...but that's just because I set it as the default when I installed OO on her laptop. I never actually mentioned to her that I installed OpenOffice rather than Word on her computer, and she has yet to notice.
I've got a short photodocumentary of the process that resulted in Sony's astonishingly forward-looking decision available here for anyone who's interested.
This is "only" 10x. Does that mean that VCs have come to their senses? Anyone have any insight into this?
The difference is more in the scale than in the multiple. 10x is a respectable rate of return for a VC investment; the ending number is "small" because Feedburner only took $10MM in two rounds of funding, where some 1.0 companies burned through that much VC cash on lunches with their branding consultants.
That said, the B round, at least, came from VCs that never lost their senses to begin with (Brad Feld @ Mobius and Fred Wilson @ USV). In both cases they're also specifically working at a smaller scale these days, making smaller investments earlier and focusing on working closely with the companies that they fund. So in that sense, yes -- some VCs, at least, are working differently these days. The dramatically dropping costs of starting a Web venture play a part in that, too: there are more companies online that can really get going with "small" amounts of money they days when a Web shop had to drop $1MM on Oracle licenses and another $1MM on the servers to run it are fading away.
Anyone know if there's a requirement to file a cease-and-desist in a timely manner?
Nope. Patents are granted for a set period of time, and unless the patent is invalidated for other reasons) it remains in force for the full termregardless of whether the patent holder is actually using the patented technology/product/device/process, and regardless of whether others are infringing on that patent.
You may be thinking of trademark law, where failure to actively defend a trademark (or failure to use that trademark in the area in which it was granted) can result in the trademark being invalidated.
I totally agree, but I don't think that's the point being made with the original post. The issue that they're pointing at is not that Verizon has a cap, but rather that Verizon is advertising "unlimited" transfer in big letters, while hiding a note that "unlimited" in this case means "5gig per month" in tiny little letters in the TOS.
If the people buying this service knew about the 5gig limit and were fine with it, that's no problem in my eyes -- it seems totally reasonable for Verizon to sell capped transfer packages. But when their customers are expecting "unlimited" to mean "unlimited" and getting something else entirely, that's a big problem.
The language has actually been in Verizon's contract since at least October, when the Washington Post wrote about the story and I blogged about the story. On October 4th, 2006, I too wrote "I take some small consolation from the fact that this is such transparently deceptive advertising that Verizon might actually be forced to increase the font size on these notes by half a point or so." As its been six months since I wrote that with no apparent change in Verizon's advertising, I'm no longer quite so optimistic on that front, though.
In a related note, I ran some numbers on what happens when you translate the "fast, faster, fastest" approach to selling broadband into transfer volume, and the disconnect between the transfer capacity that you're theoretically buying and the transfer capacity that broadband providers are actually willing to provide. Link is here for anyone interested.
Funny, funny...just checked to see what traffic was coming from slashdot, and I looked up one IP address that appeared to be reading through every Zune post I've written:
$ whois 17.184.101.7
OrgName: Apple Computer, Inc.
OrgID: APPLEC-3
Address: 20740 Valley Green Drive, MS32E
City: Cupertino
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 95014
Country: US
A Microsoft representative said, about the wireless concept: 'We felt we were addressing the social aspect of music, and the research we've done has shown that people understand the concept that wireless enables sharing... but the tagline, while provocative, hasn't meant a lot to consumers.'"
The quote points out incredibly well what the problem with "the social" was: it was a tagline, nothing more. In order to run "the social" as the tagline for the launch campaign, Microsoft marketing had to ignore:
The fact that shared music can't be passed on.
The fact that shared music dies after 3 days/3 plays.
The fact that a significant percentage of the music sold for the Zune couldn't be shared at all.
And let us not forget my favorite: the fact that it's still apparently impossible to find another Zune user to share music with.
Eh...I've ranted about this so many times I can't rant no more. If you actually want to read more about it, check out the Zunebox Proposal or the catalog of failure and incompetence that is the blog posts I've written about the Zune's marketing.
...and so I sent an imaginary reporter to the Digital Music Forum East conference to take pictures and note down what was happening in the halls. The results documented here.
