Yup, I'm into mountain biking as well. I'm also into road biking and inline skating in the summer months. In the winter, I'm often at a local ski area, either skiboarding or snowboarding.
I've noticed my geek tendencies when out biking and skating, as well. I usually bring a heart rate monitor so I can track whether I'm in an aerobic zone, and I bring the GPS while inline skating. It makes a good speedometer/trip computer. And, I've downloaded trail maps to my Windows box (when it's functioning, that is).
Why all the physical activity? I find that it makes a good counterpart to sitting at a desk all day and just doing intellectual work. Also, if I never got out and exercised, I'd put on the pounds from the inevitable junk food that's so necessary for software development.
It also says, later on down the page: "KEEP AWAY FROM FOOD." If that's true, someone should tell these guys that caffeine and food don't mix.
Spam is not good business
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
If you want to get your slogan and company name out there fast, it makes sense to use the Internet and email systems.
If you want to attract and retain a loyal customer base, it absolutely doesn't make sense to use spam or other annoying methods of advertising on the Internet.
As an example: I work for a company that owns one of the major online travel sites. A few weeks ago, we had an all-company conference call, and one of the members in my group pointed out that another online travel site had recently stepped up its advertising via popup ads on web sites. He asked why we weren't annoying the consumer with popup ads. The leader of the call replied, "I think you just answered your own question." He explained that while popup ads may be effective, they don't make any friends among consumers and they don't build loyalty.
If popup ads have such a negative impression, don't you think unsolicited commercial E-mail has a much more negative impression on the Internet population? Here's a hint: The spammers who sell Viagra (r), Viagra substitutes, penis extension pills, mortgages, and other spamvertised products almost never reveal their real business name. They hide behind throwaway e-mail addresses and make themselves untraceable to their audience.
Would a business concerned with consumer loyalty really have to hide themselves? My local grocery store doesn't have to hide from me. Neither does Target, Borders, Best Buy, or any number of bricks-and-mortar retailers. Amazon.com doesn't have to hide from me, nor do any of the online travel sites. Yet the spammers pushing penis pills don't dare reveal who they are, where they work, how I can contact them, or anything traceable.
I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
I think you're trolling here, but in case you aren't: That "hard work" relies on hijacking other people's resources. It relies on deception and lies to push a product to people.
(Disclaimer: This is not the opinion of my employer, of course.)
My primary desktop machine at work is Windows 2000, and it looks like that's going to be the corporate standard for our software for some time to come. There's not much I can do about it.
Here's the more interesting story, though: My primary desktop at home was Windows for the longest time. I also had a Web server running Linux in the basement. Due to either unreliable hardware or an unreliable OS, my Windows box kept crashing with memory-type exceptions. (It was giving me either invalid page faults in applications, or crashing the entire system with fatal error 0E. That seems to point to the hardware more than the OS.) Each time I'd reboot and run ScanDisk.
I figured this was as good a time as any to buy a new, more reliable machine to run Linux and replace the old web server machine. I installed Red Hat 7.3 on it and got all the web server components (Apache, MySQL, PHP, and so on) installed just fine. In fact, just about everything I installed was very easy to install. I started running Linux as my primary desktop at the time, since I didn't want to try reinstalling Windows only to have the machine crash. As it turns out, I was able to do most of my daily tasks (E-mail, web surfing, and web development) on the Linux box. In particular, Ximian Evolution has enough E-mail features to keep me happy, and I was able to import my old E-mail from Eudora once I could finally recover files from the Windows box.
The only downside is that the fonts don't look as nice in Gnome as they do on Windows. (I understand that's much improved now under Red Hat 8.0, which came out just a week after I installed 7.3.) And, of course, there are programs I can use only on Windows, such as my GPS software and my digital camera software.
Oh, and about those files on Windows: Once I finally booted from another partition and ran the Windows version of ScanDisk, I was able to recover my files. The problem was, all of my directories had lost their names and all of the long filenames were lost, so I was stuck with directories such as "C:\Dir0001a" and "C:\Dir0001a\Dscf01~3.jpg". Nice filesystem, Microsoft.
I got a "renewal" notice yesterday for two domains I have registered through register.com. I knew it was deceptive, but here's the interesting part: They apparently cross-referenced the name and address on those domains to the name and address of a domain I do have registered through VeriSign, and printed on the address: "Domain Administrator: (name of the organization registered through VeriSign)". However, the domains listed on the form were the ones I have registered through register.com.
