The judge was 100% correct. The technical part of what is happening is that site P (Provider) gets your email address and adds it to it's database.
Site P's database is sold to company B (Broker) on a monthly basis. Company B replicates the information from the database once a month on a given date.
Company C (Consumer) buys the rights to send email to company B's list once a month.
If then you request not be be spammed from site P a month later, you must not expect that this change will be reflected immediately in Company B's database.
Service Packs, not new versions, are how bug fixes are delivered. It is service packs that drive stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
Gates is absolutely right - you NEVER buy a new version because of a fix you expect. If you do, you're psycho. You DO install Service Packs to get the fix. Have you noticed that Service Packs are free or very affordable? There's a reason - no one pays for bug fixes - it's the responsibility of the company to fix things that don't work.
This is like buying a car. If you want the thing to last, you buy the car that has been in production for at least 3 years. Why? Because the kinks have been worked out. Then when you buy it, you assume it works. If it doesn't, you liberally employ the warranty, because you paid for a working car. If someone were to insist you pay to fix your alternator a year after buying a new car, you'd laugh at them and promptly take them to court. Same story with software.
Install the service pack if you want stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
Umm... Anyone remember those sliding machines that copied your card number onto a carbon paper slip and you wrote the amount on it and signed. You got the top copy the merchant got the other copy. Anyone?
None of the technological solutions will solve the manual card transaction problem, which really is the beauty of a CC. It's like a check, but the merchant doesn't have to trust you, rather he needs to trust the CC company.
I'm surprised discerning/.ers manage to post such crap. Not only is this article vague. For example, aside from the "many problems" with the patch system, try figuring out what these problems are. You can't, not from this article!
Check out this beauty of a quote:
A Consumer Reports survey last year found that virus infection rates on Macs are half what they are on Windows, noted Smith. "Is that because Macs are safer? I think the answer is yeah."
I wonder why there are fewer viruses for MACs... maybe they're safer... maybe...
So this means that Chinese geeks can't read Slashdot. God forbid we actually discuss stuff, find out about stuff, learn stuff, and expose stuff. That might bring the world to its knees!
I wouldn't pay a cent for a page I couldn't see before hand. In current page usage, most people find information either by a priori knowledge (they have it bookmarked, or remember the site), or they go to a search engine. To make a sweeping generalization, most people find information on the web through search engines. Another sweeping generalization: most people click on at least one of the first 10 links that the search engine returns. So most people would pay for a site they don't actually know is useful to them.
How do you buy a book? You either go to amazon, look at the user ratings, read the synopsis, and decide this could be the book for me, or you go to a book store, read most of the book and you decide, 'this is the book for me.'. in both cases you've had access to real information that helps you to judge the relevance of the book to what you want to know.
The web does not give us this luxury. A search engine returns a brief description of the site (typically the first x characters it finds). You can't judge the website content until you've actually looked at it.
Maybe its just me, but I've got enough consumer scepticism to know "buyer beware" is a rule to live by. I'd never volintarily pay for content that could just be garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
The judge was 100% correct. The technical part of what is happening is that site P (Provider) gets your email address and adds it to it's database.
Site P's database is sold to company B (Broker) on a monthly basis. Company B replicates the information from the database once a month on a given date.
Company C (Consumer) buys the rights to send email to company B's list once a month.
If then you request not be be spammed from site P a month later, you must not expect that this change will be reflected immediately in Company B's database.
Service Packs, not new versions, are how bug fixes are delivered. It is service packs that drive stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
Gates is absolutely right - you NEVER buy a new version because of a fix you expect. If you do, you're psycho. You DO install Service Packs to get the fix. Have you noticed that Service Packs are free or very affordable? There's a reason - no one pays for bug fixes - it's the responsibility of the company to fix things that don't work.
This is like buying a car. If you want the thing to last, you buy the car that has been in production for at least 3 years. Why? Because the kinks have been worked out. Then when you buy it, you assume it works. If it doesn't, you liberally employ the warranty, because you paid for a working car. If someone were to insist you pay to fix your alternator a year after buying a new car, you'd laugh at them and promptly take them to court. Same story with software.
Install the service pack if you want stability, quality improvements, bug fixes.
Umm... Anyone remember those sliding machines that copied your card number onto a carbon paper slip and you wrote the amount on it and signed. You got the top copy the merchant got the other copy. Anyone?
None of the technological solutions will solve the manual card transaction problem, which really is the beauty of a CC. It's like a check, but the merchant doesn't have to trust you, rather he needs to trust the CC company.
I'm surprised discerning /.ers manage to post such crap. Not only is this article vague. For example, aside from the "many problems" with the patch system, try figuring out what these problems are. You can't, not from this article!
Check out this beauty of a quote:
A Consumer Reports survey last year found that virus infection rates on Macs are half what they are on Windows, noted Smith. "Is that because Macs are safer? I think the answer is yeah."
I wonder why there are fewer viruses for MACs... maybe they're safer... maybe...
Oh, that's right! No on uses a MAC!
So this means that Chinese geeks can't read Slashdot. God forbid we actually discuss stuff, find out about stuff, learn stuff, and expose stuff. That might bring the world to its knees!
-Whoopass
I wouldn't pay a cent for a page I couldn't see before hand. In current page usage, most people find information either by a priori knowledge (they have it bookmarked, or remember the site), or they go to a search engine. To make a sweeping generalization, most people find information on the web through search engines. Another sweeping generalization: most people click on at least one of the first 10 links that the search engine returns. So most people would pay for a site they don't actually know is useful to them.
How do you buy a book? You either go to amazon, look at the user ratings, read the synopsis, and decide this could be the book for me, or you go to a book store, read most of the book and you decide, 'this is the book for me.'. in both cases you've had access to real information that helps you to judge the relevance of the book to what you want to know.
The web does not give us this luxury. A search engine returns a brief description of the site (typically the first x characters it finds). You can't judge the website content until you've actually looked at it.
Maybe its just me, but I've got enough consumer scepticism to know "buyer beware" is a rule to live by. I'd never volintarily pay for content that could just be garbage.