This will NOT raise awareness or work in any way.
on
TimeWarner DNS Hijacking
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Wired found someone who approves of breaking the internet:
Frankly, redirecting requests to malware sites, or IRC communication channels, to cleaner-sites sounds like a practical short term tactic to me. And if it raises awareness around the seriousness of the bot problem I'm all for it.
Right, because the kind of people who might actually use IRC know nothing about botnets and the kind of Windoze users who are part of the botnet care about IRC. This is just another attack on the free software community as outlined in the Haloween Documents.
Once again, the ISP has punished the good guys for problems crated by the bad guys. The root cause of the botnet is Windoze. Fixing it and raising awareness is as simple as cutting the problem computers off your network and telling their owners why. This is as it should be and pretending otherwise props up third rate software and threatens the stability of the net.
If you own a relatively successful site that caters to the general public [Alexa] browser stats will reflect the browser and OS usage stats pretty accurately.
Because a large segment of the population is using Firefox and Alexa was an IE only tool that Firefox users would rather do without, I don't think Alexa says anything meaningful. If you define "general public" as "microsoft using public" you could be right.
These are all misleading details. The real story is as the Register got it - Vista made no difference to M$'s bottom line. I'd interpret that as what little marketshare Vista can gain is pure cannibalism. Mac and GNU/Linux incerases are coming from the same pie and their measured sales are up.
Soon $200 GNU/Linux laptops will be all over the place and M$'s stall will turn into an accelerating decline.
you're trying to dispute the trend with a single data point.
Au contraire, the fine article is trying to establish a trend with a single botched number. I've disputed that number and given you two others, M$'s bottom line and RAM sales, which both make the same point.
Until somebody can show hard numbers indicating that Linux is displacing XP installs at a greater rate than Vista, however, I'm afraid the inevitable Year of Linux will have to be postponed. Again.
As more PC makers start pushing out $200 laptops with gnu/linux installed, you will get the counts you want to see. It looks like the only reason Dell jumped into the Linux market is because it's about to eat everything like it ate the embedded market. The WinTel era is over.
Why stop at August - in a mere 9 years it will have 110% of the market!
M$ depends on growth to feed it's "restricted" stock compensation plans. Vista adoption is slower than any Windoze version ever. Significantly, it has not made a dent on M$'s bottom line. They have already been losing developers to Google and other competitors based on the failure of their stock options plans - options for $150 when the stock is selling at $25 are kind of insulting.
They are in the non free death spiral. The downward spiral begins with long development time and poor quality, like Vista exhibits. It ends with the realization that M$'s triumph is not self assured. People can and will use other software when the M$ upgrade gravy train is over. Witness the ultimate end, $200 gnu/linux laptops. At that price point there's no room for the M$ tax. The squeeze makes it even more difficult for them to develop product and things just get worse for them.
Their efforts to own free software are a threat, but one that will be vanquished in short order by everyone else who's making good money with honest software. M$ can join the party or die.
Neither Vista nor Office 2007 made a difference to M$'s bottom line. They have nowhere to go but down to the market share their third rate software and bad attitude deserve.
One day, it will. You might wonder if it will ever run Vista well. My bet is on GNU/Linux.
In the mean time, you can keep the $3,800 price difference and get something like this, that weighs 2lbs and comes with gnu/linux installed.
What was that prediction about a $200 price point for PCs? Oh yeah, that's right - non free software won't be able to compete when the price point drops to $200. The world is looking better every day.
$200 laptops are here. It's small, light and has more horsepower than the five year old PIII I'm using. With GNU/Linux, you don't need a portable super computer.
i estimate that every time I do this, I burn the same number of calories as I might on an elliptical trainer. I assure you the beer gut ain't getting smaller on its own.
Stress causes weight gain, not loss. It also sets you up for disease. In this way, M$ and other stupid bullies are litterally killing us all. Sudden weight loss or gain is a bad sign. Keep riding that bike.
"Are automobile associations dying out? Leaders report that attendance is down but mailing list and show traffic is still good. Do we still need automobile associations, given the ease of driving and ubiquitousness of online information about automobiles? Lots of people say, yes, we still need automobile associations (and some disagree)."
On the other hand, "rented" music allows you to sample a much wider variety of music than if you had to pay for it all. $15 will buy you 15 songs on iTunes forever, or it will buy you an "infinite" (limited by what's available on the Zune Marketplace) amount of music for one month.