An analyst with Gartner is quoted as saying this move means not all is well in the land of Zune, but a rumour on the CrunchGear site indicates that Microsoft is planning on stepping things up later this year with a Zune cellphone. A smartphone designed to compete with Apple in that market it would seem, despite whatever problems may be going on, the company is still rather fond of the strange little brown device.
Lest we forget: the uninspiring launch of "the Zune" appears to have overshadowed the fact that Microsoft has consistently viewed (and presented) "Zune" as a brand that will cover an ecosystem of interrelated devices, not the specific PMP that was released a couple of months ago. I'm sure that the company would have loved to have an immediate hit, they're in this for the long term. Think XBox: Microsoft is willing to put cash into short-term life support if they believe that there's long-term potential.
Remember also that even before anyone outside of Microsoft had heard the word "Zune," Steve Ballmer was hinting at a communications/music convergence device as one of the iPod-killing-project's outputs. In the March 2006 interview that gained attention for the "Ballmer has brainwashed his children" comments, Ballmer had this to say in response to the question "think you can crack the iPod market?"
It's going to take an innovative proposition. In five years are people really going to carry two devices? One device that is their communication device, one device that is music? There's going to be a lot of opportunities to get back in that game. We want to be in that game. Expect to see announcements from us in that area in the next 12 months.
This is not to say that I see very rosy prospects in the short (or medium, or long) term for the Zune, but simply that Microsoft's direction has been pretty clear for a while; unfortunately for them, it appears that this direction has been pretty clear to Apple, as well.
I've written about recent Zune-related happenings in more detail here, but the short version is that if I were Bryan Lee I'd be taking some personal time, too -- Microsoft isn't out of this game by any means, but despite their (apparently) best efforts, hardly a week goes by without something popping up that puts Microsoft in the position of playing catch-up on yet another front: weak Zune launch, disconnect between the marketing and the reality of "the social," the development of public "music download stations," the iPhone...it's getting to be a pretty long list.
It's going to be a brutal couple of years for the Masters of the Zuniverse, no matter what happens.
It tells me that their marketing company is way ahead of their Zune design division. Social aspects are all the rage these days - see Time's Person of the Year, for example. Their marketing campaign is actually quite clever, and if I wouldn't know how utterly lame the sharing aspect of the Zune would be, I might actually be tempted to buy one.
Yeah, I suspect that the Zune's marketing group has sung that song during internal meetings, but my point is that Microsoft -- the company as a whole -- could (or should) have forseen this, and realized that a burned consumer is at least as bad as an uninterested consumer.
The sharing capability exists in the Zune because MS sees that "social" is the way to go -- I don't think that MS Marketing got this and MS Development didn't. Your XBox360 note is an interesting one, though, and I've been thinking about that as well. Seems like the success of the XBox's social aspect may actually have fed the problem: everyone was thinking "make it social like the XBox" without realizing that the ad hoc device-to-device social network that Zunes have is a very different beast.
To be social, two Zunes have to be in close proximity to one another...no physical proximity, no social. That's very different from XBoxes that connect to a preexisting network that is made up of (potentially) every other XBox360 that's been sold.
And that's exactly why something like a Zunebox (jukebox) makes sense to me: no matter how much the "3 plays or 3 days" sharing sucks, if someone could walk into Virgin music or Starbucks and download a trial version of a song the day after they bought their Zune, they'd probably be pretty excited about it. As it is now? The Zune gets a crapload of articles written by people who are trying to make use of "the social" but just can't find it.
As I wrote on thezunebox.com: Regardless of the number of Zunes in New York City, a New Yorker who consistently sees No nearby Zune devices found, or nearby devices have wireless turned off will almost inevitably come to believe that "the social" is a mean-spirited joke at their (literal) expense.
Yeah, Microsoft decided to increase the Zune's marketing budget in an effort to draw some more attention to it. Apparently the first month of sales didn't really put them on the "1MM Zunes by June" track that they want to be on.
