Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 03:15:49 +0000 From: ORBZ To: list@orbz.org Subject: [ORBZ] Shutdown
Here's the email that those of you with forward sight have been fearing since the inception of ORBZ.
As of this moment, ORBZ is shutting down. DNS zones are going to stop resolving, the website will disappear and mail will stop working (so furthur discussion on this list probably won't work -- use NANAE).
I don't want to disappear in silence like ORBS, so I'll try for as much description as possible without compromising my own position.
I received an official court notice this afternoon to turn over all information relation to ORBZ accounts. This came from the 10th Judicial District court of the State of Michigan. It appears that ORBZ may be facing criminal charges for denial of service relating to the Lotus Domino issue.
I was happy to try to weather any civil issues that may have come up, and I was committed to seeing it through. However, the threat of jail time is too much; I don't believe in this fight quite that much.
Thank you all for all your support. I sincerely hope that someone with the goal of carrying on the mission of ORBZ pops up in another country with a less foreboding legal system. Anyone who has copies of the current zones may do with them what they wish.
For those of you stuck without good spam filtering, please consider ORDB and SpamCop; they both provide excellent free solutions.
The purpose of a machine changes quite a bit over the life of a server. For this reason, do NOT give the machine a name reflecant of it's purpose.
Instead, chose a simple series to pick names from (e.g. nobel prize winner, famous computer scientists, diseases, etc.).
Then give the machines CNAMEs reflectant of their purpose.
If a user needs to know which machine, give them the CNAME, not the real name. This will simply swapping machines out, temp. redirecting to another machine, handling hardware failures, etc. You also never run into the problem of figuring out appfoo.domain.com another admin is refering too ("Wait, did you mean replace the drive in the old appfoo or the new appfoo? Which box was that again?").
I think this is a great idea, but next time can there should be more notice. For those of us on the West Coast, we don't necessarily have time to check Slashdot before noon!
Good points, but as everything in business, the answer is always straightforward: revenue.
We actually tested quite heavily with the best way to distribute the newsletter to individuals willing to receive and irritating as few people as possible. We tested several facets, including #1 & #3 you stated above, not to mention testing the frequency, the media (HTML vs. plain text), requiring people to register first (another form of double opt-in in a way). We tracked how people entered our system and correlated their account creation with which system was active. In short, we tried very hard to the Right Thing (both for the company and consumer).
Bottom line, single opt-in, which check boxes on by default, far and away generated the highest revenue.
Did I feel bad?
Not really.
If people paid attention and unclicked the boxes. We left them alone.
If they asked to be unsubscribe, we removed them. If they said never add me again, we had a permanent unsubscribe list.
I hate Spam as much as anyone, but I think if we're going to make effective progress against it, we're going to have to differentiate between companies trying to do the right thing and blatant spamming.
Note that costs are NOT riasing across the board. In particular they are NOT increasing the lifetime fee (it remains at $249) nor the annual fee.
Very few people I know are actually on the monthly plan (if anything, they get the monthly 'just to try to tivo out' first, and then quickly switch to a more cost-effective if they decide to keep Tivo). Not a huge deal, IMHO.
there is no way that they could have found my e-mail address in any legitimate way...
Hard to rule out a "friend" subscribing you, in which case it's not really their fault. I worked for a company that had a legimate newsletter, with a subscriber base reaching upwards of 2 million. I know for a fact we *never* do anything like trolling Usenet, crawling web pages, or purchasing lists from people who did so. Yet there was always a constant stream of people complaining that we were spamming them.
They typically feel into a couple different categories:
1) They didn't pay any attention to the sign-up process and left the default check-boxes alone (probably not applicable to your case).
2) They had signed up with a partner of ours. On the partner site, the person had indicated they were willing to receive emails from partners in category X (which we were one of).
3) A friend/enemy signed them up. (We tracked where every email address in our system originiated from, and the first serveral times, I confirmed it with our access log, showing clearly they had been subscribed.)
Now you can argue that every site should have a double-opt-in stradgey (e.g. sign-up via web, then MUST respond to a confirmation email or the subscription is dropped), but that's a different matter.
