Spider problems? Search engine spiders? I doubt it. I'm pretty expert in how they work as I have a long interest in indexing and searching science and I've recently done some work for a couple different SEO firms. I also happen to be pretty experienced in using word of mouth advertising which is how I can post a site with no advertising and have thousands of users a week later. I do pretty well in traffic but for the most part I like to provide solid information and services instead of just trying to suck in traffic. Even my personal hobby site gets hundreds (spiking in the thousands) of visitors a day which slightly amuses me.
Exactly the problem I meant. It'd seem that some more elegant solution should exist in such high dollar software than just assuming a white background. Of course not using gifs is a better idea but that is a whole different discussion.;)
I guess my point was not only that I know the solution while they didn't as much as that just because they are graphic designers doesn't mean they are experts in how graphic design software should be made. Even experienced graphic designers don't know all the tricks of the tools they use let alone in other tools. Like most users they tend to feel that what they learned first is the best tool for the job. I actually learned Photoshop first but I find GIMP easier to use most of the time.
If there were a drawing program I'd like to see ported to Linux it's Paint Shop Pro. It's not really a photo manipulation program but it's great for drawing. It's a shame that GIMP doesn't make more effort towards supporting basic drawing usage. All it'd need is a couple of new tools. I hear that the next major version will better support drawing tablets so maybe they are working on such needs. Software like Gnome Paint are fine but they are more of a beginners level of program.
On the other hand the majority of designers I know are simple minded idiots that can barely use Photoshop and Illustrator let alone anything else and all their designs look amazingly alike as they have no ability to think outside their own little box. Most designers come from a graphic arts background and have no experience in designing good interfaces or problem solving. If something wasn't taught to them in class they just can't handle it.
I know a couple GOOD designers and they are intelligent enough to see that different tools are better for different things you want to do. Personally I can't stand the interfaces of Photoshop and Illustrator but will sometimes use them when I need to do something GIMP or Inkscape can't yet do. On the other hand there are things that are hard to do in Photoshop and Illustrator that are easier in GIMP and Inkscape. It comes mostly from which tools you know best and a bit from the way the tools were designed. Being able to use all the tools you have available lets you do awesome work.
Even good designers sometimes have blindspots that are amusing. One of the best I know I heard the other day complaining to another designer that animated gifs always have white borders around the image. Duh. Years in school and work experience and neither knew how to get rid of the borders left over from converting an image to a gif? Of course you'd think Photoshop and Illustrator would take care of that issue automatically anyway since it's a fairly common problem. Anyway the point being that designers look at interfaces more from a stylistic point and they may miss the benefits of usability.
You've obviously never ran a site that moves hundreds of gigs a traffic a day. It's not cheap. The people who choose to pay keep the service alive for those that are to cheap or are just casual users that don't use the sites enough. I'm also experimenting with iTunes-like $.99 payments for downloading big files (like iso images and porn vids).
My server has incredibly fast pipes such that I've yet to see a user that couldn't download a file as fast as their connection could go even with my server under heavy load. For something like a Linux ISO that typically can be painful to download on it's release would $.99 be to much to ask to have this made fast and easy?
One of my site's hashes both the username and password so that except when a user logs in there is no easy way to even find out their username. It's sort of a Flickr type site that allows video as well as images and people took to using it to post amatuer porn of themselves and many were concerned about possible legal problems so I made an effort to purge all information that could trace back to who the users are from the db and logs.
I think that is about as anonymous as you can get. I've never heard of any other site that makes an effort to hide both the username and password from even the site admins. Once the user disconnects there is little record of them left.
It's easy enough to make it damn near impossible to block ads with tools like Adblock just by making the naming scheme hard to filter out or even by using some Javascript checks to block the page content from loading if ad images don't load. I go the other direction and purposely try to make my ads easy to filter by putting them in the/ads/ directory but doing that is a kindness to my advanced users.
If you don't pay to do things just because you can choose to do them for free then it's your fault if the things you like to do lock themselves down so nobody can use them for free. Just because a man hands you a dollar when you ask doesn't mean you should try to make a living by asking for change on street corners. Eventually when enough people do it they ruin the system for everyone. People stop giving for free and those who really need the help can no longer get it and neither can the leeches. Gift economies can only handle so many leeches before they collapse. It's only a free lunch so long as more people are giving out lunches than those that are taking them.