The thing that I haven't yet been able to figure out is how or why Microsoft built a large, expensive launch campaign around the Zune's sharing ability ("welcome to the social") without running the numbers on product uptake and figuring out how infrequently early adopters would be actually be able to take advantage of "the social."
After thinking about that for a little while, and reading what's been said elsewhere on the Web, I wrote up a proposal for the Zunebox -- essentially a modified Zune that's dedicated to sharing, that MS could install in music stores, cafes, retail outlets selling the Zune, and so on. (The linked page has more info on my thinking, and is not an ad-supported site in case anybody is wondering...I've just got cheap hosting space, a domain registration habit, and an interest in seeing where this discussion goes. Plus I think that the graphic that I slapped together for the thezunebox.com splash page is actually pretty clever for something done in half an hour starting at 3AM.)
It's just astonishing to me that Microsoft didn't do something to give the first wave of Zune buyers the chance to use the damn file sharing ability without having to track down another Zune buyer.
Reminds me of the Most Wanted Song / Most Unwanted Song project that Komar & Melamid did in conjunction with Dave Soldier. Based on survey responses, they created songs that (statistically speaking, of course) should appeal to 72 +/- 12% of listeners (most popular), and one that would appeal to fewer than 200 people in the entire world (least popular).
And no, they really didn't take it that seriously , they knew that their sampling and control methods weren't all that strict, and were aware that the resulting music isn't likely to actually generate responses that meet the projected stats.:)
Komar and Melamid also did a "most wanted painting" project, which has the actual survey results and resulting paintings available online.
So now the Winlots start bashing Mozilla for bugs that don't even exist, but "might" exist in the future?
I don't think that's what Glock27 was saying at all; the sentence immediately after the one you quoted seems to me to be the important one:
True this particular exploit didn't affect Mozilla/Firefox, but it is certainly possible that something similar might in the future. So, with that in mind, what new security features would help make Mozilla/Firefox even safer and better?
Taken together, those sentences indicate a very wise and reasonable reaction to this news, not a "Winlot" attack on Mozilla (for what it's worth, I actually didn't see any reference to Windows in the comment at all...).
As far as "the security record of Mozilla [being] excellent" and why you "don't see any reason why this should change in the future," that's probably because the developers working on Mozilla/Firefox have the same reaction to announcements like this that Glock27 did: it's great that their browser wasn't affected by this flaw, but that doesn't mean that it Mozilla is somehow automagically secured against all possible malicious code that will ever exist. They learn what they can from IE's mistakes and try to find ways to make their browser safer and better.
So if the disc installs software on your computer when the disc is read -- without notifying you that it's doing so -- will this technology fun afoul of the assorted anti-spyware legislation either enacted or pending in Utah, California, and New York? The laws in each of these states have provisions against software being automatically installed without the user's knowledge and consent, which seems to be exactly what's happening here.
I suppose that if it does become an issue they'll just address it with something like a good old fashioned shrinkwrap license on the CD -- "by opening this CD you are giving us permisssion to install whatever the hell we want on to your computer."
Oh, well...in the meantime, is there anybody in Utah with some free time on their hands and a desire to be a test case?:)
Okay, then I guess I'm a bit confused, as your original post said: "[h]owever, every capitalist I approach is fearful of dotcoms," which I took to mean that you had approached VCs who then told you that they were fearful of dotcoms.
From what I've been hearing (entirely second-hand, mind you), there is venture capital out there. And while VCs do require a high level of confidence that a business has potential before they'll invest, dotcoms with good ideas and solid business plans have been getting money.
So I guess my answer doesn't actually change that much...put together a solid, realistic business plan, build the business as far as you can without VC, and go out and pitch with enthusiasm and confidence...even so it'll probably fail, but that's good experience for the next time around.:)
VCs have not been exposed to any of the true idea yet. The non-disclosure form was just finished by my attorney yesterday.
Well, this would probably be why any VCs that you've approached have appeared uninterested. Without an actual, written business plan (including stuff like an analysis of the competitive landscape, realistic capital requirements and revenue projections, etc.) as a starting point you won't be able to interest anybody in investing.
