Marketing to TV viewers or AOL lusers is a totally different beast than marketing to developers. Save the bullshit and fluff for the morons who will believe it. You can't bullshit a bunch of developers. If your product sucks they will know it! If it has problems -- admit it or else you risk a public humiliation. Let the developers come up with their own uses for your product! Don't lock the developers into your way of doing something (remember the CueCat ???).
If you sell a good product or a real value-added service than you will suceed. But, developers can root-out bullshit a mile away!
I've seen/heard TV and radio shows from the 1930's in America. Back then an hour-long show was sponsored by an advertiser. So rather than having 10 minute of commecials every 30 minutes you would know that your favorite show is sponsered by some corporate entity. Why couldn't TV do this today? Why do we have to be bombarded by commecials? I think it would make much more sense for TV stations to sell ads in this format.
Advertisers seem to be under the delusion that if you show me ad once I won't buy your product. But, if you pop it up in my face or assault me with it 10,000 times I'm suddenly going to head to the nearest store and empty my wallet. I think we should stop the "ad-assault" and go for a more sophisticated sponsorship model.
If some asshole starts spamming my phone I'll sue my provider for allowing it to happen! Junk mail in my physical mailbox is bad enough.. but, at least they pay for that (and it keeps the postal service in business). But, if I'm paying for it I'm going to nip that shit in the butt real quick!
If this happened to my MP3 collection I'd be pissed. But, what do you expect with WMF's? You use Microsoft's formats -- you get held to Microsoft's rules! That is why the RIAA and friends HATE MP3's... because it is format that they can't control. Just keep encoding your shit to MP3 or OGG format and you won't have to worry about this sort of thing happening (at least until Palladium comes along!)
"what will happen to all the people like the background characters, costume makers, construction, caterers, cameramen, model makers, casting companies, etc?"
FUCK THEM! They will have to go get jobs doing something else. Maybe they are the reason that movies cost $100,000.00+ to make nowadays?!?
I bet the caterer makes a shitload. It doesn't bother me one bit to see these people out of work. Half the time our local government doesn't have enough budget to operate vital services like schools, water-treatment, and sanitation. And, here we are acting concerned that some costume-maker in Hollywood is out of a job? HA! Maybe the costume make can go run for office and try to solve some real problems for a change. It would be nice if schools could have the money they need for education. Maybe we should re-think our priorities?
"...technical support (for which Dell is known) is less expensive if your staff doesn't have to deal with disparate OS's."
Hey... when is the last time you talked to Dell tech support? They are getting worse and worse all the time. The company has grown too big for their own good. They are outsourcing their tech support to third-party companies now. I had a guy at work on the phone for 3 hours the other day trying to get a satisfactory solution from Dell support. They sent us a defective hard drive. Our hardware guy was trying to convince some lackey at Dell Tech support that it was their fault. I overheard him ask the Dell guy a couple of times: "why are you arguing with me?"
Three hours later we got a supervisor to send us out a new hard drive. But, this is becoming typical of the Dell Tech support experience. They aren't as good as they used to be 3 years ago.
So.... I buy the machine with XP and format it. I install Windows 2000 instead (which I already bought licenses for) and I am paying an extra $300 for the machine because I can't buy it with a "No OS" option?!?! I just went to the Dell site and looked for information on their "nSeries" machines that they mention in the letter -- but, I couldn't find anything. If you go look up their selections for the OptiPlex series you get a bunch of radio buttons with this choice:
Obviously centralized P2P systems like Napster, Fasttrack, and AudioGalaxy are problematic. Sure they are fast.... but their Achilles' heel is the fact that there is a single point of failure. You go after the company or the major nodes and you can effectively shut it down.
So, I was think about the next generation of P2P. Obviously if the US Gov't and lawmakers start going after P2P networks we will need to develop a more robust, anonymous method of trading files.
If I was going to make a P2P network I would think about including some of the following features.
1) Completely anonymous (maybe encrypted?). Your machine could never be singled out by IP address.
2) The ability to add security (ie: login/password). What if I want to start my own MP3 trading club and only want to have members be "invite only"? That way you can have some control over quality and selection.
3) The ability to use HTTP (preferably port 80?) to disguise traffic and prevent ISP's or schools from blocking ports and preventing trade.
4) A built-in, updatable firewall to prevent certain IP blocks from accessing your machine (ie: to prevent companies like Ranger Online Inc from searching your machine and issuing "take down" notices to your ISP.)
5) The abilty to perform a massive DoS attack on a hostile attacker. Say some company (like the RIAA or Ranger Online Inc.) starts to "hurt" the network or tries to take it down... self-defense mode would kick-in and DoS the shit out the attacker until they stopped their interference.
6) Error correction and feedback. The ablity for the system to "weed out" bad copies of files based on user feedback. You could also have it check MD5 sums to ensure quality.
