Whether you're giving up money, time, information or any other resource, it's still a pyramid scheme. As long as your buddies knew what they were getting into, no problem, at least on your side. But the company promised your buddies the same thing you got, even though they probably can never get it. It's still a pyramid scheme where most people end up getting nothing for their [time/money/whatever] but still contribute to Gratis making money from their referral. So, many people have a problem supporting it at all. Congratulations on getting in early and getting your free stuff.
As the geometric expansion of the pyramid progresses, the promise becomes more and more of a lie, even if it's never a provable, outright lie. I guess that's the main problem I have with it. The whole concept is bogus despite the fact that it isn't technically a "scam". The real place to be to make out in the deal is: CEO of Gratis. That guy probably owns a couple of Ferrari's by now. Whoever he stole the idea from was one smart cookie.
It's really simple. People hate this because it's a pyramid scheme. It promises something to entice you to give up personal information and refer other people to give up their personal information, but for the majority of the participants the promise can never be fulfilled. As the pyramid gets bigger it gets harder and harder to get anything out of the deal, until the market gets totally saturated and the pyramid collapses.
You don't lose any money in this particular scheme unless you bought some stuff along the way from the advertisers and didn't cancel it, but a whole lot of people (not a few, the base of the pyramid is always geometrically larger than the top) get inconvenienced with absolutely nothing to show for it besides the fact that YOU got yourself an iPod. You USED 5 of your bestest(sic) friends to get your free junk, while giving bogus information to the scam. If your friends don't happen to be in the first couple of generations of this pyramid, they likely get NOTHING for their trouble. That's just not cool.
Pyramid schemes are always wrong and hated, because the majority of the participants ALWAYS lose (or don't win free stuff, same thing). Because of the nature of a pyramid scheme, it cannot be otherwise. Plus, some of us find both our time and our privacy is worth something, and not to be given away lightly so that someone higher up on the pyramid can get something for free.
From everything I have read, it seems legit as far as people getting their ipods.
You're missing something. The fact that some people got iPods is meaningless if you're trying to prove this thing is "legit". Everyone who gets into the early stages of a pyramid scheme makes out great. Yeah, the initial people get their iPods, but in the end a lot of people are still going to get screwed out of their "free iPod" because it's a Ponzi/pyramid scheme. "There's no two ways about it", as the saying goes.
Here's how it works. The advertising research company gets paid X amount by the advertisers for each referral, such that 6*X is greater than the price of an iPod. They then order a brand new iPod for the first guy, keep the small profit margin and the other 5 people are left to come up with another 5 referrals... each. After about 6 generations of this all possible leads are used up as the number of people signed up increases exponentially.
The sequence below is just the number of new referrals required in each generation for every person in the previous generation to qualify for a free iPod, not including a running total:
The last few generations of signers are never able to complete their 5 referrals because every person on the Internet who could possibly fall for this has already been contacted and roped in. At that point the advertising company gets to keep ALL the money for everyone who has signed up, because no one can possibly meet the requirements to qualify for a free iPod.
They make a profit for the initial generations of people who sign up, but after the "market" gets saturated it's ALL profit. No more free iPods. It may be perfectly "legit" but it is still a pyramid scheme. Plain. And. Simple. It's only free for the people who jump on the wagon the moment it starts rolling. There is no sustainability, it will eventually (quickly) fizzle out.
I figure there's no way any generation past about the sixth (3,125) could ever have a more than 25% success rate at getting their free iPods, taking into account the supply of new iPods, the number of people who actually go through the whole process, the number of people in qualifying countries who have Internet access and somehow encounter a link into this scheme, etc, etc. There are a thousand different variables that will keep the majority of those who sign up from getting anything, while the advertising research company still gets its $50-60 per head for as long as people still think they have a snowball's chance in Hell to get a free iPod. Judging by the stupidity of the average homo sapiens, they could probably keep getting referrals out to about generation ten, maybe even eleven (wouldn't want to underestimate human stupidity). They start out with a small profit margin on each signer and work their way up to making out like bandits and laughing all the way to the bank.
There are a lot of legal scams, and this is one of them. Don't tell people it's legit just because it's legal. I think at this point it's only still legal because it's obscured by the misdirection of where the money is coming from and going to. You put money into the scheme, but your money goes directly to other companies (the advertisers, from whom you order small items to qualify for the referral system), and the advertisers pay out money but it doesn't go to you, it goes to the middleman (the advertising research company), who promises you a free iPod. It ends up being a lie because the final generations cannot possibly complete the requirements, but they are still enticed into giving up personal information and buying useless junk.
If it requires that much sleight of hand and misdirection, it's always a scam. And of course all this is ignoring the part about every person turning in 5 people so that advertisers can collect their demographic information. That part is pretty rank, and not worth the price of an iPod in my opinion. You're paying for that iPod, just not with money.
TANSTAAFL, my friend. TANSTAAFL. Or should that be TANSTAAFI now?
So you don't mind transmitting the child porn, you just don't want to be associated with the transmission.
All the conscientious mods in the audience should be modding the parent down, not up, and certainly not insightful. It's wrong in a way that should be discouraged whenever it is encountered.
That is what is called a straw man argument. It is a logical fallacy. Whether or not you "mind" the possibility that your Freenet node might be anonymously transmitting portions of a digital file that contains child porn, has nothing to do with whether or not you want to be directly associated with someone else downloading child porn through your computer, or whether or not you support anonymous expression and transmission of digital information.
The reason it's a "straw man" is because you made it up out of thin air. The original poster never stated that he "didn't mind" child porn going through his Freenet node. What he said was he didn't want to be accused of a crime that someone else did. The entire concept in your statement is fabricated. You put words in the poster's mouth. This type of argument is very common and popular among people with no training in critical thinking skills. It's hard to defend yourself against a statement you never made. This kind of thing is used in political press releases all the time. Example from Bloom County (paraphrased):
Milo: Senator Bedfellow, can you confirm that you sunk the body of Jimmy Hoffa in Farmer Brown's pond? Senator Bedfellow: NO! Milo: "I lost the body, said the Senator"
That carbon dioxide you are exhaling with every breath helps plants grow. Some of those plants get turned into food for humans and animals. Some of the animals that are fed with that plant food also get turned into food. Some of that plant and animal food is eaten by child pornographers, and fed to the children they will use for creation of child porn. By your own logic, if you fail to consent to being attached to a breathing machine which retains all of your exhaled carbon dioxide and converts it into a form unusable by plants, you "don't mind supporting child pornography". You do like to breath, don't you? Kind of liberating, isn't it? Sort of like, oh, I don't know, a freedom? Something that normally hurts nobody and should never be banned just because "insert scapegoat here" happens to do it also.