Once you've done this part of the work, have a site that you're eager to show VCs, and (ideally) have some operating numbers to show the potential for bringing a good return on capital invested, you may find that you get a different sort of reception.
While I haven't seen additional confirmation either way, Mike Masnick at Techdirt checked with a friend at Google who stated the the apparent increase to 1TB was a mistake, not a storage upgrade.
Most email currently goes through Apache . . . I think that the open sorce community has done a pretty good job of creating the email server of choice. I think that they're probably the right group to also make it more secure.
To clarify someone's "ummmmmm" comment -- this is some sort of weird troll, right?
The Apache Software Foundation does support a project known as James, a "pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server, but ummmmm...well, not a whole lot of people use it.
Yep, I am. Also know that economists tend to study this sort of thing and publish their results.
As with pretty much everything that involves trying to make order out of the lives of millions of people there isn't a generally accepted, definitive "correct" answer, but I'll pass along links to a (yes, slightly dated) report analyzing the Canada-U.S. Unemployment Rate Gap and my comment above and
Myth #3 - the unemployment rate is higher in Canada
Reality: it's computed differently in Canada vs the US. If people stop looking for jobs in the US (ie they can't find them), then they aren't considered unemployed, whereas they are still counted as unemployed (or perhaps unemployable) in Canada.
Not quite that simple, though (what is, after all?). I agree that it's not a exact and direct comparison, but my understanding is that through the late 90s and into this decade, a fair number of people who study such things have held the opinion that the Canadian employment market has remained a bit weaker than that in the US.
A report (now somewhat dated) by Centre for the Study of Living Standards (it's a Canadian organization, before anyone asks) can be found here. While the conclusions as a whole can certainly be read as "well, a whole bunch of economists worked on this report, and we all have different ideas about how to interpret the data," it is worth noting one point from the conclusions:
5. The further widening of the unemployment gap after 1989 appears to be mainly if not entirely due to the much weaker aggregate economic growth in Canada since 1990. As is documented in Fortin (1996), Canada's recession of 1990-92 -- the most severe since the Great Depression - was both substantially more pronounced and of longer duration than the downturn in the United States. Furthermore, the subsequent recovery has also been weaker in Canada. A straightforward "cyclical" story appears to explain the widening of the unemployment gap in the 1990s.
And you're a Canadian citizen or have compelling reason to believe that you'll be offered a work visa (personal connections, obscure and valuable skills)?
STEVE: What happen?
MECHANIC: Somebody set up us the patent.
OPERATOR: We get signal.
STEVE: What!
OPERATOR: Main screen turn on.
STEVE: It's you!!
BILL: How are you gentlemen?
BILL: All your patent are belong to us.
BILL: You are on your way to destruction.
STEVE: What you say!!
BILL: You have no chance to survive make your time.
BILL: HA HA HA HA...
Slashdot Mirror
...but that's just because I set it as the default when I installed OO on her laptop. I never actually mentioned to her that I installed OpenOffice rather than Word on her computer, and she has yet to notice.
I've got a short photodocumentary of the process that resulted in Sony's astonishingly forward-looking decision available here for anyone who's interested.
This is "only" 10x. Does that mean that VCs have come to their senses? Anyone have any insight into this?
The difference is more in the scale than in the multiple. 10x is a respectable rate of return for a VC investment; the ending number is "small" because Feedburner only took $10MM in two rounds of funding, where some 1.0 companies burned through that much VC cash on lunches with their branding consultants.
That said, the B round, at least, came from VCs that never lost their senses to begin with (Brad Feld @ Mobius and Fred Wilson @ USV). In both cases they're also specifically working at a smaller scale these days, making smaller investments earlier and focusing on working closely with the companies that they fund. So in that sense, yes -- some VCs, at least, are working differently these days. The dramatically dropping costs of starting a Web venture play a part in that, too: there are more companies online that can really get going with "small" amounts of money they days when a Web shop had to drop $1MM on Oracle licenses and another $1MM on the servers to run it are fading away.
Anyone know if there's a requirement to file a cease-and-desist in a timely manner?
