I've been programming in C and using unix systems for over 10 years, and linux since kernel rev 0.99pl14 (a few months before 1.0). The days of POSIX and linux are much better than the bad-old-days, when you'd often times have to edit the source and change to , and dozens of other minor (and many not-so-minor) tweaks that I'm thankful are only a distant memory. When I was a grad student at
OSU, I'd spend a lot of late nights trying to get code (usually written at Berkley) for SunOS to compile on HP/UX (HP has a major presence in Corvallis, which is otherwise a college town), 'cause the free code from Berkley tended to work a lot better than the bloated crap from a major EDA vendor who's located about 70 miles to the north (that was their 8.0 release, which basically didn't work at all, it had so many bugs).
Today's world is so much nicer... "./configure",
"make", "make install" (well, I'm a bit wary of that last part, as it usually needs root). When this very nice process doesn't work, usually the configure script tells you when you need to do. Pretty cool.
Still, there are source-only distributions that fail to build. Now I can understand this if it's from an up-to-the-minute CVS, but from a tarball on a web page or ftp server, that's not so cool. As a programmer, the software needs to be something pretty special for me to go dig in and fix the build process. It's just not fun work (particularily for a large project), and unless you've got quite a bit of experience, it can be nearly impossible.
So if you're an open/free source author and you don't offer binaries, make sure the code builds on the systems you're hoping your users have.
Napster really isn't a good way to get free CDs, only because very few Napster users rip and share the entire CD. When searching for a particular artist, more often than not, you'll get a long list of essentially the tracks that've had radio play, a few others you've not heard, but rarely the entire album. There's no technical limitation preventing users from sharing an entire album, and while some do, it's the exception and not the rule. The barrier to finding and actually sucessfully downloading an entire album is about the same as borrowing it from a friend and making a copy.
Now there are royalties paid to songwriters (ala BMI) for radio play that Napster users don't pay, but it's easy to see how Napster increases physical CD sales, along the same lines as radio play. If a good portion of Napster users starting sharing entire albums (as was common using ftp and usenet), it might actually cut into CD sales.
If the Napster client had a feature to insert your CD and press "share whole cd", and it'd rip the entire disc (w/out skips), use CDDB to names the files and include ID3 tags, and encode with good settings using LAME.... well, it'd make for a very different network than the current Napster. Maybe when/if gnutella or some other truely p2p network takes off, this'd be a cool weekend hack on a free/open source client program.
When I saw the Dallas 8051-based 8-bit Java about 4 months ago, I was pretty amazed, though I haven't actually done any coding with it. The 8051 is a pretty slow chip, and I program it with assembly. I believe their 8-bit Java runs on a souped-up greatly enhanced 8051 variant, but still an 8-bit microcontroller.
I just read the press release, and it looks like Hemos added the "world's first" part, which this certainly is not, since the Dallas TINI has been on the market for a while now.
"Gone Jackal" believes: the open source isn't going to win the hearts of the people, since most just don't care.
If I read Eben Moglen's words correctly, it seems like you and he have exactly opposite opinions here. He believes kids will grow up with "freedom" and won't even consider closed source.
Personally, I'm skeptical it'll turn out that way, though it'd sure be nice if it did.
SSL is expensive, and it has nothing to do with CPU power. SSL requires the server to provide a signed certificate, and the browser expects the signature to match against one of a small number that are hard coded into it. Netscape 3.x and up, and IE 5 (but not IE 4, still in widespread use) can accept certs not signed by a recognized certification authority, but the user is confronted with a sequence of dialog boxes, that contain disturbing language. In IE, the default is to not allow the page to load. Netscape's default, after 5 or 6 dialogs, it to proceed, but not store the cert on the hard drive. This basically boils down to the website using SSL needing to obtain a cert from one of the trusted (by the browser's author) certification authorities.
Verisign charges a minimum of $350/year. That's right, you have to pay the Verisign Tax every year. Of course, if someone captures your cert, they can only impersonate you until it expires. Thawte (which has been bought by Verisign) still provides certs for $125/year, and that's what my site uses (I hope they don't raise the Thawte price, though I can't see why they wouldn't now that they've got a near monopoly). Netscape comes loaded with several others certification authority keys, but all of those folks seem to only offer certs in conjuction with their hosting or their (expensive) software.
SSL certs aren't cheap, because
represent a significant effort to verify the business contact info for the operators of the site. For e-commerce, it's a really good idea, that little lock icon closing means two things... your data is encrypted, and the sight you're communicating with really is who they claim to be. The certification authority's process is thoughly audited by a big-five accounting firm (KPMG for Verisign, I think), and those folks ain't cheap (I know because Robin works for one of the big-five).
Getting a huge portion of the web to click the non-default choices to allow a untrustworthy certification authority would be a serious reduction in the overall security of e-commerce, and it's probably open a huge opportunity for spammers to appear as reputable business. Not a good idea.
If you want to fill the net with encrypted data, what's really needed is a protocol that doesn't require either side to incur a monetary cost. SSL is (or at least seems, not being an cryptanalyist) a good e-commerce protocol. SSL's barrier to entry and reoccuring cost will prevent if from being useful for the social goal of filling the net with encrypted streams.
In the early 90s, it was widely believed that GaAs transistors would replace good 'ole Si for microprocessors. They're a lot faster, after all.
Well, several things happened:
Nobody figured out how to make reseasonalbe P-channel devices.
Small geometries were much harder, because III/V and II/VI type (more than one element) semiconductors suffer from a whole bunch of problems where, which in my limited understanding (I'm a circuits guy) are due to the wrong atom at a place in the crystal lattice, such as a Ga where and As should have been.
It's easy to take Silicon Dioxide (glass) for granted, until you try to figure out a good way to make insulators on other materials.
All the while, good ole Si kept getting better and better... not only faster, but higher densities. Today's CPU speed is as much a function of using lots of transistors as it is their speed. As more transistors were available, everyone invested a lot of research and thought into ways to use them to run code faster (superscaler architecture, branch prediction, out-of-order and speculative execution, etc)
Now I've been watching the J-junction for several years now, though I know much less about how it really works that I ought to. I do know there's a big difference between a test device and processes that produce only thousands of them to being viable for a modern microprocessor. GaAs transistors are hugely popular for RF applications, where you only need a small number of them. Today nobody believes the world will eventually be overtaken by GaAs based microprocessors.
It seems unlike the world will really be overtaken by J-Junction microprocessors, at least in our lifetimes. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, since I've got a lot of energy invested in transistors, and with a bit of luck that'll remain valuable for another 25 years... but then again, look what happened to all those guys how only knew about tubes!
Anyways, the point is that there's a big difference between a small number of insanely fast test devices to a high density processor with all the other requisites to make a reasonable microprocessor.
The methods might seem a little draconian to the rest of the people who aren't as adamant about spam, but that's EXACTLY what the subscribers of the information want.
It seems unlikely that users and ISPs subscribing to MAPS RBL really want to filter out messages from hundreds of non-spammer sites, who's only mistake was hosting at an ISP that later allowed some spammers to put up web pages.
They're not innocent. They're putting food on the table for a spamhaus. They should move, it's as simple as that. Web pages can be hosted anywhere on the globe.
