* If you expect to have any control over the venture, you need to have your management team in place and solid. If you're an individual, forget about VC. VCs typically don't get involved until you've already got your venture running and are grossing more than $1M
* If you're just getting started, you probably want tier one, aka "Seed capital" aka "Angel investment", which basically translates to finding someone with some money to burn that believes in your project; this could be family & friends or some rich person who has an interest in what you're doing. The best way to solicit T1 money from strangers is to put together a business plan that has a clear exit strategy for the angel investor when the time comes for the next tier of funding.
* Ultimately, this whole deal is a catch-22. Most people who have money either want majority control, or won't be interested until you've proven that your idea is marketable and profitable, in which case, it may be less critical for you to need capital.
* If you have an idea that you think is profitable, but have not deployed it in any manner to demonstrate that the concept is practical and marketable, then the value of your venture is ZERO. Unproven ideas are worth virtually nothing. Everyone on the planet thinks they have the world's greatest idea.
* Don't discount the potential of soliciting government grants or regional business development deals, especially if your idea is unproven -- often these types of deals require more salesmanship than practicality.
* Sad but true. Often the entities that would most benefit from exploiting your idea/tech/service are the ones who can't be bothered with you UNTIL you embarass them by demonstrating that your idea kicks ass. You usually don't get the attention of major players until you're pissing other companies in your industry off. Your best bet is if you have companies being serviced by a potential investor/partner that represent your target audience, you should target them and try to get their attention that way.
Have we not established a few basic tenets of the spamademic?
1. Spammers make money by using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth than what they pay for. Stopping spam from entering peoples' inboxes is less than half the problem. 70% or more of all SMTP traffic is UCE and everyone pays for that in higher costs and slower performance regardless of whether they have spam filters in place.
2. The majority of the anti-spam solutions (with the exception of RBLs) including the one related to this article, require extra time, bandwidth and resources on the part of innocent networks to deal with the spam problem. This is a step backwards.
If you want to stop spammers you have to stop them from stealing bandwidth. To date, the ONLY effective solution thus far has been relay blacklisting. This has several added benefits including: stopping propagating of worms/viruses, and forcing ISPs to police the illegal activities of their users and shut down nodes which are spamming through their network.
As an ISP, I have no interest in yet another costly anti-spam solution that I have to install that doesn't address the larger issue of the tons of bandwidth spammers waste on my network and every one in between. This system wastes even more resources by attempting to verify the source of every e-mail in an even more detailed manner than before, so the end result is: more computing resources needed, more bandwidth needed and slower mail service.
No thanks.
I'll patiently wait until the *inevitable* SMTP whitelist scheme that is the only true solution to stopping spam (unless the authorities decide to actually start prosecuting spammers for their crimes).
I'm curious if there are comparable-quality Freeware/Shareware anti-virus products available? I don't mind paying for a product, but don't like having the product cease to function unless more money is extorted out of me in perpetuity. I'm sick and tired of Symantec shaking me down for subscription updates, and subsequent versions of their products becoming more bloated and inefficient.
If you ask me, the government has had these databases in effect for a long time already.. virtually all data out there is at their disposal. They just want to make it formal so it's easier to collect information and use it arbitrarily, and they don't have to be sneaky about it. Or maybe there's some seemingly innocuous provision of the pending legislation that unlocks a lot more freedom on their part to do things with the data they have, or for example, cross-reference grades and class schedules with existing profiling databases.
The potential for abuse here is rather enormous. Since they can arbitrarily put people on the "no fly" list with no notice, no reasoning, and no recourse, they could identify administration-unfriendly students by their choice of classes or academic agenda and punish them. It would not be that far out to contemplate such a thing happening. The US did this to the Panamanians when they invaded under Reagan.
It does help, exponentially. I would never put an unpatched box online with a publicly-accessible IP address. One should never do that anyway, patched or not.
Hook your PC up to the net, watch it get infected. You will have so many attacks that you can pick and choose which jurisdiction you wish to pursue a case in.
Look up and contact your local Attorney General and demand that they start prosecuting the criminals that break into PCs. These activities have been felonious crimes since day one of the Internet. Even if our OSes were more secure, it doesn't excuse the blatant illegal activities that are continuously perpetrated that cause untold amounts of wasted bandwidth, time and other resources that our leaders in the criminal justice system should be doing something about. Contact your local AG and demand they start prosecuting these cases and this stuff will be dramatically less prevalent.
