Imaging Kindle itself violated someone's patent and Amazon was sued and prevented from selling any more Kindles. The holder of that patent would also be allowed to prevent current Kindle owners from downloading any more books - effectively preventing the intended use of the product. This still prevents the use of a product that was paid for.
Kodak had a similar issue when they tried to make a Polaroid camera. After they were sued, no one could get film for the Kodak version.
What if my DirecTv DVR violates a Tivo patent and DirecTv issues a firmware update removing that functionality - which was part of the product when I paid for receiver. I don't even get a refund in this case.
There are precedents for this type of behavior.
Modern controllers can now have 20 or more "buttons" if you count each joystick direction as a button (think WASD). While less than 100, it is still a lot. What the controller can't duplicate for me is what I can do with a mouse in a FPS or RTS game. A joystick or WASD takes way to long to move/aim in a First-Person Shooter, and nothing can compare with the ability to select multiple units in a Real-Time Strategy by simply clicking and dragging with a mouse.Sure there are shortcuts to select all on the screen or all units of a particular type, but you can't duplicate the drag & drop of a mouse.
So a controller can't always beat a mouse & keyboard, but that doesn't mean we can't do better. A prefer a light gun (with real aiming like an arcade, not Wii style) over a mouse for shooting games. But Area 51 and modern FPS games aren't exactly the same thing. In Area 51 all you do is shoot and reload. Knifing someone in the back with a light gun isn't really realistic, and what about tools for the "Engineer" class. Custom controllers could be made (a wrench controller just for the engineer that was similar to a Wiimote) where you have to put down the gun and take the wrench out of your belt to make a repair. This is more realistic and could be better, but the cost makes this an unacceptable solution. Besides, someone third party would make a combined gun/wrench controller with lots of buttons so that you don't need to put the gun down, giving them an unfair advantage.
I think up until now, cost has been the biggest obstacle to making game customized controllers that can outperform a mouse & keyboard. Nintendo with the balance board and other gadgets has shown that maybe people would be willing to buy extra controllers. Mad Catz offered a special Street Fighter IV controller for $150 and wasn't able to keep them in stock for months. Would people pay for a custom Warcraft controller? What would it look like and how could it be better? I don't know, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better than a mouse & keyboard.
(1) Work for the big company working all nighters to rush out the latest RPG/FPS/MMO...
(2) Work for yourself and write mini games for cell phones (money from app store), web (money from ads)...
Depending on which route you choose will determine what languages you need to learn. Hardcore game companies might shy away from someone older that they can't boss around and make work the long hours. Mini games are simple enough to allow you to keep a different job as you get into it.
Note: As a hobby, I've written a couple games for the web that make about $500/year, and that is with well over a million ad views. Making money off of games isn't as easy as the news makes it seem when the do a story on iPhone apps.
Actually, this post isn't off topic.
South Park did an episode making fun of Al Gore right after his movie came out. In this episode, he was spreading awareness of Man-Bear-Pig (half man, half bear, half pig) instead of Global Warming.
Wikipedia on ManBearPig
So if the user clicks through an affiliate to purchase an item, but that affiliate is no longer paid by Amazon, then is it taxed? Amazon is terminiating the affiliate accounts & future payments, but if an affiliate leaves the Amazon links up on their page I assume Amazon won't give them a 404 error.
Are code reviews useful?
Lets see. Right click -> View source this web page. In the first 10 lines I see a variable called maybe with no comments as to what it means.
Yes, code reviews are useful.
When you visit the site, you get a message blaming your ISP for not being able to use the site. I assume this is done so that you will call your ISP to complain.
ISPs could then block the site completely to prevent their users from seeing this message. Then no one will ask for that content. ISP doesn't have to pay, and customers aren't unhappy because they don't know what they are missing.
Yes, I understand that ISPs blocking sites is a VERY bad idea and a slippery slope, but if the site can block a user based on ISP, then why can't a ISP block a user based on site. It seems equally fair (or unfair) in this case.
First lookup the owner of that domain. Then, there are many sites out there that will tell you which domains that person owns. The way you handle this will be very different if he owns 10 vs 10 thousand domains.
Do a search with some of the "Buy this Premium Domain" sites to see if he has listed any of his sites to see how reasonable he is. Those prices are usually 1-2x's a real max bid starting point.
