Re:Will XDocs support 'ALL' the features in PDF?
on
Microsoft takes on PDF
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It will be a PDF Killer when they include it in every single MS product. IIS will have modules to generate and process them on-the-fly, IE7 will have the Viewer, Office will have the Publisher, Exchange will have its own interface, of course, and since they'll certainly be wrapping it in a layer of DRM, the DMCA will prevent anyone from reverse-engineering it to produce a compatible Viewer for NS/Moz/Konq/Opera/Lynx or *insert-your-non-MS-OS-here*.
And since this idea wasn't mentioned at all during the DOJ Antitrust trials, DOJ probably wont bother touching it.
Windows' "driver signing" is only a way to guarantee that a particular driver is verified and certified by microsoft to be fit for its particular purpose in whatever versions of the OS the author wants to get it signed for. You can still install unsigned drivers, with only a benign warning from the OS that it's "not signed by microsoft".
"lp# on fire" still exists in the linux kernel. check linux/drivers/char/lp.c for that one.... and in linux/drivers/net/eexpress.c: "board on fire". That's when your 10mbit intel card figures it REALLY CAN'T do 100mbit, as it had once hoped:)
The registries don't need to deal with DNS requests. They send all their info to the GTLD nameserver maintainers on a daily basis, and let THEM deal with the DNS traffic. If ISOC is a non-profit organization, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they have only a finite amount of bandwidth and/or server resources, and we all know how much traffic slashdot is capable of inducing.
On the contrary. From the analyses I've read in news.admin.net-abuse.email, and my own observations, it seems at least half the major spammers - the ones with easily recognized patterns, styles, and quirks - are based in the US, but use foreign resources for their campaigns. 90% of the spam I'm getting now is originating from foreign open proxy servers, mostly in APNIC and RIPE ip space, which shows that spammers are now getting more cunning about covering their email tracks. They're also using foreign "free webhosting" services for their web content, but as you go through it all, it's evident that a lot of them are American, by their vocabulary, their pitches, addresses (er, PO boxes) and phone/fax numbers, etc.
Such practices of using open proxies and free anonymous web hosting may be advocated by the free-speech party, but I don't feel it's free speech anymore when the sole purpose of hiding their identity is to avoid punishment for NON-free-speech related crimes, as well as having a purely commercial, rather than political or editorial, purpose.
Luckily, all this effort goes to prove that they KNOW what they're doing is wrong, and jumping through hoops to avoid being caught. It makes it that much easier to prosecute them once they're identified and caught. Unfortunately, finding them is the hard part.
In the meantime, the best we can do is help the government in THEIR fight against spam and scams, by forwarding all your spam - WITH HEADERS - to utc@ftc.gov They've found and prosecuted several high-profile scammers and originators of pyramid schemes, and they notify the SEC about stock price manipulation schemes done in large spam campaigns.
The luser count went from 96000 to 98500, back down to 97000 and up to 101,400 within 30 minutes. There's nothing "special" about this record when it was broken by kiddies just loading up a bunch of drone nets.
As an efnet oper, I see the drone nets (consisting of both open proxy abusers as well as trojanned windows systems) connect and reconnect every day. They make up AT LEAST 20% of our total user base. Many of them are conveniently disguised as XDCC fileserver bots to keep the opers from indiscriminately killing them.
So as far as I'm concerned, we still haven't broken 80,000 _users_.
Learning English phonetically has two fundamental flaws: a) A word's meaning is directly bound to two things - spelling and context. b) It forces the reader/writer to say the words out loud or in their head, to associate it with its meaning and put it into context.
When you learn a word's meaning based on its spelling, you can immediately use it in, and many times out of context. This method of learning also guarantees a better understanding of grammar, since the student will already know the differences between "their" and "there", and eventually "they're" when they learn what a contraction is. A phonetic approach must spend, as you indicated, a ton of time explaining the "exceptions" to the "rules". There are very FEW exceptions when you're teaching English the Right Way.
A benefit to non-phonetic teaching: children don't immediately assume that a letter or abbreviation can be taken to mean the same as another "more complicated" word that shares the same pronunciation. There's no doubt in my mind that it was the kids taught phonetically, that made up these "u"="you" and "r"="are" associations. Anyone with a hint of clue about language mechanics knows that written English words are spelled the way they are because it's just that, a WRITTEN language.