My website is hosted at a particular ISP. Maybe I'm guilty of supporting spammers? When I start losing traffic and I can't communicate via email, it'll be easy to recognize the error of my ways... I should have used my crystal ball to predict that a spammer would move in next door. I should have known my ISP would allow it. My particular ISP changed ownership a few months back... but then I should have know they'd sell to someone who'd allow a spammer to set up shop.
So realizing what a terrible mistake I made, hosting my web site and email with an ISP that later let in a spammer, I should move, "simple as that". Sure, simple, try to find a price similar to the fairly good one I've got now (remember, I chose this ISP for a reason). Standard dial-up and simple virtual hosting are about the same price wherever you go, but Frame Relay service varies considerably. I signed a 2 year contract, so I'll have to pay for a portion of the remaining time. I'll call the phone company and the ISP, back and forth and get those circuit ID and DLCI numbers worked out, schedule the switch, hope they manage to get the line switched over correctly. Contact the registrar and get my DNS record changed, and of course change stuff on my server. I hope my SSL cert still works at the new location. The local telco raised their rates for frame relay, so I'll certainly have to pay the new higher rate, and there's a good chance it'll be a new contract, with a penalty for breaking the old one. If everything goes smoothly, maybe I'll only be off the net for a couple days. If things go badly (as a move like this often does) and it's over 5 days, then all those email bounce warnings will turn into the 5 day bounce errors. We do a bit of e-commerce from the site, so I'll lose orders while I'm down.... but I'm already losing plenty of money already, all because it's my own fault for picking an ISP that later, after changing ownership (within my 2 year contract), allow a spammer to be hosted.
Yep, it's all my fault and I need to "just move". I'll do my homework and pick a less spam-friendly ISP, and cross my fingers that they don't change ownership within the period of my lengthy service contract, or by some error allow a spammer to be hosted. Vixie blacklists some sites for having join-our-mail-list without a double confirm.... but spam is such a plauge on the world his strong-arm tactics that hurt lots of unsuspecting bystanders are the means to the end. So "KjetilK", you're right, anyone who gets screwed by Vixie ought to "just move".
Free speach implies the right for me to have to right not to listen. It does not give anyone else the right to censor/filter the speach and prevent me from listening.
Consider the world controlled by Vixie, or at least the portion of the world that's connected to the internet via AboveNet, the backbone provider he controls.
It doesn't matter if you want to visit those sites or not, because your packets will never reach them. Vixie already decided that for you. If you happen to use your free speach right to not view whatever is blocked by Vixie, then you're in good shape. If you happened to want to communicate with someone Vixie has blocked, well, it'll take massive pressure, such as thousands and thousands of outraged readers of a widely circulated publication to get him to stop blocking at the backbone level.
Of course, that's assuming that the facts as presented are actually true.
Restricting free speach by filtering at the backbone is only part of the problem. ISPs using MAPS without giving their individual customers a choice if they want it or not is only part of the story.
The larger injustice is that MAPS blacklisted large blocks of IP numbers, hampering communication to a substantial group of Media3's customers, most of whom are totally unrelated to spammers. MAPS does this to pressure Media3 to be tougher on spammers. The injustice is:
The non-spam Media3 customers get screwed, when they did nothing wrong.
Most MAPS users are unaware that they're rejecting non-spam that just happened to be at the same ISP as a spammer.
"tbo" asks: What I don't understand is why anybody is using MAPS for anything other than their mail server.
According to jamie, AboveNet (a backbone provider), until this story broke, was using MAPS RBL to do exactly this. Vixie, the MAPS co-founder is the CTO of AboveNet, so it's not too hard to see "why".
According to the update, they've stopped this. Hopefully it stays that way. Filtering at the backbone level is pretty scary.
OK, on three, let's have a great big "Awww" for poor widdle Media3.
(maybe) 21 spammers hosted by Media3 !!!
Well, if that's not reason enough to blacklist thousands of their addresses, hurting dozens, perhaps even hundreds of their unsuspecting non-spam customers, then I don't know what is! Those idiots should have read that AUP (that looks just like all the others) and predicted that Media3 would harbor some spammers. It's their own fault that they happen to live near where a dirty spammer moved in.
Damnit, I've had to press delete almost 20 times so far this week, so NUKE 'EM. Who cares if there's innocent and unsuspecting civilians... this is war! Blast 'em to hell and make Media3 sorry!! Who cares if some innocent bystanders get hurt.
Spammer sends spam (by relay raping other peoples gear), advertising products that are sold on the Web site
MAPS blacklists a large block of Media3's customers, not just the spam related one (at least that's what's claimed)
A bunch of folks having nothing to do with the spammer wonder why they're having trouble
Now, what can we do to end the spam?
How about indiscriminately blacklist everyone within ISP-level proximity of any spammer? Hurt those spammer or spam resource (in this case) harboring ISPs, with utter disregard for whatever other non-spam-related customers get caught in the cross-fire.
So, it isn't like just providing the photo paper and ink to the kiddy porno makers... it is like providing the building, cameras, film, video-feed and streaming servers for kiddy pornographers - knowing full well what they are doing - and then being surprised when people are upset with you.
Fine, lynch 'em. Tar and feather! The bastards deserve it!
In fact, bust down the doors of all their neighbors, yank those folks off their couchs and their kids away from their game consoles, and lynch them too.
They're living in same appartment complex (Class C IP address range), so let's crucify everyone in the surrounding area, so that the apt complex managers who tolerated the porographers will lose money and noone will move back in.
I'm amazed that so many readers here think it's ok to apply pressure to Media3 (who did support a spammers web site) by blacklisting a large block of Media3's legit customers, not just the spammer.
2. Listings for things other than those said. The RBL has neither of these problems.
Assuming that the facts presented are accurate (difficult to verify if above.net has stopped blocking packets based on MAPS)... then how could you conclude that blocking peacefire, FulfilledLives.com, DesktopHeaven.com, and the others is not "Listings for things other than those said".
If the facts are true, innocent customers are getting blacklisted simply because they happened to pick the same ISP as a spammer, and the ISP didn't want to drop the spammers website (because the spammer abused other ISPs, not them).
Perhaps Media3 is wrong for not dropping the spammer's website. But if MAPS is targeting a large group of Media3 customers because only one is a bad apple... even if you hate Media3.... it's amazing that you could overlook the injustice MAPS is doing to all the other innocent bystanders (Media3's other customers). Perhaps those customers should move to a different ISP, but how would they pick one? How could any of those other customers pick a new ISP? Media3's AUP looks ok and looks like all the others. How could a custoemr know, in advance, if they'll eventually be on the same class C as another customer that Vixie doesn't like but is acting within the ISP's AUP?? Even if the other customer is a nasty spammer, and even if Media3 is slow or won't terminate the spammer's web site, the fact (if it's true) remains that MAPS is targeting a large group of unrelated customers when only one is a spammer. The others are just poor innocent bystanders who could not have know in advance that they'd be in the same block of IP numbers as a spammer.
As I clicked the article I learned the "independent" study was sponsored by at&t's brightmail. Mindcraft anyone, please?
As I read it, I wondered exactly how they did the testing. Of course, they didn't give details (even worse than MindCraft). Notice the words "blocked just 2 percent of 922 spam messages sent". In the case of MAPS, the important question is who did the sending? I'm guessing that they transmitted spam that they had harvested.
