None of my code looks badly laid out. In fact, it is all properly indented.
And Dreamweaver doesn't put any javascript in my pages. If I need some javascript stuff, I code it myself by hand, and Dreamweaver is perfectly happy with this.
Sounds to me like you have been burned by people who didn't know how to use Dreamweaver correctly. Even Notepad and vi can make crappy code if the user that is using them doesn't know what they are doing. Blame the user, not the tool.
I am sure they put it up for people to actually view it. I just doubt they put it up thinking that 1000s of people would view it all at once. Maybe if you were putting up the site in order to get linked from slashdot. Then you wouldn't have an excuse. But I doubt that is the intention of a majority of these sites.
And killing a server certainly doesn't help the discussion of the article, as a majority of the posts that get modded up are jokes about the slashdotting. And then you have folks like us, who are participating in a meaninful discussion about slashdotting rather than the article we are posting under.
Whats the point of quick story submission if the article or website the story is talking about is down within a minute of the story posting? I would rather a story wait for a while and a solid mirror be put up instead of us blowing away a website for days.
Of course, if you don't RTFA, then I suppose its a moot point to you.
But a single person changing names versus a company transferring part of itself to a new company, even if they are keeping all of the former employees and doing all of the same work, do not equate. Now if the company were to rename itself, then sure. But a separate company is a separate entity, which is not necessarily bound to any of the contracts held by its parent.
Basically, the contract is non-transferrable, and there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe the prices that they are charging are being abused, but what they are doing is perfectly acceptable.
And since you seemed to be concerned with scale, we can switch to a home mortgage analogy if you would like. Same house doing the same thing it was, but I still have to pay off my mortgage, and the new owner still has to get one himself.
Actually, the first post was a very good analogy. Look at it like this:
I am with Sprint PCS and have a one year agreement with them. I choose to switch to Verizon before my agreement is up. I cannot use my Sprint PCS phone with Verizon, so I decide to sell it.
1. Sprint PCS is going to charge me for breaking my contract.
2. The new owner of the phone has to start their own contract with Sprint PCS if they want service. The remainder of my contract will not carry over to the new owner of the phone.
This example is what actually happens if I were to do all of this. But we don't see Sprint PCS, Verizon or any of the other carriers posted on Slashdot.
Fact is, this is just basic business. It only makes headlines on Slashdot because it's Microsoft.
"Due to the people at slashdot.org linking to this site without asking the owners or the hosters, asciipr0n.com is offline until further notice. Maybe you guys should start mirroring the sites you link to..."
True, however the delivery of such content is just as important as the content itself. If I hand you a bound book, and ask you to read it, no problem right? Now, what if I take all those pages and just hand them to you loose. You might not have a problem getting through, but you are more apt to get the pages out of order, lose a page...all kinds of mess ups.
A good design holds the content together. A good design helps direct the user's focus to important content. A good design will support the user without being obvious about it.
They are only required to keep you on their DNC list for 1 year, at which point your number becomes fair game again. The only way to prevent this is to call them before it expires and "renew" your DNC request.
Now that Mario and Samus are on the market, and Link is close, you are going to see GC sales come up. Think of it like this: Nintendo is holding strong with Microsoft with the Cube, and it didn't really have any of its title games out at the time. So now you have Xbox online vs. Mario, Samus and Link. Sorry, but GC won with me, and it will win for a lot of others now that those names are out.
I know people who have done that, except go to more extremes. Like stuffing a ziplock bag of speghetti in one, or taking it and taping it to a brick. I don't know if it actually goes, but its a funny idea.
Except I am browsing at 3 right now, and there are 29 "Reply to This" links, 4 viewable on my screen. Which means I have to sort through at least 4, or at most 29 links to get to the one I want. Seems easier to just move my hand.
Sounds like they had a pretty rough dialer then. On some of our larger (50k numbers) campaigns, agent-marked busies and answering machines was in the area of 1 - 5% of dialer-marked busies and machines. And this was with no more than 5s agent idle time and less than 10% drops.
For the most part, answering machines start playing your message almost immediately after it picks up. When you answer the phone, assuming you are using a normal handset, you have to take the time to move it from the cradle to your ear before you say hello. Its that delay from pick up to talk that the dialer keys off of. The more delay, the more it will assume there is a real person on the other end.
