What kind of company turns up its nose at $500 million?
The kind of company that companies which wouldn't turn up their noses at $500 million doesn't want you to believe exists.
And in fact they pretty much don't exist. Craigslist was founded by one guy, Craig Newmark, entirely with his own money. He still owns most of the company, except for one small chunk that he gave away, and that later was sold to eBay.
Craigslist is the exception that proves the rule. Consider the following facts:
Craigslist has no investors or debtors to satisfy.
Craigslist has lucked into a large and loyal customer base built entirely on word-of-mouth..
Craigslist costs very little to keep running.
Craigslist has goals set entirely by one individual who has no desire to make more money than he needs to live off of.
If any of these factors didn't apply, Craigslist would be just another company that would be utterly incapable of turning its back on that half-gigabuck. And yet each of these factors is extremely rare.
I actually find Craigslist's money policies a little short-sighted. Not that I'm entirely against them providing free ads. It's nice that you can post your resume, or sell your couch, or ask somebody to come and fix your computer, and you don't have to pay. A lot of the people who use these services couldn't afford to use them if they weren't free.
But why should all the people dealing in real estate get a free ride? I don't mean people who just want to split their rent with a roommie. I'm talking wealthly landlords and folks selling million-dollar homes. Who benefit not just from the fact that Craigslist is free, but the fact that the housing search software is well-designed. They should pay. If Mister Newmark doesn't want the money, there are plenty of worthy causes.
I use a dynamic IP range blacklist on my mail server simply because it tends to work and people should know better than to expect me not to be blocking email from dynamic address ranges.
Which people are those? The non-tech-savvy user who's made the innocent mistake of having served by a provider your blacklist has decided to punish?
Where's the straw man? Nuking a city may be worse than blocking somebody's email. But that's not the point. The point is that I'm not rejecting blacklists because they're "imperfect" (never said they had to be), I know every system has its imperfections. The question is, are the imperfections acceptable? Blocking thousand of non-spam email is not acceptable.
Ray Ozzie's theory that email is obsolete may have prevented Groove from including an email client. But Notes has always included an email client.
Anyway, you're missing the point. Yes, people primarily use Outlook to send and receive email. But if you deploy it together with Exchange, you supposedly have a groupware solution. And indeed, the Outlook/Exchange combination is obviously meant to compete with the Notes/Domino combination.
As for Sharepoint, I think you're a little confused as to exactly what it is. Sharepoint is server side software, and it's meant to be used in conjunction with Outlook, not in place of it. Of course Sharepoint has a web interface too — which I guess is what you're thinking about. Which isn't supposed to be the primary interface. Though perhaps folks use it anyway, rather than deal with Outlook's weirdnesses.
Groove was conceived as a P2P alternative the above. Hence my assertion that Groove and Outlook compete.
You obviously haven't seen Dr. Strangelove. When called to task for a command and control system that allowed a low-level Air Force commander to launch a nuclear strike on Russia without authorization, the Secretary of Defense says, "You can't condemn a system for one little flaw."
If a system has unacceptable flaws that cannot be fixed, the system itself is unacceptable. Your imaginary quest for the perfect system is a straw man.
Mr Gates himself was once moved to declare Mr Ozzie "one of the top five programmers in the universe" and revealed that he and Mr Ballmer had wanted for more than a decade to persuade him to join Microsoft.
Which would explain why Microsoft bothered to acquire Groove Networks, even though they seem to have little interest in the company's only product, a sort of P2P Notes.
I've always found Groove to be an intriguing product, though I've never been in a position to actually use it. But it seems to have less and less visibility since being acquired. (Notice that the Australian article never mentions Groove, other than a couple of references to the company that created it.) Which is hardly suprising: it's a direct competitor for Outlook. It'll probably disappear as a separate product in the next few years. Hopefully, some of Groove's GUI designers will get assigned to Outlook and impose some sanity on that monstrosity.
Blacklists largely do work. It's true that they have both false positives and false negitives, but the rates are reasonably low.
You have a low threshhold of reasonable.
For false positives, "reasonable" has to be very close to zero. If you depend on email so much that you can't simply change your address to get away from spam, than you're counting on all serious email getting through. And blacklists, by their very nature, have lots of false positives, because they don't distinguish between spammers and other folks who innocently sign up with a provider that the blacklister claims is "spam friendly". And that alone is reason not to use them.
As for false negatives, "reasonable" means that a blacklist subscriber can count on not having more than, say, 10% of his email being spam. Maybe there's a blacklist that can guarantee that. You tell me.
The fact of the matter is that email itself is broken, and as long as we keep using the current recipient-pays-before-recieving model it will stay broken...
Absolutely correct. So why waste effort trying to "fix" a system that's clearly broken? Especially when the fix is itself obviously broken.
SpamHaus is one of the most conscientious, well-organized, ethical and reliable lists around.
And yet they still give a lot of false positive and false negatives.