Anyway, long story short, you can't be so quick to point the finger. (Unless there was a story where the Bush campagian stated they did engage in such behaviour, in which case, ignore everything I've said:-)
Seriously though, if the problem is that enough people aren't playing on the beta network, why not just add more beta players? Seems simple enough to me.
So I don't know why the fact that you got a good job out of college 3 or 4 years ago has anything to do with the current situation...
Actually it was before the boom, but we weren't in a recesion, and that's a good point.
FWIW, like many folks out of school for sometime, part of duties often include hiring people. Personally, and the people I know, don't really rate knowing the specific language we use that important for *entry-level* positions. I don't really care if someone knows C. You can teach a monkey C. What I'm looking for is someone who's a good investment. Smart, good communicator, good team player, can see the big picture, eager, no attitude. For an entry-level spot, I'd take someone like that, who's never worked in C++, any day of the week.
And, well, make sure that 250,000 line program is written in something marketable like Java, C or C++. Your offers will diminish if you're playing around with non-corporate languages like Perl.
Not true.
In college, for my senior AI project, I developed a large application in Perl to watch a user surf the web and suggest related materially. Kinda like Netscape "What's Related", but when Netscape was Mosaic. Since these were the day before proxy servers, before CPAN had built up much steam, the application was pretty large.
As the AI dept at my school where some slanted towards theory and AI at the time, the two other languages I used the most where Scheme and Lisp.
I got a job, a good one at that, no problem, and no it wasn't doing CGIs. In fact, even though I work for a large-ish web company now, my first job wasn't web-centric at all. Looking back, I wish I had gotten more exposure to C/C++, but that's not difficult to make up for with a few good book, and the exposure they gave to theory, helped make up for it.
So IMHO using Perl and other "non-corporate" languages does not condem you to being a CGI monkey. (Note if all you do during college is Perl CGIs, and that's all you really got, that however, is a different matter...)
Given that Perl imitates Lisp and Scheme more closely with each release...
Huh.
I'm decent at Perl, Scheme, and Lisp but don't see the progression you're mentioning.
Sure there are similiarities (and have been there for a long time) such as 'type-less' values (e.g., no need to specify int, float, etc.), garbage collection, closures, lexical scooping, etc. but I certainly would say Perl's a procedural language with an optional OOP dressing vs. a a strictly functional language like Scheme & Lisp. Could you elaborate?
Something you're forgetting is that OSDN, last I checked, is a FOR-PROFIT company. That's a far cry from Slackware, which is an Open Source project, with no for-profit funding or motives. Regardless of what anyone thinks, that's just not a fair comparision.
Having said that, I'd probably pay some reasonable amount for an annual subscription to Slashdot. Certainly not $60/year (and no, calling it $5/month does not make it any better -- keep in mind most Slashdot readers can do math. okay, will maybe not timothy, but then again I'm not sure he can read either, so we won't consider him a slashdot reader, and instead count him as a village idiot.) Something like $20/month though (based upon my understanding of the current ad market, that's at least 5x what ads bring in). And make it annual so I can sign up and forget about, at least for a year. I don't really even care about banner ads; what I would be paying for is the the same great content I regularly get from Slashdot right now. And, no, that's not a donation.
A donation is when you want nothing in exchange. That's not the case here: I get Slashdot.
Slashdot is *great*. Perfect, no; great, certainly. I want to pay to keep it around. Nothing more, nothing else. I don't want artifical karma ratings, I don't want extra moderator points, or anything that mutates Slashdot into some ugly whore. I just want Slashdot.
(Okay, maybe I do want them to fire the village idoits, timothy & michael, but really just think of the payroll savings to the slashdot!)
Seriously, though, I think everyone should give some solid thought to subscribing. Yes, you get it free now, so why pay? Well, because it might not be there latter -- free or otherwise -- if you don't.
I'm an American taxpayer, so I help pay for NASA's costs. As such, I find this totally worthwhile. Helping me view and understand my planet is totally worth it. I find it useful. Go NASA, Go!
