So, say your mother or your girlfriend/boyfriend or less-techy individual sees this pitch from didtheyreadit, likes the potential offering and implements it, you don't want to read what they're sending you?
Look at it as though that certain someone cares not about webbugs (they know nothing about them) but about wanting to know if you read their email.
Of course, this is all assuming that you have a partner and/or mother...
Very true, but this company is hardly going to complain if they can get a $49.95 subscription out of these people before they realise that particular short-coming...
I give them credit for the "idea" and definitely the implemention (adding ".didtheyreadit" to the end of a standard email address), so best of luck to them.
And they certainly have achieved fantastic press with this slashdot exposure: suddenly a large group of people know the name, what it does, how it works and how much it costs...
I'm not suggesting that it's wrong to want to know the distribution of payment (I want to know too), just that the artists here will have donated their work in this case.
Dude, a les(s)ion in capitalism? You should see a doctor about that!;)
BTW, am I the only one that sees something moderated "Interesting" and thinks that there's a good chance that if the moderator understood what the post was saying, they would've used Informative or Insightful?
It should be "+1 I don't quite know what you're getting at, but it *seems* like *you* know what you're talking about..."
The artists are most likely donating their music. When I was in the UK, there was a CD insert in a newspaper that supported OxFam and included the similar artists (Coldplay, etc).
"Paying to download from BigNoiseMusic.com seems like a good idea when you know your money is going to help some of the world's poorest people." Chris Martin, Coldplay
They launch in a couple of days, so the site is nearly void of FAQ-type information.
A typical user would not know that a web bug was in place and the typical users are exactly who they're trying to get to buy into the service.
You and I might ignore their attempts, but there are a hell of a lot of people out there who would like the sales pitch, the 5 free samples/tests and spend the money to use the service. For the most part, they'll be emailing people without mutt and the service may just work (more or less) as described.
Where I would have an issue is with the small percentage of emails that they can't track due to clients forcing text only mail. If a user was to build a strong reliance on this service, they would only assume that the receiver had never even read their email when in actual fact they could've opened it in a text-only client and pored over it for days!
And the privacy issues are astounding -- they would essentially get every copy of email sent through their system -- personal information and details, etc. If you care enough about the information you're sending to want to know if the receivee will read it, then you can bet that this company may care enough about the content too...
Your joke aside, and this is no judgement on your comment in particular, but how about people judge this person for their contribution (fake or otherwise) and not on their looks alone?
In the forum thread about "exposing the fake", 3 out of 9 comments reference the husband or "shagging" the woman in question.
Indeed, Slashdot has since posted an article suggesting that 71% of spam originates from hosts in China. So are these laws immediately ineffective against the vast majority of spammers?
Also, most of the spam caught by my quarantine folder is now regarding medical products. At least with porn spam you could check out the pic and move on. Spam about buying "meds" is boring AND useless.
And along those lines, would US hosting companies shift servers and other infrastructure (potentially some staff) overseas to allow them to retain certain sites?
Which leads me to wonder -- is there a freelance PR business, specialising in open source software and available to work from afar (effectively contract tele-commuting), serving the OSS market?
Someone/group that would volunteer or work on a nominal per-hour fee to get well-worded and accessible info out to the masses?
If there isn't, it sounds like there might be an opportunity out there for groups smaller than someone like RedHat, IBM, Sun, etc...
The article stated that the strike pertained to new service and repairs, not to ongoing service. I was questioning its relevance to the wider Slashdot group, and whether in the international name space more effort could be made to explain to users exactly what those intials meant without leaning on Google.
Yes, I'm very aware that Slashdot does whatever it wants, and the core crowd of Linux users are fond of telling people to RTFM instead of providing direct and personable help, but still -- doesn't hurt to put your POV out there.
The sig is just a random poll that I put in my sig every few days -- I'm not sure how that's supposed to have anything to do with the strike, this site, or my comment.
