Noone thinks of Ctrl+C when they need to copy stuff, they just put their pinky on the Control key, and press the key which is about 7 cm to the right and 2 cm above.
Sorry, but the guys who actually sit around with stopwatches (and, occasionally, EEGs and CAT scanners) to quantify this sort of thing disagree with you.
Think of muscle memory as the instruction prefetch cache on a CPU. Yes, if you "hit" the cache, you'll execute the instruction faster than if you didn't. But there's still a delay involved, and (important bit here) some caching strategies are more efficient than others.
Keyboard shortcuts are a lot more intuitive to muscle memory than mouseitems can ever get.
The research that Tog cites proves the exact opposite of this claim. Where is the you research supporting it?
Basically what you (and most of the other responders here) are saying here is, "My subjective recollection trumps their scientific measurement, damnit!"
Sorry, but the world doesn't work like that.
Nobody's saying that using the meta-key shortcuts doesn't feel faster than mousing to a menu. Heck, Tog explicitly acknowledges that it feels faster to the user. All they're saying is that when you actually sit down with a stopwatch in a controlled environment it just isn't so.
Don't believe him? Don't believe me? The joy of the scientific method is that you don't have to -- just get yourself a copy of the original study, recruit a bunch of your friends, buy yourself a stopwatch and prove it to yourself. You'll probably be very surprised by the results.
That can't POSSIBLY be as fast as the keyboard shortcut, and it sure as heck doesn't take me two seconds to think of the command.
Re-read the articles. The whole point is: we don't notice the time taken to remember a keyboard shortcut. Our subjective impressions say one thing, the stopwatch says quite another.
As far as who the test subjects were, you'd have to dig up the original studies. I believe that they're buried somewhere on apple.com or asktog.com.
My friends always laugh at me when I say that I hate using the mouse because when I'm really tooling along on my computer reaching for the mouse slows me down....I'm glad someone else finally understands this!
Your friends are laughing at you because, although using the keyboard "feels" faster, nonetheless youarewrong.
Oh thank you thank you! I never would have figured out that consumers spend less on electronic toys in a recession than they do in a boom economy if it weren't for your astounding insights!
Oh wait... "No." And, secondary to that, "shut your noise tube, taco human." Hold off on the stunning macroeconomic analyses until you graduate high school, sparky, and save your pathetic attempts at flaming for the fuckedcompany bulletin boards.
Are we in a recession? Yes. Will sales of consumer electronics be lower this year than last? Yes. Has the consumer electronics market suddenly vanished? No. Is "$200-400" the magic price range that every new consumer appliance shoots for? (Let's see: basically every new gaming console, digital camera, VCR, DVD, ETC ever...) Yes. Are Sony, Apple, Compaq, Kodak, Panasonic, Nikon and the dozen other competitors in this space going to be around and making money even in that far-off day when you grow a set of balls and register a nickname here? Yes, even in that distant future when you achieve sentience. By the hand of Adam Smith and the power of Greyskull, it will be so.
And christ, minus whatever miniscule style points you might have cached and straight into negative territory for your pathetic attempt to somehow drag "Linux-based companies" into it.
Alright, how many of these people are the type that want a portable Mp3 device? Maybe half.
Half of several hundred thousand times $400 is still several heaping boatloads of cash.
And that's just right now. The obvious larger picture here is that Apple hopes to use the iPod (and, I suspect, similar devices) to leverage sales of MacOS computers, and vice-versa. It's a strategy that's made Sony and Microsoft quite a bit of cash, on the backs of products significantly less well-designed and integrated than this.
Of course, they're Apple, so they'll probably manage to fuck it up somehow, but the product is good, the strategy is sound, and the sales upside is very, very high.
Bundled for free on every Mac sold in the last 18 months, and installed retroactively on god only knows how many other ones. Easily in the high hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions.
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port...
Every iMac, PowerMac, iBook and Powerbook sold in the last two years, plus almost every Sony VAIO and a good chunk of Compaq and HP's product lines. Easily in the millions.
Raise your hand if you have both.
See above.
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device...
Looking at the sales of (picking three examples) Pilots, Rios and Digital Cameras, I'd say the number of people willing to spend $200-500 on a "cute" electronic device is "lots and lots."
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
I guess you don't. This is why Apple is a company with $4 Billion in the bank, and you're trolling on slashdot. Want fries with that?
We know for a fact that that all three of these flagship products could be replicated by OSS programmers with not a lot of difficulty.
Oh really? Would you care to put your code where your mouth is? Here's a nickel, kid, go whip up a working Pantone color-matching scheme for XFree86. (Note to audience: this is funny because it is impossible.)
I'm sorry, but this is just idiotic. The Gimp is a cute toy, and it's certainly replaced Photoshop as the tool of choice among a few hundred people who would never have paid money for Photoshop to begin with. But don't kid yourself that this has anything at all to do with the professional prepress graphics market.
Adobe's hideously inflated prices
Back here on planet earth, we call those "what the market will bear." Looking at Adobe's P/E ratios over the past 5 years, I'd say they've gauged it pretty well.
...go to support their vast corporate empire
You know, horrible things like paying the salaries of the (hundreds) of programmers they employ and increasing the value of their (millions) of shareholders.
...and *not* to better their products.