So, in other words, this little "renewal" notice made it appear like it was time for me to renew the domain registered through VeriSign, even though I really would have been transfering two other domains instead.
VeriSign is evil and deserves to die. Apparently, their product can't compete on its own merits any more; they have to resort to deception to sell it.
I did something rather low-tech: I created a "Contact Us" page on my web server that has an automatically-generated address at the bottom. It says, "Note: The address spamtest.1018617636@example.com is not a valid contact address. It's just here to catch spammers." The number is actually the current UNIX timestamp, so I know exactly who grabbed this mail address and sent me mail.
As it turns out, I really haven't received that much mail to this address. About the only mail I've ever received to it is someone from trafficmagnet.net, who tells me that I'm not listed on a few search engines and that I can pay them to have my site listed. I need to send her a nasty reply saying that I don't care about being listed on Bob's Pay-Per-Click Search Engine, and that if she had actually read the page, she would have noticed that she was sending mail to an invalid address. Besides, the web server is for my inline skate club and we don't have a $10/month budget to pay for search engine placement.
I think I've received more spam from my Usenet posting history, from my other web site, and from my WHOIS registrations than I've received from the skate club web site.
I'm a member of an organization called CAUSS, or Citizens Against Ugly Street Spam. This group started in Dallas a few years ago to fight the growing tide of street spam -- not just "work from home" signs, but signs for other products and services. Some of the other people putting up signs include independent insurance salespeople, a computer store which put up hundreds of signs (and who got sued for it), and a guy named the "Dirt Jerk" who puts up signs saying "We Level Lawns". The organization has since spread to other areas across the U.S., including Denver, California, New England, and Minnesota.
One thing the report didn't mention is that people have lost thousands of dollars in these schemes. Newest Way to Wealth, one of the Herbalife offshoots which is responsible for this scheme, encourages people to put up as many signs as possible in order to get more recruits. They sell their "training materials" for hundreds of dollars, and they tell their new recruits to buy enough Herbalife products to achieve the supervisor level. They promise that people will make thousands of dollars doing this, but I've heard reports that when people run out of money or patience and try to quit, their uplines get abusive and tell the poor, misled distributors that they hadn't been working hard enough.
And, since Herbalife is finally changing their policy to disallow signs, Newest Way to Wealth is cooking up new advertising ideas. One idea is to toss a bag filled with "Work From Home" business cards onto people's driveways, along with a few rocks to keep them from blowing away. (Of course, if they throw these little presents onto the lawn by mistake, and you don't see the baggie when you're mowing the lawn, you could end up running over it. That's a good way to put someone's eye out.) Another advertising method is to put packets of cards onto pay phones, ATM's, and every other flat surface.
As far as the signs are concerned, most states and cities have ordinances saying that it's illegal to put signs on utility poles or in the right of way.
Good luck to these new guys on the block. Maybe they have great ideas, but their timing is off. How many companies are getting venture capital these days? Who's successfully issuing IPOs in the current economy? Unless these companies can prove to investors that they're much better than Google (and AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo, et al) and that they're going to get the traffic, investors are just going to shake their heads and go to the next opportunity.
Of course, Google is privately held, so I can't tell if they're profitable or not. At least they're still around, though, and they have an impressive track record.
I've been using Vector Internet Services (visi.com) for several years, and I've had DSL through them for about 2 1/2 years or so. It's been very reliable, and best of all you can get a static IP for your DSL connection. The support staff here definitely knows what they're doing, too. Check them out: http://www.visi.com.
And I'm not just saying this for the referral bonus.
I remember many years ago when I had an Apple II+ (around 1983) and much of the commercial software out there was copy-protected. Most of these copy-protection schemes were based on using nonstandard disk formats that Apple's DOS couldn't read, but the custom DOS on the disk could read. There were things like nonstandard start bytes, knowingly bad tracks recorded on the disk, and even tracks positioned halfway off of where they should be. Software manufacturers spent increasing amounts of time and money coming up with copy-protection schemes, while pirates spent increasing amounts of time breaking them. People came up with lists of parameters that you could plug into a specialized copy program to copy these disks.