Or you could just stick to the infinite supply of free and legal music from archive.org, magnatune.com and so on and so forth. The majors have never been fresh and they are looking more and more like the Chicago Stock Yards every day - cruel, exploitative, low quality and easily circumvented.
So turn off the wireless when you're not actively looking for or sharing with other Zune players.
You trust Microsoft to let you turn off advertising? The "features" existence should tell you that's not an option that will last, even if you knew nothing at all about their software. In the M$ stock yards, advertisers are the customers and people are the sheep.
... when you try to put it in your pocket. Tell me more about that big screen, which is reported to have the same resolution as an iPod. Tell me about corners, weight, battery life, etc.
"it has a larger screen" But it has the same resolution as the video iPod's screen.
Bigger is always better until you try to put it in your pocket. Is it also thicker and have square corners? A larger battery with less life? Woops, I think that would cover all the bases.
Sometimes, spending is just throwing good money after bad. They can't make Zune a winner because rented and dissapearing music just aren't cool. Even less cool is the idea that billboards will be able to "squirt" adverts onto your player or what your player might tell them in return. Minority Report was supposed to be a horror story, not a business model.
It's idiotic to call them tactics against a "mark"... Here is where I have first hand experience that shows you're on crack.... You're a nut case.... Seriously, you're nuts....
If I'm crazy, why are you talking to me? I don't mind, but you need to build some reading comprehension skills and manners.
I don't have any claims other than the hypocrisy of the original article. They, not I make all of these claims. You and I both agree that if some of these claims are true they are a violation of law and that regulating them is not only sensible it's already happened. We may quibble over the morality of the rest but it's silly to believe all of the above and then say that regulations are paternalistic.
Of course, I don't need claims to think Casinos are disgusting and predatory. There is little social good they do to justify the harm they also do. Things were better when people ran restaurants instead.
How much smaller can they get? Firefox fits into the 50MB DSL boot disk which is designed to work with 100MHz 64MB computers. They also have a version for Windows 98, which should also work with that kind of hardware. If you start stripping stuff out of Mozilla you get something like Galeon, which is nice enough. If you start from scratch, you get Dillo which is also in DSL and works much faster. It has tabs and all but it lacks scripting and other fancy schmancy junk that many web sites now demand.
If the author wants to find the people "slave whipping" old PCs he has no further to look than his own site, which serves up a whopping 12 bugs and an obnoxious pile of advertising links. He should try it out on his new iPhone.
When you want to know about a predatory industry like Casinos you should always use the material provided by the predators for the prey. You will always find full confessions from those in such an honest trade. Insider guides, even employee manuals, should be taken as gospel truth. Allegations by outsiders who point to public records of deceptive practices should be ignored.
The lighting and drinks are lies? What does that mean? The drugged air? I've heard of that conspiracy theory, but as far as I know, it's only that -- a conspiracy theory
The article's authors believe otherwise and explain themselves before deciding that regulating fraudulent practices in casinos was some kind of paternalistic, protecting the marks from themselves move. Allow me to quote what they said because you are too lazy to read or to protective to acknowledge the practices.
The mark is kept unaware of the passing of time by artificial lighting.
In most Las Vegas casinos, there is a noticeable lack of natural light and of clocks. The gambling floor is always located away from the main entrance out onto the street to minimize the gamblers exposure to the outside world.... This design keeps casino patrons in a perpetual (and artificial) daytime, exterior environment, whether they are gambling or not. Thus, those who are already gambling find it easier to keep gambling, and those who are simply walking around the casino are more inclined to start using a machine
Near misses manipulate the player's sense of odds
The most important of these is the inclusion of a system in the machine that yields a high frequency of near misses, or situations in which the player believes they have almost won. For example, the slot machine often displays two out of the three jackpot bars, a tremendously stimulating event which has greatly reinforced the players behavior at no cost to the casino. The ringing bells, flashing lights, and other sounds from their own machine and nearby machines are other secondary conditioning mechanisms that keep the player stimulated.
Manipulation of payout odd placement
casinos are planned such that there are slot machines lining walkways around tables. However, these slots are always tight. This cuts down on the noise and distraction to table players, and makes sense because the majority of players on these machines are playing spontaneously, with little expectation of winning. This demonstrates to what degree casino layouts are optimizedin this case, to the point that a complex system is implemented simply to clean up loose change from spontaneous players.
Drugging patrons.
It has even been reported that casinos have attempted to manipulate the air circulation in order to affect the behavior of gamblers. They may add extra oxygen to the circulation to keep gamblers more alert, or even add pheromones that make people feel more relaxed and at ease. Casinos vehemently deny these allegations; however, companies marketing these technologies do exist and do make sales to casinos.
