I've been working on a PC-based Tivo-like system for a couple of months now and have published some (hopefully) useful information here.
One critical factor is the choice of a "smart" or a "dumb" capture card and deciding whether you want to be able to export your recordings to DVDR/CDR disks in DVD/SVCD/VCD format.
If you just want plain Tivo-like functionality then you can use DivX as your compression method and get reasonable results with a software-based realtime encoder.
I've compared the two options and reviewed the Pinnacle PCTV card (dumb BT8x8 capture) and the Hauppauge PVR-250 (smart -- it has onbard hardware MPEG encoding).
Is this stuff any good? Here's a clue -- hardware companies should stick to making hardware and leave the software writing to software professionals. This clearly hasn't happened in the tuner/capture-card industry.
Most of the work to date has been done under Windows but I'm currently working on using this hardware config under Linux and will update the project site accordingly.
However, if you want to then export your DivX files to DVD/SVCD/VCD you're going to get sub-optimal quality because you're transcoding between two lossy formats. Since the stuff I like to keep for posterity on CDR/DVDR is more than likely going to be material like good movies or music concerts, I have opted to use an MPEG1/MPEG2 encoder and avoid re-encoding.
There are also a couple of video samples demonstrating the differences between the three most popular options:
1. Realtime MPEG capture using a dumb card 2. Non-realtime encoding using TMPGenc 3. Realtime MPEG capture using a hardware encoder.
There's a heap more to do on this project but it's coming along quite nicely.
We also have to pay "tape license's" from every blank cd tape or anything where fits music.
Cool, so if they haul your ass off to court and charge you with copying a mate's CD you can tell them to get stuffed because you've paid a royalty tax on the blank CDR you used right?
I strongly suspect that this would not be a viable defense eh? More double dipping then from the recording industry.
Don't you just know that any industry that is allowed to extort money in this way, with the protection of legislation, must be dishing out a heap of back-handers to their favorite politicians.
Yeah, Al Kieda, that notirous terrorist guy has spiked the food chain with horrible prions that will kill all the non Islamics!
But all is not lost -- since these prions are such resiliant substances, maybe we can build jet engines out of them and bomb stupid old Al out of existance.
In other news, doctors have reported a huge increase in the number of people now qualified to seek a presidential candidacy or Senate seat.
They're putting this down to a brain wasting disease too.
Why the RIAA's P2P vendetta is crazy
on
Cringely on P2P
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Check out this Aardvark Daily column which shows another commentators view of just how silly the RIAA are for going after P2P network operators when, simply by adding a cheap card to your PC, you can get all the RIAA-sanctioned free top-20 music you want (at the equivalent of 200Kbps or better).
How long before they realize that they're just bitching about cracks in the windows while the door has been left wide open??
(yeah, I submitted this a few days ago and it was rejected -- but I'm not bitching;-)
Hell, I used to be an avid Byte subscriber twenty years or more ago -- but somehow there's something wrong with the transition from print to web.
Print publications (in this industry anyway) are always 6-8 weeks out of date -- and that's a long, long time in the IT/Net fields.
Online publications however, just don't seem to represent the same tangible "substance" as a lump of dead tree does. I suspect this is one of the reasons that few online publications have successfully migrated to the subscription model.
Perhaps it's because reading an online publication simply isn't as convenient as reading a highly portable, high contrast, full color, no batteries required, lightweight, foldable, near infinite transfer-rate printed magazine.
We all *know* the value is in the information -- but somewhere, deep inside our heads, we're thinking "how can something that we can't touch, feel or taste be of any value?"
The crazy thing is that we're still happy to pay $39 a month for cable or satellite TV when all we're getting is "information" in the form of entertainment that is equally as "virtual" as an online magazine.
Perhaps we do this because we know that a single edition of an online publication may cost as much as $100K to produce but a single episode of Enterprise or Farscape probably costs 5-15 times that much.
I love it when people ask me for a name for some stupid purpose such as this.
I simply tell them that my name is:
"Malcom [pause] Peter [pause] Brian [pause] Adrian, telescope, rock-stoat, frog-gobbler fertang fertang, ole' biscuit-barrel, don't sleep in the subway, incubator-Smith."
By the time they get to "Brian" they start to smell a rat -- and once you've memorized that little Monty-Pythonish bit of babble you can rattle the last bit of impressively quickly -- leaving them with their mouth open and eyes wide:-)
Another of my Monty Pythonish favorites:
As I was walking past St Pauls A lady grabbed me by the [pause] hand. She said: Young man, you've got some pluck... Come with me and have a sandwich.
