We got a law. Most of this spam is illegal. Everyone one of them has some way to contact the advertiser or it would be useless. Except for a couple of actions by Yahoo, AOL, and earthlink, I havent heard about a single lawsuit or better yet criminal arrest. if no-one bothers to enforce the law, well duuuh... it doesn't work. I can't remember who the law lets initiate action (almost no-one as I recall) but who-ever was charged with doing needs to adopt a ZERO TOLERANCE policy and file about a hundred suits a day.
It would sure be nice if the government could get it's nose out of people's bedrooms and do something useful for a change.
IBM begat Microsoft which begat Windoze. All on x86. If the butterfly hadn't flapped it's wings at just the right moment, the Motorola line would have won, and the industry would have taken off running something based on PDP-11 code (which was damn good) on 68xxx hardware instead.
There doesn't seem to be anything technically wrong with the system; there is a problem with how it's being used. TLD's aren't really orthogonal in the real world. Maybe you can't define a way to make them so. But there clearly need to be some rules (dodging libertarian arrows here) regarding assignment of domains. No one should one have the ability (= the necessity) of registering your damn name in every concievable domain. I'm tempted to say one individual or company gets one domain name and then you don't get to complain about any other name, including your own in another TLD. I suppose that's not practical, but somehow names need to be harder to get in some spaces.
I'm reminded of the old usenet structure... in certain groups you could only get a new group by consensus, but in alt. you could do anything. Of course it's all fallen apart now, but the concept worked well.
The People have ALL rights. The Government is enjoined from infringing on those rights. The People grant the Government certain powers to "form a more perfect union".
uhhh. what exactly do you think this "union" is we're trying to perfect? Don't you think maybe it's something about the community as a whole has some common interest, and that's why the government has powers? How can you have a "union" if everyone can do what they want, no matter what the impact on the community? Neither giant corporations nor ordinary property owners have the right to do things that significantly damage the society they live in. That's about as common sense as you can get.
The major "selling" is of the technology to Upper Management rather than from vendors.
The first time this became critical was when the Intel 8086 came out, and Intel started selling based on management commitment to Intel, not on technical grounds. A competing processor - the Z8000 - won just about every technical analysis, but Intel sold to management and that's what made them kings. It's a critical concept. Engineers think the best solution wins, but the best business decision isn't always the best technical solution.
And why does a soccer mom want Office when she gets Works for free? What soccer mom needs Excel? Or Powerpoint?
Because every file she gets from someone else is in Word or Excel or Powerpoint. Office is even more of a monopoly than windoze is, since they have the Mac market as well. The fact is that Word, excel and powerpoint are the lingua france of information. If there is one thing that needs to happen in our industry, it's making these file formats open standards. Let 100 applications open and save these formats, so they are just as much a standard as HTML is,
I often look for software solutions in the open source community, or "semi" open source, like stuff buiilt on PHP/MySQL. Most of the time, I'm lucky if I can even figure out what the damn product does, much less match it to my needs. Basic marketing is so simple I can't understand why bright people can't seem to get the hang of it.
I've got news for all you anti-suit types: Marketing isn't trying to BS someone; it's explaining what your product does, who you've designed it for, and what unique qualities make it better than other choices. GQ's and OB's: Good qualities and owner benefits. If you develop programs and can't do that, you should get a job parking cars or something. This is not rocket science and it's not hype. It's educating your customer, which is good for the customer and good for you.
Why not simply print the thing ON INPUT, onto a huge drum of paper, stored inside of the same safe the computer's stored inside of? Wow. Just like every cash register on every retail counter in the country. A retailer may turn off the printed customer receipt, because no-one wants them, but he'll NEVER turn off the continuous paper log, because that provides an audit trail of all the transactions. This is so simple, primitive and necessary, that I have to wonder if it was left out of voting machines on purpose. Any idiot would provide that simple audit trail.
Pols are ALWAYS paid more than they are worth, and always make far more than the people they represent. Whoaaa! That can only be said by someone who believes all the all-government-is-bad crap. Most politicians are deeply dedicated to making the right decisions for the people they represent, striving to make our cities and states work, and they work their butts off. And a lot of them don't get paid anything at all.
I open and close mine 5 or 6 times a day, often after moving it from one wireless network to another. It just works. I reboot maybe once every 10 days or 2 weeks.
