A less futuristic prediction posted here claims Google will soon enter the affiliate marketing sphere. Makes a lot of sense since some pay per click networks switched to pay for performance after the dotcom crash (in fact Commission Junction got rid of PPC entirely). It's a lot easier to police such a network for fraudulent affiliates.
Personally I find the general purpose comparison shopping sites like Pricegrabber and Froogle very poor at getting relevant results for most products. They are usually not able to differentiate different products and either group unrelated products together or don't group related products together. Luckily there are lots of sites where you can comparison shop for very specific products, like Compare Cartridges for printer ink cartridges, AddAll for books, DVD Price Search for movie, Cheap-Subscription for magazines, etc.
While the DesignTechnica article is a pretty good overview of the latest batch of photo printers, you should check the reviews on the printers mentioned at printer-reviews.org. For example, someone posted that after connecting the Canon Pixma iP5200 printer to their computer they had to replace the motherboard. Personally I still prefer to send out for pictures than to print them myself. Cheaper and better quality.
According to what I read a court order would be necessary. This article claims the following:
Police groups say they are not asking for any new powers but rather the ability to continue their regular investigative activities in the digital age.
Clayton Pecknold of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police said police are working with laws originally written in 1974, a time when wiretapping involved climbing telephone poles.
"The laws were written for a wired world as opposed to the wireless world," he said. "We are not asking that we be given any powers without a court order."
In another funny auction someone is selling the domain name for Brewster Jennings & Associates, which has been in the news a lot recently as it was the CIA front company that Valerie Plame supposedly worked for.
I would also say stay away from Apacer. I have a 256MB HT202 flash drive, and it has never worked. I constantly get "insert a disk" errors when copying files to it. If you do a Google search you will find many others with the exact same problem. They do have a utility on their website that claims to fix the drive by reformatting it, but I haven't heard a single report from anyone saying it works..
I can't imagine why anyone would still be buying OEM inkjet cartridges (unless they are printing photos which are usually cheaper online anyway). Look at the difference in price between OEM to remanufactured cartridges at Compare Cartridges.com, a comparison shopping site. While my Epson T0431 cartridge costs $33.72+shipping at OfficeDepot there are merchants at that site offering it for $7.95 with free shipping. Like all the spam emails you get say.. that's a savings of 76% Why do people still bother with OEM now?
I sold DVD-X-Copy as an affiliate on my web site for a few years and it was incredibly profitable. Several months ago they stopped paying me through their private affiliate program, showing me an injunction that prohibited them from paying any affiliate outside America (I live in Canada). I started promoting them through Commission Junction, a 3rd party affiliate marketing firm, though I wasn't nearly as successful as they were now offering a watered down version without a CSS ripper.
About a week ago I got a call from someone at 321 who told me that they were going to file for bankruptcy in a few days. They also said there was hope for me, since they hadn't written the software and were instead a licensee. I was told that a company called Xsoftware based in Germany actually wrote it and were probably going to start marketing the software again.
While I've been reading the threads saying DVD decryptor or DVDShrink is better, I think a lot of you missed the point. This was real, legit software that you could buy in a retail store and which tried in every way to preserve fair use rights. They put watermarks in and warning screens, etc. to appease the movie studios and ensure their software wouldn't be used by any serious pirates. This was for the average user who can't figure out how to rip VOBs and use DeCSS and all that. It really is a shame they went under.
Why limit ourselves to CNN's web site? Most of the MPAA member's web sites can be instantly turned into DeCSS links as well. Try the following links to get to DeCSS. No, I'm not linking to the DeCSS source code, that would probably be illegal for me to do. Instead, I'm linking to the web sites of Warner Bros., Universal Studios, and Walt Disney Company (who happen to have links to DeCSS--sue them, not me!).
On an unrelated topic, from my understanding the reverse engineering of CSS was originally deemed illegal because presumably Jon Johansen clicked a button which indicated he complied with a license that said he wouldn't reverse engineer Xing's DVD player. My question is: don't the laws of Norway require you to be legal age (18) to enter into a contract?
The author seems to confuse bugs in Linux (which is a kernel) with bugs in applications that run under Linux. Microsoft is never blamed for bugs in Windows program that they don't create (say ICQ for example), so why should Linux be blamed for bugs in applications that run under it (like sendmail)? I can think of 1 bug that ever crashed Linux from remote (which was fixed in no time), yet I can remember 3 that affected Windows 95/NT (remember OOB?!).
If an article were ever posted that said Windows is insecure because a lot of applications that run under Windows are buggy, Microsoft's army of lawyers would cause the page to be taken down in an instant. It's too bad there's no one to look out for Linux and other "free" OSes. Besides, to anyone with a clue, bugtraq specializes in bugs relating to UNIX type environments. There's a mailing list called "NTBugtraq" (www.ntbugtraq.com) which deals with all the bugs in Windows.
I'm sure I could ramble on longer if I actually read the article past the initial sentence..
There are 30 million Canadians. As well, about 10% of home Internet users in Canada have high speed connections such as @Home (cable modem), or Sympatico High Speed Edition (ADSL). I don't see much of a problem with the streaming. However, I can't imagine paying $9/month to get MuchMusic when I can get it on cable for pretty much the same price and it won't be postage stamp size.
I think the real reason that he wants Internet Explorer to be stuck with the operating system group is so Microsoft can't continue to develop IE for other platforms (like Macintosh, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows 3.1, etc). The OS division would have to concentrate on IE in Windows ME / 2000 and the other platforms would have to be ignored--putting Netscape/AOL back into the browser war for the other 10% of the OSes market.
I had the same problem getting 'password incorrect' every time I tried to log in to my Slackware machine. After reading the FAQ, I found the solution. You have to link OpenSSH with libcrypt:
How soon Microsoft "forgets". Less than a year ago (July 1999) Microsoft was having a war of words with American Online over their Instant Messenger (IM) client. AOL was denying MSN IM clients the ability to send messages to AOL's large instant messenger base. Microsoft wrote a letter to Steve Case, the CEO of America Online, passionately calling for an open standard for Instant Messaging (see the Slashdot discussion).
Now, less than a year later, Microsoft takes Kerberos, an existing open standard, and changes it with the sole purpose of stopping interoperability between Windows 2000 machines and other clients not developed by them. As if that wasn't bad enough, they then publish their Kerberos spec with such a tight licence that the information in it is rendered useless to all that read it. In fact those that read it no longer have the right to develop their own Kerberos client with the information contained in the spec. So basically, Microsoft published the spec with the sole intention of slowing down development of alternative clients (i.e. Kerberos clients for Linux).
One must now wonder what is Microsoft's stance on open standards. Are they for or against them? I would like to close with two quotes from Microsoft's letter to AOL as mentioned above. The meaning is the same, but the technology is different.
"Indeed, imagine a world in which users of one particular telephone service were unable to interconnect with users of another service. Similarly, imagine if AOL members could only email other AOL members. Such a world is not in the best interests of customers."
"Consequently, in the spirit of doing what is right for consumers and our industry, we'd like to convene a meeting of our respective companies to begin the far more productive process of creating an industry standard."
To respond to what you said in point number 2, DivX movies *can* be previewed. It is not too well known, but simply go to the File's properties (in Explorer) and click on Preview. The screen is a little smaller, but this does show that it is possible to stream or preview the file before the download is complete.
From what I understand, it is the fact that it is an AVI file that it can't be played in Windows Media Player before the download is complete.
Re:Ever try dowloading high encryption software?
on
Geographic Screening
·
· Score: 1
Let's count... he mentions Canada/Canadian 5 times (not 3), and mentions iCraveTV only 9 times. Not once in the initial paragraph which appears on the homepage is iCraveTV found. Instead of iCraveTV, he talks about the "latest nightmare" comming "out of Canada". Thank you for saying that I "uttered this utter stupidity," because I thought you were serious about my comments for a moment. I believe my thoughts are entirely valid and apparently so do the moderators. If you don't like my ideas, then don't read them, but don't attack me personally, that's just immature.
"Ce vote n'est pas definitif, une troisième et dernière lecture doit avoir lieu."
Which translates to something like: The vote isn't definite, a third and final reading has to take place.
This implies that this is not yet law, and there is still time to get involved to stop this law from passing. Why stop it? Well, obviously the law won't affect the majority of the population, since (I assume) it doesn't say that the French are not allowed to post their web sites anonymously on servers in other contries. All the law basically does is makes anonymous web hosts in France illegal (by punishment of prison time), which just puts some of their companies out of business. It's their own economy that the politicians are ruining.