Why is President Bush wasting all that money trying to track down and eliminate Bin Laden when he could simply report him to the RIAA for breaching their copyright.
Clearly the RIAA has far more power at its disposal than the US military and although Bin Laden has managed to evade the united power of the armed services, he wouldn't stand a chance against the recording industry.
Better still -- tell Hillary that Saddam has a huge collection of MP3s and boy-band CDs copied onto CDR. No need for a UN mandate, she'd be in and clean him out in no time!
But what I *really* want to see is the RIAA conduct a raid on the IRS computers to look for copyright breaches.
Now that would be great -- a real clash of the titans eh?
The sad thing is that it's the every-day Joe who's paying for all these power-plays -- either through our CD purchases or our taxes.
Couldn't they find something better to do with all this money?
Avis Rent A Car have announced that they're suing Visa International for an anagramatic infringement of trademark.
Cy Bersquatter, lawyer for Avis, told the media today that his client was deeply concerned that Visa International was causing confusion in the marketplace.
"They even have a Gold Card -- and we have a Gold Car in the carpark -- how confusing is that?"
It is believed that Avis have requested the death sentence.
Well the answer to the car CD-player problem is simple...
You just rip the CD by connecting the audio-out of your domestic CD player to the line-in on your PC.
Then burn the ripped files to a CDR.
And since you've been forced to go to all that hassle, you might as well burn a copy for the neighbors, and the guys at work, and the cute chick you met at that party last week, and make it available through your favorite P2P network, and...
Wouldn't it just be easier if the recording companies wised up and acted sensibly?
I have a rather nice collection of music tracks (on MP3) and music videos (in MPEG) that I've collected over the past couple of years.
I have all the latest top-10 tracks (that interest me) and lots of other less mainstream stuff as well.
And guess what -- I haven't bought a music CD for years.
Nor have I ever used a P2P network for getting this stuff.
Nor have burned copies of someone else's CDs
Just how did I accumulate this wonderful collection of music and videos?
I recorded them from free-to-air broadcasts, that's how.
Given the fidelity limitations of MP3, an FM stereo or stereo TV broadcast is more than the equal of most CD rips.
Now, if the recording industry want to sell public performance rights to broadcasters, and if the likes of Sony want to sell me the gear I need to record from these radio and TV broadcasts -- how on earth can they complain later that I don't buy their CDs?
Just throw a TV/radio tuner card in your PC and you too can quickly accumulate a great music collection at no cost -- and without the hassles of circumventing CD copy-protection or getting caught file-swapping over the Net.
So what's the recording industry going to do about it? Make recording radio/TV transmissions illegal?
I don't think so.
Let's face it -- people have been recording music (and movies) from FTA broadcasts for years. Maybe they're just starting to realise that any business model which relies on selling something people are already getting for free might be fatally flawed.
I have a really effective digital noise reduction system already attached to my body (in fact I even have three spare sets).
It works like this...
Raise both hands to the side of your head, so that they're level with your ears with the palms facing inwards.
Now bend your index fingers (digits) downwards at the second joint so they're pointed towards your head.
Move your hands (and the attached index fingers) towards each other (with your head inbetween) so that the said fingers dock with your ear-holes.
Press a little harder and -- voila -- the noise is dramatically reduced.
In the event that a failure of some kind (amputation, congenital defect) leaves you without the full complement of index fingers, the middle fingers, ring fingers or even little fingers can be substituted.
Gosh -- is this a "method"? I must rush off to the patent office right away!:-
I know full well how publishers (and other online enterprises) can lose so much money.
Back in 1997 I started a little website at 7am.com.
It wasn't pretentious and simply sought to become a news aggregation site designed to save people time by bringing together links to the most interesting stories from all around the Web.
About this time I'd also just finished co-writing a book on Java (being a programmer from way-back) and it occured to me that I could syndicate my regularly updated list of headlines and links using Java-based news ticker.
Thus an empire was born!
Within a few short months, 7am.com had gone from getting just a few hundred hits a day, to getting half a million or so.
The News Ticker was a smart idea -- it allowed people to include regularly updated, topical information on their web-pages at no cost or effort.
Within a few short years there were over 200,000 third-party web-pages carrying the 7am.com news ticker and it was being hit around 2 million times per day.
By that time I'd also started publishing a "newswire" consisting of stories written by myself and a small group of other writers who were keen to get some experience in the (then) new and exciting world of online journalism.
