It is, if you enter the rejections on your recommendations page. Amazon has no possible (or reasonable) way of knowing which of the millions of items they offer you don't want. You have to tell them.
And here's an example of the FLAW in the logic.
Go to amazon.com and start a new account.
Add a CD to your wishlist. Something from an artist with LOTS of material out there.
Now, go to recommendations.
There will be a lot of them. Everything else by that artist PLUS other stuff.
Start clicking the "Not interested" box.
Yes, it will remove that SINGLE ITEM but it will NOT affect the REST of the "recommendations".
Because Amazon does NOT utilize that information in their "recommendations".
Amazon has no possible (or reasonable) way of knowing which of the millions of items they offer you don't want.
Why do I have to specifically decline each of those "millions of items"?
Go ahead, try it. I just verified that that is how it works.
ONE item on your wishlist is enough to get HUNDRED items "recommended".
But TWENTY "Not interested"'s is not sufficient to get anything other than those 20 items off their "recommended" list.
Epic failure. I've given them 21 pieces of information and they are no closer to finding something I want than they were with the just the 1st piece of information.
#1. Items have lots of characteristics. (I think this sucks)
#2. Items have no characteristics. The sort process is based upon the idealized person who would purchase the item (based off of past purchases).
Again with the Buffy example... Someone who had purchased the season 1 boxed set WOULD POSSIBLY be interested in purchasing the entire series boxed set IF IT WAS RELEASED AFTER THEIR PREVIOUS PURCHASE.
The group that would purchase the series boxed set... time passes... and then purchase the first season's boxed set would be rather small.
Now, SOME people might purchase a paperback edition and, finding that they really like it, would then purchase the hardback edition. And that activity would further identify them with a specific group.
The key is to identify the purchasing patterns of the GROUPS and then see which GROUP an individual best fits.
But part of it does depend upon the chronology of the purchases to associate the person with the group.
Using the above example of Buffy... what set of selections would I have to make that did NOT include anything that could be key-word linked to Buffy would I have to make before it would recommend any of the Buffy DVD's?
No "vampire" selections. No "Sarah Michelle Geller" selections. No "Joss Whedon" selections. No "tv series" selections. etc.
No, I'm not being flippant or sarcastic. THAT would be the real test of their system.
#1. Find the grouping of people that liked Buffy. #2. Find the other items that they liked. #3. Remove any item that could be key-word linked to Buffy.
Which should leave you with a set of items which would indicate that you would like Buffy when you had not expressed any interest in anything directly related to it.
But in order for that to work, you'd also have to factor in their rejections. Not just the items they gave low scores to. I'm talking about the items that they rejected by NOT selecting to rent them.
You have recently purchased a just released DVD. Here are other just released DVD's that you might be interested in. Based only upon the facts that they are: #1. DVD's #2. New releases
Or, you have recently purchased two items by Terry Pratchett. Here are other items you might be interested in based upon the facts: #1. They are items #2. The word "Pratchett" appears somewhere in the description.
You would THINK that they'd be "intelligent" enough to factor in your REJECTIONS as well as your purchases (and what you've identified as items you already own).
Figure it out! I do NOT buy derivative works. No books about writers who wrote biographies about Pratchett.
Closed-source companies are less likely to take the controversial route.
It would depend upon how large the closed-source company was.
If it was one guy selling the software he wrote, you'd probably see the same implementations of his political views (provided that there was a way to do so).
With Open Source, the one guy can write his political opinions into his code... which get grabbed and used in a different project... which ends up in a third project... etc.
And unless you have a similar political bent, you'd never notice it. At least until someone who did have such a bent brought it to your attention.
CBCNews.ca: Has the internet always been managed, because this idea of network management almost seems recent?
Caputo: I had dinner with Vint Cerf [a U.S.-based computer scientist often called the father of the Internet] probably a year back and I think he'll be the first to admit that he's surprised and shocked at what his authoring of TCP/IP has meant. If you look at that underlying transmission protocol, when you send a flow of packets -- if they're getting through -- they get bigger until you get congestion, then the packets get smaller. The idea of flow control in the internet has been a tenet of it since day one.
It really depends on where you draw the line on what management is. The service provider has to figure out the business model of how much service they're going to give a subscriber and how much bandwidth they're going to provide to the internet. That oversubscription ratio is their business model.
For every five megabits they sell you for $40, they buy a quarter of a megabit because they're planning on you not using your computer 24/7. They count on you being away at work or being asleep. They simply cannot provision that five megabits because that costs way more than what they're selling it to you for. They need people not using the internet for it to work at $40 a month. Now CBC may buy its one-megabit connection for $800 a month because it's a dedicated one-megabit connection.