Eventually, the software industry decided that these schemes were a waste of time, and that they weren't really stopping piracy. They apparently decided that they could sell more software by lowering the price and making it easier to buy, instead of locking it up. (I suspect newer hardware platforms, like the IBM PC, also made this type of copy protection impossible.)
Now we have the music industry moving in the opposite direction. Apparently, consumers can't be trusted with the latest Britney Spears CD if they plan to copy it. I'm not even sure how many illegal copies of CD's are out there, but I'd be willing to venture a guess that there are proportionally more copies of obscure, hard-to-find artists than there are of Eminem, N'Sync, and the Backstreet Boys. If it's easy enough and cheap enough to buy a CD, then most honest people will buy the CD. If you're hearing an obscure disc that your friend bought in a small shop (a place so underground, they used to sell some pipes), the temptation's much higher to make a copy.
It might be very easy to hit a camera with a paintball gun or a.22. Of course, as you're lining up to take aim at the lens, the camera has a perfect view of your face. Congratulations, you're now in the police database as a gun-toting maniac in Ybor City.
Although, come to think of it, they might not have a gun detection algorithm in their software, so if a human isn't looking, you might be safe.
The complete Unisys press release and the full text of their apology can be found
here.
I can't tell if their apology is tongue-in-cheek, or if they really mean it. If they really mean it, then some of the pioneers of the Internet should be writing their apologies. (I'll get on the phone and see if Vinton Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Marc Andreesen are available, among others.)
Of course, the whole thing could just be a plug for their current computing technology, in which case I've been cleverly drawn into their trap.
Many years ago, I took an entry-level position in a large consulting company. They started me off in a rather intense four-month training program, and I had to sign a promissory note saying that if I left the company before a certain time I'd have to pay a large sum of money (in the thousands of dollars (US)).
After I had worked a little more than a year at my first assignment, my manager announced that he was cancelling the requirement for the promissory notes. The reason he gave was, "My job is to keep you guys happy. If I'm not keeping you happy, I'm not doing my job."
Good, enlightened managers will do their best to keep their employees happy so they don't have to think about leaving the company. Of course, managers may not be able to provide everything that their employees want. It's possible that people may leave because they want greater challenge or want to work on different technology, and the manager can't offer it. But to use threatening or coercive means like this to keep employees from straying seems mostly counterproductive to me. (And yes, I'm commenting on American practices, even though the original article is about Japan.)
I'd love to sue the genius who created those stickers of Calvin pissing on a Ford logo and Calvin pissing on a Chevy logo. Maybe those things are useful for mullet-headed Ford and Chevy truck drivers to work out their aggression, but to most sane people they're annoying.
Besides, these stickers are a lot more visible than fuckford.com, fuckgeneralmotors.com, or fuck {insert automaker name}.com.
I'm sorry, are you seriously comparing camera technology developed for a live event with camera technology for commercials?
Sorry, wrong choice of words. I meant that the spin-around effect has been overused on car commercials. They probably have it down to an exact science in the studio (or on a good graphics workstation). But yeah, the technique they're going to use in this game sounds interesting, and I want to see what it looks like.
This new camera thing sounds pretty cool, even though every single car company has been using this technique in their commercials for the past two years. But I think they should borrow a few other things from The Matrix:
Whenever a player wants to go to the sidelines, he has to get on a Nokia cell phone (product placement!) and call for an exit.
All of the players are wearing black leather trenchcoats and carrying lots of weapons.
Skylons appear above the stadium and move around whenever the players touch brightly colored stones. (Oh, wait. I'm thinking of the matrix table from "Land of the Lost".)
Instead of coaches, players consult The Oracle for advice during the game, and inadvertently knock over a vase during the process.
A running back about to be tackled can jump up high in the air, spin around, and roundhouse-kick his opponent and it all looks real.
I'd have to agree with that, based on my own experiences with spam filtering. I've had a procmail filter in place for a couple years now, and classifying spam based on words and phrases in the header and body is MUCH more effective than using the MAPS/RBL databases.