MAPS has put a lot of pressure on ISPs, perhaps with underhanded or questionable tactics. It good to see that slashdot with its giant readship is putting a bit of pressure onto MAPS about its questionable actions.
I've got a tiny block of IP numbers, and I know I'd be really pissed off if MAPS decided to block the entire class C range that just happened to contain my site, because a spammer operated on an IP number within that range.
Dennis Branch (of theindex.com) writes: TheIndex DOES have personal sites, the one above sounds like it will become another one. The problem here is that 99 and 44/100ths percent pure of all personal sites are also pure crap.
12 year old script kiddies and so on. I can state this as a fact after wading through over 100,000 of them.
<flame mode on> (I hope I don't lose too much karma over this....)
I'm guessing that 99.44% crap isn't actually based on having viewed 100k pages (keeping a tally as you go). Even if the crap is 99.44%, some of the very best and most informative pages on the web are in the 0.66% (I believe it's more) personal pages that are well made. Most commercial pages usually don't give you a whole lot of info about a particular topic, and it's quite rare to see a good discussion of how to really compare solutions to a problem, as vendors will try to only sell you their own solution (even if it's inferior), and commercial publishers have a long history or favoring their advertisers, and often care a lot more about page-views than really helping anyone.
So Dennis, even if you have viewed 99440 crap pages (166 hours at 6 seconds each), my point is that you have a very bad attitude towards personal pages, where a small portion are some of the best and most informative pages on the web!. One or two good personal pages relating a real person's actual experiences and tips solving a particular problem is a lot more valuable than hundreds of commercial pages that only try to hawk their wares without really helping you understand and learn anything. I believe it's even a lot more valuable than a dozen zdnet-style product reviews.
Even if you do index the good personal pages (despite your attitude), the sad truth is that the bar has been raised for search engines. What you have today may have been pretty good a couple years ago when you started. Google has really raised peoples expectations, and it's looking like the others are catching up to google's excellent performance. You still have a lot of work to do. I'd suggest you start by rethinking how you judge the value of web pages.
You might note that Yahoo has recently switched to using Google instead of Inktomi. If you had read the article, you would have noticed that.
Yes, you are right, though it doesn't explain lycos. I was about to slam you for not trying an Inktomi-based search and posting the results.... but I tried to do the same, and it's damn difficult to tell if someone's using Inktomi or not. I found (via google) this out-of-date list. Inktomi has a list of partners, and yahoo's on the list, but it doesn't say what services each partner actually uses.
This page at Inktomi mentions that AOL, iWon, MSN, and more (aprarantly 125) are using their search (it's mentioned in the top yellow box on the right side of the page).
So, with that in mind, let's give these three a try and see if they product any porn sites with a query for "black bear":
AOL's results list Condos, T-shirts, AllAlaskanGifts (paid adverts), pages about actual black bears, the B&B, Hunting, Campgrounds (not the nude one from yahoo's present search), wildlife and conservation. Pretty good...
iWon's results page displays nothing if Javascript is disabled. I gotta get that
javascript popup filtering junkbuster patch installed. For the sake of this slashdot post, I'm turning javascript back on for a moment: hmm, they're doing funny stuff and that link may not take you directly to a results page.... easy enough to do the search, but here's what I'm seeing: page about different types of bears, lodging per state, travel info, photos and articles about american and alaskan black bears, more stuff about american black bears, american bear association, dietart habits of bears, wildlife park, black bear systems (a company, funny that none of the other searches turned this one up in their top results), campground, an inn, web design company named black bear, more stuff about bears and camping. So far one of the best search results in this "black bear" benchmark, and not a single porn site yet (neglecting yahoo's return of a clothing-option campground with black bear in the name), but still one more chance for porn at MSN.......
and here's MSN's results (damnit, went to MSN before turning javascript back off, going to shut if off right now.. ok), so let's see how MSN did: Univ of Maine Athletics (mascott is a black bear), more pages about univ of maine, info about diff species of bears, research about animal social systems, stuff about yellowstone, miccesota wince shute wildlife sanctuary, even more pages about univ of maine, the sanctuary in minnesota again, and the texas zoo
Ok, three strikes. You're Out!! Inktomi's site claims these three are using it's search, and not a single porn site linked on any of the first-page search results.
I did read the original post, and admittedly his point was that his friend tried "black bear" on yahoo 6 months ago and got porn, but for crying out loud, how fucking difficult is it to actually visit the search engine and type in BLACK BEAR and see for yourself if it really dishes up porn links? Ok, not everyone knows HTML to include nice formatting and links in their messages, but it's pretty simple to visit a search engine and actually see if it dishes up porn, instead of posting about how a third party accomplished this feat half a year ago!
(ok, rant mode off, we all know the cronological order and moderation system reward early postings)
I think it's pretty safe to say that one doesn't risk getting linked to porn when searching for "black bear" these days, and I'm skeptical that this condition really existed 6 months ago on yahoo. Some search engines (notably yahoo and MSN) have problems with wasting valuable browser screen space with redundant links, at least in this simple "black bear" benchmark. For a while
now I've believe google was the best, but I'm pleasantly suprised to see that other search engines are doing quite well.
It certainly is valuable to have a relatively
short domain name, and one that is somewhat
pronouncable. A couple years ago, when my little
web site could no longer be hosted at the
university, all four letter names even somewhat
pronouncable were taken, so Robin and I went for
PJRC, taking a couple of our initials each.
A while ago, a couple people mentioned that
someone had taken my domain name and was selling
it. It turns out that, not being pronouncable,
PRJC is a common misspelling, and
these bastards
are squatting on it, along with
nearly every other imaginable combination of four letters. I sent them an email asking if they'd be willing to sell PRJC, thinking maybe I'd throw $100 or maybe even $200 at it... more than ten times what they probably paid for it in their bulk purchasing. They wanted $2000. They were willing to entertain "reasonable" offers, which more or less means four digits.
Lately, I've been doing a little bit of looking at the web logs, and it looks like the traffic comes from more or less three places:
Search Engines: vast majority of visitors leave quickly
Links: this how people who really are interested in the site usually find us
Archiver Programs: a lot of people run programs like Teleport Pro to grab a complete copy of the site
From that, I'd suggest that MCMay has a valuable point that search engines' results are much more important than the domain name, links from other sites are the most valuable. Fortunately, we get quite a few links because I've spent years slowly building up quite a number of pages with lots of info.
In the last several months, we've started selling parts, circuit boards and kits for a couple the projects, and it certainly seems like the best way to spend money to promote the site is with an
affiliate program. I'll probably end up doing a bit of cgi coding sometime in the next several months and add something like this. Even if we end up sending out $100/month (if we actually sold enough stuff in a month to pay that much, I could quit my day job and work on the web site full time!).... that'd be a lot better use of money than giving it to those damn squatters.
So, dear reader, if you've got any experience setting up one of these affiliate programs or you've had good or bad experience participating in them, please drop me a message with your experiences.
I see, fundamentally, no difference between forging a check to steal money from a persons account, and what spammers do.