Which is all great, except who are SBA, CWA or Verizon? If they go on strike, what changes?
I seriously have no idea. Whenever I see Verizon, I think it's Verisign.
All the Slashdot blurb tells me is that SBC provide a service and repair existing services. That service could be mobile dog-washing for all the explaining done.
The first article tells me that CWA is Communications Workers of America. The second suggests that a telephone company is involved, and the third is fluff.
So people might experience delays with getting a new phone service or repairing an existing one, but can still make calls, and this is frontdoor news on an "international.org" site?
I've had news submissions about students discovering critical flaws in wireless technology get rejected while something like this gets through? Hmm.
I mentioned that online ticketing is available (in my follow-up at least) and while it's a bit ugly, it works very well. All I'm saying is that there are absolutely millions of people in India that computers are not going to help. Those are the people sleeping on the floors of the station because they have nowhere else to go. I'm sure Bangladesh is worse, but China, Vietnam and Cambodia are heaven compared to India for the poor.
We only visited a couple of beaches, and not to swim or anything, only in our wanderings. One was in Kochi (dirty) and the other was a slum in Mumbai (I have never seen so much rubbish in my life) that we accidentally wandered into and thought -- what the hell, as long as no one kills us, we'll walk around and experience the "plight".
I'm not saying don't go there -- it's interesting and the food is great -- but be prepared for it. We slept in Mumbai airport (hello mosquitos!) and met a British couple on their first time away from home, visiting India -- they were shocked beyond belief and it was quite hilarious. It was a bit eye-opening for me even though I've seen a lot of China and elsewhere in Asia, a couple of countries in South America, etc.
We visited Bangalore where we stayed with a guy I met on the net who's just opened a restaurant, Kochi, Alleppey and then went on to Sri Lanka (fantastic beach at Mirissa!) which was a little cleaner and less crowded.
I beg to differ and would suggest that maybe the process is different in various stations.
There was definitely a process of filling out a form at one desk to get a booking form at another desk to then actually pay for tickets. I think it was in Mumbai and locals and foreigners alike were following the process.
We would have had no idea what we were doing had an employee of the rail company not helped us (no expectation of a tip either -- a stark contrast to everywhere else in India).
Oh, and I should add that the rail department in India has a pretty decent web site that allows you to check departures and routes and find out how many tickets are available (or NOT available usually) on a train, or how far a route is over-subscribed BUT you still come across thousands and thousands of people pushing and shoving in lines at the station. It's an art-form.
The first person that implements booking queues and a means of pushing in within this e-governance... well, they'll probably land a contract over there.;)
Visiting India is an eye-opening experience. I was there earlier this year. I've seen poor areas in Vietnam, China, Peru, etc. None of those compared to some of the sights in India where children play in beaches covered in rubbish (I don't mean a few scraps, I mean that the sand is literally under a two foot layer of garbage), frolic in water that is absolutely soup-full of rubbish.
In train stations, it's hard to even move because the number of people is just incredible. Overnight, thousands of people sleep on the floors of stations. It's hard to walk through, stepping amongst and even on bodies.
In Bangalore (known for its IT businesses) the main train station had *one* computer in the ticketing area where travellers could check their seat numbers. You can imagine the line...
Even booking a train ticket 5 days in advance, you come across trains with waiting lists 30-100s over-subscribed. On one occasion, we assumed we were booking with time to spare only to find this sort of situation, and we were forced to fly from Kochi to Mumbai so that we wouldn't miss our flight onwards.
Wages are obscenely low. One could go over there on a measly Western wage, live in luxury and have 10 full-time staff (chefs, drivers, cleaners, etc) and barely notice a dent in their income.
You will walk into a restaurant and be waited on by about 8 people. Service staff nearly always outnumber diners. It comes down to the fact that a billion people *have* to be employed somehow.
