Okay. Let's put aside the silly "Microsoft is Evil" stuff for a minute, and look at the industry in general has gone over the past 15 years.
The price of the average "IBM" PC sold has dropped by roughly 400% since I first bought one in 1989. At the same time, processor speed on these average machines has increased by 50,000%. If this trend continues, and I see no reason for it not to, the average computer in 15 years will have a 10 THz processor and cost $125.
Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up. The number of people who are needed to build the massive applications to make use of 10 THz will be huge. Somebody's got to pay the damn programmers, right? So the price of software will continue to go up. Even if OSS succeeds and the operating system and incidental programs are free, the CUSTOM programs will be expensive.
Therefore, it makes sense to give the hardware as an added bonus with the software. The same way you have cell phones given away with calling plans today. This isn't a Microsoft thing...this could easily be an IBM thing or an Adobe thing, etc.
Software, even software written in text, even OSS, is already visually designed. It always has been. Flow charts, diagrams, screenshot mockups -- shit, I've gotten specs that were nothing more than a drawing on a paper plate.
The only difference is that Bill forsees getting rid of the intermediate step of writing code to represent the visual system. Which is not, inherently, a bad idea, as that's the step that introduces the most bugs. Some humans are great optimizers, but the average coder is not very good at it. Therefore, using visual tools to generate efficient, secure, bug-free code would be ideal. I use VS.NET and Eclipse and I have to admit: when I use the visual tools for constructing datasets, my code is far less buggy and no slower than if I'd written it myself. I continue to write it myself because I like to, and nobody's caught wind of the fact that half the bugs in my folder are due to this stubbornness.
And personally, I don't know what the FUCK you're talkign about. Programs that look pretty but don't work can be written in any IDE. A skilled coder will take the best tools available and use them to great advantage. A shitty coder will take the best tools available and make something that doesn't work. It seems to me your only complaint is that if something doesn't work, it should LOOK like it doesn't work. And since there's no method in any toolkit I can think of to make an interface look trashy, it sounds to me you've just got sour grapes.
(Oh, and please don't reply to this citing some irony you feel inmy associating Microsoft with "efficient, bug free code." That's an argument of a different color, and I'm kind of playing devil's advocate in that shade. I should point out that the.NET Framework is easily on par with Java's Framework when it started to impress me in these areas, only much faster and less stochastic, which leads me to believe that it was stubborn coding practices that caused MS' security gap in the first place.)
So what's the solution for those who CAN, and whose ideas are used all over the place without their consent?
Pouting?
Patents are designed to protect research and development. They're designed to make things fair and to promote innovation. They work in that respect in every other industry, and if a company's R&D team comes up with an idea that the others HAVE to implement, they license it. Hence, intermittant wipers. Hence, the CD mechanism.
Why is it that software patents are this hated entity? Why aren't we willing to pay for great ideas, like we are in other fields of engineering? Why isn't there some expert group to decide when something is a good, innovative patent (like MP3 or the iPod interface) and when something is a bad, no-shit patent (the hyperlink).
Incidentally, if you'd read the article, this patent is not on "subdomains," but on automatically creating subdomains. Which is a pretty clever idea. If Ideaflood had actually developed a technology around it, I'll bet a lot of people would use it. DNS/Webserver integration is a very cool thing, the two go hand in hand for webhosts. I'd be willing to pay a $10 license fee for that, if Ideaflood had actually come up with it, and I'm pretty sure they didn't.
I'm not sold on the idea that all information should be free. There have been times at work when I've sat staring at a problem for days and found a solution to a common issue that I've never seen before. Generally, I just post it to a newsgroup, but I like the feeling that if I ever had that perfect integration system pop out of my brain one day, I could get some money for it. After all, I don't stare at computers for 12 - 16 hours a day because I like the pasty white colour of my arms. I do it because I get paid for it, and I enjoy it more than construction.
It's not a patent on "subdomains," it's a patent on automatically GENERATING subdomains. A pretty specific practice.
I'm pretty sure that tess2 is not a user of uspto.gov whose patent site was automatically generated when she signed up. Ipso facto, they're NOT in violation of the patent.