You've got to draw the line somewhere. Supporting freedom does not equal supporting the ability to do bad things with that freedom. Those are two different things. All Freenet does is transmit digital information anonymously. Humans create that digital information, not the other way around. Just like a firearm will never jump up and shoot you all by itself, that digital information will never jump off your computer screen and create more digital information all by itself. Digital information can't kidnap a child. Digital information can't hold a video camera. Go after the sources, don't try to legitimize the destruction of every possible freedom for the purpose of stopping the flow of certain types of digital information.
Oh, by the way, just because I'm arguing against you doesn't mean I support kiddie porn or other bad things either. I shouldn't have to say that, but I've already seen you using non-logical manufactured "evidence" to imply that your parent poster does support such things.
Well, we have only been closely looking at mars for (in an astronomical sense) a fraction of a second. Just because there hasn't been any evidence of eruption yet doesn't really mean anything.
Don't you mean in a geological sense?
(astronomical) is to (distance/size) as (geological) is to (time)
Certain types of rock often fracture and wear along orthogonal lines like that. There are even weirder forms of rock in nature on this planet. Somewhere along the coast of someplace, maybe England, there are rock formations that look like hexagonal columns of varying height all fitted together like some sort of mechanically man-made sculpture.
Here's a link. And another link. And a third link. Nature is weird. Don't be too quick to jump to conclusions about intelligent life just because you see a repeating pattern.
If I knew much about it I might find it disgusting, but I don't. What's more interesting to me is that I've heard lots of negative talk about Lotus Notes and yet there it sits right at the top of the list. Somebody must like it.
Anyway, how do you know IBM didn't contribute some of those pledges? If they can pay a few thousand to get Codeweavers to make it work acceptably with WINE, it will probably be vastly cheaper than paying a dozen IBM programmers to create a native Linux port. Sounds like a good business move to me.
Most of us aren't going to pronounce it that way because it sounds stupid and doesn't match the underlying word "GNU" which is pronounced with a hard G. And "gimp" in common usage is primarilty associated with "cripple", those other meanings are outdated and/or obscure so it will never be the first thing someone things about when they hear the word. I am a native English speaker and I've never associated either of those other meanings with the word "gimp".
You've proven nothing. GIMP, in the English language, is a stupid name that is far too easily confused with an insulting word that is not appropriate in polite speech or text, and that includes work and school environments. So I am with the original poster in saying that the name needs to change if they want to appeal to a wider audience. He's right, companies will not take software like this seriously, just like they will never take something named BitchX seriously if they're looking for a company IRC client. BitchX may not care about appealing to a wider audience, but the GIMP seems to want more users, so they should at least consider a modification of the name.
They could also make the name tell us something about what the application does, but judging from most other software names that is probably asking too much.
Re:My problems with GIMP.
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1, Redundant
That's almost along the lines of getting nervous about talking about the civil rights movement with a black person.
Uh, no, talking about "the G.I.M.P." in front of a handicapped person is along the lines of talking about "the G.N.I.G.G.E.R." in front of a black person. The spoken words carry very negative connotations. If such a thing existed, I'll bet you would be making damn sure the person you were talking to knew what you were talking about before you said it, and you'd feel pretty stupid saying it in front of an auditorium of people no matter what race they were.
GIMP is a dumb name, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you and your circle of handicapped geek friends don't get offended by it because you have the magical foreknowledge that it's just an acronym that means "GNU Image Manipulation Program". If you were asked to give a presentation on the GIMP to a large audience in any setting, you would feel pretty stupid about the second time you said the word "gimp". Acronyms don't come across well in speech. If your boss walked by while you were typing "apt-get install gimp" in your Debian box you'd probably have some explaining to do as well.
It's just dumb, on the same level that the name "BitchX" is dumb for an IRC client. There's no getting around it. It's just done to be cute, or for the shock factor, or so you can post in your blog that, "hey, I'm using BitchX now, and it rocks!" You're never going to attract a lot of people with a name like that. Somehow I don't think the BitchX developer(s) don't really care about marketing to the general public, but it seems like the GIMP developers do. So they would be well advised to consider a name update. Most regular folks aren't even going to want to download something with such a dumb name, no less try it out and talk about it with their non-geek friends.
It's not about being "mature enough to handle it", it's about realizing that the name will never come across well in speech or text to anyone who doesn't already understand what it means. Just because you're mature enough to handle an insult doesn't mean I should be insulting you. The mature thing to do is to realize you're using a word that will end up annoying people and turning them away before they even try the product. The mature thing to do is to change the name. When names like that start changing, it will be a sign that the Open Source community is maturing.
Have the maturity to realize when you are offending people for no good reason, and stop doing it. And don't worry, there will always be room on the fringes for things like BitchX, so you can feel "mature" and cool for using an application with a name that is normally not acceptable in polite society. The fringes is where things like that will always be forced to stay. It's not right or wrong, it's just the way polite societies operate. It's just the way things are. Get over it.
I haven't seen anyone else point out the even better quote by this Schare guy:
Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. "Tabs are what hooked me," he told me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each one and tax the computer's memory.
The guy is the "official spokesman" for IE and he doesn't even use it, and admits it publicly!! Instead he uses something that uses the IE rendering engine but emulates the more advanced features of Mozilla/Firefox, like tabbed browsing. Tell me again why anyone should listen to a word he says about IE? Didn't think so. Because he just demonstrated to everyone that IE is outdated, at the very least.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
Big, high quality pro level printers on the other had use CMKY and if you try and print an RGB image on a CMKY printer it will look like crap. A big, steamy pile of miscolored crap.
I suppose I'll never understand why it makes no difference that you're viewing this CMYK stuff on an RGB screen, and why the printer driver or the printer itself can't convert the RGB image to CMYK accurately enough to not make any difference whether you design in CMYK or RGB. RGB has a smaller color gamut, but how can you possibly take advantage of the larger gamut of CMYK when you're designing your graphics on an RGB screen?