Try paying for some of that free stuff and things you like will get even better. You may not be denied current functionality by leeching but you are denying yourself possible functionality by leeching. If I could spend all day making cool software and giving it away I would which would benefit you and many others but I can't because I have to work for a living creating software that people will try to sell to you with a fraction of the functionality my free version would have offered. You could donate a fraction of what they'd charge to me and, if others did the same, I'd produce something even better than what they'd have sold you and give it away. Surely you can see the logic in that unless you're really totally happy with the way things are. Is there nothing you want but can't afford or just can't buy at any price?
My original goal in charging was to pay my server costs. As users have asked me to extend functionality and provide more services I decided it was reasonable to charge for those extended features. It's reasonable to be compensated for your work. I perfer donations over charges but the fact is that most users are leeches that don't contribute back anything but none the less demand more from you. Even users that contribute content are leeching bandwidth. For a site like Slashdot that doesn't amount to a lot per individual but for sites that deal in multimedia content it adds up quickly. If you have 1000 users per day downloading 500MB each of content that adds up. One of my sites was using 150+GB a day before I decided I had to start charging in some way.
Part of the problem is the way the system is designed. Users are contributing content but for the most part they aren't yet contributing server space and bandwidth. As protocols like bit torrent improve and get merged into web browsers a lot of this problem will go away. The two major hold-ups right now are the speed limitations of most users' connections and that most users are stuck using IE which doesn't adapt rapidly to the features demanded of modern websites (like native BT support).
As both a developer that uses ads on many of his websites and a user that blocks ads I guess I feel both sides of the issue.
I didn't use ads for years because I felt they were to intrusive. Why did I decide to start using them? Mainly because ad blocking software was finally easily enough available and easy enough to use that I felt that being intrusive and adding download time didn't matter as much because users have the power to turn the ads off. Sometimes I even offer a button on my sites that will disbale ads for the user. The secondary reason is because users have told me time and again that they'd rather see ads than be charged a fee (even less than a dollar). Often I offer both as options. Paying members don't see ads and get more features but the basics are paid for by ads. For a long time I ran my websites completely from donations but in recent years (since about the time of the 911 attack) users have stopped donating. I've not been able to pinpoint the why but it seemed a very strong trend despite my sites continuing to grow. Loss of donations has forced me to use ads and charge for membership as loath as I am to use those methods. Oddly enough I've also noticed the more useful a website the less the ads get clicked. This seems a bad trend to me as it encourages websites of crap instead of making good information easily available. Two of my websites.. one gets about 500 unique visitors a day and contains solid Linux information.. the other gets about 100 visitors a day and is down right now and contains nothing but a notice that it'll be back up after I finish recoding it. The first site usually gets no clicks while the later gets about five per day. The same trend seems to hold among my other sites. Sort of encourages the building of dead-end or confussing websites.
I've tried a couple different ad programs. So far I like Yahoo's better than Google's because it doesn't load quite as slow and the ads pay better per click. On the other hand Yahoo does a poor job of rotating ads but I suspect this is due to their beta status.
Given that I make a living from ads why do I block them? Because they are freaking annoying. I don't read junk mail, spam email, watch tv, or read magazines that insert ads throughout the content. For myself I'd rather make donations to websites I like than pay for memberships or see ads. I'd be more willing to do memberships if they didn't overprice them. Usually I charge about $5/mo for my sites which is pretty reasonable. A site that charges more than that or that makes signing up painful I just won't use. Ads I'd use more if they weren't so often annoying to look at and inserted in inappropiate spots in the content. My perfered type of ad to see is a small paid sponsorship (~80x30 pixels) at the bottom of the menu or page. If I see such an ad I'll more often click on it especially if it looks well made (flashy but tasteful) and related to the site content.
The only problem with that is if companies are allowed to hold monopolies or near monopolies on the market where competition is kept out by controlling file specs, software patents, etc. If no better competition is given a chance to take life then there are no other options for consumers.
If you try software and find it buggy or insecure you should be able to return it within a reasonable period (30 days?). One reason I stopped using commercial software was because I got tired of paying for something only to find it unusable and impossible to return. The law should uphold the consumers right to get the product that was promised on the packaging.
