For some sectors that offer service value (like Linux) that is good - for other sectors (like music and movies) - that have littlemore than entertainment value, that is bad.
Sociologists have been talking about for a while how how we are/have shifted from the industrial age to the information age, and that we are going away from "goods" to "services". Goods are automated. Services provide the distribution of the goods along with the distribution of information.
The only strange thing about all of this, is how fragile is this change?
Money is no longer real. Its simply printed and/or blipped on computers. It is not backed by gold or silver like it used to be. The money holders (banks) hold less and charge people for giving it away (service) and they don't even own anything besides nice buildings (although that is changing). Its pretty much a crime to own a decent amount of cash money for some reason.
IBM and Sun have been talking for quite some time about the "service" model. RedHat has pretty much gone to the service model.
The only thing that seems to be lacking is good customer service.
Despite the market demand for computer media and success of the cable industry and broadband internet over cable, with the AOL/Time Warner issues and now the NBC and MS issues, it appears as though the media are still content being rich like they are now (who wouldn't??). But their strangle hold on the content and their inability to change is still evident, and the only people that are really slightly inconvenienced by their actions are their paying customers. Their non-paying counterparts are just inconvenienced. FYI, convenience sells (see iTunes, "fast" food, and convenience stores for an example).
AOL/Time Warner should have been a complete success. Time Warner owns stuff like HBO, and if they adopted something similar to the subscription model like "premium" channels it would have been a remarkable success. Content (Time Warner) and the control of the distribution channel (AOL) is ironically what they want, but can't seem to understand their own business very well. Look at the success of the porn industry with almost the same product, but they do not have a lock on the pipe like AOL/Time Warner did.
Personally, I never understood the NBC and MS union or what their goals were, but apparently neither did they.
Repeat after me and the history of the human population and their ability to get rid of a virus.
You can't.
How does the TV ad that comes on at dinner time about herpes go? Something like:
Its not about a cure, its about suppression.
The only progress that humans have ever made in viral medicine are vaccines that load up our body with the virus early in life so that our bodies are not as susceptible to it when it comes again. The virus comfortably lives in our bodies for the rest of our lives. Is tamiflu a cure? No.
All it does is treat the symptoms just like AZT, cold medicines, and everything else. AIDS is the best virus because drug companies can push their expensive, quality of life decreasing drugs on people for years until they die.
Here is how much we really care about people's quality of life:
The Supreme Court ruled that federal authorities may arrest and prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, concluding that state laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.
That was from an online news source a while back.
This is a drug with no side effects. Has never killed a human. Its fun. It can be naturally grown almost anywhere. Its inexpensive. It helps with depression and anxiety.
Even most all of the "good" prescriptions (recreationally) have so many side effects that people who like to use recreational drugs don't take these or at least not for too long at a time. Tolerance, dependance, stomach problems, severe mental and physical impairment, and a slew of others.
I find it deplorable that Congress is even considering to make it legal for drug companies to put out drugs that are potentially dangerous and deadly without the ability for them to be sued or any negative consequences from being dangerous and deadly to people.
Does any of this make sense or is it OK to people?
I'm fairly paranoid and all that about things. But a birdie flu is not something that bothers me less than people being bothered by it.
From the bird flu FAQ, around 200 people have died from it, and it was compared to the last plague, SARS, to the 800. How about this silly question? "Can avian flu be passed from person to person? There are indications that it can, although so far not in the form which could fuel a pandemic." Or this? "Does this mean there is likely to be a large outbreak of bird flu? Experts are concerned that this could happen. But in the Thai case, the virus was only passed to close relatives and spread no further." Or this? "What would be the consequence if this did happen? Once the virus gained the ability to pass easily between humans the results could be catastrophic. Worldwide, experts predict anything between two million and 50 million deaths."
So the worst case guestimate is that 0.7% of the population might die. Lets compare that to real data. The population appears to be growing. And, over the past month, on average 6 million people are net gained on this planet. And this growth is estimated to continue at the same rate until July, 2006.
So, if everybody forgets to die and fuck for 8 months its the same thing as the worst case scenario from something that may not be contracted from person to person.
Be scared, very scared.
Wake me up when a good plague comes though. I remember when they would wipe out 1/3 of the population, and we would be grateful, and life went on without laws protecting drug companies from being sued for potentially killing people who make drugs to keep stuff like this from hurting us. Now that, my friends is something to be worried about.
Good question. The only difference is that Google actually makes stuff that people use. Not to diss Xerox PARC in any shape or form, but Google is phenomenal in that it is a profitable and valuable entire company, not a subsidiary, that simply will not stop.
Pretty soon I'll just have to ask Google what I'm going to eat for lunch. It tells me almost everything else. I think its sick that Google has become the best phone book available, a reverse phone directory, a map, a complex unit converter, it can do range searches (widget $100..$200), and I don't even know but a fraction of what they can do. Are we geeks the only ones that realize how excellent Google is, or does everybody else think of them as a thing that finds them websites?
Maybe you have, but slashdot will still put his crap on the front page. I guess it saves the editor the last sentence after the article blurb to start the ensuing flame war:)
MS chooses to stop supporting the Mac with IE. For whatever reason, they think that's in their best interest. Now Dvorak thinks that's MS should spend $400M to abandon the browser they've been pushing for 10 years, to buy one that supports an OS they just walked away from.
MS hasn't even stopped supoport for IE yet, just annouced it. If they changed their mind and think it's such a big mistake, they can continue IE on MacOS.
MS has in my opinion screwed up royally with IE. Aside from its security issues and compatibility issues and all of its other issues, I simply don't like the COM thing where IE is just a wrapper around a ton of COM objects. Although it may be similar to OS X's webcore in concept, it is entirely different. Also, webcore is open source, open standards, and all that other jazz we like. I don't know if this has changed, but IE used to be required for IIS because IE is so tied to the operating system and I guess IIS uses some of the COM objects for parsing HTML or whatever. COM also kills portability. I would imagine that porting IE was more of a separate project, and that is why MS is killing it, plus it is completely redundant on the Mac. MS has also fallen into being trapped into IE because of its design and how so many customers have become dependent on it for intranets.
Anyway, that is not really what we are talking about. What I would assume that Dmorak is alluding to is that MS should buy Opera because of their embedded market. (Did I guess that correct? If not, the rest of my post is probably offtopic as well).
However, buying Opera for the embedded market is just another example of why MS screwed up with IE. Its not a portable product, and buying Opera would not do much more for them to decide whether to keep IE (Bob is the only fuckup that I know of MS abandoning) it would then just fragment their products, and then they have to decide again whether or not to keep IE.
