As a side note, does anybody know of any companies that are actually using sourceforge enterprise for interenal development?
Yeah, HP, according to the article. I've also read elsewhere that a large NY investment bank was using SourceForge - Morgan Stanley IIRC.
It's a good thing, for those who care about VA Linux. If those two large clients see benefits from using SourceForge, it could present LNUX with an important foothold on both coasts, in the IT as well as the financial market. Not a bad deal.
When Speakeasy goes out of business along with Covad, or when Covad implements PPPoE to lower costs and stay in the game, you should try TZO. Very reliable DynDNS service. Yes, it's not free, but then again, it's either that or no more "power user" privilege.
I don't really understand what the outrage is about. Sure, PPPoE is a hack, you lose 1% of your expensive bandwidth to useless control information, and dialing up on a connection advertised as "always on" is pretty damn lame. In practical terms, however, it's not the monster some readers here make it out to be. I've had a Verizon PPPoE line for over a year now, with alternately a BSD or an NT box happily keeping a 24/7, always on, no user intervention required connection used by a number of other machines on the home LAN. No "router firmware" someone mentioned, no "manually dialing up", no "waiting for the browser to open the first page", no problems.
I think the real issue here is simply the hurt pride that comes with being forced by a monopolistic provider to use an overtly dumbed-down consumer solution and knowing that it could have been - and was, for a short time - better. I'd, however, take a 1.5M PPP link over a 53k one any day and not be too bitter about it considering the improved price/performance ratio.:)
Of course. But given the patience the judge showed in dealing with Rogers support, I'm fairly positive she would've let it slide had Rogers been more forthcoming in acknowledging their faults and providing some kind of refund. They instead chose the warpath and are now reaping the bad publicity they deserve.
Then again, nothing like a good lawsuit to tame some of the more egregious offenders. Both my ISP and my credit card company have gotten a lot better since being slammed with multi-million dollar class action suits.:) --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
The judge's expectations of receiving a refund for downtimes on her cable line are not out of line at all. If Rogers were smart, they'd do what Verizon does on their (rather shitty) DSL lines - a free day of service for every hour of downtime. I've managed to get several weeks of free service so far without having to put any pressure whatsoever on the Verizon support reps. They won't bring it up, but their guidelines must state that if a customer asks about that particular policy, the rep must go ahead with crediting the account with the requested hours. They probably do check their logs to see if your claim of a down router - biggest problem, especially on the weekends - is true, so don't push it too far.:)
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
The russkies are no great designers of space equipment. They get by on the cheap, because they have to. And the risks are higher. In fact, the ISS is using some of the same technologies as MIR, and nobody is happy about it at all.
Your logic escapes me. The Russians are able to put in orbit durable and cheap modules despite being severely limited by their budget and general economic chaos of the country, and you're arguing that their space savoir-faire is inferior? It's like saying Linux sucks, simply because Torvalds couldn't afford to work with good hardware and so made sure his OS was light-weight enough to run on the cheapest 386. Rather irrational, don't you think?
As for "nobody being happy" about the ISS using the same technologies as MIR, I'm sure NASA, the ESA and the taxpayers of their respective countries would beg to differ. Reusing Russians' experience with MIR and Salyut, both technical and human, saved billions of dollars.
Overall, it seems pretty silly to attack an entire space program on a few incidents happening way after a spacecraft's MTBF had been reached or some poor developer's failure to account for the difference between the metric and imperial system. Shit happens, in space and elsewhere. How many people died on their way to the mall in something as technologically primitive as a Ford Pinto? --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Bush is about as pro free market as Reagan was. Talk the free trade up, while increasing government interference in the marketplace to "level the playing field" for American corporations v. the rest of the world on the one hand and corporations v. the workers on the other. The free market they speak of is one where corporations are free to operate without incurring any of the traditional risks and liabilities associated with doing business.