We've blocked every IP block from Korea at the router level. The level of spam originating from their IP space is simply astronomical. Maybe if their telcos got their act together, more of their citizens who might want to contact people outside the country might be able to do so. Otherwise, I suspect the reason most people don't use e-mail is because it's completely unreliable due to spammers taking over their networks and being RBL'd.
Even though you claim at times you're more a "nerd wannabe" than a "nerd", you do have a unique pulpit from which you can reach many people, and an unintimidating way of communicating. Can you give us some examples of how you feel you've exploited your insight and notoriety to further ideals that you feel are important? What do you think are the most substantive misconceptions the public has about tech people?
Suffice to say that critiquing any Apple product is likely to elicit great ire from the Apple sycophant community, but sorry, it's just my experience. I checked a lot of iPod-oriented messageboards and it seems I am far from the only person having these problems.
I thought maybe NAV was the culprit so I completely removed all references from the startup scripts and stripped the OS down to bare bones. I even changed BIOS settings regarding plug-n-play and peripheral and USB options.. nothing made a difference.
I have a Sony PC-100 video camera that I can connect right into the FW port on the PC and it works fine. It's only the iPod that isn't recognized.
So I end up using the USB, which causes the system to reboot whenever I plug the iPod in (page fault in non paged area BSOD). After the system reboots, as long as I don't remove the iPod from the cradle, iTunes will recognize it. But if I tell iTunes to manually synch upon demand, the computer crashes again.
Ridiculous. This is a super clean AMD-based XP-Pro system that has nothing but the most basic startup processes that are part of the OS. I'm anal about making sure my systems are clean, and this PC that has the problems basically only runs 2-3 main applications. The system is not overclocked or non-standard. The closest thing to non-standard is that it's an AMD-based machine instead of Intel. The iPod should work, but it is buggy - or the driver software or something is messed up.
It wouldn't hurt to wait, especially if you're using a PC. My iPod causes my PC to reboot whenever it plugs into the USB-based docking port. I have no problems with any other USB devices, so there are still some glitches to be worked out for iPod on the PC side of things.
I picked up an iPod the other day and I found that its USB and Firewire connectivity on PCs to be iffy at best. I couldn't get Firewire to work at all, most of the time when iTunes tries to connect to the iPod, it causes a fatal system error and I have to reboot XPpro. I haven't had trouble with any other devices using these ports so I have to assume the PC version of iTunes has some glitches that create problems with some PC configurations.
I am having the same problem. The system recognized that an update was available, and when I accepted the update, CRASH (under Win98SE). I also find it annoying that it says there are plug-ins available, but then you can't install them.
Back to the drawing board. I hope they get this stuff worked out.
Generally speaking, tech people are an eccentric bunch. The best among them are usually not concerned with IP theft. A good analogy would be that of a musician, who's afraid to have his music recorded for fear someone will steal it. Big whoop. A true artist is not motivated by such selfish desires and benefits exponentially more in the long run by freely sharing his work. Even the chaff from such efforts is more substantive than trying to maintain control of everything and living in a miserable sphere of paranoia.
If you're running Tivo with DTV, you never need to plug the unit in and have it "phone home" and update. If you're doing PPV stuff, maybe, but with the satellite versions of Tivo, I've had my unit unplugged for more than a year and it works fine.
I think this is relatively moot if you're like many Tivo users and you've enabled the unpublished 30s autoskip hack (S-P-S-3-0-S). When you press the skip button, it jumps exactly 30 seconds. You hit this 6-8 times during commercial breaks and you're back at your show; much faster than FF and you don't have to pay attention to the screen so who gives a damn what they're displaying?
I am less interested in the fact they may want to run ads, as I am profoundly disappointed that this idea on the part of Tivo indicates that they are way, WAY out of touch with their customers' needs and desires, which doesn't bode well for the future of the company. There are tons of ways they could make money by adding new services and features.... and advertising-related crap will never be among them.
