I personally hate C++ with a vengeance, because I'm at the wrong end of the learning curve (and have been since g++ first came out).
I reluctantly agree that something as complex as OOo or Mozilla has no choice, really, to use C++ in todays market place.
However, I firmly believe that anything low-level enough to require OS specific ifdefs should be in a plain ole C module with a seperate test suite. In the pre-C++ days of Mozilla, I could isolate, fix and verify an issue in about an hour. Now, it's really hit or miss, with misses being predominant. I know that tells a lot about my C++ skills, but I do tend to be a guy that finds really nasty OS specific stuff in the language of my choice:-)
The bottom line is that you have to pick the language that your most proficient coders and bug fixers prefer. For complex stuff, that means C++, for low level stuff, that usually means C.
And I have to insist on letting the proficient staff pick the language. I see way to much C++ code that compiles with the C compiler if you take the// comments out and change all occurances of "class" to "struct", so I personally feel that the easy market access to C++ programmers is overrated.
You're probably right with the assertion of the number of vhosts per IP limiting IIS more than Apache (on a decent OS like BSD or Linux). However, I have a hard time believing that this would outweigh the numeric advantage the mass-vhosting web server would have. As you say, bandwdith limitations will kick in way before operating system overhead kicks in (and I for one do not think weighing a gazillion of never-viewed web sites on a single IP address should count as heavy as one {Amazon|Slashdot|CNN} sized web server).
Hmmm... If a single web hosting company can influence the stats by that much, there is something seriously wrong with the stats.
One approach would be to count unique IP addresses (i.e., vhosted sites would not be counted twice).
But even better, it would be way cool if Google's linking metrics could be brought in. That way, a rough guesstimate of the amount of information served by all the web servers could be established.
There's lies, damn lies and statistics. I remember when a sales droid walked up to me and recommended I switch to IIS because it was the dominant web server. He had brought this list of high profile IIS installations, and on the surface it looked impressive. When I confronted him with how many of those still had Apache or UNIX somewhere in the path (either as a firewall, server for static images or ads), he started mumbling incoherently.
Several people have pointed out the issue of key revocation (you'll find it very hard to type).
But what's worse in *this* particular case is the demonstration that latent finger prints can near-trivially be developed into a fingerprint glove that fools the device. Just picture it... A would-be thieve would watch you in the supermarket, picking up a bottle of Coke, put it back because you do prefer Mountain Dew after all. He picks up that bottle by the neck, pays for it with cash. From there on he could plunder your credit card.
One can only hope that the rollout will be done in a more responsible way that the Korean K12 Internet Access initiative. If you're the unlucky recipient of spam, chances are that a lot of it is sent to you courtesy of the Korean school system. All 16,000 schools got a preconfigured PC with some Windows toolkit on it that will connect anyone on the Internet to anyone else for any purpose. Kewl. Of course, none of the educators were educated into being good Internet citizens, and with English skills at a minimum the non-Korean speaking world now has a problem.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
The parent will probably be modded "Funny", but there is a good source for debate here...
Obviously, there are boundaries to what the public should expect back from its tax dollars at work.
The public would not take kindly to minuteman design plans to be revealed under the Freedom of Information Act (in fact, that act is pretty specific in this respect, but since it was intended to repair the situation where government officials were hiding information the public should have access to, a lot of thought went into defining those boundaries; unlike the more general laws that deal with public use of government sponsored activities).
It would probably be a good thing if the House looked into this whole thing. Yeah, I know. I'll be dressing up warmly just in case hell freezes over.
Hmmm, didn't Microsoft go on record that they supported taxpayer funded research being freely available provided it would not be encumbered by the GPL?
Or would that just have been a divide and conquer approach to make sure the free software camps keep fighting each other rather than joining forces?
I personally shudder at the thought that taxpayer money should go to subsidizing software hoarding (and that's any taxpayer money, not just US).
Oh well. This won't impact open software one way of the other until patents get thrown into the mix. Closed source has never hurt open source.
I've got the commemorative T-Shirt *and* CD from the first Mozilla party. The CD, of course, is for history only. It does remind me of how far it has come in the mean time...
The t-shirt is gorgeous, black fabric, the industrial backdrop with the star, and the text "Mozilla party member".
