I have had to delete a few from my blog already, but I didn't think much of it. I think I've had a total of ten so far, and due to the small volume I didn't even think about the possibility that there are spom-bots out there doing this already.
Now that there's a plugin for MT that will automate this, though, I think I'll install it. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the spambots will just get smarter and we'll have another arms race soon.
I always wondered what the screensaver had to do with worms. Now I know - it's a simulation of worms eating food in 1969, or something. I guess I still don't know. Damn you computer scientists, and your weird algorithms!
Hopefully this will work about as well as the "Just Say No" and D.A.R.E. programs that have been tried in the past.
There should be no place in school for industry-sponsored propaganda, whether it is true or not. I don't agree with copyright infringement, but removing our fair use rights is worse than allowing some level of piracy. The RIAA/MPAA are trying to outlaw fair use as well as simply cutting down on piracy, and the end result is that both messages are lost on anyone who wants to keep fair use.
If I was a teacher, I'd warm-up the class with some fair use laws, and dispell some of the FUD before the industry rep came into the classroom. If I had a child who was about to attend this, I'd give him/her the option of staying home from school that day, or I'd provide him/her with some ammunition to counter the claims that are made. Maybe convince the kid to try to get the part of the "artist" in the school play. "I'm an artist. I'm signed on a major label, which pays me $0.25 per album sold, but I haven't even seen that money yet because they garnish it to cover the cost of the recording studio and marketing, and also to subsidize costs from the vast majority of artists on the label who make less money than the label spends on them. I make my money from live gigs, and I use my recordings as a sort of advertisement to get people to see my live shows. Even if I didn't get paid, I'd still write music - after all, that's what I did for ten years before getting signed to a major label."
Let me see... yeah, I can safely confirm that I have between $1,000 and $10,000 in my checking account right now.
Wow! I only have between $800 and $4,500 in my checking account. Can I borrow, say, between $200 and $2,000 dollars? You'll have it back in 1-15 years.
Now that I think about it, prison sentences are like this. The bigger number is for the sake of the victims' families, and the smaller number is how soon the prison will be full and they have to let a few out.
Isn't the genitorturers an Upstate NY local band? An ex-roommate of an ex-friend had some sort of connection with the band... Oh, I remember. Her boyfriend at the time was known as "the guy who got fisted by the lead singer of the Genitorturers." So maybe they weren't local. But I sure as hell don't want to hear anything from that guy. Worse than goatsecx.
Oh, and I don't think it's fashionable any more to say, "I listen to good music like [obscure band you've never heard] and [another even more obscure band you've never heard], none of this mainstream crap." That always sounds like you're trying too hard to impress others with your mix tapes. We know iTunes doesn't have every song by every obscure band, and I think it's too much to ask Apple to put every song by every band on the service, especially when it's still in its infancy.
A lot of that acoustic environment can be created fairly cheaply, provided you aren't afraid to put some sound-dampening materials on the walls. While the kid down the street may not have the means to pick up a handful of nice mics, though, most gigging musicians have (or should have) at least one or two nice microphones, and most serious drummers I know can mic their sets with their own equipment. So while all this might cost a few grand total, it's not uncommon to find a band that can provide all the necessary equipment themselves. And if one assumes that the kid down the street can buy the computer and legally acquire the software, it's not much of a stretch to also assume he's got more than an SM57 mic and a six foot cable.
All that being said, though, I also don't agree that the typical kid-down-the-street has the know-how to produce a professional recording. Usually the people who build their own studios act as the engineer, producer, accountant, carpenter, electrician, cleaning staff, and IT staff. It's also good to have two adjacent rooms with a big window, 4-6 good headsets, a room mic, a snake, and a lot of experience with recording in a professional environment. All this can be achieved more easily than the costs associated with running Warner's studio, but it's a far cry from "the kid down the street could do it just as well." Yeah, the kid down the street can also make you a web site, but he's probably going to use FrontPage and stick a site counter on the bottom, just below the animated "e-mail me" gif. Yet another slashdot rant.
Why should Microsoft loose money and time for such a small market?
Did you even read the post you are responding to? BECAUSE MICROSOFT IS A MONOPOLY. This is part of what happens when you're a monopoly, you have to play by some stricter rules. There isn't a viable alternative to the Office suite, if you want to work with almost any other company out there. So MS has to provide reasonable support for the competition. That means porting Office to the Mac in a timely fashion.