I'd say that the market should decide most of these issues but that there should be some liability for commercial software vendors (of either open or closed source software) as to security issues (security patches should be free, quick, and easy to use and software should be sold with recent software patches included) and life critical systems (if you sell software for heart monitors then it shouldn't crash).
I've seen to many users open a new system, plug it into the network, and find it infected before the new patches can download. IMO that is just a horrible design and distribution flaw. Such systems effect all of us online and companies should be responsible for distributing this crap. Release dates should be clearly printed on the box and the software should have all the security patches up through that date included. Customers and dealers should be able to request a free update disc for no more than cost.
If they were that bright they'd see the market for DRM-free region-free DVD's and produce a better HD DVD standard that also avoids these 'features'. If played right they could produce these machines that are more consumer friendly and sell their own movies though it. They have a lot of resources. They could attack Hollywood straight on by making their own movies and television and releasing them on their own format of discs as well as over the Internet. Even if all they got out of the effort was better licensing terms from electronics companies and Hollywood they'd still be able to make billions from it. They've got nothing to lose for shaking the tree a lil bit.
If there was a technical fix I might agree but phishing is the age old problem that most people are morons. There is no solution except user education. Putting the blame on banks will just make them stop offering services that make our lifes easier.
Real security problems I think should hold corporations accountable but phishing is not a real security problem. If you're stupid enough to give someone you're security information then it's your fault if they take advantage of that information.
Every time we think we've made stuff that even an idiot can use they invent a better idiot.
What difference does it make? If they have software on your system they could, if they wanted, just take that information from you without you even knowing it. You trust them enough to run their software but not enough to submit a bug report?
Probably pretty close to what I use. I break messages down so attachments only get stored once for all users that have that attachment and the same for message bodies. The only data that is really replicated every time is the message headers. I also compress all plain-text message segments to save additional space.
A lot of the data can be compressed that way and it's especially good for popular forwards and viral attachments (where you get 400 copies of the same virus in your inbox in an hour). It's to bad Thunderbird doesn't have such storage as an option.
There are dozens of web-based services for sharing large files. The biggest problem with such services is that http uploads and downloads are pretty suck ass for files of any size. Not as bad as smtp but still pretty bad. Browsers really don't do a very good job at making sure that entire files get transfered with a minimal of fuss for the user.
If you don't send crash reports then don't bitch that your software crashes. Companies and opensource projects use this information to track severity of bugs and figure out how to fix these bugs.
I use everything. Which is why I think I'm qualified to abuse the shortcomings in all of them. In general I think software sucks. To be fair I tear my own works apart the most. I hate ugly, buggy, inflexible, hard to use software.
I've been playing with a desktop enviroment of my own creation that is developed in Gecko and offers task-based management of programs and documents. Even that I'm constantly picking at but so far it seems better than Windows, Gnome, KDE, OS X, or any other desktop I've tried over the years. I'm trying to find time to convert it to use Gnome instead of Gecko just so it'll work with non-web-based apps better. We shall see. To bad I can't afford to hire help and then throw it out as a product for everyone to abuse and curse at.. work out those flaws.
Firefox has a BT extension as well that may be included in future versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. I agree that such use could be interesting although I still think BT is flawed as distribution tool for heavy automated use at this time. As you say speed and reliability is also a problem with BT for small distributions. RSS/BT could do a lot to replace mass transmission of binaries from services such as Yahoo and Google Groups.
I've cheated and developed my own method that is similar to BT, doesn't require any browser add-ons or extra software installed, and fixes the speed and reliability problems as well as making it easier to use in situations where you need to expose many files from an automated system. It also makes uploading files extremely easy. Once I reopen my website with this new feature I am thinking of opensourcing the server and client code for it and licensing it off for those who don't want to agree to the GPL's restrictions.
My site offers file sharing and discussion so I guess it might seem to attract some of that crowd you mention although I'm more interested in artists and other content creators looking for a new means of sharing their work. So far mostly it's been used by people trading amatuer porn. Not exactly what I was aiming for but porn is often at the bleeding (or just dripping with some bodily fluid?) edge of technology.