Hmmm, I've personally come full circle on searching versus the categorization approach. I think this has mostly to do with the simple fact that categorizing stuff is expensive, and thus needs more revenue to sustain the service.
And that requirement usually results in more ads to be thrown in. Which means, weeding through more and more inappropriate hits as time goes on. I've wound up once too often on a vendors web site whose product I have already eliminated from my shortlist.
Thus, the success in attracting advertizer revenue is precisely what does a service in for me.
Frankly, if Google went subscription I'd buy it to the exclusion of all other search engines, provided my money prevents me from seeing any paid-for links.
Remember what got the ball rolling with car manufacturer liability. Ford manufactured a car that roasted its occupants when hit from behind. Ford figured it would be cheaper to pay the victims than it would be to fix the car. When this surfaced, public outcry did the rest.
Most cases aren't as clear-cut. Continuing on the car industry example, can you hold a vendor liable if you're not wearing seatbelts, and suffer serious injury as a result? Probably not. Can you sue if you are injured in a parking accident by the airbag? Probably not. Now, why were you injured in the first place by said airbag? Because they are inflating with the power required to restrain a person not wearing seatbelts. Anything wrong with this picture? You bet. The consumer has a responsibility of his own, in this case: wearing the seat belt.
Liability is eventually determined by a judge and a jury, and in corner cases it's just a lottery, which is why car manufacturers err on the side of safety -- theirs, not the safety of the customers who are wearing seat belts.
The same thing is looming on the horizon when a software lemon law gets introduced. Vendors will still go to great lengths to skirt their responsibility, and even if that works to "improve" the product, chances are the consumer will be hurt in the end.
For a preview of things to come, look at Microsoft's security fix to Outlook. It is available, so like seat belts, common sense holds that if you don't apply it, you willfully accept the consequences. But unlike seat belts (which are at worst an inconvenience), applying this patch will cripple Outlook beyond being usable.
You can't win this one. Frankly, I'd settle for a law that demands truth in advertizing w.r.t software products.
I'd say that the underlying issues as far as patents are concerned are pretty much identical. The question is not: do we want Roundup(tm) resistent crops, humice or hyperlinks in the first place? Regardless of your stance towards them, chances are you'll answer that question differently depending on what the subject is. I for one am abhorred by the humouse idea, but I'd be equally abhorred if the humouse was in the public domain.
The real moral question is: do we want to allow individuals (or as the case may be, legal entities) controlling said creations based on patent law alone?
If "terminal server" (hah! that meant something completely different before MS usurped the term) is your only goal, you may want to try rdesktop under the X emulator under MacOS X. I think it'd be lighter weight.
I use rdesktop to access some corporate goop that only runs on Windoze, and it's gorgeous. Unlike the MS terminal server client, you can even use weird screen resolutions like 700x500 to make apps fit in your host window without scroll bars.
Unfortunately, the quirks can be real show stoppers. VMware has the edge in that it actually is a useful environment if you have to occasionally use Windows, and need a bit of performance. As long as VMware sort of works under FreeBSD (yeah, I know, it's official and BSD is dying; nothing to see here, please move on), I'm happy with it.
Bochs is pretty impressive in that it actually works and actually does useful things, but I wouldn't dream of using it for serious work as it stands now. It's just too slow, and plex86 is just too far out.
I did work on Wine way back when and I still like its idea, but portability really is a huge issue.
None of these emulators are at the point where I can start contributing anything useful. The gorgeous thing about Wine is that, once you get it to run at all, you can start addressing things that don't work for you, and work in that area can benefit all the emulators. As things stand now, you're pioneering to get any of them to run Solitaire under FreeBSD, and that just hurts too much to consider scratching.
May 7 10:13:40 postfix/smtp[21587]: DDA0282CC: to=, relay=listserv1.networkpromotion.com[142.166.168.2 13], delay=197242, status=deferred (host listserv1.networkpromotion.com[142.166.168.213] said: 451-System error, mail not delivered. 451 Error opening 'MD_LS3-16310300.TMP': There is not enough space on the disk.)