But aside from that, your logic is frighteningly small-minded. Why should stores have wheelchair accessible entrances? Such a small market, and not worth the money it costs to set up such a thing, I would think.
It's actually finished already...
on
Longhorn in 2006
·
· Score: 1
They're just going to release it internally and go through two upgrades, and then publicly release the third version. What they should have been doing all along.
Perhaps the article was a little too subtle -- his comparison was meant to point out some of the absurd statements made in reviews that go the other direction: Windows users trying out Linux for the first time. In those reviews, it is very common to see complaints that are just as petty as the ctrl-x ctrl-v problem Roblimo has. Although I have to agree with him - I use Linux at home, and Win2K at work, and I find myself trying to paste with the middle button and copy by selecting all the time at work.
To get the full effect of the review, you have to read between the lines. This wasn't so much a review of WinXP from a Linux user's perspective, it was a statement about how Windows-to-Linux reviews typically go. They pick apart the system with petty little things that aren't wrong, just different.
Oh, and a word of advice: you're in no position to tell the OSS community what needs to be done to be taken seriously. Try getting rid of a few of those f-bombs if you want others to take you seriously. "Fucktards" does not grant you credibility. And your subject line is pretty inflammatory. Not a good approach if you want to sway opinions.
I can't live without Mozilla and Winamp/XMMS. I have actually gotten used to just using a webmail client for my email so it doesn't matter which OS I'm using, and I have the mp3's stored on a fat32 partition mounted as/music in Linux, and M:\ in windows.
Whatever software you can get for both OS's, get it. I'd definitely have to agree with OO.o if money is an issue, but frankly, Office XP works better, and faster. Sorry, folks, but it's got a lot more dev time behind it and it shows.
The reason they want to call people on the DNC list is not because that group tends to buy from phone solictors. It's more of a case of these telemarketers need to call a certain number of people to fulfill their contracts. It's stupid to think that somebody who has taken the effort to sign up on the list would actually buy something from a telemarketer who ignored that list, but the process is so complicated that nobody in the pipeline thinks of that. The guy (or girl) who takes the list and has to screen out all the DNC's (call centers are already required to maintain their own lists) just wants to have the biggest list as possible, even though they should prefer a smaller list of better numbers - that is, people who are more likely to be nice to telemarketers and buy something. But Mr. (or Ms.) list procurement is just focused on getting the biggest list with the least work required.
It's misguided, for sure, but come on - what would you expect from these people, anyway?
If you're a monopoly, then the government should be setting some special rules for you to abide by. A sort of guarantee of quality of service, I believe. Utility companies, for example, can't behave in the same manner as shoe manufacturers because you can always buy a different brand of shoes. But the local electric company has to run its business according to some government standards, since consumers have little choice but to use that company's electric service (I'm ignoring the differences between electric suppliers and the company that delivers it, which could be two different companies).
Which takes us to Microsoft. They've been declared a monopoly by the US government, so they really do need to get a different set of rules to follow in the areas where MS is a monopoly (web browser, desktop OS, and perhaps office suite). I know you're probably thinking that there are other choices, but for most people, using an alternate OS is akin to building a windmill for your power supply - not for the average consumer.
The electric company has to maintain a certain quality of service. A city block can't go without power for two weeks, and we can expect to not experience wildly fluctuating power levels coming out of our outlets. Likewise, MS, as a monopoly, needs to supply a product that doesn't put us at higher risk than, say, one of the many competitors the company has illegally muscled out of the industry. Sure, it sounds tough, but MS brought this on itself, and it isn't nearly as tough as the challenges it put forth to all its former competitors.
Sun's mistakes are well documented, but the biggest one is believing that what made them successful in the past would make them successful in the future.
This sounds an awful lot like the music business. However, I don't think that Sun is in that position. There are some expensive systems out there that rely on Solaris boxes running the show, and most of the time those machines seem quite capable of doing the job well. Sure, it may be expensive, but when a company is shelling out $50K for a new system, people like to see the big purple box come with it.
That was extremely helpful. I zipped through a few of those chapters, and I'll probably make a stop at the bookstore tonight or tomorrow now. So, thanks!
