Suppose you post your resumï½ on Monster.com. Who are you going to whitelist?
monster.com
That won't work unless you specifically make your resumé "confidential." Normally, your contact information is visible to potential employers so that they can contact you directly. The only time that e-mail is routed through monster.com is when you select the option labelled Save my Resume as confidential. In a buyer's market like this one, I'd recommend against doing anything that made one any less accessible to employers.
When somebody not on your whitelist sends you an email, they will be notified that they are not on your whitelist. They can either:
1. Pay $1 for you to see their message anyway 2. Don't pay anything, realizing that you will never see their message.
You call that simple? Jeebus!
So what happens when someone sees your resumé inline and puts it into the stack of ten people to be interviewed. They e-mail you and get your extortion autoresponder ("pay me $1 or I will throw the e-mail away unread"). Simple: The list of candidates to be interviewed drops from ten to nine.
Remember, the $1 per message amount could be changed, but as it stands I would make around $200 dollars a week, just from spam.
No you would not. Your responses would go to the fictitious addresses that the spammers provided. 99% of the messages would bounce and 1% would go to people that never sent you the spam (but whose address was forged on the spam).
This way, spammers pay me for using my bandwith.
No, you just use more bandwidth and they pay you nothing. Now you receive their spam (bandwidth used). Then you send an autoresponse (outgoing bandwidth used). Then you get a bounce from the autoresponse (using yet more bandwidth).
If this is such a foolproof plan, why aren't you doing it?
1) use a "throw-away" email address when including them in your resume.
Most people can't even deal with a single address.
2) develop a more friendly "white list" system that makes it easy for you to "open it up" for your potentual employers. So when I send mail out to someone important, I'm just one click away from adding them to my "white list".
Listen Miss Cleo, you have no way of knowing who will respond to your resumé. It might be a company that you send it to. It might be someone at that company working from home. It might be someone at another division that you did not know about. If your resumé was posted on a web site, it might be anyone responding.
Come on guys, I thought/.ers were nerds and knew how to write programs.
My mail server and e-mail processing software implement filtering that would probably make your head spin. Despite having dozens of e-mail accounts and three different domains, I probably see less the one percent of the spam that's sent to my domains. I have autoresponders for retired addresses, auto-complaints for mail from Brazil (to mail-abuse@nic.br), and I use multiple blacklists. Some of my e-mail addresses accept blind copies from untrusted senders and some do not.
But the spam problem needs to be solved for everyone, not just computer geeks that hang out on Slashdot. When the risk of fines and jail time make it unattractive, then we will have really solved the problem.
Yes, deploying a more trusted protocol will take several years to reach every corner of the Internet.
And cost billions of dollars and lead to massive disruptions.
Sounds like a good reason to start immedately.
It would take a long time to saw your arm off with a steak knife, too, but that does not mean that you should start doing so immediately.
The reason this could work is that the Internet is not as decentralized as you make it out to be.
Yes, it is. I'm a perfect example. I have a SOHO business cable connection and run a small mail server that serves three domains.
Between MSN/Hotmail, AOL/Netscape, Yahoo, Earthlink and the telcos/cablecos, you've got about 90% of personal mail accounts.
So what? You don't have mine. You also have tunnel vision. How many users in Australia are served by those ISPs? How many in the U.K. are? The Internet actually extends to countries other than the U.S. You may have stumbled on web pages with letters that you don't recognize. Those pages are often from other countries.
Any larger company has the staff to go upgrade sendmail.
Many larger companies don't even run "sendmail". They run expensive, proprietary mail servers that better meet their needs. And an "upgrade" could mean a horrible cost in time and dollars, not to mention the disruption that is likely to occur.
Most smaller companies have upstream ISPs that could relay from legacy SMTP to the secure version, or they just use the ISP relay directly.
I thought that the idea was to get rid of relaying, not require it. How does this hypothetical protocol help anyone if I leave an open relay on my "old-style" SMTP server and some spammer exploits it? In your scenario, my legacy SMTP server would relay through my ISP's "trusted" server and the spam would all go through.
In summary, the problem is a behavioral one. Blaming the protocol for spam is like blaming knives for the death of Nicole Simpson. Spam is theft and it should be illegal.
Seems to me that the problem could be self correcting if there were no forged headers.
So the headers trace back to a fly-by-night ISP in Gangdong-gu, Korea. What are you going to do about it?
Why can't SMTP relays reject mail whose most recent Received-From: header does not match the the sender?
Because some people use services like pobox.com which forward incoming mail but must use their ISP's mail server to send mail. Your proposed solution would put that useful service, and many like it, out of business. (No, you can't trust reply-to headers to work. Many packages wrongly reply to the purported from: address rather than the reply-to.)
Spam is a technical problem, so why can't we come up with a technical solution?
Because of the infrastructure costs associated with the existing protocols. How many mail servers are running on the Internet? How many clients are there that speak the existing SMTP protocol?
Redesigning SMTP to add encryption, identification, and authentication, is not a big problem. Deploying the new protocol is.
We should not have to undertake an effort that will disrupt business nationwide for months, if not years, just to avoid passing a law.
Why rely on a legal solution from many of the people who have brought us such brilliant solutions as the DMCA and the CDA
And let's not forget other laws, like the ones that make child pornography illegal and make it illegal to sell plutonium. Why is it that there is always some belief that laws are inherently bad? That some bad laws have been passed is no reason to abandon our entire legislative process and our form of government.
illegal is great in theory, but there is no possible way to enforce that on a world wide basis.
It's impossible to enforce almost any laws with 100% effectiveness, but that does mean that we should ignore the problem. If some sleazeball in Florida hires a firm in Korea to spam me, put his ass in jail.
white lists are the only way to stop spam.
