Re:Yeah. let's depend on IBM for our future
on
More on the PowerPC 970
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Target multiple architectures. Let the users decide!
Y'know, I don't know why this keeps coming up. Apple's bottom line has always depended on keeping tight control over the hardware to allow maximum integration with their own software. And it works.
Keep in mind that Linux and BSD aren't targetted towards consumers who want to just "rip, mix, burn" or have plug-and-play that's actually exactly that. Even Windows can't deliver consistently on its promise of universal ease-of-use because so many vendors have so much hardware that may or may not work with the system and its existing drivers.
Whatever else you think about Apple's computers, they are without a doubt the easiest PCs on the planet if you're a neophyte. Take it from me, I've got two young women in my home who are all but completely computer-illiterate, and if I didn't have Mac OS X running they'd be constantly lost at sea. I'd love to try hooking up a Linux box for either or both of them, but there's no way I could expect them to use it. Macs are easy, and their users like them that way.
Yeah, I know it's a profit issue for Apple as well, because without business software sales like Microsoft relies on they'd be bankrupt without hardware profits. But I like to think it's more than just money. Apple cares about making a good and easy-to-use product, or else they'd just be chasing Windows like (sorry, not trolling here, but it's true) GNOME and KDE are instead of constantly innovating their own hardware and interface designs.
Targetting multiple architectures means that Apple's got to deal with unpredictable hardware configurations, cards, motherboards, drivers, all sorts of things that could cause inconvenient kernel panics, drive failures, or worse. Users are used to that with Windows, and they pretty much expect it with Linux. With Macs, they expect things to just work. Controlling the hardware is the best way for Apple to do that.
Two imcompatible formats promising the same thing. Whatever will we do? Will one be more successful than the other? Will one drive the other to extinction? Do you think that the winner will be the most technologically sophisticated, or the cheapest and most widely-licensed?
Interesting news, but nothing I'm going to worry about. We've all weathered incompatible formats before. If you want to know which one will win, just wait a year after drives for both formats go on sale and check your Best Buy flier for the cheapest price.
You don't think an actor would let a studio get away with that without paying likeness rights?
If an actor had an identical twin, or a near lookalike, who was hired to replace him based on physical similarities alone, there's not much he could do about it.
But what I had in mind was an actor having his face and voice scanned for one movie, with a provision in the contract that doing so entitles the movie studio to use those recorded images at their convenience for X more movies or for X years. Just as a music contract can take away an artist's right to sing his own songs or be recorded by any other label, an acting contract could claim an actor's virtual image for as long as the studio wants.
So if he makes one movie, and it's a blockbuster, he can either act in the sequel for whatever the studio's paying or he can allow a double to take his place who will be digitally modified to look and sound just like him, while the actor himself is legally prohibited from acting for any other films until the movie's done.
I remember hearing (this is unsubstantiated) that after "The Hunt for Red October" was a hit, Alec Baldwin demanded an enormous pay increase to play Jack Ryan in the next movie. Imagine his surprise when he was soundly dropped and replaced with Harrison Ford, who I imagine commands a much higher check than Alec Baldwin ever got for a single movie.
The moral of these stories, of course, is that humility is a virtue worth cultivating, because when you get right down to it, nobody's irreplacable. Especially in Hollywood, where (if "The Matrix Reloaded" is any sign of things to come) we'll soon be able to map any actor's face onto a double's body with astonishing ease.
Tolkien is on record as having said that LotR is not an allegory of anything, be it religious (Christianity) or political (nuclear war) or anything else. He was a devout Catholic, and he used religious themes in his story, but that's a far cry from retelling the story of the Bible in literary form.
Every time that someone says "God" in the movie, Trinity (if she is present) responds as if she was being addressed. This happens at least twice.
Unfortunately, this only happens twice (in the nightclub and in the car en route to the Oracle).
Search a copy of the screenplay online sometime. Neo says "Jesus Christ, that thing's real!?" after he's debugged and Trinity doesn't react. Trinity says "Goddammit", "God damn you, Cypher!" and "Jesus, he's killing him", thereby allegedly invoking herself. There are plenty of other times characters say "God" to or around Trinity with no reaction.
It's just an interjection, that's all. Of all the supposed easter eggs, this one's clearly a coincidence.
Christian groups like to talk about "The Matrix" and "The Lord of the Rings" because they're very popular movies that include a lot of religious symbolism and draw on theology for their themes and stories. This is well and good. It's always hard to get people to talk about religion when they're not in the habit of it, especially when they're not very informed on the facts of Christianity or any other major religion.