By all means, implement systems that speed up processes (because they are ridiculously slow in India) but don't remove any potential to employ more people. And I think that a wonder-system based on Linux could have limited appeal in a country that absolutely *lives* on taking forever to accomplish simple tasks. They're smart people, but FFS Indians have ludicrously difficult processes.
I'm not shitting you that I say that in a train station, you need to get a ticket booking request form, not to book a ticket (that'd be too obvious), but just to request a ticket booking form. Desks, queues, forms, meticulous, pains-taking handwriting -- that's just India!
"...on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor."
5 hours, just for the first CD, and using 99% CPU and all available RAM. You have to admire the patience of Thom Holwerda...
Of course, once he's installed the OS, the Dock drops into an infinite loop that crashes the machine, but oh well -- actually navigating to any applications -- who needs that kind of junk?
There's definitely room for improvement, but it shows promise!
When I was in Bangkok and Singapore earlier this year, N-Gage's were available in shops everywhere and people seemed to be buying them. It might be that some of their success comes from the Asian market, and that trying again in the US/Europe is made easier by the fact that it's profitable to sell a revised model elsewhere?
Spybot just blocked three tracking cookies from ads on this one page. Go Slashdot! I don't think they'll be winning a Best Practises award at the Webby's anytime soon.
I think that the volume of the latter two would be higher than you'd expect.
And those endless MS ads are probably in direct contrast to stories of Gentoo developers/founders ending their involvement with debts of $20k. I'm not a developer for any specific platform, but if I had to choose between a few options, a successful company with money to burn on web ads is pretty far from a group whose leader is losing money on the project.:(
Even google, probably the geekiest of the search engines, states that Linux accounts for 1% of its users. I think Slashdot would have a much higher percentage, but I doubt it'd be a majority by a long shot.
Slashdot Mirror
So, say your mother or your girlfriend/boyfriend or less-techy individual sees this pitch from didtheyreadit, likes the potential offering and implements it, you don't want to read what they're sending you?
Look at it as though that certain someone cares not about webbugs (they know nothing about them) but about wanting to know if you read their email.
Of course, this is all assuming that you have a partner and/or mother...
I did some work for an adult DVD company and thought it quite amusing when the proprietor said of payment when we were negotiating:
"Cash or product?"
Very true, but this company is hardly going to complain if they can get a $49.95 subscription out of these people before they realise that particular short-coming...
I give them credit for the "idea" and definitely the implemention (adding ".didtheyreadit" to the end of a standard email address), so best of luck to them.
And they certainly have achieved fantastic press with this slashdot exposure: suddenly a large group of people know the name, what it does, how it works and how much it costs...
Record companies, OD2, etc. The usual crap!
I'm not suggesting that it's wrong to want to know the distribution of payment (I want to know too), just that the artists here will have donated their work in this case.
Dude, a les(s)ion in capitalism? You should see a doctor about that! ;)
BTW, am I the only one that sees something moderated "Interesting" and thinks that there's a good chance that if the moderator understood what the post was saying, they would've used Informative or Insightful?
It should be "+1 I don't quite know what you're getting at, but it *seems* like *you* know what you're talking about..."
The artists are most likely donating their music. When I was in the UK, there was a CD insert in a newspaper that supported OxFam and included the similar artists (Coldplay, etc).
"Paying to download from BigNoiseMusic.com seems like a good idea when you know your money is going to help some of the world's poorest people."
Chris Martin, Coldplay
They launch in a couple of days, so the site is nearly void of FAQ-type information.
A typical user would not know that a web bug was in place and the typical users are exactly who they're trying to get to buy into the service.
You and I might ignore their attempts, but there are a hell of a lot of people out there who would like the sales pitch, the 5 free samples/tests and spend the money to use the service. For the most part, they'll be emailing people without mutt and the service may just work (more or less) as described.
Where I would have an issue is with the small percentage of emails that they can't track due to clients forcing text only mail. If a user was to build a strong reliance on this service, they would only assume that the receiver had never even read their email when in actual fact they could've opened it in a text-only client and pored over it for days!