When you do ask for a price, ask him for the price of several of his domains at once. Act like you are not specifically interested in just of those domains and any would work for you. Maybe pretend to be another reseller interested in building your portfolio.
Some of the other advice above is also good. Don't be desparate, and the first email should be very short.
Still not a novel idea.
We have 3 regex for each text box driven by a back-end config file:
One for character input (typed, virtual keyboard, pasted-in, bar coded...). Ex: For an IP Address, only allow 0-9 and period to be typed.
One for what the partially complete text can look like. Ex: For the IP example, numbers can't exceed 255 and you can't have two consecutive periods, but if you have typed a partially valid but incomplete IP Address, it is not shown as invalid. This is validated after every key press.
One for validating the completed string. This is your standard IP Address regex that you can find anywhere on the web. This is validated after the user leaves the text box.
A Google search for "social security number" regex returned 11,300 results. I guess all of those people needed a regular expression to NOT validate data.
Also, the patent uses the term validator which is not a word according to most spell checkers that I use. I know this because I type this word frequently when documenting.NET code. Validator is the term Microsoft uses for ASP.NET controls that validate input.
Its one thing to patent an existing idea, but don't steal the made up words from an existing implementation and expect to get away with it.
Offering discounts and requiring a certain number of units to be sold to get that discount is legal. Limiting the number of units they buy from the competition or not allowing them to sell AMD is not legal.
To follow the OfficeMax example, the more paper I buy from OfficeMax, the better my discount. OfficeMax doesn't revoke my discount if I buy something from Staples - as long as I hit the agreed upon quota to receive the discount.
Wasn't saying it was a good idea. But if they were avoiding doing backups because the only thing on the drive was one big SQL DB, and they didn't have a way of backing it up without taking it offline, then swapping a drive is better than nothing.
I haven't done anything with incremental backups for a drive with a single SQL database, so I have no idea how that works. But let's say they don't care about incremental backups or old backups. They only need to spend about $5K for a handful of matching 15K RPM SAS drives.
Every day or so, swap out one of the drives and replace it with the oldest backup drive. You then have 5-10 days of full daily backups.
Again, I'm not saying it is a good idea, but someone with zero IT knowledge could do both backup and recovery tasks with no training and no investigation. No need to figure out how to backup a live Database without locking the whole thing up for hours, which is probably why they didn't do tape backups in the first place.
If I had mod points, I would mod this up. No one thinks about the user's responsibility to backup their data on the web.
I assume that almost no one backs up their blog entries, but how many people would lose all of their friend's email addresses if they lost their email account. How about their family pictures hosted online.
Even if someone did have a popular blog and backed up all of their data, they have still lost any fans, links, page rank... that they had accumulated.
Maybe I could understand that there might be issues with backing up live databases, and they didn't want to deal with it. Still not an excuse.
BUT, according to the site "the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration".
Only TWO drives.
All they had to do was pull one of the drives, replace it, and lock up the original off site. In a couple of hours the drives would have been mirrored again.
If your only issue is with warmth, then a fireplace may be alternative. A wood burning unit obviously doesn't require electricity, but some gas ones can run without power as well. You just can't use the blower. A 35,000+ BTU vent-free natural gas fireplace can be had for about $1000 + $300 installation + $200 mantle. A vented gas fireplace will increase the cost of both the fireplace and installation.
This is just something else to consider. Sure it doesn't power the fridge, but when its 20 degrees out you can always put the perishables outside.
I tried reading the article, but the crystal ball spent half the time trying to guess what the next great thing would be (cloud computing...) and then how Microsoft would fit into it.
The article accuses Microsoft of going in too many different directions at once, but when there are so many possible outcomes, how can they not. Microsoft can't affort to miss out on the next big thing, whatever it may be, so they play in every market.
Microsoft was already late to the internet (Netscape), virtualization (VMWare), Business Apps (SAP), internet search (lots of companies), and then improved search + ads (Google), Virtual Meetings (WebEx), next gen programming (Java/Eclipse), media players (IPod), video game systems (PlayStation/Nintendo), phones (IPhone)... and they can't afford to miss the next big thing. Sure, in some of these industries they were in the market, but maybe their product was inferior and it didn't take off (Zune, early revs of Windows Mobile).
So they must maintain a market presence in business apps, touch computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, game systems, video streaming, health care... just in case that is the next big thing.