What I have problems with is when people hold up these films as proof of their creators' intentions to promote particular religions. The "Star Wars" films have been accused, off and on, of promoting "New Age" religion and spirituality. "The Matrix" relies on Buddhist beliefs and themes as much as Christian ones, if not more. And I still can't understand why the Christian right touts "The Lord of the Rings" as a brilliantly disguised retelling of the Gospels (which it wasn't) while the "Harry Potter" books are vilified for encouraging witchcraft and occult interests (which they aren't).
All of these are works of fiction, not of faith. They use a variety of religious themes together to make their story more interesting to viewers, often in ways that's not immediately obvious. But religious sorts should be careful to take these stories as they are and not assume too much about the creators' intents.
Ms Clayton, who is a movie director and screenwriting lecturer for the University of London and the British Film Council, was commissioned by diet Coke to carry out the research in order to better understand what the British public love about popular movies....from the article. Do you suppose that someone wants to make a Diet Coke-themed movie, or that they want to refine this formula somehow into their next soda? ("Diet Coke, now with more comedy!")
Also, I really don't see how the net is so special that things you buy over it shound't have tax on them.
It's not net sales, it's interstate sales. If you ever buy something online from a company that ships it from your same state, your liable for sales tax according to that state's laws. But once the product crosses state lines, that's interstate commerce which, according to the U.S. Consititution, only the federal government can regulate. Not all businesses *do* charge for same-state online purchases, even though they're legally expected to do so. They just haven't been caught.
This has applied forever to catalog sales, but the recent boom in Internet commerce has made it a much bigger financial loss for businesses in certain states. The net result, I imagine, is that businesses that can afford to will simply move their warehouses to Nevada or some other state that lets them offer better deals to their customers. (Mind you, this will probably be fewer businesses than you might hope.)
Forget everything you know about TiVo
on
TiVo Basic
·
· Score: 4, Informative
This isn't a "TiVo box" as we usually know it, without all the subscription features. What it is, is a DVD-VCR. Without any subscription fees (a cause for hesitation among average consumers), it allows you to record shows and movies to the hard disk, then burn them at your leisure to a recordable DVD. Voila, all the functionality of a VCR with the advantages of digital media and commercial-free archiving.
It seems to me that TiVo's strategy is to make this a must-have device for those features alone -- which are all Toshiba's hard work, not theirs -- while including the TiVo subscription features as a kind of upgrade, which no doubt is advertised prominently at the bottom of the 3-day guide every time you use it.
It's a good strategy, and I think it will pay off -- not in the sense of 90% of all purchasers becoming subscribers, but in the sense of maybe 20% of all people who wouldn't buy a TiVo because of the subscription now buy it for the DVD-recording features. Like another poster suggested, I'm sure TiVo will offer AOL-like 30-day trial subscriptions for free somewhere along the line, once enough of these TiVo-capable recorders are out there being used. Because like broadband internet, once you learn to love it, there's no going back.
You get three films for $50, plus a bonus disc covering all three films that certainly wouldn't be available outside the boxed set. If the films were sold separately, they'd be priced at best at $18 apiece, $54 total, and you wouldn't get the bonus disc. (I can't think of anyone who'd want to buy one Indiana Jones DVD without the other two, anyhow.)
Bah, I developed this myself....
on
High Density CDs
·
· Score: 4, Funny
It allows the drive to burn up 1.4GB of data using a regular 700MB blank CD-R blank.
I rewrote my drivers some time ago to provide exactly this level of performance, through the simple but clever technique of only writing 1's to the CD and skipping all the 0's, which the CD drive never reads anyhow.
Well, okay, I rewrote the "write" portion of the code. The "read" portion is still giving me trouble, but I'm confident it's just a matter of time.
Not my point. Take Slashdot itself, for example -- it uses color, fonts, and small graphics to keep the site organized, interesting, and easy to scan. Jakob's site is over-simplified so that, to my eyes, it's actually harder to scan his pages for the bits I want most.
A newspaper will specially highlight headlines that deserve notice, use color to grab your attention, divide up the page into columns to make it easier to read, and so forth. It will use whitespace to separate chunks of text that are distinct from each other. And so on, and so forth. They use them not just to grab your attention, they use them because it makes the thing easier and more enjoyable to read.