For a time, I was using the rblcheck program to check mail based on the MAPS RBL, MAPS DUL, and ORBS lists. I found that the ORBS list was somewhat effective, but at the same time I was losing E-mail based on the politics of ORBS and RBL. I found that I suddenly couldn't get mail from friends who had cable modems. They weren't open relays or anything; it's just that Roadrunner wouldn't let ORBS into its network to do mail testing. Worse yet, ORBS and RBL and DUL still didn't prevent all of my spam from coming in. I've since stopped using rblcheck because my ISP moved to a mail cluster where I can't use it.
Anyone who's using the RBL to filter more than just E-mail traffic is trying to impose a political solution on the problem. That's fine if the end users agree with the politics, but not fine for people who just want to get about their work. Besides, most spammers these days use fly-by-night dialup accounts and hijack an open relay. (I'm starting to think that any mail server within the APNIC address space is an open relay.)
As your post suggests, it's a lot more reliable to use classifications based on the text than it is to use someone's idea of who's spamming and who isn't. ORBS seems to be the most accurate at detecting who's an open relay and who isn't, but even they have let politics sneak in.
It's not often that a management philosophy actually makes me mad, but this article is really getting under my skin. Why? He's making a bunch of wrong assumptions:
He claims that it takes 25 hours a week to get coordinated with other programmers and to understand the systems they're working on. So, he immediately writes this off as unproductive time. If someone really spends 25 hours a week doing overhead tasks, then the system is broken. If, on the other hand, researching the system and understanding how it works produces better code (or at least working code, as compared to broken hacks), then that research time is indispensable.
He claims that 70-hour workweeks are the key to profitability. Everyone else has already criticized this idea, so I'll just poke at it a little bit. I worked 70-hour workweeks once on a project because it was grossly underestimated and because we had a drop-dead date. Nobody in management anticipated the challenges of this project, and it had taken a long time to get designs finalized in the first place. Also, for most of us it was our first major project in C++ (this was back in 1991). Maybe it's possible to motivate programmers to do things this way for a few weeks, when they know the consequences. But to do this all the time, as a normal course of business? Any programmer with half a brain will see right through this.
He doesn't realize that programmers are going to have lives outside of work. Sure, it'd be nice to have a really cool office that has nice comfy chairs and entertainment facilities. But unless your developers are complete hermits, sooner or later they'll find hobbies, friends, and families outside of work. And they'll start to resent having a heavy workload that keeps them away from those things.
Cheap American managers are likely to read this article, think, "Hmm. Let's get those programmers in here 70 hours a week," and consider Greenspun's perks to be expensive frills that can be ignored, scaled back, or purchased and then eliminated when the stock price falls.
Software projects collapse. Companies fail. What would the legion of ArsDigita programmers think if the company suddenly went bankrupt, and all of their 70-hour workweeks were a waste?
I've been there before: The company I worked for in 1991 spun off a division which became part of a joint venture with Amdahl in 1993. Several months later, they announced that the joint venture company was killing the project that I had been working on. They assured us that they needed all the people to stay with the company, and the CEO said, "And if anyone leaves the company, I'll be personally hurt." Well, with no product and nothing to work on, morale sunk like a rock, and several people left -- including me. And, just last year at this time, my previous employer was laying off developers left and right because our product didn't sell. For the people who weren't laid off, management wanted everyone to take a 10% pay cut until January, to be made up with stock options. I left the company soon after that, even though they wanted to keep me there.
As a software engineer, I'm motivated by knowing I'm working on a quality product that people will find useful. I know I'm not going to be writing quality code if I'm on a 70-hour per week death march and resenting being overworked by an employer -- especially if there's a chance the company may go belly-up next year. My current company respects and rewards its employees' contributions, and that's worth a lot more than having a big-screen TV, a pinball machine, and comfy chairs.
Abstract: A method and system for promoting businesses engaged in "electronic commerce". The business owner comes up with a concept of selling goods and services via the Internet, with the aim of making more profits than can be achieved by established businesses with existing infrastructures. Said business owner engages in promoting his/her ideas to a number of investors eager to make a substantial return on their investments. Investors, charmed by the lure of the Internet, do not investigate the worthiness of the owner's claims, the viability of the proposed electronic commerce site, or the probability that the business will ever make money. Said investors, in turn, invest large amounts of money into the stock of the corporation, and the resulting marketing hype drives the stock price up to levels well beyond those of most established companies. Profits realized from the stock valuation, in turn, support extravagant parties, brightly painted offices with toys all around (in order to foster "creativity"), and a general atmosphere of levity until such time as the business is no longer able to meet its financial obligations. Investors then leave and invest in the next electronic commerce company meeting these specifications.