I got through 4 years of college and 2 years of grad school primarily scheduled by beer. My xcelent advice: * Study til 9PM * Drink beer til 11PM * Sing along with the jukebox til closing. It's more fun to have a whole table singing together than this new-fangled Kerry-oki stuff. * If you can't find your car, walk home, wake up a housemate, and start crying. * If you can find your car, don't drive. (This is a new rule that we didn't do when I was in college. But having got a DUI a few years ago, I recommend it. http://www.digitalmx.com/john/dui.html) * When you wake up and feel OK, go to class. Under no circumstnaces take a class that starts before 8. Unless you can pass without going to class. I got through one that way.
The 68K instruction set is better than most of them, although if memory serves the Z80000 was even better. But, I still contend the best all time machine language was the PDP-11 instruction set.
As I recall, the 68K was pretty much an imitation of the PDP-11, constrained by 1975 die size limitations. The 8080 begat the Zilog Z80, which begat the 16-bit Z8000. The main thing I remember about the z8000 is that I could never understand the paged addressing scheme. I also remember that nearly every engineering group found the Z8000 superior to the Intel's 16-bit 8086, but by then intel had learned how to get decisions made in board rooms instead of engineering labs. Operation Crush!
As part of a $1500 computer, the price issue is pretty irrelevant.
I don't think most companies are buying 1500 computers. The average worker's computer should be a total commodity by now, and it should cost about $300 plus the OS. I suspect that on many PCs today, Microsoft is getting more money than the hardware guys.
And of course you're aware that the OEM OS you buy has to get thrown away when the computer is no good. You cannot transfer the license to another machine.
I've also noticed that a lot of other search pages are showing up when I do a search for something on google. It is really irritating, since it usually provides absolutely nothing of value. Wish they could figure out how to nix those pages. I don't see how they're getting in there.
news flash to October_30th: a MONOPOLY is not a MARKET. Markets require competitors and choices.
Microsoft imposed this license per cpu formula many years ago and kept it up until the courts stopped them. That's one of the reasons OS/2 - which was far better - never caught on. Neither computer makers nor consumers were free to choose. That is not a market.
OK, so there's a big database. As many have already pointed out, databases already exist. Trying to stamp out databases of personal information has about as much hope as outlawing pot and sharing music. Waste of time.
We need to shift the focus of the debate from whether or not the database exists to how it is used. I think we need a new Bill of Rights to protect us from inaccurate and misused information in ANY database.
People should be able to sue the hell out of a database provider who distributes inaccurate information, and the responsiblility for accuracy should rest on the provider, not on the poor slob being tracked.
In fact, maybe there OUGHT to be a government sponsored database, because then there would be a specific place to go check for inaccuracies, instead of trying to guess who's got what on you.
And there should be severe restrictions on the uses that can be made of the information. I don't care if the government knows I marched against the war, but I damn well don't expect to get my taxes audited as a result. It's way easier to enforce restrictions on the inappropriate use of information than it is on the simple collection of it.
And anyone using data about me from the database should be liable if they can't prove they're using it on me, not someone else. What if you could sue Macy's for opening a credit account in your name using your credit data if it wasn't really you?
Government doesn't have to be the enemy. This is a place where the power of government could be used to protect us. Of course, you'd have to have a government that cared.
Wow. What ever happened to ADA? I thought that was supposed to be only language for high reliability government stuff. Course that was years ago. I watched NASA TV during the landing and it looked a whole lot like Solaris windows to me. But then I'm not a good judge of unix species.
Not supported by Safari either. Sure is cool though. Seems like it would be a lot faster for little icons on a page, so you don't have to retrieve a bunch of tiny files.
If there were no copyrights, there'd be no New York Times.
I doubt that. The NYT gets paid mostly by advertisers and secondarily by people who want to read today's news and commentary. I don't think lack of a copyright would change that. Wouldn't give a you a nickle for yesterday's NYT.
Slashdot Mirror
We got a law. Most of this spam is illegal. Everyone one of them has some way to contact the advertiser or it would be useless.
Except for a couple of actions by Yahoo, AOL, and earthlink, I havent heard about a single lawsuit or better yet criminal arrest. if no-one bothers to enforce the law, well duuuh... it doesn't work. I can't remember who the law lets initiate action (almost no-one as I recall) but who-ever was charged with doing needs to adopt a ZERO TOLERANCE policy and file about a hundred suits a day.