Probably not a lot of people are aware, but 7am.com was (to the best of my knowledge) the very first website in the world to carry the pictures sent back from the surface of Mars by the Pathfinder mission in 1997. 7am.com beat NASA, CNN and all the other sites I checked by several minutes and -- thanks to the News Ticker's ability to "get the message out" to a heap of other sites, there were over 100K visitors within the first half hour of those images being posted.
The exact details of how this "scoop" was achieved is revealed in an upcoming book I'm writing.
7am.com also scooped most of the traditional media when NATO launched its attacks on Serb targets in Yugoslavia. One of our newshounds lived near an airport from which the B-52's were despatched and he filed a report within a minute or so of the first wave taking off.
The same thing happened in 1998 when the US and Britain attacked Iraq -- 7am.com got the news up first.
7am.com got the full Starr Report on Clinton's "misbehavior" online before many of the other news sites -- but we were smart enough to ZIP up our copy so that people could download it more quickly.
Our ability to scoop big (and small) stories like this, combined with the viral growth of our news ticker meant that 7am.com was ranked by NetRatings (now Neilsen/Net Ratings) as being more popular than Playboy.com, The BBC's news website, and right up there alongside FoxNews.
So why have I typed all this stuff?
Well here's the bottom line...
Until mid 1999, 7am.com was doing all this on a monthly budget of around US$7,000.
That's right -- the total cost of running what was, at the time, the world's most widely syndicated web-based news service, was just $84,000 a year. What's more -- there were months when revenues almost covered those costs so the actual operating loss was significantly less.
How was this achieved?
Simple -- 7am.com was a true "virtual newsroom" which took full advantage of the power the Net offers to slash overheads.
Although the webservers were located in San Diego, California, the "head office" of 7am.com was a tiny home-office in the New Zealand countryside, 10,000 miles away.
Total staff consisted of myself and two or three other part-time freelancers.
No Porsches in the carpark (no carpark!), no flash offices, no boozy lunches, no scooters in the hallway -- just a small group of people working their asses off and breaking some important new ground.
I have to admit that I worked 18 hours a day for four years without a single day off. In fact, I got an ear infection and had the rather unpleasant experience of my eardrum bursting because I was too busy to get to the doctor in time -- but hey, it's only pain eh?
About that time a group of VCs came along and said "we can take this business to the US and make a fortune". They promptly bought a majority stake in the business and set about "preparing it for sale".
Now remember, this was a business that had run very successfully on a shoestring budget for nearly four years and had built the largest syndication network of its type on the Net.
It had a very successful structure and operating model -- hell, it was even gearing up to make a profit!
Unfortunately, things changed dramatically once the VCs got their hands on the controls.
Suddenly the total outgoings jumped from $7K per month to nearer $120K per month. Offices were hired, staff recruited, new computers purchased, etc, etc, etc.
Suddenly seven figure sums were being consumed -- and, what's worse, the carefully crafted, and very successful publishing systems which had been put in place were being overhauled (ie: screwed around with) despite my objections.
To cut a long story short (buy the book if you want details;-), the money-hungry VCs effectively bloated the operational costs by a huge sum.
Phrases such as "you've got to spend money to make money" and "image is important" were bandied about freely.
I was told that nobody would be interested in investing in, or buying 7am.com if it didn't have "substance". The "virtual" concept had to be replaced by lots of people huddled in little cubicles it seemed.
My suggestions that surely profit was more important than "image" fell on deaf ears (perhaps I was once again ahead of my time eh?:-)
The VCs ended up totally screwing the sale of the company, I got so frustrated I resigned, and now 7am.com continues to "chug along" but seems to have totally lost the spark, innovation and cutting-edge attitude that won it such success when the money-barons weren't in control.
By the way, I *am* serious about the book. There are literally thousands of "my secrets to success" type of books written by figureheads of business such as Richard Branson, Victor Kiam, etc -- mine has the working title "The secrets of failure".
I may not know what to do right in the world of business, but I sure have a very long list of things I've done wrong. Hopefully people will buy the book and learn from *my* mistakes rather than their own.
Let's face it, I must have screwed up real bad to come out of the dot-com boom with nothing but pocket change eh?
If shaking the floor makes it easier for old people to get around then does this mean that California will become the new retirement playground for senior citizens?
California, the state where Quake is more than just a game:-)
Given that you had to handle the bounces manually, you can probably claim damages of a buck or two for each message and sue as well
Oh no, they were too clever for that. I'm based in New Zealand so there's the thorny issue of lodging a cross-jurisdictional prosecution.
I've noticed that these people are carefully choosing to use non-US-based domains in which to forge their reply addresses. They're also obviously aware that it's just not economically viable to prosecute from outside the USA.