These are basic design elements which every graphic designer knows, and most other people recognize instinctively. Jakob ignores them deliberately for the sake of ignoring them, and in doing so he loses all their benefits. His homepage is difficult to scan, his page is all in one column and as a result my 800-pixel-wide browser default contains way too much horizontal text to be easy to read. The colors are so bland and faded as to be useless as highlighting. His use of font variations is limited to one bold size and one header size.
I could go on and on, but my point stands. Too little design is just as bad as too much, and raw information presented as such does nothing to convey your message if you can't make it a little interesting to the eyes.
With all due respect to his message of "Simplify, simplify", Nielsen is too passionate about his mission to be practical in applying it.
Just look at his site -- hasn't enjoyed any kind of redesign since he created it, or indeed any kind of design at all. There's nothing interesting on it, nothing inviting, nothing to indicate to someone that one thing is more important than another. In his vigor to keep his site accessible to text-only browsers he's completely ignored the visually unimpaired.
If his message today is that text-only ads will be ignored just as colorful graphical ones already are, then he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.
The article says that the expiration date is 4 1/2 years after the cartridge is put into the printer. Surely, more than 99.9% of users will run out of ink well before the expiration date.
Heck, based on the ones I've owned, 99.9% of users will probably have to replace the printer before that expiration date.
The sound engineers gave a high rank to equipment that produced the sound accurately. The musicians gave a high rank to equipment that made the music clear.
In the same vein, young new-car-owning males gave the highest rank to equipment with the most excessive bass; yuppie parents gave highest rank to equipment that played everything at half speed; and pre-teenagers gave the highest rank to equipment that looped the same four measures over and over again.
Not all albums can be bought at once for $9.99, but it looks like the most popular ones can. This is a savings of $2-$6 in most cases, a good bargain, especially since it's guaranteed cheaper than what you'll pay at most music stores. A good idea they ought to promote more.
Too bad they didn't have the Windows version ready at the same time, but it's probably a good idea -- this lets Apple get the store working smoothly using a much smaller, if (probably) more enthusiastic, audience using hardware and software Apple can reliably predict.
It's sneaky that Apple requires QuickTime 6.2 to play their AAC files, since many Windows users won't have it yet. And I agree with other posters that Apple's compromises on DRM -- one Mac per library, share with up to three Macs via Rendezvous, burn up to 10 CDs before you have to make changes -- are the way to go. They let people enjoy fair use while keeping them from going overboard to obvious copyright violations. (And if you don't like it, surely you can just burn and re-rip the songs to MP3s, right?)
The Store is a bit overwhelmed right now, no big surprise -- many searches just return errors. What excites me is that if the Store really takes off, it should be just a matter of time until downloadable movies (in QuickTime format, natch) are available to broadband customers the same way.
Don't do it on a server - do it on a system you set up just for this purpose. That grants you absolution for any number of "550 we do not" systems you care to run.
With all due respect to your solution, expecting admins to set up a honeypot and monitor it aggressively isn't exactly fair. Doing that is a fair amount of ongoing work, while simply securing an open relay one is responsible for is a low-effort one-time job. It's the difference between locking your front door and organizing a neighborhood watch; the latter may be more noble, but that doesn't make the former an unreasonable request.
- Scrapping the Internet is a good idea because spammers have used email to annoy everyone.
- Under this new, hypothetical email system, Verisign would require everyone to buy a secure ID to ensure they are who their messages say they are.
- The columnist is willing to spend more money and lose his privacy in exchange for these conveniences, so we should be, too.
Please. The problem with spammers isn't because SMTP is so weak. The primary cause of the modern deluge of spam is unsecured email servers around the world, allowing senders to spoof their identity and auto-email anyone they happen to have an address for. And no new system, no matter how rigidly secured, will make up for admins who don't do their job; if it did, it would be prohibitively expensive or complicated and thus be impossible to implement as widely as email is now.
The writer, Larry Seltzer, complains about spammers abusing his account, and yet his online publisher sticks a link to his email address right at the bottom of everything he writes. I would suggest that if he wants to reduce the flow of junk to his inbox, he start with his own managers.
I dunno about this -- my girlfriend seems to have no energy whatsoever left after I apply vibrations to her for 10-15 minutes straight...
I can understand your confusion. My suggestion, then, is to throw the vibrator away and do the job yourself next time. She'll have more energy and you won't have to go to sleep quite so frustrated.
Slashdot Mirror
Target multiple architectures. Let the users decide!
Y'know, I don't know why this keeps coming up. Apple's bottom line has always depended on keeping tight control over the hardware to allow maximum integration with their own software. And it works.
