If the small local ISP is screwing up, and refuses to respond in any useful way despite your best repeated efforts, it sounds like its time to take your business elsewhere, maybe to one of those large ISPs you mentioned.
The only problem is that more large ISPs are doing this than small ones. Large ISPs have teams of executives with nothing better to do than sit around and figure out how else to further screw their customers. Small ISPs are generally too busy trying to keep their infrastructure online for an extended period of time.
Despite what their ads say, the goal of a large corporation is to make the shareholders happy by having steadily increasing profits. They do this by providing "bigger, better, faster", by cutting costs, and by finding additional revenue streams. Unfortunately, this often screws the customer, and in a virtual monopoly, the execs could care less about that.
Forget "bigger, better, faster" in the US because there is virtually no competition and they don't want to spend money on infrastructure upgrades when their customers are already chained to them with no hope of escape.
Cutting costs, well, I for one have a much easier time understanding heavy Indian accents than I did a few years ago.
Finding additional revenue streams, yep that US$0.001 per mis-typed domain name adds up quick when you are looking at 100s of thousands of them per day. The truly clueless will be thankful that the ISP is providing this "service". The average user will be slightly annoyed at worst, but most likely won't care. The rest of us will just start running our own DNS servers, and skip using our ISP's DNS servers all together.
I started running my own DNS servers years ago when mt ISP's DNS servers were becoming non-responsive. Much better response times, and no unwanted redirect crap.
Now, I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with what this city is doing. But I wonder how many people who are criticizing Time Warner over this really understand what they're arguing in favor of. They're arguing in favor of an economic system that is designed to be anti-competitive and to provide services for less than a private company ever could. Given that most seem to be criticizing Time Warner for "not competing", I would say very few understand this.
One could say that they are arguing for the rights of the taxpayers/voters to decide how their local taxes are spent, and what services their local government provides. This is why we have local elections, so that the citizens can decide whether or not their local government can provide desired services that are not otherwise available.
As for the argument of TWC "not competing", if they didn't want to compete with a local government provided service, then they should have established the services the citizens wanted when it was requested. As it stands here, TWC was asked to take the lead, they declined, and now they are crying because their customers decided that TWC's services weren't sufficient and they voted to use their tax dollars to provide for themselves.
TWC felt that the potential customer base was too small to warrant addition investment, and they were proven wrong. Now they are crying at the legislature so that their bad business decision can be reversed.
You might accidentally break the bank. You may want to try putting the server and a rackmount UPS into something like the cases you can find here. Take along a back-up generator. And lots of fans and filters. Spare parts for the server would also be helpful.
Or clean-up the mistakes people can't back themselves out of if they screw the layout in Dreamweaver, etc... "Hey, lets pour through all this machine generated/bloated markup and find where the user screwed the layout", talk about a fun time.
About the only professional sport I like to occasionaly watch is hockey. The other pro sports, while I'm not all that fond of them, I do understand why people would want to watch it, with the exception of basketball. I can't fathom how people enjoy that sport, court is too small, scores are too large.
I am completely unable to grasp the reason there is a large enough potential audience to make pro video gaming profitable. No doubt that the gamers are serious about what they do, I fail to see where the leagues or sponsors are making any profit on their investment. No profit for leagues or sponsors == no pro gaming. Shit man, if I'm gonna spend the time watching someone else play a video game, I may as well be playing it myself.
The thing that I find to be most outrageous is that there are pro video gamers in the first place. Last I checked, they weren't showing up anywhere on ESPN. WTF, was that just some sort of feeble attempt by the game publishers to get more people buying their warez? "Oh, if you get really really good, we will pay you to play video games all day long. (You gotta be in the top 0.0000005% to get that though, in the meantime we will still take your $$$)"
I think that validation should be done on both the server and client side. The client-side validation provides immediate feedback, and a better user experience. If the submit button is disabled, the user is likely to abandon the order WITHOUT reading the form for validation errors, and you may get support calls telling you your app is broken because people can't be bothered to read. (Yes, that's bitterness you perceive.)
Thanks for that reminder. After I implemented the server side validation, we stopped getting bad CC number typos, but did have a few irate customers when their "orders" didn't show up. I even considered disabling the server side validation while I was working on the building the client side validation.
