Have you ever driven across the US? I did it four times when I was in the military. The time I drove the speed limited 24ft U-Haul across was not very fun but the other three were. I truely enjoyed the experience. You DO NOT need an SUV or minivan to have a good time, even with a family of four. Most of my fun was because I enjoyed driving my car, a 91 Mustang GT. Nothing great but was relatively new at the time and very well suited for a long highway battle, very stable, no struggling up the hills, not taken by the wind and only 2k rpm's at 80mph.
In a computer store, you'll often see monitors stacked on a rack and connected to a signal splitter that degrades image quality (with the cheapest monitors on top catching the most glare).
Kind of like the area that I share with my cube friends.. No splitters but monitors everywhere.
Far from the "ideal" conditions that I doubt anyone really has.
This is like Kodak giving someone the recipe for the official Kodak set of chemicals, then telling them that they can't give that recipe to other people.
This is not a deal with some specific partner company like you describe above. Its like making the recipe available to EVERYONE, then telling EVERYONE not to give it to ANYONE? So if everyone makes their own operable product it is fine, but you can not give out that operable client and allow others to make derivitive works from it (GPL), they would have to do it all themselves. That simply does not make sense.
I had a mid sized Chevy rental (Berretta, Cavalier, etc) back in 1993 that I needed to take on an extended trip to FL with. Three days into the venture I was about to exceed my miles. I eventually started pulling fuses until I found the one that stopped the Odometer. Worked like a charm for the next three days. There were some negatives though. The speedometer, internal blower motor, and I believe the radio all did not work either. A small sacrifice to save roughly 1500 miles and related fees.
Not really related but.. I would NEVER buy a previous rental car. I know the way I treated them and I am sure others have done the same. Ever test the antilock brakes or the cruise control operation? Try this with a FWD car. Set the cruise around 55 and then pull up the parking brake. You will skid for quite a distance before the cruise finally kicks off, and then roughly 15 more seconds before coming to a complete stop. If the parking brake is not strong enough to lock the back tires, wait until the cruise kicks off and then tap the regular brake. This should get the back tires to lock up and stay locked up (remember, starting friction is greater then sliding friction). Don't try this on a bend though, you could end up with a Darwin Award.
That brings up an interesting point. How could a product that existed in time before this method of copy prevention become illegal? Sounds to me like Sony is using a method that could already by bypassed even before it was ever even used. This whole computer cd player prevention doesnt seem to be a "protection" method anyway. I view encryption or protection as a higher level technology designed to keep people out. Not a design that uses existing equipment anomalies in hopes that they will not be able to read it. What if they put the output level redicuously low on the cd and you could barely hear it unless you used a special Sony addon to your headphone jack? Would connecting your own extra amplifier be a violation or a circumvention device? They are using a method of prevention that violates a generally accepted standard, not an encryption scheme.
You can always get around this thing. Just takes some good old fashion recording techniques like everyone did for decades until recently when ripping became possible.
Use the audio out jacks on your home cd player and attach them to the audio in on the back of your soundcard. If your lucky enough to have optical in/out, even better. Fire up any wav recorder, adjust the recording levels, and go to town. Many wav editors already include some method of detecting gaps and can break the wav file into separate files if needed. Sure it's not a straight digital rip and the quality may be slightly degraded but not anything you would notice after it's compressed to MP3 anyway. Keep in mind that it only takes ONE person in the entire world to do this, the rest of them will get it from their favorite P2P about two hours later. Soon you will see nfo files with mp3's that include the model of the home unit used, optical or rca jack, and then the compression scheme.
IMHO, mp3 players are not going away and seem to be gaining momentum rapidly. To completely ignore this fact and even go against it does not seem to make good business sense at all. I see MORE people downloading with this plan, not less. What are they thinking?