The database is read only for the most part from the agent point of view. However, there is a field at the end of each record that states the last disposition of that number. When the dialer (or an agent) hears the disconnected tone, the dialer adds its code for DISCONNECTED to that field for the record (usually some string of numbers, a la 404 for web).
Upon pickup, it picks the next available agent, your info shows up on their computer terminal via application bridge from the switch to a computer on the LAN.
The dialer is smart enough to recognize an answering machine, busy, all kinds of different things, including a live human voice. The amount of busies, disconnected or answering machines that get through to the agent is minimal. Otherwise you are paying your agent to do what your expensive dialer should be doing.
If you hang up, agent gets dialtone, and they hit a button to flag they are available for the next call
At this point, its up to the dialer admin what will happen to that number. He would have programmed the dialer's reactions to the codes when building the campaign. Usually that means deciding how long you are going to keep a number that is continually marked as busy or answering machine in the loop. We usually marked them out after 6 tries.
DNCs do have to be flagged manually, but thats only so that if the number slips into another campaign, the dialer filters it out. Assuming your admin has coded DNCs right, they shouldn't be called again within that campaign, and won't be called again by that dialer once he adds them to the master DNC list.
And you know what? A patch was available to MS systems before Code Red starting really moving. I was pushing my administrator to do it. He didn't feel it was necessary. A couple of days later we get hit, and he spends the next days and nights trying to stop the spread and recover.
Code Red exists because of crap MS security. Code Red spread because of crap Administrators.
Slashdot Mirror
None of my code looks badly laid out. In fact, it is all properly indented.
And Dreamweaver doesn't put any javascript in my pages. If I need some javascript stuff, I code it myself by hand, and Dreamweaver is perfectly happy with this.
Sounds to me like you have been burned by people who didn't know how to use Dreamweaver correctly. Even Notepad and vi can make crappy code if the user that is using them doesn't know what they are doing. Blame the user, not the tool.
I am sure they put it up for people to actually view it. I just doubt they put it up thinking that 1000s of people would view it all at once. Maybe if you were putting up the site in order to get linked from slashdot. Then you wouldn't have an excuse. But I doubt that is the intention of a majority of these sites.
And killing a server certainly doesn't help the discussion of the article, as a majority of the posts that get modded up are jokes about the slashdotting. And then you have folks like us, who are participating in a meaninful discussion about slashdotting rather than the article we are posting under.
Whats the point of quick story submission if the article or website the story is talking about is down within a minute of the story posting? I would rather a story wait for a while and a solid mirror be put up instead of us blowing away a website for days.
Of course, if you don't RTFA, then I suppose its a moot point to you.
But a single person changing names versus a company transferring part of itself to a new company, even if they are keeping all of the former employees and doing all of the same work, do not equate. Now if the company were to rename itself, then sure. But a separate company is a separate entity, which is not necessarily bound to any of the contracts held by its parent.
Basically, the contract is non-transferrable, and there is nothing wrong with that. Maybe the prices that they are charging are being abused, but what they are doing is perfectly acceptable.
And since you seemed to be concerned with scale, we can switch to a home mortgage analogy if you would like. Same house doing the same thing it was, but I still have to pay off my mortgage, and the new owner still has to get one himself.
Actually, the first post was a very good analogy. Look at it like this:
I am with Sprint PCS and have a one year agreement with them. I choose to switch to Verizon before my agreement is up. I cannot use my Sprint PCS phone with Verizon, so I decide to sell it.
1. Sprint PCS is going to charge me for breaking my contract.
2. The new owner of the phone has to start their own contract with Sprint PCS if they want service. The remainder of my contract will not carry over to the new owner of the phone.
This example is what actually happens if I were to do all of this. But we don't see Sprint PCS, Verizon or any of the other carriers posted on Slashdot.
Fact is, this is just basic business. It only makes headlines on Slashdot because it's Microsoft.
this is what that page currently says:
"Due to the people at slashdot.org linking to this site without asking the owners or the hosters, asciipr0n.com is offline until further notice. Maybe you guys should start mirroring the sites you link to..."
haha, i think that is great.
Worst. Satire. Ever.
"The web _is_ content."