Just a question. Since I don't really understand how any of it works, I'll assume that you're 100% correct and that there really is an advantage to working directly in CMYK.
Yeah, except as usual the GTK file dialog takes up about 50% more screen space without providing any additional useful information. Sorry, that's been one of my pet peeves with most Linux applications for years now. They just take up too much screen space unnecessarily. Almost every dialog box I've ever seen in Linux has had empty space or junk that didn't need to be there. With large dialogs it has often affected usability when the entire dialog wouldn't fit on the screen. Very annoying.
Photoshop 6 and 7 are both listed as "silver" applications on Codeweaver's compatibility database for CrossOver Office, which means they are very usable with a few bugs keeping them from running perfectly. If you want better support for those versions and support for CS and Elements, be sure to place a vote in the compatibility database. If it's worth some money to you, make a pledge. Pledges pay for development time, basically. The apps that get the most votes and pledges will be supported fastest. Looks like right now Photoshop CS is at the bottom of their list of the Top 25 Pledged Apps with $819.50.
Oh, and CrossOver Office is based on WINE, and all the bug fixes that Codeweavers find will eventually work their way back into the WINE source, so supporting Codeweavers is generally a good thing for Linux and the whole Open Source community.
ObDisc: Not associated with Codeweavers in any way, but I've used CrossOver Office and found it to be good software.
Re:Seriously... Why would you use this?
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GIMP 2.2 Released
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· Score: 1
I remember reading that some big video production place paid Codeweavers to make Photoshop 6/7 work with CrossOver Office, so they could run it on Linux and save a bundle on Windows licensing costs. That's why at least PS 7 is listed as supported on the CX Office website. I wouldn't be surprised if PS CS also worked at this point, with the latest version of CX Office.
My theory on the lack of details is that they did all the tests and finally convinced him he's a nutbar hypochondriac and doesn't want the world to know that he got everyone all concerned about something that was all in his head.
Put the pitchforks down, folks, it's a joke!
But seriously, I'm one of those who thinks those who care about this issue should be given a little better status update than, "hey, I'm feeling better". It just seems kind of rude to leave so many people in the dark like that after getting them involved in the story. A lot of people have an emotional stake in his health status now that he has invited them in with long-winded stories of going to the brink of death. This sort of thing needs what the shrinks call "closure". Even for those who couldn't care less if he had lived or died there is natural human curiosity at work keeping them wondering what the root cause of the problem was and what has happened to solve it.
Patrick Volkerding needs to step up and give out a bit more information.
Seriously, can we let the lawyers find out about The-Next-Best-Thing(tm) on their own. Do we have to spoon-feed it to them and put a big bullseye on everything good?
What's the point of having a good thing if you can't tell anyone about it?
Obviously it wasn't that good if it went down with the mere threat of a raid by the authorities. It wasn't that good if the authorities in multiple countries could be talked into performing such a raid. Sites that demonstrably use Bittorrent for purely legal distribution of such files that they own the copyright to will not be going down. Your favorite Linux distro, for example, will still be available by Bittorrent most likely.
No lawyer has any legal ground to stand on to convince the authorities in France to shut down Mandrake's Bittorrent tracker, run by Mandrake and published with a link on Mandrake's own website. SuprNova and the others are going down for the same reasons the original Napster went down; because they were too centralized and operated on the fringes of legality, if not totally outside the law.
What's that old saying again? What doesn't kill an Internet technology will only make it stronger. This won't kill BT for 100% legal uses and a new decentralized P2P technology is already evolving (exeem?) to replace BT for stuff like warez that can't be shown to be 100% legal. If you try to keep things secret you just put off the inevitable. The lawyers will always find out about and attack questionably legal things eventually, that's their job. Plus, the more people you keep out with your secrecy, the worse performance you'll get from your BT downloads.
In the end, the next "working" P2P system will be that much closer to being indestructible. They certainly won't be able to take it down just by shutting down one website or writing an article about it on Slashdot. Anything that can be killed by a simple article on/. doesn't really deserve to be out there in the first place. You're just whining that you can't get to your free warez as easily as you've gotten used to. So what?
Bittorrent was never even designed to do what it has been used for by sites like SuprNova, despite how cool it may have been while it worked. The creator of Bittorrent said so himself. It was not designed to be an instructible way to exchange copyrighted data illegally without fear of reprisal. It's not Slashdot's fault that you and others decided to use it for this purpose anyway. Slashdot is really doing you a favor by hastening the evolution of the next generation P2P clients. You'll get access to your warez and old TV shows, don't you worry. It just won't be via SuprNova.org after today.
You have no defensible point and yet you were modded +5, Insightful. At least 3 mods should be ashamed today.
While everyone is complaining about math issues and how gbit and gbyte relate i think the real point is RW speed, current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download. so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt card that would make it compleatly impractical. i would prefere to see a card that has at least CDROM read transfer speeds. that would be something worth buying.
Sandisk (and Panasonic too, I think) have just come out with flash media in various formats (Compact Flash, Secure Digital, etc.) that have read/write speeds of 20-megaBYTES/second, minimum. The previous generation (Sandisk Ultra II or Extreme) cards have minimum R/W speeds of 10/9MB per second, respectively. So I think whatever technology you are using is definitely not "current generation" if it is that slow. If you're talking about a USB key there are a lot of those around now that support "Hi-Speed" USB 2.0 and should be much faster than whatever memory you are talking about.
There are also 8 gigaBYTE Compact Flash cards already on the market, so if they really meant gigaBIT in the article they are already behind the times. I think the big deal (the "real point") in this case is only supposed to be the size, which everyone is missing while they focus on capacity. Maybe the size means they can soon pack 8 gigaBYTES into one of those new thumbnail-sized mini-SD cards in one of those new thumb-sized mobile phones, or your quarter-sized MP3 player. That will be kind of cool.
And if they can get 8GB into a form factor that small by using these tiny memory cells, just think what the capacity of a Compact Flash size card will be. Probably at least 8 times the mini-SD card, so about 64GB. We will need that when our digital cameras record 50-megapixel photos, which is probably about where the professional cameras will be by 2009.
Why does every digital camera have a crappy motor-driven zoom? Aren't there others out there that would prefer a normal (no-zoom) lens? Isn't a motor-driven zoom totally useless?