Then again, I love most of what NASA does. It's one of the things that makes me proud to be an American. In fact, I wish they would replace that little box on our tax forms that lets give money to the presidental matching one with one that says "Check here to give $5 to NASA." I know I'd check it.
IF there are aliens who fly around the universe with SUPERIOR technology - they'd have the means to contact us.... and when they DO - we'll know it.
1) The point isn't necessarily to find aliens with, as you described it "SUPERIOR technology", but any sign of intellegent life. I.e. any race that has sufficent technology to emit a signal capable of reaching earth (and that limitation only because we currently can't do much better).
they'd have the means to contact us
2) What do you base this upon? (Aside from SciFi movies?) We simply don't know if it's possible at all or even how long it would take a civilization to reach that point. We've had radio for over 100 years, and we don't know how to contact other alien civilizations. How do we know it won't be another 10,000 years until we can.
Personally, I find it an excellent use of my spare cpu cycles. You're free to take yours where you wish.
Slashdot Mirror
you need not be in the IT field to be a computer geek. just having a large interest in computers is enough now a days...
I guess that explains timothy and michael.
-Bill
According to the guy's resume, his past job titles have been:
- CEO of his own company
- Director of Marketing
- Director of New Media
- Editor/Producer
- Report/Photo Stringer
I think it's cool they guy did all that, but isn't calling him a "computer geek" misleading, if not just *wrong*?
-Bill
... before it gets slashdot'ed ...
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 2002 03:15:49 +0000
From: ORBZ
To: list@orbz.org
Subject: [ORBZ] Shutdown
Here's the email that those of you with forward sight
have been fearing since the inception of ORBZ.
As of this moment, ORBZ is shutting down. DNS zones
are going to stop resolving, the website will disappear
and mail will stop working (so furthur discussion on
this list probably won't work -- use NANAE).
I don't want to disappear in silence like ORBS, so I'll
try for as much description as possible without
compromising my own position.
I received an official court notice this afternoon to
turn over all information relation to ORBZ accounts.
This came from the 10th Judicial District court of the
State of Michigan. It appears that ORBZ may be facing
criminal charges for denial of service relating to the
Lotus Domino issue.
I was happy to try to weather any civil issues that may
have come up, and I was committed to seeing it through.
However, the threat of jail time is too much; I don't
believe in this fight quite that much.
Thank you all for all your support. I sincerely hope
that someone with the goal of carrying on the mission
of ORBZ pops up in another country with a less
foreboding legal system. Anyone who has copies of the
current zones may do with them what they wish.
For those of you stuck without good spam filtering,
please consider ORDB and SpamCop; they both provide
excellent free solutions.
Ian Gulliver
ORBZ
It's listening to the random noise you get even when the mic is turned off. Kind of an insight into your computer's subconscious, perhaps.
Ahh... That's why mine keeps repeating "All work and no play make Jack a dull buy."
And here I thought the mediation wasn't working.
-Bill
The purpose of a machine changes quite a bit over the life of a server. For this reason, do NOT give the machine a name reflecant of it's purpose.
Instead, chose a simple series to pick names from (e.g. nobel prize winner, famous computer scientists, diseases, etc.).
Then give the machines CNAMEs reflectant of their purpose.
If a user needs to know which machine, give them the CNAME, not the real name. This will simply swapping machines out, temp. redirecting to another machine, handling hardware failures, etc. You also never run into the problem of figuring out appfoo.domain.com another admin is refering too ("Wait, did you mean replace the drive in the old appfoo or the new appfoo? Which box was that again?").
-Bill
The easiest remedy to which would be the firing of Jon Katz.
Hey, how about letting subscribers vote an editor off slashdot every year?!
Dude, I'd subscribe MULTIPLE times for a chance to vote off timothy!
-Bill
I think this is a great idea, but next time can there should be more notice. For those of us on the West Coast, we don't necessarily have time to check Slashdot before noon!
-Bill
"The Customer is Always Wrong"
;-)
Hasn't that always been the Slashdot creed?
*duck*
-Bill
Do the math. :-)
-Bill
What are the problems from doing the above?
Good points, but as everything in business, the answer is always straightforward: revenue.