Keep in mind that Linux and BSD aren't targetted towards consumers who want to just "rip, mix, burn" or have plug-and-play that's actually exactly that. Even Windows can't deliver consistently on its promise of universal ease-of-use because so many vendors have so much hardware that may or may not work with the system and its existing drivers.
Whatever else you think about Apple's computers, they are without a doubt the easiest PCs on the planet if you're a neophyte. Take it from me, I've got two young women in my home who are all but completely computer-illiterate, and if I didn't have Mac OS X running they'd be constantly lost at sea. I'd love to try hooking up a Linux box for either or both of them, but there's no way I could expect them to use it. Macs are easy, and their users like them that way.
Yeah, I know it's a profit issue for Apple as well, because without business software sales like Microsoft relies on they'd be bankrupt without hardware profits. But I like to think it's more than just money. Apple cares about making a good and easy-to-use product, or else they'd just be chasing Windows like (sorry, not trolling here, but it's true) GNOME and KDE are instead of constantly innovating their own hardware and interface designs.
Targetting multiple architectures means that Apple's got to deal with unpredictable hardware configurations, cards, motherboards, drivers, all sorts of things that could cause inconvenient kernel panics, drive failures, or worse. Users are used to that with Windows, and they pretty much expect it with Linux. With Macs, they expect things to just work. Controlling the hardware is the best way for Apple to do that.
Two imcompatible formats promising the same thing. Whatever will we do? Will one be more successful than the other? Will one drive the other to extinction? Do you think that the winner will be the most technologically sophisticated, or the cheapest and most widely-licensed?
Interesting news, but nothing I'm going to worry about. We've all weathered incompatible formats before. If you want to know which one will win, just wait a year after drives for both formats go on sale and check your Best Buy flier for the cheapest price.
You don't think an actor would let a studio get away with that without paying likeness rights?
If an actor had an identical twin, or a near lookalike, who was hired to replace him based on physical similarities alone, there's not much he could do about it.
But what I had in mind was an actor having his face and voice scanned for one movie, with a provision in the contract that doing so entitles the movie studio to use those recorded images at their convenience for X more movies or for X years. Just as a music contract can take away an artist's right to sing his own songs or be recorded by any other label, an acting contract could claim an actor's virtual image for as long as the studio wants.
So if he makes one movie, and it's a blockbuster, he can either act in the sequel for whatever the studio's paying or he can allow a double to take his place who will be digitally modified to look and sound just like him, while the actor himself is legally prohibited from acting for any other films until the movie's done.
I remember hearing (this is unsubstantiated) that after "The Hunt for Red October" was a hit, Alec Baldwin demanded an enormous pay increase to play Jack Ryan in the next movie. Imagine his surprise when he was soundly dropped and replaced with Harrison Ford, who I imagine commands a much higher check than Alec Baldwin ever got for a single movie.
The moral of these stories, of course, is that humility is a virtue worth cultivating, because when you get right down to it, nobody's irreplacable. Especially in Hollywood, where (if "The Matrix Reloaded" is any sign of things to come) we'll soon be able to map any actor's face onto a double's body with astonishing ease.
Tolkien is on record as having said that LotR is not an allegory of anything, be it religious (Christianity) or political (nuclear war) or anything else. He was a devout Catholic, and he used religious themes in his story, but that's a far cry from retelling the story of the Bible in literary form.
Every time that someone says "God" in the movie, Trinity (if she is present) responds as if she was being addressed. This happens at least twice.
Unfortunately, this only happens twice (in the nightclub and in the car en route to the Oracle).
Search a copy of the screenplay online sometime. Neo says "Jesus Christ, that thing's real!?" after he's debugged and Trinity doesn't react. Trinity says "Goddammit", "God damn you, Cypher!" and "Jesus, he's killing him", thereby allegedly invoking herself. There are plenty of other times characters say "God" to or around Trinity with no reaction.
It's just an interjection, that's all. Of all the supposed easter eggs, this one's clearly a coincidence.
Christian groups like to talk about "The Matrix" and "The Lord of the Rings" because they're very popular movies that include a lot of religious symbolism and draw on theology for their themes and stories. This is well and good. It's always hard to get people to talk about religion when they're not in the habit of it, especially when they're not very informed on the facts of Christianity or any other major religion.
What I have problems with is when people hold up these films as proof of their creators' intentions to promote particular religions. The "Star Wars" films have been accused, off and on, of promoting "New Age" religion and spirituality. "The Matrix" relies on Buddhist beliefs and themes as much as Christian ones, if not more. And I still can't understand why the Christian right touts "The Lord of the Rings" as a brilliantly disguised retelling of the Gospels (which it wasn't) while the "Harry Potter" books are vilified for encouraging witchcraft and occult interests (which they aren't).