I should patent not reading the fucking article. I'd make a killing on slashdot.
The iPod is a hard drive, just direct copy the stuff over from it.
Obviously, you've never used an iPod, or you don't understand my conundrum.
I rarely want to copy everything on the iPod to a hard drive (basically, only if i'm backing up prior to a software update). That's 30 gig and it's not worth the time or the spacehogging when I only want a few songs or a few albums on the new host computer.
On the iPod, files are saved in a series of directories numbered from F01 to F20. The files are saved in these directories round robin...so in an album of 13 songs, you're likely to have one song in each directory. The filenames are just the song title, plus the track number. So if I want to find a song on the iPod outside of iTunes, I have to search for it in those directories by title. To extract an album or playlist, I'd have to search for each song and copy it that way.
Technically feasible, but a pain in the ass.
So instead, I use EphPod (on the PC) or PodWerks (on the Mac) to read in the iPod Library.XML file and locate the files for me. Saves time and effort. And both of these apps are stored on the iPod itself...so my "sharing" tools are self contained, just not within the itunes app itself.
OK. I have a library of close to 250 gigabytes on three machines (four counting the ipod). And iTunes has been the best organizational system I've found. Once you get the music in there, you have so much power at your fingertips for doing mass associations, creating autogenerated playlists, altering EQs, archiving music, searching for a particular song, etc.
Is it perfect? Hell no. For one thing, it plays fast and loose with ID3 tags, so even songs that are tagged correctly in iTunes sometimes lose their tags when they come out of it. Some of the really useful apple extensions like the star rating disappear when you move the files (which sucks when you're auditioning several thousand songs for possible deletion). For another, the "let's appease the RIAA" decision of not allowing copying FROM an iPod means I need to maintain other applications to get stuff that I placed on the iPod.
Finally, using iTunes sort of requires you to adopt the iPod Way of doing things -- e.g. you have to let it control your library, or else it goes a bit whacko. This makes sense. You should ALWAYS control the lowest level of abstraction using the highest level whenever possible, or risk having to maintain the abstraction on each level. iTunes' ability to treat metadata as a pseudo filesystem makes it a very useful high level abstraction. It takes very little extra effort to do all your file maintenance in iTunes, but if you're such a control freak that you're constantly moving files around, you shouldn't be using a music library application in the first place.
Incidentally, the library handling is much saner on OSX, where you can move files to your heart's content and not worry about the app not being able to find them.
Yes. They would only need to use a small portion of their budget. Let's see...what's ten percent of fuck all?
And this is exactly why OGG is, and will remain, a stalled format. With nobody to promote it, and everybody who might care about it already enabled by other technologies (MP3/AAC/WMA) that are intensly marketed and aren't prohibitively expensive, there's little reason to use Vorbis. I re-ripped my whole collection to AAC when I realized it was support by every platform I use AND had industry support besides, guaranteeing it wouldn't be a dead format.
OGG isn't even the Betamax of the group. Betamax had SONY behind it. OGG is more like, I dunno, reel to reel.
Yes, I am sure that Paul and Ringo are pissed off at the similarity between the names "Apple Records" and "iTunes Music Store." I mean, I can hardly tell the difference!
They're just waiting for apple to roll out its new slogans, "Happiness is a warm iPod" and "Everybody's got something to hide (Except me and my iTunes Library)."
Uh, the fact that Apple would dictate what you could and couldn't do with said license, and would be within rights to deny one to whoever they liked, could be seen as a preventative measure.
Anyhow, there's a good chance they'll do this eventually. There are a number of lucrative markets that Apple would never touch but where playback of iTMS audio files could be useful. Muzak? Radio? DJing? High end jukeboxes? Marine audio? What about audiobook devices for the blind? If apple will license their player to HP, I'm sure they'd license similar tech for these other applications as soon as somebody proposes a fair enough deal.
The iPod is already popular. The people who want a hackable device already have a ton of options. And since you can install Linux on the iPod, the iPod is one of the options!