Think about this scenario.. You upload some secret insider information via a sites web form. By contract, you have transferred all of your rights and gave the web site operator sole and exclusive rights to the data. The web site operator takes this newly acquired data, formats it in a method consistent with the rest of their web pages, and then exercises their exclusive rights to the data and posts it on their public web site for all to see. Who is now responsible for this data? You or the web site operator who is the sole owner and has the exclusive rights to distribute it, and chose to distribute it? You simply xfered the rights over, they published it, not you. Substitute insider secrets for porn, mp3's, source code, links to web sites, etc...
They are voluntarily taking ANY input, claiming all rights to it, and then publish it. I do not see how they could ever claim it is not their data, by contract, when you submitted it to them they took exclusive rights. I see nothing in the contract that states it is ours until the shit hits the fan and then we xfer it back to you.
What about a shell account and SSH? I haven't used everything in your list but security was a concern of mine.
I have had Unix shell account for the past 5 years that I pay about $5/month for. Accessing this shell account via SSH and using the port forwarding function would provide just about everything you would need.
The shell provider supports IMAP, SMTP, POP, Fetchmail, Procmail, a web interface for email, and Squid.
I use Putty (its free) in Windows to connect via SSH and forward over my local ports 119, 25, 110, 143, and 3128 over to the shell providers. For Linux I use higher local ports but to the same listed ports on the remote. Now I have an encrypted channel over all of these ports to my shell provider. Aside from being encrypted, it allows me access to all of these ports as if I was dialed into the provider or local on the providers machine. I can send mail as anyone (because I am considered a local user, its not relaying) to anyone. I can use IMAP with Pegasus (or Outlook and Eudora) on my laptop and keep the messages on the server, use the same on home PC but POP in to retrieve and delete. I prefer Pegasus on Windows due to a better method of selecting profiles and can be changed on the fly, supports PGP, and its also free. Fetchmail gets and filters the mail from my normal dialup provider and any other POP accounts I have to the shell account. I can also use the providers news server and squid. At work, this would help me mask my browsing and downloading habits. Did I mention that I also have 10MB of space to store files that can be SCP'd over and a real live command prompt if needed?
I believe this is about as close to an all in one solution that you will find.
Mindset interactive, one of the companies being sued, has a spam signup list right on thier web site (http://mindseti.com/corp/mindsetinteractive/reg_p age.htm). It contains at least 20 different offers with check boxes and a place for your personal information. I wonder if anyone actually uses this (other then a sick joke), or its a front to claim this is where people opted in at? I do not know if they do any type of return email verification first. Anyone care to put their own email address in and try it? HAHAHA
I had a similar experience with junk faxes at my last job. Tons of our machines got ads for a toner company. I called the business and was informed that I had requested these ads. Funny thing though. This went to at least 30 fax machines I saw that day and spread across at least 15 different departments in the company. There is no way that all of these people opted in for this crap. How do you prove we did not?
Another issue. I get quite a few spams that claim that they are not intended for receipients of xx list of states, and they are filtered to prevent residents of those states "to the best of their ability". I can tell you that they have NO ability to filter that --> thats the best ability.
It is all a scam and just another way for spammers to try to fool you or justify they are providing a useful service.
The "Opt in/out" debate pertains to a lot of things and not just emails. The phone company comes to mind on this one. Don't want your phone number published in the phone book or given out in directory assistance? That is an option that they charge for and on a monthly basis. Yes, you have to pay to prevent getting dinner time calls for a motor club.
How about the financial institution debacle last year with the information sharing? I noticed ONE opt out notice that was clearly marked as such. All others were buried inside filler ads and in back of not returned sections of the monthly bill and required a seperate mailing to a different address. On one hand these companies appear to be your consumer oriented friend to get your business and then they jam it up your ass when they think they have you. No wonder there are so many frustrated people in the world today.
This person is very smart. He even completed collage at 18. Why would such an intellegent person act like this suddenly snap? He MUST have played violent video games when he was a teenager.