I read through the article and I don't think it's reasonable to automatically assume this will lead to better spam. What if the most effective advertising rate is to not spam? Supposedly this Taguchi method rapidly takes thousands of variables into consideration and through a few experiments, comes up with the most effective method. If experimenters include the method of delivery as a variable, they may find that another technique works better than spam.
From where I stand, I see the possibility that spam will decrease significantly. The Taguchi method could be the next big buzzword (or buzzphrase) and every spammer who wants to make more money (which would be all of them - why else would they sacrifice their ethics) might determine that there is some better method than bulk mailing to *@*.* with deceptive subject lines and random strings everywhere.
And even if that doesn't happen, the end result would be spam that isn't quite such a nuisance. Something that we might not mind as much. And if we're going to keep getting spam, I'd rather it not be the kind that offends, insults and annoys us.
Want to annoy yourself? Sign up for the Do Call Registry. Just a little sarcastic fun. And the inherent absurdity of such a registry shows how we really don't want to be bothered by telemarketers. If anybody suggests that the DNC registry is a bad thing, ask them what they'd think of a Do Call registry.
I secretely believe that most Americans are lonely, and look forward to receiving phone calls from strangers, asking them to purchase exciting new products and informing them of new opportunities they may not have been aware of.
Are YOU ever disappointed when an exciting new product becomes available, yet you have no idea how much it could improve your life? Are there new services available to you that you would like to try, but you're too timid to call the company yourself? Sign up on the Do Call Registry, and you'll never have to eat dinner alone again!
The Do Call Registry uses an exciting technology known as the internet to collect your information, and all you have to do is provide your name, number, and e-mail address! Take control of the number of telemarketing calls you receive.
How can "Java == SUV". it does not support operator overloads?
The article was written in C++. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like he added any of those pesky deconstructor functions, and the article has runout of memory and stopped responding. Java has automatic garbage collection.:)
You, sir, should spend more time previewing before claiming to be "absolutely clear":
Microsoft has never has and never will issue security updates through email.
Oh, it has never has and never will? Almost as clear as:
Anything that you get claiming to be from MS is some kind of fraud, worm, virus, spam, etc.
I'll stop short of saying anything about the quality of their software, but not everything that comes from Microsoft is a fraud, worm, virus, or spam.
Use this opportunity to remind anyone you know that may not be as computer illiterate as you. This worm, in addition to ANYTHING claiming to be updates from MS, are not real.
So anyone who is not as illiterate as me? Oh, and it's good to hear that this worm are not real. I was under the impression that the worm was real. I also thought that patches from MS's site were real.
Better luck with your next post. We all have off nights.:)
Interestingly, I don't think you read the end of my comment.:) Computer geeks use computers differently than the rest of the world. And the bottom line is, if the users complain, then it is an issue. You can't close a bug report with, "users aren't using application the way we expect them to."
Clearly a slow-loading app isn't a problem if you leave the application open for 163 days. But you're an exception. Most people shut down their applications at the end of the work day, if not their whole system. For these people, I can understand why a long load time is bad. And if they complain, you can't very well tell them that you don't have a problem with the load time, and they should stop turning off their computers.
Slashdot Mirror
I have had to delete a few from my blog already, but I didn't think much of it. I think I've had a total of ten so far, and due to the small volume I didn't even think about the possibility that there are spom-bots out there doing this already.
Now that there's a plugin for MT that will automate this, though, I think I'll install it. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that the spambots will just get smarter and we'll have another arms race soon.
I always wondered what the screensaver had to do with worms. Now I know - it's a simulation of worms eating food in 1969, or something. I guess I still don't know. Damn you computer scientists, and your weird algorithms!
Hopefully this will work about as well as the "Just Say No" and D.A.R.E. programs that have been tried in the past.
There should be no place in school for industry-sponsored propaganda, whether it is true or not. I don't agree with copyright infringement, but removing our fair use rights is worse than allowing some level of piracy. The RIAA/MPAA are trying to outlaw fair use as well as simply cutting down on piracy, and the end result is that both messages are lost on anyone who wants to keep fair use.
If I was a teacher, I'd warm-up the class with some fair use laws, and dispell some of the FUD before the industry rep came into the classroom. If I had a child who was about to attend this, I'd give him/her the option of staying home from school that day, or I'd provide him/her with some ammunition to counter the claims that are made. Maybe convince the kid to try to get the part of the "artist" in the school play. "I'm an artist. I'm signed on a major label, which pays me $0.25 per album sold, but I haven't even seen that money yet because they garnish it to cover the cost of the recording studio and marketing, and also to subsidize costs from the vast majority of artists on the label who make less money than the label spends on them. I make my money from live gigs, and I use my recordings as a sort of advertisement to get people to see my live shows. Even if I didn't get paid, I'd still write music - after all, that's what I did for ten years before getting signed to a major label."