Now if there were just a few lawyers who were prepared to file such cases on a percentage basis, taking their cut from the court awarded damages, then I think they'd be awfully busy.
Unfortunately I also suspect that these spammers have a very cleverly devised financial structure such that their main assets and wealth are protected from any such action. Even if the courts awarded a damaged party any sizeable sum, the chances of them actually receiving a dollar would be very slim.
What I've taken to doing is signing up spammers to other spammers single-opt-in mailing lists.
Of course you don't sign up the email address they give you in the email header -- that's almost always forged so you could be penalising an innocent party. You have to go to the website being promoted (if there is one) and have a hunt around for an email address.
If there isn't one on the site (check the HTML code for embedded addresses for formmail scripts) then see what you can pick out of the domain name registration info.
I'm building up a great list of spammers and their single-opt-in lists that I now unleash on anyone stupid enough to place one of my addresses on their own opt-out list.
It's unfortunate that law enforcement has a monopoly on law enforcement
Hey, according to the FTC, spamming per se isn't against the law anyway.
We're not talking about competing with the police, we're talking about competing with Dr Phil -- a little analysis and a whole lot of attitude adjustment:-)
Is it anyone's fault if they have a little "accident" while you're chatting with them?:-)
Some spammer took a random address from one of my domains to use as a return address. I was suddenly getting hundreds of bounced spam per hour
I had the same thing happen to me.
First of all I asked the site being promoted in the spam [one of the erotica.com group] to please stop forging addresses at my domain.
Nothing changed -- not even an acknowledgement.
So I started forwarding all the bounces to support@erotica.com and their domain contact address domadmin@aeroweb.com
Nothing changed.
Then I started also started forwarding the bounces to affiliates of erotica.com.
Nothing changed
Then I contacted the upstream provider and asked them to shut down the intermediary site (one of their clients) that was being directly referenced in the spam.
Nothing changed, not even an acknowledgement.
So their abuse address was added to the list of those receiving the bounces.
Over a period of three days, nearly 9,000 bounce messages were received and forwarded to the parties involved.
No doubt they were filtering these bounces -- but what else can you do in such a situation?
The spammers don't care that they're screwing up someone's email system by forging return addresses and the upstream provider (pnap.net) is obviously also a blackhat in league with the devil.
If people think it's annoying getting 30-60 spams a day, imagine what it's like getting 3,000 unwanted email bounces per day due to the sleazy activites of spammers!
I have to tell you that sometimes (like this weekend when I received neary 9,000 bounced spam messages after a spammer used various email address at the domain I adminster in the "from" field of their emailings) I feel like becoming a hitman for hire.
Let's see...
I'd put up a website where you could send me your most despised spam and a $5 donation.
Once any given spammer accounted for $25K worth of donations, I'd put on my steel-capped boots and go pay them a visit.
A little basic "attitude readjustment" (courtesy of the said boots and the odd length of lead pipe) would provide significant encouragement for them to mend their spamming ways.
Photos of the repentant spammer (or what's left of them) would then be posted on the website as a warning to other spammers who might consider bothering Net users with their crap.
Now is there anyone who'd use such a valuable Net-community service I wonder?:-)
I'm not a creationist (well at not in the conventional sense of the word) but it strikes me that if God were going to create and populate the earth then he'd hardly do it all by hand would he?
Being the/an all-powerful, all-knowing being, he'd surely be smart enough to simply create the right conditions for life to flourish and then seed it with a simple single-celled creature -- leaving the rest to evolution.
Only an omnistupid being would design and construct each individual organism within an ecosystem eh?
Hopefully about the time everything under the sun becomes resistent to antibiotics we will have microscopic robots running through our blood stream wiping out invaders
Oh yeah... that's good -- until these little computer-controlled nano-probes fall victim to a software virus eh?
Imagine what damage that could do to your insides!
Slashdot Mirror
I've been working on a PC-based Tivo-like system for a couple of months now and have published some (hopefully) useful information here.
One critical factor is the choice of a "smart" or a "dumb" capture card and deciding whether you want to be able to export your recordings to DVDR/CDR disks in DVD/SVCD/VCD format.
If you just want plain Tivo-like functionality then you can use DivX as your compression method and get reasonable results with a software-based realtime encoder.
I've compared the two options and reviewed the Pinnacle PCTV card (dumb BT8x8 capture) and the Hauppauge PVR-250 (smart -- it has onbard hardware MPEG encoding).
Is this stuff any good? Here's a clue -- hardware companies should stick to making hardware and leave the software writing to software professionals. This clearly hasn't happened in the tuner/capture-card industry.
