As has been posted here many times already, many DVD players don't work with CD-Rs. However, each machine's specs will tell you what formats it will play. If it doesn't say a certain format is supported, then you can't assume that it is. Some DVD olayers have problems with other kinds of media, auch as VCDs and Photo CDs. If you want to play a given media type on a player, then you have to check the supported formats before you make the purchase. A friend of mine was shopping for a player last week, and before he went down to Best Buy, I told him to ask for a player that supports CD-R. He did, and the salesman directed him to a Pioneer, which he bought. He's happy, and now he won't have any trouble if he gets one of these discs. Simple as that.
Yep, I believe it was called the Napper Crapper 2000, or something like that.
The toilet may be a little tricky, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the fridge show up on a future model. Gee, I wonder if you could have it set up to automatically place an order with Kozmo when the beer runs low.
On second thought, maybe the engineers ought to put a little more effort into getting that toilet in there somehow.
I'm not going to get into whether this post is insightful or flamebait, but there may be a legitimate point here. Let's assume that MS manages to push the distribution of its software to OEMs. What responsibilities does it also get rid of? Let's see...
Manufacturing the CDs, printing manuals, etc. Who do you think manufactured all that material with Dell printed all over it? All MS has to do is provide the OEM with master copies. This also has the effect of eliminating the expense of storing and transporting large amounts of inventory.
Support. OK, MS support sucks to the point that it's almost nonexistent, but they still have to make some small effort to support something they sold you. But when you get OEM software, MS goes out of its way to tell you that your support must come from whoever sold you the computer and not MS. Getting rid of support staff will save them quite a lot of cash.
Security. If MS wants to secure its software, going the OEM route is the best way. Since OEMs generally use the same basic hardware in each line of systems (motherboard, BIOS version, NIC, etc.), it's easier to build security into software that will latch onto something on that machine. It also decreases the likliehood that the end user is going to do something that will cause headaches for MS's security scheme. I mean, if you buy a Dell with a three-year warranty, you're going to be less likely to change out the motherboard during those three years simply because that'd void the warranty. I'm not saying there's no chance of this happening, just that it's less likely. And if you do, and if that screws up MS's security scheme..., well, refer to my paragraph on support. MS will just send you back to the OEM and make them deal with it.
Reduced competition. This one is a bit more iffy. However, if MS can shift its software distribution to the OEMs, it may hope that they will continue to bundle several products with the same machine, thereby ensuring that MS will continue to get a cut of each machine sold. On the other hand, let's say that you build your own system, then go out and buy a copy of Windows. You just blew a significant chunk of change on the OS, but you don't have an office suite yet. Assuming that MS Office is secured in the same way that Windows is, thereby making piracy a little more difficult, and assuming that you're not the kind of person to try to crack it, either because of a sense of ethics or a lack of knowledge, then you're going to have to shell out more cash. Or you might look into a cheaper alternative, such as WordPerfect or Star Office. You might even decide to try something else and come back to MS Office if you aren't happy. But there's a chance that you will be happy and never come back. Having an OEM bundle the MS product up front eliminates this possibility for MS. Of course, there's that little court case a few years ago about forced bundling, but you see how far that got us in getting to choose the software we want with new computers.
I don't know if MS is really actively conspiring to shift its products away from retail and onto OEMs, but doing this certainly has its advantages.
As another poster points out, satellite is only a viable option if you have no other choice. The latency is just too high because of the distance the signal must travel, and no amount of technology is going to change that, unless, of course, we can get around that pesky speed of light.
Having said that, my one brief experience with using Starband wasn't that bad. However, when I was telling this to a network tech friend of mine, he said that another tech had looked at the Starband config and found that they are using caching. If true, this would make some amount of sense, since it'd move the data a little closer to the end user. Still, I don't like caching, since you can never be sure if the page you're getting is current. Can anyone out there confirm or deny that this is going on, and, if it is, can a user choose not to use the cache servers?