What most Microsoft bashing tends to miss is that being in the market isn't enough.
Sometimes first to market is enough (Playstation 2 vs Xbox). Othertimes it is tie-ins with 3rd parties (IPod with the ITunes library). Sometimes it is price driven (Linux) and sometimes the quality of the product matters most (IPhone). I never see anyone do a full review Microsoft except as a list of bullet points for the markets that they play in.
I have implemented something similar, but I haven't been checking the number of blocked messages. All I know is that I used to get spam, and now I haven't gotten any for years. I use this for Formus and the Contact Us page.
My rules are: 1) The text boxes for things like name and subject are actually called junk. 2) There are hidden textboxes called name and subject (1 hidden by javascript and one by CSS) that if they are populated the post is ignored. 3) A third hidden field is the result of a simple javascript math equation that is checked on the server side. If the value is wrong, the post is thrown out.
As others have said, if your site is small these types of things are good enough to prevent spam because the spammers won't bother to figure it out. These concepts would never work for any of the larger sites or 3rd party forum software.
It was only a couple weeks ago that Slashdot referenced an article about aging weather satellites.
We will soon lose coverage that will determine when we should evacuate for hurricanes.
Sometimes, NASA tasks are not glamorous. Is it worth going to Mars or the moon again instead of:
I agree that going after these scareware companies is too difficult, which is why we should go after the advertising networks that help them post their ads instead. According to the article "The defendants used an elaborate ruse that duped Internet advertising networks and popular Web sites into carrying their advertisements." Even if you are duped, once you see the scareware ad you should revoke the ad account for that company. Most sites have a way of clicking that a blog post, wiki article,... should be reviewed or removed because it is inappropriate, but you never see something like this for an ad.
I will create a web site where users can make music similar to Wii Music. Every song that is "played" is now a shared song on the internet that others can listen to (a.k.a. steal) and therefore I am entitled to $1 every time someone creates a new song. If people don't listen to other people's songs on the site, then I will automatically push the songs to their hard drive via today's latest zero-day exploit.
Slashdot Mirror
Imaging Kindle itself violated someone's patent and Amazon was sued and prevented from selling any more Kindles. The holder of that patent would also be allowed to prevent current Kindle owners from downloading any more books - effectively preventing the intended use of the product. This still prevents the use of a product that was paid for.
Kodak had a similar issue when they tried to make a Polaroid camera. After they were sued, no one could get film for the Kodak version.
What if my DirecTv DVR violates a Tivo patent and DirecTv issues a firmware update removing that functionality - which was part of the product when I paid for receiver. I don't even get a refund in this case.
There are precedents for this type of behavior.
The Pirate Bay should block visitors from the Netherlands
Are you from the Netherlands?
No.
Welcome.
Modern controllers can now have 20 or more "buttons" if you count each joystick direction as a button (think WASD). While less than 100, it is still a lot. What the controller can't duplicate for me is what I can do with a mouse in a FPS or RTS game. A joystick or WASD takes way to long to move/aim in a First-Person Shooter, and nothing can compare with the ability to select multiple units in a Real-Time Strategy by simply clicking and dragging with a mouse.Sure there are shortcuts to select all on the screen or all units of a particular type, but you can't duplicate the drag & drop of a mouse.
So a controller can't always beat a mouse & keyboard, but that doesn't mean we can't do better. A prefer a light gun (with real aiming like an arcade, not Wii style) over a mouse for shooting games. But Area 51 and modern FPS games aren't exactly the same thing. In Area 51 all you do is shoot and reload. Knifing someone in the back with a light gun isn't really realistic, and what about tools for the "Engineer" class. Custom controllers could be made (a wrench controller just for the engineer that was similar to a Wiimote) where you have to put down the gun and take the wrench out of your belt to make a repair. This is more realistic and could be better, but the cost makes this an unacceptable solution. Besides, someone third party would make a combined gun/wrench controller with lots of buttons so that you don't need to put the gun down, giving them an unfair advantage.
I think up until now, cost has been the biggest obstacle to making game customized controllers that can outperform a mouse & keyboard. Nintendo with the balance board and other gadgets has shown that maybe people would be willing to buy extra controllers. Mad Catz offered a special Street Fighter IV controller for $150 and wasn't able to keep them in stock for months. Would people pay for a custom Warcraft controller? What would it look like and how could it be better? I don't know, but that doesn't mean it couldn't be better than a mouse & keyboard.
