Many people do not understand what open source really means. I tried explaining the benefits of using Firefox from a useability and security standpoint in our work environment. Our tech support supervisor said "Sure it works great now but when are they going to start charging for it?". I tried to explain there was no cost and the concept of open source blah blah blah etc.. He was also willing to put money down that "they" would start charging for it in the near future even after my explanation. Yeah, easy bet but that is not the point. He knows nothing of open source and even after I gave some further information, he still did not understand. He is using Firefox on his own machine now though.
I've bought from several places directly from adwords. I found adwords a useful addition to Google. Downside though. If I am searching specifically for PVR-250 and I click on an adword link and they only sell a Pinnacle capture card and not a PVR-250, it degrades the adword concept and waters down the usefulness of adwords. I think in time, this WILL catch up with Google and people will lose confidence in the whole adword system. A good example is nextag? Does anyone even click on their adwords anymore? I did about 2 years ago and have not since. I have no idea what the site even is anymore but they will never get any business from me. If this gets worse, adwords will not looked at by less and less people as time goes on hurting Google in the long run. Google is popular because it provides what people want. As the provide part goes down, so with the users. Changing search engines is as easy as typing in a different search engine URL in the address bar.
I use all three optical inputs that my stereo reciever has and even use the coaxial digital input. The PSX, Xbox, and DVD player use up the three optical audio inputs and my SBLive from my "multimedia platform" computer is connected to the coaxial digital input. I agree with the Monster cable being useless though.
At what point in your interaction with other people, do you ask if they would like to feel your iPod. I found the whole concept of that a little strange. I carry quite a few electronic gadgets and things around with me. I've never felt inclined to ask anyone if they would like to see them or feel them.
Is there a highlight button to highlight the search terms in the resulting page in the integrated Firefox searchbar? If so, I have not found it. The Find in page function in recent builds of Firefox is better then other browsers I have used but it is not connected to the search term query. The GoogleBar plugin for Firefox has a highlighter and it mimics the functionality of the official Google toolbar for IE. Using that beats searching yourself within the page with find and retyping the phrase.
Ever played the NFL Blitz series from Midway? I don't know about innovative but it was fun to play. Getting offtopic here but although the game was fun, it had a very annoying catchup mode or level playing mode. You could hardly ever get more then a 7 point lead without the game providing the losing player some very obvious advantage or big play so they could catch up. One in every three games seemed to go into overtime.
I have an Olympus D360L, 1.3Mp. I've taken thousands of pictures and it works great even after being dropped many times. I have no desire to print the results and when I do, it is normally only on a Xmas card or something not really important so the 1.3Mp is not an issue. The only reason I will upgrade is to get optical zoom and the only other feature I desire is some form of the fill in flash which allows outstanding close pictures in low light (if you can hold steady enough). I've tried the fill in on some non Olympus digital cameras but I did not get desirable results, it seems they use fill in flash as another term for flash always, not the same. Of course it may be a while until I upgrade as I blew my tech budget on a DV camera last month.
What other form of payment does iTunes take? If only credit cards, they never had the option of the non credit card population. If they take other forms of payment, those customers can still use that method and do not need a card or paypal anyway.
I thought there was more college students with maxed out cards then students with no cards.
I've had Mobi-TV television channels on my Sprint cell phone for over a year now. They have about 20 channels. My phone is a little old and slow so I only get about 1-2 video frames second but the audio is not choppy. I watch it all the time to and from work when I do not have driving duty.
With my unlimited Sprint vision service (their name for mobile internet access), I get the Mobi-TV monthly service bascially for free as Sprint provides a $10 credit for download content which is what Mobi-TV costs per month.
I have been using Thunderbird since about 0.4. It is my primary email and non binary usenet reader application and has been since I first started using it. At home, all of my accounts are IMAP and although I have some very large folders, it works very good and no difference in speed from OE, Eudora and several other IMAP capable readers I've used. At work I use on my Linux desktop to connect to our Exchange server via IMAP and it does seem to take a little long to open large folders (more then 1000 mails and some up to several 1000) that have not been accessed for a long time. Of course, I do not have an option to compare that exact setup to OE.