Oops. I see your point. Sorry 'bout that. I was still kind of out of it when I read your post (too much surfing, way too little sleep), so I was just focusing on the part about using the RBL, DUL, and ORBS. And I agree with you. Hell, if someone didn't want to run Linux, they could use something like Mercury Mail, which is free and runs on Windows.
My personal pet peeve are the old Silicon Graphics machines with the broken Sendmail--the one that is not only open but also doesn't record the connecting IP in the headers. Most of these machines must have found their way to places like China and Korea, as that seems to be where they're getting abused, and good luck getting anyone there to fix them or even to respond to your relay report. My only consolation is that the machine will eventually end up on enough blacklists that one big spam run will cause it to choke to death on undeliverable mail. Then the administrator is forced to deal with it.
Since you're most likely filtering against the IPs of dialup POPs, all that would really work is the DUL, and you have to bear in mind that it isn't really a blacklist, just a list of IPs that are dialups and that shouldn't have access to mail servers other than their own. This will help somewhat, but it still isn't a complete fix.
No, you're thinking of a bill that was introduced into Congress in 1998 by Sen. Frank Murkowski. It passed the Senate as a rider to S. 1618 but died in the House after organizations such as CAUCE and FREE mounted a huge phone-in campaign. They were against the bill because it was seen as pro-spam because it implied that spamming was fine as long as the spammer provided a way to get removed from his list. Aside from the obvious problems with an opt-out system, there were major loopholes. For example, there wasn't much to prevent a spammer from removing you from one list, then adding you to others later, since you'd have to somehow figure out that the same person had spammed you twice. There was also nothing to prevent your address to be sold or given to another spammer. So, Party A could spam you, get your remove request, remove you, then give your address to Party B, who is spamming on Party A's behalf, to spam you again. (There was no penalty for the person _sponsoring_ the spam, only for the one actively sending it at that moment, so each and every spammer could spam you until you asked for removal.) Finally, neither you nor your ISP could sue for damages if a spammer didn't remove you. All you could do was report the spammer to the Federal Trade Commission, who had sole authority to levy penalties. Aside from these issues, ISPs were afraid that the bill implied a right for their customers to spam if they followed certain guidelines, and the ISPs feared that they would lose the ability to enforce their AUPs. For example, what if a spammer obtained a Hotmail address to receive remove requests, and Hotmail closed the account. Could the spammer argue in court that Hotmail had no right to do this, since the spammer was using the account to perform a legally-required function, namely, to receive and honor remove requests, as required by law? Luckily, this monstrosity died before it became law.
Perhaps, but consider this. Some estimates have put the percentage of spam coming into AOL as high as 30% of e-mail traffic. Now how many terabytes of storage do you suppose AOL has for e-mail, not to mention how much bandwidth is needed to receive it? If you figure that 30% of that goes to spam, you can see that there is a real cost, one that the spammer isn't paying. If AOL is going to send out a million CDs, they have incremental costs associated with doing that, costs that _they_ must pay. Your garden variety spammer signs up for a dialup account with an ISP, then spams away like there's no tomorrow, until the ISP is alerted and pulls the plug. What does the originating ISP get? $19.95? Maybe, unless the spammer used a fake cc number or requests a chargeback, which credit card companies often give. And what costs has the ISP incurred? Well, the spammer used their bandwidth to send out his spam, and he costs their sysadmins time (translation: money), since they have to deal with the mess the spammer leaves behind, plus, he causes the billing/collections department time (translation: money) as they try to get some money out of him, and he might also cause legal fees to pile up if the ISP decides to sue.
As a matter of fact, I sold dialup ISDN to a guy who I later found out wanted to spam. Let's look at what this one incident cost in terms of time.
20 minutes for me to explain the product set and sign him up.
10 minutes to speak with someone in QA about his nasty e-mail she received telling us he wanted to cancel because he objected to our AUP.