...and...
CBCNews.ca: So theoretically an internet service provider could sell customers a dedicated peer-to-peer router?
Caputo: Conceivably. The beauty is to let the market figure it out, and it will.
So he wants to sell technology that allows the ISP's to OVERSELL their bandwidth while LYING to their customers and he refers to that as "the market".
How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?
For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.
The viruses that attack windows won't work on Mac...you have experiment and find different avenues of attack...identify the security hole to exploit.
The avenues of attack are the same. Those are CLASSES of attacks.
A zombie can scan IPs for known security holes, but the programmer still has to design a virus, worm, etc. specifically for the Mac that will exploit that hole.
And with about 5 million Macs out there, why wouldn't said programmer do so?
All I'm saying is that Mac's current security is due to market share, not intrinsic to design.
And I'm saying that an environment of 5 million machines WOULD be exploited if it COULD be exploited.
And it still seems like you're implying that the people at Apple have somehow come up with a brilliant way of stopping all attacks by worms, email attachements and browser exploits.
Look up the word "security".
There is nothing "brilliant" about following basic security practices in the design of the system.
That's all there is. Nothing magical. And it won't change if Macs suddenly become the dominant platform.
All Apple does is follow basic security practices.
But what's made, and perpetuated, the notion that Macs are immune to viruses and other attacks is that there just aren't very many of them out there.
No. With the Internet, attacks can be automated.
Put an unpatched WinXP on the Internet and watch how quickly it is cracked by an automated process randomly scanning IP blocks.
Even with Mac's quickly growing market share, it's still far more lucrative to target mass market windows machines.
So you'd turn down $5 million for a chance at a portion of $90 million?
No. If they were easy to crack, they would be cracked. Automatically. By a zombie scanning IP blocks.
Can we say "OSX is intrinsically more secure?" Maybe, certainly a lot of its default configuration tend to be more secure than Windows' defaults.
The real issue is that Macs are very secure ON THEIR OWN. Not in relation to anything else.
Today, most boxes are cracked via worms, browser exploits and email attachments.
Removing entire avenues of attack is possible with a Mac. Remove an avenue of attack and you've increased your security.
Then, as long as the DIS-INFECTION rate is HIGHER than the INFECTION rate, those systems will be "secure". At least, they will not be cracked by worms, browser exploits or email attachments.
But there is no denying that Gates did have this vision of a software company at a time when operating systems and most applications were bought bundled with the hardware in EVERY case.
I said they were successful because they saw software as a viable business and acted/invested accordingly.
That is where you are wrong. Whether you want to believe it or not.
Other people also saw that selling an OS without selling the hardware could be a viable business. Yet those other companies did NOT survive.
Again, Microsoft BOUGHT their OS from someone who wrote it because HE saw that the OS did not have to be sold with the machine BEFORE Bill Gates saw that (as you claim).
The genius was recognizing that the computer market was evolving to a point where hardware and operating systems could and would be decoupled.
Again, Bill Gates BOUGHT the OS from someone else.
By your "logic", Edison would have been a "genius" for buying an electric light bulb from someone else who built one.
I knew this thread would fall into the trap of recursive "reasoning".
Of course you did. Even though no one has said that, you still believe that is what you read.
Repeat after me, "a company cannot exploit its monopoly to become a monopoly".
Why? No one said that they had.
But it was somewhat controversial at the time, at least among the big computer hardware makers, and so I admire them for pulling it off and for being a major player in the "re-wiring" of the computer industry.
Admire them all you want. That isn't the way it happened.
Case in point, Bill Gates did NOT write MS-DOS. He BOUGHT it from someone who DID write it. And only then because Bill Gates had already been approached by IBM for licensing of such.
When you make your call, remind whomever you talk to that Senator Obama could talk to The Honourable Hoyer and Pelosi to ask them for their assistance in ending this bill.
It's cheaper to use the "available" code when the executives in charge of the project cannot be bothered to familiarize themselves with the project AND stand to make a bonus the sooner it ships.
it primarily depends upon the recipients who don't know any better than to use all sorts of unsafe mail clients who allow such tricks to be played on them.
But most of the modern mail clients have that functionality either turned off or they pop up a window that requires the recipient to agree to send the acknowledgment or view the images. I don't know about you, but I'm running Thunderbird on Ubuntu and it does both.
so this is not a privacy issue but a security issue.. and it's much older than 2000.
I agree that it is older than 2000. But it is becoming less of an issue every day. As the older machines fail, they will be replaced with newer ones with modern email clients.
