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European Union Says No To Spam
Peter Dyck writes: "CNN reports that the Council of Ministers of the European Union (EU) has agreed on Thursday to pass a new law banning the use of unsolicited e-mail. The resolution also bans the so-called inertia marketing for the promotion of financial services. This means that within the 15 EU member-states companies cannot resort anymore to direct marketing to sell their wares. Marketing is still possible, but the consumers must opt-in for it first." However, this is just one bend in a long and bureaucratic road.
I love the taste of good spam in the morning!
/. is archiving -1 comments... what the fuck?
Mmmmmm.
Food - USA most obese in the world.
Water - USA biggest polluter in the world.
Electricity - Brownouts in Calafornia.
Cynicism is the natural defence of the romantic.
I'm a European (well, Irish actually) and we do actually have computers over here. We also have running water, cars, and buildings.
But, if you'd like to send over some food and drink and a few other bits and pieces, here's a list:
15" TexMex pizza (dont put too much barbeque sauce on it - it ruins the taste)
6 pack of Budweiser
Sony HI-FI system with dolby digital plus a cable to connect to my DVD player. (We're getting electricity soon!!)
Try and get it fedexed ASAP as I'm kinda hungry.
Best regards,
Mick.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in th recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be mong OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying