My next innovative product will be a device that emits a high energy electromagnetic impulse to disable all computerized guns in the area. I'm sure the sales of this device to criminals will be very high. Hell, even the police might buy one or two.
You'd be amazed at how many people don't check. Seriously, those stupid rubbery power cords going into a plastic prong frame don't always hold snuggly in the correct position. I had a guy just the other day report his video had gone out and wanted me to come check it for him. He blew a $50 house call just for a monitor cable that had come loose from his video card. I suppose he saved money, though, as I would have charged $200 to set the machine up for him.
When I first saw the story headline, I clicked on the link as soon as I got to it, without reading on. I read the 3 pages of the story before coming back to Slashdot. Then I read that it needed registration. What? I didn't have to register. So I went back and now I have to register. OK, so I tried a few more times. It seems that in their farm of servers, some are not configured to ask for registration, yet. So just keep hitting it a few times with the same URL, and you'll eventually get a server that doesn't hassle you about your private info.
No mod to SMTP is needed. This can already be done. It's just a matter making a mod to the implementation. When it gets RCPT commands, one per destination address, what it does is after accepting the first one, refuse all subequent addresses with a 4XX code. A correct mail server will requeue the mail for all the soft-rejected addresses. Spamware will usually move on. Of course one disadvantage with this is that even more bandwidth is taken up. But that's countered by the fact that the retries are more often from legitimate mail. In fact I've even considered making an SMTP daemon hack that always rejects all mail with a 4XX code once or twice, keeping a little DB of what it has done. Then on the 2nd or 3rd try, it can be let in. Until spammers catch on and start making spamware do requeues, this should reduce the spam volume. It can also slow down your mail, too.
Now they need to come out with RAID models. That is, it would have the usual SCSI connector(s), but 2 or more (a model with 2, a model with 4, and a model with 8, would be a nice lineup) IDE connectors. Then you can fill up an external drive case with cheap IDE drives, and attach it via SCSI for a cheap terabyte box. Some means to configure it would be needed and it should default to bunch of disks mode before configured.
The same thing but with a Firewire interface to the computer would be nice, too.
Will it fit inside a Sun 411 drive case... with an IDE drive, of course? It's pretty tight in the back in there. But if it will fit, that would be cool. OK, maybe a little warm. You know what I mean.
Alan Ralsky, who may just be the world's biggest sender of internet spam, has been getting a taste of his own medicine. But now the tide may be turning, he reports.
"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is." he says. "But, I will get even. I know who they are and I know what to do." he adds with a mischievous grin.
Reports have been coming in from all around the internet about the duplicates. First there was just one or two. Then there was ten. Yesterday there were a few hundred. And today, over twenty five thousand duplicate stories have been posted on the famous geek forum called Slashdot, where the campaign against Ralsky was hatched.
"It's not me." says Ralsky, interviewed outside his home, which is surrounded by hundreds of postal bags because no more room remains inside. He adds "I don't do story submissions. Hell, I didn't even know the place existed until a few weeks ago."
Another truck arrives, and 3 postmen deliver 25 more bags of mail. Over half the yard is covered in bags now.
"I know who these guys are now. My lawyers were looking into this, but I've never heard back from them, so I just had to take matters into my own hands." says Ralsky as small snicker shows up in his grin. "It's all about getting even, and I know what these people hate the most; it's duplicate stories." he goes on saying "In Soviet Russia we didn't have people doing things like this; mail bags would deliver you away."
Ask when all this might come to an end, Ralsky replied "You just wait until I try out all the mod points I managed to get."
The users need to pick one. I picked one. They can, too. What? Are they afraid the might be the wrong one? But they aren't afraid of having us pick "the one" for them? Then they should hire one of us to pick it for them. Sheesh. Why is this so hard?
What most users want is for it to work exactly the way they are used to computers working, only better. Well, some don't care about the better part. Actually most don't give a rat's arse if it's better. They just want it to be easy and simple and do what they are doing now, which has been pretty much molded by their past with Microsoft Windows.
The real issue being raise regarding standardizing Linux isn't about what users want, anyway. It's about what developers want. It's about what lazy developers want, which is to not have to figure out anything about a different distribution. If two distributions are identical, or if there is only one, they probably don't care.
Standardizing Linux is the wrong way to go about bringing Linux to the corporate desktop and the end user. But that's not saying standards are bad. Instead, the approach should be that we offer the different alternatives to what will be a standard, and then let the decision of which will be that standard for those end user be made by those end users. In other words, let the strong survive. Let there be a system that does get chosen for the new age of desktop computing, and let it be based on Linux. The semantics there is important. It should be based on Linux, not assimilate it.
Distribution choice is a good thing. But if a group of people making a few different distributions want to make changes to theirs to make sure they are the same as each other, let them. That's their choice. But corporate IT decision makes are going to be asking questions like "what is the difference between this distribution and that distribution?" So what will the answer be? Are we going to be able to say what the difference is, or will be end up confusing them more by saying "Oh, they're just alike; flip a coin to decide."
Of course, making sure that programs can be installed on, and run on, a wide range of different distributions is a good thing. But part of the responsibility to achieve that lies with the developers of that program, such as being flexible as to where files are found, what library versions can be used, etc. Consistent interfaces help, but we also need to be able to change and adapt to make things constantly improve, and when there are new things to adopt, new decisions have to be made, and choices have to be available to decide from.
Just don't move towards the notion that a single standard shall define Linux, and no other can be Linux. Linux is a class of systems that have diversity and can adapt. That is as much a part of the power of Linux as is its strength in security and reliability.
Business decisions are all too rarely made on the basis of long term planning. Regardless of the intent, those decisions will be constantly made over and over as the years go by, and as many projects fail. The needs will change, even if they are clouded by uncertainty. Linux, too, will fail, if it loses its ability to adapt.
For many kinds of products, having the URL is pointless. Just being aware of the product or the brand name is what it's about. Of course if the phone number were catchy, like 555-HOTPIZZA, then you would remember it a lot sooner. But for those kinds of products where going to their web site, such as online ordering, does make sense, then by all means put at least the domain name there. You don't need to have to click on the ad to remember a short and catchy domain name (why they command a high price) which you might need to use later when you don't have the ad around, such as BUY.COM or THINKGEEK.COM.
One complication... the one I think advertisers need to get over... is the ability to do 100% tracking of where people came from. They get a referrer when people do click; they don't when they remember the domain name. Under the current model, SlashDot isn't getting the credit for the ad or the reference if you just type in the name. For that reason I'd prefer to see all ads bought strictly on an impression basis, not on a click-through basis. So far I've had one advertiser inquire about putting ads on my web site, and I turned them down because they only wanted to pay me for actual purchases made when the customer's click through. In addition to the risk of being ripped off by that method, I really didn't see very many people actually buying anything during the click-through visit.
When I go to a web site, I don't have time to click on some ad. I know what I want to get, I go get it, and I get out. While being a geek I'm certainly going to be more focused on what I'm doing than the average person, I still believe even they will be fairly well focused on what they are doing, for the most part. Of course there are people who are just online to blow some time. Basically my point is, I don't click on web ads very much at all. I ignore them.
Or so I thought.
I thought I even ignored TV ads. I was in the grocery store a few weeks back and trying to think of what it was I wanted to get (I never write a list), I suddenly thought of a TV ad I saw a few times for a food product, and thought it might be worth trying (turns out I liked it). I've had similar things happen with ads I've seen on web sites, including Slashdot. I didn't click, but I though of it later and just went there.
I'm sure the advertisers saw the web as a wonderful way to really get an accurate measure of who responded to ads, under the assumption that people would always click on them. Back when clickety-click was a new thing, that might have been the case. That lasted about 3 weeks and got boring.
Traditional ads work using a concept called impression. The ad makes an impression in the viewer's/listener's mind. They act on that later. Some tricks enhance that, such as jingles that people just can't get out of their head. People are usually not making buying decisions while seeing/hearing ads, but they are affected later on, like I was in the grocery store.
The problem, I think, with web ads is that people still behave in very similar ways to ads on the web much as they do to TV, radio, newspaper, or magazine ads. That behaviour is that it impresses the mind and emerges later on to influence a buying decision when that time comes (and the ad isn't around. either... except for those stupid floor stick-ons in the grocery store than make me dizzy). Advertisers have always wanted better or more accurate demographics and responsiveness data. And they believed that with all the programming and computers involved in the web, here was that chance because they believed people would respond instantly to ads but now with the web, they can actually do something in that response. With TV, etc, they were not in the place to do that. But I think this was the big mistake, because people don't really work that way for the most part.
But impression ads work, at least if they are designed as impression ads.
I've seen some ads on Slashdot which had no identity of the advertiser whatsoever. That's a mistake. That's a missed opportunity to leave an impression. I was busy at the time and didn't have time to click, and after the next refresh it was gone and another had replaced it. I wasn't going to buy anything, or visit some other web site right then, but I might have later on. Well, I didn't get to. Sure, Slashdot didn't get a paid click-through, either. But they weren't going to get one because I was busy, as I usually am when I come here.
Basically, the business model for web advertising is wrong. Many advertisers are still trying to do something new on the web, and it still isn't working all that well because that's not how people usually behave (there are exceptions). And due to this model, many kinds of products and services for which click through makes no sense at all are not advertising at all, or at least not very much, on the web. Consider for example McDonalds, or Wendy's, or Burger King. maybe they have a new food product you might like. If you see it enough times on TV, or hear it often enough on the radio, the next time you are hungry or near those places, you might give it a try. And you might like it. But seriously, if you saw it on the web, would you click on it? No. But several impressions of even just a web banner ad touting a new sandwich that you might like, could get you into the store to try one. The sad thing is, those ads just aren't here on Slashdot, or the other places people of various interests do come to on the web.
I think the advertising business needs to get back to the old traditional impression advertising model that has been well proven on other media, and use that on the web, too, and bring in all the more traditional advertisers who before would not have thought of doing web advertising. And I do think if that is done, smaller, but more scattered, ads will work, and work well... to make an impression!
It's a matter of whether they want to include me in their market space or not. If they don't make it for the computers I use then they are not putting me in their market. That means they aren't really interested in my business. Then I don't feel any moral obligations. But as soon as they change to include me in their market by making their product work for me, then I would feel it right to pay them for what I use.
I'd be happy to pay for the music I get online, provided...
My privacy is absolutely protected (my identity cannot be sold to anyone for any purpose whatsoever)
The music comes in a format which will work on my computer system, which is Linux on my desktop, and Linux or OpenBSD for the servers.
Once I buy and download it, I can play it from my computer as often as I want.
I do download music from the net. But what I download I either delete or I buy the CD of it. When I get the CD, I rip the tracks and put them in my junkbox machine (e.g. my Linux file server) and play them there. The CDs are stored and not sold, given away, or even loaned. But if the CDs eventually no longer work, then I will certainly reconsider my plan. If I can pay to download and that works, fine. But if none of the pay-for methods work, what else can I do but steal the music?
Artists... is your label ripping you off by not making your music work for me?
If that were the case, then the companies should free their employees to provide all the assistance they can right there at work, where those statistics are gathered. Instead, what we have are scripted procedures for helping that really don't help at all. I've had to lie to techs several times when they ask me to reboot my computer while trying to resolve an issue of why I am getting busy signals or no answer from their dialup pool, just to get them past one of the many "stupid points" in their script. In at least one case I know I was dealing with a tech who knew damned well I didn't reboot, but because the call may have been recorded, he couldn't really say it. But he obviously knew Linux and dropped a few buzzwords that hinted to me what he was really thinking, which would probably have gone over his PHB's head as chit-chat (often allowed when tests being done take some time). But the real problem ultimately is that under company rules, getting tech support from the company usually sucks. There are some notable exceptions.
Yes, this is the issue. But I'm hoping to get Alan Ralsky to say it, so we can get him to admit that he is stealing delivery resources from his targets and the ISPs that serve them. Of course he'll never do that. Bulk mailing services like dartmail and topica are doing the same things; they don't clean their lists automatically while they are willing to remove people that ask to be removed (especially if they threaten the upstream ISP with SMTP blocking). We just need more people to make those threats against the spammer's ISPs so that the spammers' costs go up. Maybe at least then they will see a reduction in cost by automatically deleting rejected addresses that never produce sales.
I have one question for Alan Ralsky: why do you spammers never remove the email addresses that bounce back? Since my mail servers get your junk mailed over and over and over to email addresses which represent supposed users that have never even existed, it's clear you don't make any attempt whatsoever to clean your lists of bounces. Spam is theft, and this makes it clear that it is willful. Maybe we slashdotters should be asking the Oakland County Prosecuting Attorney's Office to pursue criminal theft charges.
I'm sure the christian fundamentalists will be jumping on setting up kids.us sites. Other groups wanting to provide information from a different point of view will eventually want to counter that. And I'm sure Disney will want to indoctrinate the kids that computers that don't restrict your right to copy any file is somehow evil.
Of course there will be some intrusions. But a lot of things can be done to prevent it that could not be done on the rest of the internet. For one thing, First Amendment won't apply, since it's not a matter of preventing you from putting content on the net, it's a matter of whether a certain group will point to your information. Of course there can be arguments on the other side of that. And certain technical restrictions that break things they can get away with here, such as the "no longs to any other domain". You can't do that in the rest of the internet. Of course it won't be perfect, as some will surely slip in (computers can get hacked). But violations can be taken more seriously here than in the regular internet. Note I say "can". I don't know if they actually will.
Maybe they can offer a contract to Google to spider the whole domain, but in addition offering a kids friendly search engine, Google could also do the cross checks by having the special bots that spider it also check all the links for anything that isn't kids.us, lock those out of the kids.us search engine database, and report them to the appropriate agency handling it. When a link is found that goes to a non-kids.us site, the domain owner is called up by that agency (their emergency contact info might be part of the registration requirement) and told to remove it within the hour, or their domain name gets disabled (which could be done faster if the kids.us zone file has short TTL settings on all the delegations). Since the technology exists to isolate the upper level domain names, such as Slashdot uses to optionally show them to you in postings, it could easily be extended to totally block out the link if it's not to kids.us, or even reject the posting altogether. The problem is more a social one of making people actually do it since way too many people (adults here) are too clueless to understand how to make things right. So we shouldn't be seeing a goatse.cx or urinalpoop.org showing up if they do it right.
There are lots of different kinds of spoofing, so I don't know which you are referring to, so I can't give a specific example of how to prevent it. But the obvious part is that there are at least 2 levels of protection parents can engage. The light level is simply make sure the kids start on a kids.us portal. Then as long as the site operators do what they are supposed to, the kids will be safe. The stronger level is to configure the browser so that when the kids are logged in to the computer, it won't allow access to any web content (including images, Java, CSS, whatever) which isn't found by means of a kids.us domain lookup. So the URLs with IP addresses won't work, either.
One form of spoofing you may be referring to is stuff like emailed URLs that look like a kids.us URL, but in fact go to somewhere else. But that's an issue of whether the parents allow the kids to use software that would access some other domain. By using the stronger level of protection, even opening spam with these links will fail, as long as the program displaying it goes through the same mechanisms to find the site (which I believe is the case on Windows). The content actually in that mail is another issue. Since almost everything in email can be forged, you might not want to allow your kids access to email unless you have some stronger protection to ensure they are getting it only from other kids you approve of. Restricting kids to web based email on a kids.us webmail site, that by extension of the law should only communicate with other such sites and not to any outside of the kids.us domain, and not by SMTP which could spoof that, should keep your kids safe.
I don't believe the law is requiring you as a parent to restrict your kids to this domain, but rather, is giving you this as an option, so that if you choose to, you can set up the computer to limit itself to kids.us and actually leave your child unattended for a while at the computer with more confidence than you would have today. My worry, though, is that this might be just the first step to more laws, or case law, in the future. Consider a court deciding to take children away from their parents and the fact that the parents didn't restrict their kids to kids.us on the computer was what tipped the scale in the case. That would open up a whole lot of new problems that I can see. And I'm afraid a case like that will happen within a few years.
Has anyone considered what will happen in the next few years as the FCC mandates all TV broadcasting in the major markets be in digital format? Has California considered how it will deal with a glut of old analog TV sets headed for the trash dump? I suppose they could be sold on EBay to the rest of the country until the digital mandate becomes 100%. Ironically, when we stimulate the economy with products consumers want to buy, like computers in the recent decade, we also stimulate trash. So maybe our disposal rates will be a lagged measure of our economy.
And how will you know if the backup network even works? Of course you could test it. But will it work under the kind of extreme live stress that would take down the primary network? And what if the issue is simply load than neither network can fully handle? Could you run both networks in tandemn correctly? It sounds to me like the original problem was that the network was designed by someone who thinks of the switches as magical black boxes that will take care of everything... someone that assumes perfect abstraction. That 3 million dollars to build a parallel network I think could be better spent by hiring competent people to build a correct network that includes redundancies structured in the right places. No matter what you do, there will be some single points of failure, such as the very logic used to switch over to the backup network if that's what you have (which would be a big waste if it sat there idle). The network engineering people need to know and understand those single points of failure and have plans to deal with failures at those points.
Nope. Attacking the opponent because he can't even defend his own position. Attacking the opponent who makes the false assumption that because one example problem is given that there is only one problem. I do enjoy a good debate, and it is even more enjoyable when I have a good opponent who knows his material well, and also doesn't use faulty logic. It's a shame this one just degraded into flaws in the arguments themselves, and not the subjects being debated about. This didn't fit the description of either enjoyable or debate. I'll be looking for other threads for someone more qualified who can defend Microsoft Windows. I do know there are plenty because I have debated them before (and no, I don't always win, and often I do learn things I didn't know). I won't be back to this thread because it's a waste of time. If you want to have the last word, then post a reply.
There isn't just one bad experience. I only gave one out of many, simply because it was very recent and fresh in my memory. And in Unix you don't have to close down the application to be able to release the floppy. The directory is not in use once the application closes the file, as long as you didn't do something stupid like change the current directory to that floppy. And automounting and autounmounting can be done. I've done it before (I just happen to avoid floppies lately because they are so lame).
But you do seem to be one of those people who, when someone else gives one example, jumps to the conclusion that one example is all there is. Not true. But based on my experience with people, those who make such assumptions are generally not open minded. I am, but you have years and years of frustrations with Microsoft Windows to overcome. No, Linux isn't perfect, but it's openness at least makes it easy to accomplish most anything you need to. Windows is a royal PITA in that department.
The majority of people don't know a damned thing about Linux. They hardly know anything about Windows. Now I won't say they aren't better off with Windows as they probably are. But the fact is that they (customers) are just plain and simple not making that choice on the basis of knowing anything about either one.
Your argument about why MS wants Windows on every PC shipped is also bogus. Thats what the PR department wants you to believe. The real reason it started was because of a competitor called DR-DOS. Some manufacturers were starting to ship PCs with DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. Machines without an OS were not the issue, nor was Linux. And you can see further evidence that this is the case because this contract with Microsoft doesn't even allow a machine to be shipped with an alternate operating system if the customer does ask for it. Try calling up one of the big PC makers (e.g. the ones that would hurt bad if Microsoft yanked it's contract) and ask for some desktop machine or even a Laptop to be shipped with Linux instead of Windows (and without paying Microsoft for something you don't get).
I was using someone else's Windows 2000 and Word 2000 the other day because I needed to convert an HTML file to Word DOC format. Should be simple! It wasn't. I brought a floppy with the original file (read only), and a new blank formatted floppy. I started up Word and loaded the HTML file from the first floppy. Then I changed floppies and had Word store the document in Word format. The failed because it has the original file still "open" from the first floppy, and this being a different floppy, it got a error from the underlying I/O system while trying to write (maybe because it remembered the original floppy was read only). What I ended up having to do was have Word save the document on disk, then close Word and restart it, load the document back now from the hard disk, and then save it to the 2nd floppy. Maybe I should have just done this on Linux with OpenOffice or something and saved the hassle.
I've installed Linux and Windows both many hundreds of times. The former generally to upgrade or repurpose a machine. The latter usually because it just plained needed it with the very same version again after a few months of "software degrade". And you're trying to tell me that my experiences with Windows that convince me it's crap is elitist? Hardly. Linux may not be easy like Windows is, and certainly confuses most non-geek users, especially if they are installing it. But it's just not in the crappy league Windows is. Of course I'll still recommend Windows for the naive users of computers. And it's sad that they are better off with crap. But they don't have to ask because that's the default, anyway.
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My next innovative product will be a device that emits a high energy electromagnetic impulse to disable all computerized guns in the area. I'm sure the sales of this device to criminals will be very high. Hell, even the police might buy one or two.
But you do have some gawdawful high taxes. Now you know why we have guns.
You'd be amazed at how many people don't check. Seriously, those stupid rubbery power cords going into a plastic prong frame don't always hold snuggly in the correct position. I had a guy just the other day report his video had gone out and wanted me to come check it for him. He blew a $50 house call just for a monitor cable that had come loose from his video card. I suppose he saved money, though, as I would have charged $200 to set the machine up for him.
When I first saw the story headline, I clicked on the link as soon as I got to it, without reading on. I read the 3 pages of the story before coming back to Slashdot. Then I read that it needed registration. What? I didn't have to register. So I went back and now I have to register. OK, so I tried a few more times. It seems that in their farm of servers, some are not configured to ask for registration, yet. So just keep hitting it a few times with the same URL, and you'll eventually get a server that doesn't hassle you about your private info.
No mod to SMTP is needed. This can already be done. It's just a matter making a mod to the implementation. When it gets RCPT commands, one per destination address, what it does is after accepting the first one, refuse all subequent addresses with a 4XX code. A correct mail server will requeue the mail for all the soft-rejected addresses. Spamware will usually move on. Of course one disadvantage with this is that even more bandwidth is taken up. But that's countered by the fact that the retries are more often from legitimate mail. In fact I've even considered making an SMTP daemon hack that always rejects all mail with a 4XX code once or twice, keeping a little DB of what it has done. Then on the 2nd or 3rd try, it can be let in. Until spammers catch on and start making spamware do requeues, this should reduce the spam volume. It can also slow down your mail, too.
Now they need to come out with RAID models. That is, it would have the usual SCSI connector(s), but 2 or more (a model with 2, a model with 4, and a model with 8, would be a nice lineup) IDE connectors. Then you can fill up an external drive case with cheap IDE drives, and attach it via SCSI for a cheap terabyte box. Some means to configure it would be needed and it should default to bunch of disks mode before configured.
The same thing but with a Firewire interface to the computer would be nice, too.
Will it fit inside a Sun 411 drive case ... with an IDE drive, of course? It's pretty tight in the back in there. But if it will fit, that would be cool. OK, maybe a little warm. You know what I mean.
FTP, eh? Commercial software, eh? Low budget, eh? This is gonna be so easy.
Alan Ralsky, who may just be the world's biggest sender of internet spam, has been getting a taste of his own medicine. But now the tide may be turning, he reports.
"They've signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is." he says. "But, I will get even. I know who they are and I know what to do." he adds with a mischievous grin.
Reports have been coming in from all around the internet about the duplicates. First there was just one or two. Then there was ten. Yesterday there were a few hundred. And today, over twenty five thousand duplicate stories have been posted on the famous geek forum called Slashdot, where the campaign against Ralsky was hatched.
"It's not me." says Ralsky, interviewed outside his home, which is surrounded by hundreds of postal bags because no more room remains inside. He adds "I don't do story submissions. Hell, I didn't even know the place existed until a few weeks ago."
Another truck arrives, and 3 postmen deliver 25 more bags of mail. Over half the yard is covered in bags now.
"I know who these guys are now. My lawyers were looking into this, but I've never heard back from them, so I just had to take matters into my own hands." says Ralsky as small snicker shows up in his grin. "It's all about getting even, and I know what these people hate the most; it's duplicate stories." he goes on saying "In Soviet Russia we didn't have people doing things like this; mail bags would deliver you away."
Ask when all this might come to an end, Ralsky replied "You just wait until I try out all the mod points I managed to get."
The users need to pick one. I picked one. They can, too. What? Are they afraid the might be the wrong one? But they aren't afraid of having us pick "the one" for them? Then they should hire one of us to pick it for them. Sheesh. Why is this so hard?
What most users want is for it to work exactly the way they are used to computers working, only better. Well, some don't care about the better part. Actually most don't give a rat's arse if it's better. They just want it to be easy and simple and do what they are doing now, which has been pretty much molded by their past with Microsoft Windows.
The real issue being raise regarding standardizing Linux isn't about what users want, anyway. It's about what developers want. It's about what lazy developers want, which is to not have to figure out anything about a different distribution. If two distributions are identical, or if there is only one, they probably don't care.
Standardizing Linux is the wrong way to go about bringing Linux to the corporate desktop and the end user. But that's not saying standards are bad. Instead, the approach should be that we offer the different alternatives to what will be a standard, and then let the decision of which will be that standard for those end user be made by those end users. In other words, let the strong survive. Let there be a system that does get chosen for the new age of desktop computing, and let it be based on Linux. The semantics there is important. It should be based on Linux, not assimilate it.
Distribution choice is a good thing. But if a group of people making a few different distributions want to make changes to theirs to make sure they are the same as each other, let them. That's their choice. But corporate IT decision makes are going to be asking questions like "what is the difference between this distribution and that distribution?" So what will the answer be? Are we going to be able to say what the difference is, or will be end up confusing them more by saying "Oh, they're just alike; flip a coin to decide."
Of course, making sure that programs can be installed on, and run on, a wide range of different distributions is a good thing. But part of the responsibility to achieve that lies with the developers of that program, such as being flexible as to where files are found, what library versions can be used, etc. Consistent interfaces help, but we also need to be able to change and adapt to make things constantly improve, and when there are new things to adopt, new decisions have to be made, and choices have to be available to decide from.
Just don't move towards the notion that a single standard shall define Linux, and no other can be Linux. Linux is a class of systems that have diversity and can adapt. That is as much a part of the power of Linux as is its strength in security and reliability.
Business decisions are all too rarely made on the basis of long term planning. Regardless of the intent, those decisions will be constantly made over and over as the years go by, and as many projects fail. The needs will change, even if they are clouded by uncertainty. Linux, too, will fail, if it loses its ability to adapt.
For many kinds of products, having the URL is pointless. Just being aware of the product or the brand name is what it's about. Of course if the phone number were catchy, like 555-HOTPIZZA, then you would remember it a lot sooner. But for those kinds of products where going to their web site, such as online ordering, does make sense, then by all means put at least the domain name there. You don't need to have to click on the ad to remember a short and catchy domain name (why they command a high price) which you might need to use later when you don't have the ad around, such as BUY.COM or THINKGEEK.COM.
One complication ... the one I think advertisers need to get over ... is the ability to do 100% tracking of where people came from. They get a referrer when people do click; they don't when they remember the domain name. Under the current model, SlashDot isn't getting the credit for the ad or the reference if you just type in the name. For that reason I'd prefer to see all ads bought strictly on an impression basis, not on a click-through basis. So far I've had one advertiser inquire about putting ads on my web site, and I turned them down because they only wanted to pay me for actual purchases made when the customer's click through. In addition to the risk of being ripped off by that method, I really didn't see very many people actually buying anything during the click-through visit.
When I go to a web site, I don't have time to click on some ad. I know what I want to get, I go get it, and I get out. While being a geek I'm certainly going to be more focused on what I'm doing than the average person, I still believe even they will be fairly well focused on what they are doing, for the most part. Of course there are people who are just online to blow some time. Basically my point is, I don't click on web ads very much at all. I ignore them.
Or so I thought.
I thought I even ignored TV ads. I was in the grocery store a few weeks back and trying to think of what it was I wanted to get (I never write a list), I suddenly thought of a TV ad I saw a few times for a food product, and thought it might be worth trying (turns out I liked it). I've had similar things happen with ads I've seen on web sites, including Slashdot. I didn't click, but I though of it later and just went there.
I'm sure the advertisers saw the web as a wonderful way to really get an accurate measure of who responded to ads, under the assumption that people would always click on them. Back when clickety-click was a new thing, that might have been the case. That lasted about 3 weeks and got boring.
Traditional ads work using a concept called impression. The ad makes an impression in the viewer's/listener's mind. They act on that later. Some tricks enhance that, such as jingles that people just can't get out of their head. People are usually not making buying decisions while seeing/hearing ads, but they are affected later on, like I was in the grocery store.
The problem, I think, with web ads is that people still behave in very similar ways to ads on the web much as they do to TV, radio, newspaper, or magazine ads. That behaviour is that it impresses the mind and emerges later on to influence a buying decision when that time comes (and the ad isn't around. either ... except for those stupid floor stick-ons in the grocery store than make me dizzy). Advertisers have always wanted better or more accurate demographics and responsiveness data. And they believed that with all the programming and computers involved in the web, here was that chance because they believed people would respond instantly to ads but now with the web, they can actually do something in that response. With TV, etc, they were not in the place to do that. But I think this was the big mistake, because people don't really work that way for the most part.
But impression ads work, at least if they are designed as impression ads.
I've seen some ads on Slashdot which had no identity of the advertiser whatsoever. That's a mistake. That's a missed opportunity to leave an impression. I was busy at the time and didn't have time to click, and after the next refresh it was gone and another had replaced it. I wasn't going to buy anything, or visit some other web site right then, but I might have later on. Well, I didn't get to. Sure, Slashdot didn't get a paid click-through, either. But they weren't going to get one because I was busy, as I usually am when I come here.
Basically, the business model for web advertising is wrong. Many advertisers are still trying to do something new on the web, and it still isn't working all that well because that's not how people usually behave (there are exceptions). And due to this model, many kinds of products and services for which click through makes no sense at all are not advertising at all, or at least not very much, on the web. Consider for example McDonalds, or Wendy's, or Burger King. maybe they have a new food product you might like. If you see it enough times on TV, or hear it often enough on the radio, the next time you are hungry or near those places, you might give it a try. And you might like it. But seriously, if you saw it on the web, would you click on it? No. But several impressions of even just a web banner ad touting a new sandwich that you might like, could get you into the store to try one. The sad thing is, those ads just aren't here on Slashdot, or the other places people of various interests do come to on the web.
I think the advertising business needs to get back to the old traditional impression advertising model that has been well proven on other media, and use that on the web, too, and bring in all the more traditional advertisers who before would not have thought of doing web advertising. And I do think if that is done, smaller, but more scattered, ads will work, and work well ... to make an impression!
It's a matter of whether they want to include me in their market space or not. If they don't make it for the computers I use then they are not putting me in their market. That means they aren't really interested in my business. Then I don't feel any moral obligations. But as soon as they change to include me in their market by making their product work for me, then I would feel it right to pay them for what I use.
I'd be happy to pay for the music I get online, provided...
I do download music from the net. But what I download I either delete or I buy the CD of it. When I get the CD, I rip the tracks and put them in my junkbox machine (e.g. my Linux file server) and play them there. The CDs are stored and not sold, given away, or even loaned. But if the CDs eventually no longer work, then I will certainly reconsider my plan. If I can pay to download and that works, fine. But if none of the pay-for methods work, what else can I do but steal the music?
Artists ... is your label ripping you off by not making your music work for me?
If that were the case, then the companies should free their employees to provide all the assistance they can right there at work, where those statistics are gathered. Instead, what we have are scripted procedures for helping that really don't help at all. I've had to lie to techs several times when they ask me to reboot my computer while trying to resolve an issue of why I am getting busy signals or no answer from their dialup pool, just to get them past one of the many "stupid points" in their script. In at least one case I know I was dealing with a tech who knew damned well I didn't reboot, but because the call may have been recorded, he couldn't really say it. But he obviously knew Linux and dropped a few buzzwords that hinted to me what he was really thinking, which would probably have gone over his PHB's head as chit-chat (often allowed when tests being done take some time). But the real problem ultimately is that under company rules, getting tech support from the company usually sucks. There are some notable exceptions.
Yes, this is the issue. But I'm hoping to get Alan Ralsky to say it, so we can get him to admit that he is stealing delivery resources from his targets and the ISPs that serve them. Of course he'll never do that. Bulk mailing services like dartmail and topica are doing the same things; they don't clean their lists automatically while they are willing to remove people that ask to be removed (especially if they threaten the upstream ISP with SMTP blocking). We just need more people to make those threats against the spammer's ISPs so that the spammers' costs go up. Maybe at least then they will see a reduction in cost by automatically deleting rejected addresses that never produce sales.
I have one question for Alan Ralsky: why do you spammers never remove the email addresses that bounce back? Since my mail servers get your junk mailed over and over and over to email addresses which represent supposed users that have never even existed, it's clear you don't make any attempt whatsoever to clean your lists of bounces. Spam is theft, and this makes it clear that it is willful. Maybe we slashdotters should be asking the Oakland County Prosecuting Attorney's Office to pursue criminal theft charges.
I'm sure the christian fundamentalists will be jumping on setting up kids.us sites. Other groups wanting to provide information from a different point of view will eventually want to counter that. And I'm sure Disney will want to indoctrinate the kids that computers that don't restrict your right to copy any file is somehow evil.
Of course there will be some intrusions. But a lot of things can be done to prevent it that could not be done on the rest of the internet. For one thing, First Amendment won't apply, since it's not a matter of preventing you from putting content on the net, it's a matter of whether a certain group will point to your information. Of course there can be arguments on the other side of that. And certain technical restrictions that break things they can get away with here, such as the "no longs to any other domain". You can't do that in the rest of the internet. Of course it won't be perfect, as some will surely slip in (computers can get hacked). But violations can be taken more seriously here than in the regular internet. Note I say "can". I don't know if they actually will.
Maybe they can offer a contract to Google to spider the whole domain, but in addition offering a kids friendly search engine, Google could also do the cross checks by having the special bots that spider it also check all the links for anything that isn't kids.us, lock those out of the kids.us search engine database, and report them to the appropriate agency handling it. When a link is found that goes to a non-kids.us site, the domain owner is called up by that agency (their emergency contact info might be part of the registration requirement) and told to remove it within the hour, or their domain name gets disabled (which could be done faster if the kids.us zone file has short TTL settings on all the delegations). Since the technology exists to isolate the upper level domain names, such as Slashdot uses to optionally show them to you in postings, it could easily be extended to totally block out the link if it's not to kids.us, or even reject the posting altogether. The problem is more a social one of making people actually do it since way too many people (adults here) are too clueless to understand how to make things right. So we shouldn't be seeing a goatse.cx or urinalpoop.org showing up if they do it right.
There are lots of different kinds of spoofing, so I don't know which you are referring to, so I can't give a specific example of how to prevent it. But the obvious part is that there are at least 2 levels of protection parents can engage. The light level is simply make sure the kids start on a kids.us portal. Then as long as the site operators do what they are supposed to, the kids will be safe. The stronger level is to configure the browser so that when the kids are logged in to the computer, it won't allow access to any web content (including images, Java, CSS, whatever) which isn't found by means of a kids.us domain lookup. So the URLs with IP addresses won't work, either.
One form of spoofing you may be referring to is stuff like emailed URLs that look like a kids.us URL, but in fact go to somewhere else. But that's an issue of whether the parents allow the kids to use software that would access some other domain. By using the stronger level of protection, even opening spam with these links will fail, as long as the program displaying it goes through the same mechanisms to find the site (which I believe is the case on Windows). The content actually in that mail is another issue. Since almost everything in email can be forged, you might not want to allow your kids access to email unless you have some stronger protection to ensure they are getting it only from other kids you approve of. Restricting kids to web based email on a kids.us webmail site, that by extension of the law should only communicate with other such sites and not to any outside of the kids.us domain, and not by SMTP which could spoof that, should keep your kids safe.