The very valid reason why mail servers don't always return a message when a mail address does not exist, is because this can be used to phish for existing usernames - when you don't get a bounce message, you know you've probably hit a valid username. (because for most systems, login/username = default mail alias)
I work for a small insurance company. I cannot silently kill any incoming email.
So the email addresses are Firstname.Lastname@ (although we also accept and deliver FirstnameLastname@).
Phishing for "John@" is easy. Phishing for "John.Adams@" is a lot more difficult.
I do not have the experience he has, but I see some strangeness in the phrases he uses.
The Internet's traffic system gives preferential treatment to short communication paths. The technical term is "round-trip time effect." The shorter your RTT, the faster TCP speeds up and the more traffic you can deliver.
Yes. And? Do I really want the server next to me to be as slow as the server in Tokyo?
The Internet's congestion avoidance mechanism, an afterthought that was tacked-on in the late 80's, reduces and increases the rate of TCP streams to match available network resources, but it doesn't molest UDP at all. So the Internet is not neutral with respect to its two transport protocols.
I'm not sure about this. But he's the expert so I'll accept his claim. But wouldn't it be easier to add UDP management capabilities to the existing structure than any of the alternatives?
VoIP wants its packets to have small but consistent gaps, and file transfer applications simply care about the time between the request for the file and the time the last bit is received. In between, it doesn't matter if the packets are timed by a metronome or if they arrive in clumps. Jitter is the engineering term for variations in delay.
Wasn't that what Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) was supposed to address?
The Internet is non-neutral with respect to applications and to location, but it's overly neutral with respect to content, which causes gross inefficiency as we move into the large-scale transfer of HDTV over the Internet.
Yes. And? So grabbing a huge file off of the server next to me is more efficient than a VOIP call to Tokyo. I'm not seeing the problem yet.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to amazon.com and start a new account.
Add a CD to your wishlist. Something from an artist with LOTS of material out there.
Now, go to recommendations.
There will be a lot of them. Everything else by that artist PLUS other stuff.
Start clicking the "Not interested" box.
Yes, it will remove that SINGLE ITEM but it will NOT affect the REST of the "recommendations".
Because Amazon does NOT utilize that information in their "recommendations".
Why do I have to specifically decline each of those "millions of items"?Go ahead, try it. I just verified that that is how it works.
ONE item on your wishlist is enough to get HUNDRED items "recommended".
But TWENTY "Not interested"'s is not sufficient to get anything other than those 20 items off their "recommended" list.
Epic failure. I've given them 21 pieces of information and they are no closer to finding something I want than they were with the just the 1st piece of information.
There are two different ways to approach this.
#1. Items have lots of characteristics. (I think this sucks)
#2. Items have no characteristics. The sort process is based upon the idealized person who would purchase the item (based off of past purchases).
Again with the Buffy example ...
Someone who had purchased the season 1 boxed set WOULD POSSIBLY be interested in purchasing the entire series boxed set IF IT WAS RELEASED AFTER THEIR PREVIOUS PURCHASE.
The group that would purchase the series boxed set ... time passes ... and then purchase the first season's boxed set would be rather small.
Now, SOME people might purchase a paperback edition and, finding that they really like it, would then purchase the hardback edition. And that activity would further identify them with a specific group.
The key is to identify the purchasing patterns of the GROUPS and then see which GROUP an individual best fits.
But part of it does depend upon the chronology of the purchases to associate the person with the group.
Using the above example of Buffy ... what set of selections would I have to make that did NOT include anything that could be key-word linked to Buffy would I have to make before it would recommend any of the Buffy DVD's?
No "vampire" selections.
No "Sarah Michelle Geller" selections.
No "Joss Whedon" selections.
No "tv series" selections.
etc.
No, I'm not being flippant or sarcastic. THAT would be the real test of their system.
#1. Find the grouping of people that liked Buffy.
#2. Find the other items that they liked.
#3. Remove any item that could be key-word linked to Buffy.
Which should leave you with a set of items which would indicate that you would like Buffy when you had not expressed any interest in anything directly related to it.
But in order for that to work, you'd also have to factor in their rejections. Not just the items they gave low scores to. I'm talking about the items that they rejected by NOT selecting to rent them.
Amazon SUCKS at recommending anything for me.
You have recently purchased a just released DVD. Here are other just released DVD's that you might be interested in. Based only upon the facts that they are:
#1. DVD's
#2. New releases
Or, you have recently purchased two items by Terry Pratchett. Here are other items you might be interested in based upon the facts:
#1. They are items
#2. The word "Pratchett" appears somewhere in the description.
You would THINK that they'd be "intelligent" enough to factor in your REJECTIONS as well as your purchases (and what you've identified as items you already own).