Most of the work to date has been done under Windows but I'm currently working on using this hardware config under Linux and will update the project site accordingly.
However, if you want to then export your DivX files to DVD/SVCD/VCD you're going to get sub-optimal quality because you're transcoding between two lossy formats. Since the stuff I like to keep for posterity on CDR/DVDR is more than likely going to be material like good movies or music concerts, I have opted to use an MPEG1/MPEG2 encoder and avoid re-encoding.
There are also a couple of video samples demonstrating the differences between the three most popular options:
1. Realtime MPEG capture using a dumb card
2. Non-realtime encoding using TMPGenc
3. Realtime MPEG capture using a hardware encoder.
There's a heap more to do on this project but it's coming along quite nicely.
We also have to pay "tape license's" from every blank cd tape or anything where fits music.
Cool, so if they haul your ass off to court and charge you with copying a mate's CD you can tell them to get stuffed because you've paid a royalty tax on the blank CDR you used right?
I strongly suspect that this would not be a viable defense eh? More double dipping then from the recording industry.
Don't you just know that any industry that is allowed to extort money in this way, with the protection of legislation, must be dishing out a heap of back-handers to their favorite politicians.
Imagine that a customer walks out of a record store, having bought the latest Britney Spears CD and jumps in the cab.
The radio is playing one of the very tracks that feature on the CD in the passenger's hand.
Now the recording company is scoring three times:
Once when the radio pays its public performance fee
Again when they charge the cabby his annual fee.
And once more when they sold the passenger his Britney Spears CD.
Boy, talk about tripple-dipping!
Yeah, Al Kieda, that notirous terrorist guy has spiked the food chain with horrible prions that will kill all the non Islamics!
But all is not lost -- since these prions are such resiliant substances, maybe we can build jet engines out of them and bomb stupid old Al out of existance.
In other news, doctors have reported a huge increase in the number of people now qualified to seek a presidential candidacy or Senate seat.
They're putting this down to a brain wasting disease too.
Check out this Aardvark Daily column which shows another commentators view of just how silly the RIAA are for going after P2P network operators when, simply by adding a cheap card to your PC, you can get all the RIAA-sanctioned free top-20 music you want (at the equivalent of 200Kbps or better).
;-)
How long before they realize that they're just bitching about cracks in the windows while the door has been left wide open??
(yeah, I submitted this a few days ago and it was rejected -- but I'm not bitching
Ha... my good old Netscape Communicator 4.51 seems pretty damned bullet-proof. Well more bulletproof than the Anonymizer site anyway.
/web/surveys.php was not found on this server
When I asked for a test it came back with:
-------------
Not Found
The requested URL
Apache/1.3.26 Server at livesupport.anonymizer.com Port80
------------
If I turn off Javascript then it runs but doesn't display the IP number.
Duh!
Hell, I used to be an avid Byte subscriber twenty years or more ago -- but somehow there's something wrong with the transition from print to web.
Print publications (in this industry anyway) are always 6-8 weeks out of date -- and that's a long, long time in the IT/Net fields.
Online publications however, just don't seem to represent the same tangible "substance" as a lump of dead tree does. I suspect this is one of the reasons that few online publications have successfully migrated to the subscription model.
Perhaps it's because reading an online publication simply isn't as convenient as reading a highly portable, high contrast, full color, no batteries required, lightweight, foldable, near infinite transfer-rate printed magazine.
We all *know* the value is in the information -- but somewhere, deep inside our heads, we're thinking "how can something that we can't touch, feel or taste be of any value?"
The crazy thing is that we're still happy to pay $39 a month for cable or satellite TV when all we're getting is "information" in the form of entertainment that is equally as "virtual" as an online magazine.
Perhaps we do this because we know that a single edition of an online publication may cost as much as $100K to produce but a single episode of Enterprise or Farscape probably costs 5-15 times that much.
So what can a publisher do?
I love it when people ask me for a name for some stupid purpose such as this.
:-)
I simply tell them that my name is:
"Malcom [pause] Peter [pause] Brian [pause] Adrian, telescope, rock-stoat, frog-gobbler fertang fertang, ole' biscuit-barrel, don't sleep in the subway, incubator-Smith."
By the time they get to "Brian" they start to smell a rat -- and once you've memorized that little Monty-Pythonish bit of babble you can rattle the last bit of impressively quickly -- leaving them with their mouth open and eyes wide
Another of my Monty Pythonish favorites:
As I was walking past St Pauls
A lady grabbed me by the [pause] hand.