To violate the copyright law is to redistrubute a copy of a work that you do not have the permission from the copyright owner to redistribute.
To make it known to others that someone is violating a copyright law is NOT violating the copyright law. That law is well defined. Where is that line of facilitating crossed? Jim is selling 8 tracks from his trunk. What if you tell your friend that? What if you put a sign on your car? What if you put up a billboard, an ad in the local paper, the yellow pages, a city wide postal mail? A bulk email? A web page? A note in your personal blog? There is a line that is crossed in facilitating and it is not a well defined line. What if the ad in the above examples is worded differently but ultimately mean the same thing. "Hey, get your cheap 8 tracks from Jim's trunk!" or... "Jim must be stopped, he is ripping off artists and the record companies from his trunk". Both are clearly stating where you can get them and the fact he may be violating the copyright law. How can one method be legal and the other illegal? That is why there are laywers and lobbyists.
There is more and more quite legal content on BitTorrent (though probably not a large percentage)
That statement is very misleading and will only confuse people or incorrectly allow them to directly associate BitTorrent with other P2P apps like KaZaa and old Napster. No one including yourself has absolutely no idea what percentage of what is being offered with BitTorrent. In fact, nothing is "on" BitTorrent at all as there is no BitTorrent network in any way shape or form. Anyone anywhere can run it and provide pointers to anything. BitTorrent provides no central point for people to connect and see what trackers are offering, other then the transfer method, BitTorrent is NO different then FTP. You can not log into an FTP server and see what other FTP servers around the internet are offering either. They are completely isolated and seperate from each other. I think it is important to have the those details correct to help people understand that BitTorrent is not central to the problem of copyright violations, it is what some individuals do with BitTorrent that is questionable but again, that can happen with any protocol.
I believe SpoofStick is or was an advantage over just showing the address bar because of several spoofs and exploits with address bar address manipulation, basically, there are several methods to get different addresses to appear in the address bar. I believe most of those issues have been fixed in IE and FF though. An example exploit is detailed here and here, Google can reference many more. Another phishing attempt it can prevent is the popup that has its own real looking address bar, basically a mimic page that looks like a real IE or FF screen but the address bar is fake, of course with forcing your address bar to show, you would see two of them which should clue you in to a problem.
The spoof worked for me on FF 1.0 on W2K. One more reason to use the Spoofstick browser plugin for FF or IE. It clearly showed the popup originated from secunia.com and not Citibank.
What about sites you are already familiar with or did some research after finding the deal? Example, I have bought from Newegg before. If I search for something and an adword with Newegg comes up. I am familiar with Newegg so I click on the link and buy the product. Almost cut and dry but I was already a Newegg customer and I checked other sites for the same product also. I may have also NOT chose another site because of being familiar with Newegg but I clicked and checked anyway. What about clicking an adword, going to a retailer, reading about product and the retailer. Now you go to resaller ratings and examine and go back to the original retailer. Who should get the credit? The adword or the reseller rating site? What if I go back to the site directly from another computer or the next day to finally buy the product? Neither the adword or the reseller rating site gets credit. I'd be willing to bet at least 75% of people do not complete a purchase the first time visiting a site which makes the whole referer concept a little complex for stat purposes. It appears to me that advertisers and marketering people are very good at not only manipulating the consumers but also manipulating their bosses with statistics. It looks like smoke and mirrors to me with so many unknowns.
There is no easy way to verify where and when someone decided to buy your product. Of course before the web, it was always that way. Suddenly somewhere and someone determined that you could now directly measure how effective and ad was with all this digital technology and tracking. Well guess what. It is NOT much more accurate then measuring effectiveness of non internet ads. That is the root of the problem. I saw an ad for the car maker Saturn on Lycos last month, I did not run out and by a Saturn because of that ad. I doubt anyone did, was the ad effective? I have no idea but this ad was no different then the same ad placed in a magazine. How many people would have saw that? How many people bought a Saturn because of the that? The same thing advertisers are complaining about with advertising on the internet are the same exact issues advertisers before them have been dealing with for at least a century. How to measure effectiveness of an ad campaign.