Wow. I wonder how many people are already violating my patent.
Luckily, I've been able to avoid most E-mail viruses (except for the chain letters, anyway). I usually find out about them at work, and there's usually enough people panicking about them when I get in that I know not to read my mail.
As far as spam filtering goes, though, it's nearly impossible to do it effectively using a prebuilt package. The spammers seem to have plenty of new tricks up their sleeve all the time. (My favorite is the one saying "This is not spam." If you have to say it isn't spam, then it's spam.) I've written some rather elaborate filtering using procmail, and it's been quite accurate. The best part is that I can make adjustments as I go along. On the flip side, it isn't 100% effective -- occasionally spam gets through, and occasionally it misses something that is spam. And, of course, to program in procmail you have to have a good understanding of how regular expressions work.
I haven't tried PR3 yet, but I've used PR2 for a while. Every time I've used it, it runs slow and gets slower after using it for a while. I checked using TaskInfo 2000 and it has a HUGE memory footprint -- it takes about 30 MB of memory just to start it, and it keeps allocating memory liberally as it's running. I've seen it get up to 50 or 60 MB, at which point my poor Windoze box was swapping so much that it was painful. That's why I've given up and gone back to Netscape 4.7.
This is on an AMD Athlon 550 with 64 mb running Windows 98, although every system crash pushes me farther toward installing Linux on this machine.
Does anyone know why it's allocating so much memory? Is every other line of code malloc() or something? Hopefully, it's just debug stuff for now, but I'd hope the release version doesn't gulp memory down like this.
Sure, it would be cool to get onto the space elevator and ride into outer space in five hours. But I can imagine a few downsides:
Listening to elevator music for five hours would surely make anyone go insane.
That's five hours of standing, facing forward, not looking at anyone, and pretending not to notice the other passengers' odors.
What if some kid gets on before you and presses all the buttons? You'd have a 30 hour ride while you stop at every minor comet, asteroid, and satellite.
Microsoft will leverage Linux as an entry point to Windows.
If this report is true, then I think this strategy could really backfire on Microsoft. It's more likely that people will use this as an exit point from Windows to Linux. After all, there's probably quite a few potential Linux users who would switch in a heartbeat, but hesitate because the Office suite on Windows is more productive and more polished. Now, with the option of running Word, Excel, or Outlook on Linux, that objection goes away. (And that's my honest opinion, really: their Office suite is probably the best one out there, but the Windows operating system has plenty of architectural flaws.)
At least it looks like they're operating and planning as two separate companies now. Maybe they think they're going to lose the DOJ case.
Slashdot Mirror
while we're at it, make the body out of glass, and we'd see an end to road rage as we know it.
We'd also see an end to make-out sessions on Lover's Lane as we know it.
Yup, I'm into mountain biking as well. I'm also into road biking and inline skating in the summer months. In the winter, I'm often at a local ski area, either skiboarding or snowboarding.
I've noticed my geek tendencies when out biking and skating, as well. I usually bring a heart rate monitor so I can track whether I'm in an aerobic zone, and I bring the GPS while inline skating. It makes a good speedometer/trip computer. And, I've downloaded trail maps to my Windows box (when it's functioning, that is).
Why all the physical activity? I find that it makes a good counterpart to sitting at a desk all day and just doing intellectual work. Also, if I never got out and exercised, I'd put on the pounds from the inevitable junk food that's so necessary for software development.
It also says, later on down the page: "KEEP AWAY FROM FOOD." If that's true, someone should tell these guys that caffeine and food don't mix.
If you want to get your slogan and company name out there fast, it makes sense to use the Internet and email systems.
If you want to attract and retain a loyal customer base, it absolutely doesn't make sense to use spam or other annoying methods of advertising on the Internet.
As an example: I work for a company that owns one of the major online travel sites. A few weeks ago, we had an all-company conference call, and one of the members in my group pointed out that another online travel site had recently stepped up its advertising via popup ads on web sites. He asked why we weren't annoying the consumer with popup ads. The leader of the call replied, "I think you just answered your own question." He explained that while popup ads may be effective, they don't make any friends among consumers and they don't build loyalty.