And the privacy issues are astounding -- they would essentially get every copy of email sent through their system -- personal information and details, etc. If you care enough about the information you're sending to want to know if the receivee will read it, then you can bet that this company may care enough about the content too...
Your joke aside, and this is no judgement on your comment in particular, but how about people judge this person for their contribution (fake or otherwise) and not on their looks alone?
In the forum thread about "exposing the fake", 3 out of 9 comments reference the husband or "shagging" the woman in question.
Keep it in your pants!
They don't have soul. Their branding experts want you to associate the word "soul" with their company, that's all.
Indeed, Slashdot has since posted an article suggesting that 71% of spam originates from hosts in China. So are these laws immediately ineffective against the vast majority of spammers?
Also, most of the spam caught by my quarantine folder is now regarding medical products. At least with porn spam you could check out the pic and move on. Spam about buying "meds" is boring AND useless.
It wouldn't surprise me at all.
And along those lines, would US hosting companies shift servers and other infrastructure (potentially some staff) overseas to allow them to retain certain sites?
Which leads me to wonder -- is there a freelance PR business, specialising in open source software and available to work from afar (effectively contract tele-commuting), serving the OSS market?
Someone/group that would volunteer or work on a nominal per-hour fee to get well-worded and accessible info out to the masses?
If there isn't, it sounds like there might be an opportunity out there for groups smaller than someone like RedHat, IBM, Sun, etc...
The article stated that the strike pertained to new service and repairs, not to ongoing service. I was questioning its relevance to the wider Slashdot group, and whether in the international name space more effort could be made to explain to users exactly what those intials meant without leaning on Google.
Yes, I'm very aware that Slashdot does whatever it wants, and the core crowd of Linux users are fond of telling people to RTFM instead of providing direct and personable help, but still -- doesn't hurt to put your POV out there.
The sig is just a random poll that I put in my sig every few days -- I'm not sure how that's supposed to have anything to do with the strike, this site, or my comment.
Which is all great, except who are SBA, CWA or Verizon? If they go on strike, what changes?
.org" site?
I seriously have no idea. Whenever I see Verizon, I think it's Verisign.
All the Slashdot blurb tells me is that SBC provide a service and repair existing services. That service could be mobile dog-washing for all the explaining done.
The first article tells me that CWA is Communications Workers of America. The second suggests that a telephone company is involved, and the third is fluff.
So people might experience delays with getting a new phone service or repairing an existing one, but can still make calls, and this is frontdoor news on an "international
I've had news submissions about students discovering critical flaws in wireless technology get rejected while something like this gets through? Hmm.
I mentioned that online ticketing is available (in my follow-up at least) and while it's a bit ugly, it works very well. All I'm saying is that there are absolutely millions of people in India that computers are not going to help. Those are the people sleeping on the floors of the station because they have nowhere else to go. I'm sure Bangladesh is worse, but China, Vietnam and Cambodia are heaven compared to India for the poor.
We only visited a couple of beaches, and not to swim or anything, only in our wanderings. One was in Kochi (dirty) and the other was a slum in Mumbai (I have never seen so much rubbish in my life) that we accidentally wandered into and thought -- what the hell, as long as no one kills us, we'll walk around and experience the "plight".
I'm not saying don't go there -- it's interesting and the food is great -- but be prepared for it. We slept in Mumbai airport (hello mosquitos!) and met a British couple on their first time away from home, visiting India -- they were shocked beyond belief and it was quite hilarious. It was a bit eye-opening for me even though I've seen a lot of China and elsewhere in Asia, a couple of countries in South America, etc.
We visited Bangalore where we stayed with a guy I met on the net who's just opened a restaurant, Kochi, Alleppey and then went on to Sri Lanka (fantastic beach at Mirissa!) which was a little cleaner and less crowded.
I beg to differ and would suggest that maybe the process is different in various stations.