I see your point and agree somewhat with the reasoning behind it, but... The shows purpose is to show your new tech gizmo. If your new gizmo happens to be an interactive game and the people cluster to it, then guess what? That is obviously what the current mass of people there at the time are really interested in and want to see. The shows producers have a choice. Either rid the show of the games, or do what they can to attract a different demographic of person that would truely be interested in the other things the show has to offer. Artifically hindering certain vendors to simulate or stimulate an interest in other vendors does not do anyone a service and would not be a true representation of what the general crowd is truely interested in. You do have to draw a line somewhere. I'm sure if there was an open bar and ladies giving free lap dances in a conference room off to the side it would be jam packed too. That is not really the showing of new technology though.
I am sure that this workaround will fall into one of two catagories.
Someone has already patented the idea of "time shifting" to manipulate an independent secondary process and now will expect royalties on this procedure.
-or-
This violates the reverse engineering clause or removeal of a protection mechanism section of the DMCA and you will be soon be getting a canned cease and desist letter in the mail.
It's working and spreading in Oahu also, for those who failed geography, thats the most populated island where Honolulu, Pearl Harbor and Waikiki are. Hurricane Internet is running it there. Great company that has been on the island for years. Linux is used anywhere possible throughout the business and they even freely supported the local LUG's mailing list and archives for years.
I still listen to my collection of over 5000 midi and mods, granted I did get most of them years ago in the 2x uphill manner you stated above. I havent made any tracker files since wavetable MIDI came about though. Even with a low price combination of a SB Live and a second Yamaha chipset soundcard, with some instrument changes and effects you can get very good quality midi files which can then be recorded as standard.wav files and burned to CD. I have about 200 midi files that I've converted this way over the years and have since compressed them to MP3 and added them to my local file/MP3 server.
Search engine oddities
on
Google Juice
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· Score: 2
Funny thing. Search for "Google" at MSN, google.com is the first site listed but only because it is a MS internet keyword. The first returned site is... http://search.msn.com
Yes, I think they fudged those results.. Maybe MS thinks you mistyped Google and really meant to type MSN. Search for MSN on Google and http://search.msn.com is the first returned.
I dont't use Lycos and after messing around there today I remember why. Too many moving things, flash crap flying across the screen. Why would someone use this place on a regular basis?
So I guess every etailer will have move down the list for clicks. I know this has been beat to death but this whole "One Click" thing is really odd. Using the previous as a precedent, this could keep going, 2 clicks, 3 clicks, and so on down to 1.6x10^6 clicks. If your starting your business this week you are down around 648,000. Unless you could buy one of the.bombs rights that had something under 100 clicks.
I see a marketing snafu here that tries to justify using Flash by spreading FUD.
Hard-to-navigate Web forms "are freaking people out" and pushing customers away from e-commerce sites, said Wittman. Flash-designed pages and applications will help businesses retain customers and provide direct savings.
I may be reading too deep here but it looks like he is referencing statistics that show a relatively high number of consumers are bailing out of e-purchases at the last stages. I do not feel this is because of "confusing" web forms. It's probably because the site wants too much information, has not shown or has an unacceptable privacy policy, the shipping charges are too high, or the customer has simply decided to browse somewhere else first. Using Flash will not change any of the above. Have you ever backed out because of a "freaky" form?
Another questionable statement..
"I think the challenge is convincing enterprise in today's environment to make that investment," he said. "But I think there's a compelling case to be made there. For starters, it means serving a lot less pages.
How much bandwidth does it take to refresh a page to re-enter some information? If your company is bandwidth limited or server limited to the point that client refreshes are putting you over the edge and into the red, you have far more serious problems then switching to Flash is going to solve..
Want a perfect example of how NOT to use flash? Try downloading updated drivers or information on Pine's mp3 products from the Pine site with a dialup.
It seems to me that the MPAA wants a new avenue to broadcast thier media and therefore provide another method of income for them. The reason they are not doing this now is because of the potential for privacy and lack of distibution control on existing hardware and software platforms. That is strictly thier decision. The proposed solution is to modify the entire computer hardware and software industry to fit the needs of the few remaining media companies. There is no god given or legal right that your business plan has to work on the existing platforms. If you do not like what is available, take your chances and create your own system. Then if the consumers want to take advantage of this they have a choice, if not they are not being deprived or harmed in any way shape or form by not getting media shoved down our throats by the media companies over our current system.