Why would I want a no-zoom lens on a compact digicam? That would be like having a prime lens on an SLR that can't be removed and exchanged for a different focal length. Maybe what you meant was a manual zoom? A manual zoom can certainly be faster and more precise than a zoom driven by buttons.
You might want to look at the Minolta DiMAGE A2 or A200. The DiMAGE series is one of the few non-SLR cameras with a manual zoom lens. Also has a 2/3" 8MP sensor, fairly large for a digicam. It will also do macro at the telephoto end (200mm equiv.) as close as 5 inches, so it's decent for macro photography alone and even better with some close-up adapters. Most digicams will only do macro at the wide end. I bought an A2 because this guy said things like this about it:
"I'm happy to say that at Minolta the design engineers appear not only to be photographers, but enthusiastic ones at that. Controls on the A2 are well placed and easy to use. Unusual for a digital camera, almost every function can be controlled without going through menus on the rear LCD."
Minolta are also the ones that integrated their "Anti-Shake[tm]" image stabilization into the body of their recent cameras (A1, A2, A200, Z3, 7D), thus when they created their first SLR it turned every Minolta AF-compatible lens made in the last 20 years into an inexpensive image stablized lens. Pretty cool, that. I don't think Minolta is really getting the recognition it deserves for some of the technology they've employed over the years. Here's a review of the very nice Minolta Maxxum 7D digital SLR.
They also have one of the nicest compact ultra-zooms out there, the Dimage Z3, with 12x zoom, 4MP and Anti-Shake. It compares quite favorably with other ultra-zooms like the Olympus 7xx series and the Panasonic DMC-FZ10/15/20.
He was taking regular interval photos to capture the cloud movements, and the before and after pictures are exactly the same in terms of what's in the frame. Obviously the camera was stationary on a good solid tripod. The shutter was open 1/20th of a second at f5.6 to capture the ambient light. During that 1/20th of second there was a very brief, bright flash. I human eye might not have noticed it even while directly looking at it, but it is perfectly reasonable for the CCD in the camera to have picked it up if it occurred while the shutter was open.
I really have a difficult time believing the amount of idiocy I have seen on/. while reading this story. I'm not referring to you but to all the people who thing this thing is a "bug" or a magaical "contrail shadow" that is somehow flat even though there's nothing flat for it to be projected on. Slashdot seems to have lost its collective mind this week. If it's not a fake there's no way it could be anything but a small meteorite. It either hit the light or skimmed by close enough for the shock wave to blow out the light and cause the flash/smoke.
Yo, bug people! The flash and the smoke are separated by empty space! The flash fired on the camera! If the bug was that close it would have been solid, not transparent, whether it was blurry or not! You're all insane! It's not a bug!
Gaaa! Popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
It seems to me from my understanding of this "exploit" that Javascript isn't exactly the problem. Only the attacking website has to run Javascript. The website being attacked could be completely devoid of Javascript and still be vulnerable to this spoofing, as long as it opened a new window in some fashion, and as long as the attacking website can somehow discover the name of the new window that has been opened.
In fact, if I understand this thing correctly, even the attacking website could be devoid of Javascript and still work if the links are operated manually. You could use HTML and a target attribute if you wanted, it just wouldn't operate automatically. All the Javascript does is run a timer and automatically overwrite the contents of the pop-up window, hopefully before the victim notices what's going on.
All this is about is that one website can open a new window with name "foo" and if another website opens a new window named "foo" after that, the contents of the original window "foo" gets overwritten rather than a new, separate "foo" window being created. There is a namespace conflict, and it's definitely a security bug that should be fixed, but it doesn't really have anything to do with Javascript. One website simply shouldn't be allowed to overwrite the contents of a window that was opened by another website just because it used the same name for the window. That's bad.
A side issue here is that even if the browser behavior gets fixed and both websites can open a separate window named "foo" at the same time, we still won't necessarily be able to tell them apart if the contents and title are identical. So from the phishing standpoint it's still a bit of a problem. The attacker will still have a 50/50 chance of having the confused user pick the wrong window to enter sensitive data, probably thinking they had clicked the link twice or in some other way opened two copies of the window. Even if the address bar is always displayed, many people would never notice that the two windows had different URLs.
The web is really getting tough to use safely these days. Anyone who thinks they're too smart to be fooled by a phishing scam just hasn't met a slick enough phishing scam. Don't worry, they're coming.
I haven't seen anyone yet pointing out the obvious problem with these statistics of IE 0.5, Firefox 0.11. Somebody seems to be assuming that just because a user switches from IE to Firefox, it actually changes the likelihood of that person clicking on ads. What's more likely is that all those Firefox users never clicked on ads even when they were using IE or Netscape or Mozilla.
These statistics are meaningless unless you can demonstrate that Firefox changes the behavior of the user. Yeah, so I can block ads now, so what? They're the same ads that I NEVER clicked on back when I could see them flashing in my face! Therefore, nothing has changed! Firefox isn't bad for advertisers. Users who never click on ads are bad for advertisers. It doesn't matter what browser they're using. Comparing the browsers like this is a total red herring.
I've seen comments to the effect that you can "force" an older extension to work in a newer Firefox/Thunderbird by unzipping the XPI and modifying a text string in one of the files (install.rdf) to match the new version number, then zip it back up and install it. Here's some instructions for modifying a Firefox extension, should be the same with a Thunderbird extension: http://liewcf.com/wp/archives/2004/11/diy-upgrade- incompatible-firefox-extensions/
If you were using server-side filters you would know. It can't pick up new messages from any folders except the inbox. Amongst other minor problems, you also can't read a mail without having to download any attachments first.
AHA! And I thought I was just misconfiguring something. So that's why none of my IMAP folders besides the inbox are ever updated until I enter them. I've got a few filters on the server side that move new messages into different folders. I don't know why I never identified this as a bug.
I also agree with the great-grandparent. I've said before I was surprised to see it reaching 1.0 so soon after 0.8. It needs a ton of work still.
Slashdot Mirror
Whether you're giving up money, time, information or any other resource, it's still a pyramid scheme. As long as your buddies knew what they were getting into, no problem, at least on your side. But the company promised your buddies the same thing you got, even though they probably can never get it. It's still a pyramid scheme where most people end up getting nothing for their [time/money/whatever] but still contribute to Gratis making money from their referral. So, many people have a problem supporting it at all. Congratulations on getting in early and getting your free stuff.