"Free" drinks and ordinary odds are not deceptive like the above is. The mark is unaware of the powerful emotional manipulation at work. This is not a friendly game of cards, it's fraud.
If you provide a food nugget on a varying number of presses, e.g., 1 press=win, 3 presses=win, 10 presses=win, 4 presses=win -- it'll punch the bar all day.
What you see at work here is the power of an intermittent reward. A reward that's given every time is soon despised but one that has to be worked for always has value. Perverse, isn't it? It explains much of the crazyloyalty of M$ fans and their dissatisfaction with things that just work. Intermittent positive reward is the most powerful kind of training.
Slot machines are the ideal gambling machine. In a game of even chances, the side with the most resources will eventually win. Casinos are allowed to tilt the odds in their favor. They still win, but they do best when those odds are expressed as purely as possible as the result of a long series of trials. That is, the casino is most assured of taking all of your money on a greater number of small bets than they are with a small number of large bets. The ideal slot machine would cost nothing to run and accept pennies and exist everywhere, so that anyone could drop their money in at any time.
The authors show a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on:
Essentially, then, significant government regulation of gambling and casinos means protecting people from themselvesfrom their own innate psychology.
It's amazing how they could come to such a conclusion after detailing so many manipulative and deceptive practices. The lighting, the drinks, the drugged air the arrangement of odds are all lies. Because people do not know they are being lied to, it's hardly fair to say that regulating Casinos is protecting people from themselves.
Taking things from people you are lying to is called fraud. It is a crime and it is indirectly violent because the victim must work and make sacrifices to replace what was stolen. Casinos as they exist in the US are practicing fraud. Outlawing these disgusting institutions is no more paternalistic than banning other forms of theft. It's that simple.
You might want to update your spam about Microsoft paying its employees in stock options, since the company stopped issuing them four years ago: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/july-dec03/ stocks_7-10.html.
Oh, big news there. Update from "options" to "restricted" is noted. Thanks.
I'm sure you can imagine other reasons why Microsoft is on the verge of collapse, and probably has been in your minds for years now (but funnily enough, just never seems to collapse)
Well, thanks Dr. AC, but that has not been on my mind for years. The obvious superiority of free software has been on my mind for about seven years, and I've expected a shift but I'm a slow learner. It took me a couple of years to realize that M$ must be destroyed. It's Vista and Office 2007, which are so obviously a play from the early 90's book of software, that have convinced me the end is near for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Wired found someone who approves of breaking the internet:
Right, because the kind of people who might actually use IRC know nothing about botnets and the kind of Windoze users who are part of the botnet care about IRC. This is just another attack on the free software community as outlined in the Haloween Documents.
Once again, the ISP has punished the good guys for problems crated by the bad guys. The root cause of the botnet is Windoze. Fixing it and raising awareness is as simple as cutting the problem computers off your network and telling their owners why. This is as it should be and pretending otherwise props up third rate software and threatens the stability of the net.
I use IRC, and if my ISP blocks it, it's a dealbreaker, even if I have to sue to cancel the contract.
Next level time, apt-get install bind.
If you own a relatively successful site that caters to the general public [Alexa] browser stats will reflect the browser and OS usage stats pretty accurately.
Because a large segment of the population is using Firefox and Alexa was an IE only tool that Firefox users would rather do without, I don't think Alexa says anything meaningful. If you define "general public" as "microsoft using public" you could be right.
These are all misleading details. The real story is as the Register got it - Vista made no difference to M$'s bottom line. I'd interpret that as what little marketshare Vista can gain is pure cannibalism. Mac and GNU/Linux incerases are coming from the same pie and their measured sales are up.
Soon $200 GNU/Linux laptops will be all over the place and M$'s stall will turn into an accelerating decline.
you're trying to dispute the trend with a single data point.
Au contraire, the fine article is trying to establish a trend with a single botched number. I've disputed that number and given you two others, M$'s bottom line and RAM sales, which both make the same point.
Until somebody can show hard numbers indicating that Linux is displacing XP installs at a greater rate than Vista, however, I'm afraid the inevitable Year of Linux will have to be postponed. Again.
As more PC makers start pushing out $200 laptops with gnu/linux installed, you will get the counts you want to see. It looks like the only reason Dell jumped into the Linux market is because it's about to eat everything like it ate the embedded market. The WinTel era is over.