Apple used to allow third party apps to play in the iPod sandbox. But users were turning the software into a suite of apps for filesharing and piracy -- basically, shitting in the sandbox. This was during an essential period for Apple, when they were trying to smooth the kinks in their dealings with the major labels.
Being the enablers of a massive pirate community would NOT have been good for Apple or for users of the iPod. It might have resulted in civil action. It definitely would have soured the deal, meaning no iTMS, and probably a massive amount of lost sales and less innovation for the rest of us.
Yes. Firewire is a good example. Apple's not "bullheaded," they're shrewd. If there's more money to be made by licensing out the technology than there is by sitting on it, they'll do the latter. Check out their relationship with Belkin...they release a new device, and Belkin has accessories for it. You gain a lot out of these accessories, and Apple doesn't have to do the work themselves.
Of course, if Apple's liable to lose their foothold in the marketplace and cause themselves a good deal of hassle, they won't do it. That's why they nixed the clones and why they won't move to x86 any time soon.
If it's true that anybody can license FairPlay...then in theory, anybody COULD make their own iTunes competitor.
Which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately...how the loss of MP3.com has left a lot of artists with no money and no deal in the shitter, and there's nobody left in the void to take their place other than Windows-only files or unrestricted downloads. Some of these -- like Weed -- are pretty nice, but using fairplay could be a pretty nice solution that's compatible with the best device in town.
The only reason people are using Linux today is that they are too cheap to buy Macintoshes.
Most are too proud to admit it. After all, they're using the world's first all-clone operating system, and they didn't even have to pay for it. Its mascot is a flightless bird! And that, my friends, is an acheivement to be proud of.
Incidentally, I have half a chocolate bar left, if anybody's hungry, it's Free as in Sugar Free.
(Wow, what a vindictive and bitter post. Guess the past 8 hours spent trying desparately to get this fucking piece of shit program to compile have really worn down my normally cautious and tolerant exterior. I mean seriously, if it weren't for OSS, I probably could have just BOUGHT a program from somebody and not wasted my time. I could have gotten LAID tonight if I wasn't working on this).
I use Windows. I also use the MacOS and Linux. But mostly I use windows. Not because it is better, but because it has the fewest amount of hassles overall.
I should point out that I don't get viruses, filter spam, block popups and the firewall stops DoSs. Because if I had to contend with those things, I'd probably shift platforms.
AMD existed before windows, you know. My first x86 computer had an AMD chip in it, and it didn't have Windows. As for the Apple machines not being as fast as they are today -- the speed gap isn't as big a factor in Apple's product design as you seem to think. They're lagged "disastrously" behind at various times and never really scrambled to keep up...instead, they moved at their own gradual pace. They did the same thing in the 1980s with basically no competition in the market.
Actually, if Microsoft didn't exist, it's more likely that one of the other companies of the day would have taken the inexpensive ubiquity of IBM's business platform someplace similar to where Windows is now. Norton maybe, or Lotus. In fact, there were a number of pre-windows graphical "commanders" that I experimented with before going whole-hoc Win3.1. I don't think IBM would have done anything...I shopped PCs in the late 80s, and IBM salesman couldn't care less about the scholastic and home users who helped popularize windows. They only wanted BUSINESSES...and the software showed it. The closest thing to a game on the machine I looked at was fucking QBASIC.
Anyway, Microsoft had a bit of a lead by basing windows on dos. But anybody could have cloned the Mac -- the difference was, MS had the tenacity to keep going, releasing numerous bad products until eventually they got a good one, and trust marketing and word of mouth to do the rest. Sound familiar? It was this tenacity that got them where they were today. After all, wasn't it tenacity that encouraged them to say, "hey guys, nice standard. Mind if we change it a bit? After all, we use it more than you."
Incidentally, I remember exactly why I got Windows in the first place, before I had any software to run on it: Windows had a really neat paint program! If Linux had some really neat app, and not just a bunch of advanced clones that do basically the same things as Windows, people like me might be more likely to use it. At this point, it's not worth the hassle (since I don't intend on ever upgrading Win2k anyway...that's why i got this tattoo!).