Figure it out! I do NOT buy derivative works. No books about writers who wrote biographies about Pratchett.
If it was one guy selling the software he wrote, you'd probably see the same implementations of his political views (provided that there was a way to do so).
With Open Source, the one guy can write his political opinions into his code ... which get grabbed and used in a different project ... which ends up in a third project ... etc.
And unless you have a similar political bent, you'd never notice it. At least until someone who did have such a bent brought it to your attention.
How about just telling the customers EXACTLY what they're paying for?
For $40 you get a guaranteed MINIMUM bandwidth of X with a potential to burst to Y.
If you want more, you pay for more.
I have no problem with them making money as long as they're providing an honest service.
So what is the charge for them? $0.25? $0.50? $1.00? I'd pay it.
Why only for "large numbers of domain registrations"?
For the average person checking a domain, 20 cents is nothing. I'd be happy to pay that to put a temporary "hold" on a domain I was considering.
There is nothing "brilliant" about following basic security practices in the design of the system.
That's all there is. Nothing magical. And it won't change if Macs suddenly become the dominant platform.
All Apple does is follow basic security practices.
Put an unpatched WinXP on the Internet and watch how quickly it is cracked by an automated process randomly scanning IP blocks.
So you'd turn down $5 million for a chance at a portion of $90 million?No. If they were easy to crack, they would be cracked. Automatically. By a zombie scanning IP blocks.
The real issue is that Macs are very secure ON THEIR OWN. Not in relation to anything else.Today, most boxes are cracked via worms, browser exploits and email attachments.
Removing entire avenues of attack is possible with a Mac. Remove an avenue of attack and you've increased your security.
Then, as long as the DIS-INFECTION rate is HIGHER than the INFECTION rate, those systems will be "secure". At least, they will not be cracked by worms, browser exploits or email attachments.
Here's another history lesson for you.
http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/dos.htm
Looks like people (and companies) were writing Operating Systems (and apps) without selling hardware for YEARS before that.
Also, in the English language, "every" and "most" are not synonyms.
Other people also saw that selling an OS without selling the hardware could be a viable business. Yet those other companies did NOT survive.
Again, Microsoft BOUGHT their OS from someone who wrote it because HE saw that the OS did not have to be sold with the machine BEFORE Bill Gates saw that (as you claim).
Again, Bill Gates BOUGHT the OS from someone else.By your "logic", Edison would have been a "genius" for buying an electric light bulb from someone else who built one.
Case in point, Bill Gates did NOT write MS-DOS. He BOUGHT it from someone who DID write it. And only then because Bill Gates had already been approached by IBM for licensing of such.
So that alone disproves your theory.
IBM handed Microsoft a monopoly on the OS for their new PC "toy".
Bill Gates & Co then hired people who knew how to exploit that monopoly.
Yes, their competitors made mistakes. So did Microsoft.
Microsoft Bob.
Microsoft Blackbird.
Etc.
The difference being that Microsoft had their monopoly to fall back on when their other attempts failed. Their competitors did not.
Bill is going for the "humble" bit now. But that's not how it happened.
You'll have to keep hitting 0 to get to a person.
I made my call.
When you make your call, remind whomever you talk to that Senator Obama could talk to The Honourable Hoyer and Pelosi to ask them for their assistance in ending this bill.
McDermott, Jim WA 7th 225-3106
The woman who answered the phone says that he is against retroactive immunity.
That's one vote against it.
http://clerk.house.gov/member_info/mcapdir.html
Email does NOT have the same impact as a phone call.
Past articles:
Telegraph use in campaigns smash records!
Radio use in campaigns smash records!
Television use in campaigns smash records!
Phone use in campaigns smash records!
Fear that your competition will download it and leap-frog all "your" development "efforts" by using "your" code in their device.
I'm serious. If they UNDERSTOOD the process, they would ANNOUNCE that it was GPL'd and that anyone who wanted to could modify it or add features, etc.
Just like LinkSys found with their wireless routers.
It's cheaper to use the "available" code when the executives in charge of the project cannot be bothered to familiarize themselves with the project AND stand to make a bonus the sooner it ships.
And the links to their videos ... are links to unrelated videos.
... it's non-existent. WHY choose those items? Why THOSE items?
And the "coverage"
I'm getting the feeling this is more about how someone could spend a HUGE budget instead of how someone could UPGRADE their data center.
So the email addresses are Firstname.Lastname@ (although we also accept and deliver FirstnameLastname@).
Phishing for "John@" is easy. Phishing for "John.Adams@" is a lot more difficult.
Since their business model depends upon selling their "service" to people who don't know anything about email other than "click to send" ...