It would sure be nice if the government could get it's nose out of people's bedrooms and do something useful for a change.
J.
IBM begat Microsoft which begat Windoze. All on x86. If the butterfly hadn't flapped it's wings at just the right moment, the Motorola line would have won, and the industry would have taken off running something based on PDP-11 code (which was damn good) on 68xxx hardware instead.
Could we get this on a web form so we can just check the boxes and send it to whoever we want?
With a little imagination, we could cover a lot more kinds of rejection.
There doesn't seem to be anything technically wrong with the system; there is a problem with how it's being used. TLD's aren't really orthogonal in the real world. Maybe you can't define a way to make them so. But there clearly need to be some rules (dodging libertarian arrows here) regarding assignment of domains. No one should one have the ability (= the necessity) of registering your damn name in every concievable domain. I'm tempted to say one individual or company gets one domain name and then you don't get to complain about any other name, including your own in another TLD. I suppose that's not practical, but somehow names need to be harder to get in some spaces.
I'm reminded of the old usenet structure... in certain groups you could only get a new group by consensus, but in alt. you could do anything. Of course it's all fallen apart now, but the concept worked well.
"Budweiser", for example, can refer to beer as well as to a similar beverage made from fermented rice.
ooohhh. good one!
Budvar rulz
The People have ALL rights. The Government is enjoined from infringing on those rights. The People grant the Government certain powers to "form a more perfect union".
uhhh. what exactly do you think this "union" is we're trying to perfect? Don't you think maybe it's something about the community as a whole has some common interest, and that's why the government has powers? How can you have a "union" if everyone can do what they want, no matter what the impact on the community? Neither giant corporations nor ordinary property owners have the right to do things that significantly damage the society they live in. That's about as common sense as you can get.
The major "selling" is of the technology to Upper Management rather than from vendors.
The first time this became critical was when the Intel 8086 came out, and Intel started selling based on management commitment to Intel, not on technical grounds. A competing processor - the Z8000 - won just about every technical analysis, but Intel sold to management and that's what made them kings. It's a critical concept. Engineers think the best solution wins, but the best business decision isn't always the best technical solution.
And why does a soccer mom want Office when she gets Works for free? What soccer mom needs Excel? Or Powerpoint?
Because every file she gets from someone else is in Word or Excel or Powerpoint. Office is even more of a monopoly than windoze is, since they have the Mac market as well. The fact is that Word, excel and powerpoint are the lingua france of information. If there is one thing that needs to happen in our industry, it's making these file formats open standards. Let 100 applications open and save these formats, so they are just as much a standard as HTML is,
I often look for software solutions in the open source community, or "semi" open source, like stuff buiilt on PHP/MySQL. Most of the time, I'm lucky if I can even figure out what the damn product does, much less match it to my needs. Basic marketing is so simple I can't understand why bright people can't seem to get the hang of it.
I've got news for all you anti-suit types: Marketing isn't trying to BS someone; it's explaining what your product does, who you've designed it for, and what unique qualities make it better than other choices. GQ's and OB's: Good qualities and owner benefits. If you develop programs and can't do that, you should get a job parking cars or something.
This is not rocket science and it's not hype. It's educating your customer, which is good for the customer and good for you.
Why not simply print the thing ON INPUT, onto a huge drum of paper, stored inside of the same safe the computer's stored inside of?
Wow. Just like every cash register on every retail counter in the country. A retailer may turn off the printed customer receipt, because no-one wants them, but he'll NEVER turn off the continuous paper log, because that provides an audit trail of all the transactions. This is so simple, primitive and necessary, that I have to wonder if it was left out of voting machines on purpose. Any idiot would provide that simple audit trail.
Pols are ALWAYS paid more than they are worth, and always make far more than the people they represent.
Whoaaa! That can only be said by someone who believes all the all-government-is-bad crap. Most politicians are deeply dedicated to making the right decisions for the people they represent, striving to make our cities and states work, and they work their butts off. And a lot of them don't get paid anything at all.
I open and close mine 5 or 6 times a day, often after moving it from one wireless network to another. It just works. I reboot maybe once every 10 days or 2 weeks.
Vrai's got it right.