That's fine by me. Tens of thousands of other users are more than willing to do so. Expecting a developer to promise something that isn't legally smart or technically possible is unreasonable.
If you write something down you have to expect that somebody somewhere could accidently see it. Do you really think that when your PC sends a crash report to Microsoft, Apple, or whomever that there is no chance of some of your files being sent with it? A) That data could be causing the crash and therefore could be sent. B) That data could possibly be infered by data that was sent. C) If something is broken then all promises as to safeguards become moot.
Now a promise not to disclose or use, other than for technical reasons, any of your data they happen to see might be possible. I'd have to think about it and probably consult a lawyer to see.
Is nntp any better? Like smtp it was designed for a much gentler Internet where security wasn't much of an issue and people didn't try to send 8GB files to 100's of their closest friends. Most of these protocols don't even handle character sets in a reasonable manner.
It may not be but that is how millions of people and companies including Yahoo and Google use it. SMTP is a crappy protocol in general and should be abandoned.
Actually I've got extensive programs I've written for managing huge volumes of mail and other data I collect. Labeling, sort, browsing, and searching data are things that interest me and which I've spent a lot of years working out good solutions for. I keep trying to refactor my programs into something that retains it's power but is easy enough for normal people. If only I had the time and money to work on such things I'm sure I could get some software out that probably rivals the best data mining tools out there.
As it is I'm currently building a web-based tool (aka a website) for managing information and files that I hope will be pretty helpful. To start with I'm limiting it to media files (video, audio, and images), URLs, and discussion forums but I'd like to expand it to cover other areas such as email and documents eventually if I get the funding I'm looking for. The goal is to hit a niche market that does a lot of the same things as Flickr, Delicious, Google Images, Yahoo/Google Groups, Slashdot, and RapidShare. We shall see if it works out. Managing terabytes of data on a limited budget is always tricky.
Being copied doesn't mean something is good. It just means the copier has no better ideas of their own or have the mistaken believe that it's more important to copy a bad design to ease user's switching than it is to create a design that is actually good.
OpenOffice's UI is almost as horrible as Office itself. Thunderbird is clunky for managing large numbers of emails but is nowhere near the mess that Outlook is (and really doesn't look much like it.. if you're actually familiar with both).
Although you didn't mention it I'll take this time to say I hate how KDE and Gnome both copy way to much from Windows and OS X. They'll never get a good user-interface that way. Windows is just a mess that seems to have been made by a drunker marketing department. OS X is made to impress with eye candy and to be easy for newbies. Neither is designed to make experienced users more productive. Because of copying KDE and Gnome are really no more easy to use or productive than Windows and OS X.:(
Email is really a horrible bunch of protocols not at all designed for real world use today. It seems crazy to me that we shunt around binaries encoded as text and that we have to pass duplicates along the same path rather than sending a single copy. Not to even get into the mess Email is in other ways. It'd be nice if major email providers at least could arrange a more effecient means of trading mail. I hope Yahoo, Google, etc don't store every single copy of duplicate messages and attachments. That'd just be stupid.
As a web developer I can say that I would never promise not to read any data stored on my machines. It just isn't possible to say that. There is always the chance it could come up in some sort of log or be required for some sort of technical or legal reason. It'd be unwise to make such a promise knowing that you probably can't live up to it.
So email me, if your project is interesting to me I'll give you free web space on my super high-speed connected server.;)
I'm working to make a free website interface but I want it to be worlds better than Geocities and similar sites so it'll be a while before it's ready. In the meantime I have space available for the asking.
Why? Isn't it easier to just use a normal website that lets users post files and share links to them?
I've got such a site being redesigned from the ground up because unfortunately the bandwidth usage is huge. We're talking 150GB+ (after 3 weeks uptime.. never advertising) a day and growing quickly. I've got that problem solved but it's a serious expense if you haven't got a clever solution. I get 1500GB/mo of bandwidth with my server and I was still running out part way through the month before I found this fix.
Bit Torrent would be good but browsers don't have it built-in yet and users don't like using sites that require them to add other software to their computers. It's still a little flakey too IMO. Not really designed for a single server to offer millions of files to tens of thousands of users.