I'm amazed by this user-hostile suggestion every time I hear it. Suppose you post your resumé on Monster.com. Who are you going to whitelist? Suppose your friend changes ISPs and then tries to e-mail you his new address? It won't be whitelisted, so it will bounce. Suppose to fill out a tech support request form. You don't know the address of the person that will contact you (or even if they will be the same domain as the web site).
What do you not understand about the word "license"? Sun's web page says that they are offering a free license and that you have to pay for media or download costs. What's so damned confusing or misleading about that?
I will just wait for someone to put it on P2P to download for free (Actual)
There's always some jackass that has to try to fsck things up for everyone. Thousands of man-hours that have gone into the development of Solaris and you felt the need to announce your intent to pirate it rather than pay a $20 download fee?
Sun is being incredibly generous in giving you a free license to such a robust, professional OS. Why don't you just pay the $20 and download it from them instead of being an ass about it?
I'm happy to see that Sony recognizes that a computer needs to be integrated into a home as a small, practical appliance. I gave my mother a computer and it's housed in a piece of furniture, with doors, that matches the style of her home. As a result of it being out-of-sight, it remains largely out-of-use. Unlike most Slashdot readers, she does not just think to turn the computer on to check e-mail, surf the web, etc. To her, it's a big, complicated device made up of multiple boxes (system unit, keyboard, monitor, modem, printer, mouse) and more wires than she can deal with. I have to wonder if she would use something like the Sony computer featured in the review...
1) Yeah, I know something that Sun doesn't. I'm a Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future when hardware allows primarily Sun was originally too cheap to make a non-SCSI version of Solaris in '93 and had poor 3rd party vendor support in '97.
If you make technology decisions based on what companies were doing five to ten years ago, I pity your employer.
The "non-SCSI" version of Solaris that you wanted a decade ago ('93): I guess you never considered that Sun's decision to only release only a SCSI version might have been based on market demand, engineering costs, and performance, did you? You say that they were "too cheap." Well, bucko, they are in business to make money. Did you expect them to lose money on a charity version of the software just for you?
But you still didn't answer my question: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? Your earlier statements imply that you do.
2) Irrelevant. Let others distribute it. [referring to bandwidth and ISO collectors]
You don't know what you are talking about. To download the software, you have to provide Sun with valuable marketing information, including your name, e-mail address, mailing address, job description and company name (if applicable), phone number, etc. You have to request licenses for the number of systems on which you will use it. If Sun released their software to mirrors, they could not collect that information. You also have no idea as to whether their attorneys consider the pre-download, click-through license to be necessary to protect their intellectual property.
3) Irrelevant. I've witnessed firsthand as corps deployed Solaris x86 over Linux for no other reason than it was completely free for small scale commercial use. Corprate+Free will always trump Hippie+Free to suits.
Not irrelevent -- and you've just created a straw man argument. I never claimed that "suits" would not prefer "Corporate+Free" software to "Hippie+Free" software. Nice try.
4) Redundant. Also blatantly false. [Referrung to my comment: 4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.]
What was false? Do you think that kids generally have credit cards to buy software? Do you think that most kids are "potential customers for Sun hardware and software"?
I previously left one comment you made unanswered: It's as if you were asleep for the last 10 years of Linux market penetration.
Sun is in business to make money, not to give away software to people too cheap to spend $20. Mandrake tried developing software and giving it away for a free download. Despite having one of the most popular Linux distros, Mandrake's business model failed and they are bankrupt. Market penetration isn't worth shit if your company goes bankrupt.
Summary: You've got a chip on your shoulder about Sun. You have whined about everything from the current measly $20 download fee to Solaris requiring SCSI a decade ago. This isn't about Solaris. It's about your transparent attempts to promote Linux. You had no interest in this release of Solaris x86 from the beginning. Your initial comments about a hypothetical "proof of concept system" were just a smoke screen. You have gone out of your way to criticize Solaris at every turn while praising Linux. You said it yourself. You are a "Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future."
Please don't respond. Your bias has been exposed and you are just going to dig yourself a deeper hole if you reply.
You make it sound like this release should only be for the pre-converted.
No I do not. I said that it was probably not the OS for you if you already decided that you did not like it at the previous version levels. It's not a drastic change from recent revisions. $20 is a great deal if you have never tried it or have been impressed with previous versions.
They might as well just charge the old full price if that is the case.
I was unwilling to buy it at the old full price, but I paid my $20 and downloaded it earlier today. That appears to counter your claim.
More widely dispersing the product is much more valuable than charging a nuisance fee for it.
Multiple retorts follow:
1. Sun's internal information: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? If so, please share. Sun has given previous versions away. They've charged for previous versions. I think that they have a pretty good idea of what is in their best interests.
2. ISO collectors: As I said before, if the $20 discourages the ISO collectors, then it is worthwhile. Sun probably has no desire to have their bandwidth sucked dry by people that download the OS and put it on a shelf to "try later." Someone who spends $20 on a product is much more likely to actually use it than someone who just picked it up for free.
3. Commercial respectability: Many people believe that businesses are hesitant to use "free" software because they are suspicious of it. It has been widely speculated that Sun's reason for charging for StarOffice was to make it a respected, commercial product, not to make a bundle selling it. Many, in fact, believe that there will be more copies of it in use at businesses because it is NOT free.
4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.
I just don't see how $20 should be an impediment to any professional who has an interest in Solaris 9 x86. If I thought that a proof-of-concept demo would impress my clients/employer, then I'd spend the $20 in a heartbeat.