Personally I wouldn't worry about patents. The original intent of patents were to protect IP but now they're primarily used for two other purposes: to stifle innovation and attract investors. The lone coder doesn't really need to feel intimidated by either of these issues. In a worst-case scenario, if you manage to create an app which attracts the attention of an entity which would threaten you, at the same time you'll probably also be approached by entities that are interested in acquiring your technology (and willing to help defend it).
It's a sad commentary on the state of innovation in our society that something like this is even an issue. Imagine if all the great artists throughout history were discouraged by the thought that their work might infringe upon or offend somebody, or whether or not the prospect was profitable.
Then again, if you're getting into coding merely as a means to an end, you can do us all a favor and don't bother. If you haven't identified an area where you think you can contribute, why bother? You're in the biz for the wrong reason and we have enough lame code from un-passionate producers just doing it to make a buck.
I have always contended that e-mail is a very private medium. When we run e-mail services for our clients, we do not examine the contents of their mailboxes ever. We control spam via RBLs and it has proven to be more effective and offer a much higher degree of privacy.
Likewise, the freebie web e-mail services are fine for goofing off, but I would never use such services for core communications. There is virtually no guarantee of privacy ever with any of those services. Their terms of service and privacy policies are spineless. At any time they can change their policy and there's no doubt they have archives of every message sent and received. I'm not assuming most people have mail content that needs to be kept highly-private, nor that anyone would necessarily be interested in the content, but it's the principal of the matter. I've always felt that e-mail is a sacred medium that should be respected.
As a result, I am among those who really don't care what Google, Hotmail, Yahoo or others do. I may occasionally use their service, but the core of my communication will never involve their systems. It just seems like a smart move. A company whoring its services will inevitably exploit the content that you generate through their network. It's not what any of us signed up for or agreed early on, but it's as much of their business model as anything else, so don't be naive and think you have any privacy whatsoever on these whore e-mail services. You don't.
Slashdot Mirror
.. from someone having been there..
* If you expect to have any control over the venture, you need to have your management team in place and solid. If you're an individual, forget about VC. VCs typically don't get involved until you've already got your venture running and are grossing more than $1M
* If you're just getting started, you probably want tier one, aka "Seed capital" aka "Angel investment", which basically translates to finding someone with some money to burn that believes in your project; this could be family & friends or some rich person who has an interest in what you're doing. The best way to solicit T1 money from strangers is to put together a business plan that has a clear exit strategy for the angel investor when the time comes for the next tier of funding.
* Ultimately, this whole deal is a catch-22. Most people who have money either want majority control, or won't be interested until you've proven that your idea is marketable and profitable, in which case, it may be less critical for you to need capital.
* If you have an idea that you think is profitable, but have not deployed it in any manner to demonstrate that the concept is practical and marketable, then the value of your venture is ZERO. Unproven ideas are worth virtually nothing. Everyone on the planet thinks they have the world's greatest idea.
* Don't discount the potential of soliciting government grants or regional business development deals, especially if your idea is unproven -- often these types of deals require more salesmanship than practicality.
* Sad but true. Often the entities that would most benefit from exploiting your idea/tech/service are the ones who can't be bothered with you UNTIL you embarass them by demonstrating that your idea kicks ass. You usually don't get the attention of major players until you're pissing other companies in your industry off. Your best bet is if you have companies being serviced by a potential investor/partner that represent your target audience, you should target them and try to get their attention that way.
1. Buy lots of bread.. put them in the toaster..
2. If the toast looks like the Virgin Mary, put it up on eBay
3. $$Profit$$
Have we not established a few basic tenets of the spamademic?
1. Spammers make money by using a disproportionate amount of bandwidth than what they pay for. Stopping spam from entering peoples' inboxes is less than half the problem. 70% or more of all SMTP traffic is UCE and everyone pays for that in higher costs and slower performance regardless of whether they have spam filters in place.
2. The majority of the anti-spam solutions (with the exception of RBLs) including the one related to this article, require extra time, bandwidth and resources on the part of innocent networks to deal with the spam problem. This is a step backwards.
If you want to stop spammers you have to stop them from stealing bandwidth. To date, the ONLY effective solution thus far has been relay blacklisting. This has several added benefits including: stopping propagating of worms/viruses, and forcing ISPs to police the illegal activities of their users and shut down nodes which are spamming through their network.