Nope. Patents are granted for a set period of time, and unless the patent is invalidated for other reasons) it remains in force for the full termregardless of whether the patent holder is actually using the patented technology/product/device/process, and regardless of whether others are infringing on that patent.
You may be thinking of trademark law, where failure to actively defend a trademark (or failure to use that trademark in the area in which it was granted) can result in the trademark being invalidated.
I totally agree, but I don't think that's the point being made with the original post. The issue that they're pointing at is not that Verizon has a cap, but rather that Verizon is advertising "unlimited" transfer in big letters, while hiding a note that "unlimited" in this case means "5gig per month" in tiny little letters in the TOS.
If the people buying this service knew about the 5gig limit and were fine with it, that's no problem in my eyes -- it seems totally reasonable for Verizon to sell capped transfer packages. But when their customers are expecting "unlimited" to mean "unlimited" and getting something else entirely, that's a big problem.
The language has actually been in Verizon's contract since at least October, when the Washington Post wrote about the story and I blogged about the story. On October 4th, 2006, I too wrote "I take some small consolation from the fact that this is such transparently deceptive advertising that Verizon might actually be forced to increase the font size on these notes by half a point or so." As its been six months since I wrote that with no apparent change in Verizon's advertising, I'm no longer quite so optimistic on that front, though.
In a related note, I ran some numbers on what happens when you translate the "fast, faster, fastest" approach to selling broadband into transfer volume, and the disconnect between the transfer capacity that you're theoretically buying and the transfer capacity that broadband providers are actually willing to provide. Link is here for anyone interested.
Funny, funny...just checked to see what traffic was coming from slashdot, and I looked up one IP address that appeared to be reading through every Zune post I've written:
$ whois 17.184.101.7
OrgName: Apple Computer, Inc.
OrgID: APPLEC-3
Address: 20740 Valley Green Drive, MS32E
City: Cupertino
StateProv: CA
PostalCode: 95014
Country: US
I'm serious. Insert your own joke here...
The quote points out incredibly well what the problem with "the social" was: it was a tagline, nothing more. In order to run "the social" as the tagline for the launch campaign, Microsoft marketing had to ignore:
Eh...I've ranted about this so many times I can't rant no more. If you actually want to read more about it, check out the Zunebox Proposal or the catalog of failure and incompetence that is the blog posts I've written about the Zune's marketing.
...and so I sent an imaginary reporter to the Digital Music Forum East conference to take pictures and note down what was happening in the halls. The results documented here.
Lest we forget: the uninspiring launch of "the Zune" appears to have overshadowed the fact that Microsoft has consistently viewed (and presented) "Zune" as a brand that will cover an ecosystem of interrelated devices, not the specific PMP that was released a couple of months ago. I'm sure that the company would have loved to have an immediate hit, they're in this for the long term. Think XBox: Microsoft is willing to put cash into short-term life support if they believe that there's long-term potential.
Remember also that even before anyone outside of Microsoft had heard the word "Zune," Steve Ballmer was hinting at a communications/music convergence device as one of the iPod-killing-project's outputs. In the March 2006 interview that gained attention for the "Ballmer has brainwashed his children" comments, Ballmer had this to say in response to the question "think you can crack the iPod market?"
This is not to say that I see very rosy prospects in the short (or medium, or long) term for the Zune, but simply that Microsoft's direction has been pretty clear for a while; unfortunately for them, it appears that this direction has been pretty clear to Apple, as well.
I've written about recent Zune-related happenings in more detail here, but the short version is that if I were Bryan Lee I'd be taking some personal time, too -- Microsoft isn't out of this game by any means, but despite their (apparently) best efforts, hardly a week goes by without something popping up that puts Microsoft in the position of playing catch-up on yet another front: weak Zune launch, disconnect between the marketing and the reality of "the social," the development of public "music download stations," the iPhone...it's getting to be a pretty long list.
It's going to be a brutal couple of years for the Masters of the Zuniverse, no matter what happens.
It tells me that their marketing company is way ahead of their Zune design division. Social aspects are all the rage these days - see Time's Person of the Year, for example. Their marketing campaign is actually quite clever, and if I wouldn't know how utterly lame the sharing aspect of the Zune would be, I might actually be tempted to buy one.
