Actually, DR-DOS isn't as dead as you imply; it's quite a serious player in the embedded systems market of all things. Not too big on the "updated website" business though - check out the date on the press release, bottom right.;)
From the context, I'd say he was talking about pitching this to corporate types who don't understand the way OSS works - "deployment", not "development". When you are dealing with PHBs who are entrenched in Microsoft and you suggest Linux, you stand a far better chance if you precede "Linux" not with "GNU/" but one of the names the PHB has read about in Forbes or whatever. That means "Redhat Linux", "SuSE Linux", and at a pinch "Mandrake Linux", the rest just don't get enough column inches where it counts.
And yes, it sucks, but sometimes it really does work that way unfortunately.
Hitting the wires right at the start of the day's trading. Novell's stock is up 28% already and climbing fast, not that than means much since it was only worth a few bucks to start with, but it's a very positive sign. Obviously Wall Street hasn't consigned Linux to the depths of SCO's IP bin just yet.
Plus, Novell is another company with a lot of "history" with Microsoft, so I don't know which is going to be more enjoyable; watching Novell's posturing with Microsoft, or watching them kick SCO from here to the SEC's offices. Either way, I'm sure it is going to be "entertaining, in a Jerry Springer kind of way.";)
...and great for Apache. The underlying message seems to be that switching from Apache to IIS will either cause your company to fail outright, or at best cost you a huge chunk of resources while you switch to and from. That fact that Network Solutions is on the list is even better, because for many managers and users NetSol is *the*.com company, and if they can't make IIS work...
Depends on the ISP. Generally speaking mid-sized ISPs have pretty good abuse desks, mainly because they are big enough to have a decent technical team, yet small enough to not be swamped by abuse reports. That said, this kind of thing is a no brainer for the scripted response type of first line support used by large ISPs. Basically it boils down to "look for an IP in the mail headers that falls within a set of provided IPs and if present, click some widget to block outbound email from that IP". All you need then is some process to advise the customer of the problem and remove the block once the problem is resolved.
As you say, DNSBLs (non-dynamic ones anyway) have been rendered largely obsolete by the spamnets of compromised machines. There are so many of the damn things that a spammer can use an IP for a couple of days, discard it and not need to use it again for a couple of months, by which time it is probably off the DNSBLs again. This approach adopted by Telia (and Demon Internet in the UK, others?) is the only efficient way a large ISP can deal with this issue without incurring massive labour costs that I can think of.
Why do you automatically assume that an integrated suite is better than a load of separate applications?
I don't, it's an apples to oranges thing, and for some an apple is better than an orange while for others it's the other way around, and I actually prefer seperate applications. Thanks to the Slashdot effect, I've not been able to ascertain whether Ability is still a monolithic application or not (it used to be a single binary called "ability.exe"). That approach would be non-starter for a feature bloated program like MS Office, but as you point out it does offer the possibility of much tighter embedding of objects, something Ability did indeed excel at, if you will excuse the pun.
Ability? Wow, talk about a blast from the past, they've certainly been off my radar for a while, having last used their software ages ago. Anyway, Ability is in no way a competitor for MS Office, I think there is a little CNet inflation going on here. Ability Office was an integrated office application like ClarisWorks or Microsoft Works, not an application suite like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Against the former, it might make an impact, the latter is a more difficult proposition IMHO. Where Ability really used to shift boxes was with the low-end PC software bundle market, and I don't see this time around being too much different.
I think it really depends on how you spin it. It goes without saying that someone has to be making money from spam, and also that there are gullable fools who buy the stuff on offer. The problem is that many of the gullable fools are not the same ones that actually buy the porn and pills being peddled, but those that by the spamming services too.
The spam "business" seems to be constructed in several levels. At the top you have the metaspammers (see the ROKSO for a list) who don't really sell anything other than spamming tools and services. These guys are the ones raking in the bulk of the cash, and are probably the only ones with the werewithal and resources to run the global spamnets without getting nailed (so far). Underneath those is a mesh of "affliate programs" and small fry who do spam their own products and finally, at the bottom, are the dregs of humanity that actually buy the physical products.
The problem is, that everytime something like this comes up on Slashdot, Kuroshin, or even the "mainstream" TV and press media, there is a chance that someone has the following chain of "reasoning":
There is money to be made in spam.
Why shouldn't that be me?
How do I spam?