Just as a side note, Japan has a nation-wide government run job database called Hello Work [hellowork.go.jp]. I know in the US "government-run" is synonymous with "piece of crap." Not so in this case. It is detailed and very very comprehensive.
So does the US. Its a joint effort between the states unemployment offices and the Department of Labor. Its called Americas Job Bank. Its been running for over four years. I've used it for my last two jobs, the most recent being last week! There are no adds, popups, or crap littering the site. Just a well laid out results page.
Do not underestimate the power of the people. The bottom lines is, when people want something, they will find it or create a method to get it in the form they want it in. With or without the so called innovation of the big players. MP3 and TV episode swapping are two perfect examples. I feel the big corporations and media giants are too far away from the public and fighting a loosing battle. They want to control what you watch and when you watch it. Much to thier dismay, this is not what the people want!! No amount of marketing and manipulation can change that. How many pay for play, streaming this and that business models are going to fail before they wake up? With the distibution snafu they created for media, how are they going to overcome the overhead to distribute and control on demand media at a cost that people will be willing to pay for it?
Why is the finder of a flaw automatically labeled as the bad guy, and given this list of things to do after the fact? We have completely lost touch with reality here. If a finder releases an exploit or details he/she is considered the faulty party. What about the vender who made the software? I, in no way shape or form, work for that vendor. In the case of closed source, they created the software, they market the software, and they control every aspect of the software. They made a conscience effort to get the software out the door ASAP to make a jump on the competition. In the process they overlooked security, did not test the product fully, and did not care less about you, the end user who found this flaw. Now they want you to work with them and not inform others that are acting as Guinea pigs too? The only reason MS and other large vendors are even considering security now is because of the general public getting wind of it from main stream news media. For me, it depends on the specific vendor for what action to take. MS is not my buddy or friend, and not one I'd care to help for free. They charge per call for general phone support, if they want my support, they can call my 800 number with thier major credit card and pay me, if it turns out not to be a flaw, I'll refund the payment. They have more then enough money to hire thousands of programmers. To them, security is a PR issue and a non-revenue generator.
Maybe saving all traffic through a mail server is a good thing. This could prevent someone from forging a mail or a reply. It's not hard to craft a mail message. The mail servers at my last company were all screwed up IMHO. They used HP Openmail servers with Outlook clients. You could craft emails to look like anyone from the company to anyone at the company with absolutely no tracking from the client end. All you had to do was send an Internet email with a From: header that someone in the company had, like some_user@company.com. When it got to our mail servers, it would recognized the From: field as an internal user, attach all the associated Openmail routing stuff, remove the SMPT stuff and send it to the specified recipient. Result? A forged email that appears in every instance to have come from an employee at the company, to an employee at the company and sent internally (no indication that it was sent from the internet and sent via SMTP). You could send mail from one supervisor to another explaining how you thought they sucked and no one would know the difference, we had >50000 employees so you could find other useful things to do with it. Hell, I don't even work there anymore, have no access to their network and I could still send mails between employees. I never got involved with our Openmail setup but I assume that it was configured that way by our headquarters and not the default behavior. I for one would like to think that logging and backing up of email would prevent someone from getting away with this or being blamed for something they did not do.
After having my Hotmail account for 2 or so years I have finally received my first piece of spam in it.
That is incredible. I receive over 50 a day (and about 200/day more to the bulk mail folder) before I have ever used the address in the public, or opened any mail I did not recognize to prevent web bugs or html confirmation tracking. My address is one that I know people may use for a fake address when they do not want to use their own. Funny thing though, I have the same exact user name at bigfoot.com, mail.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com, internettrash.com and others and get very little spam to those. Hats off to altavista, I get about 1 spam every 6 months to that account. My GTE, now Verizon dialup account plainly sucks. About a week after switching to them, I pulled my mail for the first time and already had over 15 spam messages. They are easy to filter though as my own address is never in the To: field
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Have you ever driven across the US? I did it four times when I was in the military. The time I drove the speed limited 24ft U-Haul across was not very fun but the other three were. I truely enjoyed the experience. You DO NOT need an SUV or minivan to have a good time, even with a family of four. Most of my fun was because I enjoyed driving my car, a 91 Mustang GT. Nothing great but was relatively new at the time and very well suited for a long highway battle, very stable, no struggling up the hills, not taken by the wind and only 2k rpm's at 80mph.
