Simplicity is still better. Norman basically makes the case that, from a marketing perspective, simplicity does not sell. People perceive a complex UI as being more powerful and capable. This makes market pressure favor the complex UI.
However, that doesn't mean it's better. It means maybe you'll sell more, but it doesn't mean the device will work better or people will use more of the features. If you care about the user experience after the sale, simplicity still wins. If all you care about is separating the man from his money, slather on the complexity.
For old hacks who are thoroughly used to table-based layouts, as the only kluge that worked consistently, CSS is a tough sell. From an old rant on this topic where I quote a friend of mine who builds sites:
See I'm not a fan of the pure CSS sites. [It] makes updates and general maintenance a pain. We've done a few sites that way and they are the ones I hate working on when [the] client calls with updates, enhancements, etc.... I can make a table and format a page in two seconds, versus looking up styles or creating new ones, using guess and check, checking all browsers.... Tables don't cause any problems if they're done correctly, so why make my life more difficult to use pure CSS, when 9 [out of] 10 times the site is going to be very graphically driven.
That was from a year ago. Now even he has seen the light and is starting to build standards-based sites. It just took a while.
One invaluable resource for identifying browser CSS support is this page which has nice pretty colors showing the amount of support.
Newton-Raphson is a method of repeatedly estimating the solution to an equation by refining guesses, using both the equation and its first derivative. This function does just a couple of steps. More information on NR can be found at Mathworld.
1. Dust on a DSLR sensor does happen--I've had it happen to my Canon many times. It's easy if you're in a dusty environment. Remember that in a film camera, the film is the sensor and you get a fresh "sensor" every time you take a photo. With digital, your "film" never moves, so you get the same surface exposed to dust. Over time (and I've taken thousands of photos) dust will accumulate and begin to spoil your images. Not an issue with point & shoot because those cameras are sealed, but I change lenses several times each time I shoot, so I know it's going to be a problem.
2. Cleaning it doesn't require sending it back to the manufacturer, you can buy brushes and swabs used to clean the sensors yourself. I was nervous as hell the first time I did it; now I'm just merely nervous, but I've done it several times and I'm glad I learned how. I bought mine from Copper Hill Images. Couldn't be happier; not only is the stuff they sent good, but I made an error in ordering and ordered overlapping bundles, and they caught it and refunded the difference before I'd even brought it up with them.
Well, I've got only a dozen or so mailboxes, and I routinely get 20,000 spams every day. SpamAssassin catches the bulk of them, but 20-50 get through each day and have to be manually sifted.
I'd love to describe my ideal spammer punishment, but it's NSFW.
At one small company I once worked at, my Windows box popped up a strange notice one day that someone else was using my IP. Since my IP was fixed (so that I could access various IP-restricted network devices) this immediately raised some red flags. We began looking for the culprit; something must've tipped off the hacker because we found ourselves locked out of our mail server. Since access to the mail server was only permitted from inside our network, we shut off our net access, hoping to block the hacker while we got back into our server.
We tracked the hacker down. It turned out it was another admin, who had gone some kind of crazy. He had three NICs in his desktop box all configured to impersonate different machines, he had re-routed the boss's email through his mailbox (and some clients' mail too), and had all kinds of other things going on. And he had sat there the whole time we were trying to ID the hacker, pretending nothing was going on, all the while trying to stay ahead of us. Strangest thing I ever saw.
Yes, he was fired. He really didn't seem to know why he'd done it (none of it made rational sense) and he'd really put his family in a bind. I think he was sick, but I'm not a psychiatrist.
Electronic Arts proved people will pay for the same software over and over again. Microsoft is just removing the inconvenient step of re-branding it every year.
Let's be truly clear. Mail admins block, but by using Spamhaus's list, they are effectively taking Spamhaus's word that mail from that domain is worth blocking. They are ceding a certain amount of control over their mail server. For every mail admin to research every spammer would be a major waste of human time, so instead mail admins trust someone else to do that research for them and maintain the list. It's more efficient, but it means you have to trust the organization maintaining the list not to abuse it.
Blacklists suck. Whitelists suck. Spam sucks. We do the best with what we've got. But for Spamhaus to pretend that they don't know that adding an IP to their list will result in it being blocked from delivering mail to a vast portion of the net is disingenuous. That's exactly why they list large blocks of IPs: because it prevents mail from being delivered, applying pressure to the ISP because their customers are angry. If a listing truly had no effect, they wouldn't do it. (Never mind the ethics of harming uninvolved parties in order to attack the party you dislike; it's the same tactic as another group whose label begins with "t" uses.)