Why stop at August - in a mere 9 years it will have 110% of the market!
M$ depends on growth to feed it's "restricted" stock compensation plans. Vista adoption is slower than any Windoze version ever. Significantly, it has not made a dent on M$'s bottom line. They have already been losing developers to Google and other competitors based on the failure of their stock options plans - options for $150 when the stock is selling at $25 are kind of insulting.
They are in the non free death spiral. The downward spiral begins with long development time and poor quality, like Vista exhibits. It ends with the realization that M$'s triumph is not self assured. People can and will use other software when the M$ upgrade gravy train is over. Witness the ultimate end, $200 gnu/linux laptops. At that price point there's no room for the M$ tax. The squeeze makes it even more difficult for them to develop product and things just get worse for them.
Their efforts to own free software are a threat, but one that will be vanquished in short order by everyone else who's making good money with honest software. M$ can join the party or die.
Neither Vista nor Office 2007 made a difference to M$'s bottom line. They have nowhere to go but down to the market share their third rate software and bad attitude deserve.
We were just talking about how browser stats are useless. The only hard use number so far comes from disappointing memory sales, and M$'s bottom line which show Vista is not being used much.
The real story is that the upgrade train is out of steam. M$ introduced both a new OS and a new office suit without a real change their bottom line. Their market is stagnant and will only decline as people get sick of XP and see Vista as even worse. The tipping point has arrived.
One day, it will. You might wonder if it will ever run Vista well. My bet is on GNU/Linux.
In the mean time, you can keep the $3,800 price difference and get something like this, that weighs 2lbs and comes with gnu/linux installed.
What was that prediction about a $200 price point for PCs? Oh yeah, that's right - non free software won't be able to compete when the price point drops to $200. The world is looking better every day.
$200 laptops are here. It's small, light and has more horsepower than the five year old PIII I'm using. With GNU/Linux, you don't need a portable super computer.
Is flaccid state better?
Ask MicroSoft for assurance and immoral support or consult with Dr. Stallman for a cure.
i estimate that every time I do this, I burn the same number of calories as I might on an elliptical trainer. I assure you the beer gut ain't getting smaller on its own.
Stress causes weight gain, not loss. It also sets you up for disease. In this way, M$ and other stupid bullies are litterally killing us all. Sudden weight loss or gain is a bad sign. Keep riding that bike.
"Are automobile associations dying out? Leaders report that attendance is down but mailing list and show traffic is still good. Do we still need automobile associations, given the ease of driving and ubiquitousness of online information about automobiles? Lots of people say, yes, we still need automobile associations (and some disagree)."
Yes, I really hate being able to replace my (admittedly brown) battery.
How often does Bill Gates sell you a new one? Does it cost less than the iPod's long lasting one? Does it come from Sony and catch fire?
On the other hand, "rented" music allows you to sample a much wider variety of music than if you had to pay for it all. $15 will buy you 15 songs on iTunes forever, or it will buy you an "infinite" (limited by what's available on the Zune Marketplace) amount of music for one month.
Or you could just stick to the infinite supply of free and legal music from archive.org, magnatune.com and so on and so forth. The majors have never been fresh and they are looking more and more like the Chicago Stock Yards every day - cruel, exploitative, low quality and easily circumvented.
So turn off the wireless when you're not actively looking for or sharing with other Zune players.
You trust Microsoft to let you turn off advertising? The "features" existence should tell you that's not an option that will last, even if you knew nothing at all about their software. In the M$ stock yards, advertisers are the customers and people are the sheep.
"it has a larger screen" But it has the same resolution as the video iPod's screen.
Bigger is always better until you try to put it in your pocket. Is it also thicker and have square corners? A larger battery with less life? Woops, I think that would cover all the bases.
At least that's what Roughly Drafted told me.
Sometimes, spending is just throwing good money after bad. They can't make Zune a winner because rented and dissapearing music just aren't cool. Even less cool is the idea that billboards will be able to "squirt" adverts onto your player or what your player might tell them in return. Minority Report was supposed to be a horror story, not a business model.
Maybe we'll finally have the freedom of synching our digital audio players via wi-fi.
If the pigopolists would just leave device makers alone, we'd already have such an obvious feature. Instead they pull stunts like this to limit device features and user choice. If M$ is first to market with a wifi enabled music player it can only be because of market manipulation like the above.
They won't really be first, though. Zaurus and other PDAs have had both free music players and wifi for years.