In a computer store, you'll often see monitors stacked on a rack and connected to a signal splitter that degrades image quality (with the cheapest monitors on top catching the most glare).
Kind of like the area that I share with my cube friends.. No splitters but monitors everywhere.
Far from the "ideal" conditions that I doubt anyone really has.
This is like Kodak giving someone the recipe for the official Kodak set of chemicals, then telling them that they can't give that recipe to other people.
This is not a deal with some specific partner company like you describe above.
Its like making the recipe available to EVERYONE, then telling EVERYONE not to give it to ANYONE? So if everyone makes their own operable product it is fine, but you can not give out that operable client and allow others to make derivitive works from it (GPL), they would have to do it all themselves. That simply does not make sense.
I had a mid sized Chevy rental (Berretta, Cavalier, etc) back in 1993 that I needed to take on an extended trip to FL with. Three days into the venture I was about to exceed my miles. I eventually started pulling fuses until I found the one that stopped the Odometer. Worked like a charm for the next three days. There were some negatives though. The speedometer, internal blower motor, and I believe the radio all did not work either. A small sacrifice to save roughly 1500 miles and related fees.
Not really related but..
I would NEVER buy a previous rental car. I know the way I treated them and I am sure others have done the same. Ever test the antilock brakes or the cruise control operation? Try this with a FWD car. Set the cruise around 55 and then pull up the parking brake. You will skid for quite a distance before the cruise finally kicks off, and then roughly 15 more seconds before coming to a complete stop. If the parking brake is not strong enough to lock the back tires, wait until the cruise kicks off and then tap the regular brake. This should get the back tires to lock up and stay locked up (remember, starting friction is greater then sliding friction).
Don't try this on a bend though, you could end up with a Darwin Award.
That brings up an interesting point.
How could a product that existed in time before this method of copy prevention become illegal? Sounds to me like Sony is using a method that could already by bypassed even before it was ever even used. This whole computer cd player prevention doesnt seem to be a "protection" method anyway. I view encryption or protection as a higher level technology designed to keep people out. Not a design that uses existing equipment anomalies in hopes that they will not be able to read it. What if they put the output level redicuously low on the cd and you could barely hear it unless you used a special Sony addon to your headphone jack? Would connecting your own extra amplifier be a violation or a circumvention device? They are using a method of prevention that violates a generally accepted standard, not an encryption scheme.
You can always get around this thing. Just takes some good old fashion recording techniques like everyone did for decades until recently when ripping became possible.
Use the audio out jacks on your home cd player and attach them to the audio in on the back of your soundcard. If your lucky enough to have optical in/out, even better. Fire up any wav recorder, adjust the recording levels, and go to town. Many wav editors already include some method of detecting gaps and can break the wav file into separate files if needed. Sure it's not a straight digital rip and the quality may be slightly degraded but not anything you would notice after it's compressed to MP3 anyway. Keep in mind that it only takes ONE person in the entire world to do this, the rest of them will get it from their favorite P2P about two hours later. Soon you will see nfo files with mp3's that include the model of the home unit used, optical or rca jack, and then the compression scheme.
IMHO, mp3 players are not going away and seem to be gaining momentum rapidly. To completely ignore this fact and even go against it does not seem to make good business sense at all. I see MORE people downloading with this plan, not less. What are they thinking?
Think about this scenario..
You upload some secret insider information via a sites web form. By contract, you have transferred all of your rights and gave the web site operator sole and exclusive rights to the data.