As the parent to your post wrote, if American leaders were as concerned about maintaining the free market as they like to appear in front of gullible TV audiences, we wouldn't have the government bailing out LTCM with tax payer money, nor would perversions such as the current EULAs be legal.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Well, it's not as if the Soviet Union had just one company the government would use. Various powerplants manufacturers, electronics firms, design bureaus and so on would compete with each other for funding and, very importantly, prestige. The latter especially would help them attract the best graduates from good engineering schools and have the political clout to secure even more contracts.
I'm honestly too lazy to look up the names of particular bureaus in the current space program, but the competition between the Chelomei and Yangel bureaus in the 1960s springs to mind.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Freedom to innovate (through incompatibilities with existing standards), providing the product that the consumer wants even it means releasing buggy beta software, discontinuing support for multiple platforms. I think I've already seen that somewhere.
Thank God for visionaries (or mere realists?) like RMS. --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Now, if you'd gotten your head out of your defensive insecure little ass before reading my post, you would've perhaps understood that seeing companies like Nokia or Sony and their foolish investors pay the price of working on projects that don't fit my view of the Way Things Should Be can only make me happy. So keep developing bullshit technologies that you and your friends will drool over in your circle jerk, just don't expect the rest of us to give a shit about your products. --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
We've seen it with WAP - a "great" idea developed by people totally out of touch with the reality of their intended market. Just who the fuck is going to use this? Certainly not the mass consumer market the kitchen-white design and laughable features (wireless modem? 10 inch screen running at what, 640x480? hello?) seem to target. The layman might've bought the device two or three years ago, before everyone who has any use for the internet and can afford a computer got onto AOL and started cruising for preteens in the great online community.
Think about the people you know who have the money to buy not only the appliance, but the various Sony gadgets that the thing is supposed to control. WEGA TV - $1'000+, DVD - $400+, sound system - $1000+. Do you really think that, first, those people constitute a large enough market in the US and, second, they aren't already fully connected and would cringe at the lack of expected functionality in the Sony device?
This webpad shit is DOA, just like WAP, committee designed by a bunch of Finnish cokeheads who had the galt to believe that people outside of their insignificant socio-economic circle would be willing to pay exhorbitant rates to daytrade and check the delay on that connection at ORD.
Honestly, there are several basic facts that idealab whiteboarding motherfuckers should get into their heads:
Everyone who could connect is connected, in the Atlantic zone at least.
People are set in their ways and will expect functionality similar to what they have now.
1% of the population controls 99% of the capital. Just because everybody you know has a Visor with a GSM phone and modem and an mp3 player in their M3, doesn't mean that most people do.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
A couple years ago, Bruce Perens penned Preparing for the Intellectual-property Offensive for LinuxWorld. It's an interesting perspective on the potential for the subversion of the patent system by unscrupulous (is there any other kind?) proprietary software vendors.
Some noteworthy ideas, including that of "open patent" development, which keeps resurfacing whenever patents are discussed, but doesn't really seem to have taken hold yet. --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Take a look at Richard Stallman's 1997 text The Right to Read. Very interesting and far-sighted perspective on the things that RMS saw coming three years ago and that are becoming reality much more quickly than even the more paranoid among us had thought. --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Actually, Creative is sponsoring some work on drivers for their oldish (but still very nice) DXR2 decoder board. Check it out here. --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
In one series of experiments, the team found that larvae exposed to an overnight dose of microwaves wriggled less and grew 5 per cent faster than larvae that were not exposed, suggesting that the microwaves were speeding up cell division.
Just keep talking on that mobile after you've had the mandatory car accident due to yakking in traffic and you'll get back in shape in no time. --
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
With advance apologies to Cliff and Chaoli, I have synthesized a stereotype of the generic representative of various pagan, Earth, magic, or "alternative" belief groups. As with any generalization, numerous individual examples can serve to counter any given stereotypical trait. These exceptions should not, however, blind one to what is, in my experience, a statistical reality.
Typical Wiccan:
American
Female
Under 18 or between 30 and 40 years old
Below average to average looks
Average to above average intelligence
In addition to the above factors, I would also note a cultural tendency (predating interest in the "alternatives") toward romanticism, usually at the expense of economic, social and political awareness.