They're dorks. Spammers do come in flavors (and some even double up in multiple categories; there are at least two mainsleaze^H^H^H^H^H^Hstream e-mail marketing companies that have seperate domain names and IP addresses for squeaky clean opt-in e-mail lists and honest to god spam). It's been a while since I read Nadine's sorry tale, but ISTR both companies figured in it.
Thanks for the pointer, I didn't have them in my filters just yet.
I still suggest you do the experiment. It worked for me (and for my Nadine -- sigh)
There is something fundamentally wrong with the market if you can buy a printer with ink cartridge for the same amount of money that buys you just a cartridge. For most users, TCO is dominated by the cost of cartridges.
I'll leave it to the respective zealots to point out that this is what makes capitalism great or to point out that it sucks, I don't care.
I'm just wondering how this market survives at these price points. All the consumer inkjet printers suffer from it do some degree, and I would not expect that to be sustainable.
The only thing I really hold against HP is the way they squandered the Apollo name. HP manufactured printers that suck to the point they don't want their name on it get branded as Apollo, and back when HP acquired Apollo no one expected the name to be dragged through the mud that bad.
The trick of creating company specific addresses works if you have full control of you e-mail domain. If you don't, it's possible that plussed addresses do work. If your e-mail address is john.doe@company.com, enter john.doe+evilcompany@company.com when Evil corporation wants your e-mail address to download, say, their Evil Player.
If plussed addresses don't work at your provider, bug them.
A really sophisticated way of doing this is to use TMDA, which extends this concept into time-limited addresses as well as more classic notions of "tagging" an e-mail address.
Spammers are very apt at verifying that their address lists actually work. Ever get a spam that seems really outlandish? A spammer asking for assistance in time travel? A kook that proclaims the end of the world is nigh? A totally empty message body?
Chances are they were just checking to see if the mail bounced.
If you have your own domain, try this experiment. Create an e-mail account, say: john.doe@your.domain. On your home page, publish the e-mail addresses john.doe@your.domain and jane.doe@your.domain. Make sure mail for your virtual jane is bounced with a "no such user" error. Watch how long it takes for john.doe to start getting spam. Check your logs for attempts to deliver to either john or jane.
If your experience matches mine, spam for john will be at least tenfold of what jane gets after about a month. After about a year, the relative difference will level off, but if by that time you create jane.doe@your.domain you will probably notice that she is very popular with spammers who do not speak your language.
One can debate which is worse, the bombardment of spam in a language you can read or the bombardment of spam in a language you can't, but feeding spammers fake addresses will only "hurt" the extremely stupid ones.
Not that there's any shortage of those. I get spam advertizing piano lessons in South Buenos Aires or airco repair in Hong Kong, and I own no airco or piano.
Please, don't pull domain names out of a hat. There is an official fake address that you can use: me@privacy.net See their website for more info.
A friend of mine runs a domain that happens to be used a lot by people who think they enter a non-existant domain, and it's driving him nuts. Well, there is some amusement value in noticing how many variations people come up with, but still...
Why is it that Florida seems to attract so many kooks? I mean, sure, nice weather and plenty of old ladies flush with cash, but there must be something in the water to make Florida the scam capital of the world, as well as the spam capital.
Neither the wx nor the abundance of local victims fully explain it.
A friend of mine inherited a bunch of huge (68 MB) Micropolis disks that got stuck in legal limbo. To avoid a huge tax charge they had to be dead by natural causes.
So the company that owned them puts them in a card board box, and drops them three stories down, thinking that would kill them.
A year later my friends asks if he can have the dead drives for parts. Low level formatting showed not a single bad block has developed since the drives were shipped from the factory.
Incredible. I ran one of the things for years in my PC, and later in a MicroVAX 2000. It never died, it just became a bit small over time...
Indeed, I don't care if it renders properly, as long as it serves its purpose (i.e., renders enough text to allow the user to use the web site). For all I care, the HTML that NS3 and IE3 both accepted (with the addition of basic table support) is good enough for me.
I know it is possible to make a page render properly in 99% of the browser market share. But that's not my point. Even if enough talented people are around to do it, a significant percentage of that talent base will not want to. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones.
