My experience exactly. Most of the time, if it's not on the first couple pages, either my query Needs Work, or it's nowhere to be found regardless.
Even with the most accurate query, generally by the 3rd page you're down to linkfarms, foreign mirrors, and server junk (exposed logfiles etc.)
On rare occasions there will be many pages of good results, but that's not typical, and generally only applies to very specific or niche queries that aren't linkfarm or forum fodder.
So... if I don't see something at least in mortar range of the desired target within the first 10 results, I know I'd best recalibrate my aim and try again.:)
Some years ago doctors discovered that a particular type of recurring, intractable back pain was caused by driving long distances with a fat wallet in one's back pocket, which in turn puts pressure against certain nerves. Remove the wallet from the pocket, and the pain goes away!
Some wag dubbed this a "walletectomy" -- which unlike corporate-speak, has a real if ironic meaning ("removal of the wallet").
I wouldn't mind the regular commercials in a good clean reliable ARCHIVABLE download. If I really gave a shit, I could always edit them out, but it'd be less bother to just go buy the DVDs.
Come to think of it, why not offer DVD subscriptions for popular shows, to be mailed out every other week?? (assuming two episodes per DVD) Or single DVDs at a higher price, but make the full-season subs cheap enough that most people will just do that.
However, back to ads -- there's another issue here: Advertisers pay on a PER AD AIRED basis. If the download can be "aired" NN-many times on your personal equipment, how does the network get paid for those NN-times that you are presumed to see the ads again? I suspect THAT is what they're worrying about. Whereas with a one-time stream, they can set up ad billing on the same basis as for any ordinary broadcast.
Back in the Dark Ages of computing, there was a UNIX virus that could also infect DOS machines. I can't find its original name offhand, but I vaguely recall that it was the ancestor of the Quox boot sector virus.
Very good points. Boils down to -- it doesn't matter which methods or media you're working in, you've still got to know the fundamentals of the subject, or you're going to get stuff wrong.
I'm not an artist by any stretch, but when I was in public school we were required to take a certain number of art classes, and got the fundamentals of lighting and perspective banged into our heads like it or not. And when you learn something hands-on like that, it stays with you whether you realise it or not.
Many a time I've seen people fight with drawings (both hand and CGI) and know they look wrong, but not why, because they don't understand about light/shadow and perspective -- and without that understanding, nothing they do can fix what "looks wrong".
Funny example: Someone I know was waving their hands about a photo of a UFO on some website. I took one look and said nope, that's an aluminum pie plate... aside from other inconsistencies, the purported photo had evidently started life as two different images, as the shadows were inconsistent -- the sun would have had to be at two different strengths at the same time. Ooops.:)
My sister is a senior architect in a big firm in San Francisco. She also was from one of the last graduating classes that had to do everything by hand (AutoCAD didn't yet exist; in fact PCs didn't yet exist).
When the power was out for an extended period, she was the ONLY person in her office who had the skills to continue working. Everyone else was dead in the water, because they had never learned how to do arch.drawings and drafting by hand. If they don't have their computer and AutoCAD and 3DStudioMax, they can't work.
At a billable rate of $100/hour, a few hours downtime is a significant chunk of income lost, both for the individuals and for the parent firm.
Moral is, if your job CAN be done by hand, it behooves you to at least develop the basic skills to do it manually, because sometimes those computer-based tools are not available. And people who HAVE the manual skills are becoming rarer and rarer, since many universities no longer teach these older methods at all. If you HAVE those manual skills, that's an opportunity for you, when no one else CAN do the work.
Think of it like COBOL: no longer used much, but when you really *need* a COBOL programmer, you've got to pay whatever they ask, cuz they just aren't a dime a dozen anymore.
Not to mention that having the manual skills gives you a broader perspective and understanding of your craft as a whole, even if you never use these skills in your everyday work.
At the Win2K tech info tour, M$ handed out an IE5 CD that they told us was the Win2K team's internal version, rewhacked to suit themselves. The exact version number is 5.00.2314.1003c. It seems to lack a lot of the problems and vulnerabilities seen in other versions.
At any rate, I just tested it, and it did display the correct address, tho it couldn't see any of the web page itself other than a whopping big "SECUNIA" banner.