It also dissuades many of us with prior experience with Solaris x86 that aren't particularly interested in paying for the privelege of being disappointed again.
If you were disappointed before, the Solaris x86 is probably not the OS for you. Others have been very favorably impressed with Solaris for x86 in previous incarnations. I have used it in v7 and v8 and was quite happy with it.
If Sun doesn't want sun.com to get swamped (which is an absurd idea anwyas), they could allow other sites to mirror this.
While Sun has a lot of bandwidth, it is not unlimited. I know that download speeds were much less impressive when Solaris v8 came out and was freely available. Also, by not allowing other sites to "mirror" it, they maintain control on the distribution and users can be sure that the ISOs are not corrupted, intentionally or otherwise. Yes, I know about MD5 checksums, but many people will download and burn ISOs without ever checking them.
As far as being poorly paid goes: I'd rather buy a V100 than pay for a Solaris x86 demo download.
I'm sure that Sun is happy to hear that. If you want to buy a Sun Fire V100 to set up a proof-of-concept system, I'm certain that Sun will be more than happy to help to configure a system that meets your needs.
The easier it is for one of us to put up a proof of concept system, the more likely it is that Solaris x86 will trickle into corps and bring expensive Sun boxes along for a ride.
If $20 is a stumbling block to you, then you are probably the worst-paid sysadmin in the world.
But even ignoring my uncalled-for snide remark, keeping the "free software" kiddies from sucking up all of the bandwidth is worth $20. Having downloads stall or crawl down at a glacially slow pace is a much worse impediment than paying $20. Amazingly, the $20 fee actually dissuades many of the "ISO collectors" that prowl the net.
You Free people need to go get a real fucking job and move out of your parent's basements and see what the rest of the world is doing.
I could not have said it better myself. "I'm part of the free software movement" is often just code for "I've never written a line of code in my life and don't contribute in any way to any free software projects. But when they are done, I'll be there to download them."
Nice way of trying to appear nice, but still screwing you...
Yeah! Why should I have to pay them for the bandwidth that I use? In fact, I think it really sucks that they won't pay the cost to FedEx the CDs to me. Cheap bastards.
And they conveniently don't mention that I have to pay for the blank CDs after I download their ISOs. First screw me out of $20 for gigabytes of bandwidth and then I find out I have to supply the blank CDs. Assholes.
Why can't they follow the Mandrake Linux model where they give away their product AND supply the bandwidth for free? It seems a shame to abandon that business model just because it drove Mandrake into bankruptcy.
I have _insisted_ that customers/suppliers/consultants speak to me in non-proprietary formats for about a year now, and I have never bumped into someone that didn't know how to send that DXF or DOC file as a PDF to me..
I'm glad that such an arrangement is working out for you. On the other hand, many business arrangements are dictated by the customer. Want that $45million satellite contract? Then you *will* produce documents in Word 7.0 format so that the customer can maintain them. You *will* do presentation and training materials using Powerpoint. Similarly, if Lockheed/Martin offers to "partner" with you on a business deal, you can bet that they will set the terms of the partnership, including data formats and programs to be used -- and if you can't live with those terms, then there they will find another company that can. If they like Word's revision tracking feature, then no amount of preaching about the beauty of open standards is going to convince them to collaborate with you using a package that does not support it.
Don't put down secretaries too fast, sometimes they are the most willing (and able) people in the whole transaction.
Nothing of the kind was meant on my part. But the ability to hire someone off the street who knows the packages, including all of the little peculiarities, shortcuts, features, and functions is worth a lot. The complexity of modern office suites is absolutely mind-numbing. It's no longer just the simple remapping of a few control-keys. There is no small loss of productivity while someone learns a new office suite.
A little patience and respect goes a LONG way in the business world, even if there are a lot of assholes out there. I tried bitter and ruthless, and it didn't work out for me.
Good words. I hope more people take them to heart.
When a company has monopolistic powers, there is foul play. The BSA doesn't.
No, Microsoft does. The point is that Microsoft is using its monopolistic powers to coerce people into agreeing to unreasonable licensing terms -- and that the BSA is enforcing those unreasonable terms.
I really thought that I had made that fairly clear in the original posting.
Maybe because she likes to "Think Different"
on
Baked Apple
·
· Score: 4, Funny
So did you think to ask her why she did it?
Another example of a Mac user inspired by the "Think Different" campaign. What other kind of half-baked reason could she have?
Speaking as a middle aged businessman (yes, check my website, my CV is there) I'd say the costs to a business of not being able to read am MSWord document are far lower than the costs to a business of being exposed to the sorts of security problems that Microsoft products bring, irrespective of BSA audits. If you're serious about business, you cannot afford to do business with Microsoft.
Let's not get melodramatic. The vast majority of successful businesses use Microsoft products. The worst security problem that they face is users writing passwords on Post-It notes. Firewalls, NAT, and anti-virus software mean that the average desktop is fairly well protected. Browser-based exploits are normally not a big issue for businesses because pages that take advantage of those vulnerabilities are rare, quickly taken down, and not typically something that an office worker would visit. Exploits that rely on flaws in Outlook are easily avoided through the use of other e-mail clients like Lotus Notes. While I would not deploy Microsoft's servers (web, e-mail, SQL, etc.), that hardly means that the average Windows workstation implodes every two weeks.
As to your comment about MS Word documents, when those documents are joint proposals worth large sums of money, it's damned important. You don't want to submit a proposal only to find that your non-MS word processor printed all of the "hidden" comments, messed up the layout of tables, or otherwise made your proposal look inferior to that of your competitors. When something it time-critical, you can't afford to lose days while people try to figure out why the document can't be read or looks different. It's those days of lost time that will put you at a competitive disadvantage. And, let us not forget the other proprietary formats for Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
I'm no apologist for Microsoft. I'd love to see the world go to open standards for file formats. But, until that happens, businesses will continue to exchange documents in proprietary Microsoft formats.