It's idiotic to call them tactics against a "mark" ... Here is where I have first hand experience that shows you're on crack. ... You're a nut case. ... Seriously, you're nuts. ...
If I'm crazy, why are you talking to me? I don't mind, but you need to build some reading comprehension skills and manners.
I don't have any claims other than the hypocrisy of the original article. They, not I make all of these claims. You and I both agree that if some of these claims are true they are a violation of law and that regulating them is not only sensible it's already happened. We may quibble over the morality of the rest but it's silly to believe all of the above and then say that regulations are paternalistic.
Of course, I don't need claims to think Casinos are disgusting and predatory. There is little social good they do to justify the harm they also do. Things were better when people ran restaurants instead.
How much smaller can they get? Firefox fits into the 50MB DSL boot disk which is designed to work with 100MHz 64MB computers. They also have a version for Windows 98, which should also work with that kind of hardware. If you start stripping stuff out of Mozilla you get something like Galeon, which is nice enough. If you start from scratch, you get Dillo which is also in DSL and works much faster. It has tabs and all but it lacks scripting and other fancy schmancy junk that many web sites now demand.
If the author wants to find the people "slave whipping" old PCs he has no further to look than his own site, which serves up a whopping 12 bugs and an obnoxious pile of advertising links. He should try it out on his new iPhone.
When you want to know about a predatory industry like Casinos you should always use the material provided by the predators for the prey. You will always find full confessions from those in such an honest trade. Insider guides, even employee manuals, should be taken as gospel truth. Allegations by outsiders who point to public records of deceptive practices should be ignored.
The lighting and drinks are lies? What does that mean? The drugged air? I've heard of that conspiracy theory, but as far as I know, it's only that -- a conspiracy theory
The article's authors believe otherwise and explain themselves before deciding that regulating fraudulent practices in casinos was some kind of paternalistic, protecting the marks from themselves move. Allow me to quote what they said because you are too lazy to read or to protective to acknowledge the practices.
The mark is kept unaware of the passing of time by artificial lighting.Near misses manipulate the player's sense of odds
Manipulation of payout odd placement Drugging patrons."Free" drinks and ordinary odds are not deceptive like the above is. The mark is unaware of the powerful emotional manipulation at work. This is not a friendly game of cards, it's fraud.
If you provide a food nugget on a varying number of presses, e.g., 1 press=win, 3 presses=win, 10 presses=win, 4 presses=win -- it'll punch the bar all day.
What you see at work here is the power of an intermittent reward. A reward that's given every time is soon despised but one that has to be worked for always has value. Perverse, isn't it? It explains much of the crazy loyalty of M$ fans and their dissatisfaction with things that just work. Intermittent positive reward is the most powerful kind of training.
Slot machines are the ideal gambling machine. In a game of even chances, the side with the most resources will eventually win. Casinos are allowed to tilt the odds in their favor. They still win, but they do best when those odds are expressed as purely as possible as the result of a long series of trials. That is, the casino is most assured of taking all of your money on a greater number of small bets than they are with a small number of large bets. The ideal slot machine would cost nothing to run and accept pennies and exist everywhere, so that anyone could drop their money in at any time.
The authors show a fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on:
Essentially, then, significant government regulation of gambling and casinos means protecting people from themselvesfrom their own innate psychology.
It's amazing how they could come to such a conclusion after detailing so many manipulative and deceptive practices. The lighting, the drinks, the drugged air the arrangement of odds are all lies. Because people do not know they are being lied to, it's hardly fair to say that regulating Casinos is protecting people from themselves.
Taking things from people you are lying to is called fraud. It is a crime and it is indirectly violent because the victim must work and make sacrifices to replace what was stolen. Casinos as they exist in the US are practicing fraud. Outlawing these disgusting institutions is no more paternalistic than banning other forms of theft. It's that simple.
You might want to update your spam about Microsoft paying its employees in stock options, since the company stopped issuing them four years ago: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/economy/july-dec03/ stocks_7-10.html.
Oh, big news there. Update from "options" to "restricted" is noted. Thanks.
I'm sure you can imagine other reasons why Microsoft is on the verge of collapse, and probably has been in your minds for years now (but funnily enough, just never seems to collapse)
Well, thanks Dr. AC, but that has not been on my mind for years. The obvious superiority of free software has been on my mind for about seven years, and I've expected a shift but I'm a slow learner. It took me a couple of years to realize that M$ must be destroyed. It's Vista and Office 2007, which are so obviously a play from the early 90's book of software, that have convinced me the end is near for them.