True, however the delivery of such content is just as important as the content itself. If I hand you a bound book, and ask you to read it, no problem right? Now, what if I take all those pages and just hand them to you loose. You might not have a problem getting through, but you are more apt to get the pages out of order, lose a page...all kinds of mess ups.
A good design holds the content together. A good design helps direct the user's focus to important content. A good design will support the user without being obvious about it.
And now, when you are younger, you can look upon the older and wiser and try not to become as pessimistic, disillusioned and bitter as they have.
Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker!
They are only required to keep you on their DNC list for 1 year, at which point your number becomes fair game again. The only way to prevent this is to call them before it expires and "renew" your DNC request.
Update: the mini-PC wasn't released by Microsoft. Try reading the article next time.
The best part is that all these ads for Visual Studio.Net always seem to show up under these articles.
Ah, sweet irony!
But I bought a Gamecube. Why? Mario, Link, Samus.
Now that Mario and Samus are on the market, and Link is close, you are going to see GC sales come up. Think of it like this: Nintendo is holding strong with Microsoft with the Cube, and it didn't really have any of its title games out at the time. So now you have Xbox online vs. Mario, Samus and Link. Sorry, but GC won with me, and it will win for a lot of others now that those names are out.
God invented headphones so we could wear jeans and sandals?!?!?
MSN, the "Microsoft operating system required" internet service
As opposed to AOL, the "Microsoft operating system required" internet service.
I know people who have done that, except go to more extremes. Like stuffing a ziplock bag of speghetti in one, or taking it and taping it to a brick. I don't know if it actually goes, but its a funny idea.
Except I am browsing at 3 right now, and there are 29 "Reply to This" links, 4 viewable on my screen. Which means I have to sort through at least 4, or at most 29 links to get to the one I want. Seems easier to just move my hand.
Sounds like they had a pretty rough dialer then. On some of our larger (50k numbers) campaigns, agent-marked busies and answering machines was in the area of 1 - 5% of dialer-marked busies and machines. And this was with no more than 5s agent idle time and less than 10% drops.
For the most part, answering machines start playing your message almost immediately after it picks up. When you answer the phone, assuming you are using a normal handset, you have to take the time to move it from the cradle to your ear before you say hello. Its that delay from pick up to talk that the dialer keys off of. The more delay, the more it will assume there is a real person on the other end.
Autodialer dials number from read-only database
The database is read only for the most part from the agent point of view. However, there is a field at the end of each record that states the last disposition of that number. When the dialer (or an agent) hears the disconnected tone, the dialer adds its code for DISCONNECTED to that field for the record (usually some string of numbers, a la 404 for web).
Upon pickup, it picks the next available agent, your info shows up on their computer terminal via application bridge from the switch to a computer on the LAN.
The dialer is smart enough to recognize an answering machine, busy, all kinds of different things, including a live human voice. The amount of busies, disconnected or answering machines that get through to the agent is minimal. Otherwise you are paying your agent to do what your expensive dialer should be doing.
If you hang up, agent gets dialtone, and they hit a button to flag they are available for the next call
At this point, its up to the dialer admin what will happen to that number. He would have programmed the dialer's reactions to the codes when building the campaign. Usually that means deciding how long you are going to keep a number that is continually marked as busy or answering machine in the loop. We usually marked them out after 6 tries.
DNCs do have to be flagged manually, but thats only so that if the number slips into another campaign, the dialer filters it out. Assuming your admin has coded DNCs right, they shouldn't be called again within that campaign, and won't be called again by that dialer once he adds them to the master DNC list.
So in the end, TeleZapper can work.
"Here's hoping we're here 5 years from now doing exactly the same thing with the same folks"
/.!
YES! Another 5 years of bad spelling and duplicate stories. Long live
Look up "hypocracy" in the dictionary, and you see "http://www.slashdot.org".
Microsoft is evil! We must destroy the Evil Empire. But ooooh, look at all the pretty games and hacks you can do to the xBox! Let me buy one today!
Try your local newspaper. Some papers will even let you search online if you are too lazy to go buy a paper.
And you know what? A patch was available to MS systems before Code Red starting really moving. I was pushing my administrator to do it. He didn't feel it was necessary. A couple of days later we get hit, and he spends the next days and nights trying to stop the spread and recover.
Code Red exists because of crap MS security. Code Red spread because of crap Administrators.