I would hope it is better the Trendmicro. Trend finds the spyware but only after it is installed and running and can do nothing to get rid of it. It works as nothing more then a flag that says, yes, this person has spyware and it installed and is running great on that computer. I recieve tons of these everyday from our users:
Virus alert. TROJ_ONECLICK.A is detected on DESK032963(MJones) in XXXXX domain. Infected file: C:\Documents and Settings\mjones\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\GLEVOTUZ\webplugin[1].cab (wupdt.exe) Detection date: 2004.12.01 14:58:11 Action: Virus successfully detected, cannot perform the Clean action (Cannot perform the Quarantine action)
Unfortunately, I believe it to be inevitable that Google will become 'evil'. A single company that controls the search of all the information on the Internet.
There is big difference between an online business and a B&M. All a person needs to do online to use the services of a different company is type in a different URL in the address bar. This was a major thing that the dot.bombs did not realize. Remember back in the day when online businesses were selling things at a major loss to get the customer base built up? There is very little loyalty. As soon as the price went back up the customers went somewhere else. In the real world that is not an option. You can not go to a single strip mall or shopping center in your town and select Target, Walmart, Kmart, Sears, Models, etc.. to shop. You have to take stores are physically there or drive somewhere else. In the online world, that restriction does not exist. What I am trying to say I guess is that if Google does not meet peoples needs, all it takes is a different URL to find one that does.
I can saturate my connection to Giganews at any time of the day (~380KB/sec on my 3Mbit line). Of course they are only 8 hops with a max of 12ms away. Giganews reverse traceroute
For a growing number of ISP's, outsourcing to specialized usenet providers is becoming the ISP's news source. Short term it makes sense for users and providers for consistancy and quality (retention and speed) but for long term usenet existance, consolidation seems like a bad idea. Imagine how easy it would be for 5 or 10 large usenet companies to come under fire and be shutdown. Down goes usenet.
We had a higher level employee that could not get into our Citrix farm from his home computer. We do not normally support home computers but we made an exception for him as he was willing to bring the PC into the office for us to look at. He was full of spyware. I ran the typical tools and ran all updates AND installed Firefox. I gave him a short story with Firefox and IE and how spyware was getting to his PC. He called back three weeks later and reported that he loves Firefox and asked why we are not deploying it office wide to all of our computers. I don't think this person qualifies as lazy or a moron but probably more like non technical. Not everyone can be an expert on everything. People still buy stuff from Best-Buy and Circuit City when there are many places online that are much cheaper, people still show up on a car dealer lot without a clue of what the invoice price really is and do not compare prices. Morons? I don't think so, uninformed, yes.
We recieved two of these from a vendor for data processing. Half way into coping the files off, the device stopped responding and we started to get the dreaded head clacking from one of the drives, the whole device and all the data on them is now useless to us. I am not a statistician but I assume a 5 drive device would have a 5 times greater chance of failing then a single drive would. Those are not very good chances based on my experience in the past few years with IDE drives. YMMV
The moment they know you're in I.T. everyone in your family, and all your mother's friends, want you to fix their PCs
I had to give up my family and friend side job of building them computers. I now reference them to the small business section of www.dell.com (much better deals then the regular home section) and www.slickdeals.net for references to Dell SB deals. I've had enough of giving out lifetime free tech support. I traveled to my home town for Thanksgiving and spent about 10 hours of my long weekend fixing computers for friends and family. Sure, I will still help them with spyware and such but I am now the second phone call after Dell for those I've pointed in that direction and not the first. Sorry for the diehard white box builders but I had to get out. Not worth it to me.
I hope you are not trying to imply i am some how an affiliate with them. I have bought electronic stuff from them in the past and simply provided a direct link to a LCD screen. I am in no way shape or form related to them in any way.
Slashdot Mirror
Another issue..