10 minutes discussing it with my supervisor.
15 minutes for me, my supervisor, the QA representative, and the QA manager to discuss the situation.
5 minutes for me and my supervisor to tell the manager of billing that the customer was definitely to be billed for the time he used, even though he stated in his message that he wouldn't pay.
30 minutes for the manager of QA to speak to him and tell him that he was going to get charged, since he had asked and was told at the time of signup that we don't do refunds. It was at this time that his intention to spam was revealed.
10 minutes for me to spaek with our sysadmin to find out if he had spammed while he was connected, which he hadn't, as far as we could tell at the time.
Now you can add up the time above and get an idea of the cost. Keep in mind that you'll have to double, triple, or quadruple some numbers based on the number of people involved. And I don't even know if we ever got our money out of him.
And don't forget the costs to another organization if the spammer hijacks a mail server to relay his junk. Sure, anyone running an open relay these days is asking for trouble, but there are times when closing them can be a huge pain, such as on an old mainframe running an old MTA and an outdated OS. There are some machines out there that are old enough that there just aren't any upgrades available, and the organizations that own them might not be able to justify replacing them solely for that reason.
My point isn't to downplay the annoyance of regular junk mail, but spammers cost lots of people lots of money, and I didn't even get onto the subject of fraudulent spam, which most of it seems to be. IMHO, AOL is right to sue them. Hell, I wish they'd do this more often, and it'd be nice if other ISPs did the same. If these lowlifes want to use the resources of others to try to squeeze a buck out of some newbie, then they need to get their balls nailed to the wall for it.
It's too bad these things can't "learn" from each other the way Furby's can. All you'd have to do is buy one, hack it, return it to the store, and before you know it, every one of them would be saying, "The DMCA sucks," or "Penguin Power," over and over. Since I'd bet that most of the people who'd actually buy one of these things would pay more attention to it than they would to anyone who posts here, this would be the perfect way to educate the masses about what really matters.
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As has been posted here many times already, many DVD players don't work with CD-Rs. However, each machine's specs will tell you what formats it will play. If it doesn't say a certain format is supported, then you can't assume that it is. Some DVD olayers have problems with other kinds of media, auch as VCDs and Photo CDs. If you want to play a given media type on a player, then you have to check the supported formats before you make the purchase. A friend of mine was shopping for a player last week, and before he went down to Best Buy, I told him to ask for a player that supports CD-R. He did, and the salesman directed him to a Pioneer, which he bought. He's happy, and now he won't have any trouble if he gets one of these discs. Simple as that.
Yep, I believe it was called the Napper Crapper 2000, or something like that. The toilet may be a little tricky, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the fridge show up on a future model. Gee, I wonder if you could have it set up to automatically place an order with Kozmo when the beer runs low. On second thought, maybe the engineers ought to put a little more effort into getting that toilet in there somehow.