Personally, I would rather MS keep IE and all the problems with it. Some day people will learn.
The last paragraph however seems to devalue HF's. I suggest you read Buxton's paper entitled "Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development". Get the design right at the start and you won't get (as) bad project management and end products.
Yeah, I bust on HFs for a reason. Thanks for the tip on the paper. Its excellent, and it reinforces what I said and the parent said -- "design is just as much an aspect of engineering as engineering is an aspect of design."
BB puts it differently. He says, "design is a separate process from engineering.... design takes a very different mid-set and training than does engineering. In my experience, for example, employees who were a disaster in product engineering were outstanding in the design phase, and vice versa..." he goes on to say:
"1. Regardless of how you characterize the two, design and engineering are very differentskill sets, and the two professions are made up of two very distinct populations.
2. Each skill set is essential for the production of quality products, but neither is sufficient on its own.
3. For the most part, software companies and their process have a huge deficit in the design arts and process, and much of their failure is due to their attempting to integrate design into the engineering process, and have it done by engineers. "
I agree with all of that. What he adds to what we said, is that these guys are different people altogether but they are dependent on each other. HF is not design. Its a nebulous whatever between psychology, anatomy, and engineering with the emphasis on the previous two, and IMNHO a detriment to the third. Of course anything that is to be used by a human should accommodate the plusses and minuses of the human and their abilities and physical constraints. HF horror stories are things like mirror image control panels or an air control tower that could only be used by males in the 90th percentile for height to see the planes, everyone else had to stand on milk crates. But that is not a human factors mistake, its a design and engineering mistake (aka, stupidity and a lack of attention to detail -- what? you really want normal people to work there???)
I really like the BB paper. I loved the analogy between making a car vs a piece of software. The car can have a complete mockup before it was even really designed or made. Software is almost a one shot deal. There is little prototyping. Basically prototyping in software is called 1.uhoh. And then, there has been so much of a commitment and investment in the product that many of the uhoh's cannot be fully undone. That is called a rewrite.
And for the human factors stuff, it scares me that it is becoming a 'field'.
Too late. It is a 'field' and I too have a problem with it.
The whole 'guru' thing worked because the human factors guy was often less of an idiot than the engineers he was working with. Now with idiots coming at a problem from both the engineering and human factors side, things are going to be a mess. Human factors has momentum too. Scary. 'Does it work well?' and 'Is it easy to use?' are easy questions to answer, you don't need a huge amount of training in mumbo jumbu shit like 'human factors'. Sure, it's helpful for somebody out there to be saying 'this HF is more important than those, etc.', but there doesn't need to be a dedicated Human factors fairy on every design team.
I agree 110%. HF is a part of everything that is designed for people to use. To me the 'field' is called psychology and anatomy. A HF guy I knew was talking about working with some kind of touch screen, and the question came up, "What size should we make the area to touch?". He immediately went out and did some research with an ink pad and random people's fingers and measured them. W00t! What a value added to have this guy around. Was it necessary to do such a measurement or approximation? 100% Did it require some guy with a PhD to determine and do this? Hell no.
No, Sun's marketing department should praised for the hype. Sun leveraged Netscape to rename whatever they called javascript to be called javascript even though it had nothing to do with java. Sun started calling everything java except coffee. Javastations, javaos, hotjava, $300 Linux computers at Walmart that had the "Java Desktop System", which I cannot figure out if Java is in it or not, I think its just Gnome.
Java's supposed to be hype was because it was a cross-platform, write once, run anywhere language and portable across systems with compiled bytecode that could be run in a jvm. Somewhere I have heard that it was more like write once, debug everywhere. Java has almost died for GUI apps because the implementation did not live up to the hype. Java is now mostly found in app severs and whatnot as a middleware between web severs and databases.
Java's implementation has caused me headaches as a system administrator and computer user for 10 years now, and I've been over the hype for quite some time.
I have no beef with the language. I dabbled in it years ago, but didn't find any use for it, but that has nothing to do with my opinion of the implementation. Its the fact that I have had so many issues with it over the years that has caused my opinion. These issues have been Linux support, Matlab problems due to java, Oracle's universal installer that had issues because of java, Sun's "web installers" that have had problems, Netscape crashing for years because of java, etc.
From what I hear, Java has fulfilled a real demand in the app server market, and I'm fine with that. I don't do that kind of work anymore, so I have no involvement with it. But when I did, we had java problems, but this was years ago.
Personally, I believe that the hype is still floating around as witnessed by:
If Java has lost its hype, it's only because it's already accomplished all its goals.:-)
I'm not sure what the goals were. I was under the assumption that it was a cross platform application environment, completely with a cross platform GUI. If this was the goal, I am unaware of an example of its success. There are only a handful of examples. I believe Eclipse might be a success, but I'm unsure if it is entirely written in java or not. Apple has a java control program for their raid array that mostly works, and there is Azureus, but I personally don't like that either because of its heavy resource requirements, and it would not work on my Mac with two users in two different accounts using it at the same time. Oh, I forgot about OpenOffice. Again, I don't think that is entirely written in java, and I simply do not own enough of a computer to run OO, but I tried. The document that I was trying to open was created on a 700MHz or so PC, but I could not do anything with it on my PowerBook G4. I asked the person to simply export it to a CSV so I could work with the spreadsheet.
Being that computers are so fast, if Java was a working cross platform GUI language and free, I don't see why at least 90% of the programs available for computers are not Java. If I owned a company that wrote a GUI program, and if there was a cross platform GUI language and implementation that worked, I certainly would use it. Even if portability was not a desired goal, why not open the door to 100% marketshare with one writing?
we should be suing the retailer, not Sony. The retailer has sold a product that was unsafe for the purchasing party, and the retailer should be responsible.
The reason? Retailers (I own 2 stores) should check their product before selling it -- IF the contract with the purchaser stipulates this. In a free market, I believe we'd see such stipulations. In a heavily regulated one, government has allowed everyone to be protected EXCEPT the consumer. In cses where the consumers are hurt in large numbers, they have almost no ability to find restitution.
I can't decide if I agree or disagree with the retailer being responsible. Under the current system, this is not possible at all. Stores sell stuff that is unsafe all the time. Poison comes to mind. With a slightly different good and service, there is a different model. Its called prescription drugs. The pharmacist is supposed to be the one that I assume is responsible for making the final judgment on the sale of a prescription drug. I do not know of any time when this responsibility was enforced or tested, but from what I gather they are there to be the final person that knows things like the other drugs that you are on, that all the paperwork is in order, etc. They are kindof the police of the legal drug world.