You also ignored my point about the ability one has to hire people. There are a lot more clerical and professional office workers that are familiar with Microsoft Office and Windows than there are those familiar with Debian and OpenOffice.org. Again, if you reduce your qualified applicant pool by 90% or more, you are at a competitive disadvantage.
If you do business with the BSA they will be keeping tabs on you, making sure you follow your word and keep your agreements. If you do not like that - and you clearly don't - dont buy from them.
And go out of business. Slashdot readers in high school and college can talk about how "3l33t" Linux and OpenOffice.org are, but let's wander over into the real world that most businesses occupy. Businesses exchange documents in Word format. They exchange presentations in PowerPoint. Formatting matters. Features matter. Being able to hire secretaries that know the software matters. No matter how much you like Linux or FreeBSD, you won't find a talented pool of officeworkers that know how to use it.
If anything I said was substantially incorrect, businesses would be switching in droves to open source alternatives. That's how capitalism works. If it was cost-competitive to use open source in most businesses, then Windows would not have a 90+% installed base.
There is no extortion. There is no coercion. There is no foul play.
When a company has monopolistic powers, there is foul play.
So are you saying you like to rely on the 3.5" floppy?
I don't "rely" on it. I simply find it the best alternative for certain functions.
It has to get phased out at some point so that companies will put something new in.
Why? They put CD drives in. They put DVD drives in. They put Zip drives in. They put LS-120 drives in.
ignoring that Apple did this 5 years ago across the board
Don't forget NeXT. They introduced computers in 1988 that had no floppy drives. We all know what a powerhouse they are now. I can't believe you would point to Apple as a good example. They have a tiny share of the market and it's only dropped further since that move (I'm not stating that it caused the further erosion, but it clearly was not a tremendous sales hit).
There are motherboards available with no parallel or serial ports too.
And how is this good? I have a GPS that speaks serial. Actually, three of them. My computers on my telescopes speak serial. My Atmel development equipment speaks serial. My printer speaks parallel. My EPROM programmer interfaces through the parallel port. I have an interface from my Futaba RC radio to my computer that uses the parallel port. I have a primitive logic analyzer that uses the parallel port. There are computers that have no video output, but it doesn't mean that they are better for the lack.
Think about 2 years from now, when perhaps a (for sake of arguement) SD (secure digital) card slot is standard on computers
Therein lies the problem. We don't have a standard and the only company that can set one is Microsoft (love or hate them). The 3.5" floppy became the standard because IBM chose it and everyone else was just cloning IBM machines. While a popular brand, Dell is not in that position, nor are they proposing or providing a standard. They are simply removing a storage device.
I say to Dell, if you want to do away with the floppy, then propose a viable alternative, get it endorsed by Microsoft, and get an consortium of major manufacturers to agree to support that alternative device.
Thats because we have MUCH better options than the floppy.
What are the "MUCH better options than floppy" for these scenarios?:
1. Collecting data (less than 1mb) from QNX embedded systems that contain no CD writers and are not on the Internet. I worked for the USPS on such machines and there are over 3,000 of them used in automated mail sortation equipment alone.
2. Installing the Ethernet drivers that came on floppies.
3. "Ghosting" a disk image.
4. Running the diagnostics that Maxtor supplied on a bootable floppy.
5. Transporting limited amounts of data to secure, non-networked machines.
CD-Rs take longer to write for small quantities of data and are much less robust. CD-ROM drives will fail long before floppy drives do in dusty environments. USB pen drives cost far too much to be tossed around like floppies. They also won't work under many OSs. DAT and other mag tapes are not bootable and are not good random-access devices. Nor do most PCs have them.
If there are alternatives which are always superior, what are they? Just what should Maxtor supply drive diagnostics on? CD? I bet that at least 24% of the PCs in use today are not even set up to boot from CD -- and I would not be surprised if it were more like 50%.
TCP/IP works just fine for its intended purposes today. Floppies don't.
If I want cheap media to which I can write a few hundred K of data and then give to someone, what works better than floppies? I've got two 24x CD writers in my main box, but there are still times when it's faster to make a floppy. For example, floppies are great when one wants to boot into DOS to flash system ROM. Making a bootable CD-ROM is much more of a hassle.
Look, nobody is going to take your precious floppy drives from you.
When they pry them from my cold, dead, hands...
But they have long since been obsoleted by superior alternatives, and for new hardware it's time to move on.
Superior for what? I have a self-booting memory test diskette that logs results to disk. I can copy it, hand it to a tech, he can use it in the field and bring the results back to me. You can't do that with a CD-ROM. USB pen drives are way too expensive and normally won't work under DOS. Many drive partitioning and copying programs rely on the ability to create a floppy diskette. There are anti-virus cleanup programs that rely on the ability to create a diskette. I just bought some cheap network cards. They came with driver floppies. A floppy will fit in my shirt pocket. A CD-ROM won't. A floppy is can lie on the desk and be pushed around for a month and still work. A CD-ROM would be too scratched to use.
A $12-per-PC savings is just not a compelling enough reason to get rid of floppy drives.
Slashdot Mirror
Suppose you post your resumï½ on Monster.com. Who are you going to whitelist?
monster.com
That won't work unless you specifically make your resumé "confidential." Normally, your contact information is visible to potential employers so that they can contact you directly. The only time that e-mail is routed through monster.com is when you select the option labelled Save my Resume as confidential. In a buyer's market like this one, I'd recommend against doing anything that made one any less accessible to employers.