If the.mail domain is intended to be a policed system, consider that $2000 as a deposit ensuring that you won't spam, and guaranteeing you a chance to plead your case when complaints come up.
And remember: only the smtp server delviering the mail needs a.mail domain. Thousands of hosting companies would be willing to outlay $2000 to certify all of their servers, then give you access to relay your mail through trustedrelay6.somecompany.mail. It'd be no different than paying for bandwidth...
Newbies could learn well from this: if a poster states a valid, insightful argument that goes against the idea that all information should be free, your first line of defense should be anonymous cuss words.
If these fail, call them Micro$oft lovers. Or Mac zealots.
And *I* don't see why small companies like myself wouldn't take the chance to lower their email hosting fees by a dollar and offer guaranteed delivery of non-spam. I already police my users (so no worries about losing access to.mail), all I'd have to do is outlay $2000 per year. I only need to host 33 email domains at $5/mo each to cover that. I already have TRIPLE that in email domains, so I'd do it. In yet another fact, I could probably get my coloc admin to grant me relay on one of his servers...and make him pay the $2000 (or rather add it to his operating costs, which are 1000 times mine).
I mean, why the FUCK do you need an smtp server at your house anyway? I don't have a UPS Store in my basement. SMTP at home is the reason we have so much spam, plain and simple.
To your webserver, the only difference between some smartpants linux guy running home email server and a compromised machine running a spam worm is -- well, there are probably no references to v14_ga_ra! in the email from the guru.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. Let's put aside the silly "Microsoft is Evil" stuff for a minute, and look at the industry in general has gone over the past 15 years.
The price of the average "IBM" PC sold has dropped by roughly 400% since I first bought one in 1989. At the same time, processor speed on these average machines has increased by 50,000%. If this trend continues, and I see no reason for it not to, the average computer in 15 years will have a 10 THz processor and cost $125.
Now, the while the cost of hardware continues to go down, the cost of software continues to go up. The number of people who are needed to build the massive applications to make use of 10 THz will be huge. Somebody's got to pay the damn programmers, right? So the price of software will continue to go up. Even if OSS succeeds and the operating system and incidental programs are free, the CUSTOM programs will be expensive.
Therefore, it makes sense to give the hardware as an added bonus with the software. The same way you have cell phones given away with calling plans today. This isn't a Microsoft thing...this could easily be an IBM thing or an Adobe thing, etc.
Whoa here, buddy.
.NET Framework is easily on par with Java's Framework when it started to impress me in these areas, only much faster and less stochastic, which leads me to believe that it was stubborn coding practices that caused MS' security gap in the first place.)
Software, even software written in text, even OSS, is already visually designed. It always has been. Flow charts, diagrams, screenshot mockups -- shit, I've gotten specs that were nothing more than a drawing on a paper plate.
The only difference is that Bill forsees getting rid of the intermediate step of writing code to represent the visual system. Which is not, inherently, a bad idea, as that's the step that introduces the most bugs. Some humans are great optimizers, but the average coder is not very good at it. Therefore, using visual tools to generate efficient, secure, bug-free code would be ideal. I use VS.NET and Eclipse and I have to admit: when I use the visual tools for constructing datasets, my code is far less buggy and no slower than if I'd written it myself. I continue to write it myself because I like to, and nobody's caught wind of the fact that half the bugs in my folder are due to this stubbornness.
And personally, I don't know what the FUCK you're talkign about. Programs that look pretty but don't work can be written in any IDE. A skilled coder will take the best tools available and use them to great advantage. A shitty coder will take the best tools available and make something that doesn't work. It seems to me your only complaint is that if something doesn't work, it should LOOK like it doesn't work. And since there's no method in any toolkit I can think of to make an interface look trashy, it sounds to me you've just got sour grapes.
(Oh, and please don't reply to this citing some irony you feel inmy associating Microsoft with "efficient, bug free code." That's an argument of a different color, and I'm kind of playing devil's advocate in that shade. I should point out that the
Really?
So what's the solution for those who CAN, and whose ideas are used all over the place without their consent?
Pouting?