There was definitely a process of filling out a form at one desk to get a booking form at another desk to then actually pay for tickets. I think it was in Mumbai and locals and foreigners alike were following the process.
We would have had no idea what we were doing had an employee of the rail company not helped us (no expectation of a tip either -- a stark contrast to everywhere else in India).
Oh, and I should add that the rail department in India has a pretty decent web site that allows you to check departures and routes and find out how many tickets are available (or NOT available usually) on a train, or how far a route is over-subscribed BUT you still come across thousands and thousands of people pushing and shoving in lines at the station. It's an art-form.
;)
The first person that implements booking queues and a means of pushing in within this e-governance... well, they'll probably land a contract over there.
Visiting India is an eye-opening experience. I was there earlier this year. I've seen poor areas in Vietnam, China, Peru, etc. None of those compared to some of the sights in India where children play in beaches covered in rubbish (I don't mean a few scraps, I mean that the sand is literally under a two foot layer of garbage), frolic in water that is absolutely soup-full of rubbish.
In train stations, it's hard to even move because the number of people is just incredible. Overnight, thousands of people sleep on the floors of stations. It's hard to walk through, stepping amongst and even on bodies.
In Bangalore (known for its IT businesses) the main train station had *one* computer in the ticketing area where travellers could check their seat numbers. You can imagine the line...
Even booking a train ticket 5 days in advance, you come across trains with waiting lists 30-100s over-subscribed. On one occasion, we assumed we were booking with time to spare only to find this sort of situation, and we were forced to fly from Kochi to Mumbai so that we wouldn't miss our flight onwards.
Wages are obscenely low. One could go over there on a measly Western wage, live in luxury and have 10 full-time staff (chefs, drivers, cleaners, etc) and barely notice a dent in their income.
You will walk into a restaurant and be waited on by about 8 people. Service staff nearly always outnumber diners. It comes down to the fact that a billion people *have* to be employed somehow.
By all means, implement systems that speed up processes (because they are ridiculously slow in India) but don't remove any potential to employ more people. And I think that a wonder-system based on Linux could have limited appeal in a country that absolutely *lives* on taking forever to accomplish simple tasks. They're smart people, but FFS Indians have ludicrously difficult processes.
I'm not shitting you that I say that in a train station, you need to get a ticket booking request form, not to book a ticket (that'd be too obvious), but just to request a ticket booking form. Desks, queues, forms, meticulous, pains-taking handwriting -- that's just India!
From the article:
"...on their website they warn you: the emulated processor is about 40 times slower than the host processor."
5 hours, just for the first CD, and using 99% CPU and all available RAM. You have to admire the patience of Thom Holwerda...
Of course, once he's installed the OS, the Dock drops into an infinite loop that crashes the machine, but oh well -- actually navigating to any applications -- who needs that kind of junk?
There's definitely room for improvement, but it shows promise!
When I was in Bangkok and Singapore earlier this year, N-Gage's were available in shops everywhere and people seemed to be buying them. It might be that some of their success comes from the Asian market, and that trying again in the US/Europe is made easier by the fact that it's profitable to sell a revised model elsewhere?
Vi vs Emacs
/me is bringing a bat, fool!
Spybot just blocked three tracking cookies from ads on this one page. Go Slashdot! I don't think they'll be winning a Best Practises award at the Webby's anytime soon.
I think that the volume of the latter two would be higher than you'd expect.
:(
And those endless MS ads are probably in direct contrast to stories of Gentoo developers/founders ending their involvement with debts of $20k. I'm not a developer for any specific platform, but if I had to choose between a few options, a successful company with money to burn on web ads is pretty far from a group whose leader is losing money on the project.
Even google, probably the geekiest of the search engines, states that Linux accounts for 1% of its users. I think Slashdot would have a much higher percentage, but I doubt it'd be a majority by a long shot.
...if they have $40k (or are awarded the grant).
How many "ordinary scientists" have $40k burning a hole in their pocket?
And who would admit to being an ordinary scientist anyway!?