Simple solution to this problem.
When somebody not on your whitelist sends you an email, they will be notified that they are not on your whitelist. They can either:
1. Pay $1 for you to see their message anyway
2. Don't pay anything, realizing that you will never see their message.
You call that simple? Jeebus!
So what happens when someone sees your resumé inline and puts it into the stack of ten people to be interviewed. They e-mail you and get your extortion autoresponder ("pay me $1 or I will throw the e-mail away unread"). Simple: The list of candidates to be interviewed drops from ten to nine.
Remember, the $1 per message amount could be changed, but as it stands I would make around $200 dollars a week, just from spam.
No you would not. Your responses would go to the fictitious addresses that the spammers provided. 99% of the messages would bounce and 1% would go to people that never sent you the spam (but whose address was forged on the spam).
This way, spammers pay me for using my bandwith.
No, you just use more bandwidth and they pay you nothing. Now you receive their spam (bandwidth used). Then you send an autoresponse (outgoing bandwidth used). Then you get a bounce from the autoresponse (using yet more bandwidth).
If this is such a foolproof plan, why aren't you doing it?
1) use a "throw-away" email address when including them in your resume.
/.ers were nerds and knew how to write programs.
Most people can't even deal with a single address.
2) develop a more friendly "white list" system that makes it easy for you to "open it up" for your potentual employers. So when I send mail out to someone important, I'm just one click away from adding them to my "white list".
Listen Miss Cleo, you have no way of knowing who will respond to your resumé. It might be a company that you send it to. It might be someone at that company working from home. It might be someone at another division that you did not know about. If your resumé was posted on a web site, it might be anyone responding.
Come on guys, I thought
My mail server and e-mail processing software implement filtering that would probably make your head spin. Despite having dozens of e-mail accounts and three different domains, I probably see less the one percent of the spam that's sent to my domains. I have autoresponders for retired addresses, auto-complaints for mail from Brazil (to mail-abuse@nic.br), and I use multiple blacklists. Some of my e-mail addresses accept blind copies from untrusted senders and some do not.
But the spam problem needs to be solved for everyone, not just computer geeks that hang out on Slashdot. When the risk of fines and jail time make it unattractive, then we will have really solved the problem.
Yes, deploying a more trusted protocol will take several years to reach every corner of the Internet.
And cost billions of dollars and lead to massive disruptions.
Sounds like a good reason to start immedately.
It would take a long time to saw your arm off with a steak knife, too, but that does not mean that you should start doing so immediately.
The reason this could work is that the Internet is not as decentralized as you make it out to be.
Yes, it is. I'm a perfect example. I have a SOHO business cable connection and run a small mail server that serves three domains.
Between MSN/Hotmail, AOL/Netscape, Yahoo, Earthlink and the telcos/cablecos, you've got about 90% of personal mail accounts.
So what? You don't have mine. You also have tunnel vision. How many users in Australia are served by those ISPs? How many in the U.K. are? The Internet actually extends to countries other than the U.S. You may have stumbled on web pages with letters that you don't recognize. Those pages are often from other countries.
Any larger company has the staff to go upgrade sendmail.
Many larger companies don't even run "sendmail". They run expensive, proprietary mail servers that better meet their needs. And an "upgrade" could mean a horrible cost in time and dollars, not to mention the disruption that is likely to occur.
Most smaller companies have upstream ISPs that could relay from legacy SMTP to the secure version, or they just use the ISP relay directly.
I thought that the idea was to get rid of relaying, not require it. How does this hypothetical protocol help anyone if I leave an open relay on my "old-style" SMTP server and some spammer exploits it? In your scenario, my legacy SMTP server would relay through my ISP's "trusted" server and the spam would all go through.
In summary, the problem is a behavioral one. Blaming the protocol for spam is like blaming knives for the death of Nicole Simpson. Spam is theft and it should be illegal.
Seems to me that the problem could be self correcting if there were no forged headers.
So the headers trace back to a fly-by-night ISP in Gangdong-gu, Korea. What are you going to do about it?
Why can't SMTP relays reject mail whose most recent Received-From: header does not match the the sender?
Because some people use services like pobox.com which forward incoming mail but must use their ISP's mail server to send mail. Your proposed solution would put that useful service, and many like it, out of business. (No, you can't trust reply-to headers to work. Many packages wrongly reply to the purported from: address rather than the reply-to.)
Spam is a technical problem, so why can't we come up with a technical solution?
Because of the infrastructure costs associated with the existing protocols. How many mail servers are running on the Internet? How many clients are there that speak the existing SMTP protocol?
Redesigning SMTP to add encryption, identification, and authentication, is not a big problem. Deploying the new protocol is.
We should not have to undertake an effort that will disrupt business nationwide for months, if not years, just to avoid passing a law.
Why rely on a legal solution from many of the people who have brought us such brilliant solutions as the DMCA and the CDA
And let's not forget other laws, like the ones that make child pornography illegal and make it illegal to sell plutonium. Why is it that there is always some belief that laws are inherently bad? That some bad laws have been passed is no reason to abandon our entire legislative process and our form of government.
illegal is great in theory, but there is no possible way to enforce that on a world wide basis.
It's impossible to enforce almost any laws with 100% effectiveness, but that does mean that we should ignore the problem. If some sleazeball in Florida hires a firm in Korea to spam me, put his ass in jail.
white lists are the only way to stop spam.
I'm amazed by this user-hostile suggestion every time I hear it. Suppose you post your resumé on Monster.com. Who are you going to whitelist? Suppose your friend changes ISPs and then tries to e-mail you his new address? It won't be whitelisted, so it will bounce. Suppose to fill out a tech support request form. You don't know the address of the person that will contact you (or even if they will be the same domain as the web site).