My point is that these people are (supposedly) trained, certified, and specialized in one fairly small area to be the final overseer of that area. So, are all retailers supposed to have such a training, certification, and responsibility?
Being that there are so many crappy products out there on the market today, I often have wanted a more responsible retailer that I could trust to weed out the crap, and I could simply go to that store and buy something that I know is good. Its kind of like an integrator. Cars are sold that way. Macs and Dells are sold that way. DVD players are not.
Now I question the retailer being responsible for a product. Actually, I now believe that it should be the supplier, not the retailer. What if Sony sent a sealed CD to your store that had a manufacturing flaw and it cut off the hand of the person that opened the case? To me, this seems like a completely Sony related thing, not a retailer thing.
Possibly the only way these people will be caught is with the new ANPR system. If your car number plate is recognised in two different places within a short time that are far enough apart it would would be impossible without cloning, then it will no doubt be flagged for investigation.
That is why I always steal license plates from old, broken down cars.
The amendment, which is attached to a bill on intellectual property rights, states that ``authors cannot forbid the reproduction of works that are made on any format from an online communications service when they are intended to be used privately'' and not for commercial use.
I am no copyright lawyer, but somewhere it does not seem for the inverse to make sense. Meaning, how could authors forbid the reproduction of works that are intended to be used privately? But this also kills the entire notion of copyright altogether. The GPL appears to be null and void in France now, even though it has never been "proven in court" anyway.
What does copyright actually mean? How is it binding? Can I say at the bottom of this post:
(C) 2006 by hackstraw
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this post, but changing it is not allowed. If you read this post twice (copying it from the computer to your brain more than one time), I am therefore explicitly granted the right to kill your gerbil if I see fit.
Everything but the last sentence was taken from the FSF's copyright on the GPL. To me, that statement seems like an EULA, and what validity do either of those have?
Another thing, is I'm confused after thisstuffthat has come from France in the not so recent past.
I'm not trolling (this usually pads people from being modded as troll for some reason).
But the guy says "I bit the bullet and swiped the plastic." So it appears at first to be a fairly large and potentially risky purchase. I'm not sure of the timeframe here, but it appears as though in a short time this guy has bought every game available, has an HDTV, bought every accessory and online option. Detailed the price of everything. And this was posted by Zonk.
If I'm the only one who is skeptable, so be it mod me to -1 and this will be forgotten, but the sum of the parts don't seem to add up to be a review.
Also, who submitted this thing? Zonk himself? Or did it spontaneously generate from the meant-to-imply-an-in-drawn-breath department?
Don't like wasteful government bureaucracy? Don't like government created monopolies? Don't like taxes? Well then, it's time for a shameless libertarian pitch: Vote for Libertarians! Libertarians want to eliminate taxes, government waste, corporate handouts, boondoggles, military imperialism, and especially unconstitutional agencies (like the FCC).
Who else do you think I vote for?
Why else do you think I'm frustrated?
There is the minority "elite" that have the power. There is the minority "elite" that "know better" (or at least that is my perception since I'm one of them:). Then there are the majority of folks that are the flock that follow the power people.
The problem is that every great idea's biggest asset is its biggest liability. Cell phones are great because you can (theoretically) make a call from anywhere at any time. Cell phones greatest liability is that anybody can call you no matter where you are at any time. Communism is great because everybody is basically equal and share the wealth. Communism is bad because everybody is equal and shares the wealth so they have no incentive to do anything different in a changing environment because nobody has any more assets or capabilities to implement change in the environment. Capitalism is great because it can quickly and easily change in a changing world, and those that have the assets or abilities to "capitalize" on the changes get rewarded by it, others see the changes and are inspired to do the same. Capitalism's down side is that the people that at one time capitalized on the changes and have acquired assets because of the changes, now feel compelled to leverage the environment to keep what they have and not allow others to make the changes.
Those are very simplistic views, but they at least make sense to me. I guess the only constant is change. Thank you Hereclitus.
The article uses "There are only half as many keys to learn" as an advantage. Not quite. I still need to learn all the keys, but there's only half as many spaces in which to put them. So I'm learning at least two key positions for every button...if not more.
The fact is that I have to use all of the letters and numbers. If its 1 key that I depress 26 times to get to z or similar, I still have to learn the method to get from the insane thoughts in my brain to the computer. Telepathy does not work well.
I've gotten into a debate before on/. from people that are convinced that we still need a hardware based key TO SHOUT TO PEOPLE! I have disabled the key for years through a variety of hacks because it only causes problems. I would guess its on the top 100 list of tech support calls. Try using vi and look to find out that the past few commands were issued with the cap lock enabled.
If an application needs only caps, can't it use something like toupper()? The key is also in a prime real estate position that is never used as much as tab or shift or even q or z. Actually, by design, it is not intended to be used that much because it toggles the state of the "lock". If it were on top of the monitor or somewhere more out of the way, I would not care, and I don't think too many people would mind. The shift keys can be used FOR A QUICK SCREAM!!!
There have been a vast number of keyboards or other input devices over the years, but until something extremely and radically different and easy to adopt comes by, we will stick to the familiar format. Cording keyboards, joy stick like keyboards (left with the left control and right with the right control sends an '8' for example), fancy keyboards like this, Steven Hawking style input. I've seen people use their mouth and poke the keyboard in the standard dvorak layout with a pencil. The guy was an HCI person that was also a quadropolegic. I guess that was the best method he could come up with for input. There is eye tracing methods. Software keyboards. Cell phone overloaded keys (1abc, 2bcd, etc) dvorak layout using the same structure of the querty is not very successful. I used to know tons of other keyboard design tricks, but I've forgotten them because they were and still are useless.
Plus the article in question pertains to VOIP and telephony not the entire internet.
I've found it interesting, and hopefully something good will come from the telcos being the primary backbone net providers that are getting out of phone service, cable TV companies are turning into "information gateways" to the home to include internet, TV, and phones. Phones have been used for network traffic for years via modems (I guess DSL is just a special modem, ISDN was never popular in the US, and appears to have died??).
The FCC has no juristiction outside the US.