Do I use Spamhaus? Yes. Is a Spamhaus listing alone enough to get mail blocked on my server? Nope. It's just another vote of no-confidence for a particular message. Do I loathe spammers? You betcha. But Spamhaus shouldn't pretend they're not a blocking list. And these spammers should be laughed out of court, the rat bastards.
Okay, set aside for a moment that it's Microsoft here. Think for a second.
Web applications are not new. I've built my fair share of them. (Maybe even more than my fair share.) In some circumstances, they work very well:
application can be accessed for anywhere with net access
application can be updated instantly
easy to share data between users
customer relieved of burden of maintaining servers and data storage
They have downsides, too:
application requires a functional web browser; browser bugs may impact web application
application provider might go out of business, taking your data with them
pay-as-you-go
centralized data repository is an attractive target for hackers
And yet for many applications, particularly specialized applications dealing with customer account access, inventory management, project management, online publishing, or a whole slew of other things, we accept these limitations. We assess the costs of not using a web application and determine that, overall, the web application provides value for the money.
What's interesting here is that while existing web applications have enough benefits to outweigh the risks, it's not clear that replacing standard desktop apps will come out the same in the risk/benefit analysis. The kinds of things we're doing on the web, we're doing because they work better that way; we've had years of experience with the desktop, and we know some things work better with centralized server models, and others work better with all the work done on the client. Microsoft is betting the farm on everyone being happy to push to the server model, but it won't happen; there are too many compelling reasons to keep ordinary desktop apps right where they are, on your desktop.
What they're afraid of is losing the fight for the desktop. This is their long-term strategy to lock everyone into their system. First they tried to lock up the OS. Then they tried to lock up the file formats. While Linux and OpenOffice are not quite credible threats (if you consider market share only) MS can look ahead and see a day when they have enough market share to seriously threaten their dominance on the desktop, and it isn't 50%, or even 25%. Maybe it's 20%, that magic point where people feel like there is an alternative, and then it's the tipping point, people no longer feel locked in. So MS wants to keep people locked in, because it keeps the cash flowing. That means locking up the data itself. And that's what their online apps are all about.
I had exactly the same problem, and I did search many levels for anything I missed. I think that's as much of the game as was developed, and it just ends there. Pretty sure at that point I was out of the "flOw" and it wasn't fun for me any more.
Businesses are already overwhelmed by the costs of administering Windows, and the sad thing is, Microsoft makes Windows admins re-learn everything every few years because they change the One True Way to manage a network. They say they're trying to make things better, but it's the same problem with developing for MS platforms: everything changes every few years.
Vista is so complex that it's going to be a nightmare to try to get a handle on it. These new jobs are glaziers making glass for windows broken by boys throwing rocks. False industry, and a burden on resources. These people could be doing something productive but instead they'll be put to work holding Vista together.
That argument smells like complete BS. EA is extraordinarily profitable, as evidenced by the bonus they gave me while I worked there, which is based on company, studio, and personal performance. EA's sweatshop environment is all about shoveling out the dung as fast as they can.
Don't misunderstand me. EA has a lot of very talented artists, musicians, programmers, producers, and QA people, but the way the company is run clearly indicates that it's all about profit and those talented folk are just cannon fodder.
Honestly, there are few EA games that are compelling these days, and I'm flat-out sick of paying $50 for a game only to have more ads shoved in my face. This deal does absolutely nothing for gamers and games, and is only about EA grabbing as much money as they can.
The only people who consider it a pain in the ass are people who are (a) lazy, (b) not adequately security-conscious, (c) programming without a framework that provides good tools to do this.
The reason we have so many SQL injections is because we have legions of web programmers who were never taught how to write code in a hostile environment. Web programming is never presented in that light; it's always, "here's a quick little script that fetches twenty records from a database and displays them." Security is far too often a footnote or an appendix that beginning programmers never get to.
Building apps for the web is not like doing your Data Structures I homework. You need a different mindset. It's a lot more like designing locks--for prisons full of inmates eager to get out.
The majority of the browsing public don't care about standards OR security. They care about whether the browser will get them the latest music from iTMS, the latest movie trailer, and whether it works with myspace.com. They do not know why standards are important nor do they grok the concept of "unsafe at any speed" browsers. In short, as long as the browser works for the sites they visit, it is Good Enough.