If popup ads have such a negative impression, don't you think unsolicited commercial E-mail has a much more negative impression on the Internet population? Here's a hint: The spammers who sell Viagra (r), Viagra substitutes, penis extension pills, mortgages, and other spamvertised products almost never reveal their real business name. They hide behind throwaway e-mail addresses and make themselves untraceable to their audience.
Would a business concerned with consumer loyalty really have to hide themselves? My local grocery store doesn't have to hide from me. Neither does Target, Borders, Best Buy, or any number of bricks-and-mortar retailers. Amazon.com doesn't have to hide from me, nor do any of the online travel sites. Yet the spammers pushing penis pills don't dare reveal who they are, where they work, how I can contact them, or anything traceable.
I would rather trust a spammer than a lazy computer programmer to get a job done, that's for sure. It's not about being nice, it's about being a hard worker. Stupid isn't forever, but lazy is.
I think you're trolling here, but in case you aren't: That "hard work" relies on hijacking other people's resources. It relies on deception and lies to push a product to people.
(Disclaimer: This is not the opinion of my employer, of course.)
Here's the more interesting story, though: My primary desktop at home was Windows for the longest time. I also had a Web server running Linux in the basement. Due to either unreliable hardware or an unreliable OS, my Windows box kept crashing with memory-type exceptions. (It was giving me either invalid page faults in applications, or crashing the entire system with fatal error 0E. That seems to point to the hardware more than the OS.) Each time I'd reboot and run ScanDisk.
Unfortunately, the day came when, after rebooting, ScanDisk crashed and told me it was out of memory. I later found out that ScanDisk under Windows 98 can run out of memory on partitions more than 16 GB. I was unable to boot my system into Windows after that -- almost the entire filesystem was toast.
I figured this was as good a time as any to buy a new, more reliable machine to run Linux and replace the old web server machine. I installed Red Hat 7.3 on it and got all the web server components (Apache, MySQL, PHP, and so on) installed just fine. In fact, just about everything I installed was very easy to install. I started running Linux as my primary desktop at the time, since I didn't want to try reinstalling Windows only to have the machine crash. As it turns out, I was able to do most of my daily tasks (E-mail, web surfing, and web development) on the Linux box. In particular, Ximian Evolution has enough E-mail features to keep me happy, and I was able to import my old E-mail from Eudora once I could finally recover files from the Windows box.
The only downside is that the fonts don't look as nice in Gnome as they do on Windows. (I understand that's much improved now under Red Hat 8.0, which came out just a week after I installed 7.3.) And, of course, there are programs I can use only on Windows, such as my GPS software and my digital camera software.
Oh, and about those files on Windows: Once I finally booted from another partition and ran the Windows version of ScanDisk, I was able to recover my files. The problem was, all of my directories had lost their names and all of the long filenames were lost, so I was stuck with directories such as "C:\Dir0001a" and "C:\Dir0001a\Dscf01~3.jpg". Nice filesystem, Microsoft.
So, in other words, this little "renewal" notice made it appear like it was time for me to renew the domain registered through VeriSign, even though I really would have been transfering two other domains instead.
VeriSign is evil and deserves to die. Apparently, their product can't compete on its own merits any more; they have to resort to deception to sell it.
As it turns out, I really haven't received that much mail to this address. About the only mail I've ever received to it is someone from trafficmagnet.net, who tells me that I'm not listed on a few search engines and that I can pay them to have my site listed. I need to send her a nasty reply saying that I don't care about being listed on Bob's Pay-Per-Click Search Engine, and that if she had actually read the page, she would have noticed that she was sending mail to an invalid address. Besides, the web server is for my inline skate club and we don't have a $10/month budget to pay for search engine placement.
I think I've received more spam from my Usenet posting history, from my other web site, and from my WHOIS registrations than I've received from the skate club web site.
One thing the report didn't mention is that people have lost thousands of dollars in these schemes. Newest Way to Wealth, one of the Herbalife offshoots which is responsible for this scheme, encourages people to put up as many signs as possible in order to get more recruits. They sell their "training materials" for hundreds of dollars, and they tell their new recruits to buy enough Herbalife products to achieve the supervisor level. They promise that people will make thousands of dollars doing this, but I've heard reports that when people run out of money or patience and try to quit, their uplines get abusive and tell the poor, misled distributors that they hadn't been working hard enough.