Well, they have jurisdiction over my phone to the point that about 30% of the bill goes to them or other government agencies. I'm a little miffed that I have to pay for 911 service to my phone without an option. I am not required to have a phone, but I am required to pay for extra phone "features"?? Why do I have to pay for it on every phone line? I'm sure somebody has a link, but I would love to know how much as a percent of my money really is just recycled back to the people that print it to begin with. Before I even get my paycheck, they take a huge chunk. What is left over, I typically owe another 5 to 10% to spend it somewhere. I have to pay semi-annually for the privilege of owning some of my own possessions (real estate tax, car tax). There are exceptions for some goods and services. I don't have to pay an extra tax for medications. I have to pay a tax for general goods. I have to pay an additional tax to eat over the general goods tax (WTF??) To crash in a hotel, I have to pay a tax. To ride a bus or taxi to the hotel, no tax (yet, or its hidden and not itemized). I wonder about he real estate thing from time to time. Who owns the dirt, and who am I paying for it? The last people moved out of "my" house and "sold" it to me but I never met them or have given them a dime. In the US at least, from what I understand most of the land was stolen or just invaded. Some of it was purchased. Other countries own all of the land by the government, and let the people use it.
I guess the tax thing is OK, because I do eat, and everybody pays mostly the same percentage except the wealthy pay less and the lower income pay a higher percentage, but lower income people mostly suck at managing their lives and money and wealthy people are successful at it and provide the lower income people with their jobs with the extra income they get by paying fewer taxes, but they also pay an exorbitant amount of total taxes (I think) that is much more than most people's "pre-tax" income. Man, that made me tired.
Sure, colors look "nice". They have been standardized and used to make the highways more attractive and functional for years. Red for stop, blue for information, brown for camping, green for generic directions, yellow for yield, you get the point. Stoplights are red, yellow, and green either from top to bottom or left to right.
Syntax highlighting and color 'ls' listings are a blessing. Especially for catching typos when coding. "Why isn't that keyword the same color as the others? Oh, its elsif not elseif".
If they were distinct colours, I could tell instantly which tile was which without thinking.
Most people's eyes cannot go beyond 5 or so colors in order to make them distinct from each other in graphs and things. After that, we resort to X's, dashed and dotted lines. Again, this is a function of just looking at it. If I am familiar with the data, and I can't tell without a graphics tool to give me the hex RGB values of the colors, I guess it might be difficult for others. Oh, and some people are colorblind. It kills me that gnuplot makes the default first colors red and green, the most commonly seen as brown by a decent. I guess they missed the 500 level HCI class and the 100 level psych class.
Incidentally, everyone criticises the shutdown option on the start menu, but no-one says where shutdown should be placed...
My Macs show it under the generic Apple logo at the left upper hand of the screen with other useful things like force quitting an application, logging out, sleep, shutdown, restart, software updates, and other generic things besides mixing them with nested menus of applications, and all of the above items, and more things. Again, in psych 100 or HCI 500 there is the 7 +- 2 data that says that humans are decent of remembering about 5 to 9 things at a time. These things can be "chunked". I would consider shutdown, restart, sleep as a chunked item, and those are grouped together with a horizontal rule for clarity.
I diss HCI so much because I studied it in grad school, and was not impressed. Most of it was convoluted "special" cases of the stuff I learned in my intro psych class and/or simple common sense and/or trial and error or just an iterative process of abstraction or grouping of displayed information.
Anybody that has clicked on the Windows "Start" menu should notice in a few seconds how confusing it is. That is not a very good first impression, IMHO. That is why people try to put junk on their Desktop as shortcuts if they can figure out how to do so. Its been difficult to add, remove, organize, or "extract" all of the information in the "Start" menu for 10 years now. But with 90+% market share of the world's computers, why fix what isn't broken?
Apple integrates the "Program Files" into the common file manager, instead of making the file manager the web browser (which uses different keyboard shortcuts when in "web" mode vs "file manager" mode".
I don't dislike Windows because its a Microsoft product, and its popular to do so. I've been a Windows programmer, and have used Windows off and on from the early 90s to 97, and briefly from 99 to 00, and I forget each time how awful it is after a 6 month vacation from it until I use it again for 10 minutes or so. I quickly get reminded why I stopped using it.
Another reason I diss HCI, is that computers are not that special, and they are becoming less special every day in reality, but perceptually conceived as more special over time by many people. My DVR is a computer. It has no mouse or keyboard. It has a radically different "UI" than any other that I have used, but its really fucking good. With a brief glance at the directions for making the remote fairly universal for other components (that is not my favorite thing about the device, but its OK) and a few minutes of looking at the different screens with clear color coded and shaped buttons on the remote, I can record any show or every show in seconds, and so can any other "computer illiterate" p
we see just as much spam as ever, and it's just as obfuscated as ever
Much of the SPAM I examine is so obfuscated I can't even tell what they are trying to trick me into buying or what they are trying to steal from me.
I don't know if these are phishing mails to test for a more efficient future phishing scams or what kind of results they are looking for.
My most favorite SPAM recently was disguised from the US IRS that was a deceptive email from a "Christian" group trying to trick me into whatever. I'm not sure, but I mailed all of the ISPs and generic email addresses like abuse@, root@, webmaster@, postmaster@. Only 3 to 5 bounced, so maybe they will soon be annointed by His Noodly Appendage, reform their ways, and give me a gift for Christmas anyway.
The link does not mention whether or not the SPAM was sent via normal ISPs and from normal servers or from owned Windows boxes.
A quick check of my logs says that over the past few days 12% of all SPAM came from known dynamic IP addresses on behalf of someone else. 49% of the SPAM had URLs in the body that resolved to China or Korea.44% had URLs in Japan. Note: there can be overlap so I don't believe that 93% of URLs were from Japan, China, or Korea. In fact, another scan shows that 44% were from Japan, China, or Korea.
So this still seems as though it is an Asian thing to me. Either way, its pretty easy to identify these things in a lower volume situation, so I prefer it this way.
There seems to be a trend in computers where there are 2 to 3 big alternatives. OSes -- Apple vs Mac vs *NIX/Linux. CPUs -- AMD vs Intel vs IBM. Disks -- Seagate vs Western Digital. Laptops -- Mac vs PC. Desktops -- Apple vs Dell.
I can't say that this is a good thing or not, but it seems to be a trend.
Slashdot Mirror
For some sectors that offer service value (like Linux) that is good - for other sectors (like music and movies) - that have littlemore than entertainment value, that is bad.
Sociologists have been talking about for a while how how we are/have shifted from the industrial age to the information age, and that we are going away from "goods" to "services". Goods are automated. Services provide the distribution of the goods along with the distribution of information.
The only strange thing about all of this, is how fragile is this change?
Money is no longer real. Its simply printed and/or blipped on computers. It is not backed by gold or silver like it used to be. The money holders (banks) hold less and charge people for giving it away (service) and they don't even own anything besides nice buildings (although that is changing). Its pretty much a crime to own a decent amount of cash money for some reason.