What do you not understand about the word free?
What do you not understand about the word "license"? Sun's web page says that they are offering a free license and that you have to pay for media or download costs. What's so damned confusing or misleading about that?
I will just wait for someone to put it on P2P to download for free (Actual)
There's always some jackass that has to try to fsck things up for everyone. Thousands of man-hours that have gone into the development of Solaris and you felt the need to announce your intent to pirate it rather than pay a $20 download fee?
Sun is being incredibly generous in giving you a free license to such a robust, professional OS. Why don't you just pay the $20 and download it from them instead of being an ass about it?
I'm happy to see that Sony recognizes that a computer needs to be integrated into a home as a small, practical appliance. I gave my mother a computer and it's housed in a piece of furniture, with doors, that matches the style of her home. As a result of it being out-of-sight, it remains largely out-of-use. Unlike most Slashdot readers, she does not just think to turn the computer on to check e-mail, surf the web, etc. To her, it's a big, complicated device made up of multiple boxes (system unit, keyboard, monitor, modem, printer, mouse) and more wires than she can deal with. I have to wonder if she would use something like the Sony computer featured in the review...
1) Yeah, I know something that Sun doesn't. I'm a Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future when hardware allows primarily Sun was originally too cheap to make a non-SCSI version of Solaris in '93 and had poor 3rd party vendor support in '97.
If you make technology decisions based on what companies were doing five to ten years ago, I pity your employer.
The "non-SCSI" version of Solaris that you wanted a decade ago ('93): I guess you never considered that Sun's decision to only release only a SCSI version might have been based on market demand, engineering costs, and performance, did you? You say that they were "too cheap." Well, bucko, they are in business to make money. Did you expect them to lose money on a charity version of the software just for you?
But you still didn't answer my question: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? Your earlier statements imply that you do.
2) Irrelevant. Let others distribute it.
[referring to bandwidth and ISO collectors]
You don't know what you are talking about. To download the software, you have to provide Sun with valuable marketing information, including your name, e-mail address, mailing address, job description and company name (if applicable), phone number, etc. You have to request licenses for the number of systems on which you will use it. If Sun released their software to mirrors, they could not collect that information. You also have no idea as to whether their attorneys consider the pre-download, click-through license to be necessary to protect their intellectual property.
3) Irrelevant. I've witnessed firsthand as corps deployed Solaris x86 over Linux for no other reason than it was completely free for small scale commercial use. Corprate+Free will always trump Hippie+Free to suits.
Not irrelevent -- and you've just created a straw man argument. I never claimed that "suits" would not prefer "Corporate+Free" software to "Hippie+Free" software. Nice try.
4) Redundant. Also blatantly false.
[Referrung to my comment: 4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.]
What was false? Do you think that kids generally have credit cards to buy software? Do you think that most kids are "potential customers for Sun hardware and software"?
I previously left one comment you made unanswered:
It's as if you were asleep for the last 10 years of Linux market penetration.
Sun is in business to make money, not to give away software to people too cheap to spend $20. Mandrake tried developing software and giving it away for a free download. Despite having one of the most popular Linux distros, Mandrake's business model failed and they are bankrupt. Market penetration isn't worth shit if your company goes bankrupt.
Summary: You've got a chip on your shoulder about Sun. You have whined about everything from the current measly $20 download fee to Solaris requiring SCSI a decade ago. This isn't about Solaris. It's about your transparent attempts to promote Linux. You had no interest in this release of Solaris x86 from the beginning. Your initial comments about a hypothetical "proof of concept system" were just a smoke screen. You have gone out of your way to criticize Solaris at every turn while praising Linux. You said it yourself. You are a "Linux user now and will likely advocate Linux replacements for Sun deployments in the future."
Please don't respond. Your bias has been exposed and you are just going to dig yourself a deeper hole if you reply.
Kinda like OpenBSD's OpenSSH, which happened to be running on a Sun box.
So you're saying that Sun Microsystems controlled the distribution of OpenSSH? If you say so...
You make it sound like this release should only be for the pre-converted.
No I do not. I said that it was probably not the OS for you if you already decided that you did not like it at the previous version levels. It's not a drastic change from recent revisions. $20 is a great deal if you have never tried it or have been impressed with previous versions.
They might as well just charge the old full price if that is the case.
I was unwilling to buy it at the old full price, but I paid my $20 and downloaded it earlier today. That appears to counter your claim.
More widely dispersing the product is much more valuable than charging a nuisance fee for it.
Multiple retorts follow:
1. Sun's internal information: Do you know something about Sun's costs and marketing studies that the rest of us do not? If so, please share. Sun has given previous versions away. They've charged for previous versions. I think that they have a pretty good idea of what is in their best interests.
2. ISO collectors: As I said before, if the $20 discourages the ISO collectors, then it is worthwhile. Sun probably has no desire to have their bandwidth sucked dry by people that download the OS and put it on a shelf to "try later." Someone who spends $20 on a product is much more likely to actually use it than someone who just picked it up for free.
3. Commercial respectability: Many people believe that businesses are hesitant to use "free" software because they are suspicious of it. It has been widely speculated that Sun's reason for charging for StarOffice was to make it a respected, commercial product, not to make a bundle selling it. Many, in fact, believe that there will be more copies of it in use at businesses because it is NOT free.
4. The kiddie factor: Ask for a credit card and you eliminate lots of downloads by kids -- who are, by and large, not potential customers for Sun hardware and software.