(1) Work for the big company working all nighters to rush out the latest RPG/FPS/MMO...
(2) Work for yourself and write mini games for cell phones (money from app store), web (money from ads)...
Depending on which route you choose will determine what languages you need to learn. Hardcore game companies might shy away from someone older that they can't boss around and make work the long hours. Mini games are simple enough to allow you to keep a different job as you get into it.
Note: As a hobby, I've written a couple games for the web that make about $500/year, and that is with well over a million ad views. Making money off of games isn't as easy as the news makes it seem when the do a story on iPhone apps.
Actually, this post isn't off topic.
South Park did an episode making fun of Al Gore right after his movie came out. In this episode, he was spreading awareness of Man-Bear-Pig (half man, half bear, half pig) instead of Global Warming.
Wikipedia on ManBearPig
So if the user clicks through an affiliate to purchase an item, but that affiliate is no longer paid by Amazon, then is it taxed? Amazon is terminiating the affiliate accounts & future payments, but if an affiliate leaves the Amazon links up on their page I assume Amazon won't give them a 404 error.
Are code reviews useful?
Lets see. Right click -> View source this web page. In the first 10 lines I see a variable called maybe with no comments as to what it means.
Yes, code reviews are useful.
When you visit the site, you get a message blaming your ISP for not being able to use the site. I assume this is done so that you will call your ISP to complain.
ISPs could then block the site completely to prevent their users from seeing this message. Then no one will ask for that content. ISP doesn't have to pay, and customers aren't unhappy because they don't know what they are missing.
Yes, I understand that ISPs blocking sites is a VERY bad idea and a slippery slope, but if the site can block a user based on ISP, then why can't a ISP block a user based on site. It seems equally fair (or unfair) in this case.
First lookup the owner of that domain. Then, there are many sites out there that will tell you which domains that person owns. The way you handle this will be very different if he owns 10 vs 10 thousand domains.
Do a search with some of the "Buy this Premium Domain" sites to see if he has listed any of his sites to see how reasonable he is. Those prices are usually 1-2x's a real max bid starting point.
When you do ask for a price, ask him for the price of several of his domains at once. Act like you are not specifically interested in just of those domains and any would work for you. Maybe pretend to be another reseller interested in building your portfolio.
Some of the other advice above is also good. Don't be desparate, and the first email should be very short.
A Google search for "social security number" regex returned 11,300 results. I guess all of those people needed a regular expression to NOT validate data. .NET code. Validator is the term Microsoft uses for ASP.NET controls that validate input.
Also, the patent uses the term validator which is not a word according to most spell checkers that I use. I know this because I type this word frequently when documenting
Its one thing to patent an existing idea, but don't steal the made up words from an existing implementation and expect to get away with it.
Offering discounts and requiring a certain number of units to be sold to get that discount is legal. Limiting the number of units they buy from the competition or not allowing them to sell AMD is not legal.
To follow the OfficeMax example, the more paper I buy from OfficeMax, the better my discount. OfficeMax doesn't revoke my discount if I buy something from Staples - as long as I hit the agreed upon quota to receive the discount.
Damn you for making me reference Joel On Software
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
Go to the site's home page to see the top and bottom 10 judges: http://www.therobingroom.com/
Wasn't saying it was a good idea.
But if they were avoiding doing backups because the only thing on the drive was one big SQL DB, and they didn't have a way of backing it up without taking it offline, then swapping a drive is better than nothing.
I haven't done anything with incremental backups for a drive with a single SQL database, so I have no idea how that works.
But let's say they don't care about incremental backups or old backups. They only need to spend about $5K for a handful of matching 15K RPM SAS drives.
Every day or so, swap out one of the drives and replace it with the oldest backup drive. You then have 5-10 days of full daily backups.
Again, I'm not saying it is a good idea, but someone with zero IT knowledge could do both backup and recovery tasks with no training and no investigation.
No need to figure out how to backup a live Database without locking the whole thing up for hours, which is probably why they didn't do tape backups in the first place.
If I had mod points, I would mod this up.
No one thinks about the user's responsibility to backup their data on the web.