Slashdot Mirror
Spider problems? Search engine spiders? I doubt it. I'm pretty expert in how they work as I have a long interest in indexing and searching science and I've recently done some work for a couple different SEO firms. I also happen to be pretty experienced in using word of mouth advertising which is how I can post a site with no advertising and have thousands of users a week later. I do pretty well in traffic but for the most part I like to provide solid information and services instead of just trying to suck in traffic. Even my personal hobby site gets hundreds (spiking in the thousands) of visitors a day which slightly amuses me.
Exactly the problem I meant. It'd seem that some more elegant solution should exist in such high dollar software than just assuming a white background. Of course not using gifs is a better idea but that is a whole different discussion. ;)
I guess my point was not only that I know the solution while they didn't as much as that just because they are graphic designers doesn't mean they are experts in how graphic design software should be made. Even experienced graphic designers don't know all the tricks of the tools they use let alone in other tools. Like most users they tend to feel that what they learned first is the best tool for the job. I actually learned Photoshop first but I find GIMP easier to use most of the time.
If there were a drawing program I'd like to see ported to Linux it's Paint Shop Pro. It's not really a photo manipulation program but it's great for drawing. It's a shame that GIMP doesn't make more effort towards supporting basic drawing usage. All it'd need is a couple of new tools. I hear that the next major version will better support drawing tablets so maybe they are working on such needs. Software like Gnome Paint are fine but they are more of a beginners level of program.
On the other hand the majority of designers I know are simple minded idiots that can barely use Photoshop and Illustrator let alone anything else and all their designs look amazingly alike as they have no ability to think outside their own little box. Most designers come from a graphic arts background and have no experience in designing good interfaces or problem solving. If something wasn't taught to them in class they just can't handle it.
I know a couple GOOD designers and they are intelligent enough to see that different tools are better for different things you want to do. Personally I can't stand the interfaces of Photoshop and Illustrator but will sometimes use them when I need to do something GIMP or Inkscape can't yet do. On the other hand there are things that are hard to do in Photoshop and Illustrator that are easier in GIMP and Inkscape. It comes mostly from which tools you know best and a bit from the way the tools were designed. Being able to use all the tools you have available lets you do awesome work.
Even good designers sometimes have blindspots that are amusing. One of the best I know I heard the other day complaining to another designer that animated gifs always have white borders around the image. Duh. Years in school and work experience and neither knew how to get rid of the borders left over from converting an image to a gif? Of course you'd think Photoshop and Illustrator would take care of that issue automatically anyway since it's a fairly common problem. Anyway the point being that designers look at interfaces more from a stylistic point and they may miss the benefits of usability.
You've obviously never ran a site that moves hundreds of gigs a traffic a day. It's not cheap. The people who choose to pay keep the service alive for those that are to cheap or are just casual users that don't use the sites enough. I'm also experimenting with iTunes-like $.99 payments for downloading big files (like iso images and porn vids).
My server has incredibly fast pipes such that I've yet to see a user that couldn't download a file as fast as their connection could go even with my server under heavy load. For something like a Linux ISO that typically can be painful to download on it's release would $.99 be to much to ask to have this made fast and easy?
One of my site's hashes both the username and password so that except when a user logs in there is no easy way to even find out their username. It's sort of a Flickr type site that allows video as well as images and people took to using it to post amatuer porn of themselves and many were concerned about possible legal problems so I made an effort to purge all information that could trace back to who the users are from the db and logs.
I think that is about as anonymous as you can get. I've never heard of any other site that makes an effort to hide both the username and password from even the site admins. Once the user disconnects there is little record of them left.
It's easy enough to make it damn near impossible to block ads with tools like Adblock just by making the naming scheme hard to filter out or even by using some Javascript checks to block the page content from loading if ad images don't load. I go the other direction and purposely try to make my ads easy to filter by putting them in the /ads/ directory but doing that is a kindness to my advanced users.
If you don't pay to do things just because you can choose to do them for free then it's your fault if the things you like to do lock themselves down so nobody can use them for free. Just because a man hands you a dollar when you ask doesn't mean you should try to make a living by asking for change on street corners. Eventually when enough people do it they ruin the system for everyone. People stop giving for free and those who really need the help can no longer get it and neither can the leeches. Gift economies can only handle so many leeches before they collapse. It's only a free lunch so long as more people are giving out lunches than those that are taking them.