I got through 4 years of college and 2 years of grad school primarily scheduled by beer. My xcelent advice:
* Study til 9PM
* Drink beer til 11PM
* Sing along with the jukebox til closing. It's more fun to have a whole table singing together than this new-fangled Kerry-oki stuff.
* If you can't find your car, walk home, wake up a housemate, and start crying.
* If you can find your car, don't drive. (This is a new rule that we didn't do when I was in college. But having got a DUI a few years ago, I recommend it. http://www.digitalmx.com/john/dui.html)
* When you wake up and feel OK, go to class. Under no circumstnaces take a class that starts before 8. Unless you can pass without going to class. I got through one that way.
At my university, the poor engineering students had to learn Fortran. Now there's a language that's not too different from assembly
Naah.. Fortran goes on punched cards. Assembly takes paper tape.
The 68K instruction set is better than most of them, although if memory serves the Z80000 was even better. But, I still contend the best all time machine language was the PDP-11 instruction set.
As I recall, the 68K was pretty much an imitation of the PDP-11, constrained by 1975 die size limitations. The 8080 begat the Zilog Z80, which begat the 16-bit Z8000. The main thing I remember about the z8000 is that I could never understand the paged addressing scheme.
I also remember that nearly every engineering group found the Z8000 superior to the Intel's 16-bit 8086, but by then intel had learned how to get decisions made in board rooms instead of engineering labs. Operation Crush!
As part of a $1500 computer, the price issue is pretty irrelevant.
I don't think most companies are buying 1500 computers. The average worker's computer should be a total commodity by now, and it should cost about $300 plus the OS. I suspect that on many PCs today, Microsoft is getting more money than the hardware guys.
And of course you're aware that the OEM OS you buy has to get thrown away when the computer is no good. You cannot transfer the license to another machine.
As soon as Linux is ready for the desktop, Microsoft is going to hell.
Linux won't kill microsoft. Open Office could.
I've also noticed that a lot of other search pages are showing up when I do a search for something on google. It is really irritating, since it usually provides absolutely nothing of value. Wish they could figure out how to nix those pages. I don't see how they're getting in there.
Many monopolies exist
Name three, that are not either regulated by a public utilities commission or guaranteed by patent rights.
news flash to October_30th: a MONOPOLY is not a MARKET.
Markets require competitors and choices.
Microsoft imposed this license per cpu formula many years ago and kept it up until the courts stopped them. That's one of the reasons OS/2 - which was far better - never caught on. Neither computer makers nor consumers were free to choose. That is not a market.
OK, what I want to know is if Englishmen and Frenchmen both stink, how come Canadians smell OK? Must neutralize somehow.
OK, so there's a big database. As many have already pointed out, databases already exist. Trying to stamp out databases of personal information has about as much hope as outlawing pot and sharing music. Waste of time.
We need to shift the focus of the debate from whether or not the database exists to how it is used. I think we need a new Bill of Rights to protect us from inaccurate and misused information in ANY database.
People should be able to sue the hell out of a database provider who distributes inaccurate information, and the responsiblility for accuracy should rest on the provider, not on the poor slob being tracked.
In fact, maybe there OUGHT to be a government sponsored database, because then there would be a specific place to go check for inaccuracies, instead of trying to guess who's got what on you.
And there should be severe restrictions on the uses that can be made of the information. I don't care if the government knows I marched against the war, but I damn well don't expect to get my taxes audited as a result. It's way easier to enforce restrictions on the inappropriate use of information than it is on the simple collection of it.
And anyone using data about me from the database should be liable if they can't prove they're using it on me, not someone else. What if you could sue Macy's for opening a credit account in your name using your credit data if it wasn't really you?
Government doesn't have to be the enemy. This is a place where the power of government could be used to protect us. Of course, you'd have to have a government that cared.
Wow. What ever happened to ADA? I thought that was supposed to be only language for high reliability government stuff. Course that was years ago. I watched NASA TV during the landing and it looked a whole lot like Solaris windows to me. But then I'm not a good judge of unix species.
Not supported by Safari either. Sure is cool though. Seems like it would be a lot faster for little icons on a page, so you don't have to retrieve a bunch of tiny files.
If there were no copyrights, there'd be no New York Times.
I doubt that. The NYT gets paid mostly by advertisers and secondarily by people who want to read today's news and commentary. I don't think lack of a copyright would change that. Wouldn't give a you a nickle for yesterday's NYT.