The argument that you invariably hear when you complain to the person answering webmaster@company.com is that it is too hard to support all browsers. It's their statement, not mine. I've got to operate on the presumption that if they say it's too hard, it's too hard for them. Fair enough.
What I'm asking of them is that they not worry about what it looks like if they think they cannot support the browser. In most cases, a simple page with one gif and a form will take care of the functionality.
But nooooo, what you see as an end user is a metric shitload of JavaScript trying to the the right thing but failing horribly. It's the botched attempts to make it work that add insult to injury.
Heck, I've sent constructive mails to webmasters informing them that their web site didn't work, and that even IE5.5 misrendered it to the point of being useless, and I got "upgrade to IE" back for an answer.
Webmasters often tell me they don't care if it renders properly on anything other then their system. If they feel that way, what's wrong with presenting everyone who is not using an Pentium IV at 2.2GHz on a 1024Kbps ADSL line with IE 6.0 with a page that renders on Lynx?
It has often been noted that many web designers don't care about the blind. And why should they? The blind only make up an insignificant fraction of the market. I believe the world would be a better place if the blind were catered for on web sites that offer basic functionality. I'm not asking for braille versions of Flash Pacman animations, I'm asking for all of the market being served at least basic functionality.
And indeed, I don't care if I have to live without flashy animations as a result of choosing Mozilla on FreeBSD. I just want to report my meter readings, book an airline seat, or be able to look up a telephone number without being forced to walk over to a different PC to boot Win95. And I'm not even blind, and wouldn't want to think about how blind people have to perform those simple tasks. Support for the blind would be thrown in for free if sites that refuse to deal with other browsers at least provide something simple that works.
I really wonder what APIs or software code in the media player or IE AMD, a HARDWARE vendor relies on... I really do...
I used to wonder about this line of thinking too. But the answer struck me light a bolt of lightning when I remembered the CTL3D issue.
Remember the good ole' days when NT was the answer to the stability problems that had plagued Win 3.1 users? One of the issues that surfaced consistently in that period was incompatibilities between different revisions of CTL3D.DLL. You would have a stable system with the app of your choice, install another app, and poof, the first one dies. Or dies when started up *after* the first one, but not if started *before*. A nightmare for tech support staff.
That's what this CEO is worried about. In Linux terms, it'd be as if every app came with its own glibc, with incompatible API's.
Of course, all of the conflicting CTL3D's with conflicting version numbers originated from Microsoft themselves, but that doesn't make the nightmare any less.:-)
I really don't want to start writing two sets of code again.
No one wants that. Frankly, I don't care if a web page is "optimized" for either browser. Unfortunately, on many commercial sites that optimization happens at the expense of usability.
Now, I rarely care if a page renders okay or not. If I care badly enough, I'll fire up my Win95 box and view the page there. If I don't I'll just move on, to the mutual satisfaction of me and the web designer. Fair enough.
What ticks me off is that sites that want to save money by getting users to use the web for simple things screw up those simple things.
I recently had the option of either phoning in my electricity and gas meter readings, or reporting them on the web. The utility company's web site renders perfectly in Mozilla. After filling out the form, I found that there was no "Send" button. "View Source" was disabled, but I got hold of the contents and found that the complex JavaScript code did nothing more than hit "submit". I crafted a URL that passed the relevant data as "GET" style parameters and fed it to wget. Inspection of the output file showed me that the utility thanked me for reporting my meter readings.
Now, let me summarize my findings:
- there is no server side intelligence to detect using GET instead of the POST the JavaScript implements
- there is no (zero, nil) parameter checking in the JavaScript
- it was faster for me to reverse-engineer the web page than it would have been to boot Win95
This leaves me to wonder: if you don't want to support older browsers but you still want to to save money by having your users use the web instead of phoning in, what's wrong with using a simple <FORM>? Why bother getting the page for the Other browsers pixel perfect?
Few companies have the resources to support all browsers, but they're hurting themselves by not having a simple page for simple problems. Things like reporting meter readings, posting a consumer question or booking a rental car can all be done trivially using plain ole HTML. It's beyond me why webmasters insist on getting it to look pretty on browsers they hate.
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I personally hate C++ with a vengeance, because I'm at the wrong end of the learning curve (and have been since g++ first came out).