Try paying for some of that free stuff and things you like will get even better. You may not be denied current functionality by leeching but you are denying yourself possible functionality by leeching. If I could spend all day making cool software and giving it away I would which would benefit you and many others but I can't because I have to work for a living creating software that people will try to sell to you with a fraction of the functionality my free version would have offered. You could donate a fraction of what they'd charge to me and, if others did the same, I'd produce something even better than what they'd have sold you and give it away. Surely you can see the logic in that unless you're really totally happy with the way things are. Is there nothing you want but can't afford or just can't buy at any price?
My original goal in charging was to pay my server costs. As users have asked me to extend functionality and provide more services I decided it was reasonable to charge for those extended features. It's reasonable to be compensated for your work. I perfer donations over charges but the fact is that most users are leeches that don't contribute back anything but none the less demand more from you. Even users that contribute content are leeching bandwidth. For a site like Slashdot that doesn't amount to a lot per individual but for sites that deal in multimedia content it adds up quickly. If you have 1000 users per day downloading 500MB each of content that adds up. One of my sites was using 150+GB a day before I decided I had to start charging in some way.
Part of the problem is the way the system is designed. Users are contributing content but for the most part they aren't yet contributing server space and bandwidth. As protocols like bit torrent improve and get merged into web browsers a lot of this problem will go away. The two major hold-ups right now are the speed limitations of most users' connections and that most users are stuck using IE which doesn't adapt rapidly to the features demanded of modern websites (like native BT support).
As both a developer that uses ads on many of his websites and a user that blocks ads I guess I feel both sides of the issue.
I didn't use ads for years because I felt they were to intrusive. Why did I decide to start using them? Mainly because ad blocking software was finally easily enough available and easy enough to use that I felt that being intrusive and adding download time didn't matter as much because users have the power to turn the ads off. Sometimes I even offer a button on my sites that will disbale ads for the user. The secondary reason is because users have told me time and again that they'd rather see ads than be charged a fee (even less than a dollar). Often I offer both as options. Paying members don't see ads and get more features but the basics are paid for by ads. For a long time I ran my websites completely from donations but in recent years (since about the time of the 911 attack) users have stopped donating. I've not been able to pinpoint the why but it seemed a very strong trend despite my sites continuing to grow. Loss of donations has forced me to use ads and charge for membership as loath as I am to use those methods. Oddly enough I've also noticed the more useful a website the less the ads get clicked. This seems a bad trend to me as it encourages websites of crap instead of making good information easily available. Two of my websites.. one gets about 500 unique visitors a day and contains solid Linux information.. the other gets about 100 visitors a day and is down right now and contains nothing but a notice that it'll be back up after I finish recoding it. The first site usually gets no clicks while the later gets about five per day. The same trend seems to hold among my other sites. Sort of encourages the building of dead-end or confussing websites.
I've tried a couple different ad programs. So far I like Yahoo's better than Google's because it doesn't load quite as slow and the ads pay better per click. On the other hand Yahoo does a poor job of rotating ads but I suspect this is due to their beta status.
Given that I make a living from ads why do I block them? Because they are freaking annoying. I don't read junk mail, spam email, watch tv, or read magazines that insert ads throughout the content. For myself I'd rather make donations to websites I like than pay for memberships or see ads. I'd be more willing to do memberships if they didn't overprice them. Usually I charge about $5/mo for my sites which is pretty reasonable. A site that charges more than that or that makes signing up painful I just won't use. Ads I'd use more if they weren't so often annoying to look at and inserted in inappropiate spots in the content. My perfered type of ad to see is a small paid sponsorship (~80x30 pixels) at the bottom of the menu or page. If I see such an ad I'll more often click on it especially if it looks well made (flashy but tasteful) and related to the site content.
The only problem with that is if companies are allowed to hold monopolies or near monopolies on the market where competition is kept out by controlling file specs, software patents, etc. If no better competition is given a chance to take life then there are no other options for consumers.
If you try software and find it buggy or insecure you should be able to return it within a reasonable period (30 days?). One reason I stopped using commercial software was because I got tired of paying for something only to find it unusable and impossible to return. The law should uphold the consumers right to get the product that was promised on the packaging.