This leads me to believe that interest in the "occult" as defined in the article is usually an attempt by intellectually weak, physically diminutive individuals to seek a form of worldview which cannot be based on either complex socio-political ideas or typical, sexually driven social interaction.
Needless to say, I do not exactly see the correlation between being a geek and being a devotee of some pagan spinoff cult. To the contrary, I think that most geeks - not the teenage losers Jon Katz likes writing about, but the intellectually dominant, self-assured types - can only scorn any such cheap escapist pursuits.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Teams will have 72 hours to implement a program to perform this task and submit this program to the contest judges.
Three days of amphetamine fueled creative rage, just what I need after meeting that deadline Friday afternoon. Hope the cash awards offset the cost.;)
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Re:How many chickens was it?
on
Endgame For SCO
·
· Score: 1
If you'd read the article at osOpinion, you'd have realized that Gil Bates was simply providing a brief summary. Slashdot editors and people submitting stories might be quick to jump to conclusions- the most annoying example being timothy and his childish bad government/good marketplace dichotomy)- but that criticism is simply unfair here. -- Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie. H. Rap Brown
Oh boy, I dread the day when the blueshirts at SpaceFlight, Inc. will start trying to raise profitability by cutting costs. "In related news, an aging Airbus A600 operated by United Airlines has suffered structural breakup during an emergency atmospheric reentry. Large sections of the Boston area reported contaminated by nuclear fallout." -- Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie. H. Rap Brown
This is very good news of course, to BSD hackers who are slightly tired of the press coverage that Linux has been given in the past year.
I can see how a little resentment can creep into the most level-headed individual when things like political, religious or operating system choice are at play. Nevertheless, I see the mindshare gains acquired by Linux and Open Source over the past two years as a patently good thing for other- some, I'm sure, will argue, better- free Unices. A lot of organizations have, it seems, warmed to the idea that commercial software might not be only available option, and as they discover that viable alternatives exist to their, say, Windows-centric perspective, Linux will not be the only OS that will gain popularity simply because once shown the possibility of choice, one's point of view usually becomes quite a bit more flexible.
That said, the fact that a great number of closed-source ISVs only support Linux or even, commonly, one particular distribution, does irritate me immensely, as does the growing disregard for portability in Open Source software written by Linux users for Linux users. -- Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie. H. Rap Brown
It's not a worthless paper, and my comment was directed more against the institutions themselves rather than the idea of IT improving a developing country's sort. My main issue with optimistic predictions about any given sector of the economy or policy reversing the poverty and general desolation (recently came back from a trip to Murmansk, in northern Russia, what a disaster) of a country's population is that historically, we have seen nothing like the benefits described in theoretical economics. Factors of a psychological, social and historical nature always seem to interfere with the best developed plan without ever being taken into account by supposedly well-informed, well-prepared and certainly well-paid consultants, bankers and government policy wonks.
I can see the potential benefits of increased access to information provided by a deeper penetration of affordable communications in developing countries' societies - information is power, after all, at least in understanding the events shaping one's life. However, I am extremely wary about touting any one field, be it IT or agribusiness, as a driving force behind deep-seated reform at all levels of society as long as the forces controlling the development of the field are concentrated in the remote boardrooms of corporations whose interests are radically opposed to those of the subjects in their employ.
If the tools "they" give you have been designed only to maximize "their" profit, can you really use them to construct a better environment for anybody but "them"? When Microsoft (or Apple, or HP, or whoever) gives your school a million-dollar computer lab and stipulates that no competitors' products are to be installed on the shiny new machines, is the end result ultimately beneficial or harmful? -- Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie. H. Rap Brown
I see people suggesting various addresses such as billg@microsoft.com or foo@example.net. These are fine, as are random fakes (but not {abuse,root,postmaster}@bar.com, since they're never live), but consider using the names provided by either the company's whois information or, should you get lucky, a live email address listed somewhere on the web site.