Yup. He's right. Photoshop has been completely stagnant since version 3.0. That's why the company went bankrupt in 95, and most graphics professionals are using either LivePicture, CorelPaint or The Gimp.
Oh wait, that's bullshit: Adobe has actually consistantly improved the product, and has crushed every major competitor in the market as a result.
Flash could be so much bigger than it is now if it were an open standard.
Current estimates are that over 95% of all web browsers have a flash plugin installed. Most Windows OEMs bundle it, Apple bundles it with MacOS 9 and X, and there's even a linux version available. What, exactly, do you mean by "bigger?" I don't think Macromedia is losing any sleep over the lack of support for the all-important IRIX market.
For shame!
Quite. Do you usually post while in a vegetative state, or was this a one-time-only thing?
Right now it's a federal crime to interfere with the delivery of regular postal mail. Why should e-mail be any different?
Gee, I dunno, because postal mail is a federally protected monopoly, whereas email has multiple competing providers that you can pick and choose on the basis of the service they provide?
The EFF's anti-MAPS stance has little to do with careful consideration of the legal and ethical issues involved, and a great deal to do with the fact that EFF honcho John Gilmore has landed himself on multiple spam blacklists, and been booted off at least one ISP (Verio) for intentionally running a wide-open relay.
Gilmore's stance is pretty straightforward: running an open relay was a good thing in 1987, so of course it must still be best practice in 2001.
Would it have killed you to do more than skim the headline, see the words "AOL" and "protocol" in it, and instantly decide that this was obviously about Instant Messaging?
The protocol in question is not OSCAR or TOC. I'd tell you what is actually under discussion here, but I'd rather you just scrolled up and figure it out for yourself.
to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power
No force was used, unless you define "publishing a list of IP addresses" to be "force." No intimidation was used. Certainly no illegal power was employed. I guess you can argue "undue", but I simply don't buy it.
The only boycott involved is my boycott of MAPS; they certainly did not boycott me, they extorted me.
MAPS publishes a list of IP addresses to boycott email traffic from. Their subscribers implement that boycott.
MAPS neither boycotted you nor extorted you. MAPS did not ask anything of you personally: As I have been stating repeatedly here, and as you have been assiduously avoiding acknowledging, you are simply not at issue here. The dispute is between MAPS and your ISP. "You" are always free to choose to give your time and money to a more responsible business, or convince your brother to give his time and money to an equally irresponsible one if that is your preference.
To sum up: you make heated claims about MAPS, but you deliberately and repeatedly mis-state the technical and legal facts. You claim persecution, but refuse to provide key evidence to support your claim. You persist in confusing an action directed at your ISP with an action directed at you personally. In short, you're a troll and a FUD-spreader, despite your better grasp of english grammar than the breed generally has. And in this all, you're sadly typical of most of the anti-MAPS firebreathers.
What I meant was this: MAPS expected me to change ISPs to suit them
No. MAPS wanted your ISP to change whatever behavior it was that got them listed in the first place.
The tangible benefit to them is increased legitimacy and an increased sense of power ("we cost someone another subscriber!").
Please look up the definition of the word "tangible." You have just provided a perfect example of an intangible benefit.
And even then, you're wrong. Read their damn website. The benefit to them is, hopefully, that an ISP changes the behavior that led to the listing. (And boy oh boy would it be nice if you would just name your ISP so that we both could stop being deliberately vague about what the hell happened here. Your continued evasions really make it hard to think that you're presenting your case in good faith, and make me wonder if maybe your ISP isn't owned by Dean Anderson or Mitch Halmu.)
That's extortion to me: Using a threat to change someone else's behavior. What word would you use?
It's called a boycott. It has a long and honorable history, and it is not extortion. Look it up.
given that MAPS and services like it, automatically blackhole email from dynamically served DNS entries, I am quite happy to see them sued, sued into oblivion even.
MAPS doesn't "blackhole email". MAPS doesn't filter anything. MAPS publishes lists of addresses, which administrators of mail servers are free to use for any purpose they like. (Usually blocking mail, but often just tagging it or filtering it to different folders.) MAPS is one of several competing organizations who offer lists like this, and mail administrators are free to pick among them and their competitors; they are also quite free to use none of them at all.
If your or your friends are using ISPs that employ a blocking list you don't agree with, stop giving them your money. It's not like there's a lack of ISPs that don't use MAPS' lists.
And MAPS does not automatically list addresses from dynamic DNS services. One of MAPS' lists (the DUL) lists network ranges of consumer dialup services (note: dynamic IP assignment is not the same thing as dynamic DNS), but that list is entirely seperate from the RBL, and comes with large warnings attached that the addresses listed are probably not spammers. As a consequence, very few companies filter mail based on the DUL.
At any point that I am walking down a public street, a salesman could approach me and launch right into a sales pitch.
As a rule, people do not pay monthly or hourly fees to walk down the streets. Strangly, people value their time and resources a bit more when they have to pay for it.
And by the way, aggressive public salesmanship (stepping into your path, yelling loudly at you) can be and often is criminally prosecuted under various public nuisance abatement and personal harassment laws.
Sorry, but they are not here, I do not have them at hand. And even if I did, I would not post my IP address -- I'm not stupid.