I'm not going to get into whether this post is insightful or flamebait, but there may be a legitimate point here. Let's assume that MS manages to push the distribution of its software to OEMs. What responsibilities does it also get rid of? Let's see... Manufacturing the CDs, printing manuals, etc. Who do you think manufactured all that material with Dell printed all over it? All MS has to do is provide the OEM with master copies. This also has the effect of eliminating the expense of storing and transporting large amounts of inventory. Support. OK, MS support sucks to the point that it's almost nonexistent, but they still have to make some small effort to support something they sold you. But when you get OEM software, MS goes out of its way to tell you that your support must come from whoever sold you the computer and not MS. Getting rid of support staff will save them quite a lot of cash. Security. If MS wants to secure its software, going the OEM route is the best way. Since OEMs generally use the same basic hardware in each line of systems (motherboard, BIOS version, NIC, etc.), it's easier to build security into software that will latch onto something on that machine. It also decreases the likliehood that the end user is going to do something that will cause headaches for MS's security scheme. I mean, if you buy a Dell with a three-year warranty, you're going to be less likely to change out the motherboard during those three years simply because that'd void the warranty. I'm not saying there's no chance of this happening, just that it's less likely. And if you do, and if that screws up MS's security scheme..., well, refer to my paragraph on support. MS will just send you back to the OEM and make them deal with it. Reduced competition. This one is a bit more iffy. However, if MS can shift its software distribution to the OEMs, it may hope that they will continue to bundle several products with the same machine, thereby ensuring that MS will continue to get a cut of each machine sold. On the other hand, let's say that you build your own system, then go out and buy a copy of Windows. You just blew a significant chunk of change on the OS, but you don't have an office suite yet. Assuming that MS Office is secured in the same way that Windows is, thereby making piracy a little more difficult, and assuming that you're not the kind of person to try to crack it, either because of a sense of ethics or a lack of knowledge, then you're going to have to shell out more cash. Or you might look into a cheaper alternative, such as WordPerfect or Star Office. You might even decide to try something else and come back to MS Office if you aren't happy. But there's a chance that you will be happy and never come back. Having an OEM bundle the MS product up front eliminates this possibility for MS. Of course, there's that little court case a few years ago about forced bundling, but you see how far that got us in getting to choose the software we want with new computers. I don't know if MS is really actively conspiring to shift its products away from retail and onto OEMs, but doing this certainly has its advantages.
As another poster points out, satellite is only a viable option if you have no other choice. The latency is just too high because of the distance the signal must travel, and no amount of technology is going to change that, unless, of course, we can get around that pesky speed of light. Having said that, my one brief experience with using Starband wasn't that bad. However, when I was telling this to a network tech friend of mine, he said that another tech had looked at the Starband config and found that they are using caching. If true, this would make some amount of sense, since it'd move the data a little closer to the end user. Still, I don't like caching, since you can never be sure if the page you're getting is current. Can anyone out there confirm or deny that this is going on, and, if it is, can a user choose not to use the cache servers?
Oops. I see your point. Sorry 'bout that. I was still kind of out of it when I read your post (too much surfing, way too little sleep), so I was just focusing on the part about using the RBL, DUL, and ORBS. And I agree with you. Hell, if someone didn't want to run Linux, they could use something like Mercury Mail, which is free and runs on Windows. My personal pet peeve are the old Silicon Graphics machines with the broken Sendmail--the one that is not only open but also doesn't record the connecting IP in the headers. Most of these machines must have found their way to places like China and Korea, as that seems to be where they're getting abused, and good luck getting anyone there to fix them or even to respond to your relay report. My only consolation is that the machine will eventually end up on enough blacklists that one big spam run will cause it to choke to death on undeliverable mail. Then the administrator is forced to deal with it.
Since you're most likely filtering against the IPs of dialup POPs, all that would really work is the DUL, and you have to bear in mind that it isn't really a blacklist, just a list of IPs that are dialups and that shouldn't have access to mail servers other than their own. This will help somewhat, but it still isn't a complete fix.
No, you're thinking of a bill that was introduced into Congress in 1998 by Sen. Frank Murkowski. It passed the Senate as a rider to S. 1618 but died in the House after organizations such as CAUCE and FREE mounted a huge phone-in campaign. They were against the bill because it was seen as pro-spam because it implied that spamming was fine as long as the spammer provided a way to get removed from his list. Aside from the obvious problems with an opt-out system, there were major loopholes. For example, there wasn't much to prevent a spammer from removing you from one list, then adding you to others later, since you'd have to somehow figure out that the same person had spammed you twice. There was also nothing to prevent your address to be sold or given to another spammer. So, Party A could spam you, get your remove request, remove you, then give your address to Party B, who is spamming on Party A's behalf, to spam you again. (There was no penalty for the person _sponsoring_ the spam, only for the one actively sending it at that moment, so each and every spammer could spam you until you asked for removal.) Finally, neither you nor your ISP could sue for damages if a spammer didn't remove you. All you could do was report the spammer to the Federal Trade Commission, who had sole authority to levy penalties. Aside from these issues, ISPs were afraid that the bill implied a right for their customers to spam if they followed certain guidelines, and the ISPs feared that they would lose the ability to enforce their AUPs. For example, what if a spammer obtained a Hotmail address to receive remove requests, and Hotmail closed the account. Could the spammer argue in court that Hotmail had no right to do this, since the spammer was using the account to perform a legally-required function, namely, to receive and honor remove requests, as required by law? Luckily, this monstrosity died before it became law.