:-)
// comments out and change all occurances of "class" to "struct", so I personally feel that the easy market access to C++ programmers is overrated.
I reluctantly agree that something as complex as OOo or Mozilla has no choice, really, to use C++ in todays market place.
However, I firmly believe that anything low-level enough to require OS specific ifdefs should be in a plain ole C module with a seperate test suite. In the pre-C++ days of Mozilla, I could isolate, fix and verify an issue in about an hour. Now, it's really hit or miss, with misses being predominant. I know that tells a lot about my C++ skills, but I do tend to be a guy that finds really nasty OS specific stuff in the language of my choice
The bottom line is that you have to pick the language that your most proficient coders and bug fixers prefer. For complex stuff, that means C++, for low level stuff, that usually means C.
And I have to insist on letting the proficient staff pick the language. I see way to much C++ code that compiles with the C compiler if you take the
You're probably right with the assertion of the number of vhosts per IP limiting IIS more than Apache (on a decent OS like BSD or Linux). However, I have a hard time believing that this would outweigh the numeric advantage the mass-vhosting web server would have. As you say, bandwdith limitations will kick in way before operating system overhead kicks in (and I for one do not think weighing a gazillion of never-viewed web sites on a single IP address should count as heavy as one {Amazon|Slashdot|CNN} sized web server).
Hmmm... If a single web hosting company can influence the stats by that much, there is something seriously wrong with the stats.
One approach would be to count unique IP addresses (i.e., vhosted sites would not be counted twice).
But even better, it would be way cool if Google's linking metrics could be brought in. That way, a rough guesstimate of the amount of information served by all the web servers could be established.
There's lies, damn lies and statistics. I remember when a sales droid walked up to me and recommended I switch to IIS because it was the dominant web server. He had brought this list of high profile IIS installations, and on the surface it looked impressive. When I confronted him with how many of those still had Apache or UNIX somewhere in the path (either as a firewall, server for static images or ads), he started mumbling incoherently.
Or thttpd...
:-)
Even though, arguably, even thttpd has too many features
Several people have pointed out the issue of key revocation (you'll find it very hard to type).
But what's worse in *this* particular case is the demonstration that latent finger prints can near-trivially be developed into a fingerprint glove that fools the device. Just picture it... A would-be thieve would watch you in the supermarket, picking up a bottle of Coke, put it back because you do prefer Mountain Dew after all. He picks up that bottle by the neck, pays for it with cash. From there on he could plunder your credit card.
Sounds scary to me...
Hmmm... Free StarOffice for Chinese kids...
One can only hope that the rollout will be done in a more responsible way that the Korean K12 Internet Access initiative. If you're the unlucky recipient of spam, chances are that a lot of it is sent to you courtesy of the Korean school system. All 16,000 schools got a preconfigured PC with some Windows toolkit on it that will connect anyone on the Internet to anyone else for any purpose. Kewl. Of course, none of the educators were educated into being good Internet citizens, and with English skills at a minimum the non-Korean speaking world now has a problem.
The big question is, of course, why China? Why not make it freely available to any school kid under 18? That would be a huge marketing move.
The parent will probably be modded "Funny", but there is a good source for debate here...
Obviously, there are boundaries to what the public should expect back from its tax dollars at work.
The public would not take kindly to minuteman design plans to be revealed under the Freedom of Information Act (in fact, that act is pretty specific in this respect, but since it was intended to repair the situation where government officials were hiding information the public should have access to, a lot of thought went into defining those boundaries; unlike the more general laws that deal with public use of government sponsored activities).
It would probably be a good thing if the House looked into this whole thing. Yeah, I know. I'll be dressing up warmly just in case hell freezes over.
Hey, it's NASA sponsored, remember?
Paperwork is probably the number one ingredient.
Hmmm, didn't Microsoft go on record that they supported taxpayer funded research being freely available provided it would not be encumbered by the GPL?
Or would that just have been a divide and conquer approach to make sure the free software camps keep fighting each other rather than joining forces?
I personally shudder at the thought that taxpayer money should go to subsidizing software hoarding (and that's any taxpayer money, not just US).
Oh well. This won't impact open software one way of the other until patents get thrown into the mix. Closed source has never hurt open source.