And all this does is send another gullable fool off to the metaspammers that peddle the "guaranteed" opt-in address lists, bulk mailers and similar services. The money floats up to the top of the tree and the cycle perpetuates. Occasionally, I'm sure, one of these guys gets lucky and makes a decent amount of cash in exchange for thier soul, but I'll bet that the majority do not, and soon pull out of the game with a somewhat lighter bank balance. The spam business seems to be a pyramid scheme in all but name, if you ask me.
Re:Better served by a standard *nix shell
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
Ever hear of "GNU's Not Unix"? Pretty much all of the core command line tools from "bc" to "zcat" (passing through "find" and "grep" en route) compile, or have versions for Win32. Most of them are in fact available from the site I linked to if you look. I can run nearly all my bash scripts on Win32 without any modification, and in combination with JP Software's 4NT or Take Command can actually as much done on Windows before I have to resort to a more thorough language. The biggest problem with Windows scripting is that pipes are not real-time; each command has to finish before the next stage of the pipe can start.
Samba is distributed under the GPL. SCO distributes Samba, both as part of its Linux product and, as recently announced, with its commericial SCO Unix product. If you refuse to accept the GPL license for a product (SCO don't) then you may not distribute that product at all.
The Samba's teams previous stance was to the moral high ground, and that since SCO was not totally infringing the GPL, they would not try to prevent them from distributing it. Now SCO is violating the GPL, they can keep the moral high ground and revoke SCO's right to distribute their product on copyright grounds. SCO could try and dispute that is valid as well, but that would also entail picking a fight with the movie, music and printing industries amongst others. I doubt even SCO is that dumb.
I wonder what stance the Samba team is going to take on this? They (quite rightly, IMHO) stood by and let SCO bundle the Samba package with SCO Unix because they were doing so without breaking the GPL, only bending it. Now that, they are applying further restrictions to the license and are in clear breach of the GPL they could tell SCO to stick it without the slightest stain on the conciences that let SCO continue to distribute Samba in the first place.
I'm sure the remaining users of SCO Unix are going to love how their plans to integrate their systems with Windows are going to have to be shelved until SCO can write their own (like that's ever going to happen). SCO strategy update:
Piss off IBM
Get counter-sued by IBM
Piss off OSS community
Get sued by RedHat, SuSE...
Violate GPL
Get sued by EFF
Piss off SCO customers
Lose significant chunk of customer base
???
Profit^H^H^H^H^H^H Devastating loss & jail time (oops!)
I wonder if Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen have doing some moon lighting they didn't tell us about.
Re:Better served by a standard *nix shell
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 2, Informative
You mean like zsh, compiled natively for Win32? Along with a whole bunch of other GNU tools for that matter. I've seen native versions of csh and ksh too, but the bash port seems to rely on CygWin, which makes it a little more bulky, but still very useable.
What if this shell actually knocks the socks off *sh?
That's a bit of a recurive comment isn't it, what with the glob/regexp "*sh" including "msh" and all? But I suppose it'll go on to pick itself up by its own bootlaces, invent the monopole magnet, debug the rest of Windows and couple of other impossible things before heading off to Milliway's for breakfast.
Funny this should come up today, because in yesterday's paper here in the UK was a picture of a toddler from behind (I'd guess about 2-3 years old). She had quite severe ricketts (which is also caused by Vitamin D deficiency) such that her legs had a similar degree of curvature to a banana.
You can blame Margaret Thatcher for stopping children's milk in our schools way back when if you want, but the problem is far more serious than that, I think. With all the faddy and medically unproven diets such as Atkins being bandied about, how many parents are foisting those diets on thier children without any idea of the effects? I will not be at all suprised if medical disorders developed by bad diets in childhood are going to become as much of a problem for the health services as smoking related illnesses are now.
Good point; I'd overlooked that the US has smaller gallons than us Brits, maybe you should try and adopt the Metric system or something?;) Anyway, on the otherhand, you are taking 20% of my 30mpg to get to the US equivalent of 24mpg, rather than the combined urban/extra-urban mileage. That's a touch under 35mpg at present, which means I'm actually getting a combined average of 30mpg (us), which I think is pretty good for an engine of that capacity.
Ahh, but this is US centric Slashdot, and in the US the average car is actually a four tonne SUV I gather. Jokes aside, I get over 30 miles per gallon urban mileage in my 6 cylinder, 2.5l BMW and over 50mpg extra-urban. 25mpg is not what I'd call "reasonably efficient" either, it's what I'd call "crap".