The subject of "harm" is perhaps one place to look. In the case of check fraud, the money or property probably won't be recovered, or only partially recovered, and either the bank or account holder will take a loss. In the case of spam, a whole lot of users press delete, maybe an ISP bears some bandwidth or mail server load (low incremental cost), and maybe a couple stupid suckers fall for whatever scam the message is hawking, and take a minor loss, but from their own action (any they probably learn something from it).
Now this guy crashed someone server by sending too much stuff so quickly, so there is some real harm, but 7 years in jail? I'd personally like to see him do at least a little time, perhaps only to strike some fear into all the other spammers out there, but 7 years sounds pretty damn harsh.
The American Bear Association (ABA) home page - The home page of The
American Bear Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting
the well-being of bears and all wildlife through a better understanding.
Black Bear...American Black Bear...Michigan Black Bear - GarLyn Farm
ZOOlogical Park now features american black bear. Photo's, information, and
links to more sites about black bear and other animals.
NEW NABC INDEX - The mission of the North American Bear Center is to
enhance the understanding of the general public of the habits, needs and environment of bears in
North America.
Wildlife Endangered Species - Black Bear - they are a rare sight in Texas, the black bear is the
most common kind of bear in the United States. Black bears are considered to be endangered in the
state of Texas. Black bears
An American Black Bear - Fuzzy, weighing in at more than 400 pounds, lives
at GarLyn Farm ZOOlogical Park. Also links to more bear information.
Black Bear Conservation Committee - Promoting the restoration of the
Louisiana black bear in its historic range, through education, research,
and habitat management.
Working With Wildlife - Black Bear - NC State University - Notes about
wildlife management of the Black Bear.
American Black Bear - (Encarta® Concise Encyclopedia Article)
American Black Bear - Fact sheet from "About the Animals" where information on a large variety of
animals can be obtained, from present day habitat to estimated populations.
Black Bear Paging Service - Providing local paging service, products and accessories for West
Virginia and southern Ohio. A member of SoutherNet Association of paging.
Black Bear Lodge - Located on Little St. Germaine Lake out of St. Germaine WI. A four season resort.
They have fishing, golfing, hunting, skiing, and snowmobiling nearby.
Black Bear Inn, South Lake Tahoe - The Inn is nestled on a wooded acre, offering luxury
accommodations in a rustic, mountain setting. Black Bear Inn's main lodge has five generous guest
rooms, and there are three cabins on the grounds
Black Bear B&B - Located in the scenic Sunday River Valley, on Sunday River Road, the Black Bear
offers an alternative to guests who appreciate being within two miles of one of the East's
outstanding ski areas, Sunday
Black Bear Design - Design professional web sites for affordable rates. All artwork is custom
artwork; no clip art is used.
Looks like Lycos is doing pretty well...
I also tried google, and
their results are pretty good also.
What's amazing is that someone would post such a comment and not even bother trying the search. Come on, it's pretty damn simple.
Quite saddly, Ars-Fartsica shortsightedly speaks: "for 99% of us, the most intriguing thing we do online is buy things"
People actually do many other interesting things on-line, and here's some of them:
Many folks read and contribute opinions to public or semi-public discussion forums, as you and I have done here. Perhaps it is less than
in the glory days of usenet, but it's certainly
a healthy percentage. Public discussing boards are common at many websites, and they tend to be filled with comments. That's no tiny fraction of users.
Most users exchange private messages with a limited set of other users. E-mail is used, at least somewhat, by nearly ALL internet users. Many many users, at some point, exchange email with another person whom they would not have met and communicated with in the absence of the internet.
A good number of people participate in real-time chat or instant messaging. AOL and MS wouldn't have a big IM war if there weren't an aweful lot of "eyeballs" at stake.
A significant number of people exchange files with one-another. Napster's claimed 40e6 userbase, and actual 500k to 1e6 active-at-any-given-time numbers are very significant. Copyright issues aside, digital data copying creates an exchange of commodities based on abundance instead of scarcity. I personally find this environment of abundance very intriguing.
A smaller, but meaningful number of users publish their ideas or creative efforts. Personal websites are often lacking content, but there are a good many that are among the most informative sites on the web, at least for their particular topic. Even though this number is small, the benefit is quite substantial, and when you consider the number of readers, the total number of users involved grows quickly.
A good number of programmers write Free or Open-Source software, which would otherwise not come about with the net. While the number of programmers is small compared to the entire group of users, the combined group of programmers and users of their wares (the full set involved in the communication) is rather large.
I suppose the meaning in your comment revolves around the word "intriguing". It is a sad state of affairs when on-line shopping is more intriguing than these examples of people communicating with other in ways generally not possible with the net, and with people whom they would likely never have known, exchanging ideas that they would not have expressed, or publishing or consuming data they would not have had, had it not been for the internet.
It is a topic of much debate if anonymous access is a benefit. For people who can't see much value in the internet beyond on-line shopping, anonymous access must seem like a worthless persuit. In all of these examples listed above, anonymous access can add intriguing possibilities. Some possibilities are for abuse (spam email comes easily to mind), some allow users to exchange copyrighted or contraband material, and others allow people to express themselves and share ideas that they would have been afraid to share otherwise.
The in the subject line, anon.penet.fi was an anonymous remailer. (this paragraph is for the benefit of anyone who wasn't using the net back then.... back with on-line shopping more or less didn't exist) You sent an email, and it would resend it to someone else or to a newsgroup, without any identifying info about you. When someone replied, it would receive the reply and send it to you, in a similarily anonymous way. It was used heavily in the old days of the usenet (before being overrun with spam). It was commononly used by people in various alt.sex... groups, who obviously wanted to talk about their (often kinky) sex interests, without fear of neighbors and workmates learning their identity. There were many other legit uses, sexual abuse recovery discussions come to mind, though open sex related conversations seemed to be one of the largest legit uses. Unfortunately there were many abuses, such as posting hate speach, death threats, etc. I remember when it was shut down, but I've since forgotten the details. Perhaps someone else will post them. For a long time, it was believed that anon.penet.fi would never compromise. The guy running it (wasn't it something like "Julf") claimed he'd delete everything if a court order ever was served. Unfortunately, the court order did happen and enough pressure was applied that the authorities made him comply and they obtained all the data. Many people who had depended on the anonyminity were scared that they would be exposed. The whole anon.penet.fi case certainly is a lesson that in the long run, a central server won't work.
For better or worse, I'm quite interested in the technical aspects of how such an anonymous protocol could be designed. I was unaware of these other projects,
fling and the work at
zer0knowledge. Had it not been for this slashdot discussion, I probably would not have learned of their existance. Now I have some interesting reading to go do.... but I'll say just one more time: anyone who thinks the most intriguing aspect of the internet is on-line shopping really needs to open their eyes. I know it's less than 99%, and I hope it's a lot less.
"Kiss the Blade" asks:
I have long been fascinated by the strange relation between fantasy fiction and computer nerds. Why is this?
...and then goes on about social isolation, seeking social interaction on-line, etc, laced with stereotypes.
Some time ago I read an
alertbox column which had an interesting point about gui interfaces (tried for about 15 minutes to locate it again... it's in there somewhere).