That's why Firefox has to keep trying in order to maintain share. Because the number of people on the web is increasing, and it's not the smart ones who are just now coming online. Complacency is the route to obsolescence.
PHP may indeed be crap, but not for the reasons you specify.
Whether you prefer Perl-like syntax (that PHP uses) or VBScript syntax is largely a matter of preference. I've personally found that VBScript is more of a pain in the ass than PHP.
You can have ADO if you want it, or you can use PDO which does support parameterized queries. Or you can use mysqli instead of mysql.
I honestly found VBScript lacking more basic convenience functions than PHP ever did.
The extension model may be a matter of taste. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. PHP's handling of multiple form fields with the same name does suck, but at least it isn't too hard to work-around (just re-parse the posted data the way it should have been done).
PHP security doesn't suck any worse than ASP or Perl or ColdFusion or anything else, once you disable things like magic_quotes and register_globals (which is recommended practice). However, there's a lot of crappy PHP code floating around, and if you're new to web programming, you don't know enough to tell the good code from the bad. Nor do you really grok the notion that your code can be hammered on by every malcontent on the planet. Those problems are also not unique to PHP. But since PHP is so widely available, lots of amateurs write code with it.
The problem is that the telcos want to collect TWICE. They already have tiered fees for people to download the content; they want to be able to charge content providers as well for data consumers have already paid to retrieve.
Burnout 3 is a great game, but it wasn't developed in-house at EA, it was created by Criterion in the UK before EA bought them (a deal that went through partway through development of the title). I remember working with the Criterion guys before I left EA last year. BO3 does have some really fun bits, I remember being impressed with it even at the early stages.
I run a fractal-related site, and just the leftovers from people clicking through to sites that had links to my site was enough to give me 10x the traffic. I had calls from my host and a few other problems, so I took the web sites down for a few hours while trying to help some other folks figure out what was going on.
I've been slashdotted four times or so before, so I know what it's like. The server handled it just fine, it was the connection that was the trouble.
I'm glad that the initial onslaught is over, but I'm still seeing elevated traffic levels, and probably will for a few days. This is normal for any kind of slashdotting.
I've watched the spam to my inbox go from a few messages a day at the beginning of this year to over 300 a day now. Doubling every ten weeks is a statistic I can believe.
It's clear spammers have no regard for the law. One need only look at their track record: abusing open relays to defray the cost of sending mail, forging headers to divert attention away from themselves, advertising illegal products, businesses, or outright scams, exploiting vulnerabilities in computers to turn victims into zombies for more spamming.
Educating users is futile... I can't even got most of my friends to stop forwarding the latest chain message. I barely saved one of my friends from falling for a credit card phishing scheme, and she's pretty experienced compared to most.
The only thing that is going to work is to go after the people running spamvertised sites. But that's going to cause problems by creating a new kind of "Joe Job"... hire a spammer to spam for your competitor's product; the wrath of the anti-spam crowd then goes straight to your competitor.
1. Personal web servers. Given the quality of most of these sites, probably not a great loss.
2. Game servers. No more running a CounterStrike servers for your buddies.
3. IM file transfers (AIM, ICQ). These require open ports.
4. VoIP, unless that VoIP implementation routes connections through a third computer.
The problem is, when you advocate blocking inbound connections, you force the bulk of the net to only be passive consumers of prepackaged content, rather than equal participants in the net. Blocking specific ports for specific reasons (like outbound port 25, although that has problems too) is one thing, but just deciding everything should be blocked but "approved" stuff means a lot of apps are dead in their tracks... stuff that isn't web/mail.
It sounds like they run DNS which "load-balances" requests to the spamvertised sites through zombies set up as open proxies. Since the zombies are scattered throughout all IPs, it makes blocking them hard.
Of course the scumbags know their weak spot is the DNS. Blocking particular domains is easy, and changing the authoritative DNS for a zone takes a while (done that too often). It steps up the spam blacklisting to now require not just refusing mail, but also refusing to talk to certain DNS servers that are known to operate this way. They can move around, but it's harder; I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the current situation.
The biggest problem with the blacklist is it cost-shifts, exactly what anti-spammers hate about spam.
Think about it. You are shifting the burden of pressuring an ISP into killing a spammer onto that ISP's non-spamming customers, and you're doing it without advance warning.