If I were to take on the challenge of home-schooling my children (which I don't intend), I'll make a very concerted effort to make sure the student can tell me what a word means by reading it without saying it out loud; simply by looking at the pattern of letters, and then writing down a word that I use in a sentence for them, that they've already learned to spell, to reinforce their understanding of the relationship between spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.
As a side note, I'd love to know the statistics of kids who are born deaf, who learn English the "right way", and who eventually go on to make grammatical mistakes, if they ever tend to do such a thing. Since they don't know what things sound like, and therefore don't know that "y" sounds like "why" or "their" sounds like "they're", how could they possibly make such mistakes?
I'd lobby AGAINST the big companies with special interests. Effectively bid against them with their favorite politicians. Imagine the shock on the faces of the CEOs of [insert evil companies here] when their efforts to get their representative in office to sign bills in their selfish anti-consumer interests fail miserably, because one person happened to have the money (and the balls) to counter them and stand up for the people who don't have such fortune.
The first organizations I'd "bid" against are certainly the MPAA and RIAA, and their member media companies.
And on the lighter side of things, with a very substantial (er, $100B USD) sum of money, I'd love to just forcibly buy out Microsoft, fire gates and balmer (or at least delegate them to head the Minesweeper and Solitaire development teams), and relicense Windows under the BSD terms and open it to the world.
The Big Evil Companies with special interests have used their ill-gained money to slap the consumers around long enough, using politicians as their puppets. They really need to be taught a hard lesson in checks and balances, and this is precisely what I'd do.
The vast majority of the electrical connectors you see are either male of female. They're all built just to mate with its complement, which raises parts storage issues as well as restricts how things can plug into eachother. I got a hold of genderless-mating modular connectors that can snap together in many configurations, and have no concept of 'male' or 'female'. They're apparently made by Anderson Power Products. I have a few pictures of their smaller connectors here. Connectors like these would be GREAT for daisy chaining DC power sources and/or building quick-disconnect battery charging harness, since their design maintains polarity regardless of the "direction" of the connector (supply to supply, battery to battery, battery to supply, etc)
An ISP is not obligated to provide full, unhindered access for, to, or by anyone elses network. The RIAA has no legal grounds to force Informationwave to open up access to their network, for the same reasons private retail outlets and restaurant establishments can choose not to serve anyone they feel might cause harm to their establishment or other customers. RIAA is big, but not big enough to reverse precident.
What about 911 emergency service?
on
Can You Hear Me Now?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
At least in the US, cellphone carriers are required by law to allow all 911 calls through on any cellphone, whether it's activated or not. The law is pretty strictly enforced, too. It's reasonable to assume that wherever he was, a similar service or law exists.
I can imagine that 1) there was some sort of equivalent service in his area, and 2) his service should have a number to call, like '0' or '611' to talk to someone about adding minutes to his calling plan. The guy was smart enough (and lucid enough) to know that chilling batteries rejuvenates them to some extent, but couldn't figure out how to get a hold of anyone on a service that doesn't require "charged" minutes? He's getting more credit than he deserves.
Regardless, if such emergency services aren't available where he was, let it be a lesson to the carriers there. Someone could easily hold them liable for not permitting emergency calls to go through, where life-threatening situations exist.
10GB/month comes out to roughly 32Kbit/sec on a continuous basis. If the colo provider can allow no-charge on-net traffic to/from their news server, the traffic wont affect the total charged by much. In fact, if you could manage to pull down 100Kbit/sec, which is barely anything on the scale of average colo bandwidth usage, you'd end up with at least 850MB/day, or over 25GB/month (rough estimate, give or take overhead, etc). I know it's unlikely that the average person actually has a friend with equipment on a colo network, but it's certainly practical by any means, as long as there's an on-net news server available to the colo customers.
Most tier-1 colo providers offer their colo customers free access to an in-house news server if they have one available, so if you know someone with a machine hosted somewhere like XO, worldcom, qwest, etc, get them to install nntpcache so you can access their local news server remotely. The only drawback (besides your own bandwidth caps) is the extra bandwidth on the colo machine's part (for client-side AND server-side nntp traffic)
This involves them doing the standard, is your modem turned on, is it working, is the green light flashing.... you don't have a green light, oh its your own modem, so how do you tell if thats working ?
So it does cost them money in terms of call and tech support. They have to have special call centre scripts, new diagnosis procedures etc etc.