She said: Young man, you've got some pluck...
Come with me and have a sandwich.
Why is President Bush wasting all that money trying to track down and eliminate Bin Laden when he could simply report him to the RIAA for breaching their copyright.
Clearly the RIAA has far more power at its disposal than the US military and although Bin Laden has managed to evade the united power of the armed services, he wouldn't stand a chance against the recording industry.
Better still -- tell Hillary that Saddam has a huge collection of MP3s and boy-band CDs copied onto CDR. No need for a UN mandate, she'd be in and clean him out in no time!
But what I *really* want to see is the RIAA conduct a raid on the IRS computers to look for copyright breaches.
Now that would be great -- a real clash of the titans eh?
The sad thing is that it's the every-day Joe who's paying for all these power-plays -- either through our CD purchases or our taxes.
Couldn't they find something better to do with all this money?
and where does it end?
Avis Rent A Car have announced that they're suing Visa International for an anagramatic infringement of trademark.
Cy Bersquatter, lawyer for Avis, told the media today that his client was deeply concerned that Visa International was causing confusion in the marketplace.
"They even have a Gold Card -- and we have a Gold Car in the carpark -- how confusing is that?"
It is believed that Avis have requested the death sentence.
Well the answer to the car CD-player problem is simple...
You just rip the CD by connecting the audio-out of your domestic CD player to the line-in on your PC.
Then burn the ripped files to a CDR.
And since you've been forced to go to all that hassle, you might as well burn a copy for the neighbors, and the guys at work, and the cute chick you met at that party last week, and make it available through your favorite P2P network, and...
Wouldn't it just be easier if the recording companies wised up and acted sensibly?
RIAA -- blacksmiths of the 21st century
I have a rather nice collection of music tracks (on MP3) and music videos (in MPEG) that I've collected over the past couple of years.
I have all the latest top-10 tracks (that interest me) and lots of other less mainstream stuff as well.
And guess what -- I haven't bought a music CD for years.
Nor have I ever used a P2P network for getting this stuff.
Nor have burned copies of someone else's CDs
Just how did I accumulate this wonderful collection of music and videos?
I recorded them from free-to-air broadcasts, that's how.
Given the fidelity limitations of MP3, an FM stereo or stereo TV broadcast is more than the equal of most CD rips.
Now, if the recording industry want to sell public performance rights to broadcasters, and if the likes of Sony want to sell me the gear I need to record from these radio and TV broadcasts -- how on earth can they complain later that I don't buy their CDs?
Just throw a TV/radio tuner card in your PC and you too can quickly accumulate a great music collection at no cost -- and without the hassles of circumventing CD copy-protection or getting caught file-swapping over the Net.
So what's the recording industry going to do about it? Make recording radio/TV transmissions illegal?
I don't think so.
Let's face it -- people have been recording music (and movies) from FTA broadcasts for years. Maybe they're just starting to realise that any business model which relies on selling something people are already getting for free might be fatally flawed.
I have a really effective digital noise reduction system already attached to my body (in fact I even have three spare sets).
:-
It works like this...
Raise both hands to the side of your head, so that they're level with your ears with the palms facing inwards.
Now bend your index fingers (digits) downwards at the second joint so they're pointed towards your head.
Move your hands (and the attached index fingers) towards each other (with your head inbetween) so that the said fingers dock with your ear-holes.
Press a little harder and -- voila -- the noise is dramatically reduced.
In the event that a failure of some kind (amputation, congenital defect) leaves you without the full complement of index fingers, the middle fingers, ring fingers or even little fingers can be substituted.
Gosh -- is this a "method"? I must rush off to the patent office right away!
I know full well how publishers (and other online enterprises) can lose so much money.
;-), the money-hungry VCs effectively bloated the operational costs by a huge sum.
:-)
Back in 1997 I started a little website at 7am.com.
It wasn't pretentious and simply sought to become a news aggregation site designed to save people time by bringing together links to the most interesting stories from all around the Web.
About this time I'd also just finished co-writing a book on Java (being a programmer from way-back) and it occured to me that I could syndicate my regularly updated list of headlines and links using Java-based news ticker.
Thus an empire was born!
Within a few short months, 7am.com had gone from getting just a few hundred hits a day, to getting half a million or so.
The News Ticker was a smart idea -- it allowed people to include regularly updated, topical information on their web-pages at no cost or effort.
Within a few short years there were over 200,000 third-party web-pages carrying the 7am.com news ticker and it was being hit around 2 million times per day.