I also tested Netscape 3.04 and Mozilla 1.5, and neither was vulnerable. NS3 did briefly show google.com in the address bar, but corrected itself before displaying the actual page. Then both showed the explanation: ============== Your browser is vulnerable if the Address Bar displays "http://www.google.com/".
Please note. This could easily have been a page looking like the genuine "Google" web site (or any other web site) asking for your login credentials, credit card details, etc.
This is only limited by the imagination of the attacker (phisher). ================== which is the part that IE5 couldn't see.
It has more to do with frightening people away from LEGAL downloads. After all, if you're afraid of downloading *any* content, that makes it harder for an *independent* artist to distribute his own content via the net. And the RIAA is not about creation, it's about maintaining a *distribution monopoly*. If artists find other ways to get their product into customers' hands, the RIAA becomes redundant.
So... scare the customers away from those alternative channels, preferably before they become the preferred method for new artists.
Now that you mention it, I believe those were wireless Linksys units. I'll see if my buddy remembers which model it was... tho at a guess, whatever is the newest consumer model suitable for a small office.
I like the sound of that unit with the serial port more all the time:) Will keep an eye out for one. Gotta do a computer swapmeet soon anyway, good time to pick one up below retail.
I have a tested-perfect ear and was taught all the Music Stuff thru many years of required classes, but still there is something missing when I try to read music -- I can puzzle it out, but it never really connects with the notes that I *know* it represents. Like someone who can figure out words one letter at a time, but can't extract meaning from it. Turns out that's a real syndrome, "word blindness"... I think I'm "music blind", in the same manner.
My friend has run into more than one these Linksys routers with the weird issues, no AV involved. He couldn't figure it out either, and he does this sort of thing for a living. After some head-scratching he replaced 'em with another router, and the problem went away.
Serial port on the Snapgear unit would sure be useful; any real reason why a person couldn't run regular dialup thru it? Personally I am never fully comfy with letting an XP machine run around loose; unlike W9x, where I can keep an eye on everything without much trouble (to me, any unusual activity on 9x sticks out like a whole handful of sore thumbs), there's just too much background activity on XP, and one evil process more or less can readily go unnoticed.
A basement full of Cisco gear would be overkill for me (besides... no basement!:) but for sure that's nice to have when you're gunning for certification. Nothing beats hands-on experience.
I had similar thoughts. I looked at the linked download-sales sites, and concluded:
Why would I buy a download that is timebombed and can't be archived to DVD, when for the same or less money I could pick up the real-DVD at WalMart, and be able to watch it whenever and wherever I want?
Offer a significantly cheaper download with no strings attached (I don't care if it's watermarked, I just don't want it timebombed or tied to a single medium or player), and then I'm interested. And when you price it, remember that *the customer* is absorbing the time, cost, and bother of making a DVD for storage and later viewing.
Considering that most DVDs wind up priced in the $8 to $18 range once they hit the discount rack, $3 to $5 is probably a fair price for an unencumbered download of a reasonably current film.
I suppose it's largely a matter of whether they develop the "more logic" in-house (one-time cost) or license it from someone else (fee for every unit). ISTM the cable-modem mfrgs. have their market over a barrel, thus not much incentive to offer more features than the next guy.
[looks at SnapGear Lite2+] Seems to have more than plenty features, and the first price I found was $60, not bad. Thanks for the recommendation.
I don't expect to EVER live where broadband is available over a wire, so whatever I get will have to work with fixed wireless (if that ever reaches out this far... mutter, grumble). I did look at satellite, but soon ran away screaming!
As to Linksys, a friend who deals with this sort of gear all the time reports that their current routers have some weird issues -- stripping all attachments and throttling your connection down to modem speeds; at a guess, something is set wrong by default, and there doesn't seem to be any way to configure it back to normal. He used to like LinkSys too, but is avoiding them for now.
Oh, no, this is just an attempt to get all the Star Wars slash authors to come out from the underground, so Lucas can stomp the genre into oblivion. After all, Lucas himself said, "There is no sex in the Star Wars universe".
