new, new, old, new, old new economy. davecb writes: "To compliment Jon's essay on the Myth of the Tech Slump, have a look at last month's cover article in The Atlantic, where computer technology is quietly changing the old-economy companies of the rust belt into something rather different: the new old economy.
The author asks (and answers) 'The great question about the surge in American productivity since 1996 is, Will it last, or is it simply a brief, blessed pop that will disappear forever when the next recession comes? That is essentially another way of asking whether the New Economy and the New Old Economy are real, or are just the Old Economy on adrenaline.'
He and I suspect it's the very opposite of a slump."
Mommy, where is my new baby brother's barcode? raincrow writes: "One of the only good things that came out of the CueCat fiasco (for me, anyway, besides the free barcode scanner and accompanying shiny coaster), was the discover of ReaderWare, which has made the management of my personal library so much better. The ReaderWare newsletter, in turn, has a lot of good tips on bar code scanners, and turned me on to Qode (http://www.qode.com/), which is a shopping system that uses a personal barcode scanner to let you set up your own shopping lists and other goodies (ReaderWare folks just like it because it can store barcodes untethered from the PC and therefore keeps you from having to lug all your books to the computer). What's interesting is that Qode.com makes a really big deal about being *anonymous*. Quoting from the site 'Note that we said anonymity, not privacy. Qode has been working to solve the problems of consumer privacy by designing a system that does not require any personal or identifying information. Qode matches promotions specifically to the products entered into the system by its anonymous users. It is impossible to connect this information to any individual. We then deliver the promotion to your private, custom web site ? not your e-mail.' Any experiences out there? I'm still looking for the holes, but that's a niftly little gadget for $50.00."
Lose mail free with Not-so-Hotmail! Just when you thought the confluence of spam (note to Hormel -- the bad kind, not your tasty meat product, which is uppercased) and email had exerted all the evil it could, the opposite proves true. Read this account on ZDnet about what happens when your mail doesn't get sent on hotmail due to hyperactive, automatic spam-prevention bots. (The "your" of course referring to people with Hotmail accounts.)
Don't they make video cards or something? Johnathon Walls writes "It seems that the sequels to The Matrix are in even more trouble as Carrie Moss ends up on crutches for six weeks due to a knee injury. This is added trouble to the previous holdups reported by Slashdot. Jet Li has also pulled out (though I'm uncertain how new this bit is)."
I was in the middle of a play-by-email game of Diplomacy when my e-mail hosting service decided to block any mail with 'diploma' in the subject. Of course they didn't notify users about the new spam filter, or the list of keywords, or provide any control over it, so it took me a while to realise. O how I laughed. My allies thought I had suddenly fallen cold with them and Turkey fell quicker than a really quick thing.
There's a spamming technique that allows spammers to find your email address even if you've NEVER given it to anyone. Basically you set up a script that vomits a bunch of spam to a domain with random user names and watch to see which ones DON'T bounce. I suspect a big name like hotmail would be an excellent target for such an attack. More users means better chance of finding unlisted "private" mail boxes. My mail server has been hit by many of these scans. Yeesh.
"If Microsoft, one of the largest technology companies, can say who we send e-mail to, that really puts constraints on freedom of speech in the U.S.," said Johnson, an information technology worker at a major Illinois hospital.
It depresses me that
People this stupid exist
News services repeat such bone-headed opinions without labelling them as such
~Cederic