Patents are designed to protect research and development. They're designed to make things fair and to promote innovation. They work in that respect in every other industry, and if a company's R&D team comes up with an idea that the others HAVE to implement, they license it. Hence, intermittant wipers. Hence, the CD mechanism.
Why is it that software patents are this hated entity? Why aren't we willing to pay for great ideas, like we are in other fields of engineering? Why isn't there some expert group to decide when something is a good, innovative patent (like MP3 or the iPod interface) and when something is a bad, no-shit patent (the hyperlink).
Incidentally, if you'd read the article, this patent is not on "subdomains," but on automatically creating subdomains. Which is a pretty clever idea. If Ideaflood had actually developed a technology around it, I'll bet a lot of people would use it. DNS/Webserver integration is a very cool thing, the two go hand in hand for webhosts. I'd be willing to pay a $10 license fee for that, if Ideaflood had actually come up with it, and I'm pretty sure they didn't.
I'm not sold on the idea that all information should be free. There have been times at work when I've sat staring at a problem for days and found a solution to a common issue that I've never seen before. Generally, I just post it to a newsgroup, but I like the feeling that if I ever had that perfect integration system pop out of my brain one day, I could get some money for it. After all, I don't stare at computers for 12 - 16 hours a day because I like the pasty white colour of my arms. I do it because I get paid for it, and I enjoy it more than construction.
Do YOU understand what this patent means?
It's not a patent on "subdomains," it's a patent on automatically GENERATING subdomains. A pretty specific practice.
I'm pretty sure that tess2 is not a user of uspto.gov whose patent site was automatically generated when she signed up. Ipso facto, they're NOT in violation of the patent.
I should patent not reading the fucking article. I'd make a killing on slashdot.
The iPod is a hard drive, just direct copy the stuff over from it.
Obviously, you've never used an iPod, or you don't understand my conundrum.
I rarely want to copy everything on the iPod to a hard drive (basically, only if i'm backing up prior to a software update). That's 30 gig and it's not worth the time or the spacehogging when I only want a few songs or a few albums on the new host computer.
On the iPod, files are saved in a series of directories numbered from F01 to F20. The files are saved in these directories round robin...so in an album of 13 songs, you're likely to have one song in each directory. The filenames are just the song title, plus the track number. So if I want to find a song on the iPod outside of iTunes, I have to search for it in those directories by title. To extract an album or playlist, I'd have to search for each song and copy it that way.
Technically feasible, but a pain in the ass.
So instead, I use EphPod (on the PC) or PodWerks (on the Mac) to read in the iPod Library.XML file and locate the files for me. Saves time and effort. And both of these apps are stored on the iPod itself...so my "sharing" tools are self contained, just not within the itunes app itself.
That was the quince, buddy. Apple stole their trademark from the Beatles.
OK. I have a library of close to 250 gigabytes on three machines (four counting the ipod). And iTunes has been the best organizational system I've found. Once you get the music in there, you have so much power at your fingertips for doing mass associations, creating autogenerated playlists, altering EQs, archiving music, searching for a particular song, etc.
Is it perfect? Hell no. For one thing, it plays fast and loose with ID3 tags, so even songs that are tagged correctly in iTunes sometimes lose their tags when they come out of it. Some of the really useful apple extensions like the star rating disappear when you move the files (which sucks when you're auditioning several thousand songs for possible deletion). For another, the "let's appease the RIAA" decision of not allowing copying FROM an iPod means I need to maintain other applications to get stuff that I placed on the iPod.
Finally, using iTunes sort of requires you to adopt the iPod Way of doing things -- e.g. you have to let it control your library, or else it goes a bit whacko. This makes sense. You should ALWAYS control the lowest level of abstraction using the highest level whenever possible, or risk having to maintain the abstraction on each level. iTunes' ability to treat metadata as a pseudo filesystem makes it a very useful high level abstraction. It takes very little extra effort to do all your file maintenance in iTunes, but if you're such a control freak that you're constantly moving files around, you shouldn't be using a music library application in the first place.
Incidentally, the library handling is much saner on OSX, where you can move files to your heart's content and not worry about the app not being able to find them.
ogg needs to start advertising.