Jakob describes the early non-gui interfaces (eg. unix) as "black caves". The user needs to form a mental image in their mind of the the directories, files, and other resources, and then type commands to operate on them with little or no on-screen information, in much the same way you'd have to navigate through a black cave, keeping a mental picture of where you are. He claims the early computer interfaces worked well for engineers, because of their superior ability to form mental models, but ended up being worthless for ordinary users.
Indeed, D & D appeals to people who naturally have this ability to form mental models. Perhaps playing D & D helps one learn and improve their ability to form mental models. I believe the more likely scenario is that the game has a fairly high barrier to entry, in terms of using mental models and imagination, and at least to start playing and enjoy it enough to continue, you either have it or you don't. Considerable time spent playing probably improves one's mental modeling abilities, much like experience using non-gui computer interfaces, but to get started and actually enjoy the game, as a player or DM, you really need to have that ability to envision the D & D world.
Programming computers is certainly a persuit which requires forming mental models. Programming does involve some work to compose the code, and learning to do this is similar to the effort required to learn a natual language, though computer languages are much simpler and have a very limited vocabulary. I believe it is this natural ability for form mental models which makes programming fun for some (whom you refer to as "nerds"), where for most people it seems like very hard work.
Frederick P Brooks writes in The Mythical Man-Month:
...there is a delight of working in such a tractable medium. The Programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination.
Perhaps imagination and mental models are a skill, of maybe it's inate, wired into ones brain from the beginning. Those who have it seem to have it much much moreso that those how have little or none. This ability is the key element that makes programming and role playing fun and interesting, and for the majority of the population without these abilities of mental modeling and a lack of imagination, programming seems like drudgery and D & D seems like a waste of time.
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Today's world is so much nicer... "./configure", "make", "make install" (well, I'm a bit wary of that last part, as it usually needs root). When this very nice process doesn't work, usually the configure script tells you when you need to do. Pretty cool.
Still, there are source-only distributions that fail to build. Now I can understand this if it's from an up-to-the-minute CVS, but from a tarball on a web page or ftp server, that's not so cool. As a programmer, the software needs to be something pretty special for me to go dig in and fix the build process. It's just not fun work (particularily for a large project), and unless you've got quite a bit of experience, it can be nearly impossible.
So if you're an open/free source author and you don't offer binaries, make sure the code builds on the systems you're hoping your users have.
And where do you get an honest opinion about which product might be best for you needs? That never comes from an advertiser.
How hard is that? (well, for someone who already knows their way around the Mozilla code)
Now there are royalties paid to songwriters (ala BMI) for radio play that Napster users don't pay, but it's easy to see how Napster increases physical CD sales, along the same lines as radio play. If a good portion of Napster users starting sharing entire albums (as was common using ftp and usenet), it might actually cut into CD sales.
If the Napster client had a feature to insert your CD and press "share whole cd", and it'd rip the entire disc (w/out skips), use CDDB to names the files and include ID3 tags, and encode with good settings using LAME.... well, it'd make for a very different network than the current Napster. Maybe when/if gnutella or some other truely p2p network takes off, this'd be a cool weekend hack on a free/open source client program.
I just read the press release, and it looks like Hemos added the "world's first" part, which this certainly is not, since the Dallas TINI has been on the market for a while now.
the open source isn't going to win the hearts of the people, since most just don't care.
If I read Eben Moglen's words correctly, it seems like you and he have exactly opposite opinions here. He believes kids will grow up with "freedom" and won't even consider closed source.
Personally, I'm skeptical it'll turn out that way, though it'd sure be nice if it did.
Verisign charges a minimum of $350/year. That's right, you have to pay the Verisign Tax every year. Of course, if someone captures your cert, they can only impersonate you until it expires. Thawte (which has been bought by Verisign) still provides certs for $125/year, and that's what my site uses (I hope they don't raise the Thawte price, though I can't see why they wouldn't now that they've got a near monopoly). Netscape comes loaded with several others certification authority keys, but all of those folks seem to only offer certs in conjuction with their hosting or their (expensive) software.
SSL certs aren't cheap, because represent a significant effort to verify the business contact info for the operators of the site. For e-commerce, it's a really good idea, that little lock icon closing means two things... your data is encrypted, and the sight you're communicating with really is who they claim to be. The certification authority's process is thoughly audited by a big-five accounting firm (KPMG for Verisign, I think), and those folks ain't cheap (I know because Robin works for one of the big-five).
Getting a huge portion of the web to click the non-default choices to allow a untrustworthy certification authority would be a serious reduction in the overall security of e-commerce, and it's probably open a huge opportunity for spammers to appear as reputable business. Not a good idea.
If you want to fill the net with encrypted data, what's really needed is a protocol that doesn't require either side to incur a monetary cost. SSL is (or at least seems, not being an cryptanalyist) a good e-commerce protocol. SSL's barrier to entry and reoccuring cost will prevent if from being useful for the social goal of filling the net with encrypted streams.
Well, several things happened:
- Nobody figured out how to make reseasonalbe P-channel devices.
- Small geometries were much harder, because III/V and II/VI type (more than one element) semiconductors suffer from a whole bunch of problems where, which in my limited understanding (I'm a circuits guy) are due to the wrong atom at a place in the crystal lattice, such as a Ga where and As should have been.
- It's easy to take Silicon Dioxide (glass) for granted, until you try to figure out a good way to make insulators on other materials.
- All the while, good ole Si kept getting better and better... not only faster, but higher densities. Today's CPU speed is as much a function of using lots of transistors as it is their speed. As more transistors were available, everyone invested a lot of research and thought into ways to use them to run code faster (superscaler architecture, branch prediction, out-of-order and speculative execution, etc)
Now I've been watching the J-junction for several years now, though I know much less about how it really works that I ought to. I do know there's a big difference between a test device and processes that produce only thousands of them to being viable for a modern microprocessor. GaAs transistors are hugely popular for RF applications, where you only need a small number of them. Today nobody believes the world will eventually be overtaken by GaAs based microprocessors.It seems unlike the world will really be overtaken by J-Junction microprocessors, at least in our lifetimes. Maybe that's just wishful thinking, since I've got a lot of energy invested in transistors, and with a bit of luck that'll remain valuable for another 25 years... but then again, look what happened to all those guys how only knew about tubes!
Anyways, the point is that there's a big difference between a small number of insanely fast test devices to a high density processor with all the other requisites to make a reasonable microprocessor.
It seems unlikely that users and ISPs subscribing to MAPS RBL really want to filter out messages from hundreds of non-spammer sites, who's only mistake was hosting at an ISP that later allowed some spammers to put up web pages.
My website is hosted at a particular ISP. Maybe I'm guilty of supporting spammers? When I start losing traffic and I can't communicate via email, it'll be easy to recognize the error of my ways... I should have used my crystal ball to predict that a spammer would move in next door. I should have known my ISP would allow it. My particular ISP changed ownership a few months back... but then I should have know they'd sell to someone who'd allow a spammer to set up shop.