Anyone else think of things that future P2P networks will need to withstand the attack?
We need to set up some time when Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen is giving a speech. Then, on their way out we grab them and throw them on a plane and drag their asses to Australia. We can even call the Australian police ahead of time so they will be waiting at the airport when we land!
Now VeriSign is speaking out against ICANN because they aren't getting their way. But, 2 years ago they had their nose so far up ICANN's ass they could smell what they had for breakfast. VeriSign is probably one of the worst monopolies on the planet (not including Microsoft)! There is hardly a pie left that doesn't have their fingerprints in it. They speak out against ICANN when it suits them and get into bed with them when they are getting what they want. I say they are nothing but a bunch of snakes in the grass.
If companies start to make it a habit of suing people who tell the truth about them people will stop trusting these companies. Why did they tell HP about it first? They were honest and got bitch slapped. So, next time the researchers will think twice before going to the company. Maybe they will just publish on FreeNet or leak their story on Slashdot first?
There is a simple RIAA Killer in HTML and Javascript here. No program necessary. Just open this link: http://riaakiller.tripod.com/ and minimize the window. Every 3 seconds it will reload RIAA.ORG and RIAA.COM. That works out to about 20 page loads a minute. If we can get 10,000 people doing this it would be about 200,000 page loads per minute. Check it out!
They've blocked all ping traffic to their servers. Someone needs to write a little application that does about 10,000 wget's an hour on their homepage on port 80. We start to distribute this tool and get about 10,000,000 people downloading their homepage 10,000 times an hour. We could take down their servers for good! Anyone got some spare time?
Once again....security through obscurity...
on
WarTalking Arrest
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If we all pretend the problem doesn't exist... maybe it will go away on its own? We'll just prosecute anyone who points out that we have a problem. Then, everything will be fine. I swear -- the intelligence in this country has gone right down the shitter in the last 25 years. We used to respect and honor knowledge. Now me simply make a mockery of it. I weep for my generation.
"Hopefully it will have as much success as Prohibition...."
Yet look at the idiotic "war on drugs" that has been going on since the 1980's. They have about as much chance of winning this war as a snowball has in hell. But, they continue to pump billions of dollars into the program and fill the jails anyway. I think that the RI/MPAA's fight against filesharing will end up like the war on drugs in about 5 years.
Sure the Peekabooty website talks about free speech in China, blah, blah, blah.... Everyone here is arguing about whether the Chinese will block Peekabooty and whether it will be an effective tool for freedom of speech. But, the REAL point of this software isn't to help the Chinese -- it's to help us poor saps in the Good Ole US of A! Think about it: since 9/11 our Government has gotten more and more oppressive. They have taken away freedoms that we used to take for granted. But, if the developers of Peekabooty came right out and said: "this is used to circumvent the assholes in Homeland Security" they would get a visit from the NSA/FBI/CIA etc.. They picked an oppressive regime (like China) to talk about this tool. But, substitute the letters USA for CHINA and you will begin to see the truth.
Another nice benefit of this tool will be the developement of secure, anonymous P2P networks. Look at all the shit in the news lately about how ISP's are cutting off KaZaa. And, how Ranger Online is tracking down Gnutella users. The RIAA/MPAA Gestapo is out to get us and take us down. New tools like Peekabooty and FreeNet will help to insure that these organizations will never, EVER shut down the free-flow of information on the Net. Peekabooty is a dagger that is aimed right at the heart of corporate America! It says: "You think you can take over the Net? Ha! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!". This just proves to them that we can always defeat them with technology regardless of how much money they have!
The P2P clients need to be modified to detect scans from Ranger Online Inc.. Why not figure out what IP's they are using and systematically block them? Even better -- build this feature into P2P clients so that the user can change the IP's at will (rather than hard-coding it into the binary). That way when Ranger Online changes their IP's in attempt to start scanning again -- we can find out what range they are using and block them again!
So, let's get some packet-sniffers up and going and figure out what range of IP's these "attacks" are coming from. If I find anything I will post it here in this thread. Let's shut these guys down and put them out of business for good!
It's easy to arrest Warez d00dz. They don't shoot back! The cops would much rather go after an "easy target" than risk their lives trying to arrest some crackhead with a sub-machine gun.
Seriously man. I used to go to Toys-R-Us and buy games for my Atari 800XL on floppies. We'd bring them home, copy them, and then return them with some lame exuse (ie: "this game doesn't work on my computer"). Then, we'd get together at school and trade games during lunchtime.
Later, we all got on BBS's and traded stuff. The reporter obviously didn't research the history of warez very well.