Many people do not understand what open source really means. I tried explaining the benefits of using Firefox from a useability and security standpoint in our work environment. Our tech support supervisor said "Sure it works great now but when are they going to start charging for it?". I tried to explain there was no cost and the concept of open source blah blah blah etc.. He was also willing to put money down that "they" would start charging for it in the near future even after my explanation. Yeah, easy bet but that is not the point. He knows nothing of open source and even after I gave some further information, he still did not understand. He is using Firefox on his own machine now though.
I've bought from several places directly from adwords. I found adwords a useful addition to Google. Downside though. If I am searching specifically for PVR-250 and I click on an adword link and they only sell a Pinnacle capture card and not a PVR-250, it degrades the adword concept and waters down the usefulness of adwords. I think in time, this WILL catch up with Google and people will lose confidence in the whole adword system. A good example is nextag? Does anyone even click on their adwords anymore? I did about 2 years ago and have not since. I have no idea what the site even is anymore but they will never get any business from me. If this gets worse, adwords will not looked at by less and less people as time goes on hurting Google in the long run. Google is popular because it provides what people want. As the provide part goes down, so with the users. Changing search engines is as easy as typing in a different search engine URL in the address bar.
I use all three optical inputs that my stereo reciever has and even use the coaxial digital input. The PSX, Xbox, and DVD player use up the three optical audio inputs and my SBLive from my "multimedia platform" computer is connected to the coaxial digital input. I agree with the Monster cable being useless though.
At what point in your interaction with other people, do you ask if they would like to feel your iPod. I found the whole concept of that a little strange. I carry quite a few electronic gadgets and things around with me. I've never felt inclined to ask anyone if they would like to see them or feel them.
Is there a highlight button to highlight the search terms in the resulting page in the integrated Firefox searchbar? If so, I have not found it. The Find in page function in recent builds of Firefox is better then other browsers I have used but it is not connected to the search term query. The GoogleBar plugin for Firefox has a highlighter and it mimics the functionality of the official Google toolbar for IE. Using that beats searching yourself within the page with find and retyping the phrase.
The squeeky wheel no longer gets oiled, it gets replaced.
Ever played the NFL Blitz series from Midway? I don't know about innovative but it was fun to play.
Getting offtopic here but although the game was fun, it had a very annoying catchup mode or level playing mode. You could hardly ever get more then a 7 point lead without the game providing the losing player some very obvious advantage or big play so they could catch up. One in every three games seemed to go into overtime.
I have an Olympus D360L, 1.3Mp. I've taken thousands of pictures and it works great even after being dropped many times. I have no desire to print the results and when I do, it is normally only on a Xmas card or something not really important so the 1.3Mp is not an issue. The only reason I will upgrade is to get optical zoom and the only other feature I desire is some form of the fill in flash which allows outstanding close pictures in low light (if you can hold steady enough). I've tried the fill in on some non Olympus digital cameras but I did not get desirable results, it seems they use fill in flash as another term for flash always, not the same.
Of course it may be a while until I upgrade as I blew my tech budget on a DV camera last month.
What other form of payment does iTunes take? If only credit cards, they never had the option of the non credit card population. If they take other forms of payment, those customers can still use that method and do not need a card or paypal anyway.
I thought there was more college students with maxed out cards then students with no cards.
I've had Mobi-TV television channels on my Sprint cell phone for over a year now. They have about 20 channels. My phone is a little old and slow so I only get about 1-2 video frames second but the audio is not choppy. I watch it all the time to and from work when I do not have driving duty.
With my unlimited Sprint vision service (their name for mobile internet access), I get the Mobi-TV monthly service bascially for free as Sprint provides a $10 credit for download content which is what Mobi-TV costs per month.
I have been using Thunderbird since about 0.4. It is my primary email and non binary usenet reader application and has been since I first started using it. At home, all of my accounts are IMAP and although I have some very large folders, it works very good and no difference in speed from OE, Eudora and several other IMAP capable readers I've used. At work I use on my Linux desktop to connect to our Exchange server via IMAP and it does seem to take a little long to open large folders (more then 1000 mails and some up to several 1000) that have not been accessed for a long time. Of course, I do not have an option to compare that exact setup to OE.