Yeah, I suspect that the Zune's marketing group has sung that song during internal meetings, but my point is that Microsoft -- the company as a whole -- could (or should) have forseen this, and realized that a burned consumer is at least as bad as an uninterested consumer.
The sharing capability exists in the Zune because MS sees that "social" is the way to go -- I don't think that MS Marketing got this and MS Development didn't. Your XBox360 note is an interesting one, though, and I've been thinking about that as well. Seems like the success of the XBox's social aspect may actually have fed the problem: everyone was thinking "make it social like the XBox" without realizing that the ad hoc device-to-device social network that Zunes have is a very different beast. To be social, two Zunes have to be in close proximity to one another...no physical proximity, no social. That's very different from XBoxes that connect to a preexisting network that is made up of (potentially) every other XBox360 that's been sold. And that's exactly why something like a Zunebox (jukebox) makes sense to me: no matter how much the "3 plays or 3 days" sharing sucks, if someone could walk into Virgin music or Starbucks and download a trial version of a song the day after they bought their Zune, they'd probably be pretty excited about it. As it is now? The Zune gets a crapload of articles written by people who are trying to make use of "the social" but just can't find it. As I wrote on thezunebox.com: Regardless of the number of Zunes in New York City, a New Yorker who consistently sees No nearby Zune devices found, or nearby devices have wireless turned off will almost inevitably come to believe that "the social" is a mean-spirited joke at their (literal) expense.
Yeah, Microsoft decided to increase the Zune's marketing budget in an effort to draw some more attention to it. Apparently the first month of sales didn't really put them on the "1MM Zunes by June" track that they want to be on.
The thing that I haven't yet been able to figure out is how or why Microsoft built a large, expensive launch campaign around the Zune's sharing ability ("welcome to the social") without running the numbers on product uptake and figuring out how infrequently early adopters would be actually be able to take advantage of "the social."
After thinking about that for a little while, and reading what's been said elsewhere on the Web, I wrote up a proposal for the Zunebox -- essentially a modified Zune that's dedicated to sharing, that MS could install in music stores, cafes, retail outlets selling the Zune, and so on. (The linked page has more info on my thinking, and is not an ad-supported site in case anybody is wondering...I've just got cheap hosting space, a domain registration habit, and an interest in seeing where this discussion goes. Plus I think that the graphic that I slapped together for the thezunebox.com splash page is actually pretty clever for something done in half an hour starting at 3AM.)
It's just astonishing to me that Microsoft didn't do something to give the first wave of Zune buyers the chance to use the damn file sharing ability without having to track down another Zune buyer.
...so that I could point out that in Corporate America, TiVo owns you!
And no, they really didn't take it that seriously , they knew that their sampling and control methods weren't all that strict, and were aware that the resulting music isn't likely to actually generate responses that meet the projected stats. :)
Komar and Melamid also did a "most wanted painting" project, which has the actual survey results and resulting paintings available online.
I don't think that's what Glock27 was saying at all; the sentence immediately after the one you quoted seems to me to be the important one:
True this particular exploit didn't affect Mozilla/Firefox, but it is certainly possible that something similar might in the future. So, with that in mind, what new security features would help make Mozilla/Firefox even safer and better?
Taken together, those sentences indicate a very wise and reasonable reaction to this news, not a "Winlot" attack on Mozilla (for what it's worth, I actually didn't see any reference to Windows in the comment at all...).
As far as "the security record of Mozilla [being] excellent" and why you "don't see any reason why this should change in the future," that's probably because the developers working on Mozilla/Firefox have the same reaction to announcements like this that Glock27 did: it's great that their browser wasn't affected by this flaw, but that doesn't mean that it Mozilla is somehow automagically secured against all possible malicious code that will ever exist. They learn what they can from IE's mistakes and try to find ways to make their browser safer and better.
I suppose that if it does become an issue they'll just address it with something like a good old fashioned shrinkwrap license on the CD -- "by opening this CD you are giving us permisssion to install whatever the hell we want on to your computer."