As the geometric expansion of the pyramid progresses, the promise becomes more and more of a lie, even if it's never a provable, outright lie. I guess that's the main problem I have with it. The whole concept is bogus despite the fact that it isn't technically a "scam". The real place to be to make out in the deal is: CEO of Gratis. That guy probably owns a couple of Ferrari's by now. Whoever he stole the idea from was one smart cookie.
Happy Holidays to all.
It's really simple. People hate this because it's a pyramid scheme. It promises something to entice you to give up personal information and refer other people to give up their personal information, but for the majority of the participants the promise can never be fulfilled. As the pyramid gets bigger it gets harder and harder to get anything out of the deal, until the market gets totally saturated and the pyramid collapses.
You don't lose any money in this particular scheme unless you bought some stuff along the way from the advertisers and didn't cancel it, but a whole lot of people (not a few, the base of the pyramid is always geometrically larger than the top) get inconvenienced with absolutely nothing to show for it besides the fact that YOU got yourself an iPod. You USED 5 of your bestest(sic) friends to get your free junk, while giving bogus information to the scam. If your friends don't happen to be in the first couple of generations of this pyramid, they likely get NOTHING for their trouble. That's just not cool.
Pyramid schemes are always wrong and hated, because the majority of the participants ALWAYS lose (or don't win free stuff, same thing). Because of the nature of a pyramid scheme, it cannot be otherwise. Plus, some of us find both our time and our privacy is worth something, and not to be given away lightly so that someone higher up on the pyramid can get something for free.
From everything I have read, it seems legit as far as people getting their ipods.
You're missing something. The fact that some people got iPods is meaningless if you're trying to prove this thing is "legit". Everyone who gets into the early stages of a pyramid scheme makes out great. Yeah, the initial people get their iPods, but in the end a lot of people are still going to get screwed out of their "free iPod" because it's a Ponzi/pyramid scheme. "There's no two ways about it", as the saying goes.
Here's how it works. The advertising research company gets paid X amount by the advertisers for each referral, such that 6*X is greater than the price of an iPod. They then order a brand new iPod for the first guy, keep the small profit margin and the other 5 people are left to come up with another 5 referrals... each. After about 6 generations of this all possible leads are used up as the number of people signed up increases exponentially.
The sequence below is just the number of new referrals required in each generation for every person in the previous generation to qualify for a free iPod, not including a running total:
1, 5, 25, 125, 625, 3125, 15625, 78125, 390625, 1953125, 9765625, 48828125
The last few generations of signers are never able to complete their 5 referrals because every person on the Internet who could possibly fall for this has already been contacted and roped in. At that point the advertising company gets to keep ALL the money for everyone who has signed up, because no one can possibly meet the requirements to qualify for a free iPod.
They make a profit for the initial generations of people who sign up, but after the "market" gets saturated it's ALL profit. No more free iPods. It may be perfectly "legit" but it is still a pyramid scheme. Plain. And. Simple. It's only free for the people who jump on the wagon the moment it starts rolling. There is no sustainability, it will eventually (quickly) fizzle out.
I figure there's no way any generation past about the sixth (3,125) could ever have a more than 25% success rate at getting their free iPods, taking into account the supply of new iPods, the number of people who actually go through the whole process, the number of people in qualifying countries who have Internet access and somehow encounter a link into this scheme, etc, etc. There are a thousand different variables that will keep the majority of those who sign up from getting anything, while the advertising research company still gets its $50-60 per head for as long as people still think they have a snowball's chance in Hell to get a free iPod. Judging by the stupidity of the average homo sapiens, they could probably keep getting referrals out to about generation ten, maybe even eleven (wouldn't want to underestimate human stupidity). They start out with a small profit margin on each signer and work their way up to making out like bandits and laughing all the way to the bank.
There are a lot of legal scams, and this is one of them. Don't tell people it's legit just because it's legal. I think at this point it's only still legal because it's obscured by the misdirection of where the money is coming from and going to. You put money into the scheme, but your money goes directly to other companies (the advertisers, from whom you order small items to qualify for the referral system), and the advertisers pay out money but it doesn't go to you, it goes to the middleman (the advertising research company), who promises you a free iPod. It ends up being a lie because the final generations cannot possibly complete the requirements, but they are still enticed into giving up personal information and buying useless junk.
If it requires that much sleight of hand and misdirection, it's always a scam. And of course all this is ignoring the part about every person turning in 5 people so that advertisers can collect their demographic information. That part is pretty rank, and not worth the price of an iPod in my opinion. You're paying for that iPod, just not with money.
TANSTAAFL, my friend. TANSTAAFL. Or should that be TANSTAAFI now?
So you don't mind transmitting the child porn, you just don't want to be associated with the transmission.
All the conscientious mods in the audience should be modding the parent down, not up, and certainly not insightful. It's wrong in a way that should be discouraged whenever it is encountered.
That is what is called a straw man argument. It is a logical fallacy. Whether or not you "mind" the possibility that your Freenet node might be anonymously transmitting portions of a digital file that contains child porn, has nothing to do with whether or not you want to be directly associated with someone else downloading child porn through your computer, or whether or not you support anonymous expression and transmission of digital information.
The reason it's a "straw man" is because you made it up out of thin air. The original poster never stated that he "didn't mind" child porn going through his Freenet node. What he said was he didn't want to be accused of a crime that someone else did. The entire concept in your statement is fabricated. You put words in the poster's mouth. This type of argument is very common and popular among people with no training in critical thinking skills. It's hard to defend yourself against a statement you never made. This kind of thing is used in political press releases all the time. Example from Bloom County (paraphrased):
Milo: Senator Bedfellow, can you confirm that you sunk the body of Jimmy Hoffa in Farmer Brown's pond?
Senator Bedfellow: NO!
Milo: "I lost the body, said the Senator"
That carbon dioxide you are exhaling with every breath helps plants grow. Some of those plants get turned into food for humans and animals. Some of the animals that are fed with that plant food also get turned into food. Some of that plant and animal food is eaten by child pornographers, and fed to the children they will use for creation of child porn. By your own logic, if you fail to consent to being attached to a breathing machine which retains all of your exhaled carbon dioxide and converts it into a form unusable by plants, you "don't mind supporting child pornography". You do like to breath, don't you? Kind of liberating, isn't it? Sort of like, oh, I don't know, a freedom? Something that normally hurts nobody and should never be banned just because "insert scapegoat here" happens to do it also.