Those who blithely talk about "switching hosts" have never had to do it. It just ain't that simple, and it sure as hell isn't free. It means being off the net completely for days--not just e-mail down, but all your services, unless you've got the money for a complete duplicate set of servers.
I have no problem with blacklisting spammers, but I have a major problem with blacklisters who think collateral damage is a good thing or at least nothing to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
Google cache links:
d eanhunt.com/bizarre-google-request-update+http://d eanhunt.com/bizarre-google-request&hl=en&gl=us&ct= clnk&cd=1
d eanhunt.com/bizarre-google-request-update+http://d eanhunt.com/bizarre-google-request-update&hl=en&gl =us&ct=clnk&cd=1
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:2Dkt-Yaf0yoJ:
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cache:2Dkt-Yaf0yoJ:
So rather than wait for this blogger to cave into some asshat's demands, we smoke his server utterly. Nice.
Simplicity is still better. Norman basically makes the case that, from a marketing perspective, simplicity does not sell. People perceive a complex UI as being more powerful and capable. This makes market pressure favor the complex UI.
However, that doesn't mean it's better. It means maybe you'll sell more, but it doesn't mean the device will work better or people will use more of the features. If you care about the user experience after the sale, simplicity still wins. If all you care about is separating the man from his money, slather on the complexity.
That was from a year ago. Now even he has seen the light and is starting to build standards-based sites. It just took a while.
One invaluable resource for identifying browser CSS support is this page which has nice pretty colors showing the amount of support.
Newton-Raphson is a method of repeatedly estimating the solution to an equation by refining guesses, using both the equation and its first derivative. This function does just a couple of steps. More information on NR can be found at Mathworld.
1. Dust on a DSLR sensor does happen--I've had it happen to my Canon many times. It's easy if you're in a dusty environment. Remember that in a film camera, the film is the sensor and you get a fresh "sensor" every time you take a photo. With digital, your "film" never moves, so you get the same surface exposed to dust. Over time (and I've taken thousands of photos) dust will accumulate and begin to spoil your images. Not an issue with point & shoot because those cameras are sealed, but I change lenses several times each time I shoot, so I know it's going to be a problem.
2. Cleaning it doesn't require sending it back to the manufacturer, you can buy brushes and swabs used to clean the sensors yourself. I was nervous as hell the first time I did it; now I'm just merely nervous, but I've done it several times and I'm glad I learned how. I bought mine from Copper Hill Images. Couldn't be happier; not only is the stuff they sent good, but I made an error in ordering and ordered overlapping bundles, and they caught it and refunded the difference before I'd even brought it up with them.
Well, I've got only a dozen or so mailboxes, and I routinely get 20,000 spams every day. SpamAssassin catches the bulk of them, but 20-50 get through each day and have to be manually sifted.
I'd love to describe my ideal spammer punishment, but it's NSFW.
At one small company I once worked at, my Windows box popped up a strange notice one day that someone else was using my IP. Since my IP was fixed (so that I could access various IP-restricted network devices) this immediately raised some red flags. We began looking for the culprit; something must've tipped off the hacker because we found ourselves locked out of our mail server. Since access to the mail server was only permitted from inside our network, we shut off our net access, hoping to block the hacker while we got back into our server.
We tracked the hacker down. It turned out it was another admin, who had gone some kind of crazy. He had three NICs in his desktop box all configured to impersonate different machines, he had re-routed the boss's email through his mailbox (and some clients' mail too), and had all kinds of other things going on. And he had sat there the whole time we were trying to ID the hacker, pretending nothing was going on, all the while trying to stay ahead of us. Strangest thing I ever saw.
Yes, he was fired. He really didn't seem to know why he'd done it (none of it made rational sense) and he'd really put his family in a bind. I think he was sick, but I'm not a psychiatrist.
Electronic Arts proved people will pay for the same software over and over again. Microsoft is just removing the inconvenient step of re-branding it every year.
Let's be truly clear. Mail admins block, but by using Spamhaus's list, they are effectively taking Spamhaus's word that mail from that domain is worth blocking. They are ceding a certain amount of control over their mail server. For every mail admin to research every spammer would be a major waste of human time, so instead mail admins trust someone else to do that research for them and maintain the list. It's more efficient, but it means you have to trust the organization maintaining the list not to abuse it.