We actually tested quite heavily with the best way to distribute the newsletter to individuals willing to receive and irritating as few people as possible. We tested several facets, including #1 & #3 you stated above, not to mention testing the frequency, the media (HTML vs. plain text), requiring people to register first (another form of double opt-in in a way). We tracked how people entered our system and correlated their account creation with which system was active. In short, we tried very hard to the Right Thing (both for the company and consumer).
Bottom line, single opt-in, which check boxes on by default, far and away generated the highest revenue.
Did I feel bad?
Not really.
If people paid attention and unclicked the boxes. We left them alone.
If they asked to be unsubscribe, we removed them. If they said never add me again, we had a permanent unsubscribe list.
I hate Spam as much as anyone, but I think if we're going to make effective progress against it, we're going to have to differentiate between companies trying to do the right thing and blatant spamming.
My two cents anyway.
-Bill
Note that costs are NOT riasing across the board. In particular they are NOT increasing the lifetime fee (it remains at $249) nor the annual fee.
Very few people I know are actually on the monthly plan (if anything, they get the monthly 'just to try to tivo out' first, and then quickly switch to a more cost-effective if they decide to keep Tivo). Not a huge deal, IMHO.
-Bill
there is no way that they could have found my e-mail address in any legitimate way...
:-)
Hard to rule out a "friend" subscribing you, in which case it's not really their fault. I worked for a company that had a legimate newsletter, with a subscriber base reaching upwards of 2 million. I know for a fact we *never* do anything like trolling Usenet, crawling web pages, or purchasing lists from people who did so. Yet there was always a constant stream of people complaining that we were spamming them.
They typically feel into a couple different categories:
1) They didn't pay any attention to the sign-up process and left the default check-boxes alone (probably not applicable to your case).
2) They had signed up with a partner of ours. On the partner site, the person had indicated they were willing to receive emails from partners in category X (which we were one of).
3) A friend/enemy signed them up. (We tracked where every email address in our system originiated from, and the first serveral times, I confirmed it with our access log, showing clearly they had been subscribed.)
Now you can argue that every site should have a double-opt-in stradgey (e.g. sign-up via web, then MUST respond to a confirmation email or the subscription is dropped), but that's a different matter.
Anyway, long story short, you can't be so quick to point the finger. (Unless there was a story where the Bush campagian stated they did engage in such behaviour, in which case, ignore everything I've said
-Bill
Er, isn't that the *exact* same thing that yahoo does?!
-Bill
I always thought a good gui was like a good API: minimal and complete.
Minimal, as it's just confusing to give me a million ways to do same things in such a small amount of space.
Complete, as it's frustrating if there's something I *should* be able to do, but can't!
-Bill
What does this mean to open source software...
buh bye sendmail!
-Bill
Simple. Just add me as a beta test! :-)
Seriously though, if the problem is that enough people aren't playing on the beta network, why not just add more beta players? Seems simple enough to me.
-Bill
Sure we are, or at least certainly we were. (Past you comment, I haven't seen anything new that we're out of it.)
The U.S. Recession began back in March of last year. CNN.com has more information, including this article.
HTH,
-Bill
So I don't know why the fact that you got a good job out of college 3 or 4 years ago has anything to do with the current situation...
Actually it was before the boom, but we weren't in a recesion, and that's a good point.
FWIW, like many folks out of school for sometime, part of duties often include hiring people. Personally, and the people I know, don't really rate knowing the specific language we use that important for *entry-level* positions. I don't really care if someone knows C. You can teach a monkey C. What I'm looking for is someone who's a good investment. Smart, good communicator, good team player, can see the big picture, eager, no attitude. For an entry-level spot, I'd take someone like that, who's never worked in C++, any day of the week.
-Bill
And, well, make sure that 250,000 line program is written in something marketable like Java, C or C++. Your offers will diminish if you're playing around with non-corporate languages like Perl.
Not true.
In college, for my senior AI project, I developed a large application in Perl to watch a user surf the web and suggest related materially. Kinda like Netscape "What's Related", but when Netscape was Mosaic. Since these were the day before proxy servers, before CPAN had built up much steam, the application was pretty large.