Interesting choice of post to jump into the middle of the thread on, would that be a hint by any chance? If so, foolish, foolish thing to do; there are a lot of people capable of doing that that read Slashdot and one of them is almost certainly going to write the thing. I can only hope that they don't get caught, because if found guilty they are going to get one *hell* of a sentence for making a rash decision.
Don't post/give out the address in the first place.;)
Use a fairly trivial bit of JavaScript to mangle the address, but render it properly in the browser.
Referral to my CGI based contact form that doesn't include the addresses on the client.
Lame mangling such as used by Slashdot.
Note that posting in plain test is not up there. I've recently dumped an email address I've been using for over a decade due to an inordinate amount of spams and Joe Jobs. Times have changed, and so have my attitudes to giving out my email address. Total spams in my inbox since doing this in August is just three (yes that's right - I've seen one spam a month), previously I was getting (with filtering) about 40 a day!
Obviously Amazon is aware of all of the "Mickey Mouse" and "Slashdot" type accounts that the New York Times garners. I would assume that Amazon's intent is that by requesting some information that you would not be prepared to share with others they can avoid this, and thus prevent some abuse. Let's face it, Amazon isn't some dodgy peddler of porn and pills that trades from a different URL each week, plus if you have got an account, it was probably to order something, which means they already *have* your credit card number.
I don't think this will fly. It sounds good, but the result will be a myriad of small cases that swamp the justice system and the only real winners will be the lawyers. Faxes are much more traceable, despite what telcos might like you to believe, and are tied to an address and therefore to a person much easier, making the TCPA a more effective deterrant. A much better way for spam might be to allow an offshoot of Government (FTC/FCC in the US, OFCOM in the UK) to collate spam from the public and pursue prosecutions. Any money gained could then go into the national treasury and either offset some taxes or be spent on improved public services.
This has several advantages, not least of which is that the entire public can benefit from prosecutions, but also it avoids duplication of effort and allows the big players to be identified first. Plus, if enough countries start to counter spam in this way, then cooperation between the various agencies, or even an anti-spam version of Interpol is a logical next step.
how do you legislate that from inside a single country?
The "Axis of Spam"? (That'll go down a treat when countries of a certain religious belief get put on it.) Besides, while most spam might appear to be originating from servers in the far east, the spammers and spamvertised sites almost always track back to the US and EU, in that order. Amsterdam seems to have recently become the Lagos away from home for the 419 scammers for example, and almost all the "herbal viagra" seems to be US. If the proposed legislation enables prosecution of the source, then these scum will not only have to operate off shore, but live off shore, which should hopefully remove some of the incentives. I'll believe it when I see it though.
They might be doing Linux, but they are certainly not keen on the idea and are only doing so because their customers keep asking for it. Well, at least they are listening to their customers I suppose, so there is that, but it still feels to me like Sun has seriously lost its sense of direction recently. I suspect a lot of FUD filled editorial is going to be written under banners like "Has the SPARC gone out for Sun?" real soon now.
Still, at least Apple's star seems to be rising at the moment.;)
Yeah, another hosts file full of 127.0.0.1's - a much more up to date list is also available from the Kazaa Lite sites. Wonderful if you don't run a web server on localhost, but it still tries to establish a connection to your non-existant local server before failing. Try replacing the 127.0.0.1's with 0.0.0.0's. Much cleaner, and it should be slightly faster too, not that you'll notice.
This does not seem a very resiliant spam net to me; a lot of the binaries you have examined seem to contain hardcoded values of hosts in the domains "768men.info", "bubra.biz" and "ucp6.biz". You even imply a hardcoded IP address (66.227.96.168) currently being hosted by FDCServers.net. One angle of attack might be to talk to the registrars and ISPs responsible for those domains and try and get them delisted under any AUP they might have. If you can get the domains delisted, then the entire spam net falls apart and the operator will have to start over. Clearly there is criminal behaviour going on here so you have some leverage, albeit not much, to try and convince them to take this course of action.
As to the law enforcement agencies, spam is simply not a serious crime in their eyes, especially given the amount of effort they need to effect a successful prosecution. Sure, the network is being used for spam now, but a simple change to the.exe being hosted by FDCServers (or whatever hosting company the spammer is using at the time) could change that into *anything*. Make sure that you make that clear. Give them a list of any compromised IPs you have identified and suggest that they see if any of those IPs have also been used to launch DoS attacks, etc (likely, given the lack of patching). If you can establish a link to a high profile case then that might be sufficient to kick start an investigation.