I don't believe the law is requiring you as a parent to restrict your kids to this domain, but rather, is giving you this as an option, so that if you choose to, you can set up the computer to limit itself to kids.us and actually leave your child unattended for a while at the computer with more confidence than you would have today. My worry, though, is that this might be just the first step to more laws, or case law, in the future. Consider a court deciding to take children away from their parents and the fact that the parents didn't restrict their kids to kids.us on the computer was what tipped the scale in the case. That would open up a whole lot of new problems that I can see. And I'm afraid a case like that will happen within a few years.
Has anyone considered what will happen in the next few years as the FCC mandates all TV broadcasting in the major markets be in digital format? Has California considered how it will deal with a glut of old analog TV sets headed for the trash dump? I suppose they could be sold on EBay to the rest of the country until the digital mandate becomes 100%. Ironically, when we stimulate the economy with products consumers want to buy, like computers in the recent decade, we also stimulate trash. So maybe our disposal rates will be a lagged measure of our economy.
And how will you know if the backup network even works? Of course you could test it. But will it work under the kind of extreme live stress that would take down the primary network? And what if the issue is simply load than neither network can fully handle? Could you run both networks in tandemn correctly? It sounds to me like the original problem was that the network was designed by someone who thinks of the switches as magical black boxes that will take care of everything ... someone that assumes perfect abstraction. That 3 million dollars to build a parallel network I think could be better spent by hiring competent people to build a correct network that includes redundancies structured in the right places. No matter what you do, there will be some single points of failure, such as the very logic used to switch over to the backup network if that's what you have (which would be a big waste if it sat there idle). The network engineering people need to know and understand those single points of failure and have plans to deal with failures at those points.
Nope. Attacking the opponent because he can't even defend his own position. Attacking the opponent who makes the false assumption that because one example problem is given that there is only one problem. I do enjoy a good debate, and it is even more enjoyable when I have a good opponent who knows his material well, and also doesn't use faulty logic. It's a shame this one just degraded into flaws in the arguments themselves, and not the subjects being debated about. This didn't fit the description of either enjoyable or debate. I'll be looking for other threads for someone more qualified who can defend Microsoft Windows. I do know there are plenty because I have debated them before (and no, I don't always win, and often I do learn things I didn't know). I won't be back to this thread because it's a waste of time. If you want to have the last word, then post a reply.
There isn't just one bad experience. I only gave one out of many, simply because it was very recent and fresh in my memory. And in Unix you don't have to close down the application to be able to release the floppy. The directory is not in use once the application closes the file, as long as you didn't do something stupid like change the current directory to that floppy. And automounting and autounmounting can be done. I've done it before (I just happen to avoid floppies lately because they are so lame).
But you do seem to be one of those people who, when someone else gives one example, jumps to the conclusion that one example is all there is. Not true. But based on my experience with people, those who make such assumptions are generally not open minded. I am, but you have years and years of frustrations with Microsoft Windows to overcome. No, Linux isn't perfect, but it's openness at least makes it easy to accomplish most anything you need to. Windows is a royal PITA in that department.
The majority of people don't know a damned thing about Linux. They hardly know anything about Windows. Now I won't say they aren't better off with Windows as they probably are. But the fact is that they (customers) are just plain and simple not making that choice on the basis of knowing anything about either one.
Your argument about why MS wants Windows on every PC shipped is also bogus. Thats what the PR department wants you to believe. The real reason it started was because of a competitor called DR-DOS. Some manufacturers were starting to ship PCs with DR-DOS instead of MS-DOS. Machines without an OS were not the issue, nor was Linux. And you can see further evidence that this is the case because this contract with Microsoft doesn't even allow a machine to be shipped with an alternate operating system if the customer does ask for it. Try calling up one of the big PC makers (e.g. the ones that would hurt bad if Microsoft yanked it's contract) and ask for some desktop machine or even a Laptop to be shipped with Linux instead of Windows (and without paying Microsoft for something you don't get).
I was using someone else's Windows 2000 and Word 2000 the other day because I needed to convert an HTML file to Word DOC format. Should be simple! It wasn't. I brought a floppy with the original file (read only), and a new blank formatted floppy. I started up Word and loaded the HTML file from the first floppy. Then I changed floppies and had Word store the document in Word format. The failed because it has the original file still "open" from the first floppy, and this being a different floppy, it got a error from the underlying I/O system while trying to write (maybe because it remembered the original floppy was read only). What I ended up having to do was have Word save the document on disk, then close Word and restart it, load the document back now from the hard disk, and then save it to the 2nd floppy. Maybe I should have just done this on Linux with OpenOffice or something and saved the hassle.
I've installed Linux and Windows both many hundreds of times. The former generally to upgrade or repurpose a machine. The latter usually because it just plained needed it with the very same version again after a few months of "software degrade". And you're trying to tell me that my experiences with Windows that convince me it's crap is elitist? Hardly. Linux may not be easy like Windows is, and certainly confuses most non-geek users, especially if they are installing it. But it's just not in the crappy league Windows is. Of course I'll still recommend Windows for the naive users of computers. And it's sad that they are better off with crap. But they don't have to ask because that's the default, anyway.