I've got the commemorative T-Shirt *and* CD from the first Mozilla party. The CD, of course, is for history only. It does remind me of how far it has come in the mean time...
The t-shirt is gorgeous, black fabric, the industrial backdrop with the star, and the text "Mozilla party member".
Both are prized trophys!
Hmmm, I've personally come full circle on searching versus the categorization approach. I think this has mostly to do with the simple fact that categorizing stuff is expensive, and thus needs more revenue to sustain the service.
And that requirement usually results in more ads to be thrown in. Which means, weeding through more and more inappropriate hits as time goes on. I've wound up once too often on a vendors web site whose product I have already eliminated from my shortlist.
Thus, the success in attracting advertizer revenue is precisely what does a service in for me.
Frankly, if Google went subscription I'd buy it to the exclusion of all other search engines, provided my money prevents me from seeing any paid-for links.
Remember what got the ball rolling with car manufacturer liability. Ford manufactured a car that roasted its occupants when hit from behind. Ford figured it would be cheaper to pay the victims than it would be to fix the car. When this surfaced, public outcry did the rest.
Most cases aren't as clear-cut. Continuing on the car industry example, can you hold a vendor liable if you're not wearing seatbelts, and suffer serious injury as a result? Probably not. Can you sue if you are injured in a parking accident by the airbag? Probably not. Now, why were you injured in the first place by said airbag? Because they are inflating with the power required to restrain a person not wearing seatbelts. Anything wrong with this picture? You bet. The consumer has a responsibility of his own, in this case: wearing the seat belt.
Liability is eventually determined by a judge and a jury, and in corner cases it's just a lottery, which is why car manufacturers err on the side of safety -- theirs, not the safety of the customers who are wearing seat belts.
The same thing is looming on the horizon when a software lemon law gets introduced. Vendors will still go to great lengths to skirt their responsibility, and even if that works to "improve" the product, chances are the consumer will be hurt in the end.
For a preview of things to come, look at Microsoft's security fix to Outlook. It is available, so like seat belts, common sense holds that if you don't apply it, you willfully accept the consequences. But unlike seat belts (which are at worst an inconvenience), applying this patch will cripple Outlook beyond being usable.
You can't win this one. Frankly, I'd settle for a law that demands truth in advertizing w.r.t software products.
I'd say that the underlying issues as far as patents are concerned are pretty much identical. The question is not: do we want Roundup(tm) resistent crops, humice or hyperlinks in the first place? Regardless of your stance towards them, chances are you'll answer that question differently depending on what the subject is. I for one am abhorred by the humouse idea, but I'd be equally abhorred if the humouse was in the public domain.
The real moral question is: do we want to allow individuals (or as the case may be, legal entities) controlling said creations based on patent law alone?
If "terminal server" (hah! that meant something completely different before MS usurped the term) is your only goal, you may want to try rdesktop under the X emulator under MacOS X. I think it'd be lighter weight.
I use rdesktop to access some corporate goop that only runs on Windoze, and it's gorgeous. Unlike the MS terminal server client, you can even use weird screen resolutions like 700x500 to make apps fit in your host window without scroll bars.
Unfortunately, the quirks can be real show stoppers. VMware has the edge in that it actually is a useful environment if you have to occasionally use Windows, and need a bit of performance. As long as VMware sort of works under FreeBSD (yeah, I know, it's official and BSD is dying; nothing to see here, please move on), I'm happy with it.
Bochs is pretty impressive in that it actually works and actually does useful things, but I wouldn't dream of using it for serious work as it stands now. It's just too slow, and plex86 is just too far out.
I did work on Wine way back when and I still like its idea, but portability really is a huge issue.
None of these emulators are at the point where I can start contributing anything useful. The gorgeous thing about Wine is that, once you get it to run at all, you can start addressing things that don't work for you, and work in that area can benefit all the emulators. As things stand now, you're pioneering to get any of them to run Solitaire under FreeBSD, and that just hurts too much to consider scratching.
Maybe this has something to do with it?
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May 7 10:13:40 postfix/smtp[21587]: DDA0282CC: to=, relay=listserv1.networkpromotion.com[142.166.168.