To violate the copyright law is to redistrubute a copy of a work that you do not have the permission from the copyright owner to redistribute.
To make it known to others that someone is violating a copyright law is NOT violating the copyright law. That law is well defined. Where is that line of facilitating crossed? Jim is selling 8 tracks from his trunk. What if you tell your friend that? What if you put a sign on your car? What if you put up a billboard, an ad in the local paper, the yellow pages, a city wide postal mail? A bulk email? A web page? A note in your personal blog? There is a line that is crossed in facilitating and it is not a well defined line. What if the ad in the above examples is worded differently but ultimately mean the same thing. "Hey, get your cheap 8 tracks from Jim's trunk!" or... "Jim must be stopped, he is ripping off artists and the record companies from his trunk". Both are clearly stating where you can get them and the fact he may be violating the copyright law. How can one method be legal and the other illegal? That is why there are laywers and lobbyists.
I agree with your point but not your wording.
There is more and more quite legal content on BitTorrent (though probably not a large percentage)
That statement is very misleading and will only confuse people or incorrectly allow them to directly associate BitTorrent with other P2P apps like KaZaa and old Napster. No one including yourself has absolutely no idea what percentage of what is being offered with BitTorrent. In fact, nothing is "on" BitTorrent at all as there is no BitTorrent network in any way shape or form. Anyone anywhere can run it and provide pointers to anything. BitTorrent provides no central point for people to connect and see what trackers are offering, other then the transfer method, BitTorrent is NO different then FTP. You can not log into an FTP server and see what other FTP servers around the internet are offering either. They are completely isolated and seperate from each other. I think it is important to have the those details correct to help people understand that BitTorrent is not central to the problem of copyright violations, it is what some individuals do with BitTorrent that is questionable but again, that can happen with any protocol.
I believe SpoofStick is or was an advantage over just showing the address bar because of several spoofs and exploits with address bar address manipulation, basically, there are several methods to get different addresses to appear in the address bar. I believe most of those issues have been fixed in IE and FF though. An example exploit is detailed here and here, Google can reference many more. Another phishing attempt it can prevent is the popup that has its own real looking address bar, basically a mimic page that looks like a real IE or FF screen but the address bar is fake, of course with forcing your address bar to show, you would see two of them which should clue you in to a problem.
The spoof worked for me on FF 1.0 on W2K. One more reason to use the Spoofstick browser plugin for FF or IE. It clearly showed the popup originated from secunia.com and not Citibank.
The solution has been around for ages now, and it's called micropayments.
Micropayments are not a solution, they are an idea being tossed around on paper. If the concept was infallible, they would have been in use years ago.
What about sites you are already familiar with or did some research after finding the deal? Example, I have bought from Newegg before. If I search for something and an adword with Newegg comes up. I am familiar with Newegg so I click on the link and buy the product. Almost cut and dry but I was already a Newegg customer and I checked other sites for the same product also. I may have also NOT chose another site because of being familiar with Newegg but I clicked and checked anyway. What about clicking an adword, going to a retailer, reading about product and the retailer. Now you go to resaller ratings and examine and go back to the original retailer. Who should get the credit? The adword or the reseller rating site? What if I go back to the site directly from another computer or the next day to finally buy the product? Neither the adword or the reseller rating site gets credit. I'd be willing to bet at least 75% of people do not complete a purchase the first time visiting a site which makes the whole referer concept a little complex for stat purposes. It appears to me that advertisers and marketering people are very good at not only manipulating the consumers but also manipulating their bosses with statistics. It looks like smoke and mirrors to me with so many unknowns.
There is no easy way to verify where and when someone decided to buy your product. Of course before the web, it was always that way. Suddenly somewhere and someone determined that you could now directly measure how effective and ad was with all this digital technology and tracking. Well guess what. It is NOT much more accurate then measuring effectiveness of non internet ads. That is the root of the problem. I saw an ad for the car maker Saturn on Lycos last month, I did not run out and by a Saturn because of that ad. I doubt anyone did, was the ad effective? I have no idea but this ad was no different then the same ad placed in a magazine. How many people would have saw that? How many people bought a Saturn because of the that? The same thing advertisers are complaining about with advertising on the internet are the same exact issues advertisers before them have been dealing with for at least a century. How to measure effectiveness of an ad campaign.