The web site operator takes this newly acquired data, formats it in a method consistent with the rest of their web pages, and then exercises their exclusive rights to the data and posts it on their public web site for all to see. Who is now responsible for this data? You or the web site operator who is the sole owner and has the exclusive rights to distribute it, and chose to distribute it? You simply xfered the rights over, they published it, not you.
Substitute insider secrets for porn, mp3's, source code, links to web sites, etc...
They are voluntarily taking ANY input, claiming all rights to it, and then publish it. I do not see how they could ever claim it is not their data, by contract, when you submitted it to them they took exclusive rights. I see nothing in the contract that states it is ours until the shit hits the fan and then we xfer it back to you.
Hey, you didn't say it was for your mother! Point taken
What about a shell account and SSH? I haven't used everything in your list but security was a concern of mine.
I have had Unix shell account for the past 5 years that I pay about $5/month for.
Accessing this shell account via SSH and using the port forwarding function would provide just about everything you would need.
The shell provider supports IMAP, SMTP, POP, Fetchmail, Procmail, a web interface for email, and Squid.
I use Putty (its free) in Windows to connect via SSH and forward over my local ports 119, 25, 110, 143, and 3128 over to the shell providers. For Linux I use higher local ports but to the same listed ports on the remote. Now I have an encrypted channel over all of these ports to my shell provider. Aside from being encrypted, it allows me access to all of these ports as if I was dialed into the provider or local on the providers machine. I can send mail as anyone (because I am considered a local user, its not relaying) to anyone. I can use IMAP with Pegasus (or Outlook and Eudora) on my laptop and keep the messages on the server, use the same on home PC but POP in to retrieve and delete. I prefer Pegasus on Windows due to a better method of selecting profiles and can be changed on the fly, supports PGP, and its also free. Fetchmail gets and filters the mail from my normal dialup provider and any other POP accounts I have to the shell account. I can also use the providers news server and squid. At work, this would help me mask my browsing and downloading habits.
Did I mention that I also have 10MB of space to store files that can be SCP'd over and a real live command prompt if needed?
I believe this is about as close to an all in one solution that you will find.
Mindset interactive, one of the companies being sued, has a spam signup list right on thier web site (http://mindseti.com/corp/mindsetinteractive/reg_p age.htm). It contains at least 20 different offers with check boxes and a place for your personal information. I wonder if anyone actually uses this (other then a sick joke), or its a front to claim this is where people opted in at? I do not know if they do any type of return email verification first. Anyone care to put their own email address in and try it? HAHAHA
I had a similar experience with junk faxes at my last job. Tons of our machines got ads for a toner company. I called the business and was informed that I had requested these ads. Funny thing though. This went to at least 30 fax machines I saw that day and spread across at least 15 different departments in the company. There is no way that all of these people opted in for this crap. How do you prove we did not?
Another issue. I get quite a few spams that claim that they are not intended for receipients of xx list of states, and they are filtered to prevent residents of those states "to the best of their ability". I can tell you that they have NO ability to filter that --> thats the best ability.
It is all a scam and just another way for spammers to try to fool you or justify they are providing a useful service.
The "Opt in/out" debate pertains to a lot of things and not just emails. The phone company comes to mind on this one. Don't want your phone number published in the phone book or given out in directory assistance? That is an option that they charge for and on a monthly basis. Yes, you have to pay to prevent getting dinner time calls for a motor club.
How about the financial institution debacle last year with the information sharing? I noticed ONE opt out notice that was clearly marked as such. All others were buried inside filler ads and in back of not returned sections of the monthly bill and required a seperate mailing to a different address. On one hand these companies appear to be your consumer oriented friend to get your business and then they jam it up your ass when they think they have you. No wonder there are so many frustrated people in the world today.
This person is very smart. He even completed collage at 18. Why would such an intellegent person act like this suddenly snap? He MUST have played violent video games when he was a teenager.
I see your point and agree somewhat with the reasoning behind it, but...