Perhaps, but consider this. Some estimates have put the percentage of spam coming into AOL as high as 30% of e-mail traffic. Now how many terabytes of storage do you suppose AOL has for e-mail, not to mention how much bandwidth is needed to receive it? If you figure that 30% of that goes to spam, you can see that there is a real cost, one that the spammer isn't paying. If AOL is going to send out a million CDs, they have incremental costs associated with doing that, costs that _they_ must pay. Your garden variety spammer signs up for a dialup account with an ISP, then spams away like there's no tomorrow, until the ISP is alerted and pulls the plug. What does the originating ISP get? $19.95? Maybe, unless the spammer used a fake cc number or requests a chargeback, which credit card companies often give. And what costs has the ISP incurred? Well, the spammer used their bandwidth to send out his spam, and he costs their sysadmins time (translation: money), since they have to deal with the mess the spammer leaves behind, plus, he causes the billing/collections department time (translation: money) as they try to get some money out of him, and he might also cause legal fees to pile up if the ISP decides to sue. As a matter of fact, I sold dialup ISDN to a guy who I later found out wanted to spam. Let's look at what this one incident cost in terms of time. 20 minutes for me to explain the product set and sign him up.
10 minutes to speak with someone in QA about his nasty e-mail she received telling us he wanted to cancel because he objected to our AUP.
10 minutes discussing it with my supervisor.
15 minutes for me, my supervisor, the QA representative, and the QA manager to discuss the situation.
5 minutes for me and my supervisor to tell the manager of billing that the customer was definitely to be billed for the time he used, even though he stated in his message that he wouldn't pay.
30 minutes for the manager of QA to speak to him and tell him that he was going to get charged, since he had asked and was told at the time of signup that we don't do refunds. It was at this time that his intention to spam was revealed.
10 minutes for me to spaek with our sysadmin to find out if he had spammed while he was connected, which he hadn't, as far as we could tell at the time. Now you can add up the time above and get an idea of the cost. Keep in mind that you'll have to double, triple, or quadruple some numbers based on the number of people involved. And I don't even know if we ever got our money out of him. And don't forget the costs to another organization if the spammer hijacks a mail server to relay his junk. Sure, anyone running an open relay these days is asking for trouble, but there are times when closing them can be a huge pain, such as on an old mainframe running an old MTA and an outdated OS. There are some machines out there that are old enough that there just aren't any upgrades available, and the organizations that own them might not be able to justify replacing them solely for that reason. My point isn't to downplay the annoyance of regular junk mail, but spammers cost lots of people lots of money, and I didn't even get onto the subject of fraudulent spam, which most of it seems to be. IMHO, AOL is right to sue them. Hell, I wish they'd do this more often, and it'd be nice if other ISPs did the same. If these lowlifes want to use the resources of others to try to squeeze a buck out of some newbie, then they need to get their balls nailed to the wall for it.
It's too bad these things can't "learn" from each other the way Furby's can. All you'd have to do is buy one, hack it, return it to the store, and before you know it, every one of them would be saying, "The DMCA sucks," or "Penguin Power," over and over. Since I'd bet that most of the people who'd actually buy one of these things would pay more attention to it than they would to anyone who posts here, this would be the perfect way to educate the masses about what really matters.