I would hope it is better the Trendmicro. Trend finds the spyware but only after it is installed and running and can do nothing to get rid of it. It works as nothing more then a flag that says, yes, this person has spyware and it installed and is running great on that computer. I recieve tons of these everyday from our users:
Virus alert.
TROJ_ONECLICK.A is detected on DESK032963(MJones) in XXXXX domain.
Infected file: C:\Documents and Settings\mjones\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE5\GLEVOTUZ\webplugin[1].cab (wupdt.exe)
Detection date: 2004.12.01 14:58:11
Action: Virus successfully detected, cannot perform the Clean action (Cannot perform the Quarantine action)
Unfortunately, I believe it to be inevitable that Google will become 'evil'. A single company that controls the search of all the information on the Internet.
There is big difference between an online business and a B&M. All a person needs to do online to use the services of a different company is type in a different URL in the address bar. This was a major thing that the dot.bombs did not realize. Remember back in the day when online businesses were selling things at a major loss to get the customer base built up? There is very little loyalty. As soon as the price went back up the customers went somewhere else. In the real world that is not an option. You can not go to a single strip mall or shopping center in your town and select Target, Walmart, Kmart, Sears, Models, etc.. to shop. You have to take stores are physically there or drive somewhere else. In the online world, that restriction does not exist. What I am trying to say I guess is that if Google does not meet peoples needs, all it takes is a different URL to find one that does.
I can saturate my connection to Giganews at any time of the day (~380KB/sec on my 3Mbit line). Of course they are only 8 hops with a max of 12ms away. Giganews reverse traceroute
For a growing number of ISP's, outsourcing to specialized usenet providers is becoming the ISP's news source. Short term it makes sense for users and providers for consistancy and quality (retention and speed) but for long term usenet existance, consolidation seems like a bad idea. Imagine how easy it would be for 5 or 10 large usenet companies to come under fire and be shutdown. Down goes usenet.
We had a higher level employee that could not get into our Citrix farm from his home computer. We do not normally support home computers but we made an exception for him as he was willing to bring the PC into the office for us to look at. He was full of spyware. I ran the typical tools and ran all updates AND installed Firefox. I gave him a short story with Firefox and IE and how spyware was getting to his PC. He called back three weeks later and reported that he loves Firefox and asked why we are not deploying it office wide to all of our computers. I don't think this person qualifies as lazy or a moron but probably more like non technical. Not everyone can be an expert on everything. People still buy stuff from Best-Buy and Circuit City when there are many places online that are much cheaper, people still show up on a car dealer lot without a clue of what the invoice price really is and do not compare prices. Morons? I don't think so, uninformed, yes.
We recieved two of these from a vendor for data processing. Half way into coping the files off, the device stopped responding and we started to get the dreaded head clacking from one of the drives, the whole device and all the data on them is now useless to us. I am not a statistician but I assume a 5 drive device would have a 5 times greater chance of failing then a single drive would. Those are not very good chances based on my experience in the past few years with IDE drives. YMMV
The moment they know you're in I.T. everyone in your family, and all your mother's friends, want you to fix their PCs
I had to give up my family and friend side job of building them computers. I now reference them to the small business section of www.dell.com (much better deals then the regular home section) and www.slickdeals.net for references to Dell SB deals. I've had enough of giving out lifetime free tech support. I traveled to my home town for Thanksgiving and spent about 10 hours of my long weekend fixing computers for friends and family. Sure, I will still help them with spyware and such but I am now the second phone call after Dell for those I've pointed in that direction and not the first. Sorry for the diehard white box builders but I had to get out. Not worth it to me.
I hope you are not trying to imply i am some how an affiliate with them. I have bought electronic stuff from them in the past and simply provided a direct link to a LCD screen. I am in no way shape or form related to them in any way.