So realizing what a terrible mistake I made, hosting my web site and email with an ISP that later let in a spammer, I should move, "simple as that". Sure, simple, try to find a price similar to the fairly good one I've got now (remember, I chose this ISP for a reason). Standard dial-up and simple virtual hosting are about the same price wherever you go, but Frame Relay service varies considerably. I signed a 2 year contract, so I'll have to pay for a portion of the remaining time. I'll call the phone company and the ISP, back and forth and get those circuit ID and DLCI numbers worked out, schedule the switch, hope they manage to get the line switched over correctly. Contact the registrar and get my DNS record changed, and of course change stuff on my server. I hope my SSL cert still works at the new location. The local telco raised their rates for frame relay, so I'll certainly have to pay the new higher rate, and there's a good chance it'll be a new contract, with a penalty for breaking the old one. If everything goes smoothly, maybe I'll only be off the net for a couple days. If things go badly (as a move like this often does) and it's over 5 days, then all those email bounce warnings will turn into the 5 day bounce errors. We do a bit of e-commerce from the site, so I'll lose orders while I'm down.... but I'm already losing plenty of money already, all because it's my own fault for picking an ISP that later, after changing ownership (within my 2 year contract), allow a spammer to be hosted.
Yep, it's all my fault and I need to "just move". I'll do my homework and pick a less spam-friendly ISP, and cross my fingers that they don't change ownership within the period of my lengthy service contract, or by some error allow a spammer to be hosted. Vixie blacklists some sites for having join-our-mail-list without a double confirm.... but spam is such a plauge on the world his strong-arm tactics that hurt lots of unsuspecting bystanders are the means to the end. So "KjetilK", you're right, anyone who gets screwed by Vixie ought to "just move".
Consider the world controlled by Vixie, or at least the portion of the world that's connected to the internet via AboveNet, the backbone provider he controls.
It doesn't matter if you want to visit those sites or not, because your packets will never reach them. Vixie already decided that for you. If you happen to use your free speach right to not view whatever is blocked by Vixie, then you're in good shape. If you happened to want to communicate with someone Vixie has blocked, well, it'll take massive pressure, such as thousands and thousands of outraged readers of a widely circulated publication to get him to stop blocking at the backbone level.
Of course, that's assuming that the facts as presented are actually true.
Restricting free speach by filtering at the backbone is only part of the problem. ISPs using MAPS without giving their individual customers a choice if they want it or not is only part of the story.
The larger injustice is that MAPS blacklisted large blocks of IP numbers, hampering communication to a substantial group of Media3's customers, most of whom are totally unrelated to spammers. MAPS does this to pressure Media3 to be tougher on spammers. The injustice is:
What I don't understand is why anybody is using MAPS for anything other than their mail server.
According to jamie, AboveNet (a backbone provider), until this story broke, was using MAPS RBL to do exactly this. Vixie, the MAPS co-founder is the CTO of AboveNet, so it's not too hard to see "why".
According to the update, they've stopped this. Hopefully it stays that way. Filtering at the backbone level is pretty scary.
(maybe) 21 spammers hosted by Media3 !!!
Well, if that's not reason enough to blacklist thousands of their addresses, hurting dozens, perhaps even hundreds of their unsuspecting non-spam customers, then I don't know what is! Those idiots should have read that AUP (that looks just like all the others) and predicted that Media3 would harbor some spammers. It's their own fault that they happen to live near where a dirty spammer moved in.
Damnit, I've had to press delete almost 20 times so far this week, so NUKE 'EM. Who cares if there's innocent and unsuspecting civilians... this is war! Blast 'em to hell and make Media3 sorry!! Who cares if some innocent bystanders get hurt.
Now, what can we do to end the spam?
How about indiscriminately blacklist everyone within ISP-level proximity of any spammer? Hurt those spammer or spam resource (in this case) harboring ISPs, with utter disregard for whatever other non-spam-related customers get caught in the cross-fire.
Fine, lynch 'em. Tar and feather! The bastards deserve it!
In fact, bust down the doors of all their neighbors, yank those folks off their couchs and their kids away from their game consoles, and lynch them too.
They're living in same appartment complex (Class C IP address range), so let's crucify everyone in the surrounding area, so that the apt complex managers who tolerated the porographers will lose money and noone will move back in.
2. Listings for things other than those said. The RBL has neither of these problems.
Assuming that the facts presented are accurate (difficult to verify if above.net has stopped blocking packets based on MAPS)... then how could you conclude that blocking peacefire, FulfilledLives.com, DesktopHeaven.com, and the others is not "Listings for things other than those said".
If the facts are true, innocent customers are getting blacklisted simply because they happened to pick the same ISP as a spammer, and the ISP didn't want to drop the spammers website (because the spammer abused other ISPs, not them).
Perhaps Media3 is wrong for not dropping the spammer's website. But if MAPS is targeting a large group of Media3 customers because only one is a bad apple... even if you hate Media3.... it's amazing that you could overlook the injustice MAPS is doing to all the other innocent bystanders (Media3's other customers). Perhaps those customers should move to a different ISP, but how would they pick one? How could any of those other customers pick a new ISP? Media3's AUP looks ok and looks like all the others. How could a custoemr know, in advance, if they'll eventually be on the same class C as another customer that Vixie doesn't like but is acting within the ISP's AUP?? Even if the other customer is a nasty spammer, and even if Media3 is slow or won't terminate the spammer's web site, the fact (if it's true) remains that MAPS is targeting a large group of unrelated customers when only one is a spammer. The others are just poor innocent bystanders who could not have know in advance that they'd be in the same block of IP numbers as a spammer.
As I read it, I wondered exactly how they did the testing. Of course, they didn't give details (even worse than MindCraft). Notice the words "blocked just 2 percent of 922 spam messages sent". In the case of MAPS, the important question is who did the sending? I'm guessing that they transmitted spam that they had harvested.
MAPS has put a lot of pressure on ISPs, perhaps with underhanded or questionable tactics. It good to see that slashdot with its giant readship is putting a bit of pressure onto MAPS about its questionable actions.
I've got a tiny block of IP numbers, and I know I'd be really pissed off if MAPS decided to block the entire class C range that just happened to contain my site, because a spammer operated on an IP number within that range.
So forgive my ignorance of the terminology, what exactly is a War Room layout anyways?
TheIndex DOES have personal sites, the one above sounds like it will become another one. The problem here is that 99 and 44/100ths percent pure of all personal sites are also pure crap. 12 year old script kiddies and so on. I can state this as a fact after wading through over 100,000 of them.
<flame mode on> (I hope I don't lose too much karma over this....)
I'm guessing that 99.44% crap isn't actually based on having viewed 100k pages (keeping a tally as you go). Even if the crap is 99.44%, some of the very best and most informative pages on the web are in the 0.66% (I believe it's more) personal pages that are well made. Most commercial pages usually don't give you a whole lot of info about a particular topic, and it's quite rare to see a good discussion of how to really compare solutions to a problem, as vendors will try to only sell you their own solution (even if it's inferior), and commercial publishers have a long history or favoring their advertisers, and often care a lot more about page-views than really helping anyone.
So Dennis, even if you have viewed 99440 crap pages (166 hours at 6 seconds each), my point is that you have a very bad attitude towards personal pages, where a small portion are some of the best and most informative pages on the web!. One or two good personal pages relating a real person's actual experiences and tips solving a particular problem is a lot more valuable than hundreds of commercial pages that only try to hawk their wares without really helping you understand and learn anything. I believe it's even a lot more valuable than a dozen zdnet-style product reviews.