And, since Herbalife is finally changing their policy to disallow signs, Newest Way to Wealth is cooking up new advertising ideas. One idea is to toss a bag filled with "Work From Home" business cards onto people's driveways, along with a few rocks to keep them from blowing away. (Of course, if they throw these little presents onto the lawn by mistake, and you don't see the baggie when you're mowing the lawn, you could end up running over it. That's a good way to put someone's eye out.) Another advertising method is to put packets of cards onto pay phones, ATM's, and every other flat surface.
As far as the signs are concerned, most states and cities have ordinances saying that it's illegal to put signs on utility poles or in the right of way.
Of course, Google is privately held, so I can't tell if they're profitable or not. At least they're still around, though, and they have an impressive track record.
I've been using Vector Internet Services (visi.com) for several years, and I've had DSL through them for about 2 1/2 years or so. It's been very reliable, and best of all you can get a static IP for your DSL connection. The support staff here definitely knows what they're doing, too. Check them out: http://www.visi.com. And I'm not just saying this for the referral bonus.
Eventually, the software industry decided that these schemes were a waste of time, and that they weren't really stopping piracy. They apparently decided that they could sell more software by lowering the price and making it easier to buy, instead of locking it up. (I suspect newer hardware platforms, like the IBM PC, also made this type of copy protection impossible.)
Now we have the music industry moving in the opposite direction. Apparently, consumers can't be trusted with the latest Britney Spears CD if they plan to copy it. I'm not even sure how many illegal copies of CD's are out there, but I'd be willing to venture a guess that there are proportionally more copies of obscure, hard-to-find artists than there are of Eminem, N'Sync, and the Backstreet Boys. If it's easy enough and cheap enough to buy a CD, then most honest people will buy the CD. If you're hearing an obscure disc that your friend bought in a small shop (a place so underground, they used to sell some pipes), the temptation's much higher to make a copy.
Although, come to think of it, they might not have a gun detection algorithm in their software, so if a human isn't looking, you might be safe.
I can't tell if their apology is tongue-in-cheek, or if they really mean it. If they really mean it, then some of the pioneers of the Internet should be writing their apologies. (I'll get on the phone and see if Vinton Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, and Marc Andreesen are available, among others.)
Of course, the whole thing could just be a plug for their current computing technology, in which case I've been cleverly drawn into their trap.
Good, enlightened managers will do their best to keep their employees happy so they don't have to think about leaving the company. Of course, managers may not be able to provide everything that their employees want. It's possible that people may leave because they want greater challenge or want to work on different technology, and the manager can't offer it. But to use threatening or coercive means like this to keep employees from straying seems mostly counterproductive to me. (And yes, I'm commenting on American practices, even though the original article is about Japan.)
Besides, these stickers are a lot more visible than fuckford.com, fuckgeneralmotors.com, or fuck {insert automaker name}.com.
Sorry, wrong choice of words. I meant that the spin-around effect has been overused on car commercials. They probably have it down to an exact science in the studio (or on a good graphics workstation). But yeah, the technique they're going to use in this game sounds interesting, and I want to see what it looks like.
For a time, I was using the rblcheck program to check mail based on the MAPS RBL, MAPS DUL, and ORBS lists. I found that the ORBS list was somewhat effective, but at the same time I was losing E-mail based on the politics of ORBS and RBL. I found that I suddenly couldn't get mail from friends who had cable modems. They weren't open relays or anything; it's just that Roadrunner wouldn't let ORBS into its network to do mail testing. Worse yet, ORBS and RBL and DUL still didn't prevent all of my spam from coming in. I've since stopped using rblcheck because my ISP moved to a mail cluster where I can't use it.
Anyone who's using the RBL to filter more than just E-mail traffic is trying to impose a political solution on the problem. That's fine if the end users agree with the politics, but not fine for people who just want to get about their work. Besides, most spammers these days use fly-by-night dialup accounts and hijack an open relay. (I'm starting to think that any mail server within the APNIC address space is an open relay.)
As your post suggests, it's a lot more reliable to use classifications based on the text than it is to use someone's idea of who's spamming and who isn't. ORBS seems to be the most accurate at detecting who's an open relay and who isn't, but even they have let politics sneak in.