Ever try dowloading high encryption software?
on
Geographic Screening
·
· Score: 5
While it's all nice for Katz to blame Canada (and not a company located inside it) for inventing "geographic screening", he obviously has ignored the fact that the United States has been doing so for much longer. Whenever I try to download high encryption software I have to sign my life away saying that I live in the US or Canada. Even after that, most sites will even do a reverse lookup on my ip address just to be sure. This seems to be worse "geographic screening" than iCraveTV.com did (valid postal code needed), yet he never hints about it durring his rant of the day...
Slashdot Mirror
A less futuristic prediction posted here claims Google will soon enter the affiliate marketing sphere. Makes a lot of sense since some pay per click networks switched to pay for performance after the dotcom crash (in fact Commission Junction got rid of PPC entirely). It's a lot easier to police such a network for fraudulent affiliates.
Personally I find the general purpose comparison shopping sites like Pricegrabber and Froogle very poor at getting relevant results for most products. They are usually not able to differentiate different products and either group unrelated products together or don't group related products together. Luckily there are lots of sites where you can comparison shop for very specific products, like Compare Cartridges for printer ink cartridges, AddAll for books, DVD Price Search for movie, Cheap-Subscription for magazines, etc.
While the DesignTechnica article is a pretty good overview of the latest batch of photo printers, you should check the reviews on the printers mentioned at printer-reviews.org. For example, someone posted that after connecting the Canon Pixma iP5200 printer to their computer they had to replace the motherboard. Personally I still prefer to send out for pictures than to print them myself. Cheaper and better quality.
Google helped me found her.. She's in Cairo, Egypt.
In another funny auction someone is selling the domain name for Brewster Jennings & Associates, which has been in the news a lot recently as it was the CIA front company that Valerie Plame supposedly worked for.
I would also say stay away from Apacer. I have a 256MB HT202 flash drive, and it has never worked. I constantly get "insert a disk" errors when copying files to it. If you do a Google search you will find many others with the exact same problem. They do have a utility on their website that claims to fix the drive by reformatting it, but I haven't heard a single report from anyone saying it works..
Bottom line.. Don't buy Apacer flash drives.
I can't imagine why anyone would still be buying OEM inkjet cartridges (unless they are printing photos which are usually cheaper online anyway). Look at the difference in price between OEM to remanufactured cartridges at Compare Cartridges.com, a comparison shopping site. While my Epson T0431 cartridge costs $33.72+shipping at OfficeDepot there are merchants at that site offering it for $7.95 with free shipping. Like all the spam emails you get say.. that's a savings of 76% Why do people still bother with OEM now?
About a week ago I got a call from someone at 321 who told me that they were going to file for bankruptcy in a few days. They also said there was hope for me, since they hadn't written the software and were instead a licensee. I was told that a company called Xsoftware based in Germany actually wrote it and were probably going to start marketing the software again.
While I've been reading the threads saying DVD decryptor or DVDShrink is better, I think a lot of you missed the point. This was real, legit software that you could buy in a retail store and which tried in every way to preserve fair use rights. They put watermarks in and warning screens, etc. to appease the movie studios and ensure their software wouldn't be used by any serious pirates. This was for the average user who can't figure out how to rip VOBs and use DeCSS and all that. It really is a shame they went under.
You can compare inkjet cartridges and laser toner at www.comparecartridges.com. There are over 1000 printer cartridges listed there.
- http://www.warnerbros.com/event.ng/Type=clic k&ProfileID=4434&RunID=16324&AdID=7738&TagValues=
1 99.256.273.3072.3073.3074.3139&FamilyID= 1117&GroupID=463&Redirect=http:%2F%2Fwww.2600.dk%2 Fmirrors%2Fcss%2Ffiles%2FDeCSS.zip
- http://www.mca.com/globalnav/gnf.pl?url=http:%2F%
2 Fwww.2600.dk%2Fmirrors%2 Fcss%2Ffiles%2FDeCSS.zip
- http://disney.go.com/event.ng/Type=click& RunID=11143&ProfileID=2828&AdID=8588&GroupID=481&
F amilyID=1934&TagValues=2635.2638.2641.27 42.3148.3194.3198.3306&Redirect=http:%2F%2Fwww.260 0.dk%2Fmirrors%2Fcss%2Ffiles%2FDeCSS.zip
On an unrelated topic, from my understanding the reverse engineering of CSS was originally deemed illegal because presumably Jon Johansen clicked a button which indicated he complied with a license that said he wouldn't reverse engineer Xing's DVD player. My question is: don't the laws of Norway require you to be legal age (18) to enter into a contract?The author seems to confuse bugs in Linux (which is a kernel) with bugs in applications that run under Linux. Microsoft is never blamed for bugs in Windows program that they don't create (say ICQ for example), so why should Linux be blamed for bugs in applications that run under it (like sendmail)? I can think of 1 bug that ever crashed Linux from remote (which was fixed in no time), yet I can remember 3 that affected Windows 95/NT (remember OOB?!).