All of these are works of fiction, not of faith. They use a variety of religious themes together to make their story more interesting to viewers, often in ways that's not immediately obvious. But religious sorts should be careful to take these stories as they are and not assume too much about the creators' intents.
Can't people just draw by hand anymore?
Well, I tried drawing this reply on my monitor with a pencil, but for some reason the computer wouldn't remember it and I had to type it instead.
Ms Clayton, who is a movie director and screenwriting lecturer for the University of London and the British Film Council, was commissioned by diet Coke to carry out the research in order to better understand what the British public love about popular movies. ...from the article. Do you suppose that someone wants to make a Diet Coke-themed movie, or that they want to refine this formula somehow into their next soda? ("Diet Coke, now with more comedy!")
Also, I really don't see how the net is so special that things you buy over it shound't have tax on them.
It's not net sales, it's interstate sales. If you ever buy something online from a company that ships it from your same state, your liable for sales tax according to that state's laws. But once the product crosses state lines, that's interstate commerce which, according to the U.S. Consititution, only the federal government can regulate. Not all businesses *do* charge for same-state online purchases, even though they're legally expected to do so. They just haven't been caught.
This has applied forever to catalog sales, but the recent boom in Internet commerce has made it a much bigger financial loss for businesses in certain states. The net result, I imagine, is that businesses that can afford to will simply move their warehouses to Nevada or some other state that lets them offer better deals to their customers. (Mind you, this will probably be fewer businesses than you might hope.)
This isn't a "TiVo box" as we usually know it, without all the subscription features. What it is, is a DVD-VCR. Without any subscription fees (a cause for hesitation among average consumers), it allows you to record shows and movies to the hard disk, then burn them at your leisure to a recordable DVD. Voila, all the functionality of a VCR with the advantages of digital media and commercial-free archiving.
It seems to me that TiVo's strategy is to make this a must-have device for those features alone -- which are all Toshiba's hard work, not theirs -- while including the TiVo subscription features as a kind of upgrade, which no doubt is advertised prominently at the bottom of the 3-day guide every time you use it.
It's a good strategy, and I think it will pay off -- not in the sense of 90% of all purchasers becoming subscribers, but in the sense of maybe 20% of all people who wouldn't buy a TiVo because of the subscription now buy it for the DVD-recording features. Like another poster suggested, I'm sure TiVo will offer AOL-like 30-day trial subscriptions for free somewhere along the line, once enough of these TiVo-capable recorders are out there being used. Because like broadband internet, once you learn to love it, there's no going back.
You get three films for $50, plus a bonus disc covering all three films that certainly wouldn't be available outside the boxed set. If the films were sold separately, they'd be priced at best at $18 apiece, $54 total, and you wouldn't get the bonus disc. (I can't think of anyone who'd want to buy one Indiana Jones DVD without the other two, anyhow.)
It allows the drive to burn up 1.4GB of data using a regular 700MB blank CD-R blank.
I rewrote my drivers some time ago to provide exactly this level of performance, through the simple but clever technique of only writing 1's to the CD and skipping all the 0's, which the CD drive never reads anyhow.
Well, okay, I rewrote the "write" portion of the code. The "read" portion is still giving me trouble, but I'm confident it's just a matter of time.
Not my point. Take Slashdot itself, for example -- it uses color, fonts, and small graphics to keep the site organized, interesting, and easy to scan. Jakob's site is over-simplified so that, to my eyes, it's actually harder to scan his pages for the bits I want most.
A newspaper will specially highlight headlines that deserve notice, use color to grab your attention, divide up the page into columns to make it easier to read, and so forth. It will use whitespace to separate chunks of text that are distinct from each other. And so on, and so forth. They use them not just to grab your attention, they use them because it makes the thing easier and more enjoyable to read.
These are basic design elements which every graphic designer knows, and most other people recognize instinctively. Jakob ignores them deliberately for the sake of ignoring them, and in doing so he loses all their benefits. His homepage is difficult to scan, his page is all in one column and as a result my 800-pixel-wide browser default contains way too much horizontal text to be easy to read. The colors are so bland and faded as to be useless as highlighting. His use of font variations is limited to one bold size and one header size.
I could go on and on, but my point stands. Too little design is just as bad as too much, and raw information presented as such does nothing to convey your message if you can't make it a little interesting to the eyes.