The javascript actually checks the card number as soon as cc field in the form looses focus, onBlur="testCreditCard();", so that the user, (with javascript enabled,) doesn't even get to the submit button before an alert box is displayed if they didn't enter their card number correctly. I kept the other code on the server in the event that someone who has javascript disabled will still get an error message if they enter an invalid card number.
I do like the idea of disabling the submit button if an invalid card number is entered. I may add that in, along with a message by the submit button indicating that the card number is invalid.
In most web apps a user puts in info, presses next and then when something isn't right they be punted back to the same form with maybe a message explaining why. This validation can be handled instantly in traditional apps, giving the user more feedback and better interaction.
Never underestimate the lack of attention that the users will pay to those messages when you do punt them back to the same form and let them know what the problem is. I have a shopping cart that checks to see if the credit card number entered is a valid card number. If the card does not pass it's check digit, the user is returned to the payment form to fill that in again, with a message that the card number was invalid.
While this does prevent running up lots of transaction charges for trying to charge something on a non-existent card due to a typo, many people wouldn't notice the message and would just go off to whatever else they wanted to do without completing the order. We were getting several incomplete orders in the shopping cart each week due to this. After I implemented a little bit of javascript to run the check digit in the browser and throw up an alert for an invalid card number, the problem with incomplete orders in the system vanished. We do still have the number checked on the server as well, just in case someone has javascript disabled.
Yeah, no stress at all when you start getting tons of overdraft charges/notices from your bank because some asshat emptied your bank account without your knowledge. Oh yeah your rent/mortgage/whatever is due a couple of days after you find out, and at the start of a holiday weekend at that.
At least with a regular burglary, or hell even a bank robbery, I know that the money I have in the bank for taking care of rent, bills, fixing/replacing shit because of the burglary is still there. Now if I was home at the time of the burglary, then I would be more worried about cleaning up the bloody mess made when dealing with the intruder, (yes, it is perfectly legal to shoot home invaders where I am at).
She probably clicked on one of the sponsored links. Go ahead, google it and click on all the sponsored links. Most lead you to some insane sign-up requiring your name and e-mail address before allowing you to go any farther. One of them even had "Payment Information" as the 3rd step. One actually did disclose charges up-front, reasonable charges and they actually send CD's in the mail.
Come-on people, you know you want to google it and click on the sponsored links. Each click on the sponsored link costs the advertiser money, and a slashdotting will quickly run these scam sites' ad-words budget past their limits or cost a small fortune.
In the other hand, the botnet owners could decide that will be better to erase the evidence (and the infected people machines in the process) and put the blame on the ones that announced that will clean that mess.. and of course, start a new botnet in new machines without that vulnerability, lowering profits for a while but feeling untouchables after.
But the machines whose drives were erased "hadn't been cleaned yet". That would also be good for the repair shops getting paid to reinstall the OS and setting up firewalls to help prevent such a thing from happening in the future. Sounds like a win-win-win situation, machines get removed from the botnet, techs get paid, ISP's have lower bandwidth utilization.
A simple little primer could also be given to people getting their machines fixed:
1. That is not a nude picture of <Hot Celebrity Name Here>, it is a virus.
2. You do not need to update your flashplayer or whatever to view that video you got a link to in your e-mail from some random stranger. The video does not exist, the update they are trying to push on you is a virus. If you truly need to update your flashplayer or whatever, you will be provided a link to the official site, but google for the correct site anyway.
3. Their is no rich prince in Nigeria that needs your help, it is just some scammer trying to get your money.
4. Your bank is not e-mailing you wanting you to update your account information, if you really think that it is your bank, look up their number in the phone book and call them first to verify.
...
However it seems in practice the elimination process would fall foul of the law.
I'm sure I'm not alone when I say, "So?"
<sarcasm>But don't you know, all those people with zombie machines will suddenly start complaining when their computers start running faster and they have better internet connection speeds.</sarcasm>
I do have to agree, so what if it runs foul of the law. If the relevant laws were effective, we wouldn't have the botnet problem in the first place.
Just how many people will complain once they get better performance from their machines that are no longer owned.
Slashdot Mirror
Margin of error in the poll results.
- or -
That's the percentage of truly stupid people in the population.
If it deters people from applying for city jobs, it could prove to be a good thing.
-jcr
But would it also deter the idiots from applying? Do you really want all your city's jobs filled by idiots?
Do use books from gutenberg.org. Inkscape/Gimp the photos to make them look antique, and steampunk the drive cases.