Tell me that you actually believe that this would cost them an extra $7 per month, per customer who chooses to use their own cable modem.
does it really justify charging $84 extra per year to "support" people who may potentially have problems with their cable modem? I don't have statistics on cable modem failures/troubleshooting, but if it's anything like dsl/pots modems, it takes at most 2 or 3 hours to completely solve most problems. If each customer with an 'unsupported' cable modem had one such problem per year, it's unlikely that it would add up to $84 worth of AT&T's support time. And that's assuming they don't just say "we can't support it. contact your cable modem manufacturer.", in which case it costs them the $0.50 or so for the time it takes them to tell the customer that it's not AT&T's responsibility.
Charging $7 more per month for every non-AT&T-approved cable modem across the board is completely unfair to those users who don't have problems with theirs (read: clued people, who usually don't need to call the ISP to diagnose a problem anyway)
we all know that cold hard drives are happy hard drives (until condensation happens), but I think requiring some sort of strong cooling will be a necessity. The limitations of hard drives will no longer be of just the read/write head.
Rotational speeds and data density will get so high, that the vibration and heat caused by mechanical bearings will not only cause uncontrolled thermal expansion, but also create platter vibration larger (peak-to-peak) than the density of the data itself. Mechanical bearings will need to be replaced by either compressed-liquid bearings, or isolated magnetic bearings to eliminate the vibration. It's also unfortunate that the MR heads require a thin cushion of air to ride slightly above the platter's surface. That rules out running the platter inside a strong vacuum, to eliminate air friction (ever had a cdrom spin in a high-speed CD drive for a few minutes, and felt it? that heat is from friction with the air, not from the laser)
I'm surprised these things aren't brought up when advances in disk density is discussed.
The mailing I got from register.com suggested that it was "very important" that I renew or I'd risk losing my domains. They never mentioned WHICH domains were "at risk".
I stuffed it back in the envelope with 'return to sender' stamped on it, with a pretty nasty note, and reminding them that 1) none of my domains are registered with them, and 2) now I'll never even consider registering new domains with them, thanks to their scam. No domain registry has the right to steal my business from any other registry, no matter how evil the other one is. Did they think nobody would notice?
Any phone system provider is federally mandated to make sure the system is up 99.999% of the time. In fact, they face hefty fines for even ONE minute of downtime of a service area. It's to their advantage to build redundancy into their distribution system or face the consequences later. In the case of fiber-based distribution systems, they use a redundant ring (where a signal has a guaranteed redundant path) around their service area to accomplish this. When someone digs a trench and knocks out the service to a single home, it's still possible to run to a neighbor's house and use their phone in an emergency, so the federal regulations don't require complete redundancy on that "last mile". Therefore, fiber-based telco services are inherently more robust than telco over copper. Not to mention the advantage fiber has in its resistance to electrical/radio interference lightning.
Actually, it would be considered friendly competition in most areas. In Sacramento, we have AT&T broadband, AT&T cable tv, and pacbell POTS. The only alternative to AT&T broadband cable modem is pacbell DSL (or in the northern sacramento area, surewest DSL). The only alternative to AT&T cable tv is satellite/dss. The only alternative to pacbell POTS service is cellular/pcs - and the biggest player here? AT&T wireless. Having another company that can provide TV, phone, and internet access in the neighborhood is quite welcome, and may drive prices down across the board for that area (why would the incumbant broadband/telephone company reduce prices otherwise?)
Winfirst's service is awesome. Not only do they provide fully digital tv service, but they offer video-on-demand to every customer, kind of like server-side TIVO. Their equipment is capable of 100mbit to the customer (which they were planning on reserving for enterprise/large-business customers). It was unfortunate that their investment bankers pulled a majority of their funding. Their Sacramento area system would be profitable with about twice as many customers as they currently have, but they need the capital to get the rest of the sacramento area into service (orangevale, folsom, downtown, south sac, west sac). They currently serve natomas, carmichael, north sac, part of foothill farms)
Microsoft is in bed with anybody in the business of making money. And since Microsoft ALSO uses (insert random banner-ad and popunder-ad company here) for hotmail and their various other "free" services, they value their business relationships more than their victim^Wcustomer's wishes. How would it benefit microsoft if users of their programs had the ability to prevent microsoft from making ad revenue?