As the AI dept at my school where some slanted towards theory and AI at the time, the two other languages I used the most where Scheme and Lisp.
I got a job, a good one at that, no problem, and no it wasn't doing CGIs. In fact, even though I work for a large-ish web company now, my first job wasn't web-centric at all. Looking back, I wish I had gotten more exposure to C/C++, but that's not difficult to make up for with a few good book, and the exposure they gave to theory, helped make up for it.
So IMHO using Perl and other "non-corporate" languages does not condem you to being a CGI monkey. (Note if all you do during college is Perl CGIs, and that's all you really got, that however, is a different matter...)
Anyway my two cents,
-Bill
Given that Perl imitates Lisp and Scheme more closely with each release...
Huh.
I'm decent at Perl, Scheme, and Lisp but don't see the progression you're mentioning.
Sure there are similiarities (and have been there for a long time) such as 'type-less' values (e.g., no need to specify int, float, etc.), garbage collection, closures, lexical scooping, etc. but I certainly would say Perl's a procedural language with an optional OOP dressing vs. a a strictly functional language like Scheme & Lisp. Could you elaborate?
-Bill
Something you're forgetting is that OSDN, last I checked, is a FOR-PROFIT company. That's a far cry from Slackware, which is an Open Source project, with no for-profit funding or motives. Regardless of what anyone thinks, that's just not a fair comparision.
Having said that, I'd probably pay some reasonable amount for an annual subscription to Slashdot. Certainly not $60/year (and no, calling it $5/month does not make it any better -- keep in mind most Slashdot readers can do math. okay, will maybe not timothy, but then again I'm not sure he can read either, so we won't consider him a slashdot reader, and instead count him as a village idiot.) Something like $20/month though (based upon my understanding of the current ad market, that's at least 5x what ads bring in). And make it annual so I can sign up and forget about, at least for a year. I don't really even care about banner ads; what I would be paying for is the the same great content I regularly get from Slashdot right now. And, no, that's not a donation.
A donation is when you want nothing in exchange. That's not the case here: I get Slashdot.
Slashdot is *great*. Perfect, no; great, certainly. I want to pay to keep it around. Nothing more, nothing else. I don't want artifical karma ratings, I don't want extra moderator points, or anything that mutates Slashdot into some ugly whore. I just want Slashdot.
(Okay, maybe I do want them to fire the village idoits, timothy & michael, but really just think of the payroll savings to the slashdot!)
Seriously, though, I think everyone should give some solid thought to subscribing. Yes, you get it free now, so why pay? Well, because it might not be there latter -- free or otherwise -- if you don't.
My two cents,
-Bill
So: when you see Warcraft III on the shelves, don't buy it.
Amen!
In particular, please wait at least one day, so I have plenty of time to get my copy before it sells out.
-Bill
Whatever.
I'm an American taxpayer, so I help pay for NASA's costs. As such, I find this totally worthwhile. Helping me view and understand my planet is totally worth it. I find it useful. Go NASA, Go!
Then again, I love most of what NASA does. It's one of the things that makes me proud to be an American. In fact, I wish they would replace that little box on our tax forms that lets give money to the presidental matching one with one that says "Check here to give $5 to NASA." I know I'd check it.
My two cents,
-Bill
Today Be employes a single person in a tiny office in Mountain View.
Hmmm... you'd think he would just telecommute, no?
-Bill
IF there are aliens who fly around the universe with SUPERIOR technology - they'd have the means to contact us.... and when they DO - we'll know it.
1) The point isn't necessarily to find aliens with, as you described it "SUPERIOR technology", but any sign of intellegent life. I.e. any race that has sufficent technology to emit a signal capable of reaching earth (and that limitation only because we currently can't do much better).
they'd have the means to contact us
2) What do you base this upon? (Aside from SciFi movies?) We simply don't know if it's possible at all or even how long it would take a civilization to reach that point. We've had radio for over 100 years, and we don't know how to contact other alien civilizations. How do we know it won't be another 10,000 years until we can.
Personally, I find it an excellent use of my spare cpu cycles. You're free to take yours where you wish.
-Bill