The shows purpose is to show your new tech gizmo. If your new gizmo happens to be an interactive game and the people cluster to it, then guess what? That is obviously what the current mass of people there at the time are really interested in and want to see. The shows producers have a choice. Either rid the show of the games, or do what they can to attract a different demographic of person that would truely be interested in the other things the show has to offer. Artifically hindering certain vendors to simulate or stimulate an interest in other vendors does not do anyone a service and would not be a true representation of what the general crowd is truely interested in.
You do have to draw a line somewhere. I'm sure if there was an open bar and ladies giving free lap dances in a conference room off to the side it would be jam packed too. That is not really the showing of new technology though.
I am sure that this workaround will fall into one of two catagories.
Someone has already patented the idea of "time shifting" to manipulate an independent secondary process and now will expect royalties on this procedure.
-or-
This violates the reverse engineering clause or removeal of a protection mechanism section of the DMCA and you will be soon be getting a canned cease and desist letter in the mail.
It's working and spreading in Oahu also, for those who failed geography, thats the most populated island where Honolulu, Pearl Harbor and Waikiki are. Hurricane Internet is running it there. Great company that has been on the island for years. Linux is used anywhere possible throughout the business and they even freely supported the local LUG's mailing list and archives for years.
I still listen to my collection of over 5000 midi and mods, granted I did get most of them years ago in the 2x uphill manner you stated above. I havent made any tracker files since wavetable MIDI came about though. Even with a low price combination of a SB Live and a second Yamaha chipset soundcard, with some instrument changes and effects you can get very good quality midi files which can then be recorded as standard .wav files and burned to CD. I have about 200 midi files that I've converted this way over the years and have since compressed them to MP3 and added them to my local file/MP3 server.
Funny thing. Search for "Google" at MSN, google.com is the first site listed but only because it is a MS internet keyword. The first returned site is... http://search.msn.com
Yes, I think they fudged those results.. Maybe MS thinks you mistyped Google and really meant to type MSN. Search for MSN on Google and http://search.msn.com is the first returned.
I dont't use Lycos and after messing around there today I remember why. Too many moving things, flash crap flying across the screen. Why would someone use this place on a regular basis?
So I guess every etailer will have move down the list for clicks. I know this has been beat to death but this whole "One Click" thing is really odd. Using the previous as a precedent, this could keep going, 2 clicks, 3 clicks, and so on down to 1.6x10^6 clicks. If your starting your business this week you are down around 648,000. Unless you could buy one of the .bombs rights that had something under 100 clicks.
I see a marketing snafu here that tries to justify using Flash by spreading FUD.
Hard-to-navigate Web forms "are freaking people out" and pushing customers away from e-commerce sites, said Wittman. Flash-designed pages and applications will help businesses retain customers and provide direct savings.
I may be reading too deep here but it looks like he is referencing statistics that show a relatively high number of consumers are bailing out of e-purchases at the last stages. I do not feel this is because of "confusing" web forms. It's probably because the site wants too much information, has not shown or has an unacceptable privacy policy, the shipping charges are too high, or the customer has simply decided to browse somewhere else first. Using Flash will not change any of the above. Have you ever backed out because of a "freaky" form?
Another questionable statement..
"I think the challenge is convincing enterprise in today's environment to make that investment," he said. "But I think there's a compelling case to be made there. For starters, it means serving a lot less pages.
How much bandwidth does it take to refresh a page to re-enter some information? If your company is bandwidth limited or server limited to the point that client refreshes are putting you over the edge and into the red, you have far more serious problems then switching to Flash is going to solve..
Want a perfect example of how NOT to use flash? Try downloading updated drivers or information on Pine's mp3 products from the Pine site with a dialup.
It seems to me that the MPAA wants a new avenue to broadcast thier media and therefore provide another method of income for them. The reason they are not doing this now is because of the potential for privacy and lack of distibution control on existing hardware and software platforms. That is strictly thier decision. The proposed solution is to modify the entire computer hardware and software industry to fit the needs of the few remaining media companies. There is no god given or legal right that your business plan has to work on the existing platforms. If you do not like what is available, take your chances and create your own system. Then if the consumers want to take advantage of this they have a choice, if not they are not being deprived or harmed in any way shape or form by not getting media shoved down our throats by the media companies over our current system.