They're dorks. Spammers do come in flavors (and some even double up in multiple categories; there are at least two mainsleaze^H^H^H^H^H^Hstream e-mail marketing companies that have seperate domain names and IP addresses for squeaky clean opt-in e-mail lists and honest to god spam). It's been a while since I read Nadine's sorry tale, but ISTR both companies figured in it.
Thanks for the pointer, I didn't have them in my filters just yet.
I still suggest you do the experiment. It worked for me (and for my Nadine -- sigh)
There is something fundamentally wrong with the market if you can buy a printer with ink cartridge for the same amount of money that buys you just a cartridge. For most users, TCO is dominated by the cost of cartridges.
I'll leave it to the respective zealots to point out that this is what makes capitalism great or to point out that it sucks, I don't care.
I'm just wondering how this market survives at these price points. All the consumer inkjet printers suffer from it do some degree, and I would not expect that to be sustainable.
The only thing I really hold against HP is the way they squandered the Apollo name. HP manufactured printers that suck to the point they don't want their name on it get branded as Apollo, and back when HP acquired Apollo no one expected the name to be dragged through the mud that bad.
The trick of creating company specific addresses works if you have full control of you e-mail domain. If you don't, it's possible that plussed addresses do work. If your e-mail address is john.doe@company.com, enter john.doe+evilcompany@company.com when Evil corporation wants your e-mail address to download, say, their Evil Player.
If plussed addresses don't work at your provider, bug them.
A really sophisticated way of doing this is to use TMDA, which extends this concept into time-limited addresses as well as more classic notions of "tagging" an e-mail address.
Spammers are very apt at verifying that their address lists actually work. Ever get a spam that seems really outlandish? A spammer asking for assistance in time travel? A kook that proclaims the end of the world is nigh? A totally empty message body?
Chances are they were just checking to see if the mail bounced.
If you have your own domain, try this experiment. Create an e-mail account, say: john.doe@your.domain. On your home page, publish the e-mail addresses john.doe@your.domain and jane.doe@your.domain. Make sure mail for your virtual jane is bounced with a "no such user" error. Watch how long it takes for john.doe to start getting spam. Check your logs for attempts to deliver to either john or jane.
If your experience matches mine, spam for john will be at least tenfold of what jane gets after about a month. After about a year, the relative difference will level off, but if by that time you create jane.doe@your.domain you will probably notice that she is very popular with spammers who do not speak your language.
One can debate which is worse, the bombardment of spam in a language you can read or the bombardment of spam in a language you can't, but feeding spammers fake addresses will only "hurt" the extremely stupid ones.
Not that there's any shortage of those. I get spam advertizing piano lessons in South Buenos Aires or airco repair in Hong Kong, and I own no airco or piano.
Please, don't pull domain names out of a hat. There is an official fake address that you can use:
me@privacy.net
See their website for more info.
A friend of mine runs a domain that happens to be used a lot by people who think they enter a non-existant domain, and it's driving him nuts. Well, there is some amusement value in noticing how many variations people come up with, but still...
Why is it that Florida seems to attract so many kooks? I mean, sure, nice weather and plenty of old ladies flush with cash, but there must be something in the water to make Florida the scam capital of the world, as well as the spam capital.
Neither the wx nor the abundance of local victims fully explain it.
A friend of mine inherited a bunch of huge (68 MB) Micropolis disks that got stuck in legal limbo. To avoid a huge tax charge they had to be dead by natural causes.
So the company that owned them puts them in a card board box, and drops them three stories down, thinking that would kill them.
A year later my friends asks if he can have the dead drives for parts. Low level formatting showed not a single bad block has developed since the drives were shipped from the factory.
Incredible. I ran one of the things for years in my PC, and later in a MicroVAX 2000. It never died, it just became a bit small over time...
Indeed, I don't care if it renders properly, as long as it serves its purpose (i.e., renders enough text to allow the user to use the web site). For all I care, the HTML that NS3 and IE3 both accepted (with the addition of basic table support) is good enough for me.
I know it is possible to make a page render properly in 99% of the browser market share. But that's not my point. Even if enough talented people are around to do it, a significant percentage of that talent base will not want to. Sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad ones.