Even if you do index the good personal pages (despite your attitude), the sad truth is that the bar has been raised for search engines. What you have today may have been pretty good a couple years ago when you started. Google has really raised peoples expectations, and it's looking like the others are catching up to google's excellent performance. You still have a lot of work to do. I'd suggest you start by rethinking how you judge the value of web pages.
Yes, you are right, though it doesn't explain lycos. I was about to slam you for not trying an Inktomi-based search and posting the results.... but I tried to do the same, and it's damn difficult to tell if someone's using Inktomi or not. I found (via google) this out-of-date list. Inktomi has a list of partners, and yahoo's on the list, but it doesn't say what services each partner actually uses. This page at Inktomi mentions that AOL, iWon, MSN, and more (aprarantly 125) are using their search (it's mentioned in the top yellow box on the right side of the page). So, with that in mind, let's give these three a try and see if they product any porn sites with a query for "black bear":
- AOL's results list Condos, T-shirts, AllAlaskanGifts (paid adverts), pages about actual black bears, the B&B, Hunting, Campgrounds (not the nude one from yahoo's present search), wildlife and conservation. Pretty good...
- iWon's results page displays nothing if Javascript is disabled. I gotta get that
javascript popup filtering junkbuster patch installed. For the sake of this slashdot post, I'm turning javascript back on for a moment: hmm, they're doing funny stuff and that link may not take you directly to a results page.... easy enough to do the search, but here's what I'm seeing: page about different types of bears, lodging per state, travel info, photos and articles about american and alaskan black bears, more stuff about american black bears, american bear association, dietart habits of bears, wildlife park, black bear systems (a company, funny that none of the other searches turned this one up in their top results), campground, an inn, web design company named black bear, more stuff about bears and camping. So far one of the best search results in this "black bear" benchmark, and not a single porn site yet (neglecting yahoo's return of a clothing-option campground with black bear in the name), but still one more chance for porn at MSN.......
- and here's MSN's results (damnit, went to MSN before turning javascript back off, going to shut if off right now.. ok), so let's see how MSN did: Univ of Maine Athletics (mascott is a black bear), more pages about univ of maine, info about diff species of bears, research about animal social systems, stuff about yellowstone, miccesota wince shute wildlife sanctuary, even more pages about univ of maine, the sanctuary in minnesota again, and the texas zoo
Ok, three strikes. You're Out!! Inktomi's site claims these three are using it's search, and not a single porn site linked on any of the first-page search results.I did read the original post, and admittedly his point was that his friend tried "black bear" on yahoo 6 months ago and got porn, but for crying out loud, how fucking difficult is it to actually visit the search engine and type in BLACK BEAR and see for yourself if it really dishes up porn links? Ok, not everyone knows HTML to include nice formatting and links in their messages, but it's pretty simple to visit a search engine and actually see if it dishes up porn, instead of posting about how a third party accomplished this feat half a year ago!
(ok, rant mode off, we all know the cronological order and moderation system reward early postings)
I think it's pretty safe to say that one doesn't risk getting linked to porn when searching for "black bear" these days, and I'm skeptical that this condition really existed 6 months ago on yahoo. Some search engines (notably yahoo and MSN) have problems with wasting valuable browser screen space with redundant links, at least in this simple "black bear" benchmark. For a while now I've believe google was the best, but I'm pleasantly suprised to see that other search engines are doing quite well.
A while ago, a couple people mentioned that someone had taken my domain name and was selling it. It turns out that, not being pronouncable, PRJC is a common misspelling, and these bastards are squatting on it, along with nearly every other imaginable combination of four letters. I sent them an email asking if they'd be willing to sell PRJC, thinking maybe I'd throw $100 or maybe even $200 at it... more than ten times what they probably paid for it in their bulk purchasing. They wanted $2000. They were willing to entertain "reasonable" offers, which more or less means four digits.
Lately, I've been doing a little bit of looking at the web logs, and it looks like the traffic comes from more or less three places:
- Search Engines: vast majority of visitors leave quickly
- Links: this how people who really are interested in the site usually find us
- Archiver Programs: a lot of people run programs like Teleport Pro to grab a complete copy of the site
From that, I'd suggest that MCMay has a valuable point that search engines' results are much more important than the domain name, links from other sites are the most valuable. Fortunately, we get quite a few links because I've spent years slowly building up quite a number of pages with lots of info.In the last several months, we've started selling parts, circuit boards and kits for a couple the projects, and it certainly seems like the best way to spend money to promote the site is with an affiliate program. I'll probably end up doing a bit of cgi coding sometime in the next several months and add something like this. Even if we end up sending out $100/month (if we actually sold enough stuff in a month to pay that much, I could quit my day job and work on the web site full time!).... that'd be a lot better use of money than giving it to those damn squatters.
So, dear reader, if you've got any experience setting up one of these affiliate programs or you've had good or bad experience participating in them, please drop me a message with your experiences.
The subject of "harm" is perhaps one place to look. In the case of check fraud, the money or property probably won't be recovered, or only partially recovered, and either the bank or account holder will take a loss. In the case of spam, a whole lot of users press delete, maybe an ISP bears some bandwidth or mail server load (low incremental cost), and maybe a couple stupid suckers fall for whatever scam the message is hawking, and take a minor loss, but from their own action (any they probably learn something from it).
Now this guy crashed someone server by sending too much stuff so quickly, so there is some real harm, but 7 years in jail? I'd personally like to see him do at least a little time, perhaps only to strike some fear into all the other spammers out there, but 7 years sounds pretty damn harsh.
On to Yahoo! and Lycos he goes, enters the search "black bear". Guess how many porn sites he got back?
Ok, now this I gotta see. Here's yahoo's results:
- Black Bear Cabin Rentals - manages and rents privately owned cabins located in the mountains of North Georgia.
- Big Black Bear Shop - offering plush Teddy Bears and stuffed toys.
- Black Bear Campground - offers camping in Orange County, New York.
- Black Bear Campground - enjoy the sights, sounds and recreation available
in the area.
- Black Bear Camp & Lodge - clothing optional private campground and
bunkhouse for adult men. --ok, but not really porn
- Black Bear Review - international literary magazine for the concerned poet
and artist.
- Black Bear Camp & Lodge - clothing optional private campground and
bunkhouse for adult men.
- Black Bear Diner - offers a sample menu and locations.
- Black Bear Diner - offers a sample menu and locations.
Yahoo seems to duplicate the same couple resources over and over again, not so good compared to their competition.Lycos did pretty well also, here's the lycos results:
- The American Bear Association (ABA) home page - The home page of The
American Bear Association, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting
the well-being of bears and all wildlife through a better understanding.
- Black Bear...American Black Bear...Michigan Black Bear - GarLyn Farm
ZOOlogical Park now features american black bear. Photo's, information, and
links to more sites about black bear and other animals.
- NEW NABC INDEX - The mission of the North American Bear Center is to
enhance the understanding of the general public of the habits, needs and environment of bears in
North America.
- Wildlife Endangered Species - Black Bear - they are a rare sight in Texas, the black bear is the
most common kind of bear in the United States. Black bears are considered to be endangered in the
state of Texas. Black bears
- An American Black Bear - Fuzzy, weighing in at more than 400 pounds, lives
at GarLyn Farm ZOOlogical Park. Also links to more bear information.