I assume that almost no one backs up their blog entries, but how many people would lose all of their friend's email addresses if they lost their email account. How about their family pictures hosted online.
Even if someone did have a popular blog and backed up all of their data, they have still lost any fans, links, page rank... that they had accumulated.
Maybe I could understand that there might be issues with backing up live databases, and they didn't want to deal with it. Still not an excuse.
BUT, according to the site "the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration". Only TWO drives.
All they had to do was pull one of the drives, replace it, and lock up the original off site. In a couple of hours the drives would have been mirrored again.
If your only issue is with warmth, then a fireplace may be alternative.
A wood burning unit obviously doesn't require electricity, but some gas ones can run without power as well. You just can't use the blower.
A 35,000+ BTU vent-free natural gas fireplace can be had for about $1000 + $300 installation + $200 mantle.
A vented gas fireplace will increase the cost of both the fireplace and installation.
This is just something else to consider. Sure it doesn't power the fridge, but when its 20 degrees out you can always put the perishables outside.
I tried reading the article, but the crystal ball spent half the time trying to guess what the next great thing would be (cloud computing...) and then how Microsoft would fit into it.
The article accuses Microsoft of going in too many different directions at once, but when there are so many possible outcomes, how can they not. Microsoft can't affort to miss out on the next big thing, whatever it may be, so they play in every market.
Microsoft was already late to the internet (Netscape), virtualization (VMWare), Business Apps (SAP), internet search (lots of companies), and then improved search + ads (Google), Virtual Meetings (WebEx), next gen programming (Java/Eclipse), media players (IPod), video game systems (PlayStation/Nintendo), phones (IPhone)... and they can't afford to miss the next big thing. Sure, in some of these industries they were in the market, but maybe their product was inferior and it didn't take off (Zune, early revs of Windows Mobile).
So they must maintain a market presence in business apps, touch computing, mobile computing, cloud computing, game systems, video streaming, health care... just in case that is the next big thing.
What most Microsoft bashing tends to miss is that being in the market isn't enough.
Sometimes first to market is enough (Playstation 2 vs Xbox). Othertimes it is tie-ins with 3rd parties (IPod with the ITunes library). Sometimes it is price driven (Linux) and sometimes the quality of the product matters most (IPhone). I never see anyone do a full review Microsoft except as a list of bullet points for the markets that they play in.
As a follow up to myself, I didn't come up with these ideas on my own. I read them on Slashdot a couple of years ago.
I have implemented something similar, but I haven't been checking the number of blocked messages. All I know is that I used to get spam, and now I haven't gotten any for years. I use this for Formus and the Contact Us page.
My rules are:
1) The text boxes for things like name and subject are actually called junk.
2) There are hidden textboxes called name and subject (1 hidden by javascript and one by CSS) that if they are populated the post is ignored.
3) A third hidden field is the result of a simple javascript math equation that is checked on the server side. If the value is wrong, the post is thrown out.
As others have said, if your site is small these types of things are good enough to prevent spam because the spammers won't bother to figure it out. These concepts would never work for any of the larger sites or 3rd party forum software.
You can't say cutting the budget is cutting safe water or police.
Look at the budget breakdown on the NY State web site: http://publications.budget.state.ny.us/eBudget0910/fy0910littlebook/AllFunds.html
Medicaid is 1/3 of the budget.
Law Enforcement, Courts, Jails, Utilities, Roads... all total 10%.
Funding is limited. We have to choose one or the other.
Here another article I found on the weather topic. http://www.usatoday.com/weather/hurricane/2007-06-12-quickscat-satellite_N.htm
I agree that going after these scareware companies is too difficult, which is why we should go after the advertising networks that help them post their ads instead. ... should be reviewed or removed because it is inappropriate, but you never see something like this for an ad.
According to the article "The defendants used an elaborate ruse that duped Internet advertising networks and popular Web sites into carrying their advertisements."
Even if you are duped, once you see the scareware ad you should revoke the ad account for that company.
Most sites have a way of clicking that a blog post, wiki article,
I will create a web site where users can make music similar to Wii Music. Every song that is "played" is now a shared song on the internet that others can listen to (a.k.a. steal) and therefore I am entitled to $1 every time someone creates a new song. If people don't listen to other people's songs on the site, then I will automatically push the songs to their hard drive via today's latest zero-day exploit.