Er, that would be "my ISP's mail server's address", not "my IP address", unless there's something you're not telling us?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that, OK?
If you know it, please stop making statements which claim the diametric opposite. Around these parts, we call saying something while knowing it not to be true "lying."
But my brother's ISP -- the ones actually using the RBL to block my email -- denied any responsibility and referred me to MAPS.
Exactly how is it MAPS' problem if your brother's ISP has lazy, incompetant tech support people?
If it wasn't for MAPS and the way they and they alone decide who is and is not labled a spammer
MAPS does not decide "who is a spammer." MAPS decides who will be added to the RBL. Your brother's ISP was entirely free to not use the RBL if they disagreed with MAPS' criteria and methods. Your brother, in turn, was quite free to seek out a competing ISP if he disagreed with that trust.
Furthermore, the contention that "they and they alone" make the determination that someone is a spammer is ridiculous: there are upwards of fifteen similar services to MAPS, most of which offer substantially different lists.
and their lack of any appeal process or any form of mediation outside the courts
MAPS has a lengthy appeals process, and one which I have personlly observed them going above and beyond the letter of when working with people.
The problem is, having an appeals process does not mean "we'll take you out if you gripe loudly enough," which is what most people complaining about the process were actually looking for.
Yes, I know they don't actually filter by domain name.
So stop saying that they do. Domain names are domain names. They aren't IP addresses and they aren't netblocks, and they are not strong indications of corporate boundaries. If your ISP had changed its domain name once a day for a month, its netblocks would still have been in the RBL.
This may seem like a trivial distinction to you, but you are substantially misrepresenting the technical facts about the RBL when you repeat this assertion.
To me, personally, over the telephone, they claimed only to block individual IP addresses.
If, in fact, that was said to you, I can only assume that someone at MAPS fucked up. If I worked for them, I'd apologize on their behalf. Since you're refusing to state key facts of this case, it's really hard to know whether to even accept this statement at face value.
MAPS is the sole arbiter of "antisocial behavior"?
As above. MAPS isn't the sole arbiter of anything other than "who gets listed in the RBL". Your brother's ISP was free to not use that list, use that list in a different fashion (tagging instead of blocking), whitelist your brother's account from that list, use a different service's list, or use no list at all.
they did not have any mechanism for me to prove that I was not a spammer and get my IP address taken off the RBL.
Well again, there's a problem here: it's not your IP address. It belongs to your ISP, and it is their responsibility, not yours, to take the proper steps to be delisted if they decide they want to. If they didn't think that was necessary, and it was getting in the way of your communications, pehaps you should have voted with your feet and dollars. Frankly, you were getting ripped off, and the people ripping you off appear to have successfully deflected your anger onto a 3rd party.
Their only solution was for me to change ISPs. That's extortion.
You keep flinging around terms with reckless disregard for their meaning. Extortion implies that MAPS intended to reap some tangible benefit from you, backed up by a threat of violence. The truth is that MAPS had a dispute with your ISP, your ISP choose to ignore it, and you got caught in the fallout. That's not extortion, that's life. It's also unfortunate, but the whole point of a list like the RBL is to make it hard for companies to ignore the spam issue.
What's worse, the entity they claimed was spamming was from another state, in another subnet, but they blocked (excuse me, listed) me because I had the same ISP.
Since you refuse to mention your ISP by name, it's basically impossible for anybody to attach any validity to this claim. But regardless: they did not list you. They listed your ISP. There was no appeals process for you because you don't own the netblocks and you don't set policy at your ISP. Sucks for you, I admit, but that's the nature of the beast. Stop whining and consider giving your money to a responsible company instead.
I don't have the details (specific IP addresses) at hand, but they're on file if needed.
Uh huh. Put up or shut up.
MAPS claimed they did not filter by domain name, just specific IP addresses. As several pro-MAPS people have explained here in/., this is a lie. They do not filter specific IP addresses, they filter whole blocks.
A block of IP addresses is not the same thing as a domain name. You were not lied to by MAPS, although it's entirely possible that a "pro-MAPS" person said something misleading in a comment here. (Plenty of "pro-MAPS" people are as ignorant of how the RBL works as you yourself appear to be; apparently reading the damn documentation is difficult or something. I guess it's a slashdot thing.)
And this bears repeating: MAPS never "filtered" anything. MAPS published a list of IP addresses, which ISPs could, at their discretion, choose to use as a basis for filtering. Some of them bounced mail based on that list, some of them tagged the mail as "possible spam" based on it, some just kept logs based on it, and probably some people used it as a list of mail to allow.
MAPS sent me the IP address they claim was used by a spammer. Guess what? My blocked IP addresses were not even in the same subnet.
Was your IP address in a subnet that was owned by the same entity? Did you look up the listed IP address in their lookup form and read the justification for its listing?
MAPS has always been very clear that they will eventually list all known addresses for a given company if that company persisted in antisocial behavior. This is not, however, "listing a domain name." Domain names are not the same as areas of ownership.
They were not filtering specific IP addresses, or even whole blocks of addresses; they filtered my ISP's domain name.
Did you even try to understand how the RBL's publication mechanism works? The whole system is based on the idea of a mail server (or, in rare cases, a router) querying the RBL servers for the status of a single IP address. It is not possible to list a domain name, because there is no way to ask the rbl.mail-abuse.org server if "example.com" is listed.