I don't know....I know a few of the smaller record stores around my own home are doing just fine.
Not round here. In the three towns nearest me there are *zero* independent music shops left, off the top of my head I can think of seven we used to have, there may have been more. Now we just have the big music chains and supermarkets, plus one of music/game exchange type places.
It's not P2P that was to blame though; it's low margins when you can only buy a dozen copies of the latest pap instead of the thousands a chain (or Amazon) buys, but still have to compete on price. Friendly service and a willingness to spend half and hour helping you track down an obscure indie CD on import apparently don't matter a damn if the big store up the street is selling Britney for 50p less.
We got a major book retailer arrive in our town late last year. Admittedly, it's quite nice and you can get a coffee and danish, but one of our "mom & pop" bookstores has gone already and the other is clearly struggling. I suspect it'll either be a coffee shop or mobile phone store by next summer. Survival of the fittest isn't all it's cracked up to be...
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, DR-DOS isn't as dead as you imply; it's quite a serious player in the embedded systems market of all things. Not too big on the "updated website" business though - check out the date on the press release, bottom right. ;)
And yes, it sucks, but sometimes it really does work that way unfortunately.
Plus, Novell is another company with a lot of "history" with Microsoft, so I don't know which is going to be more enjoyable; watching Novell's posturing with Microsoft, or watching them kick SCO from here to the SEC's offices. Either way, I'm sure it is going to be "entertaining, in a Jerry Springer kind of way." ;)
...and great for Apache. The underlying message seems to be that switching from Apache to IIS will either cause your company to fail outright, or at best cost you a huge chunk of resources while you switch to and from. That fact that Network Solutions is on the list is even better, because for many managers and users NetSol is *the* .com company, and if they can't make IIS work...
Depends on the ISP. Generally speaking mid-sized ISPs have pretty good abuse desks, mainly because they are big enough to have a decent technical team, yet small enough to not be swamped by abuse reports. That said, this kind of thing is a no brainer for the scripted response type of first line support used by large ISPs. Basically it boils down to "look for an IP in the mail headers that falls within a set of provided IPs and if present, click some widget to block outbound email from that IP". All you need then is some process to advise the customer of the problem and remove the block once the problem is resolved.
As you say, DNSBLs (non-dynamic ones anyway) have been rendered largely obsolete by the spamnets of compromised machines. There are so many of the damn things that a spammer can use an IP for a couple of days, discard it and not need to use it again for a couple of months, by which time it is probably off the DNSBLs again. This approach adopted by Telia (and Demon Internet in the UK, others?) is the only efficient way a large ISP can deal with this issue without incurring massive labour costs that I can think of.
I don't, it's an apples to oranges thing, and for some an apple is better than an orange while for others it's the other way around, and I actually prefer seperate applications. Thanks to the Slashdot effect, I've not been able to ascertain whether Ability is still a monolithic application or not (it used to be a single binary called "ability.exe"). That approach would be non-starter for a feature bloated program like MS Office, but as you point out it does offer the possibility of much tighter embedding of objects, something Ability did indeed excel at, if you will excuse the pun.
Ability? Wow, talk about a blast from the past, they've certainly been off my radar for a while, having last used their software ages ago. Anyway, Ability is in no way a competitor for MS Office, I think there is a little CNet inflation going on here. Ability Office was an integrated office application like ClarisWorks or Microsoft Works, not an application suite like Microsoft Office or OpenOffice. Against the former, it might make an impact, the latter is a more difficult proposition IMHO. Where Ability really used to shift boxes was with the low-end PC software bundle market, and I don't see this time around being too much different.
I think it really depends on how you spin it. It goes without saying that someone has to be making money from spam, and also that there are gullable fools who buy the stuff on offer. The problem is that many of the gullable fools are not the same ones that actually buy the porn and pills being peddled, but those that by the spamming services too.
The spam "business" seems to be constructed in several levels. At the top you have the metaspammers (see the ROKSO for a list) who don't really sell anything other than spamming tools and services. These guys are the ones raking in the bulk of the cash, and are probably the only ones with the werewithal and resources to run the global spamnets without getting nailed (so far). Underneath those is a mesh of "affliate programs" and small fry who do spam their own products and finally, at the bottom, are the dregs of humanity that actually buy the physical products.