Like netcraft's webserver statistics collection, is there something that is actively scanning mailservers and storing general stats on what software people are running as MTAs? If someone's not doing this, I'd love to start. I have a feeling sendmail is still the world's #1 mailserver for MTAs listed in domains' MX records, but M$ Exchange may be overall #1 just because it's running on nearly every NT/Win2k Server out there (usually promiscuous, too)
Slashdot Mirror
It will be a PDF Killer when they include it in every single MS product. IIS will have modules to generate and process them on-the-fly, IE7 will have the Viewer, Office will have the Publisher, Exchange will have its own interface, of course, and since they'll certainly be wrapping it in a layer of DRM, the DMCA will prevent anyone from reverse-engineering it to produce a compatible Viewer for NS/Moz/Konq/Opera/Lynx or *insert-your-non-MS-OS-here*.
And since this idea wasn't mentioned at all during the DOJ Antitrust trials, DOJ probably wont bother touching it.
You forgot eXplorer and eXpedia.
Windows' "driver signing" is only a way to guarantee that a particular driver is verified and certified by microsoft to be fit for its particular purpose in whatever versions of the OS the author wants to get it signed for. You can still install unsigned drivers, with only a benign warning from the OS that it's "not signed by microsoft".
"lp# on fire" still exists in the linux kernel. ... and in linux/drivers/net/eexpress.c: "board on fire". That's when your 10mbit intel card figures it REALLY CAN'T do 100mbit, as it had once hoped :)
check linux/drivers/char/lp.c for that one.
The registries don't need to deal with DNS requests. They send all their info to the GTLD nameserver maintainers on a daily basis, and let THEM deal with the DNS traffic. If ISOC is a non-profit organization, it shouldn't surprise anyone that they have only a finite amount of bandwidth and/or server resources, and we all know how much traffic slashdot is capable of inducing.
On the contrary. From the analyses I've read in news.admin.net-abuse.email, and my own observations, it seems at least half the major spammers - the ones with easily recognized patterns, styles, and quirks - are based in the US, but use foreign resources for their campaigns. 90% of the spam I'm getting now is originating from foreign open proxy servers, mostly in APNIC and RIPE ip space, which shows that spammers are now getting more cunning about covering their email tracks. They're also using foreign "free webhosting" services for their web content, but as you go through it all, it's evident that a lot of them are American, by their vocabulary, their pitches, addresses (er, PO boxes) and phone/fax numbers, etc.
Such practices of using open proxies and free anonymous web hosting may be advocated by the free-speech party, but I don't feel it's free speech anymore when the sole purpose of hiding their identity is to avoid punishment for NON-free-speech related crimes, as well as having a purely commercial, rather than political or editorial, purpose.
Luckily, all this effort goes to prove that they KNOW what they're doing is wrong, and jumping through hoops to avoid being caught. It makes it that much easier to prosecute them once they're identified and caught. Unfortunately, finding them is the hard part.
In the meantime, the best we can do is help the government in THEIR fight against spam and scams, by forwarding all your spam - WITH HEADERS - to utc@ftc.gov
They've found and prosecuted several high-profile scammers and originators of pyramid schemes, and they notify the SEC about stock price manipulation schemes done in large spam campaigns.
The luser count went from 96000 to 98500, back down to 97000 and up to 101,400 within 30 minutes. There's nothing "special" about this record when it was broken by kiddies just loading up a bunch of drone nets.
As an efnet oper, I see the drone nets (consisting of both open proxy abusers as well as trojanned windows systems) connect and reconnect every day. They make up AT LEAST 20% of our total user base. Many of them are conveniently disguised as XDCC fileserver bots to keep the opers from indiscriminately killing them.
So as far as I'm concerned, we still haven't broken 80,000 _users_.
Without the essential instructions on finding studs to mount to, of course.
Learning English phonetically has two fundamental flaws:
a) A word's meaning is directly bound to two things - spelling and context.
b) It forces the reader/writer to say the words out loud or in their head, to associate it with its meaning and put it into context.
When you learn a word's meaning based on its spelling, you can immediately use it in, and many times out of context. This method of learning also guarantees a better understanding of grammar, since the student will already know the differences between "their" and "there", and eventually "they're" when they learn what a contraction is. A phonetic approach must spend, as you indicated, a ton of time explaining the "exceptions" to the "rules". There are very FEW exceptions when you're teaching English the Right Way.
A benefit to non-phonetic teaching: children don't immediately assume that a letter or abbreviation can be taken to mean the same as another "more complicated" word that shares the same pronunciation. There's no doubt in my mind that it was the kids taught phonetically, that made up these "u"="you" and "r"="are" associations. Anyone with a hint of clue about language mechanics knows that written English words are spelled the way they are because it's just that, a WRITTEN language.