Yes. They would only need to use a small portion of their budget. Let's see...what's ten percent of fuck all?
And this is exactly why OGG is, and will remain, a stalled format. With nobody to promote it, and everybody who might care about it already enabled by other technologies (MP3/AAC/WMA) that are intensly marketed and aren't prohibitively expensive, there's little reason to use Vorbis. I re-ripped my whole collection to AAC when I realized it was support by every platform I use AND had industry support besides, guaranteeing it wouldn't be a dead format.
OGG isn't even the Betamax of the group. Betamax had SONY behind it. OGG is more like, I dunno, reel to reel.
Yes, I am sure that Paul and Ringo are pissed off at the similarity between the names "Apple Records" and "iTunes Music Store." I mean, I can hardly tell the difference!
They're just waiting for apple to roll out its new slogans, "Happiness is a warm iPod" and "Everybody's got something to hide (Except me and my iTunes Library)."
Uh, the fact that Apple would dictate what you could and couldn't do with said license, and would be within rights to deny one to whoever they liked, could be seen as a preventative measure.
Anyhow, there's a good chance they'll do this eventually. There are a number of lucrative markets that Apple would never touch but where playback of iTMS audio files could be useful. Muzak? Radio? DJing? High end jukeboxes? Marine audio? What about audiobook devices for the blind? If apple will license their player to HP, I'm sure they'd license similar tech for these other applications as soon as somebody proposes a fair enough deal.
Well, there are counterexamples. A lot of big albums are missing tracks -- and you can't buy a partial album for $10.
I'm sorry...no.
The iPod is already popular. The people who want a hackable device already have a ton of options. And since you can install Linux on the iPod, the iPod is one of the options!
Apple used to allow third party apps to play in the iPod sandbox. But users were turning the software into a suite of apps for filesharing and piracy -- basically, shitting in the sandbox. This was during an essential period for Apple, when they were trying to smooth the kinks in their dealings with the major labels.
Being the enablers of a massive pirate community would NOT have been good for Apple or for users of the iPod. It might have resulted in civil action. It definitely would have soured the deal, meaning no iTMS, and probably a massive amount of lost sales and less innovation for the rest of us.
Yes. Firewire is a good example. Apple's not "bullheaded," they're shrewd. If there's more money to be made by licensing out the technology than there is by sitting on it, they'll do the latter. Check out their relationship with Belkin...they release a new device, and Belkin has accessories for it. You gain a lot out of these accessories, and Apple doesn't have to do the work themselves.
Of course, if Apple's liable to lose their foothold in the marketplace and cause themselves a good deal of hassle, they won't do it. That's why they nixed the clones and why they won't move to x86 any time soon.
What, you mean like the new one from Alpine?
;)
Or something like what I'm working on with my Beetle . I'm integrating the dock into the dashboard
Oh wow, I hadn't thought of that.
If it's true that anybody can license FairPlay...then in theory, anybody COULD make their own iTunes competitor.
Which is something I've been thinking about a lot lately...how the loss of MP3.com has left a lot of artists with no money and no deal in the shitter, and there's nobody left in the void to take their place other than Windows-only files or unrestricted downloads. Some of these -- like Weed -- are pretty nice, but using fairplay could be a pretty nice solution that's compatible with the best device in town.
No.
The only reason people are using Linux today is that they are too cheap to buy Macintoshes.
Most are too proud to admit it. After all, they're using the world's first all-clone operating system, and they didn't even have to pay for it. Its mascot is a flightless bird! And that, my friends, is an acheivement to be proud of.
Incidentally, I have half a chocolate bar left, if anybody's hungry, it's Free as in Sugar Free.
(Wow, what a vindictive and bitter post. Guess the past 8 hours spent trying desparately to get this fucking piece of shit program to compile have really worn down my normally cautious and tolerant exterior. I mean seriously, if it weren't for OSS, I probably could have just BOUGHT a program from somebody and not wasted my time. I could have gotten LAID tonight if I wasn't working on this).
I use Windows. I also use the MacOS and Linux. But mostly I use windows. Not because it is better, but because it has the fewest amount of hassles overall.