The argument that you invariably hear when you complain to the person answering webmaster@company.com is that it is too hard to support all browsers. It's their statement, not mine. I've got to operate on the presumption that if they say it's too hard, it's too hard for them. Fair enough.
What I'm asking of them is that they not worry about what it looks like if they think they cannot support the browser. In most cases, a simple page with one gif and a form will take care of the functionality.
But nooooo, what you see as an end user is a metric shitload of JavaScript trying to the the right thing but failing horribly. It's the botched attempts to make it work that add insult to injury.
Heck, I've sent constructive mails to webmasters informing them that their web site didn't work, and that even IE5.5 misrendered it to the point of being useless, and I got "upgrade to IE" back for an answer.
Webmasters often tell me they don't care if it renders properly on anything other then their system. If they feel that way, what's wrong with presenting everyone who is not using an Pentium IV at 2.2GHz on a 1024Kbps ADSL line with IE 6.0 with a page that renders on Lynx?
It has often been noted that many web designers don't care about the blind. And why should they? The blind only make up an insignificant fraction of the market. I believe the world would be a better place if the blind were catered for on web sites that offer basic functionality. I'm not asking for braille versions of Flash Pacman animations, I'm asking for all of the market being served at least basic functionality.
And indeed, I don't care if I have to live without flashy animations as a result of choosing Mozilla on FreeBSD. I just want to report my meter readings, book an airline seat, or be able to look up a telephone number without being forced to walk over to a different PC to boot Win95. And I'm not even blind, and wouldn't want to think about how blind people have to perform those simple tasks. Support for the blind would be thrown in for free if sites that refuse to deal with other browsers at least provide something simple that works.
It's not as if it's rocket surgery.
I really wonder what APIs or software code in the media player or IE AMD, a HARDWARE vendor relies on... I really do...
:-)
I used to wonder about this line of thinking too. But the answer struck me light a bolt of lightning when I remembered the CTL3D issue.
Remember the good ole' days when NT was the answer to the stability problems that had plagued Win 3.1 users? One of the issues that surfaced consistently in that period was incompatibilities between different revisions of CTL3D.DLL. You would have a stable system with the app of your choice, install another app, and poof, the first one dies. Or dies when started up *after* the first one, but not if started *before*. A nightmare for tech support staff.
That's what this CEO is worried about. In Linux terms, it'd be as if every app came with its own glibc, with incompatible API's.
Of course, all of the conflicting CTL3D's with conflicting version numbers originated from Microsoft themselves, but that doesn't make the nightmare any less.
I really don't want to start writing two sets of code again.
No one wants that. Frankly, I don't care if a web page is "optimized" for either browser. Unfortunately, on many commercial sites that optimization happens at the expense of usability.
Now, I rarely care if a page renders okay or not. If I care badly enough, I'll fire up my Win95 box and view the page there. If I don't I'll just move on, to the mutual satisfaction of me and the web designer. Fair enough.
What ticks me off is that sites that want to save money by getting users to use the web for simple things screw up those simple things.
I recently had the option of either phoning in my electricity and gas meter readings, or reporting them on the web. The utility company's web site renders perfectly in Mozilla. After filling out the form, I found that there was no "Send" button. "View Source" was disabled, but I got hold of the contents and found that the complex JavaScript code did nothing more than hit "submit". I crafted a URL that passed the relevant data as "GET" style parameters and fed it to wget. Inspection of the output file showed me that the utility thanked me for reporting my meter readings.
Now, let me summarize my findings:
- there is no server side intelligence to detect using GET instead of the POST the JavaScript implements
- there is no (zero, nil) parameter checking in the JavaScript
- it was faster for me to reverse-engineer the web page than it would have been to boot Win95
This leaves me to wonder: if you don't want to support older browsers but you still want to to save money by having your users use the web instead of phoning in, what's wrong with using a simple <FORM>? Why bother getting the page for the Other browsers pixel perfect?
Few companies have the resources to support all browsers, but they're hurting themselves by not having a simple page for simple problems. Things like reporting meter readings, posting a consumer question or booking a rental car can all be done trivially using plain ole HTML. It's beyond me why webmasters insist on getting it to look pretty on browsers they hate.