You've got to draw the line somewhere. Supporting freedom does not equal supporting the ability to do bad things with that freedom. Those are two different things. All Freenet does is transmit digital information anonymously. Humans create that digital information, not the other way around. Just like a firearm will never jump up and shoot you all by itself, that digital information will never jump off your computer screen and create more digital information all by itself. Digital information can't kidnap a child. Digital information can't hold a video camera. Go after the sources, don't try to legitimize the destruction of every possible freedom for the purpose of stopping the flow of certain types of digital information.
Oh, by the way, just because I'm arguing against you doesn't mean I support kiddie porn or other bad things either. I shouldn't have to say that, but I've already seen you using non-logical manufactured "evidence" to imply that your parent poster does support such things.
Well, we have only been closely looking at mars for (in an astronomical sense) a fraction of a second. Just because there hasn't been any evidence of eruption yet doesn't really mean anything.
Don't you mean in a geological sense?
(astronomical) is to (distance/size) as (geological) is to (time)
Certain types of rock often fracture and wear along orthogonal lines like that. There are even weirder forms of rock in nature on this planet. Somewhere along the coast of someplace, maybe England, there are rock formations that look like hexagonal columns of varying height all fitted together like some sort of mechanically man-made sculpture.
Here's a link. And another link. And a third link. Nature is weird. Don't be too quick to jump to conclusions about intelligent life just because you see a repeating pattern.
If I knew much about it I might find it disgusting, but I don't. What's more interesting to me is that I've heard lots of negative talk about Lotus Notes and yet there it sits right at the top of the list. Somebody must like it.
Anyway, how do you know IBM didn't contribute some of those pledges? If they can pay a few thousand to get Codeweavers to make it work acceptably with WINE, it will probably be vastly cheaper than paying a dozen IBM programmers to create a native Linux port. Sounds like a good business move to me.
Most of us aren't going to pronounce it that way because it sounds stupid and doesn't match the underlying word "GNU" which is pronounced with a hard G. And "gimp" in common usage is primarilty associated with "cripple", those other meanings are outdated and/or obscure so it will never be the first thing someone things about when they hear the word. I am a native English speaker and I've never associated either of those other meanings with the word "gimp".
You've proven nothing. GIMP, in the English language, is a stupid name that is far too easily confused with an insulting word that is not appropriate in polite speech or text, and that includes work and school environments. So I am with the original poster in saying that the name needs to change if they want to appeal to a wider audience. He's right, companies will not take software like this seriously, just like they will never take something named BitchX seriously if they're looking for a company IRC client. BitchX may not care about appealing to a wider audience, but the GIMP seems to want more users, so they should at least consider a modification of the name.
They could also make the name tell us something about what the application does, but judging from most other software names that is probably asking too much.
That's almost along the lines of getting nervous about talking about the civil rights movement with a black person.
Uh, no, talking about "the G.I.M.P." in front of a handicapped person is along the lines of talking about "the G.N.I.G.G.E.R." in front of a black person. The spoken words carry very negative connotations. If such a thing existed, I'll bet you would be making damn sure the person you were talking to knew what you were talking about before you said it, and you'd feel pretty stupid saying it in front of an auditorium of people no matter what race they were.
GIMP is a dumb name, it doesn't matter in the slightest that you and your circle of handicapped geek friends don't get offended by it because you have the magical foreknowledge that it's just an acronym that means "GNU Image Manipulation Program". If you were asked to give a presentation on the GIMP to a large audience in any setting, you would feel pretty stupid about the second time you said the word "gimp". Acronyms don't come across well in speech. If your boss walked by while you were typing "apt-get install gimp" in your Debian box you'd probably have some explaining to do as well.
It's just dumb, on the same level that the name "BitchX" is dumb for an IRC client. There's no getting around it. It's just done to be cute, or for the shock factor, or so you can post in your blog that, "hey, I'm using BitchX now, and it rocks!" You're never going to attract a lot of people with a name like that. Somehow I don't think the BitchX developer(s) don't really care about marketing to the general public, but it seems like the GIMP developers do. So they would be well advised to consider a name update. Most regular folks aren't even going to want to download something with such a dumb name, no less try it out and talk about it with their non-geek friends.
It's not about being "mature enough to handle it", it's about realizing that the name will never come across well in speech or text to anyone who doesn't already understand what it means. Just because you're mature enough to handle an insult doesn't mean I should be insulting you. The mature thing to do is to realize you're using a word that will end up annoying people and turning them away before they even try the product. The mature thing to do is to change the name. When names like that start changing, it will be a sign that the Open Source community is maturing.
Have the maturity to realize when you are offending people for no good reason, and stop doing it. And don't worry, there will always be room on the fringes for things like BitchX, so you can feel "mature" and cool for using an application with a name that is normally not acceptable in polite society. The fringes is where things like that will always be forced to stay. It's not right or wrong, it's just the way polite societies operate. It's just the way things are. Get over it.
I haven't seen anyone else point out the even better quote by this Schare guy:
Mr. Schare may be the official spokesman, but he does not use Internet Explorer himself. Instead he uses Maxthon, published by a little company of the same name. It uses the Internet Explorer engine but provides loads of features that Internet Explorer does not. "Tabs are what hooked me," he told me, referring to the ability to open within a single window many different Web sites and move easily among them, rather than open separate windows for each one and tax the computer's memory.
The guy is the "official spokesman" for IE and he doesn't even use it, and admits it publicly!! Instead he uses something that uses the IE rendering engine but emulates the more advanced features of Mozilla/Firefox, like tabbed browsing. Tell me again why anyone should listen to a word he says about IE? Didn't think so. Because he just demonstrated to everyone that IE is outdated, at the very least.
Big, high quality pro level printers on the other had use CMKY and if you try and print an RGB image on a CMKY printer it will look like crap. A big, steamy pile of miscolored crap.
I suppose I'll never understand why it makes no difference that you're viewing this CMYK stuff on an RGB screen, and why the printer driver or the printer itself can't convert the RGB image to CMYK accurately enough to not make any difference whether you design in CMYK or RGB. RGB has a smaller color gamut, but how can you possibly take advantage of the larger gamut of CMYK when you're designing your graphics on an RGB screen?