I should point out that I don't get viruses, filter spam, block popups and the firewall stops DoSs. Because if I had to contend with those things, I'd probably shift platforms.
Escape Velocity.
Oh, and Snood.
AMD existed before windows, you know. My first x86 computer had an AMD chip in it, and it didn't have Windows. As for the Apple machines not being as fast as they are today -- the speed gap isn't as big a factor in Apple's product design as you seem to think. They're lagged "disastrously" behind at various times and never really scrambled to keep up...instead, they moved at their own gradual pace. They did the same thing in the 1980s with basically no competition in the market.
Actually, if Microsoft didn't exist, it's more likely that one of the other companies of the day would have taken the inexpensive ubiquity of IBM's business platform someplace similar to where Windows is now. Norton maybe, or Lotus. In fact, there were a number of pre-windows graphical "commanders" that I experimented with before going whole-hoc Win3.1. I don't think IBM would have done anything...I shopped PCs in the late 80s, and IBM salesman couldn't care less about the scholastic and home users who helped popularize windows. They only wanted BUSINESSES...and the software showed it. The closest thing to a game on the machine I looked at was fucking QBASIC.
Anyway, Microsoft had a bit of a lead by basing windows on dos. But anybody could have cloned the Mac -- the difference was, MS had the tenacity to keep going, releasing numerous bad products until eventually they got a good one, and trust marketing and word of mouth to do the rest. Sound familiar? It was this tenacity that got them where they were today. After all, wasn't it tenacity that encouraged them to say, "hey guys, nice standard. Mind if we change it a bit? After all, we use it more than you."
Incidentally, I remember exactly why I got Windows in the first place, before I had any software to run on it: Windows had a really neat paint program! If Linux had some really neat app, and not just a bunch of advanced clones that do basically the same things as Windows, people like me might be more likely to use it. At this point, it's not worth the hassle (since I don't intend on ever upgrading Win2k anyway...that's why i got this tattoo!).
Wow, that was...uh...pretty dorky.
And this is coming from somebody with a rhetoric degree. Also, you mix your metaphors like a cement machine.
If the .mail domain is intended to be a policed system, consider that $2000 as a deposit ensuring that you won't spam, and guaranteeing you a chance to plead your case when complaints come up.
.mail domain. Thousands of hosting companies would be willing to outlay $2000 to certify all of their servers, then give you access to relay your mail through trustedrelay6.somecompany.mail. It'd be no different than paying for bandwidth...
And remember: only the smtp server delviering the mail needs a
A beautiful rebuttal, in pure slashdot fashion.
Newbies could learn well from this: if a poster states a valid, insightful argument that goes against the idea that all information should be free, your first line of defense should be anonymous cuss words.
If these fail, call them Micro$oft lovers. Or Mac zealots.
Which is the major advantage of .mail over certificates...certs only work on one domain string. Add mail. to the front, your cert is invalid.
.mail, any second or third levels would be okay. Which means you can run multiple servers, and sell offshoots to recoop your $2000.
With
Furhtermore, it decreases the number of requests for authentication -- just one, to reverse lookup the domain, which you're already doing.
And you don't have to run one SMTP server per domain, you know. Use MX records, damnit!
And *I* don't see why small companies like myself wouldn't take the chance to lower their email hosting fees by a dollar and offer guaranteed delivery of non-spam. I already police my users (so no worries about losing access to .mail), all I'd have to do is outlay $2000 per year. I only need to host 33 email domains at $5/mo each to cover that. I already have TRIPLE that in email domains, so I'd do it. In yet another fact, I could probably get my coloc admin to grant me relay on one of his servers...and make him pay the $2000 (or rather add it to his operating costs, which are 1000 times mine).
I mean, why the FUCK do you need an smtp server at your house anyway? I don't have a UPS Store in my basement. SMTP at home is the reason we have so much spam, plain and simple.
Why not?
To your webserver, the only difference between some smartpants linux guy running home email server and a compromised machine running a spam worm is -- well, there are probably no references to v14_ga_ra! in the email from the guru.