IBM and Sun have been talking for quite some time about the "service" model. RedHat has pretty much gone to the service model.
The only thing that seems to be lacking is good customer service.
Now stop your bitching, get off your computer and go visit your goddamn family.
He's probably in their basement and they have locked the door.
And the red suited modern version was/is an advertisement from Coca-Cola.
Who would have ever thought about the commercialization of the holiday?
Go get him, boys. The War on Christmas ends tonight.
Don't kid yourself. Think about what the terrorists can do with that information.
Despite the market demand for computer media and success of the cable industry and broadband internet over cable, with the AOL/Time Warner issues and now the NBC and MS issues, it appears as though the media are still content being rich like they are now (who wouldn't??). But their strangle hold on the content and their inability to change is still evident, and the only people that are really slightly inconvenienced by their actions are their paying customers. Their non-paying counterparts are just inconvenienced. FYI, convenience sells (see iTunes, "fast" food, and convenience stores for an example).
AOL/Time Warner should have been a complete success. Time Warner owns stuff like HBO, and if they adopted something similar to the subscription model like "premium" channels it would have been a remarkable success. Content (Time Warner) and the control of the distribution channel (AOL) is ironically what they want, but can't seem to understand their own business very well. Look at the success of the porn industry with almost the same product, but they do not have a lock on the pipe like AOL/Time Warner did.
Personally, I never understood the NBC and MS union or what their goals were, but apparently neither did they.
Repeat after me and the history of the human population and their ability to get rid of a virus.
You can't.
How does the TV ad that comes on at dinner time about herpes go? Something like:
Its not about a cure, its about suppression.
The only progress that humans have ever made in viral medicine are vaccines that load up our body with the virus early in life so that our bodies are not as susceptible to it when it comes again. The virus comfortably lives in our bodies for the rest of our lives. Is tamiflu a cure? No.
All it does is treat the symptoms just like AZT, cold medicines, and everything else. AIDS is the best virus because drug companies can push their expensive, quality of life decreasing drugs on people for years until they die.
Here is how much we really care about people's quality of life:
The Supreme Court ruled that federal authorities may arrest and prosecute sick people whose doctors prescribe marijuana to ease pain, concluding that state laws don't protect users from a federal ban on the drug.
That was from an online news source a while back.
This is a drug with no side effects. Has never killed a human. Its fun. It can be naturally grown almost anywhere. Its inexpensive. It helps with depression and anxiety.
Even most all of the "good" prescriptions (recreationally) have so many side effects that people who like to use recreational drugs don't take these or at least not for too long at a time. Tolerance, dependance, stomach problems, severe mental and physical impairment, and a slew of others.
I find it deplorable that Congress is even considering to make it legal for drug companies to put out drugs that are potentially dangerous and deadly without the ability for them to be sued or any negative consequences from being dangerous and deadly to people.
Does any of this make sense or is it OK to people?
I'm fairly paranoid and all that about things. But a birdie flu is not something that bothers me less than people being bothered by it.
From the bird flu FAQ, around 200 people have died from it, and it was compared to the last plague, SARS, to the 800. How about this silly question? "Can avian flu be passed from person to person? There are indications that it can, although so far not in the form which could fuel a pandemic." Or this? "Does this mean there is likely to be a large outbreak of bird flu? Experts are concerned that this could happen. But in the Thai case, the virus was only passed to close relatives and spread no further." Or this? "What would be the consequence if this did happen? Once the virus gained the ability to pass easily between humans the results could be catastrophic. Worldwide, experts predict anything between two million and 50 million deaths."
So the worst case guestimate is that 0.7% of the population might die. Lets compare that to real data. The population appears to be growing. And, over the past month, on average 6 million people are net gained on this planet. And this growth is estimated to continue at the same rate until July, 2006.
So, if everybody forgets to die and fuck for 8 months its the same thing as the worst case scenario from something that may not be contracted from person to person.
Be scared, very scared.
Wake me up when a good plague comes though. I remember when they would wipe out 1/3 of the population, and we would be grateful, and life went on without laws protecting drug companies from being sued for potentially killing people who make drugs to keep stuff like this from hurting us. Now that, my friends is something to be worried about.
If the interface was simpler and the case was a little more realistic, that might be the last time we see the kid.
So is google becoming the new Xerox Parc?
Good question. The only difference is that Google actually makes stuff that people use. Not to diss Xerox PARC in any shape or form, but Google is phenomenal in that it is a profitable and valuable entire company, not a subsidiary, that simply will not stop.
Pretty soon I'll just have to ask Google what I'm going to eat for lunch. It tells me almost everything else. I think its sick that Google has become the best phone book available, a reverse phone directory, a map, a complex unit converter, it can do range searches (widget $100..$200), and I don't even know but a fraction of what they can do. Are we geeks the only ones that realize how excellent Google is, or does everybody else think of them as a thing that finds them websites?
This makes me think I overestimated him.
:)
Maybe you have, but slashdot will still put his crap on the front page. I guess it saves the editor the last sentence after the article blurb to start the ensuing flame war
MS chooses to stop supporting the Mac with IE. For whatever reason, they think that's in their best interest. Now Dvorak thinks that's MS should spend $400M to abandon the browser they've been pushing for 10 years, to buy one that supports an OS they just walked away from.
MS hasn't even stopped supoport for IE yet, just annouced it. If they changed their mind and think it's such a big mistake, they can continue IE on MacOS.
MS has in my opinion screwed up royally with IE. Aside from its security issues and compatibility issues and all of its other issues, I simply don't like the COM thing where IE is just a wrapper around a ton of COM objects. Although it may be similar to OS X's webcore in concept, it is entirely different. Also, webcore is open source, open standards, and all that other jazz we like. I don't know if this has changed, but IE used to be required for IIS because IE is so tied to the operating system and I guess IIS uses some of the COM objects for parsing HTML or whatever. COM also kills portability. I would imagine that porting IE was more of a separate project, and that is why MS is killing it, plus it is completely redundant on the Mac. MS has also fallen into being trapped into IE because of its design and how so many customers have become dependent on it for intranets.
Anyway, that is not really what we are talking about. What I would assume that Dmorak is alluding to is that MS should buy Opera because of their embedded market. (Did I guess that correct? If not, the rest of my post is probably offtopic as well).
However, buying Opera for the embedded market is just another example of why MS screwed up with IE. Its not a portable product, and buying Opera would not do much more for them to decide whether to keep IE (Bob is the only fuckup that I know of MS abandoning) it would then just fragment their products, and then they have to decide again whether or not to keep IE.