Blacklists suck. Whitelists suck. Spam sucks. We do the best with what we've got. But for Spamhaus to pretend that they don't know that adding an IP to their list will result in it being blocked from delivering mail to a vast portion of the net is disingenuous. That's exactly why they list large blocks of IPs: because it prevents mail from being delivered, applying pressure to the ISP because their customers are angry. If a listing truly had no effect, they wouldn't do it. (Never mind the ethics of harming uninvolved parties in order to attack the party you dislike; it's the same tactic as another group whose label begins with "t" uses.)
Do I use Spamhaus? Yes. Is a Spamhaus listing alone enough to get mail blocked on my server? Nope. It's just another vote of no-confidence for a particular message. Do I loathe spammers? You betcha. But Spamhaus shouldn't pretend they're not a blocking list. And these spammers should be laughed out of court, the rat bastards.
Web applications are not new. I've built my fair share of them. (Maybe even more than my fair share.) In some circumstances, they work very well:
They have downsides, too:
And yet for many applications, particularly specialized applications dealing with customer account access, inventory management, project management, online publishing, or a whole slew of other things, we accept these limitations. We assess the costs of not using a web application and determine that, overall, the web application provides value for the money.
What's interesting here is that while existing web applications have enough benefits to outweigh the risks, it's not clear that replacing standard desktop apps will come out the same in the risk/benefit analysis. The kinds of things we're doing on the web, we're doing because they work better that way; we've had years of experience with the desktop, and we know some things work better with centralized server models, and others work better with all the work done on the client. Microsoft is betting the farm on everyone being happy to push to the server model, but it won't happen; there are too many compelling reasons to keep ordinary desktop apps right where they are, on your desktop.
What they're afraid of is losing the fight for the desktop. This is their long-term strategy to lock everyone into their system. First they tried to lock up the OS. Then they tried to lock up the file formats. While Linux and OpenOffice are not quite credible threats (if you consider market share only) MS can look ahead and see a day when they have enough market share to seriously threaten their dominance on the desktop, and it isn't 50%, or even 25%. Maybe it's 20%, that magic point where people feel like there is an alternative, and then it's the tipping point, people no longer feel locked in. So MS wants to keep people locked in, because it keeps the cash flowing. That means locking up the data itself. And that's what their online apps are all about.
I had exactly the same problem, and I did search many levels for anything I missed. I think that's as much of the game as was developed, and it just ends there. Pretty sure at that point I was out of the "flOw" and it wasn't fun for me any more.
Businesses are already overwhelmed by the costs of administering Windows, and the sad thing is, Microsoft makes Windows admins re-learn everything every few years because they change the One True Way to manage a network. They say they're trying to make things better, but it's the same problem with developing for MS platforms: everything changes every few years.
Vista is so complex that it's going to be a nightmare to try to get a handle on it. These new jobs are glaziers making glass for windows broken by boys throwing rocks. False industry, and a burden on resources. These people could be doing something productive but instead they'll be put to work holding Vista together.
That argument smells like complete BS. EA is extraordinarily profitable, as evidenced by the bonus they gave me while I worked there, which is based on company, studio, and personal performance. EA's sweatshop environment is all about shoveling out the dung as fast as they can.
Don't misunderstand me. EA has a lot of very talented artists, musicians, programmers, producers, and QA people, but the way the company is run clearly indicates that it's all about profit and those talented folk are just cannon fodder.
to stop buying EA games.
Honestly, there are few EA games that are compelling these days, and I'm flat-out sick of paying $50 for a game only to have more ads shoved in my face. This deal does absolutely nothing for gamers and games, and is only about EA grabbing as much money as they can.
The only people who consider it a pain in the ass are people who are (a) lazy, (b) not adequately security-conscious, (c) programming without a framework that provides good tools to do this. The reason we have so many SQL injections is because we have legions of web programmers who were never taught how to write code in a hostile environment. Web programming is never presented in that light; it's always, "here's a quick little script that fetches twenty records from a database and displays them." Security is far too often a footnote or an appendix that beginning programmers never get to. Building apps for the web is not like doing your Data Structures I homework. You need a different mindset. It's a lot more like designing locks--for prisons full of inmates eager to get out.
The majority of the browsing public don't care about standards OR security. They care about whether the browser will get them the latest music from iTMS, the latest movie trailer, and whether it works with myspace.com. They do not know why standards are important nor do they grok the concept of "unsafe at any speed" browsers. In short, as long as the browser works for the sites they visit, it is Good Enough.