As an ISP, I have no interest in yet another costly anti-spam solution that I have to install that doesn't address the larger issue of the tons of bandwidth spammers waste on my network and every one in between. This system wastes even more resources by attempting to verify the source of every e-mail in an even more detailed manner than before, so the end result is: more computing resources needed, more bandwidth needed and slower mail service.
No thanks.
I'll patiently wait until the *inevitable* SMTP whitelist scheme that is the only true solution to stopping spam (unless the authorities decide to actually start prosecuting spammers for their crimes).
I'm curious if there are comparable-quality Freeware/Shareware anti-virus products available? I don't mind paying for a product, but don't like having the product cease to function unless more money is extorted out of me in perpetuity. I'm sick and tired of Symantec shaking me down for subscription updates, and subsequent versions of their products becoming more bloated and inefficient.
We don't need more laws, unless those laws mandate X amount of money and resources for enforcement of existing laws.
When will people wake up?
If you ask me, the government has had these databases in effect for a long time already.. virtually all data out there is at their disposal. They just want to make it formal so it's easier to collect information and use it arbitrarily, and they don't have to be sneaky about it. Or maybe there's some seemingly innocuous provision of the pending legislation that unlocks a lot more freedom on their part to do things with the data they have, or for example, cross-reference grades and class schedules with existing profiling databases.
The potential for abuse here is rather enormous. Since they can arbitrarily put people on the "no fly" list with no notice, no reasoning, and no recourse, they could identify administration-unfriendly students by their choice of classes or academic agenda and punish them. It would not be that far out to contemplate such a thing happening. The US did this to the Panamanians when they invaded under Reagan.
It does help, exponentially. I would never put an unpatched box online with a publicly-accessible IP address. One should never do that anyway, patched or not.
Hook your PC up to the net, watch it get infected. You will have so many attacks that you can pick and choose which jurisdiction you wish to pursue a case in.
Look up and contact your local Attorney General and demand that they start prosecuting the criminals that break into PCs. These activities have been felonious crimes since day one of the Internet. Even if our OSes were more secure, it doesn't excuse the blatant illegal activities that are continuously perpetrated that cause untold amounts of wasted bandwidth, time and other resources that our leaders in the criminal justice system should be doing something about. Contact your local AG and demand they start prosecuting these cases and this stuff will be dramatically less prevalent.
Here are some for starters -- of the class A and B blocks in these areas are used by spammers in Korea and China:
59.11/x
61.37/x
165.194
147.46
210.*
211.*
219.248/x
220.64/x
221.144-221.168
We've blocked every IP block from Korea at the router level. The level of spam originating from their IP space is simply astronomical. Maybe if their telcos got their act together, more of their citizens who might want to contact people outside the country might be able to do so. Otherwise, I suspect the reason most people don't use e-mail is because it's completely unreliable due to spammers taking over their networks and being RBL'd.
Even though you claim at times you're more a "nerd wannabe" than a "nerd", you do have a unique pulpit from which you can reach many people, and an unintimidating way of communicating. Can you give us some examples of how you feel you've exploited your insight and notoriety to further ideals that you feel are important? What do you think are the most substantive misconceptions the public has about tech people?
I guess you're luckier than I am in this case.
Suffice to say that critiquing any Apple product is likely to elicit great ire from the Apple sycophant community, but sorry, it's just my experience. I checked a lot of iPod-oriented messageboards and it seems I am far from the only person having these problems.
I thought maybe NAV was the culprit so I completely removed all references from the startup scripts and stripped the OS down to bare bones. I even changed BIOS settings regarding plug-n-play and peripheral and USB options.. nothing made a difference.
I have a Sony PC-100 video camera that I can connect right into the FW port on the PC and it works fine. It's only the iPod that isn't recognized.
So I end up using the USB, which causes the system to reboot whenever I plug the iPod in (page fault in non paged area BSOD). After the system reboots, as long as I don't remove the iPod from the cradle, iTunes will recognize it. But if I tell iTunes to manually synch upon demand, the computer crashes again.