I'd say that the market should decide most of these issues but that there should be some liability for commercial software vendors (of either open or closed source software) as to security issues (security patches should be free, quick, and easy to use and software should be sold with recent software patches included) and life critical systems (if you sell software for heart monitors then it shouldn't crash).
I've seen to many users open a new system, plug it into the network, and find it infected before the new patches can download. IMO that is just a horrible design and distribution flaw. Such systems effect all of us online and companies should be responsible for distributing this crap. Release dates should be clearly printed on the box and the software should have all the security patches up through that date included. Customers and dealers should be able to request a free update disc for no more than cost.
If they were that bright they'd see the market for DRM-free region-free DVD's and produce a better HD DVD standard that also avoids these 'features'. If played right they could produce these machines that are more consumer friendly and sell their own movies though it. They have a lot of resources. They could attack Hollywood straight on by making their own movies and television and releasing them on their own format of discs as well as over the Internet. Even if all they got out of the effort was better licensing terms from electronics companies and Hollywood they'd still be able to make billions from it. They've got nothing to lose for shaking the tree a lil bit.
If there was a technical fix I might agree but phishing is the age old problem that most people are morons. There is no solution except user education. Putting the blame on banks will just make them stop offering services that make our lifes easier.
Real security problems I think should hold corporations accountable but phishing is not a real security problem. If you're stupid enough to give someone you're security information then it's your fault if they take advantage of that information.
Every time we think we've made stuff that even an idiot can use they invent a better idiot.
What difference does it make? If they have software on your system they could, if they wanted, just take that information from you without you even knowing it. You trust them enough to run their software but not enough to submit a bug report?
Probably pretty close to what I use. I break messages down so attachments only get stored once for all users that have that attachment and the same for message bodies. The only data that is really replicated every time is the message headers. I also compress all plain-text message segments to save additional space.
A lot of the data can be compressed that way and it's especially good for popular forwards and viral attachments (where you get 400 copies of the same virus in your inbox in an hour). It's to bad Thunderbird doesn't have such storage as an option.
There are dozens of web-based services for sharing large files. The biggest problem with such services is that http uploads and downloads are pretty suck ass for files of any size. Not as bad as smtp but still pretty bad. Browsers really don't do a very good job at making sure that entire files get transfered with a minimal of fuss for the user.
If you don't send crash reports then don't bitch that your software crashes. Companies and opensource projects use this information to track severity of bugs and figure out how to fix these bugs.
I use everything. Which is why I think I'm qualified to abuse the shortcomings in all of them. In general I think software sucks. To be fair I tear my own works apart the most. I hate ugly, buggy, inflexible, hard to use software.
I've been playing with a desktop enviroment of my own creation that is developed in Gecko and offers task-based management of programs and documents. Even that I'm constantly picking at but so far it seems better than Windows, Gnome, KDE, OS X, or any other desktop I've tried over the years. I'm trying to find time to convert it to use Gnome instead of Gecko just so it'll work with non-web-based apps better. We shall see. To bad I can't afford to hire help and then throw it out as a product for everyone to abuse and curse at.. work out those flaws.
Firefox has a BT extension as well that may be included in future versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. I agree that such use could be interesting although I still think BT is flawed as distribution tool for heavy automated use at this time. As you say speed and reliability is also a problem with BT for small distributions. RSS/BT could do a lot to replace mass transmission of binaries from services such as Yahoo and Google Groups.
I've cheated and developed my own method that is similar to BT, doesn't require any browser add-ons or extra software installed, and fixes the speed and reliability problems as well as making it easier to use in situations where you need to expose many files from an automated system. It also makes uploading files extremely easy. Once I reopen my website with this new feature I am thinking of opensourcing the server and client code for it and licensing it off for those who don't want to agree to the GPL's restrictions.
My site offers file sharing and discussion so I guess it might seem to attract some of that crowd you mention although I'm more interested in artists and other content creators looking for a new means of sharing their work. So far mostly it's been used by people trading amatuer porn. Not exactly what I was aiming for but porn is often at the bleeding (or just dripping with some bodily fluid?) edge of technology.