With all due respect to his message of "Simplify, simplify", Nielsen is too passionate about his mission to be practical in applying it.
Just look at his site -- hasn't enjoyed any kind of redesign since he created it, or indeed any kind of design at all. There's nothing interesting on it, nothing inviting, nothing to indicate to someone that one thing is more important than another. In his vigor to keep his site accessible to text-only browsers he's completely ignored the visually unimpaired.
If his message today is that text-only ads will be ignored just as colorful graphical ones already are, then he himself should take this message to heart -- because text-only web sites are even easier to ignore.
The article says that the expiration date is 4 1/2 years after the cartridge is put into the printer. Surely, more than 99.9% of users will run out of ink well before the expiration date.
Heck, based on the ones I've owned, 99.9% of users will probably have to replace the printer before that expiration date.
The sound engineers gave a high rank to equipment that produced the sound accurately. The musicians gave a high rank to equipment that made the music clear.
In the same vein, young new-car-owning males gave the highest rank to equipment with the most excessive bass; yuppie parents gave highest rank to equipment that played everything at half speed; and pre-teenagers gave the highest rank to equipment that looped the same four measures over and over again.
Not all albums can be bought at once for $9.99, but it looks like the most popular ones can. This is a savings of $2-$6 in most cases, a good bargain, especially since it's guaranteed cheaper than what you'll pay at most music stores. A good idea they ought to promote more.
Too bad they didn't have the Windows version ready at the same time, but it's probably a good idea -- this lets Apple get the store working smoothly using a much smaller, if (probably) more enthusiastic, audience using hardware and software Apple can reliably predict.
It's sneaky that Apple requires QuickTime 6.2 to play their AAC files, since many Windows users won't have it yet. And I agree with other posters that Apple's compromises on DRM -- one Mac per library, share with up to three Macs via Rendezvous, burn up to 10 CDs before you have to make changes -- are the way to go. They let people enjoy fair use while keeping them from going overboard to obvious copyright violations. (And if you don't like it, surely you can just burn and re-rip the songs to MP3s, right?)
The Store is a bit overwhelmed right now, no big surprise -- many searches just return errors. What excites me is that if the Store really takes off, it should be just a matter of time until downloadable movies (in QuickTime format, natch) are available to broadband customers the same way.
watch who you're calling shorty, farm boy.
There, there. Most women will say it's not the size, but what you do with it that counts, anyhow.
Providing anonymity is only half the battle, you have to base yourself someplace that U.S. law [doesn't] reach to.
Which, in light of recent international events, basically limits us to extraterrestrial ports of call.
Don't do it on a server - do it on a system you set up just for this purpose. That grants you absolution for any number of "550 we do not" systems you care to run.
With all due respect to your solution, expecting admins to set up a honeypot and monitor it aggressively isn't exactly fair. Doing that is a fair amount of ongoing work, while simply securing an open relay one is responsible for is a low-effort one-time job. It's the difference between locking your front door and organizing a neighborhood watch; the latter may be more noble, but that doesn't make the former an unreasonable request.
This is not MP3's nor is it Ogg, and I am not going to buy anything that limits me in any way.
I hope your DVD collection is standing at zero, then?
IBM Researcher Offers an E-Stamp Spam Solution
A subjective summary of the column:
- Scrapping the Internet is a good idea because spammers have used email to annoy everyone.
- Under this new, hypothetical email system, Verisign would require everyone to buy a secure ID to ensure they are who their messages say they are.
- The columnist is willing to spend more money and lose his privacy in exchange for these conveniences, so we should be, too.
Please. The problem with spammers isn't because SMTP is so weak. The primary cause of the modern deluge of spam is unsecured email servers around the world, allowing senders to spoof their identity and auto-email anyone they happen to have an address for. And no new system, no matter how rigidly secured, will make up for admins who don't do their job; if it did, it would be prohibitively expensive or complicated and thus be impossible to implement as widely as email is now.
The writer, Larry Seltzer, complains about spammers abusing his account, and yet his online publisher sticks a link to his email address right at the bottom of everything he writes. I would suggest that if he wants to reduce the flow of junk to his inbox, he start with his own managers.
I dunno about this -- my girlfriend seems to have no energy whatsoever left after I apply vibrations to her for 10-15 minutes straight...
I can understand your confusion. My suggestion, then, is to throw the vibrator away and do the job yourself next time. She'll have more energy and you won't have to go to sleep quite so frustrated.