If I were to take on the challenge of home-schooling my children (which I don't intend), I'll make a very concerted effort to make sure the student can tell me what a word means by reading it without saying it out loud; simply by looking at the pattern of letters, and then writing down a word that I use in a sentence for them, that they've already learned to spell, to reinforce their understanding of the relationship between spelling, grammar, and vocabulary.
As a side note, I'd love to know the statistics of kids who are born deaf, who learn English the "right way", and who eventually go on to make grammatical mistakes, if they ever tend to do such a thing. Since they don't know what things sound like, and therefore don't know that "y" sounds like "why" or "their" sounds like "they're", how could they possibly make such mistakes?
I'd lobby AGAINST the big companies with special interests. Effectively bid against them with their favorite politicians.
Imagine the shock on the faces of the CEOs of [insert evil companies here] when their efforts to get their representative in office to sign bills in their selfish anti-consumer interests fail miserably, because one person happened to have the money (and the balls) to counter them and stand up for the people who don't have such fortune.
The first organizations I'd "bid" against are certainly the MPAA and RIAA, and their member media companies.
And on the lighter side of things, with a very substantial (er, $100B USD) sum of money, I'd love to just forcibly buy out Microsoft, fire gates and balmer (or at least delegate them to head the Minesweeper and Solitaire development teams), and relicense Windows under the BSD terms and open it to the world.
The Big Evil Companies with special interests have used their ill-gained money to slap the consumers around long enough, using politicians as their puppets. They really need to be taught a hard lesson in checks and balances, and this is precisely what I'd do.
Anderson power genderless connectors
The vast majority of the electrical connectors you see are either male of female. They're all built just to mate with its complement, which raises parts storage issues as well as restricts how things can plug into eachother. I got a hold of genderless-mating modular connectors that can snap together in many configurations, and have no concept of 'male' or 'female'. They're apparently made by Anderson Power Products. I have a few pictures of their smaller connectors here. Connectors like these would be GREAT for daisy chaining DC power sources and/or building quick-disconnect battery charging harness, since their design maintains polarity regardless of the "direction" of the connector (supply to supply, battery to battery, battery to supply, etc)
An ISP is not obligated to provide full, unhindered access for, to, or by anyone elses network. The RIAA has no legal grounds to force Informationwave to open up access to their network, for the same reasons private retail outlets and restaurant establishments can choose not to serve anyone they feel might cause harm to their establishment or other customers. RIAA is big, but not big enough to reverse precident.
At least in the US, cellphone carriers are required by law to allow all 911 calls through on any cellphone, whether it's activated or not. The law is pretty strictly enforced, too. It's reasonable to assume that wherever he was, a similar service or law exists.
I can imagine that 1) there was some sort of equivalent service in his area, and 2) his service should have a number to call, like '0' or '611' to talk to someone about adding minutes to his calling plan. The guy was smart enough (and lucid enough) to know that chilling batteries rejuvenates them to some extent, but couldn't figure out how to get a hold of anyone on a service that doesn't require "charged" minutes? He's getting more credit than he deserves.
Regardless, if such emergency services aren't available where he was, let it be a lesson to the carriers there. Someone could easily hold them liable for not permitting emergency calls to go through, where life-threatening situations exist.
10GB/month comes out to roughly 32Kbit/sec on a continuous basis.
If the colo provider can allow no-charge on-net traffic to/from their news server, the traffic wont affect the total charged by much.
In fact, if you could manage to pull down 100Kbit/sec, which is barely anything on the scale of average colo bandwidth usage, you'd end up with at least 850MB/day, or over 25GB/month (rough estimate, give or take overhead, etc).
I know it's unlikely that the average person actually has a friend with equipment on a colo network, but it's certainly practical by any means, as long as there's an on-net news server available to the colo customers.
Most tier-1 colo providers offer their colo customers free access to an in-house news server if they have one available, so if you know someone with a machine hosted somewhere like XO, worldcom, qwest, etc, get them to install nntpcache so you can access their local news server remotely.
The only drawback (besides your own bandwidth caps) is the extra bandwidth on the colo machine's part (for client-side AND server-side nntp traffic)
Should have!
So it does cost them money in terms of call and tech support. They have to have special call centre scripts, new diagnosis procedures etc etc.