Above.net (which may be owned by MAPS, I don't remember and don't quote me on that)
Quote me on this: Would it have killed you to do TWO SECONDS OF RESEARCH before posting something this blatantly stupid and incorrect?
blackholed sites like macromedia.com and ORBS.
Macromedia/Shockwave are repeat, unrepentant spammers. It is not possible to get permanently removed from their mailing lists. I couldn't do it and I'm on a first name basis with three of their senior systems staff. I wish more people would block them, but I'm just going to have to content myself with watching them go bankrupt. Buh-bye, parasites.
ORBS was blackholed only after being repeatedly asked to stop scanning above.net space for open relays. For all of Alan Brown's bluster, the sequence of events was simple: he did it, they asked him to stop, he ignored them, they null-routed him. Alan was really the only person who found it at all surprising, but that's primarily because Alan's a sociopath.
Actually, PCs are the one big exception, if anything, and that is only if you exclude notebooks. I suggest your open your eyes to the much broader world of consumer electronics. (Note: you will have to venture beyond Best Buy.)
I rate that flame about a 0.3. Try harder next time: insinuating that I only know what I see at Best Buy doesn't work too well after I spent most of my post talking about high-spec professional gear, and mentioning key Asian tech marketplaces by name.
Laptops...well, size is really the big difference outside of the US. Is it insignificant? Obviously not, and I have several friends who ordered grey-market Vaio Z505s from japan before they were available in the states. But most of the submicro laptops coming out of Japan aren't actually much smaller than the old Apple Duo 2300 or the IBM Butterfly, both of which were miserable sales failures here. 99% of the internal components of japanese and american laptops are the same (think: economies of scale), there's just weaker demand for the smaller form factors here. Just compares sales of the C1VN here versus in Japan.
So I'm really curious to know what amazingly advanced consumer tech has been hidden from us poor americans. VCD/SVCD is certainly much more available in Asia, but I wouldn't really call that "advanced", just interesting. Digital Cameras? Pretty much the same everywhere. (God knows I crawled through half the electronics stores in Bangkok and most of Orchard Road in Singapore looking for something better than a Nikon Coolpix 950 in a comparable pricerange.) Camcorders? Ditto. You can get some way-cool pirate videogame systems in SE Asia that sony/nintendo/sega would have heart failure if you tried to sell in the states, but that's a question of legal climate, not engineering skill.
Household appliances do tend to be pretty different outside the U.S., but as nifty as all lot of the tiny combo washer/dryer units I saw in Singapore were, I think their absence in the states has a lot more to do with simple lack of demand than anything else. They're cute, but there's just no need for them here: people with small enough apartments to make the tradeoff in size possibly worth it generally live in cities with lots of large, cheap public laundromats.
Now cars are another story. But we were talking about electronics.
Even the richest man in America can't buy and use a cell phone on par with a Japanese teenager.
This might have something to do with the fact that the richest men in America have little interest in SMSing Hello Kitty graphics to each other.
More seriously: I've already granted that the cell phone situation in the US is a relative mess, so you don't earn any extra points by returning to it.
Your assertion that the only difference is size (as if that were insignificant) just proves my point.
Where you seem to see some sort of strange conspiracy to... well, I'm not actually certain what your point is here. I guess it's either that those evil japanese are holding back the Really Good Toys from us Americans, or that those Awful Jingoistic Americans are insulting Asians by not acknowledging their M4D T3CHN1C4L SK1LLZ, and frankly it's a crock either way. Where you see a "MYTH!!" I just see two rather different markets using basically the same technology to service two vastly different sets of consumer desires and needs.
Because (if you are in America) you are routinely sold technology that is practically obsolete in Japan and the rest of Asia and told that it is state of the art.
Yup. Just got back from Thailand, where I picked up a 6GHz Athlon 5 system for 500 baht at the Pantip Plaza...
Oh, wait, I didn't, and you can't. What the hell are you talking about? The only substantial difference between the technology sold in Asia and that sold in the west is that consumer-quality gear in asia tends to come in smaller packages, for reasons that have very little to do with the "state of the art" and lots to do with the price of housing (and, er, the size of the local fingers).
Cell phones are, admittedly, the big exception to this: there, the Europeans and Asians really did leap out ahead. On the other hand, we have fixed-price broadband and you...don't. And likely won't, ever.
Outside of the consumer market...forget it. Everybody uses pretty much the exact same kit with regionalized manuals and sometimes a local company's name slapped on top of a product produced by a multinational. I buy a big Sun Sparc server for my database; my counterpart in Germany buys the same thing with a Siemens logo on it, and my counterpart in Japan buys it with the Fujitsu label. (Then we all run Oracle on it.) And we all buy Cisco and Juniper routers...
Slashdot Mirror
Noone thinks of Ctrl+C when they need to copy stuff, they just put their pinky on the Control key, and press the key which is about 7 cm to the right and 2 cm above.
Sorry, but the guys who actually sit around with stopwatches (and, occasionally, EEGs and CAT scanners) to quantify this sort of thing disagree with you.
Think of muscle memory as the instruction prefetch cache on a CPU. Yes, if you "hit" the cache, you'll execute the instruction faster than if you didn't. But there's still a delay involved, and (important bit here) some caching strategies are more efficient than others.