I just don't see how $20 should be an impediment to any professional who has an interest in Solaris 9 x86. If I thought that a proof-of-concept demo would impress my clients/employer, then I'd spend the $20 in a heartbeat.
It also dissuades many of us with prior experience with Solaris x86 that aren't particularly interested in paying for the privelege of being disappointed again.
If you were disappointed before, the Solaris x86 is probably not the OS for you. Others have been very favorably impressed with Solaris for x86 in previous incarnations. I have used it in v7 and v8 and was quite happy with it.
If Sun doesn't want sun.com to get swamped (which is an absurd idea anwyas), they could allow other sites to mirror this.
While Sun has a lot of bandwidth, it is not unlimited. I know that download speeds were much less impressive when Solaris v8 came out and was freely available. Also, by not allowing other sites to "mirror" it, they maintain control on the distribution and users can be sure that the ISOs are not corrupted, intentionally or otherwise. Yes, I know about MD5 checksums, but many people will download and burn ISOs without ever checking them.
As far as being poorly paid goes: I'd rather buy a V100 than pay for a Solaris x86 demo download.
I'm sure that Sun is happy to hear that. If you want to buy a Sun Fire V100 to set up a proof-of-concept system, I'm certain that Sun will be more than happy to help to configure a system that meets your needs.
The easier it is for one of us to put up a proof of concept system, the more likely it is that Solaris x86 will trickle into corps and bring expensive Sun boxes along for a ride.
If $20 is a stumbling block to you, then you are probably the worst-paid sysadmin in the world.
But even ignoring my uncalled-for snide remark, keeping the "free software" kiddies from sucking up all of the bandwidth is worth $20. Having downloads stall or crawl down at a glacially slow pace is a much worse impediment than paying $20. Amazingly, the $20 fee actually dissuades many of the "ISO collectors" that prowl the net.
You Free people need to go get a real fucking job and move out of your parent's basements and see what the rest of the world is doing.
I could not have said it better myself. "I'm part of the free software movement" is often just code for "I've never written a line of code in my life and don't contribute in any way to any free software projects. But when they are done, I'll be there to download them."
Nice way of trying to appear nice, but still screwing you...
Yeah! Why should I have to pay them for the bandwidth that I use? In fact, I think it really sucks that they won't pay the cost to FedEx the CDs to me. Cheap bastards.
And they conveniently don't mention that I have to pay for the blank CDs after I download their ISOs. First screw me out of $20 for gigabytes of bandwidth and then I find out I have to supply the blank CDs. Assholes.
Why can't they follow the Mandrake Linux model where they give away their product AND supply the bandwidth for free? It seems a shame to abandon that business model just because it drove Mandrake into bankruptcy.
I have _insisted_ that customers/suppliers/consultants speak to me in non-proprietary formats for about a year now, and I have never bumped into someone that didn't know how to send that DXF or DOC file as a PDF to me..
I'm glad that such an arrangement is working out for you. On the other hand, many business arrangements are dictated by the customer. Want that $45million satellite contract? Then you *will* produce documents in Word 7.0 format so that the customer can maintain them. You *will* do presentation and training materials using Powerpoint. Similarly, if Lockheed/Martin offers to "partner" with you on a business deal, you can bet that they will set the terms of the partnership, including data formats and programs to be used -- and if you can't live with those terms, then there they will find another company that can. If they like Word's revision tracking feature, then no amount of preaching about the beauty of open standards is going to convince them to collaborate with you using a package that does not support it.
Don't put down secretaries too fast, sometimes they are the most willing (and able) people in the whole transaction.
Nothing of the kind was meant on my part. But the ability to hire someone off the street who knows the packages, including all of the little peculiarities, shortcuts, features, and functions is worth a lot. The complexity of modern office suites is absolutely mind-numbing. It's no longer just the simple remapping of a few control-keys. There is no small loss of productivity while someone learns a new office suite.
A little patience and respect goes a LONG way in the business world, even if there are a lot of assholes out there. I tried bitter and ruthless, and it didn't work out for me.
Good words. I hope more people take them to heart.
When a company has monopolistic powers, there is foul play.
The BSA doesn't.
No, Microsoft does. The point is that Microsoft is using its monopolistic powers to coerce people into agreeing to unreasonable licensing terms -- and that the BSA is enforcing those unreasonable terms.
I really thought that I had made that fairly clear in the original posting.
So did you think to ask her why she did it?
Another example of a Mac user inspired by the "Think Different" campaign. What other kind of half-baked reason could she have?
Speaking as a middle aged businessman (yes, check my website, my CV is there) I'd say the costs to a business of not being able to read am MSWord document are far lower than the costs to a business of being exposed to the sorts of security problems that Microsoft products bring, irrespective of BSA audits. If you're serious about business, you cannot afford to do business with Microsoft.
Let's not get melodramatic. The vast majority of successful businesses use Microsoft products. The worst security problem that they face is users writing passwords on Post-It notes. Firewalls, NAT, and anti-virus software mean that the average desktop is fairly well protected. Browser-based exploits are normally not a big issue for businesses because pages that take advantage of those vulnerabilities are rare, quickly taken down, and not typically something that an office worker would visit. Exploits that rely on flaws in Outlook are easily avoided through the use of other e-mail clients like Lotus Notes. While I would not deploy Microsoft's servers (web, e-mail, SQL, etc.), that hardly means that the average Windows workstation implodes every two weeks.
As to your comment about MS Word documents, when those documents are joint proposals worth large sums of money, it's damned important. You don't want to submit a proposal only to find that your non-MS word processor printed all of the "hidden" comments, messed up the layout of tables, or otherwise made your proposal look inferior to that of your competitors. When something it time-critical, you can't afford to lose days while people try to figure out why the document can't be read or looks different. It's those days of lost time that will put you at a competitive disadvantage. And, let us not forget the other proprietary formats for Excel, PowerPoint, etc.