That's fine by me. Tens of thousands of other users are more than willing to do so. Expecting a developer to promise something that isn't legally smart or technically possible is unreasonable.
If you write something down you have to expect that somebody somewhere could accidently see it. Do you really think that when your PC sends a crash report to Microsoft, Apple, or whomever that there is no chance of some of your files being sent with it? A) That data could be causing the crash and therefore could be sent. B) That data could possibly be infered by data that was sent. C) If something is broken then all promises as to safeguards become moot.
Now a promise not to disclose or use, other than for technical reasons, any of your data they happen to see might be possible. I'd have to think about it and probably consult a lawyer to see.
Is nntp any better? Like smtp it was designed for a much gentler Internet where security wasn't much of an issue and people didn't try to send 8GB files to 100's of their closest friends. Most of these protocols don't even handle character sets in a reasonable manner.
It may not be but that is how millions of people and companies including Yahoo and Google use it. SMTP is a crappy protocol in general and should be abandoned.
Actually I've got extensive programs I've written for managing huge volumes of mail and other data I collect. Labeling, sort, browsing, and searching data are things that interest me and which I've spent a lot of years working out good solutions for. I keep trying to refactor my programs into something that retains it's power but is easy enough for normal people. If only I had the time and money to work on such things I'm sure I could get some software out that probably rivals the best data mining tools out there.
As it is I'm currently building a web-based tool (aka a website) for managing information and files that I hope will be pretty helpful. To start with I'm limiting it to media files (video, audio, and images), URLs, and discussion forums but I'd like to expand it to cover other areas such as email and documents eventually if I get the funding I'm looking for. The goal is to hit a niche market that does a lot of the same things as Flickr, Delicious, Google Images, Yahoo/Google Groups, Slashdot, and RapidShare. We shall see if it works out. Managing terabytes of data on a limited budget is always tricky.
Being copied doesn't mean something is good. It just means the copier has no better ideas of their own or have the mistaken believe that it's more important to copy a bad design to ease user's switching than it is to create a design that is actually good.
:(
OpenOffice's UI is almost as horrible as Office itself. Thunderbird is clunky for managing large numbers of emails but is nowhere near the mess that Outlook is (and really doesn't look much like it.. if you're actually familiar with both).
Although you didn't mention it I'll take this time to say I hate how KDE and Gnome both copy way to much from Windows and OS X. They'll never get a good user-interface that way. Windows is just a mess that seems to have been made by a drunker marketing department. OS X is made to impress with eye candy and to be easy for newbies. Neither is designed to make experienced users more productive. Because of copying KDE and Gnome are really no more easy to use or productive than Windows and OS X.
Email is really a horrible bunch of protocols not at all designed for real world use today. It seems crazy to me that we shunt around binaries encoded as text and that we have to pass duplicates along the same path rather than sending a single copy. Not to even get into the mess Email is in other ways. It'd be nice if major email providers at least could arrange a more effecient means of trading mail. I hope Yahoo, Google, etc don't store every single copy of duplicate messages and attachments. That'd just be stupid.
As a web developer I can say that I would never promise not to read any data stored on my machines. It just isn't possible to say that. There is always the chance it could come up in some sort of log or be required for some sort of technical or legal reason. It'd be unwise to make such a promise knowing that you probably can't live up to it.
So email me, if your project is interesting to me I'll give you free web space on my super high-speed connected server. ;)
I'm working to make a free website interface but I want it to be worlds better than Geocities and similar sites so it'll be a while before it's ready. In the meantime I have space available for the asking.
gmail.com!mogmios
Why? Isn't it easier to just use a normal website that lets users post files and share links to them?
I've got such a site being redesigned from the ground up because unfortunately the bandwidth usage is huge. We're talking 150GB+ (after 3 weeks uptime.. never advertising) a day and growing quickly. I've got that problem solved but it's a serious expense if you haven't got a clever solution. I get 1500GB/mo of bandwidth with my server and I was still running out part way through the month before I found this fix.
Bit Torrent would be good but browsers don't have it built-in yet and users don't like using sites that require them to add other software to their computers. It's still a little flakey too IMO. Not really designed for a single server to offer millions of files to tens of thousands of users.