Keyboard shortcuts are a lot more intuitive to muscle memory than mouseitems can ever get.
The research that Tog cites proves the exact opposite of this claim. Where is the you research supporting it?
Basically what you (and most of the other responders here) are saying here is, "My subjective recollection trumps their scientific measurement, damnit!"
Sorry, but the world doesn't work like that.
Nobody's saying that using the meta-key shortcuts doesn't feel faster than mousing to a menu. Heck, Tog explicitly acknowledges that it feels faster to the user. All they're saying is that when you actually sit down with a stopwatch in a controlled environment it just isn't so.
Don't believe him? Don't believe me? The joy of the scientific method is that you don't have to -- just get yourself a copy of the original study, recruit a bunch of your friends, buy yourself a stopwatch and prove it to yourself. You'll probably be very surprised by the results.
That can't POSSIBLY be as fast as the keyboard shortcut, and it sure as heck doesn't take me two seconds to think of the command.
Re-read the articles. The whole point is: we don't notice the time taken to remember a keyboard shortcut. Our subjective impressions say one thing, the stopwatch says quite another.
As far as who the test subjects were, you'd have to dig up the original studies. I believe that they're buried somewhere on apple.com or asktog.com.
My friends always laugh at me when I say that I hate using the mouse because when I'm really tooling along on my computer reaching for the mouse slows me down....I'm glad someone else finally understands this!
Your friends are laughing at you because, although using the keyboard "feels" faster, nonetheless you are wrong.
So this is why it took 18 months for the new verison of leisuretown to get finished. Trolling on slashdot. For shame, Mr. Farnon.
Do you think that installed base for Linux will be higher or lower than the installed base for Mac OS X in terms of gaming population?
In terms of a gaming population that will pay money for games? Infinitely larger, since you can't divide by zero.
Oh thank you thank you! I never would have figured out that consumers spend less on electronic toys in a recession than they do in a boom economy if it weren't for your astounding insights!
Oh wait... "No." And, secondary to that, "shut your noise tube, taco human." Hold off on the stunning macroeconomic analyses until you graduate high school, sparky, and save your pathetic attempts at flaming for the fuckedcompany bulletin boards.
Are we in a recession? Yes. Will sales of consumer electronics be lower this year than last? Yes. Has the consumer electronics market suddenly vanished? No. Is "$200-400" the magic price range that every new consumer appliance shoots for? (Let's see: basically every new gaming console, digital camera, VCR, DVD, ETC ever...) Yes. Are Sony, Apple, Compaq, Kodak, Panasonic, Nikon and the dozen other competitors in this space going to be around and making money even in that far-off day when you grow a set of balls and register a nickname here? Yes, even in that distant future when you achieve sentience. By the hand of Adam Smith and the power of Greyskull, it will be so.
And christ, minus whatever miniscule style points you might have cached and straight into negative territory for your pathetic attempt to somehow drag "Linux-based companies" into it.
Idiot.
Alright, how many of these people are the type that want a portable Mp3 device? Maybe half.
Half of several hundred thousand times $400 is still several heaping boatloads of cash.
And that's just right now. The obvious larger picture here is that Apple hopes to use the iPod (and, I suspect, similar devices) to leverage sales of MacOS computers, and vice-versa. It's a strategy that's made Sony and Microsoft quite a bit of cash, on the backs of products significantly less well-designed and integrated than this.
Of course, they're Apple, so they'll probably manage to fuck it up somehow, but the product is good, the strategy is sound, and the sales upside is very, very high.
Raise your hand if you have iTunes
Bundled for free on every Mac sold in the last 18 months, and installed retroactively on god only knows how many other ones. Easily in the high hundreds of thousands, possibly in the millions.
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port...
Every iMac, PowerMac, iBook and Powerbook sold in the last two years, plus almost every Sony VAIO and a good chunk of Compaq and HP's product lines. Easily in the millions.
Raise your hand if you have both.
See above.
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device...
Looking at the sales of (picking three examples) Pilots, Rios and Digital Cameras, I'd say the number of people willing to spend $200-500 on a "cute" electronic device is "lots and lots."
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
I guess you don't. This is why Apple is a company with $4 Billion in the bank, and you're trolling on slashdot. Want fries with that?
We know for a fact that that all three of these flagship products could be replicated by OSS programmers with not a lot of difficulty.
...go to support their vast corporate empire
...and *not* to better their products.
Oh really? Would you care to put your code where your mouth is? Here's a nickel, kid, go whip up a working Pantone color-matching scheme for XFree86. (Note to audience: this is funny because it is impossible.)
I'm sorry, but this is just idiotic. The Gimp is a cute toy, and it's certainly replaced Photoshop as the tool of choice among a few hundred people who would never have paid money for Photoshop to begin with. But don't kid yourself that this has anything at all to do with the professional prepress graphics market.
Adobe's hideously inflated prices
Back here on planet earth, we call those "what the market will bear." Looking at Adobe's P/E ratios over the past 5 years, I'd say they've gauged it pretty well.
You know, horrible things like paying the salaries of the (hundreds) of programmers they employ and increasing the value of their (millions) of shareholders.