Ridiculous. This is a super clean AMD-based XP-Pro system that has nothing but the most basic startup processes that are part of the OS. I'm anal about making sure my systems are clean, and this PC that has the problems basically only runs 2-3 main applications. The system is not overclocked or non-standard. The closest thing to non-standard is that it's an AMD-based machine instead of Intel. The iPod should work, but it is buggy - or the driver software or something is messed up.
It wouldn't hurt to wait, especially if you're using a PC. My iPod causes my PC to reboot whenever it plugs into the USB-based docking port. I have no problems with any other USB devices, so there are still some glitches to be worked out for iPod on the PC side of things.
I picked up an iPod the other day and I found that its USB and Firewire connectivity on PCs to be iffy at best. I couldn't get Firewire to work at all, most of the time when iTunes tries to connect to the iPod, it causes a fatal system error and I have to reboot XPpro. I haven't had trouble with any other devices using these ports so I have to assume the PC version of iTunes has some glitches that create problems with some PC configurations.
I am having the same problem. The system recognized that an update was available, and when I accepted the update, CRASH (under Win98SE). I also find it annoying that it says there are plug-ins available, but then you can't install them.
Back to the drawing board. I hope they get this stuff worked out.
Generally speaking, tech people are an eccentric bunch. The best among them are usually not concerned with IP theft. A good analogy would be that of a musician, who's afraid to have his music recorded for fear someone will steal it. Big whoop. A true artist is not motivated by such selfish desires and benefits exponentially more in the long run by freely sharing his work. Even the chaff from such efforts is more substantive than trying to maintain control of everything and living in a miserable sphere of paranoia.
If you're running Tivo with DTV, you never need to plug the unit in and have it "phone home" and update. If you're doing PPV stuff, maybe, but with the satellite versions of Tivo, I've had my unit unplugged for more than a year and it works fine.
I think this is relatively moot if you're like many Tivo users and you've enabled the unpublished 30s autoskip hack (S-P-S-3-0-S). When you press the skip button, it jumps exactly 30 seconds. You hit this 6-8 times during commercial breaks and you're back at your show; much faster than FF and you don't have to pay attention to the screen so who gives a damn what they're displaying?
I am less interested in the fact they may want to run ads, as I am profoundly disappointed that this idea on the part of Tivo indicates that they are way, WAY out of touch with their customers' needs and desires, which doesn't bode well for the future of the company. There are tons of ways they could make money by adding new services and features.... and advertising-related crap will never be among them.
Personally I wouldn't worry about patents. The original intent of patents were to protect IP but now they're primarily used for two other purposes: to stifle innovation and attract investors. The lone coder doesn't really need to feel intimidated by either of these issues. In a worst-case scenario, if you manage to create an app which attracts the attention of an entity which would threaten you, at the same time you'll probably also be approached by entities that are interested in acquiring your technology (and willing to help defend it).
It's a sad commentary on the state of innovation in our society that something like this is even an issue. Imagine if all the great artists throughout history were discouraged by the thought that their work might infringe upon or offend somebody, or whether or not the prospect was profitable.
Then again, if you're getting into coding merely as a means to an end, you can do us all a favor and don't bother. If you haven't identified an area where you think you can contribute, why bother? You're in the biz for the wrong reason and we have enough lame code from un-passionate producers just doing it to make a buck.
I have always contended that e-mail is a very private medium. When we run e-mail services for our clients, we do not examine the contents of their mailboxes ever. We control spam via RBLs and it has proven to be more effective and offer a much higher degree of privacy.
Likewise, the freebie web e-mail services are fine for goofing off, but I would never use such services for core communications. There is virtually no guarantee of privacy ever with any of those services. Their terms of service and privacy policies are spineless. At any time they can change their policy and there's no doubt they have archives of every message sent and received. I'm not assuming most people have mail content that needs to be kept highly-private, nor that anyone would necessarily be interested in the content, but it's the principal of the matter. I've always felt that e-mail is a sacred medium that should be respected.
As a result, I am among those who really don't care what Google, Hotmail, Yahoo or others do. I may occasionally use their service, but the core of my communication will never involve their systems. It just seems like a smart move. A company whoring its services will inevitably exploit the content that you generate through their network. It's not what any of us signed up for or agreed early on, but it's as much of their business model as anything else, so don't be naive and think you have any privacy whatsoever on these whore e-mail services. You don't.