Just a question. Since I don't really understand how any of it works, I'll assume that you're 100% correct and that there really is an advantage to working directly in CMYK.
Yeah, except as usual the GTK file dialog takes up about 50% more screen space without providing any additional useful information. Sorry, that's been one of my pet peeves with most Linux applications for years now. They just take up too much screen space unnecessarily. Almost every dialog box I've ever seen in Linux has had empty space or junk that didn't need to be there. With large dialogs it has often affected usability when the entire dialog wouldn't fit on the screen. Very annoying.
Photoshop 6 and 7 are both listed as "silver" applications on Codeweaver's compatibility database for CrossOver Office, which means they are very usable with a few bugs keeping them from running perfectly. If you want better support for those versions and support for CS and Elements, be sure to place a vote in the compatibility database. If it's worth some money to you, make a pledge. Pledges pay for development time, basically. The apps that get the most votes and pledges will be supported fastest. Looks like right now Photoshop CS is at the bottom of their list of the Top 25 Pledged Apps with $819.50.
Oh, and CrossOver Office is based on WINE, and all the bug fixes that Codeweavers find will eventually work their way back into the WINE source, so supporting Codeweavers is generally a good thing for Linux and the whole Open Source community.
ObDisc: Not associated with Codeweavers in any way, but I've used CrossOver Office and found it to be good software.
I remember reading that some big video production place paid Codeweavers to make Photoshop 6/7 work with CrossOver Office, so they could run it on Linux and save a bundle on Windows licensing costs. That's why at least PS 7 is listed as supported on the CX Office website. I wouldn't be surprised if PS CS also worked at this point, with the latest version of CX Office.
My theory on the lack of details is that they did all the tests and finally convinced him he's a nutbar hypochondriac and doesn't want the world to know that he got everyone all concerned about something that was all in his head.
Put the pitchforks down, folks, it's a joke!
But seriously, I'm one of those who thinks those who care about this issue should be given a little better status update than, "hey, I'm feeling better". It just seems kind of rude to leave so many people in the dark like that after getting them involved in the story. A lot of people have an emotional stake in his health status now that he has invited them in with long-winded stories of going to the brink of death. This sort of thing needs what the shrinks call "closure". Even for those who couldn't care less if he had lived or died there is natural human curiosity at work keeping them wondering what the root cause of the problem was and what has happened to solve it.
Patrick Volkerding needs to step up and give out a bit more information.
Seriously, can we let the lawyers find out about The-Next-Best-Thing(tm) on their own. Do we have to spoon-feed it to them and put a big bullseye on everything good?
/. doesn't really deserve to be out there in the first place. You're just whining that you can't get to your free warez as easily as you've gotten used to. So what?
What's the point of having a good thing if you can't tell anyone about it?
Obviously it wasn't that good if it went down with the mere threat of a raid by the authorities. It wasn't that good if the authorities in multiple countries could be talked into performing such a raid. Sites that demonstrably use Bittorrent for purely legal distribution of such files that they own the copyright to will not be going down. Your favorite Linux distro, for example, will still be available by Bittorrent most likely.
No lawyer has any legal ground to stand on to convince the authorities in France to shut down Mandrake's Bittorrent tracker, run by Mandrake and published with a link on Mandrake's own website. SuprNova and the others are going down for the same reasons the original Napster went down; because they were too centralized and operated on the fringes of legality, if not totally outside the law.
What's that old saying again? What doesn't kill an Internet technology will only make it stronger. This won't kill BT for 100% legal uses and a new decentralized P2P technology is already evolving (exeem?) to replace BT for stuff like warez that can't be shown to be 100% legal. If you try to keep things secret you just put off the inevitable. The lawyers will always find out about and attack questionably legal things eventually, that's their job. Plus, the more people you keep out with your secrecy, the worse performance you'll get from your BT downloads.
In the end, the next "working" P2P system will be that much closer to being indestructible. They certainly won't be able to take it down just by shutting down one website or writing an article about it on Slashdot. Anything that can be killed by a simple article on
Bittorrent was never even designed to do what it has been used for by sites like SuprNova, despite how cool it may have been while it worked. The creator of Bittorrent said so himself. It was not designed to be an instructible way to exchange copyrighted data illegally without fear of reprisal. It's not Slashdot's fault that you and others decided to use it for this purpose anyway. Slashdot is really doing you a favor by hastening the evolution of the next generation P2P clients. You'll get access to your warez and old TV shows, don't you worry. It just won't be via SuprNova.org after today.
You have no defensible point and yet you were modded +5, Insightful. At least 3 mods should be ashamed today.
While everyone is complaining about math issues and how gbit and gbyte relate i think the real point is RW speed, current flash chips have horrible RW speeds my 1 GB flash card takes almost 1/2 hor to download. so it would take 16 hours to get my data (photos) of a 32 Gbyt card that would make it compleatly impractical. i would prefere to see a card that has at least CDROM read transfer speeds. that would be something worth buying.
Sandisk (and Panasonic too, I think) have just come out with flash media in various formats (Compact Flash, Secure Digital, etc.) that have read/write speeds of 20-megaBYTES/second, minimum. The previous generation (Sandisk Ultra II or Extreme) cards have minimum R/W speeds of 10/9MB per second, respectively. So I think whatever technology you are using is definitely not "current generation" if it is that slow. If you're talking about a USB key there are a lot of those around now that support "Hi-Speed" USB 2.0 and should be much faster than whatever memory you are talking about.
There are also 8 gigaBYTE Compact Flash cards already on the market, so if they really meant gigaBIT in the article they are already behind the times. I think the big deal (the "real point") in this case is only supposed to be the size, which everyone is missing while they focus on capacity. Maybe the size means they can soon pack 8 gigaBYTES into one of those new thumbnail-sized mini-SD cards in one of those new thumb-sized mobile phones, or your quarter-sized MP3 player. That will be kind of cool.
And if they can get 8GB into a form factor that small by using these tiny memory cells, just think what the capacity of a Compact Flash size card will be. Probably at least 8 times the mini-SD card, so about 64GB. We will need that when our digital cameras record 50-megapixel photos, which is probably about where the professional cameras will be by 2009.