- Black Bear Conservation Committee - Promoting the restoration of the
Louisiana black bear in its historic range, through education, research,
and habitat management.
- Working With Wildlife - Black Bear - NC State University - Notes about
wildlife management of the Black Bear.
- American Black Bear - (Encarta® Concise Encyclopedia Article)
- American Black Bear - Fact sheet from "About the Animals" where information on a large variety of
animals can be obtained, from present day habitat to estimated populations.
- Black Bear Paging Service - Providing local paging service, products and accessories for West
Virginia and southern Ohio. A member of SoutherNet Association of paging.
- Black Bear Lodge - Located on Little St. Germaine Lake out of St. Germaine WI. A four season resort.
They have fishing, golfing, hunting, skiing, and snowmobiling nearby.
- Black Bear Inn, South Lake Tahoe - The Inn is nestled on a wooded acre, offering luxury
accommodations in a rustic, mountain setting. Black Bear Inn's main lodge has five generous guest
rooms, and there are three cabins on the grounds
- Black Bear B&B - Located in the scenic Sunday River Valley, on Sunday River Road, the Black Bear
offers an alternative to guests who appreciate being within two miles of one of the East's
outstanding ski areas, Sunday
- Black Bear Design - Design professional web sites for affordable rates. All artwork is custom
artwork; no clip art is used.
Looks like Lycos is doing pretty well...I also tried google, and their results are pretty good also.
What's amazing is that someone would post such a comment and not even bother trying the search. Come on, it's pretty damn simple.
"for 99% of us, the most intriguing thing we do online is buy things"
People actually do many other interesting things on-line, and here's some of them:
- Many folks read and contribute opinions to public or semi-public discussion forums, as you and I have done here. Perhaps it is less than
in the glory days of usenet, but it's certainly
a healthy percentage. Public discussing boards are common at many websites, and they tend to be filled with comments. That's no tiny fraction of users.
- Most users exchange private messages with a limited set of other users. E-mail is used, at least somewhat, by nearly ALL internet users. Many many users, at some point, exchange email with another person whom they would not have met and communicated with in the absence of the internet.
- A good number of people participate in real-time chat or instant messaging. AOL and MS wouldn't have a big IM war if there weren't an aweful lot of "eyeballs" at stake.
- A significant number of people exchange files with one-another. Napster's claimed 40e6 userbase, and actual 500k to 1e6 active-at-any-given-time numbers are very significant. Copyright issues aside, digital data copying creates an exchange of commodities based on abundance instead of scarcity. I personally find this environment of abundance very intriguing.
- A smaller, but meaningful number of users publish their ideas or creative efforts. Personal websites are often lacking content, but there are a good many that are among the most informative sites on the web, at least for their particular topic. Even though this number is small, the benefit is quite substantial, and when you consider the number of readers, the total number of users involved grows quickly.
- A good number of programmers write Free or Open-Source software, which would otherwise not come about with the net. While the number of programmers is small compared to the entire group of users, the combined group of programmers and users of their wares (the full set involved in the communication) is rather large.
I suppose the meaning in your comment revolves around the word "intriguing". It is a sad state of affairs when on-line shopping is more intriguing than these examples of people communicating with other in ways generally not possible with the net, and with people whom they would likely never have known, exchanging ideas that they would not have expressed, or publishing or consuming data they would not have had, had it not been for the internet.It is a topic of much debate if anonymous access is a benefit. For people who can't see much value in the internet beyond on-line shopping, anonymous access must seem like a worthless persuit. In all of these examples listed above, anonymous access can add intriguing possibilities. Some possibilities are for abuse (spam email comes easily to mind), some allow users to exchange copyrighted or contraband material, and others allow people to express themselves and share ideas that they would have been afraid to share otherwise.
The in the subject line, anon.penet.fi was an anonymous remailer. (this paragraph is for the benefit of anyone who wasn't using the net back then.... back with on-line shopping more or less didn't exist) You sent an email, and it would resend it to someone else or to a newsgroup, without any identifying info about you. When someone replied, it would receive the reply and send it to you, in a similarily anonymous way. It was used heavily in the old days of the usenet (before being overrun with spam). It was commononly used by people in various alt.sex... groups, who obviously wanted to talk about their (often kinky) sex interests, without fear of neighbors and workmates learning their identity. There were many other legit uses, sexual abuse recovery discussions come to mind, though open sex related conversations seemed to be one of the largest legit uses. Unfortunately there were many abuses, such as posting hate speach, death threats, etc. I remember when it was shut down, but I've since forgotten the details. Perhaps someone else will post them. For a long time, it was believed that anon.penet.fi would never compromise. The guy running it (wasn't it something like "Julf") claimed he'd delete everything if a court order ever was served. Unfortunately, the court order did happen and enough pressure was applied that the authorities made him comply and they obtained all the data. Many people who had depended on the anonyminity were scared that they would be exposed. The whole anon.penet.fi case certainly is a lesson that in the long run, a central server won't work.
For better or worse, I'm quite interested in the technical aspects of how such an anonymous protocol could be designed. I was unaware of these other projects, fling and the work at zer0knowledge. Had it not been for this slashdot discussion, I probably would not have learned of their existance. Now I have some interesting reading to go do.... but I'll say just one more time: anyone who thinks the most intriguing aspect of the internet is on-line shopping really needs to open their eyes. I know it's less than 99%, and I hope it's a lot less.
Some time ago I read an alertbox column which had an interesting point about gui interfaces (tried for about 15 minutes to locate it again... it's in there somewhere).
Jakob describes the early non-gui interfaces (eg. unix) as "black caves". The user needs to form a mental image in their mind of the the directories, files, and other resources, and then type commands to operate on them with little or no on-screen information, in much the same way you'd have to navigate through a black cave, keeping a mental picture of where you are. He claims the early computer interfaces worked well for engineers, because of their superior ability to form mental models, but ended up being worthless for ordinary users.
Indeed, D & D appeals to people who naturally have this ability to form mental models. Perhaps playing D & D helps one learn and improve their ability to form mental models. I believe the more likely scenario is that the game has a fairly high barrier to entry, in terms of using mental models and imagination, and at least to start playing and enjoy it enough to continue, you either have it or you don't. Considerable time spent playing probably improves one's mental modeling abilities, much like experience using non-gui computer interfaces, but to get started and actually enjoy the game, as a player or DM, you really need to have that ability to envision the D & D world.
Programming computers is certainly a persuit which requires forming mental models. Programming does involve some work to compose the code, and learning to do this is similar to the effort required to learn a natual language, though computer languages are much simpler and have a very limited vocabulary. I believe it is this natural ability for form mental models which makes programming fun for some (whom you refer to as "nerds"), where for most people it seems like very hard work.
Frederick P Brooks writes in The Mythical Man-Month:
Perhaps imagination and mental models are a skill, of maybe it's inate, wired into ones brain from the beginning. Those who have it seem to have it much much moreso that those how have little or none. This ability is the key element that makes programming and role playing fun and interesting, and for the majority of the population without these abilities of mental modeling and a lack of imagination, programming seems like drudgery and D & D seems like a waste of time.
BTW: the movies still sucks.