[Actually, this is close to truth. Lucas DID sic lawyers on the slash community, which is why all SW slash is published underground.)
Yeah, 3Com only had USR for a couple years before they decided this wasn't the deal for them. Which was probably just as well for all concerned.
Good info, thanks -- archived for reference. I'll remember you when I next feel baffled about this router and packet stuff [g] tho nothing specific I can think to ask about at the moment. (BTW my email is plastered all over my websites, so I'm easy to find.)
Other than... Recommendations on ordinary consumer routers??
I've only messed with two, on clients' DSL lines:
USR that was literally plug it in and everything instantly works. Change password, done. ZA has recorded ZERO dings since then (down from 300 or so per hour), so I guess it's doing the job.:)
D-Link that required quite a lot of confirming this or that; other than the password, I let it do as it liked. This guy's ZA wasn't getting dinged before, so no "after" to compare.
Why don't they put a firewall in cable modems, if it's already being half a router anyway??
A contrariness common in SF fandom: Someone with no ability to recognise when they're boring their audience rattles on ad tedium about their current interest; the listener, normal or not, may suddenly turn and leave without a word.
This abandon-the-conversation thing is so common that it's ordinary behaviour, not considered rude or unusual -- probably developed because otherwise you may be trapped for hours by endless exposition on some topic of absolutely no interest to you. I've found myself doing it, almost as a reflex. (And no, I'm not autistic).
Someone down below had a similar idea, except they thought the pricing structure should be reversed, thus DVDs would be cheaper at the theatre, if only to bring more warm bodies into the facility. That could work too -- the market would just have to experiment until it found its sweet spot.
I know if theatre-sold DVDs were in the $10 range, I'd not hesitate to buy a copy on the spot, if I liked what I'd just watched on the big screen well enough.
Concert venues do a killer business in CDs sold to concert-goers -- same principle!!
It seems to me that theatres (and studios) are missing out on a good market -- selling DVDs of the films that are NOW PLAYING. When people come out of a good movie they're often hot to buy a copy for their own library, and are more likely to pay new-release prices for it, too.
Yeah, the other retailers will whine, but that's just tough. If they keep their prices enough lower than theatre-vended DVDs, they'll still have their same post-theatre sales.
[inspects docsource] Appears to have started life as a Word document, subsequently run thru (at a guess) both Dreamweaver, and something like Trellix or NetObjects Fusion, having been edited by at least 3 different people, one with a clue and two without. It's a mix of HTML, XML, and CSS, with assloads of orphaned tags, which is why nothing matches. The wonder is that it displays as well as it does!
And what with all the free publicity painting a big red target on their butts, it'll then be about 10 minutes til the site is hacked. Too bad we probably won't see the assault this guy then makes on Microsoft.;D
I hadn't heard any of this, but allowing the thread to be the forecast of general aviation restrictions to come, my first thought was... what happens to all those cropdusters and puddle-jumpers, most of which are strictly visual and don't even have radios? getting too restrictive could ground a whole class of pilots, and put them and their support industries out of work.
Recently I've noticed a LOT of TV ads, even in national prime time, for sleeze products that previously I'd never heard of outside of spam. Prime time ad space goes for 6 figures a minute. Goes to show how much money is being made, for sure... far more than ANY sort of "email tax" could ever put a dent in.
Besides, as I said above, all that would happen is that spammers, if forced to post a bond or buy into a whitelist, would pass the cost on to their customers (the people they sell ad-delivery to, who are NOT the spam's recipients).
Slashdot Mirror
My experience exactly. Most of the time, if it's not on the first couple pages, either my query Needs Work, or it's nowhere to be found regardless.
:)
Even with the most accurate query, generally by the 3rd page you're down to linkfarms, foreign mirrors, and server junk (exposed logfiles etc.)
On rare occasions there will be many pages of good results, but that's not typical, and generally only applies to very specific or niche queries that aren't linkfarm or forum fodder.
So... if I don't see something at least in mortar range of the desired target within the first 10 results, I know I'd best recalibrate my aim and try again.
The procedure in fact exists:
Some years ago doctors discovered that a particular type of recurring, intractable back pain was caused by driving long distances with a fat wallet in one's back pocket, which in turn puts pressure against certain nerves. Remove the wallet from the pocket, and the pain goes away!