That's why Firefox has to keep trying in order to maintain share. Because the number of people on the web is increasing, and it's not the smart ones who are just now coming online. Complacency is the route to obsolescence.
The extension model may be a matter of taste. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. PHP's handling of multiple form fields with the same name does suck, but at least it isn't too hard to work-around (just re-parse the posted data the way it should have been done).
PHP security doesn't suck any worse than ASP or Perl or ColdFusion or anything else, once you disable things like magic_quotes and register_globals (which is recommended practice). However, there's a lot of crappy PHP code floating around, and if you're new to web programming, you don't know enough to tell the good code from the bad. Nor do you really grok the notion that your code can be hammered on by every malcontent on the planet. Those problems are also not unique to PHP. But since PHP is so widely available, lots of amateurs write code with it.
The problem is that the telcos want to collect TWICE. They already have tiered fees for people to download the content; they want to be able to charge content providers as well for data consumers have already paid to retrieve.
Burnout 3 is a great game, but it wasn't developed in-house at EA, it was created by Criterion in the UK before EA bought them (a deal that went through partway through development of the title). I remember working with the Criterion guys before I left EA last year. BO3 does have some really fun bits, I remember being impressed with it even at the early stages.
I've been slashdotted before... Google's link to sites that link to me did more than any slashdotting I've had before.
I think Google would win this fight.
I run a fractal-related site, and just the leftovers from people clicking through to sites that had links to my site was enough to give me 10x the traffic. I had calls from my host and a few other problems, so I took the web sites down for a few hours while trying to help some other folks figure out what was going on.
I've been slashdotted four times or so before, so I know what it's like. The server handled it just fine, it was the connection that was the trouble.
I'm glad that the initial onslaught is over, but I'm still seeing elevated traffic levels, and probably will for a few days. This is normal for any kind of slashdotting.
I've watched the spam to my inbox go from a few messages a day at the beginning of this year to over 300 a day now. Doubling every ten weeks is a statistic I can believe.
It's clear spammers have no regard for the law. One need only look at their track record: abusing open relays to defray the cost of sending mail, forging headers to divert attention away from themselves, advertising illegal products, businesses, or outright scams, exploiting vulnerabilities in computers to turn victims into zombies for more spamming.
Educating users is futile... I can't even got most of my friends to stop forwarding the latest chain message. I barely saved one of my friends from falling for a credit card phishing scheme, and she's pretty experienced compared to most.
The only thing that is going to work is to go after the people running spamvertised sites. But that's going to cause problems by creating a new kind of "Joe Job"... hire a spammer to spam for your competitor's product; the wrath of the anti-spam crowd then goes straight to your competitor.
Damn spammers.
This actually would block quite a few things.
1. Personal web servers. Given the quality of most of these sites, probably not a great loss.
2. Game servers. No more running a CounterStrike servers for your buddies.
3. IM file transfers (AIM, ICQ). These require open ports.
4. VoIP, unless that VoIP implementation routes connections through a third computer.
The problem is, when you advocate blocking inbound connections, you force the bulk of the net to only be passive consumers of prepackaged content, rather than equal participants in the net. Blocking specific ports for specific reasons (like outbound port 25, although that has problems too) is one thing, but just deciding everything should be blocked but "approved" stuff means a lot of apps are dead in their tracks... stuff that isn't web/mail.
It sounds like they run DNS which "load-balances" requests to the spamvertised sites through zombies set up as open proxies. Since the zombies are scattered throughout all IPs, it makes blocking them hard.
Of course the scumbags know their weak spot is the DNS. Blocking particular domains is easy, and changing the authoritative DNS for a zone takes a while (done that too often). It steps up the spam blacklisting to now require not just refusing mail, but also refusing to talk to certain DNS servers that are known to operate this way. They can move around, but it's harder; I'm not sure if this is better or worse than the current situation.
Damn spammers.
The biggest problem with the blacklist is it cost-shifts, exactly what anti-spammers hate about spam.
Think about it. You are shifting the burden of pressuring an ISP into killing a spammer onto that ISP's non-spamming customers, and you're doing it without advance warning.
Those who blithely talk about "switching hosts" have never had to do it. It just ain't that simple, and it sure as hell isn't free. It means being off the net completely for days--not just e-mail down, but all your services, unless you've got the money for a complete duplicate set of servers.
I have no problem with blacklisting spammers, but I have a major problem with blacklisters who think collateral damage is a good thing or at least nothing to worry about.