Now that I think about it, prison sentences are like this. The bigger number is for the sake of the victims' families, and the smaller number is how soon the prison will be full and they have to let a few out.
Isn't the genitorturers an Upstate NY local band? An ex-roommate of an ex-friend had some sort of connection with the band... Oh, I remember. Her boyfriend at the time was known as "the guy who got fisted by the lead singer of the Genitorturers." So maybe they weren't local. But I sure as hell don't want to hear anything from that guy. Worse than goatsecx.
Oh, and I don't think it's fashionable any more to say, "I listen to good music like [obscure band you've never heard] and [another even more obscure band you've never heard], none of this mainstream crap." That always sounds like you're trying too hard to impress others with your mix tapes. We know iTunes doesn't have every song by every obscure band, and I think it's too much to ask Apple to put every song by every band on the service, especially when it's still in its infancy.
A lot of that acoustic environment can be created fairly cheaply, provided you aren't afraid to put some sound-dampening materials on the walls. While the kid down the street may not have the means to pick up a handful of nice mics, though, most gigging musicians have (or should have) at least one or two nice microphones, and most serious drummers I know can mic their sets with their own equipment. So while all this might cost a few grand total, it's not uncommon to find a band that can provide all the necessary equipment themselves. And if one assumes that the kid down the street can buy the computer and legally acquire the software, it's not much of a stretch to also assume he's got more than an SM57 mic and a six foot cable.
All that being said, though, I also don't agree that the typical kid-down-the-street has the know-how to produce a professional recording. Usually the people who build their own studios act as the engineer, producer, accountant, carpenter, electrician, cleaning staff, and IT staff. It's also good to have two adjacent rooms with a big window, 4-6 good headsets, a room mic, a snake, and a lot of experience with recording in a professional environment. All this can be achieved more easily than the costs associated with running Warner's studio, but it's a far cry from "the kid down the street could do it just as well." Yeah, the kid down the street can also make you a web site, but he's probably going to use FrontPage and stick a site counter on the bottom, just below the animated "e-mail me" gif. Yet another slashdot rant.
But aside from that, your logic is frighteningly small-minded. Why should stores have wheelchair accessible entrances? Such a small market, and not worth the money it costs to set up such a thing, I would think.
They're just going to release it internally and go through two upgrades, and then publicly release the third version. What they should have been doing all along.
Perhaps the article was a little too subtle -- his comparison was meant to point out some of the absurd statements made in reviews that go the other direction: Windows users trying out Linux for the first time. In those reviews, it is very common to see complaints that are just as petty as the ctrl-x ctrl-v problem Roblimo has. Although I have to agree with him - I use Linux at home, and Win2K at work, and I find myself trying to paste with the middle button and copy by selecting all the time at work.
To get the full effect of the review, you have to read between the lines. This wasn't so much a review of WinXP from a Linux user's perspective, it was a statement about how Windows-to-Linux reviews typically go. They pick apart the system with petty little things that aren't wrong, just different.
Oh, and a word of advice: you're in no position to tell the OSS community what needs to be done to be taken seriously. Try getting rid of a few of those f-bombs if you want others to take you seriously. "Fucktards" does not grant you credibility. And your subject line is pretty inflammatory. Not a good approach if you want to sway opinions.
I can't live without Mozilla and Winamp/XMMS. I have actually gotten used to just using a webmail client for my email so it doesn't matter which OS I'm using, and I have the mp3's stored on a fat32 partition mounted as /music in Linux, and M:\ in windows.
Whatever software you can get for both OS's, get it. I'd definitely have to agree with OO.o if money is an issue, but frankly, Office XP works better, and faster. Sorry, folks, but it's got a lot more dev time behind it and it shows.
It means you should stop looking at that filthy porn, you sick bastard!