Just as a side note, Japan has a nation-wide government run job database called Hello Work [hellowork.go.jp].
I know in the US "government-run" is synonymous with "piece of crap." Not so in this case. It is detailed and very very comprehensive.
So does the US. Its a joint effort between the states unemployment offices and the Department of Labor. Its called Americas Job Bank.
Its been running for over four years. I've used it for my last two jobs, the most recent being last week!
There are no adds, popups, or crap littering the site. Just a well laid out results page.
Do not underestimate the power of the people. The bottom lines is, when people want something, they will find it or create a method to get it in the form they want it in. With or without the so called innovation of the big players. MP3 and TV episode swapping are two perfect examples. I feel the big corporations and media giants are too far away from the public and fighting a loosing battle. They want to control what you watch and when you watch it. Much to thier dismay, this is not what the people want!! No amount of marketing and manipulation can change that. How many pay for play, streaming this and that business models are going to fail before they wake up? With the distibution snafu they created for media, how are they going to overcome the overhead to distribute and control on demand media at a cost that people will be willing to pay for it?
Why is the finder of a flaw automatically labeled as the bad guy, and given this list of things to do after the fact? We have completely lost touch with reality here. If a finder releases an exploit or details he/she is considered the faulty party. What about the vender who made the software? I, in no way shape or form, work for that vendor. In the case of closed source, they created the software, they market the software, and they control every aspect of the software. They made a conscience effort to get the software out the door ASAP to make a jump on the competition. In the process they overlooked security, did not test the product fully, and did not care less about you, the end user who found this flaw. Now they want you to work with them and not inform others that are acting as Guinea pigs too? The only reason MS and other large vendors are even considering security now is because of the general public getting wind of it from main stream news media. For me, it depends on the specific vendor for what action to take. MS is not my buddy or friend, and not one I'd care to help for free. They charge per call for general phone support, if they want my support, they can call my 800 number with thier major credit card and pay me, if it turns out not to be a flaw, I'll refund the payment. They have more then enough money to hire thousands of programmers. To them, security is a PR issue and a non-revenue generator.
Maybe saving all traffic through a mail server is a good thing. This could prevent someone from forging a mail or a reply. It's not hard to craft a mail message. The mail servers at my last company were all screwed up IMHO. They used HP Openmail servers with Outlook clients. You could craft emails to look like anyone from the company to anyone at the company with absolutely no tracking from the client end. All you had to do was send an Internet email with a From: header that someone in the company had, like some_user@company.com. When it got to our mail servers, it would recognized the From: field as an internal user, attach all the associated Openmail routing stuff, remove the SMPT stuff and send it to the specified recipient. Result? A forged email that appears in every instance to have come from an employee at the company, to an employee at the company and sent internally (no indication that it was sent from the internet and sent via SMTP). You could send mail from one supervisor to another explaining how you thought they sucked and no one would know the difference, we had >50000 employees so you could find other useful things to do with it. Hell, I don't even work there anymore, have no access to their network and I could still send mails between employees. I never got involved with our Openmail setup but I assume that it was configured that way by our headquarters and not the default behavior. I for one would like to think that logging and backing up of email would prevent someone from getting away with this or being blamed for something they did not do.
After having my Hotmail account for 2 or so years I have finally received my first piece of spam in it.
That is incredible. I receive over 50 a day (and about 200/day more to the bulk mail folder) before I have ever used the address in the public, or opened any mail I did not recognize to prevent web bugs or html confirmation tracking. My address is one that I know people may use for a fake address when they do not want to use their own. Funny thing though, I have the same exact user name at bigfoot.com, mail.com, yahoo.com, altavista.com, internettrash.com and others and get very little spam to those. Hats off to altavista, I get about 1 spam every 6 months to that account. My GTE, now Verizon dialup account plainly sucks. About a week after switching to them, I pulled my mail for the first time and already had over 15 spam messages. They are easy to filter though as my own address is never in the To: field