By that time I'd also started publishing a "newswire" consisting of stories written by myself and a small group of other writers who were keen to get some experience in the (then) new and exciting world of online journalism.
Probably not a lot of people are aware, but 7am.com was (to the best of my knowledge) the very first website in the world to carry the pictures sent back from the surface of Mars by the Pathfinder mission in 1997. 7am.com beat NASA, CNN and all the other sites I checked by several minutes and -- thanks to the News Ticker's ability to "get the message out" to a heap of other sites, there were over 100K visitors within the first half hour of those images being posted.
The exact details of how this "scoop" was achieved is revealed in an upcoming book I'm writing.
7am.com also scooped most of the traditional media when NATO launched its attacks on Serb targets in Yugoslavia. One of our newshounds lived near an airport from which the B-52's were despatched and he filed a report within a minute or so of the first wave taking off.
The same thing happened in 1998 when the US and Britain attacked Iraq -- 7am.com got the news up first.
7am.com got the full Starr Report on Clinton's "misbehavior" online before many of the other news sites -- but we were smart enough to ZIP up our copy so that people could download it more quickly.
Our ability to scoop big (and small) stories like this, combined with the viral growth of our news ticker meant that 7am.com was ranked by NetRatings (now Neilsen/Net Ratings) as being more popular than Playboy.com, The BBC's news website, and right up there alongside FoxNews.
So why have I typed all this stuff?
Well here's the bottom line...
Until mid 1999, 7am.com was doing all this on a monthly budget of around US$7,000.
That's right -- the total cost of running what was, at the time, the world's most widely syndicated web-based news service, was just $84,000 a year. What's more -- there were months when revenues almost covered those costs so the actual operating loss was significantly less.
How was this achieved?
Simple -- 7am.com was a true "virtual newsroom" which took full advantage of the power the Net offers to slash overheads.
Although the webservers were located in San Diego, California, the "head office" of 7am.com was a tiny home-office in the New Zealand countryside, 10,000 miles away.
Total staff consisted of myself and two or three other part-time freelancers.
No Porsches in the carpark (no carpark!), no flash offices, no boozy lunches, no scooters in the hallway -- just a small group of people working their asses off and breaking some important new ground.
I have to admit that I worked 18 hours a day for four years without a single day off. In fact, I got an ear infection and had the rather unpleasant experience of my eardrum bursting because I was too busy to get to the doctor in time -- but hey, it's only pain eh?
About that time a group of VCs came along and said "we can take this business to the US and make a fortune". They promptly bought a majority stake in the business and set about "preparing it for sale".
Now remember, this was a business that had run very successfully on a shoestring budget for nearly four years and had built the largest syndication network of its type on the Net.
It had a very successful structure and operating model -- hell, it was even gearing up to make a profit!
Unfortunately, things changed dramatically once the VCs got their hands on the controls.
Suddenly the total outgoings jumped from $7K per month to nearer $120K per month. Offices were hired, staff recruited, new computers purchased, etc, etc, etc.
Suddenly seven figure sums were being consumed -- and, what's worse, the carefully crafted, and very successful publishing systems which had been put in place were being overhauled (ie: screwed around with) despite my objections.
To cut a long story short (buy the book if you want details
Phrases such as "you've got to spend money to make money" and "image is important" were bandied about freely.
I was told that nobody would be interested in investing in, or buying 7am.com if it didn't have "substance". The "virtual" concept had to be replaced by lots of people huddled in little cubicles it seemed.
My suggestions that surely profit was more important than "image" fell on deaf ears (perhaps I was once again ahead of my time eh?
The VCs ended up totally screwing the sale of the company, I got so frustrated I resigned, and now 7am.com continues to "chug along" but seems to have totally lost the spark, innovation and cutting-edge attitude that won it such success when the money-barons weren't in control.
By the way, I *am* serious about the book. There are literally thousands of "my secrets to success" type of books written by figureheads of business such as Richard Branson, Victor Kiam, etc -- mine has the working title "The secrets of failure".
I may not know what to do right in the world of business, but I sure have a very long list of things I've done wrong. Hopefully people will buy the book and learn from *my* mistakes rather than their own.
Let's face it, I must have screwed up real bad to come out of the dot-com boom with nothing but pocket change eh?
If shaking the floor makes it easier for old people to get around then does this mean that California will become the new retirement playground for senior citizens?
:-)
California, the state where Quake is more than just a game
Given that you had to handle the bounces manually, you can probably claim damages of a buck or two for each message and sue as well
Oh no, they were too clever for that. I'm based in New Zealand so there's the thorny issue of lodging a cross-jurisdictional prosecution.