Personally, I would rather MS keep IE and all the problems with it. Some day people will learn.
The last paragraph however seems to devalue HF's. I suggest you read Buxton's paper entitled "Performance by Design: The Role of Design in Software Product Development". Get the design right at the start and you won't get (as) bad project management and end products.
... design takes a very different mid-set and training than does engineering. In my experience, for example, employees who were a disaster in product engineering were outstanding in the design phase, and vice versa..." he goes on to say:
Yeah, I bust on HFs for a reason. Thanks for the tip on the paper. Its excellent, and it reinforces what I said and the parent said -- "design is just as much an aspect of engineering as engineering is an aspect of design."
BB puts it differently. He says, "design is a separate process from engineering.
"1. Regardless of how you characterize the two, design and engineering are very differentskill sets, and the two professions are made up of two very distinct populations.
2. Each skill set is essential for the production of quality products, but neither is sufficient on its own.
3. For the most part, software companies and their process have a huge deficit in the design arts and process, and much of their failure is due to their attempting to integrate design into the engineering process, and have it done by engineers. "
I agree with all of that. What he adds to what we said, is that these guys are different people altogether but they are dependent on each other. HF is not design. Its a nebulous whatever between psychology, anatomy, and engineering with the emphasis on the previous two, and IMNHO a detriment to the third. Of course anything that is to be used by a human should accommodate the plusses and minuses of the human and their abilities and physical constraints. HF horror stories are things like mirror image control panels or an air control tower that could only be used by males in the 90th percentile for height to see the planes, everyone else had to stand on milk crates. But that is not a human factors mistake, its a design and engineering mistake (aka, stupidity and a lack of attention to detail -- what? you really want normal people to work there???)
I really like the BB paper. I loved the analogy between making a car vs a piece of software. The car can have a complete mockup before it was even really designed or made. Software is almost a one shot deal. There is little prototyping. Basically prototyping in software is called 1.uhoh. And then, there has been so much of a commitment and investment in the product that many of the uhoh's cannot be fully undone. That is called a rewrite.
And for the human factors stuff, it scares me that it is becoming a 'field'.
Too late. It is a 'field' and I too have a problem with it.
The whole 'guru' thing worked because the human factors guy was often less of an idiot than the engineers he was working with. Now with idiots coming at a problem from both the engineering and human factors side, things are going to be a mess. Human factors has momentum too. Scary. 'Does it work well?' and 'Is it easy to use?' are easy questions to answer, you don't need a huge amount of training in mumbo jumbu shit like 'human factors'. Sure, it's helpful for somebody out there to be saying 'this HF is more important than those, etc.', but there doesn't need to be a dedicated Human factors fairy on every design team.
I agree 110%. HF is a part of everything that is designed for people to use. To me the 'field' is called psychology and anatomy. A HF guy I knew was talking about working with some kind of touch screen, and the question came up, "What size should we make the area to touch?". He immediately went out and did some research with an ink pad and random people's fingers and measured them. W00t! What a value added to have this guy around. Was it necessary to do such a measurement or approximation? 100% Did it require some guy with a PhD to determine and do this? Hell no.
To be fair, Java's hype was well deserved.
:-)
No, Sun's marketing department should praised for the hype. Sun leveraged Netscape to rename whatever they called javascript to be called javascript even though it had nothing to do with java. Sun started calling everything java except coffee. Javastations, javaos, hotjava, $300 Linux computers at Walmart that had the "Java Desktop System", which I cannot figure out if Java is in it or not, I think its just Gnome.
Java's supposed to be hype was because it was a cross-platform, write once, run anywhere language and portable across systems with compiled bytecode that could be run in a jvm. Somewhere I have heard that it was more like write once, debug everywhere. Java has almost died for GUI apps because the implementation did not live up to the hype. Java is now mostly found in app severs and whatnot as a middleware between web severs and databases.
Java's implementation has caused me headaches as a system administrator and computer user for 10 years now, and I've been over the hype for quite some time.
I have no beef with the language. I dabbled in it years ago, but didn't find any use for it, but that has nothing to do with my opinion of the implementation. Its the fact that I have had so many issues with it over the years that has caused my opinion. These issues have been Linux support, Matlab problems due to java, Oracle's universal installer that had issues because of java, Sun's "web installers" that have had problems, Netscape crashing for years because of java, etc.
From what I hear, Java has fulfilled a real demand in the app server market, and I'm fine with that. I don't do that kind of work anymore, so I have no involvement with it. But when I did, we had java problems, but this was years ago.
Personally, I believe that the hype is still floating around as witnessed by:
If Java has lost its hype, it's only because it's already accomplished all its goals.
I'm not sure what the goals were. I was under the assumption that it was a cross platform application environment, completely with a cross platform GUI. If this was the goal, I am unaware of an example of its success. There are only a handful of examples. I believe Eclipse might be a success, but I'm unsure if it is entirely written in java or not. Apple has a java control program for their raid array that mostly works, and there is Azureus, but I personally don't like that either because of its heavy resource requirements, and it would not work on my Mac with two users in two different accounts using it at the same time. Oh, I forgot about OpenOffice. Again, I don't think that is entirely written in java, and I simply do not own enough of a computer to run OO, but I tried. The document that I was trying to open was created on a 700MHz or so PC, but I could not do anything with it on my PowerBook G4. I asked the person to simply export it to a CSV so I could work with the spreadsheet.
Being that computers are so fast, if Java was a working cross platform GUI language and free, I don't see why at least 90% of the programs available for computers are not Java. If I owned a company that wrote a GUI program, and if there was a cross platform GUI language and implementation that worked, I certainly would use it. Even if portability was not a desired goal, why not open the door to 100% marketshare with one writing?
we should be suing the retailer, not Sony. The retailer has sold a product that was unsafe for the purchasing party, and the retailer should be responsible.
The reason? Retailers (I own 2 stores) should check their product before selling it -- IF the contract with the purchaser stipulates this. In a free market, I believe we'd see such stipulations. In a heavily regulated one, government has allowed everyone to be protected EXCEPT the consumer. In cses where the consumers are hurt in large numbers, they have almost no ability to find restitution.
I can't decide if I agree or disagree with the retailer being responsible. Under the current system, this is not possible at all. Stores sell stuff that is unsafe all the time. Poison comes to mind. With a slightly different good and service, there is a different model. Its called prescription drugs. The pharmacist is supposed to be the one that I assume is responsible for making the final judgment on the sale of a prescription drug. I do not know of any time when this responsibility was enforced or tested, but from what I gather they are there to be the final person that knows things like the other drugs that you are on, that all the paperwork is in order, etc. They are kindof the police of the legal drug world.