Yup. He's right. Photoshop has been completely stagnant since version 3.0. That's why the company went bankrupt in 95, and most graphics professionals are using either LivePicture, CorelPaint or The Gimp.
Oh wait, that's bullshit: Adobe has actually consistantly improved the product, and has crushed every major competitor in the market as a result.
Flash could be so much bigger than it is now if it were an open standard.
Current estimates are that over 95% of all web browsers have a flash plugin installed. Most Windows OEMs bundle it, Apple bundles it with MacOS 9 and X, and there's even a linux version available. What, exactly, do you mean by "bigger?" I don't think Macromedia is losing any sleep over the lack of support for the all-important IRIX market.
For shame!
Quite. Do you usually post while in a vegetative state, or was this a one-time-only thing?
Right now it's a federal crime to interfere with the delivery of regular postal mail. Why should e-mail be any different?
Gee, I dunno, because postal mail is a federally protected monopoly, whereas email has multiple competing providers that you can pick and choose on the basis of the service they provide?
Nah, it couldn't possibly be that simple.
The EFF's anti-MAPS stance has little to do with careful consideration of the legal and ethical issues involved, and a great deal to do with the fact that EFF honcho John Gilmore has landed himself on multiple spam blacklists, and been booted off at least one ISP (Verio) for intentionally running a wide-open relay.
Gilmore's stance is pretty straightforward: running an open relay was a good thing in 1987, so of course it must still be best practice in 2001.
...I'm still waiting for my inflatable shoes.
*HONK*
Would it have killed you to do more than skim the headline, see the words "AOL" and "protocol" in it, and instantly decide that this was obviously about Instant Messaging?
The protocol in question is not OSCAR or TOC. I'd tell you what is actually under discussion here, but I'd rather you just scrolled up and figure it out for yourself.
to obtain from a person by force, intimidation, or undue or illegal power
No force was used, unless you define "publishing a list of IP addresses" to be "force." No intimidation was used. Certainly no illegal power was employed. I guess you can argue "undue", but I simply don't buy it.
The only boycott involved is my boycott of MAPS; they certainly did not boycott me, they extorted me.
MAPS publishes a list of IP addresses to boycott email traffic from. Their subscribers implement that boycott.
MAPS neither boycotted you nor extorted you. MAPS did not ask anything of you personally: As I have been stating repeatedly here, and as you have been assiduously avoiding acknowledging, you are simply not at issue here. The dispute is between MAPS and your ISP. "You" are always free to choose to give your time and money to a more responsible business, or convince your brother to give his time and money to an equally irresponsible one if that is your preference.
To sum up: you make heated claims about MAPS, but you deliberately and repeatedly mis-state the technical and legal facts. You claim persecution, but refuse to provide key evidence to support your claim. You persist in confusing an action directed at your ISP with an action directed at you personally. In short, you're a troll and a FUD-spreader, despite your better grasp of english grammar than the breed generally has. And in this all, you're sadly typical of most of the anti-MAPS firebreathers.
Enough posting to 3-day-old articles now.
What I meant was this: MAPS expected me to change ISPs to suit them
No. MAPS wanted your ISP to change whatever behavior it was that got them listed in the first place.
The tangible benefit to them is increased legitimacy and an increased sense of power ("we cost someone another subscriber!").
Please look up the definition of the word "tangible." You have just provided a perfect example of an intangible benefit.
And even then, you're wrong. Read their damn website. The benefit to them is, hopefully, that an ISP changes the behavior that led to the listing. (And boy oh boy would it be nice if you would just name your ISP so that we both could stop being deliberately vague about what the hell happened here. Your continued evasions really make it hard to think that you're presenting your case in good faith, and make me wonder if maybe your ISP isn't owned by Dean Anderson or Mitch Halmu.)
That's extortion to me: Using a threat to change someone else's behavior. What word would you use?
It's called a boycott. It has a long and honorable history, and it is not extortion. Look it up.
given that MAPS and services like it, automatically blackhole email from dynamically served DNS entries, I am quite happy to see them sued, sued into oblivion even.
MAPS doesn't "blackhole email". MAPS doesn't filter anything. MAPS publishes lists of addresses, which administrators of mail servers are free to use for any purpose they like. (Usually blocking mail, but often just tagging it or filtering it to different folders.) MAPS is one of several competing organizations who offer lists like this, and mail administrators are free to pick among them and their competitors; they are also quite free to use none of them at all.
If your or your friends are using ISPs that employ a blocking list you don't agree with, stop giving them your money. It's not like there's a lack of ISPs that don't use MAPS' lists.
And MAPS does not automatically list addresses from dynamic DNS services. One of MAPS' lists (the DUL) lists network ranges of consumer dialup services (note: dynamic IP assignment is not the same thing as dynamic DNS), but that list is entirely seperate from the RBL, and comes with large warnings attached that the addresses listed are probably not spammers. As a consequence, very few companies filter mail based on the DUL.
At any point that I am walking down a public street, a salesman could approach me and launch right into a sales pitch.
As a rule, people do not pay monthly or hourly fees to walk down the streets. Strangly, people value their time and resources a bit more when they have to pay for it.
And by the way, aggressive public salesmanship (stepping into your path, yelling loudly at you) can be and often is criminally prosecuted under various public nuisance abatement and personal harassment laws.