I've noticed that these people are carefully choosing to use non-US-based domains in which to forge their reply addresses. They're also obviously aware that it's just not economically viable to prosecute from outside the USA.
Now if there were just a few lawyers who were prepared to file such cases on a percentage basis, taking their cut from the court awarded damages, then I think they'd be awfully busy.
Unfortunately I also suspect that these spammers have a very cleverly devised financial structure such that their main assets and wealth are protected from any such action. Even if the courts awarded a damaged party any sizeable sum, the chances of them actually receiving a dollar would be very slim.
What I've taken to doing is signing up spammers to other spammers single-opt-in mailing lists.
Of course you don't sign up the email address they give you in the email header -- that's almost always forged so you could be penalising an innocent party. You have to go to the website being promoted (if there is one) and have a hunt around for an email address.
If there isn't one on the site (check the HTML code for embedded addresses for formmail scripts) then see what you can pick out of the domain name registration info.
I'm building up a great list of spammers and their single-opt-in lists that I now unleash on anyone stupid enough to place one of my addresses on their own opt-out list.
Let those who live by the spam, die by the spam!
How about a law against ALL CAPS in e-mail?
:-)
Are you kidding?
What about all those PCs in Nigeria that appear to have had their caps-lock key glued down by law?
How will those poor people earn a living facilitating the transfer of ill-gotten gains across international borders if their emails don't get through?
Shame on you for oppressing the poor and disadvantaged. You must be part of the WTO eh?
It's unfortunate that law enforcement has a monopoly on law enforcement
:-)
:-)
Hey, according to the FTC, spamming per se isn't against the law anyway.
We're not talking about competing with the police, we're talking about competing with Dr Phil -- a little analysis and a whole lot of attitude adjustment
Is it anyone's fault if they have a little "accident" while you're chatting with them?
Some spammer took a random address from one
of my domains to use as a return address. I was suddenly getting hundreds of bounced spam per hour
I had the same thing happen to me.
First of all I asked the site being promoted in the spam [one of the erotica.com group] to please stop forging addresses at my domain.
Nothing changed -- not even an acknowledgement.
So I started forwarding all the bounces to support@erotica.com and their domain contact address domadmin@aeroweb.com
Nothing changed.
Then I started also started forwarding the bounces to affiliates of erotica.com.
Nothing changed
Then I contacted the upstream provider and asked them to shut down the intermediary site (one of their clients) that was being directly referenced in the spam.
Nothing changed, not even an acknowledgement.
So their abuse address was added to the list of those receiving the bounces.
Over a period of three days, nearly 9,000 bounce messages were received and forwarded to the parties involved.
No doubt they were filtering these bounces -- but what else can you do in such a situation?
The spammers don't care that they're screwing up someone's email system by forging return addresses and the upstream provider (pnap.net) is obviously also a blackhat in league with the devil.
If people think it's annoying getting 30-60 spams a day, imagine what it's like getting 3,000 unwanted email bounces per day due to the sleazy activites of spammers!
I have to tell you that sometimes (like this weekend when I received neary 9,000 bounced spam messages after a spammer used various email address at the domain I adminster in the "from" field of their emailings) I feel like becoming a hitman for hire.
:-)
Let's see...
I'd put up a website where you could send me your most despised spam and a $5 donation.
Once any given spammer accounted for $25K worth of donations, I'd put on my steel-capped boots and go pay them a visit.
A little basic "attitude readjustment" (courtesy of the said boots and the odd length of lead pipe) would provide significant encouragement for them to mend their spamming ways.
Photos of the repentant spammer (or what's left of them) would then be posted on the website as a warning to other spammers who might consider bothering Net users with their crap.
Now is there anyone who'd use such a valuable Net-community service I wonder?
I'm not a creationist (well at not in the conventional sense of the word) but it strikes me that if God were going to create and populate the earth then he'd hardly do it all by hand would he?
Being the/an all-powerful, all-knowing being, he'd surely be smart enough to simply create the right conditions for life to flourish and then seed it with a simple single-celled creature -- leaving the rest to evolution.
Only an omnistupid being would design and construct each individual organism within an ecosystem eh?
God -- working smarter, not harder?
Hopefully about the time everything under the sun becomes resistent to antibiotics we will have
microscopic robots running through our blood stream wiping out invaders
Oh yeah... that's good -- until these little computer-controlled nano-probes fall victim to a software virus eh?
Imagine what damage that could do to your insides!
If only Orson Welles were alive to see this ;-)
I knew it -- NASA never did have plans to produce such a book. It was just another hoax :-)