If an article were ever posted that said Windows is insecure because a lot of applications that run under Windows are buggy, Microsoft's army of lawyers would cause the page to be taken down in an instant. It's too bad there's no one to look out for Linux and other "free" OSes. Besides, to anyone with a clue, bugtraq specializes in bugs relating to UNIX type environments. There's a mailing list called "NTBugtraq" (www.ntbugtraq.com) which deals with all the bugs in Windows.
I'm sure I could ramble on longer if I actually read the article past the initial sentence..
Oh, and BTW this story and the article were already posted on Slashdot by timothy on June 10th.
I think the real reason that he wants Internet Explorer to be stuck with the operating system group is so Microsoft can't continue to develop IE for other platforms (like Macintosh, HP-UX, Solaris, Windows 3.1, etc). The OS division would have to concentrate on IE in Windows ME / 2000 and the other platforms would have to be ignored--putting Netscape/AOL back into the browser war for the other 10% of the OSes market.
I had the same problem getting 'password incorrect' every time I tried to log in to my Slackware machine. After reading the FAQ, I found the solution. You have to link OpenSSH with libcrypt:
./configure [options]
LIBS=-lcrypt
Works perfectly for me now.
Now, less than a year later, Microsoft takes Kerberos, an existing open standard, and changes it with the sole purpose of stopping interoperability between Windows 2000 machines and other clients not developed by them. As if that wasn't bad enough, they then publish their Kerberos spec with such a tight licence that the information in it is rendered useless to all that read it. In fact those that read it no longer have the right to develop their own Kerberos client with the information contained in the spec. So basically, Microsoft published the spec with the sole intention of slowing down development of alternative clients (i.e. Kerberos clients for Linux).
One must now wonder what is Microsoft's stance on open standards. Are they for or against them? I would like to close with two quotes from Microsoft's letter to AOL as mentioned above. The meaning is the same, but the technology is different.
To respond to what you said in point number 2, DivX movies *can* be previewed. It is not too well known, but simply go to the File's properties (in Explorer) and click on Preview. The screen is a little smaller, but this does show that it is possible to stream or preview the file before the download is complete.
From what I understand, it is the fact that it is an AVI file that it can't be played in Windows Media Player before the download is complete.
Let's count... he mentions Canada/Canadian 5 times (not 3), and mentions iCraveTV only 9 times. Not once in the initial paragraph which appears on the homepage is iCraveTV found. Instead of iCraveTV, he talks about the "latest nightmare" comming "out of Canada". Thank you for saying that I "uttered this utter stupidity," because I thought you were serious about my comments for a moment. I believe my thoughts are entirely valid and apparently so do the moderators. If you don't like my ideas, then don't read them, but don't attack me personally, that's just immature.
The article on altern.org says this near the end:
"Ce vote n'est pas definitif, une troisième et dernière lecture doit avoir lieu."
Which translates to something like: The vote isn't definite, a third and final reading has to take place.
This implies that this is not yet law, and there is still time to get involved to stop this law from passing. Why stop it? Well, obviously the law won't affect the majority of the population, since (I assume) it doesn't say that the French are not allowed to post their web sites anonymously on servers in other contries. All the law basically does is makes anonymous web hosts in France illegal (by punishment of prison time), which just puts some of their companies out of business. It's their own economy that the politicians are ruining.
While it's all nice for Katz to blame Canada (and not a company located inside it) for inventing "geographic screening", he obviously has ignored the fact that the United States has been doing so for much longer. Whenever I try to download high encryption software I have to sign my life away saying that I live in the US or Canada. Even after that, most sites will even do a reverse lookup on my ip address just to be sure. This seems to be worse "geographic screening" than iCraveTV.com did (valid postal code needed), yet he never hints about it durring his rant of the day...