You forgot:
- Disable JPEG Images
Why does every digital camera have a crappy motor-driven zoom? Aren't there others out there that would prefer a normal (no-zoom) lens? Isn't a motor-driven zoom totally useless?
Why would I want a no-zoom lens on a compact digicam? That would be like having a prime lens on an SLR that can't be removed and exchanged for a different focal length. Maybe what you meant was a manual zoom? A manual zoom can certainly be faster and more precise than a zoom driven by buttons.
You might want to look at the Minolta DiMAGE A2 or A200. The DiMAGE series is one of the few non-SLR cameras with a manual zoom lens. Also has a 2/3" 8MP sensor, fairly large for a digicam. It will also do macro at the telephoto end (200mm equiv.) as close as 5 inches, so it's decent for macro photography alone and even better with some close-up adapters. Most digicams will only do macro at the wide end. I bought an A2 because this guy said things like this about it:
"I'm happy to say that at Minolta the design engineers appear not only to be photographers, but enthusiastic ones at that. Controls on the A2 are well placed and easy to use. Unusual for a digital camera, almost every function can be controlled without going through menus on the rear LCD."
Minolta are also the ones that integrated their "Anti-Shake[tm]" image stabilization into the body of their recent cameras (A1, A2, A200, Z3, 7D), thus when they created their first SLR it turned every Minolta AF-compatible lens made in the last 20 years into an inexpensive image stablized lens. Pretty cool, that. I don't think Minolta is really getting the recognition it deserves for some of the technology they've employed over the years. Here's a review of the very nice Minolta Maxxum 7D digital SLR.
They also have one of the nicest compact ultra-zooms out there, the Dimage Z3, with 12x zoom, 4MP and Anti-Shake. It compares quite favorably with other ultra-zooms like the Olympus 7xx series and the Panasonic DMC-FZ10/15/20.
Two words for you:
/. while reading this story. I'm not referring to you but to all the people who thing this thing is a "bug" or a magaical "contrail shadow" that is somehow flat even though there's nothing flat for it to be projected on. Slashdot seems to have lost its collective mind this week. If it's not a fake there's no way it could be anything but a small meteorite. It either hit the light or skimmed by close enough for the shock wave to blow out the light and cause the flash/smoke.
tri
pod
He was taking regular interval photos to capture the cloud movements, and the before and after pictures are exactly the same in terms of what's in the frame. Obviously the camera was stationary on a good solid tripod. The shutter was open 1/20th of a second at f5.6 to capture the ambient light. During that 1/20th of second there was a very brief, bright flash. I human eye might not have noticed it even while directly looking at it, but it is perfectly reasonable for the CCD in the camera to have picked it up if it occurred while the shutter was open.
I really have a difficult time believing the amount of idiocy I have seen on
Yo, bug people! The flash and the smoke are separated by empty space! The flash fired on the camera! If the bug was that close it would have been solid, not transparent, whether it was blurry or not! You're all insane! It's not a bug!
Gaaa! Popular delusions and the madness of crowds.
It seems to me from my understanding of this "exploit" that Javascript isn't exactly the problem. Only the attacking website has to run Javascript. The website being attacked could be completely devoid of Javascript and still be vulnerable to this spoofing, as long as it opened a new window in some fashion, and as long as the attacking website can somehow discover the name of the new window that has been opened.
In fact, if I understand this thing correctly, even the attacking website could be devoid of Javascript and still work if the links are operated manually. You could use HTML and a target attribute if you wanted, it just wouldn't operate automatically. All the Javascript does is run a timer and automatically overwrite the contents of the pop-up window, hopefully before the victim notices what's going on.
All this is about is that one website can open a new window with name "foo" and if another website opens a new window named "foo" after that, the contents of the original window "foo" gets overwritten rather than a new, separate "foo" window being created. There is a namespace conflict, and it's definitely a security bug that should be fixed, but it doesn't really have anything to do with Javascript. One website simply shouldn't be allowed to overwrite the contents of a window that was opened by another website just because it used the same name for the window. That's bad.
A side issue here is that even if the browser behavior gets fixed and both websites can open a separate window named "foo" at the same time, we still won't necessarily be able to tell them apart if the contents and title are identical. So from the phishing standpoint it's still a bit of a problem. The attacker will still have a 50/50 chance of having the confused user pick the wrong window to enter sensitive data, probably thinking they had clicked the link twice or in some other way opened two copies of the window. Even if the address bar is always displayed, many people would never notice that the two windows had different URLs.
The web is really getting tough to use safely these days. Anyone who thinks they're too smart to be fooled by a phishing scam just hasn't met a slick enough phishing scam. Don't worry, they're coming.
I haven't seen anyone yet pointing out the obvious problem with these statistics of IE 0.5, Firefox 0.11. Somebody seems to be assuming that just because a user switches from IE to Firefox, it actually changes the likelihood of that person clicking on ads. What's more likely is that all those Firefox users never clicked on ads even when they were using IE or Netscape or Mozilla.
These statistics are meaningless unless you can demonstrate that Firefox changes the behavior of the user. Yeah, so I can block ads now, so what? They're the same ads that I NEVER clicked on back when I could see them flashing in my face! Therefore, nothing has changed! Firefox isn't bad for advertisers. Users who never click on ads are bad for advertisers. It doesn't matter what browser they're using. Comparing the browsers like this is a total red herring.
It's not the size that matters, it's what you do with it.
I've seen comments to the effect that you can "force" an older extension to work in a newer Firefox/Thunderbird by unzipping the XPI and modifying a text string in one of the files (install.rdf) to match the new version number, then zip it back up and install it. Here's some instructions for modifying a Firefox extension, should be the same with a Thunderbird extension:- incompatible-firefox-extensions/
http://liewcf.com/wp/archives/2004/11/diy-upgrade
If you were using server-side filters you would know. It can't pick up new messages from any folders except the inbox. Amongst other minor problems, you also can't read a mail without having to download any attachments first.
AHA! And I thought I was just misconfiguring something. So that's why none of my IMAP folders besides the inbox are ever updated until I enter them. I've got a few filters on the server side that move new messages into different folders. I don't know why I never identified this as a bug.
I also agree with the great-grandparent. I've said before I was surprised to see it reaching 1.0 so soon after 0.8. It needs a ton of work still.