Tell me that you actually believe that this would cost them an extra $7 per month, per customer who chooses to use their own cable modem.
does it really justify charging $84 extra per year to "support" people who may potentially have problems with their cable modem? I don't have statistics on cable modem failures/troubleshooting, but if it's anything like dsl/pots modems, it takes at most 2 or 3 hours to completely solve most problems. If each customer with an 'unsupported' cable modem had one such problem per year, it's unlikely that it would add up to $84 worth of AT&T's support time. And that's assuming they don't just say "we can't support it. contact your cable modem manufacturer.", in which case it costs them the $0.50 or so for the time it takes them to tell the customer that it's not AT&T's responsibility.
Charging $7 more per month for every non-AT&T-approved cable modem across the board is completely unfair to those users who don't have problems with theirs (read: clued people, who usually don't need to call the ISP to diagnose a problem anyway)
we all know that cold hard drives are happy hard drives (until condensation happens), but I think requiring some sort of strong cooling will be a necessity. The limitations of hard drives will no longer be of just the read/write head.
Rotational speeds and data density will get so high, that the vibration and heat caused by mechanical bearings will not only cause uncontrolled thermal expansion, but also create platter vibration larger (peak-to-peak) than the density of the data itself.
Mechanical bearings will need to be replaced by either compressed-liquid bearings, or isolated magnetic bearings to eliminate the vibration.
It's also unfortunate that the MR heads require a thin cushion of air to ride slightly above the platter's surface. That rules out running the platter inside a strong vacuum, to eliminate air friction (ever had a cdrom spin in a high-speed CD drive for a few minutes, and felt it? that heat is from friction with the air, not from the laser)
I'm surprised these things aren't brought up when advances in disk density is discussed.
The mailing I got from register.com suggested that it was "very important" that I renew or I'd risk losing my domains. They never mentioned WHICH domains were "at risk".
I stuffed it back in the envelope with 'return to sender' stamped on it, with a pretty nasty note, and reminding them that 1) none of my domains are registered with them, and 2) now I'll never even consider registering new domains with them, thanks to their scam.
No domain registry has the right to steal my business from any other registry, no matter how evil the other one is. Did they think nobody would notice?
Any phone system provider is federally mandated to make sure the system is up 99.999% of the time. In fact, they face hefty fines for even ONE minute of downtime of a service area.
It's to their advantage to build redundancy into their distribution system or face the consequences later.
In the case of fiber-based distribution systems, they use a redundant ring (where a signal has a guaranteed redundant path) around their service area to accomplish this. When someone digs a trench and knocks out the service to a single home, it's still possible to run to a neighbor's house and use their phone in an emergency, so the federal regulations don't require complete redundancy on that "last mile".
Therefore, fiber-based telco services are inherently more robust than telco over copper. Not to mention the advantage fiber has in its resistance to electrical/radio interference lightning.
Actually, it would be considered friendly competition in most areas. In Sacramento, we have AT&T broadband, AT&T cable tv, and pacbell POTS. The only alternative to AT&T broadband cable modem is pacbell DSL (or in the northern sacramento area, surewest DSL). The only alternative to AT&T cable tv is satellite/dss.
The only alternative to pacbell POTS service is cellular/pcs - and the biggest player here? AT&T wireless.
Having another company that can provide TV, phone, and internet access in the neighborhood is quite welcome, and may drive prices down across the board for that area (why would the incumbant broadband/telephone company reduce prices otherwise?)
Winfirst's service is awesome. Not only do they provide fully digital tv service, but they offer video-on-demand to every customer, kind of like server-side TIVO.
Their equipment is capable of 100mbit to the customer (which they were planning on reserving for enterprise/large-business customers).
It was unfortunate that their investment bankers pulled a majority of their funding. Their Sacramento area system would be profitable with about twice as many customers as they currently have, but they need the capital to get the rest of the sacramento area into service (orangevale, folsom, downtown, south sac, west sac). They currently serve natomas, carmichael, north sac, part of foothill farms)
Microsoft is in bed with anybody in the business of making money. And since Microsoft ALSO uses (insert random banner-ad and popunder-ad company here) for hotmail and their various other "free" services, they value their business relationships more than their victim^Wcustomer's wishes.
How would it benefit microsoft if users of their programs had the ability to prevent microsoft from making ad revenue?
Like netcraft's webserver statistics collection, is there something that is actively scanning mailservers and storing general stats on what software people are running as MTAs? If someone's not doing this, I'd love to start. I have a feeling sendmail is still the world's #1 mailserver for MTAs listed in domains' MX records, but M$ Exchange may be overall #1 just because it's running on nearly every NT/Win2k Server out there (usually promiscuous, too)