Can we say small air horn.
They are far worse than ax murderers as their victims don't have to put up with their ilk more than once.
The only problem is that more large ISPs are doing this than small ones. Large ISPs have teams of executives with nothing better to do than sit around and figure out how else to further screw their customers. Small ISPs are generally too busy trying to keep their infrastructure online for an extended period of time.
Despite what their ads say, the goal of a large corporation is to make the shareholders happy by having steadily increasing profits. They do this by providing "bigger, better, faster", by cutting costs, and by finding additional revenue streams. Unfortunately, this often screws the customer, and in a virtual monopoly, the execs could care less about that.
Forget "bigger, better, faster" in the US because there is virtually no competition and they don't want to spend money on infrastructure upgrades when their customers are already chained to them with no hope of escape.
Cutting costs, well, I for one have a much easier time understanding heavy Indian accents than I did a few years ago.
Finding additional revenue streams, yep that US$0.001 per mis-typed domain name adds up quick when you are looking at 100s of thousands of them per day. The truly clueless will be thankful that the ISP is providing this "service". The average user will be slightly annoyed at worst, but most likely won't care. The rest of us will just start running our own DNS servers, and skip using our ISP's DNS servers all together.
I started running my own DNS servers years ago when mt ISP's DNS servers were becoming non-responsive. Much better response times, and no unwanted redirect crap.
Now, I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with what this city is doing. But I wonder how many people who are criticizing Time Warner over this really understand what they're arguing in favor of. They're arguing in favor of an economic system that is designed to be anti-competitive and to provide services for less than a private company ever could. Given that most seem to be criticizing Time Warner for "not competing", I would say very few understand this.
One could say that they are arguing for the rights of the taxpayers/voters to decide how their local taxes are spent, and what services their local government provides. This is why we have local elections, so that the citizens can decide whether or not their local government can provide desired services that are not otherwise available.
As for the argument of TWC "not competing", if they didn't want to compete with a local government provided service, then they should have established the services the citizens wanted when it was requested. As it stands here, TWC was asked to take the lead, they declined, and now they are crying because their customers decided that TWC's services weren't sufficient and they voted to use their tax dollars to provide for themselves.
TWC felt that the potential customer base was too small to warrant addition investment, and they were proven wrong. Now they are crying at the legislature so that their bad business decision can be reversed.
You might accidentally break the bank. You may want to try putting the server and a rackmount UPS into something like the cases you can find here. Take along a back-up generator. And lots of fans and filters. Spare parts for the server would also be helpful.
Or clean-up the mistakes people can't back themselves out of if they screw the layout in Dreamweaver, etc... "Hey, lets pour through all this machine generated/bloated markup and find where the user screwed the layout", talk about a fun time.
About the only professional sport I like to occasionaly watch is hockey. The other pro sports, while I'm not all that fond of them, I do understand why people would want to watch it, with the exception of basketball. I can't fathom how people enjoy that sport, court is too small, scores are too large.
I am completely unable to grasp the reason there is a large enough potential audience to make pro video gaming profitable. No doubt that the gamers are serious about what they do, I fail to see where the leagues or sponsors are making any profit on their investment. No profit for leagues or sponsors == no pro gaming. Shit man, if I'm gonna spend the time watching someone else play a video game, I may as well be playing it myself.
It doesn't take that long to hit 5Gig when the cat lays on the keyboardddddddddddddddddddddddddd
The thing that I find to be most outrageous is that there are pro video gamers in the first place. Last I checked, they weren't showing up anywhere on ESPN. WTF, was that just some sort of feeble attempt by the game publishers to get more people buying their warez? "Oh, if you get really really good, we will pay you to play video games all day long. (You gotta be in the top 0.0000005% to get that though, in the meantime we will still take your $$$)"
Does anyone here use their ISP's DNS servers anymore?
And the effects of that UAC are different from Microsoft's UAC how? OK, I will grant that no one has actually exploded yet.
I'm thinking it may do quite allright as a cheap touchscreen kiosk type of thing.
I think that validation should be done on both the server and client side. The client-side validation provides immediate feedback, and a better user experience. If the submit button is disabled, the user is likely to abandon the order WITHOUT reading the form for validation errors, and you may get support calls telling you your app is broken because people can't be bothered to read. (Yes, that's bitterness you perceive.)