Take the example of buy.com, a notoriously unresponsive spammer. julieh@BUY.COM, their billing contact, is actually received by Julie H., an administrative assistant at buy.com. My experience with administrative, billing or technical contacts from the WHOIS database has been quite positive in that inquiries directed to the addresses listed there do, for the most part, generate a human response, often coming from the very addresses listed there.
And of course, do not hesitate using spammers' snail mail in your own domain or service registrations. After all, informative, unsolicited, commercial notices are an integral part of the net.economy, aren't they. -- Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie. H. Rap Brown
Slashdot Mirror
And get burned alive to fulfill a federal agency's dreams of increased funding and slack supervision? I think I'll pass.
Holy shit, a Beru fan on Slashdot! Good quote, brings back fond memories.
Yeah, HP, according to the article. I've also read elsewhere that a large NY investment bank was using SourceForge - Morgan Stanley IIRC.
It's a good thing, for those who care about VA Linux. If those two large clients see benefits from using SourceForge, it could present LNUX with an important foothold on both coasts, in the IT as well as the financial market. Not a bad deal.
When Speakeasy goes out of business along with Covad, or when Covad implements PPPoE to lower costs and stay in the game, you should try TZO. Very reliable DynDNS service. Yes, it's not free, but then again, it's either that or no more "power user" privilege.
I don't really understand what the outrage is about. Sure, PPPoE is a hack, you lose 1% of your expensive bandwidth to useless control information, and dialing up on a connection advertised as "always on" is pretty damn lame. In practical terms, however, it's not the monster some readers here make it out to be. I've had a Verizon PPPoE line for over a year now, with alternately a BSD or an NT box happily keeping a 24/7, always on, no user intervention required connection used by a number of other machines on the home LAN. No "router firmware" someone mentioned, no "manually dialing up", no "waiting for the browser to open the first page", no problems.
:)
I think the real issue here is simply the hurt pride that comes with being forced by a monopolistic provider to use an overtly dumbed-down consumer solution and knowing that it could have been - and was, for a short time - better. I'd, however, take a 1.5M PPP link over a 53k one any day and not be too bitter about it considering the improved price/performance ratio.
Of course. But given the patience the judge showed in dealing with Rogers support, I'm fairly positive she would've let it slide had Rogers been more forthcoming in acknowledging their faults and providing some kind of refund. They instead chose the warpath and are now reaping the bad publicity they deserve.
:)
Then again, nothing like a good lawsuit to tame some of the more egregious offenders. Both my ISP and my credit card company have gotten a lot better since being slammed with multi-million dollar class action suits.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
The judge's expectations of receiving a refund for downtimes on her cable line are not out of line at all. If Rogers were smart, they'd do what Verizon does on their (rather shitty) DSL lines - a free day of service for every hour of downtime. I've managed to get several weeks of free service so far without having to put any pressure whatsoever on the Verizon support reps. They won't bring it up, but their guidelines must state that if a customer asks about that particular policy, the rep must go ahead with crediting the account with the requested hours. They probably do check their logs to see if your claim of a down router - biggest problem, especially on the weekends - is true, so don't push it too far. :)
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Your logic escapes me. The Russians are able to put in orbit durable and cheap modules despite being severely limited by their budget and general economic chaos of the country, and you're arguing that their space savoir-faire is inferior? It's like saying Linux sucks, simply because Torvalds couldn't afford to work with good hardware and so made sure his OS was light-weight enough to run on the cheapest 386. Rather irrational, don't you think?
As for "nobody being happy" about the ISS using the same technologies as MIR, I'm sure NASA, the ESA and the taxpayers of their respective countries would beg to differ. Reusing Russians' experience with MIR and Salyut, both technical and human, saved billions of dollars.
Overall, it seems pretty silly to attack an entire space program on a few incidents happening way after a spacecraft's MTBF had been reached or some poor developer's failure to account for the difference between the metric and imperial system. Shit happens, in space and elsewhere. How many people died on their way to the mall in something as technologically primitive as a Ford Pinto?