Sorry, but they are not here, I do not have them at hand. And even if I did, I would not post my IP address -- I'm not stupid.
Er, that would be "my ISP's mail server's address", not "my IP address", unless there's something you're not telling us?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that, OK?
If you know it, please stop making statements which claim the diametric opposite. Around these parts, we call saying something while knowing it not to be true "lying."
But my brother's ISP -- the ones actually using the RBL to block my email -- denied any responsibility and referred me to MAPS.
Exactly how is it MAPS' problem if your brother's ISP has lazy, incompetant tech support people?
If it wasn't for MAPS and the way they and they alone decide who is and is not labled a spammer
MAPS does not decide "who is a spammer." MAPS decides who will be added to the RBL. Your brother's ISP was entirely free to not use the RBL if they disagreed with MAPS' criteria and methods. Your brother, in turn, was quite free to seek out a competing ISP if he disagreed with that trust.
Furthermore, the contention that "they and they alone" make the determination that someone is a spammer is ridiculous: there are upwards of fifteen similar services to MAPS, most of which offer substantially different lists.
and their lack of any appeal process or any form of mediation outside the courts
MAPS has a lengthy appeals process, and one which I have personlly observed them going above and beyond the letter of when working with people.
The problem is, having an appeals process does not mean "we'll take you out if you gripe loudly enough," which is what most people complaining about the process were actually looking for.
Yes, I know they don't actually filter by domain name.
So stop saying that they do. Domain names are domain names. They aren't IP addresses and they aren't netblocks, and they are not strong indications of corporate boundaries. If your ISP had changed its domain name once a day for a month, its netblocks would still have been in the RBL.
This may seem like a trivial distinction to you, but you are substantially misrepresenting the technical facts about the RBL when you repeat this assertion.
To me, personally, over the telephone, they claimed only to block individual IP addresses.
If, in fact, that was said to you, I can only assume that someone at MAPS fucked up. If I worked for them, I'd apologize on their behalf. Since you're refusing to state key facts of this case, it's really hard to know whether to even accept this statement at face value.
MAPS is the sole arbiter of "antisocial behavior"?
As above. MAPS isn't the sole arbiter of anything other than "who gets listed in the RBL". Your brother's ISP was free to not use that list, use that list in a different fashion (tagging instead of blocking), whitelist your brother's account from that list, use a different service's list, or use no list at all.
they did not have any mechanism for me to prove that I was not a spammer and get my IP address taken off the RBL.
Well again, there's a problem here: it's not your IP address. It belongs to your ISP, and it is their responsibility, not yours, to take the proper steps to be delisted if they decide they want to. If they didn't think that was necessary, and it was getting in the way of your communications, pehaps you should have voted with your feet and dollars. Frankly, you were getting ripped off, and the people ripping you off appear to have successfully deflected your anger onto a 3rd party.
Their only solution was for me to change ISPs. That's extortion.
You keep flinging around terms with reckless disregard for their meaning. Extortion implies that MAPS intended to reap some tangible benefit from you, backed up by a threat of violence. The truth is that MAPS had a dispute with your ISP, your ISP choose to ignore it, and you got caught in the fallout. That's not extortion, that's life. It's also unfortunate, but the whole point of a list like the RBL is to make it hard for companies to ignore the spam issue.
What's worse, the entity they claimed was spamming was from another state, in another subnet, but they blocked (excuse me, listed) me because I had the same ISP.
Since you refuse to mention your ISP by name, it's basically impossible for anybody to attach any validity to this claim. But regardless: they did not list you. They listed your ISP. There was no appeals process for you because you don't own the netblocks and you don't set policy at your ISP. Sucks for you, I admit, but that's the nature of the beast. Stop whining and consider giving your money to a responsible company instead.
I don't have the details (specific IP addresses) at hand, but they're on file if needed.
/., this is a lie. They do not filter specific IP addresses, they filter whole blocks.
Uh huh. Put up or shut up.
MAPS claimed they did not filter by domain name, just specific IP addresses. As several pro-MAPS people have explained here in
A block of IP addresses is not the same thing as a domain name. You were not lied to by MAPS, although it's entirely possible that a "pro-MAPS" person said something misleading in a comment here. (Plenty of "pro-MAPS" people are as ignorant of how the RBL works as you yourself appear to be; apparently reading the damn documentation is difficult or something. I guess it's a slashdot thing.)
And this bears repeating: MAPS never "filtered" anything. MAPS published a list of IP addresses, which ISPs could, at their discretion, choose to use as a basis for filtering. Some of them bounced mail based on that list, some of them tagged the mail as "possible spam" based on it, some just kept logs based on it, and probably some people used it as a list of mail to allow.
MAPS sent me the IP address they claim was used by a spammer. Guess what? My blocked IP addresses were not even in the same subnet.
Was your IP address in a subnet that was owned by the same entity? Did you look up the listed IP address in their lookup form and read the justification for its listing?
MAPS has always been very clear that they will eventually list all known addresses for a given company if that company persisted in antisocial behavior. This is not, however, "listing a domain name." Domain names are not the same as areas of ownership.
They were not filtering specific IP addresses, or even whole blocks of addresses; they filtered my ISP's domain name.