It just doesn't matter whether a blacklist is run by people who are smart and ethical or stupid and corrupt. The idea itself doesn't work. Spammers circumvent blacklists, while innocent people are hurt by them. That's not FUD, that's objective fact. It's time to admit that blacklists don't work and try something else.
I am all for fighting spam, but given how unreliable spam black-lists are such actions simply damage the internet.
It can't be any worse than they damage blacklists already do to innocent users who find their email mysteriously vanishing.
When are people going to realize that blacklists are worse than useless? They obviously don't work worth a shit: spam is heavier than ever. All they accomplish is making life difficult for a lot of non-spammers. Real spammers appear to have no trouble circumventing them. It's past time we gave blacklists the lack of credibility they deserve.
So creating the patches on a schedule is just software engineering, but releasing it on the same schedule is a marketing decision? What are they supposed to do, take random days off?
Lots of things that people like are canned all the time because no-one buys them...
Except that GM never even tried to sell the EV1. Instead they offerred it for lease, with no option to buy at the end of the lease. When the leases did expire, many leasees balked at returning their cars, and begged GM to sell them. You'd think GM would have gone along, to avoid the expense of scrapping them.
GM was obviously gaming the system somehow, though I've never understood exactly how.
...the phone companies have launched an aggressive assault by dropping prices...
Sad to see that folks are already assuming that RBOCs control everything that comes over their lines. I admit we're getting there, but there are still independent DSL providers. I'm a fan of Sonic.net, which is not only cheap and well-run, but reasonably geek-friendly. Or if you're a serious geek with semi-deep pockets, you can try Speakeasy, which doesn't even require that you have phone service.
I don't work on Solaris, and I'm just a lowly tech writer. But you're right, nobody at Sun releases patches on a schedule. That's beside the point. I'll say it for the third and last time: Microsoft has to use a production cycle because that's the only way they can create and deploy the ungodly number of patches that are necessary to fix all the security holes they've managed to create.
If Sun's programmers had to release that many security patches, they'd have to do it on a cycle too. (Assuming they didn't just shoot themselves.) They don't do it on a cycle because they don't do that many security patches because they've never screwed up to the point where it was necessary.
It's also noteworthy that Vista requires OEMs to have some kind of networking ability. While this is a given by today's standards, I find it very curious that an operating system REQUIRES me to have it.
That caught my eye too. Not just that it requires networking, but it has to be semi-fast networking. But then I thought it through: this isn't a requirement for Vista as such, this is a requirement for "full-featured" Vista. Presumably Vista supports streaming media over your LAN, so you can watch a movie over the Internet at resolution that isn't a joke. You don't have fast networking, then you can still install Vista, but you're missing out on the "full experience".
Define "long run". No, let's stop playing that game. I'll just assume you mean "over the next century".
Global warming, if you believe those disaster-loving Bush-haters, will cause many shifts in weather patterns, so existing climates we've come to count on will no longer be viable. We're not talking about it getting a little warmer everywhere, we're talking about it getting a lot warmer and a lot colder in lots of different places. We talking droughts in areas where they now grow a lot of food, and nasty cold weather where it's currently pretty warm. The tropical oceans will heat up fastest, so expect more hurricanes. The same effect might actually cause Europe to get colder, because the Gulf stream will probably shift direction, and it plays a big role in keeping Europe warm enough to live in.
The really dramatic effect would be if the Antarctice ice sheets melt, which would probably raise the oceans enough to flood all our coastal cities. So big deal, they just move inland. But you're talking about moving something like 2/3s of the world's population, onto land that's already stressed by the other factors were talking about.
Hmm, you're right. I wasn't sure whether the Yahoo-Google contract was still in effect, so I went to Yahoo and did a search. The results were very Googlish (and unYahooish — they're excessively fond of graphics and fancy layout). So I jumped to a conclusion.
What settled it for me was that if you click on a "cached" link you go to a page that looks very much like a Google cache page. But the IP number definitely belongs to Yahoo.
If you think about it, it doesn't matter if the number of patches per month is large or small. It's just a matter of having enough people to deal with ALL of them, on a pipeline where it ends up in a security patch download on Microsoft Update.
Yeah, that's fine if you don't test your patches, document them, worry about creating new security holes, and not producing a new patch that doesn't undo the work of old ones.
Slashdot Mirror
For example?
Craigslist is the exception that proves the rule. Consider the following facts:
- Craigslist has no investors or debtors to satisfy.
- Craigslist has lucked into a large and loyal customer base built entirely on word-of-mouth..
- Craigslist costs very little to keep running.
- Craigslist has goals set entirely by one individual who has no desire to make more money than he needs to live off of.
If any of these factors didn't apply, Craigslist would be just another company that would be utterly incapable of turning its back on that half-gigabuck. And yet each of these factors is extremely rare.I actually find Craigslist's money policies a little short-sighted. Not that I'm entirely against them providing free ads. It's nice that you can post your resume, or sell your couch, or ask somebody to come and fix your computer, and you don't have to pay. A lot of the people who use these services couldn't afford to use them if they weren't free.