Thanks! I just cancelled my account.
on
Ebay buys PayPal
·
· Score: 1
Good thing for Slashdot.... I just got back from holiday and was catching up on the news. I saw this little article and immediately went and cancelled my PayPal account. eBay is in fact "The Great Satan" (don't be fooled by immitations!). I don't need more spam. PayPal was cool in 1999... but, they have gone downhill ever since. Good bye and good riddance! Jeez! You go away for a few weeks and the whole Net goes to hell and gets taken over by AOHell or eBay.
Slashdot Mirror
Marketing to TV viewers or AOL lusers is a totally different beast than marketing to developers. Save the bullshit and fluff for the morons who will believe it. You can't bullshit a bunch of developers. If your product sucks they will know it! If it has problems -- admit it or else you risk a public humiliation. Let the developers come up with their own uses for your product! Don't lock the developers into your way of doing something (remember the CueCat ???).
If you sell a good product or a real value-added service than you will suceed. But, developers can root-out bullshit a mile away!
I've seen/heard TV and radio shows from the 1930's in America. Back then an hour-long show was sponsored by an advertiser. So rather than having 10 minute of commecials every 30 minutes you would know that your favorite show is sponsered by some corporate entity. Why couldn't TV do this today? Why do we have to be bombarded by commecials? I think it would make much more sense for TV stations to sell ads in this format.
Advertisers seem to be under the delusion that if you show me ad once I won't buy your product. But, if you pop it up in my face or assault me with it 10,000 times I'm suddenly going to head to the nearest store and empty my wallet. I think we should stop the "ad-assault" and go for a more sophisticated sponsorship model.
If some asshole starts spamming my phone I'll sue my provider for allowing it to happen! Junk mail in my physical mailbox is bad enough.. but, at least they pay for that (and it keeps the postal service in business). But, if I'm paying for it I'm going to nip that shit in the butt real quick!
Not a bad idea
Must see it work in real life
Spammers are crafty
If this happened to my MP3 collection I'd be pissed. But, what do you expect with WMF's? You use Microsoft's formats -- you get held to Microsoft's rules! That is why the RIAA and friends HATE MP3's... because it is format that they can't control. Just keep encoding your shit to MP3 or OGG format and you won't have to worry about this sort of thing happening (at least until Palladium comes along!)
FUCK THEM! They will have to go get jobs doing something else. Maybe they are the reason that movies cost $100,000.00+ to make nowadays?!?
I bet the caterer makes a shitload. It doesn't bother me one bit to see these people out of work. Half the time our local government doesn't have enough budget to operate vital services like schools, water-treatment, and sanitation. And, here we are acting concerned that some costume-maker in Hollywood is out of a job? HA! Maybe the costume make can go run for office and try to solve some real problems for a change. It would be nice if schools could have the money they need for education. Maybe we should re-think our priorities?
http://www.ionvideogames.com/refresh/movies/dg_swi tch.mov
Hey... when is the last time you talked to Dell tech support? They are getting worse and worse all the time. The company has grown too big for their own good. They are outsourcing their tech support to third-party companies now. I had a guy at work on the phone for 3 hours the other day trying to get a satisfactory solution from Dell support. They sent us a defective hard drive. Our hardware guy was trying to convince some lackey at Dell Tech support that it was their fault. I overheard him ask the Dell guy a couple of times: "why are you arguing with me?"
Three hours later we got a supervisor to send us out a new hard drive. But, this is becoming typical of the Dell Tech support experience. They aren't as good as they used to be 3 years ago.
So.... I buy the machine with XP and format it. I install Windows 2000 instead (which I already bought licenses for) and I am paying an extra $300 for the machine because I can't buy it with a "No OS" option?!?! I just went to the Dell site and looked for information on their "nSeries" machines that they mention in the letter -- but, I couldn't find anything. If you go look up their selections for the OptiPlex series you get a bunch of radio buttons with this choice:
"SELECT YOUR MICROSOFT OPERATING SYSTEM"
And there are nothing but XP versions listed.
Obviously centralized P2P systems like Napster, Fasttrack, and AudioGalaxy are problematic. Sure they are fast.... but their Achilles' heel is the fact that there is a single point of failure. You go after the company or the major nodes and you can effectively shut it down.
So, I was think about the next generation of P2P. Obviously if the US Gov't and lawmakers start going after P2P networks we will need to develop a more robust, anonymous method of trading files.
If I was going to make a P2P network I would think about including some of the following features.
1) Completely anonymous (maybe encrypted?). Your machine could never be singled out by IP address.
2) The ability to add security (ie: login/password). What if I want to start my own MP3 trading club and only want to have members be "invite only"? That way you can have some control over quality and selection.
3) The ability to use HTTP (preferably port 80?) to disguise traffic and prevent ISP's or schools from blocking ports and preventing trade.
4) A built-in, updatable firewall to prevent certain IP blocks from accessing your machine (ie: to prevent companies like Ranger Online Inc from searching your machine and issuing "take down" notices to your ISP.)