The problem is, that everytime something like this comes up on Slashdot, Kuroshin, or even the "mainstream" TV and press media, there is a chance that someone has the following chain of "reasoning":
- There is money to be made in spam.
- Why shouldn't that be me?
- How do I spam?
And all this does is send another gullable fool off to the metaspammers that peddle the "guaranteed" opt-in address lists, bulk mailers and similar services. The money floats up to the top of the tree and the cycle perpetuates. Occasionally, I'm sure, one of these guys gets lucky and makes a decent amount of cash in exchange for thier soul, but I'll bet that the majority do not, and soon pull out of the game with a somewhat lighter bank balance. The spam business seems to be a pyramid scheme in all but name, if you ask me.Ever hear of "GNU's Not Unix"? Pretty much all of the core command line tools from "bc" to "zcat" (passing through "find" and "grep" en route) compile, or have versions for Win32. Most of them are in fact available from the site I linked to if you look. I can run nearly all my bash scripts on Win32 without any modification, and in combination with JP Software's 4NT or Take Command can actually as much done on Windows before I have to resort to a more thorough language. The biggest problem with Windows scripting is that pipes are not real-time; each command has to finish before the next stage of the pipe can start.
The Samba's teams previous stance was to the moral high ground, and that since SCO was not totally infringing the GPL, they would not try to prevent them from distributing it. Now SCO is violating the GPL, they can keep the moral high ground and revoke SCO's right to distribute their product on copyright grounds. SCO could try and dispute that is valid as well, but that would also entail picking a fight with the movie, music and printing industries amongst others. I doubt even SCO is that dumb.
I'm sure the remaining users of SCO Unix are going to love how their plans to integrate their systems with Windows are going to have to be shelved until SCO can write their own (like that's ever going to happen). SCO strategy update:
- Piss off IBM
- Get counter-sued by IBM
- Piss off OSS community
- Get sued by RedHat, SuSE...
- Violate GPL
- Get sued by EFF
- Piss off SCO customers
- Lose significant chunk of customer base
- ???
- Profit^H^H^H^H^H^H Devastating loss & jail time (oops!)
I wonder if Jack Valenti or Hilary Rosen have doing some moon lighting they didn't tell us about.You mean like zsh, compiled natively for Win32? Along with a whole bunch of other GNU tools for that matter. I've seen native versions of csh and ksh too, but the bash port seems to rely on CygWin, which makes it a little more bulky, but still very useable.
That's a bit of a recurive comment isn't it, what with the glob/regexp "*sh" including "msh" and all? But I suppose it'll go on to pick itself up by its own bootlaces, invent the monopole magnet, debug the rest of Windows and couple of other impossible things before heading off to Milliway's for breakfast.
You can blame Margaret Thatcher for stopping children's milk in our schools way back when if you want, but the problem is far more serious than that, I think. With all the faddy and medically unproven diets such as Atkins being bandied about, how many parents are foisting those diets on thier children without any idea of the effects? I will not be at all suprised if medical disorders developed by bad diets in childhood are going to become as much of a problem for the health services as smoking related illnesses are now.
Good point; I'd overlooked that the US has smaller gallons than us Brits, maybe you should try and adopt the Metric system or something? ;) Anyway, on the otherhand, you are taking 20% of my 30mpg to get to the US equivalent of 24mpg, rather than the combined urban/extra-urban mileage. That's a touch under 35mpg at present, which means I'm actually getting a combined average of 30mpg (us), which I think is pretty good for an engine of that capacity.
Ahh, but this is US centric Slashdot, and in the US the average car is actually a four tonne SUV I gather. Jokes aside, I get over 30 miles per gallon urban mileage in my 6 cylinder, 2.5l BMW and over 50mpg extra-urban. 25mpg is not what I'd call "reasonably efficient" either, it's what I'd call "crap".
Interesting choice of post to jump into the middle of the thread on, would that be a hint by any chance? If so, foolish, foolish thing to do; there are a lot of people capable of doing that that read Slashdot and one of them is almost certainly going to write the thing. I can only hope that they don't get caught, because if found guilty they are going to get one *hell* of a sentence for making a rash decision.
- Don't post/give out the address in the first place.