The reason they want to call people on the DNC list is not because that group tends to buy from phone solictors. It's more of a case of these telemarketers need to call a certain number of people to fulfill their contracts. It's stupid to think that somebody who has taken the effort to sign up on the list would actually buy something from a telemarketer who ignored that list, but the process is so complicated that nobody in the pipeline thinks of that. The guy (or girl) who takes the list and has to screen out all the DNC's (call centers are already required to maintain their own lists) just wants to have the biggest list as possible, even though they should prefer a smaller list of better numbers - that is, people who are more likely to be nice to telemarketers and buy something. But Mr. (or Ms.) list procurement is just focused on getting the biggest list with the least work required.
It's misguided, for sure, but come on - what would you expect from these people, anyway?
If you're a monopoly, then the government should be setting some special rules for you to abide by. A sort of guarantee of quality of service, I believe. Utility companies, for example, can't behave in the same manner as shoe manufacturers because you can always buy a different brand of shoes. But the local electric company has to run its business according to some government standards, since consumers have little choice but to use that company's electric service (I'm ignoring the differences between electric suppliers and the company that delivers it, which could be two different companies).
Which takes us to Microsoft. They've been declared a monopoly by the US government, so they really do need to get a different set of rules to follow in the areas where MS is a monopoly (web browser, desktop OS, and perhaps office suite). I know you're probably thinking that there are other choices, but for most people, using an alternate OS is akin to building a windmill for your power supply - not for the average consumer.
The electric company has to maintain a certain quality of service. A city block can't go without power for two weeks, and we can expect to not experience wildly fluctuating power levels coming out of our outlets. Likewise, MS, as a monopoly, needs to supply a product that doesn't put us at higher risk than, say, one of the many competitors the company has illegally muscled out of the industry. Sure, it sounds tough, but MS brought this on itself, and it isn't nearly as tough as the challenges it put forth to all its former competitors.
That was extremely helpful. I zipped through a few of those chapters, and I'll probably make a stop at the bookstore tonight or tomorrow now. So, thanks!
People get modded improperly all the time. Complaining about it neither changes the past nor does it do anything for the future.
On the plus side, Slashdot karma has exactly zero worth in the rest of the world.
I read through the article and I don't think it's reasonable to automatically assume this will lead to better spam. What if the most effective advertising rate is to not spam? Supposedly this Taguchi method rapidly takes thousands of variables into consideration and through a few experiments, comes up with the most effective method. If experimenters include the method of delivery as a variable, they may find that another technique works better than spam.
From where I stand, I see the possibility that spam will decrease significantly. The Taguchi method could be the next big buzzword (or buzzphrase) and every spammer who wants to make more money (which would be all of them - why else would they sacrifice their ethics) might determine that there is some better method than bulk mailing to *@*.* with deceptive subject lines and random strings everywhere.
And even if that doesn't happen, the end result would be spam that isn't quite such a nuisance. Something that we might not mind as much. And if we're going to keep getting spam, I'd rather it not be the kind that offends, insults and annoys us.
Another gratuitous self-serving post:
Want to annoy yourself? Sign up for the Do Call Registry. Just a little sarcastic fun. And the inherent absurdity of such a registry shows how we really don't want to be bothered by telemarketers. If anybody suggests that the DNC registry is a bad thing, ask them what they'd think of a Do Call registry.
I secretely believe that most Americans are lonely, and look forward to receiving phone calls from strangers, asking them to purchase exciting new products and informing them of new opportunities they may not have been aware of.
Are YOU ever disappointed when an exciting new product becomes available, yet you have no idea how much it could improve your life? Are there new services available to you that you would like to try, but you're too timid to call the company yourself? Sign up on the Do Call Registry, and you'll never have to eat dinner alone again!
The Do Call Registry uses an exciting technology known as the internet to collect your information, and all you have to do is provide your name, number, and e-mail address! Take control of the number of telemarketing calls you receive.
I saw this coming, and I prepared. Meet... the the Do Call Registry! For those of us who don't get enough telemarketing calls. :)
Better luck with your next post. We all have off nights.
I wouldn't be surprised if face recognition searches worked in the future, but MS isn't going to be the ones who pioneer it.
Let's do a search for "Microsoft switcher" and see what comes up.
Clearly a slow-loading app isn't a problem if you leave the application open for 163 days. But you're an exception. Most people shut down their applications at the end of the work day, if not their whole system. For these people, I can understand why a long load time is bad. And if they complain, you can't very well tell them that you don't have a problem with the load time, and they should stop turning off their computers.