I'm no apologist for Microsoft. I'd love to see the world go to open standards for file formats. But, until that happens, businesses will continue to exchange documents in proprietary Microsoft formats.
You also ignored my point about the ability one has to hire people. There are a lot more clerical and professional office workers that are familiar with Microsoft Office and Windows than there are those familiar with Debian and OpenOffice.org. Again, if you reduce your qualified applicant pool by 90% or more, you are at a competitive disadvantage.
If you do business with the BSA they will be keeping tabs on you, making sure you follow your word and keep your agreements. If you do not like that - and you clearly don't - dont buy from them.
And go out of business. Slashdot readers in high school and college can talk about how "3l33t" Linux and OpenOffice.org are, but let's wander over into the real world that most businesses occupy. Businesses exchange documents in Word format. They exchange presentations in PowerPoint. Formatting matters. Features matter. Being able to hire secretaries that know the software matters. No matter how much you like Linux or FreeBSD, you won't find a talented pool of officeworkers that know how to use it.
If anything I said was substantially incorrect, businesses would be switching in droves to open source alternatives. That's how capitalism works. If it was cost-competitive to use open source in most businesses, then Windows would not have a 90+% installed base.
There is no extortion. There is no coercion. There is no foul play.
When a company has monopolistic powers, there is foul play.
You are forgetting that most people, unlike you, have:
1. Disposable income of more than $12.
Reading wasn't your strong point in school, was it? The entire point of my message was that $12 isn't much money.
2. Other things to do at 11pm.
I'm sure you do. I hope you and Rosy Palm have a lovely evening.
So are you saying you like to rely on the 3.5" floppy?
I don't "rely" on it. I simply find it the best alternative for certain functions.
It has to get phased out at some point so that companies will put something new in.
Why? They put CD drives in. They put DVD drives in. They put Zip drives in. They put LS-120 drives in.
ignoring that Apple did this 5 years ago across the board
Don't forget NeXT. They introduced computers in 1988 that had no floppy drives. We all know what a powerhouse they are now. I can't believe you would point to Apple as a good example. They have a tiny share of the market and it's only dropped further since that move (I'm not stating that it caused the further erosion, but it clearly was not a tremendous sales hit).
There are motherboards available with no parallel or serial ports too.
And how is this good? I have a GPS that speaks serial. Actually, three of them. My computers on my telescopes speak serial. My Atmel development equipment speaks serial. My printer speaks parallel. My EPROM programmer interfaces through the parallel port. I have an interface from my Futaba RC radio to my computer that uses the parallel port. I have a primitive logic analyzer that uses the parallel port. There are computers that have no video output, but it doesn't mean that they are better for the lack.
Think about 2 years from now, when perhaps a (for sake of arguement) SD (secure digital) card slot is standard on computers
Therein lies the problem. We don't have a standard and the only company that can set one is Microsoft (love or hate them). The 3.5" floppy became the standard because IBM chose it and everyone else was just cloning IBM machines. While a popular brand, Dell is not in that position, nor are they proposing or providing a standard. They are simply removing a storage device.
I say to Dell, if you want to do away with the floppy, then propose a viable alternative, get it endorsed by Microsoft, and get an consortium of major manufacturers to agree to support that alternative device.
Thats because we have MUCH better options than the floppy.
What are the "MUCH better options than floppy" for these scenarios?:
1. Collecting data (less than 1mb) from QNX embedded systems that contain no CD writers and are not on the Internet. I worked for the USPS on such machines and there are over 3,000 of them used in automated mail sortation equipment alone.
2. Installing the Ethernet drivers that came on floppies.
3. "Ghosting" a disk image.
4. Running the diagnostics that Maxtor supplied on a bootable floppy.
5. Transporting limited amounts of data to secure, non-networked machines.
CD-Rs take longer to write for small quantities of data and are much less robust. CD-ROM drives will fail long before floppy drives do in dusty environments. USB pen drives cost far too much to be tossed around like floppies. They also won't work under many OSs. DAT and other mag tapes are not bootable and are not good random-access devices. Nor do most PCs have them.
If there are alternatives which are always superior, what are they? Just what should Maxtor supply drive diagnostics on? CD? I bet that at least 24% of the PCs in use today are not even set up to boot from CD -- and I would not be surprised if it were more like 50%.
TCP/IP works just fine for its intended purposes today. Floppies don't.
If I want cheap media to which I can write a few hundred K of data and then give to someone, what works better than floppies? I've got two 24x CD writers in my main box, but there are still times when it's faster to make a floppy. For example, floppies are great when one wants to boot into DOS to flash system ROM. Making a bootable CD-ROM is much more of a hassle.
Look, nobody is going to take your precious floppy drives from you.
When they pry them from my cold, dead, hands...
But they have long since been obsoleted by superior alternatives, and for new hardware it's time to move on.
Superior for what? I have a self-booting memory test diskette that logs results to disk. I can copy it, hand it to a tech, he can use it in the field and bring the results back to me. You can't do that with a CD-ROM. USB pen drives are way too expensive and normally won't work under DOS. Many drive partitioning and copying programs rely on the ability to create a floppy diskette. There are anti-virus cleanup programs that rely on the ability to create a diskette. I just bought some cheap network cards. They came with driver floppies. A floppy will fit in my shirt pocket. A CD-ROM won't. A floppy is can lie on the desk and be pushed around for a month and still work. A CD-ROM would be too scratched to use.
A $12-per-PC savings is just not a compelling enough reason to get rid of floppy drives.