But why should all the people dealing in real estate get a free ride? I don't mean people who just want to split their rent with a roommie. I'm talking wealthly landlords and folks selling million-dollar homes. Who benefit not just from the fact that Craigslist is free, but the fact that the housing search software is well-designed. They should pay. If Mister Newmark doesn't want the money, there are plenty of worthy causes.
Where's the straw man? Nuking a city may be worse than blocking somebody's email. But that's not the point. The point is that I'm not rejecting blacklists because they're "imperfect" (never said they had to be), I know every system has its imperfections. The question is, are the imperfections acceptable? Blocking thousand of non-spam email is not acceptable.
Anyway, you're missing the point. Yes, people primarily use Outlook to send and receive email. But if you deploy it together with Exchange, you supposedly have a groupware solution. And indeed, the Outlook/Exchange combination is obviously meant to compete with the Notes/Domino combination.
As for Sharepoint, I think you're a little confused as to exactly what it is. Sharepoint is server side software, and it's meant to be used in conjunction with Outlook, not in place of it. Of course Sharepoint has a web interface too — which I guess is what you're thinking about. Which isn't supposed to be the primary interface. Though perhaps folks use it anyway, rather than deal with Outlook's weirdnesses.
Groove was conceived as a P2P alternative the above. Hence my assertion that Groove and Outlook compete.
You obviously haven't seen Dr. Strangelove. When called to task for a command and control system that allowed a low-level Air Force commander to launch a nuclear strike on Russia without authorization, the Secretary of Defense says, "You can't condemn a system for one little flaw."
If a system has unacceptable flaws that cannot be fixed, the system itself is unacceptable. Your imaginary quest for the perfect system is a straw man.
I've always found Groove to be an intriguing product, though I've never been in a position to actually use it. But it seems to have less and less visibility since being acquired. (Notice that the Australian article never mentions Groove, other than a couple of references to the company that created it.) Which is hardly suprising: it's a direct competitor for Outlook. It'll probably disappear as a separate product in the next few years. Hopefully, some of Groove's GUI designers will get assigned to Outlook and impose some sanity on that monstrosity.
For false positives, "reasonable" has to be very close to zero. If you depend on email so much that you can't simply change your address to get away from spam, than you're counting on all serious email getting through. And blacklists, by their very nature, have lots of false positives, because they don't distinguish between spammers and other folks who innocently sign up with a provider that the blacklister claims is "spam friendly". And that alone is reason not to use them.
As for false negatives, "reasonable" means that a blacklist subscriber can count on not having more than, say, 10% of his email being spam. Maybe there's a blacklist that can guarantee that. You tell me.
Absolutely correct. So why waste effort trying to "fix" a system that's clearly broken? Especially when the fix is itself obviously broken.It just doesn't matter whether a blacklist is run by people who are smart and ethical or stupid and corrupt. The idea itself doesn't work. Spammers circumvent blacklists, while innocent people are hurt by them. That's not FUD, that's objective fact. It's time to admit that blacklists don't work and try something else.
When are people going to realize that blacklists are worse than useless? They obviously don't work worth a shit: spam is heavier than ever. All they accomplish is making life difficult for a lot of non-spammers. Real spammers appear to have no trouble circumventing them. It's past time we gave blacklists the lack of credibility they deserve.
You have your own black hole? Cool! But try not to lose track of it — we've only got one planet.
So creating the patches on a schedule is just software engineering, but releasing it on the same schedule is a marketing decision? What are they supposed to do, take random days off?
My comment was making fun of your "logic". But of course your sense of irony is as limited as your grasp of logic.
GM was obviously gaming the system somehow, though I've never understood exactly how.
If Sun's programmers had to release that many security patches, they'd have to do it on a cycle too. (Assuming they didn't just shoot themselves.) They don't do it on a cycle because they don't do that many security patches because they've never screwed up to the point where it was necessary.
I assert that you're an asshole.
Don't be a jerk. The dude made an assertion, it's up to him to provide the link.
Global warming, if you believe those disaster-loving Bush-haters, will cause many shifts in weather patterns, so existing climates we've come to count on will no longer be viable. We're not talking about it getting a little warmer everywhere, we're talking about it getting a lot warmer and a lot colder in lots of different places. We talking droughts in areas where they now grow a lot of food, and nasty cold weather where it's currently pretty warm. The tropical oceans will heat up fastest, so expect more hurricanes. The same effect might actually cause Europe to get colder, because the Gulf stream will probably shift direction, and it plays a big role in keeping Europe warm enough to live in.
The really dramatic effect would be if the Antarctice ice sheets melt, which would probably raise the oceans enough to flood all our coastal cities. So big deal, they just move inland. But you're talking about moving something like 2/3s of the world's population, onto land that's already stressed by the other factors were talking about.
Not a formula for survival.
What settled it for me was that if you click on a "cached" link you go to a page that looks very much like a Google cache page. But the IP number definitely belongs to Yahoo.
And you know this is true because? http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/article.php/ 2165081
For example?
That would leave no room for an actual burger. You must have felt gyped.