Did you even try to understand how the RBL's publication mechanism works? The whole system is based on the idea of a mail server (or, in rare cases, a router) querying the RBL servers for the status of a single IP address. It is not possible to list a domain name, because there is no way to ask the rbl.mail-abuse.org server if "example.com" is listed.
But don't take my word for it. Read the damn manuals yourself.
Humm, first generation unix partitioning from IBM, or 5th generation partitioning from Sun
IBM's AIX partitioning code (originally introduced in the SP frames) predates Sun's earliest attempts by at least two years.
Above.net (which may be owned by MAPS, I don't remember and don't quote me on that)
Quote me on this: Would it have killed you to do TWO SECONDS OF RESEARCH before posting something this blatantly stupid and incorrect?
blackholed sites like macromedia.com and ORBS.
Macromedia/Shockwave are repeat, unrepentant spammers. It is not possible to get permanently removed from their mailing lists. I couldn't do it and I'm on a first name basis with three of their senior systems staff. I wish more people would block them, but I'm just going to have to content myself with watching them go bankrupt. Buh-bye, parasites.
ORBS was blackholed only after being repeatedly asked to stop scanning above.net space for open relays. For all of Alan Brown's bluster, the sequence of events was simple: he did it, they asked him to stop, he ignored them, they null-routed him. Alan was really the only person who found it at all surprising, but that's primarily because Alan's a sociopath.
the bottom line was this: MAPS lied to me about what they did and how it worked
Would you care to substantiate that fascinating, unsupported and likely actionable statement?
Actually, PCs are the one big exception, if anything, and that is only if you exclude notebooks. I suggest your open your eyes to the much broader world of consumer electronics. (Note: you will have to venture beyond Best Buy.)
I rate that flame about a 0.3. Try harder next time: insinuating that I only know what I see at Best Buy doesn't work too well after I spent most of my post talking about high-spec professional gear, and mentioning key Asian tech marketplaces by name.
Laptops...well, size is really the big difference outside of the US. Is it insignificant? Obviously not, and I have several friends who ordered grey-market Vaio Z505s from japan before they were available in the states. But most of the submicro laptops coming out of Japan aren't actually much smaller than the old Apple Duo 2300 or the IBM Butterfly, both of which were miserable sales failures here. 99% of the internal components of japanese and american laptops are the same (think: economies of scale), there's just weaker demand for the smaller form factors here. Just compares sales of the C1VN here versus in Japan.
So I'm really curious to know what amazingly advanced consumer tech has been hidden from us poor americans. VCD/SVCD is certainly much more available in Asia, but I wouldn't really call that "advanced", just interesting. Digital Cameras? Pretty much the same everywhere. (God knows I crawled through half the electronics stores in Bangkok and most of Orchard Road in Singapore looking for something better than a Nikon Coolpix 950 in a comparable pricerange.) Camcorders? Ditto. You can get some way-cool pirate videogame systems in SE Asia that sony/nintendo/sega would have heart failure if you tried to sell in the states, but that's a question of legal climate, not engineering skill.
Household appliances do tend to be pretty different outside the U.S., but as nifty as all lot of the tiny combo washer/dryer units I saw in Singapore were, I think their absence in the states has a lot more to do with simple lack of demand than anything else. They're cute, but there's just no need for them here: people with small enough apartments to make the tradeoff in size possibly worth it generally live in cities with lots of large, cheap public laundromats.
Now cars are another story. But we were talking about electronics.
Even the richest man in America can't buy and use a cell phone on par with a Japanese teenager.
This might have something to do with the fact that the richest men in America have little interest in SMSing Hello Kitty graphics to each other.
More seriously: I've already granted that the cell phone situation in the US is a relative mess, so you don't earn any extra points by returning to it.
Your assertion that the only difference is size (as if that were insignificant) just proves my point.
Where you seem to see some sort of strange conspiracy to... well, I'm not actually certain what your point is here. I guess it's either that those evil japanese are holding back the Really Good Toys from us Americans, or that those Awful Jingoistic Americans are insulting Asians by not acknowledging their M4D T3CHN1C4L SK1LLZ, and frankly it's a crock either way. Where you see a "MYTH!!" I just see two rather different markets using basically the same technology to service two vastly different sets of consumer desires and needs.
Because (if you are in America) you are routinely sold technology that is practically obsolete in Japan and the rest of Asia and told that it is state of the art.
Yup. Just got back from Thailand, where I picked up a 6GHz Athlon 5 system for 500 baht at the Pantip Plaza...
Oh, wait, I didn't, and you can't. What the hell are you talking about? The only substantial difference between the technology sold in Asia and that sold in the west is that consumer-quality gear in asia tends to come in smaller packages, for reasons that have very little to do with the "state of the art" and lots to do with the price of housing (and, er, the size of the local fingers).
Cell phones are, admittedly, the big exception to this: there, the Europeans and Asians really did leap out ahead. On the other hand, we have fixed-price broadband and you...don't. And likely won't, ever.
Outside of the consumer market...forget it. Everybody uses pretty much the exact same kit with regionalized manuals and sometimes a local company's name slapped on top of a product produced by a multinational. I buy a big Sun Sparc server for my database; my counterpart in Germany buys the same thing with a Siemens logo on it, and my counterpart in Japan buys it with the Fujitsu label. (Then we all run Oracle on it.) And we all buy Cisco and Juniper routers...