Oh, well...in the meantime, is there anybody in Utah with some free time on their hands and a desire to be a test case? :)
Okay, then I guess I'm a bit confused, as your original post said: "[h]owever, every capitalist I approach is fearful of dotcoms," which I took to mean that you had approached VCs who then told you that they were fearful of dotcoms.
From what I've been hearing (entirely second-hand, mind you), there is venture capital out there. And while VCs do require a high level of confidence that a business has potential before they'll invest, dotcoms with good ideas and solid business plans have been getting money.
So I guess my answer doesn't actually change that much...put together a solid, realistic business plan, build the business as far as you can without VC, and go out and pitch with enthusiasm and confidence...even so it'll probably fail, but that's good experience for the next time around. :)
Well, this would probably be why any VCs that you've approached have appeared uninterested. Without an actual, written business plan (including stuff like an analysis of the competitive landscape, realistic capital requirements and revenue projections, etc.) as a starting point you won't be able to interest anybody in investing.
Once you've done this part of the work, have a site that you're eager to show VCs, and (ideally) have some operating numbers to show the potential for bringing a good return on capital invested, you may find that you get a different sort of reception.
While I haven't seen additional confirmation either way, Mike Masnick at Techdirt checked with a friend at Google who stated the the apparent increase to 1TB was a mistake, not a storage upgrade.
Most email currently goes through Apache . . . I think that the open sorce community has done a pretty good job of creating the email server of choice. I think that they're probably the right group to also make it more secure.
To clarify someone's "ummmmmm" comment -- this is some sort of weird troll, right?
The Apache Software Foundation does support a project known as James, a "pure Java SMTP and POP3 Mail server and NNTP News server, but ummmmm...well, not a whole lot of people use it.
Are you perhaps thinking of qmail or postfix?
As with pretty much everything that involves trying to make order out of the lives of millions of people there isn't a generally accepted, definitive "correct" answer, but I'll pass along links to a (yes, slightly dated) report analyzing the Canada-U.S. Unemployment Rate Gap and my comment above and
Something for all of us to share and enjoy... :)
Myth #3 - the unemployment rate is higher in Canada Reality: it's computed differently in Canada vs the US. If people stop looking for jobs in the US (ie they can't find them), then they aren't considered unemployed, whereas they are still counted as unemployed (or perhaps unemployable) in Canada.
Not quite that simple, though (what is, after all?). I agree that it's not a exact and direct comparison, but my understanding is that through the late 90s and into this decade, a fair number of people who study such things have held the opinion that the Canadian employment market has remained a bit weaker than that in the US.
A report (now somewhat dated) by Centre for the Study of Living Standards (it's a Canadian organization, before anyone asks) can be found here. While the conclusions as a whole can certainly be read as "well, a whole bunch of economists worked on this report, and we all have different ideas about how to interpret the data," it is worth noting one point from the conclusions:
5. The further widening of the unemployment gap after 1989 appears to be mainly if not entirely due to the much weaker aggregate economic growth in Canada since 1990. As is documented in Fortin (1996), Canada's recession of 1990-92 -- the most severe since the Great Depression - was both substantially more pronounced and of longer duration than the downturn in the United States. Furthermore, the subsequent recovery has also been weaker in Canada. A straightforward "cyclical" story appears to explain the widening of the unemployment gap in the 1990s.
Slightly off topic, I suppose, but you know that the unemployment rate in Canada is currently higher (7.3% April 2004) than the US unemployment rate (5.6% April 2004), right?
And you're a Canadian citizen or have compelling reason to believe that you'll be offered a work visa (personal connections, obscure and valuable skills)?
STEVE: What happen?
MECHANIC: Somebody set up us the patent.
OPERATOR: We get signal.
STEVE: What!
OPERATOR: Main screen turn on.
STEVE: It's you!!
BILL: How are you gentlemen?
BILL: All your patent are belong to us.
BILL: You are on your way to destruction.
STEVE: What you say!!
BILL: You have no chance to survive make your time.
BILL: HA HA HA HA...