My point is that these people are (supposedly) trained, certified, and specialized in one fairly small area to be the final overseer of that area. So, are all retailers supposed to have such a training, certification, and responsibility?
Being that there are so many crappy products out there on the market today, I often have wanted a more responsible retailer that I could trust to weed out the crap, and I could simply go to that store and buy something that I know is good. Its kind of like an integrator. Cars are sold that way. Macs and Dells are sold that way. DVD players are not.
Now I question the retailer being responsible for a product. Actually, I now believe that it should be the supplier, not the retailer. What if Sony sent a sealed CD to your store that had a manufacturing flaw and it cut off the hand of the person that opened the case? To me, this seems like a completely Sony related thing, not a retailer thing.
Possibly the only way these people will be caught is with the new ANPR system. If your car number plate is recognised in two different places within a short time that are far enough apart it would would be impossible without cloning, then it will no doubt be flagged for investigation.
That is why I always steal license plates from old, broken down cars.
There is a very real problem at the moment with stolen licence plates.
No, this is the very problem for eternity with violating the rights of people by a government.
Outlaw guns, only outlaws own guns.
Outlaw drugs, people will now kill, steal, and do other things to provide a desired good on the black market.
Outlaw abortion, women and their child die from kitchen table abortions.
Oh, well, it keeps us busy I guess.
I hereby suspend my France-Bashing for 24 hours
TFA says:
The amendment, which is attached to a bill on intellectual property rights, states that ``authors cannot forbid the reproduction of works that are made on any format from an online communications service when they are intended to be used privately'' and not for commercial use.
I am no copyright lawyer, but somewhere it does not seem for the inverse to make sense. Meaning, how could authors forbid the reproduction of works that are intended to be used privately? But this also kills the entire notion of copyright altogether. The GPL appears to be null and void in France now, even though it has never been "proven in court" anyway.
What does copyright actually mean? How is it binding? Can I say at the bottom of this post:
(C) 2006 by hackstraw
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this post, but changing it is not allowed. If you read this post twice (copying it from the computer to your brain more than one time), I am therefore explicitly granted the right to kill your gerbil if I see fit.
Everything but the last sentence was taken from the FSF's copyright on the GPL. To me, that statement seems like an EULA, and what validity do either of those have?
Another thing, is I'm confused after this stuff that has come from France in the not so recent past.
I'm not trolling (this usually pads people from being modded as troll for some reason).
But the guy says "I bit the bullet and swiped the plastic." So it appears at first to be a fairly large and potentially risky purchase. I'm not sure of the timeframe here, but it appears as though in a short time this guy has bought every game available, has an HDTV, bought every accessory and online option. Detailed the price of everything. And this was posted by Zonk.
If I'm the only one who is skeptable, so be it mod me to -1 and this will be forgotten, but the sum of the parts don't seem to add up to be a review.
Also, who submitted this thing? Zonk himself? Or did it spontaneously generate from the meant-to-imply-an-in-drawn-breath department?
Don't like wasteful government bureaucracy? Don't like government created monopolies? Don't like taxes? Well then, it's time for a shameless libertarian pitch: Vote for Libertarians! Libertarians want to eliminate taxes, government waste, corporate handouts, boondoggles, military imperialism, and especially unconstitutional agencies (like the FCC).
:). Then there are the majority of folks that are the flock that follow the power people.
Who else do you think I vote for?
Why else do you think I'm frustrated?
There is the minority "elite" that have the power. There is the minority "elite" that "know better" (or at least that is my perception since I'm one of them
The problem is that every great idea's biggest asset is its biggest liability. Cell phones are great because you can (theoretically) make a call from anywhere at any time. Cell phones greatest liability is that anybody can call you no matter where you are at any time. Communism is great because everybody is basically equal and share the wealth. Communism is bad because everybody is equal and shares the wealth so they have no incentive to do anything different in a changing environment because nobody has any more assets or capabilities to implement change in the environment. Capitalism is great because it can quickly and easily change in a changing world, and those that have the assets or abilities to "capitalize" on the changes get rewarded by it, others see the changes and are inspired to do the same. Capitalism's down side is that the people that at one time capitalized on the changes and have acquired assets because of the changes, now feel compelled to leverage the environment to keep what they have and not allow others to make the changes.
Those are very simplistic views, but they at least make sense to me. I guess the only constant is change. Thank you Hereclitus.
The article uses "There are only half as many keys to learn" as an advantage. Not quite. I still need to learn all the keys, but there's only half as many spaces in which to put them. So I'm learning at least two key positions for every button...if not more.
/. from people that are convinced that we still need a hardware based key TO SHOUT TO PEOPLE! I have disabled the key for years through a variety of hacks because it only causes problems. I would guess its on the top 100 list of tech support calls. Try using vi and look to find out that the past few commands were issued with the cap lock enabled.
The fact is that I have to use all of the letters and numbers. If its 1 key that I depress 26 times to get to z or similar, I still have to learn the method to get from the insane thoughts in my brain to the computer. Telepathy does not work well.
I've gotten into a debate before on
If an application needs only caps, can't it use something like toupper()? The key is also in a prime real estate position that is never used as much as tab or shift or even q or z. Actually, by design, it is not intended to be used that much because it toggles the state of the "lock". If it were on top of the monitor or somewhere more out of the way, I would not care, and I don't think too many people would mind. The shift keys can be used FOR A QUICK SCREAM!!!
There have been a vast number of keyboards or other input devices over the years, but until something extremely and radically different and easy to adopt comes by, we will stick to the familiar format. Cording keyboards, joy stick like keyboards (left with the left control and right with the right control sends an '8' for example), fancy keyboards like this, Steven Hawking style input. I've seen people use their mouth and poke the keyboard in the standard dvorak layout with a pencil. The guy was an HCI person that was also a quadropolegic. I guess that was the best method he could come up with for input. There is eye tracing methods. Software keyboards. Cell phone overloaded keys (1abc, 2bcd, etc) dvorak layout using the same structure of the querty is not very successful. I used to know tons of other keyboard design tricks, but I've forgotten them because they were and still are useless.
Plus the article in question pertains to VOIP and telephony not the entire internet.
I've found it interesting, and hopefully something good will come from the telcos being the primary backbone net providers that are getting out of phone service, cable TV companies are turning into "information gateways" to the home to include internet, TV, and phones. Phones have been used for network traffic for years via modems (I guess DSL is just a special modem, ISDN was never popular in the US, and appears to have died??).