;)
- Use a fairly trivial bit of JavaScript to mangle the address, but render it properly in the browser.
- Referral to my CGI based contact form that doesn't include the addresses on the client.
- Lame mangling such as used by Slashdot.
Note that posting in plain test is not up there. I've recently dumped an email address I've been using for over a decade due to an inordinate amount of spams and Joe Jobs. Times have changed, and so have my attitudes to giving out my email address. Total spams in my inbox since doing this in August is just three (yes that's right - I've seen one spam a month), previously I was getting (with filtering) about 40 a day!Obviously Amazon is aware of all of the "Mickey Mouse" and "Slashdot" type accounts that the New York Times garners. I would assume that Amazon's intent is that by requesting some information that you would not be prepared to share with others they can avoid this, and thus prevent some abuse. Let's face it, Amazon isn't some dodgy peddler of porn and pills that trades from a different URL each week, plus if you have got an account, it was probably to order something, which means they already *have* your credit card number.
I don't think this will fly. It sounds good, but the result will be a myriad of small cases that swamp the justice system and the only real winners will be the lawyers. Faxes are much more traceable, despite what telcos might like you to believe, and are tied to an address and therefore to a person much easier, making the TCPA a more effective deterrant. A much better way for spam might be to allow an offshoot of Government (FTC/FCC in the US, OFCOM in the UK) to collate spam from the public and pursue prosecutions. Any money gained could then go into the national treasury and either offset some taxes or be spent on improved public services.
This has several advantages, not least of which is that the entire public can benefit from prosecutions, but also it avoids duplication of effort and allows the big players to be identified first. Plus, if enough countries start to counter spam in this way, then cooperation between the various agencies, or even an anti-spam version of Interpol is a logical next step.
The "Axis of Spam"? (That'll go down a treat when countries of a certain religious belief get put on it.) Besides, while most spam might appear to be originating from servers in the far east, the spammers and spamvertised sites almost always track back to the US and EU, in that order. Amsterdam seems to have recently become the Lagos away from home for the 419 scammers for example, and almost all the "herbal viagra" seems to be US. If the proposed legislation enables prosecution of the source, then these scum will not only have to operate off shore, but live off shore, which should hopefully remove some of the incentives. I'll believe it when I see it though.
They might be doing Linux, but they are certainly not keen on the idea and are only doing so because their customers keep asking for it. Well, at least they are listening to their customers I suppose, so there is that, but it still feels to me like Sun has seriously lost its sense of direction recently. I suspect a lot of FUD filled editorial is going to be written under banners like "Has the SPARC gone out for Sun?" real soon now.
Still, at least Apple's star seems to be rising at the moment. ;)
Yeah, another hosts file full of 127.0.0.1's - a much more up to date list is also available from the Kazaa Lite sites. Wonderful if you don't run a web server on localhost, but it still tries to establish a connection to your non-existant local server before failing. Try replacing the 127.0.0.1's with 0.0.0.0's. Much cleaner, and it should be slightly faster too, not that you'll notice.
As to the law enforcement agencies, spam is simply not a serious crime in their eyes, especially given the amount of effort they need to effect a successful prosecution. Sure, the network is being used for spam now, but a simple change to the .exe being hosted by FDCServers (or whatever hosting company the spammer is using at the time) could change that into *anything*. Make sure that you make that clear. Give them a list of any compromised IPs you have identified and suggest that they see if any of those IPs have also been used to launch DoS attacks, etc (likely, given the lack of patching). If you can establish a link to a high profile case then that might be sufficient to kick start an investigation.
Good hunting!
Not round here. In the three towns nearest me there are *zero* independent music shops left, off the top of my head I can think of seven we used to have, there may have been more. Now we just have the big music chains and supermarkets, plus one of music/game exchange type places.
It's not P2P that was to blame though; it's low margins when you can only buy a dozen copies of the latest pap instead of the thousands a chain (or Amazon) buys, but still have to compete on price. Friendly service and a willingness to spend half and hour helping you track down an obscure indie CD on import apparently don't matter a damn if the big store up the street is selling Britney for 50p less.
We got a major book retailer arrive in our town late last year. Admittedly, it's quite nice and you can get a coffee and danish, but one of our "mom & pop" bookstores has gone already and the other is clearly struggling. I suspect it'll either be a coffee shop or mobile phone store by next summer. Survival of the fittest isn't all it's cracked up to be...