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Bush is about as pro free market as Reagan was. Talk the free trade up, while increasing government interference in the marketplace to "level the playing field" for American corporations v. the rest of the world on the one hand and corporations v. the workers on the other. The free market they speak of is one where corporations are free to operate without incurring any of the traditional risks and liabilities associated with doing business.
As the parent to your post wrote, if American leaders were as concerned about maintaining the free market as they like to appear in front of gullible TV audiences, we wouldn't have the government bailing out LTCM with tax payer money, nor would perversions such as the current EULAs be legal.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Well, it's not as if the Soviet Union had just one company the government would use. Various powerplants manufacturers, electronics firms, design bureaus and so on would compete with each other for funding and, very importantly, prestige. The latter especially would help them attract the best graduates from good engineering schools and have the political clout to secure even more contracts. I'm honestly too lazy to look up the names of particular bureaus in the current space program, but the competition between the Chelomei and Yangel bureaus in the 1960s springs to mind.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Freedom to innovate (through incompatibilities with existing standards), providing the product that the consumer wants even it means releasing buggy beta software, discontinuing support for multiple platforms. I think I've already seen that somewhere.
Thank God for visionaries (or mere realists?) like RMS.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Now, if you'd gotten your head out of your defensive insecure little ass before reading my post, you would've perhaps understood that seeing companies like Nokia or Sony and their foolish investors pay the price of working on projects that don't fit my view of the Way Things Should Be can only make me happy. So keep developing bullshit technologies that you and your friends will drool over in your circle jerk, just don't expect the rest of us to give a shit about your products.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Think about the people you know who have the money to buy not only the appliance, but the various Sony gadgets that the thing is supposed to control. WEGA TV - $1'000+, DVD - $400+, sound system - $1000+. Do you really think that, first, those people constitute a large enough market in the US and, second, they aren't already fully connected and would cringe at the lack of expected functionality in the Sony device?
This webpad shit is DOA, just like WAP, committee designed by a bunch of Finnish cokeheads who had the galt to believe that people outside of their insignificant socio-economic circle would be willing to pay exhorbitant rates to daytrade and check the delay on that connection at ORD.
Honestly, there are several basic facts that idealab whiteboarding motherfuckers should get into their heads:
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
A couple years ago, Bruce Perens penned Preparing for the Intellectual-property Offensive for LinuxWorld. It's an interesting perspective on the potential for the subversion of the patent system by unscrupulous (is there any other kind?) proprietary software vendors.
Some noteworthy ideas, including that of "open patent" development, which keeps resurfacing whenever patents are discussed, but doesn't really seem to have taken hold yet.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Take a look at Richard Stallman's 1997 text The Right to Read. Very interesting and far-sighted perspective on the things that RMS saw coming three years ago and that are becoming reality much more quickly than even the more paranoid among us had thought.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Actually, Creative is sponsoring some work on drivers for their oldish (but still very nice) DXR2 decoder board. Check it out here.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
In one series of experiments, the team found that larvae exposed to an overnight dose of microwaves wriggled less and grew 5 per cent faster than larvae that were not exposed, suggesting that the microwaves were speeding up cell division.