The FCC has no juristiction outside the US.
Well, they have jurisdiction over my phone to the point that about 30% of the bill goes to them or other government agencies. I'm a little miffed that I have to pay for 911 service to my phone without an option. I am not required to have a phone, but I am required to pay for extra phone "features"?? Why do I have to pay for it on every phone line? I'm sure somebody has a link, but I would love to know how much as a percent of my money really is just recycled back to the people that print it to begin with. Before I even get my paycheck, they take a huge chunk. What is left over, I typically owe another 5 to 10% to spend it somewhere. I have to pay semi-annually for the privilege of owning some of my own possessions (real estate tax, car tax). There are exceptions for some goods and services. I don't have to pay an extra tax for medications. I have to pay a tax for general goods. I have to pay an additional tax to eat over the general goods tax (WTF??) To crash in a hotel, I have to pay a tax. To ride a bus or taxi to the hotel, no tax (yet, or its hidden and not itemized). I wonder about he real estate thing from time to time. Who owns the dirt, and who am I paying for it? The last people moved out of "my" house and "sold" it to me but I never met them or have given them a dime. In the US at least, from what I understand most of the land was stolen or just invaded. Some of it was purchased. Other countries own all of the land by the government, and let the people use it.
I guess the tax thing is OK, because I do eat, and everybody pays mostly the same percentage except the wealthy pay less and the lower income pay a higher percentage, but lower income people mostly suck at managing their lives and money and wealthy people are successful at it and provide the lower income people with their jobs with the extra income they get by paying fewer taxes, but they also pay an exorbitant amount of total taxes (I think) that is much more than most people's "pre-tax" income. Man, that made me tired.
Sure, colors look "nice". They have been standardized and used to make the highways more attractive and functional for years. Red for stop, blue for information, brown for camping, green for generic directions, yellow for yield, you get the point. Stoplights are red, yellow, and green either from top to bottom or left to right.
Syntax highlighting and color 'ls' listings are a blessing. Especially for catching typos when coding. "Why isn't that keyword the same color as the others? Oh, its elsif not elseif".
If they were distinct colours, I could tell instantly which tile was which without thinking.
Most people's eyes cannot go beyond 5 or so colors in order to make them distinct from each other in graphs and things. After that, we resort to X's, dashed and dotted lines. Again, this is a function of just looking at it. If I am familiar with the data, and I can't tell without a graphics tool to give me the hex RGB values of the colors, I guess it might be difficult for others. Oh, and some people are colorblind. It kills me that gnuplot makes the default first colors red and green, the most commonly seen as brown by a decent. I guess they missed the 500 level HCI class and the 100 level psych class.
Incidentally, everyone criticises the shutdown option on the start menu, but no-one says where shutdown should be placed...
My Macs show it under the generic Apple logo at the left upper hand of the screen with other useful things like force quitting an application, logging out, sleep, shutdown, restart, software updates, and other generic things besides mixing them with nested menus of applications, and all of the above items, and more things. Again, in psych 100 or HCI 500 there is the 7 +- 2 data that says that humans are decent of remembering about 5 to 9 things at a time. These things can be "chunked". I would consider shutdown, restart, sleep as a chunked item, and those are grouped together with a horizontal rule for clarity.
I diss HCI so much because I studied it in grad school, and was not impressed. Most of it was convoluted "special" cases of the stuff I learned in my intro psych class and/or simple common sense and/or trial and error or just an iterative process of abstraction or grouping of displayed information.
Anybody that has clicked on the Windows "Start" menu should notice in a few seconds how confusing it is. That is not a very good first impression, IMHO. That is why people try to put junk on their Desktop as shortcuts if they can figure out how to do so. Its been difficult to add, remove, organize, or "extract" all of the information in the "Start" menu for 10 years now. But with 90+% market share of the world's computers, why fix what isn't broken?
Apple integrates the "Program Files" into the common file manager, instead of making the file manager the web browser (which uses different keyboard shortcuts when in "web" mode vs "file manager" mode".
I don't dislike Windows because its a Microsoft product, and its popular to do so. I've been a Windows programmer, and have used Windows off and on from the early 90s to 97, and briefly from 99 to 00, and I forget each time how awful it is after a 6 month vacation from it until I use it again for 10 minutes or so. I quickly get reminded why I stopped using it.
Another reason I diss HCI, is that computers are not that special, and they are becoming less special every day in reality, but perceptually conceived as more special over time by many people. My DVR is a computer. It has no mouse or keyboard. It has a radically different "UI" than any other that I have used, but its really fucking good. With a brief glance at the directions for making the remote fairly universal for other components (that is not my favorite thing about the device, but its OK) and a few minutes of looking at the different screens with clear color coded and shaped buttons on the remote, I can record any show or every show in seconds, and so can any other "computer illiterate" p
we see just as much spam as ever, and it's just as obfuscated as ever
Much of the SPAM I examine is so obfuscated I can't even tell what they are trying to trick me into buying or what they are trying to steal from me.
I don't know if these are phishing mails to test for a more efficient future phishing scams or what kind of results they are looking for.
My most favorite SPAM recently was disguised from the US IRS that was a deceptive email from a "Christian" group trying to trick me into whatever. I'm not sure, but I mailed all of the ISPs and generic email addresses like abuse@, root@, webmaster@, postmaster@. Only 3 to 5 bounced, so maybe they will soon be annointed by His Noodly Appendage, reform their ways, and give me a gift for Christmas anyway.
The link does not mention whether or not the SPAM was sent via normal ISPs and from normal servers or from owned Windows boxes.
A quick check of my logs says that over the past few days 12% of all SPAM came from known dynamic IP addresses on behalf of someone else. 49% of the SPAM had URLs in the body that resolved to China or Korea.44% had URLs in Japan. Note: there can be overlap so I don't believe that 93% of URLs were from Japan, China, or Korea. In fact, another scan shows that 44% were from Japan, China, or Korea.
So this still seems as though it is an Asian thing to me. Either way, its pretty easy to identify these things in a lower volume situation, so I prefer it this way.
What kind?
Dude, do you want a harddrive or what?
There seems to be a trend in computers where there are 2 to 3 big alternatives. OSes -- Apple vs Mac vs *NIX/Linux. CPUs -- AMD vs Intel vs IBM. Disks -- Seagate vs Western Digital. Laptops -- Mac vs PC. Desktops -- Apple vs Dell.
I can't say that this is a good thing or not, but it seems to be a trend.