- He claims that it takes 25 hours a week to get coordinated with other programmers and to understand the systems they're working on. So, he immediately writes this off as unproductive time. If someone really spends 25 hours a week doing overhead tasks, then the system is broken. If, on the other hand, researching the system and understanding how it works produces better code (or at least working code, as compared to broken hacks), then that research time is indispensable.
- He claims that 70-hour workweeks are the key to profitability. Everyone else has already criticized this idea, so I'll just poke at it a little bit. I worked 70-hour workweeks once on a project because it was grossly underestimated and because we had a drop-dead date. Nobody in management anticipated the challenges of this project, and it had taken a long time to get designs finalized in the first place. Also, for most of us it was our first major project in C++ (this was back in 1991). Maybe it's possible to motivate programmers to do things this way for a few weeks, when they know the consequences. But to do this all the time, as a normal course of business? Any programmer with half a brain will see right through this.
- He doesn't realize that programmers are going to have lives outside of work. Sure, it'd be nice to have a really cool office that has nice comfy chairs and entertainment facilities. But unless your developers are complete hermits, sooner or later they'll find hobbies, friends, and families outside of work. And they'll start to resent having a heavy workload that keeps them away from those things.
- Cheap American managers are likely to read this article, think, "Hmm. Let's get those programmers in here 70 hours a week," and consider Greenspun's perks to be expensive frills that can be ignored, scaled back, or purchased and then eliminated when the stock price falls.
- Software projects collapse. Companies fail. What would the legion of ArsDigita programmers think if the company suddenly went bankrupt, and all of their 70-hour workweeks were a waste?
I've been there before: The company I worked for in 1991 spun off a division which became part of a joint venture with Amdahl in 1993. Several months later, they announced that the joint venture company was killing the project that I had been working on. They assured us that they needed all the people to stay with the company, and the CEO said, "And if anyone leaves the company, I'll be personally hurt." Well, with no product and nothing to work on, morale sunk like a rock, and several people left -- including me. And, just last year at this time, my previous employer was laying off developers left and right because our product didn't sell. For the people who weren't laid off, management wanted everyone to take a 10% pay cut until January, to be made up with stock options. I left the company soon after that, even though they wanted to keep me there.As a software engineer, I'm motivated by knowing I'm working on a quality product that people will find useful. I know I'm not going to be writing quality code if I'm on a 70-hour per week death march and resenting being overworked by an employer -- especially if there's a chance the company may go belly-up next year. My current company respects and rewards its employees' contributions, and that's worth a lot more than having a big-screen TV, a pinball machine, and comfy chairs.
Unless I'm mistaken, bestiality is against the law in most states. He's lucky he just got suspended -- he could have been clawed to death.
Wow. I wonder how many people are already violating my patent.
As far as spam filtering goes, though, it's nearly impossible to do it effectively using a prebuilt package. The spammers seem to have plenty of new tricks up their sleeve all the time. (My favorite is the one saying "This is not spam." If you have to say it isn't spam, then it's spam.) I've written some rather elaborate filtering using procmail, and it's been quite accurate. The best part is that I can make adjustments as I go along. On the flip side, it isn't 100% effective -- occasionally spam gets through, and occasionally it misses something that is spam. And, of course, to program in procmail you have to have a good understanding of how regular expressions work.
You can take a look at my procmail filter here, as well as a score-based algorithm that only bounces the mail if it matches more than one of the phrases listed there. Go ahead and use those examples if they help. And, check out procmail.org for all the documentation.
Does anyone know why it's allocating so much memory? Is every other line of code malloc() or something? Hopefully, it's just debug stuff for now, but I'd hope the release version doesn't gulp memory down like this.
If this report is true, then I think this strategy could really backfire on Microsoft. It's more likely that people will use this as an exit point from Windows to Linux. After all, there's probably quite a few potential Linux users who would switch in a heartbeat, but hesitate because the Office suite on Windows is more productive and more polished. Now, with the option of running Word, Excel, or Outlook on Linux, that objection goes away. (And that's my honest opinion, really: their Office suite is probably the best one out there, but the Windows operating system has plenty of architectural flaws.)
At least it looks like they're operating and planning as two separate companies now. Maybe they think they're going to lose the DOJ case.