Just keep talking on that mobile after you've had the mandatory car accident due to yakking in traffic and you'll get back in shape in no time.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Typical Wiccan:
- American
- Female
- Under 18 or between 30 and 40 years old
- Below average to average looks
- Average to above average intelligence
In addition to the above factors, I would also note a cultural tendency (predating interest in the "alternatives") toward romanticism, usually at the expense of economic, social and political awareness. This leads me to believe that interest in the "occult" as defined in the article is usually an attempt by intellectually weak, physically diminutive individuals to seek a form of worldview which cannot be based on either complex socio-political ideas or typical, sexually driven social interaction.Needless to say, I do not exactly see the correlation between being a geek and being a devotee of some pagan spinoff cult. To the contrary, I think that most geeks - not the teenage losers Jon Katz likes writing about, but the intellectually dominant, self-assured types - can only scorn any such cheap escapist pursuits.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Three days of amphetamine fueled creative rage, just what I need after meeting that deadline Friday afternoon. Hope the cash awards offset the cost. ;)
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
If you'd read the article at osOpinion, you'd have realized that Gil Bates was simply providing a brief summary. Slashdot editors and people submitting stories might be quick to jump to conclusions- the most annoying example being timothy and his childish bad government/good marketplace dichotomy)- but that criticism is simply unfair here.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
Oh boy, I dread the day when the blueshirts at SpaceFlight, Inc. will start trying to raise profitability by cutting costs. "In related news, an aging Airbus A600 operated by United Airlines has suffered structural breakup during an emergency atmospheric reentry. Large sections of the Boston area reported contaminated by nuclear fallout."
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
This is very good news of course, to BSD hackers who are slightly tired of the press coverage that Linux has been given in the past year.
I can see how a little resentment can creep into the most level-headed individual when things like political, religious or operating system choice are at play. Nevertheless, I see the mindshare gains acquired by Linux and Open Source over the past two years as a patently good thing for other- some, I'm sure, will argue, better- free Unices. A lot of organizations have, it seems, warmed to the idea that commercial software might not be only available option, and as they discover that viable alternatives exist to their, say, Windows-centric perspective, Linux will not be the only OS that will gain popularity simply because once shown the possibility of choice, one's point of view usually becomes quite a bit more flexible.
That said, the fact that a great number of closed-source ISVs only support Linux or even, commonly, one particular distribution, does irritate me immensely, as does the growing disregard for portability in Open Source software written by Linux users for Linux users.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
From an email recently received from my registrar:
You can always use a ficticious address. Just make sure that we have a working email address in order to help if things go wrong.
So, in so many words, fuck you, ignorant shit.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
It's not a worthless paper, and my comment was directed more against the institutions themselves rather than the idea of IT improving a developing country's sort. My main issue with optimistic predictions about any given sector of the economy or policy reversing the poverty and general desolation (recently came back from a trip to Murmansk, in northern Russia, what a disaster) of a country's population is that historically, we have seen nothing like the benefits described in theoretical economics. Factors of a psychological, social and historical nature always seem to interfere with the best developed plan without ever being taken into account by supposedly well-informed, well-prepared and certainly well-paid consultants, bankers and government policy wonks.
I can see the potential benefits of increased access to information provided by a deeper penetration of affordable communications in developing countries' societies - information is power, after all, at least in understanding the events shaping one's life. However, I am extremely wary about touting any one field, be it IT or agribusiness, as a driving force behind deep-seated reform at all levels of society as long as the forces controlling the development of the field are concentrated in the remote boardrooms of corporations whose interests are radically opposed to those of the subjects in their employ.
If the tools "they" give you have been designed only to maximize "their" profit, can you really use them to construct a better environment for anybody but "them"? When Microsoft (or Apple, or HP, or whoever) gives your school a million-dollar computer lab and stipulates that no competitors' products are to be installed on the shiny new machines, is the end result ultimately beneficial or harmful?
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown
I see people suggesting various addresses such as billg@microsoft.com or foo@example.net. These are fine, as are random fakes (but not {abuse,root,postmaster}@bar.com, since they're never live), but consider using the names provided by either the company's whois information or, should you get lucky, a live email address listed somewhere on the web site.
Take the example of buy.com, a notoriously unresponsive spammer. julieh@BUY.COM, their billing contact, is actually received by Julie H., an administrative assistant at buy.com. My experience with administrative, billing or technical contacts from the WHOIS database has been quite positive in that inquiries directed to the addresses listed there do, for the most part, generate a human response, often coming from the very addresses listed there.
And of course, do not hesitate using spammers' snail mail in your own domain or service registrations. After all, informative, unsolicited, commercial notices are an integral part of the net.economy, aren't they.
--
Violence is necessary, it is as American as cherry pie.
H. Rap Brown