5) The abilty to perform a massive DoS attack on a hostile attacker. Say some company (like the RIAA or Ranger Online Inc.) starts to "hurt" the network or tries to take it down... self-defense mode would kick-in and DoS the shit out the attacker until they stopped their interference.
6) Error correction and feedback. The ablity for the system to "weed out" bad copies of files based on user feedback. You could also have it check MD5 sums to ensure quality.
Anyone else think of things that future P2P networks will need to withstand the attack?
We need to set up some time when Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen is giving a speech. Then, on their way out we grab them and throw them on a plane and drag their asses to Australia. We can even call the Australian police ahead of time so they will be waiting at the airport when we land!
I'll install is while I'm waiting for my 3 Gigs of movies to finish downloading. :)
Calvin from Calvin & Hobbes!
:)
Search for: aa ae ai ao au ea ee ei eo "Calvin"
in about 3-9 hours.
Ahhhh... stupid search engine tricks! Someone should right a book about this shit.
Now VeriSign is speaking out against ICANN because they aren't getting their way. But, 2 years ago they had their nose so far up ICANN's ass they could smell what they had for breakfast. VeriSign is probably one of the worst monopolies on the planet (not including Microsoft)! There is hardly a pie left that doesn't have their fingerprints in it. They speak out against ICANN when it suits them and get into bed with them when they are getting what they want. I say they are nothing but a bunch of snakes in the grass.
If companies start to make it a habit of suing people who tell the truth about them people will stop trusting these companies. Why did they tell HP about it first? They were honest and got bitch slapped. So, next time the researchers will think twice before going to the company. Maybe they will just publish on FreeNet or leak their story on Slashdot first?
It's already in there. But, the Tripod site is down for bandwidth cap. Try one of the mirrors instead.
There is a simple RIAA Killer in HTML and Javascript here. No program necessary. Just open this link: http://riaakiller.tripod.com/ and minimize the window. Every 3 seconds it will reload RIAA.ORG and RIAA.COM. That works out to about 20 page loads a minute. If we can get 10,000 people doing this it would be about 200,000 page loads per minute. Check it out!
Try pinging www.riaa.org or www.riaa.com and you will see:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
They've blocked all ping traffic to their servers. Someone needs to write a little application that does about 10,000 wget's an hour on their homepage on port 80. We start to distribute this tool and get about 10,000,000 people downloading their homepage 10,000 times an hour. We could take down their servers for good! Anyone got some spare time?
If we all pretend the problem doesn't exist... maybe it will go away on its own? We'll just prosecute anyone who points out that we have a problem. Then, everything will be fine. I swear -- the intelligence in this country has gone right down the shitter in the last 25 years. We used to respect and honor knowledge. Now me simply make a mockery of it. I weep for my generation.
"Hopefully it will have as much success as Prohibition...."
Yet look at the idiotic "war on drugs" that has been going on since the 1980's. They have about as much chance of winning this war as a snowball has in hell. But, they continue to pump billions of dollars into the program and fill the jails anyway. I think that the RI/MPAA's fight against filesharing will end up like the war on drugs in about 5 years.
Another nice benefit of this tool will be the developement of secure, anonymous P2P networks. Look at all the shit in the news lately about how ISP's are cutting off KaZaa. And, how Ranger Online is tracking down Gnutella users. The RIAA/MPAA Gestapo is out to get us and take us down. New tools like Peekabooty and FreeNet will help to insure that these organizations will never, EVER shut down the free-flow of information on the Net. Peekabooty is a dagger that is aimed right at the heart of corporate America! It says: "You think you can take over the Net? Ha! Fuck you and the horse you rode in on!". This just proves to them that we can always defeat them with technology regardless of how much money they have!
So, let's get some packet-sniffers up and going and figure out what range of IP's these "attacks" are coming from. If I find anything I will post it here in this thread. Let's shut these guys down and put them out of business for good!
It's easy to arrest Warez d00dz. They don't shoot back! The cops would much rather go after an "easy target" than risk their lives trying to arrest some crackhead with a sub-machine gun.
Seriously man. I used to go to Toys-R-Us and buy games for my Atari 800XL on floppies. We'd bring them home, copy them, and then return them with some lame exuse (ie: "this game doesn't work on my computer"). Then, we'd get together at school and trade games during lunchtime.
Later, we all got on BBS's and traded stuff. The reporter obviously didn't research the history of warez very well.
Good thing for Slashdot.... I just got back from holiday and was catching up on the news. I saw this little article and immediately went and cancelled my PayPal account. eBay is in fact "The Great Satan" (don't be fooled by immitations!). I don't need more spam. PayPal was cool in 1999... but, they have gone downhill ever since. Good bye and good riddance! Jeez! You go away for a few weeks and the whole Net goes to hell and gets taken over by AOHell or eBay.