Thanks for that reminder. After I implemented the server side validation, we stopped getting bad CC number typos, but did have a few irate customers when their "orders" didn't show up. I even considered disabling the server side validation while I was working on the building the client side validation.
The javascript actually checks the card number as soon as cc field in the form looses focus, onBlur="testCreditCard();", so that the user, (with javascript enabled,) doesn't even get to the submit button before an alert box is displayed if they didn't enter their card number correctly. I kept the other code on the server in the event that someone who has javascript disabled will still get an error message if they enter an invalid card number.
I do like the idea of disabling the submit button if an invalid card number is entered. I may add that in, along with a message by the submit button indicating that the card number is invalid.
In most web apps a user puts in info, presses next and then when something isn't right they be punted back to the same form with maybe a message explaining why. This validation can be handled instantly in traditional apps, giving the user more feedback and better interaction.
Never underestimate the lack of attention that the users will pay to those messages when you do punt them back to the same form and let them know what the problem is. I have a shopping cart that checks to see if the credit card number entered is a valid card number. If the card does not pass it's check digit, the user is returned to the payment form to fill that in again, with a message that the card number was invalid.
While this does prevent running up lots of transaction charges for trying to charge something on a non-existent card due to a typo, many people wouldn't notice the message and would just go off to whatever else they wanted to do without completing the order. We were getting several incomplete orders in the shopping cart each week due to this. After I implemented a little bit of javascript to run the check digit in the browser and throw up an alert for an invalid card number, the problem with incomplete orders in the system vanished. We do still have the number checked on the server as well, just in case someone has javascript disabled.
Yeah, no stress at all when you start getting tons of overdraft charges/notices from your bank because some asshat emptied your bank account without your knowledge. Oh yeah your rent/mortgage/whatever is due a couple of days after you find out, and at the start of a holiday weekend at that.
At least with a regular burglary, or hell even a bank robbery, I know that the money I have in the bank for taking care of rent, bills, fixing/replacing shit because of the burglary is still there. Now if I was home at the time of the burglary, then I would be more worried about cleaning up the bloody mess made when dealing with the intruder, (yes, it is perfectly legal to shoot home invaders where I am at).
Well hell, there goes one of my beta test subjects.
Forward those specs to me when you get them. I have a few beta test subjects in mind.
She probably clicked on one of the sponsored links. Go ahead, google it and click on all the sponsored links. Most lead you to some insane sign-up requiring your name and e-mail address before allowing you to go any farther. One of them even had "Payment Information" as the 3rd step. One actually did disclose charges up-front, reasonable charges and they actually send CD's in the mail.
Come-on people, you know you want to google it and click on the sponsored links. Each click on the sponsored link costs the advertiser money, and a slashdotting will quickly run these scam sites' ad-words budget past their limits or cost a small fortune.
We were before the civil war.
In the other hand, the botnet owners could decide that will be better to erase the evidence (and the infected people machines in the process) and put the blame on the ones that announced that will clean that mess.. and of course, start a new botnet in new machines without that vulnerability, lowering profits for a while but feeling untouchables after.
But the machines whose drives were erased "hadn't been cleaned yet". That would also be good for the repair shops getting paid to reinstall the OS and setting up firewalls to help prevent such a thing from happening in the future. Sounds like a win-win-win situation, machines get removed from the botnet, techs get paid, ISP's have lower bandwidth utilization.
A simple little primer could also be given to people getting their machines fixed:
1. That is not a nude picture of <Hot Celebrity Name Here>, it is a virus.
2. You do not need to update your flashplayer or whatever to view that video you got a link to in your e-mail from some random stranger. The video does not exist, the update they are trying to push on you is a virus. If you truly need to update your flashplayer or whatever, you will be provided a link to the official site, but google for the correct site anyway.
3. Their is no rich prince in Nigeria that needs your help, it is just some scammer trying to get your money.
4. Your bank is not e-mailing you wanting you to update your account information, if you really think that it is your bank, look up their number in the phone book and call them first to verify.
...
However it seems in practice the elimination process would fall foul of the law.
I'm sure I'm not alone when I say, "So?"
<sarcasm>But don't you know, all those people with zombie machines will suddenly start complaining when their computers start running faster and they have better internet connection speeds.</sarcasm>
I do have to agree, so what if it runs foul of the law. If the relevant laws were effective, we wouldn't have the botnet problem in the first place.
Just how many people will complain once they get better performance from their machines that are no longer owned.