Some wag dubbed this a "walletectomy" -- which unlike corporate-speak, has a real if ironic meaning ("removal of the wallet").
I wouldn't mind the regular commercials in a good clean reliable ARCHIVABLE download. If I really gave a shit, I could always edit them out, but it'd be less bother to just go buy the DVDs.
Come to think of it, why not offer DVD subscriptions for popular shows, to be mailed out every other week?? (assuming two episodes per DVD) Or single DVDs at a higher price, but make the full-season subs cheap enough that most people will just do that.
However, back to ads -- there's another issue here: Advertisers pay on a PER AD AIRED basis. If the download can be "aired" NN-many times on your personal equipment, how does the network get paid for those NN-times that you are presumed to see the ads again? I suspect THAT is what they're worrying about. Whereas with a one-time stream, they can set up ad billing on the same basis as for any ordinary broadcast.
Back in the Dark Ages of computing, there was a UNIX virus that could also infect DOS machines. I can't find its original name offhand, but I vaguely recall that it was the ancestor of the Quox boot sector virus.
Very good points. Boils down to -- it doesn't matter which methods or media you're working in, you've still got to know the fundamentals of the subject, or you're going to get stuff wrong.
:)
I'm not an artist by any stretch, but when I was in public school we were required to take a certain number of art classes, and got the fundamentals of lighting and perspective banged into our heads like it or not. And when you learn something hands-on like that, it stays with you whether you realise it or not.
Many a time I've seen people fight with drawings (both hand and CGI) and know they look wrong, but not why, because they don't understand about light/shadow and perspective -- and without that understanding, nothing they do can fix what "looks wrong".
Funny example: Someone I know was waving their hands about a photo of a UFO on some website. I took one look and said nope, that's an aluminum pie plate... aside from other inconsistencies, the purported photo had evidently started life as two different images, as the shadows were inconsistent -- the sun would have had to be at two different strengths at the same time. Ooops.
My sister is a senior architect in a big firm in San Francisco. She also was from one of the last graduating classes that had to do everything by hand (AutoCAD didn't yet exist; in fact PCs didn't yet exist).
When the power was out for an extended period, she was the ONLY person in her office who had the skills to continue working. Everyone else was dead in the water, because they had never learned how to do arch.drawings and drafting by hand. If they don't have their computer and AutoCAD and 3DStudioMax, they can't work.
At a billable rate of $100/hour, a few hours downtime is a significant chunk of income lost, both for the individuals and for the parent firm.
Moral is, if your job CAN be done by hand, it behooves you to at least develop the basic skills to do it manually, because sometimes those computer-based tools are not available. And people who HAVE the manual skills are becoming rarer and rarer, since many universities no longer teach these older methods at all. If you HAVE those manual skills, that's an opportunity for you, when no one else CAN do the work.
Think of it like COBOL: no longer used much, but when you really *need* a COBOL programmer, you've got to pay whatever they ask, cuz they just aren't a dime a dozen anymore.
Not to mention that having the manual skills gives you a broader perspective and understanding of your craft as a whole, even if you never use these skills in your everyday work.
At the Win2K tech info tour, M$ handed out an IE5 CD that they told us was the Win2K team's internal version, rewhacked to suit themselves. The exact version number is 5.00.2314.1003c. It seems to lack a lot of the problems and vulnerabilities seen in other versions.
S poofing_Vulnerability_Test/ crashed Netscape 4.5 outright (that's typically caused by bad javascript), so I couldn't test it.
At any rate, I just tested it, and it did display the correct address, tho it couldn't see any of the web page itself other than a whopping big "SECUNIA" banner.
I also tested Netscape 3.04 and Mozilla 1.5, and neither was vulnerable. NS3 did briefly show google.com in the address bar, but corrected itself before displaying the actual page. Then both showed the explanation:
==============
Your browser is vulnerable if the Address Bar displays "http://www.google.com/".
Please note. This could easily have been a page looking like the genuine "Google" web site (or any other web site) asking for your login credentials, credit card details, etc.
This is only limited by the imagination of the attacker (phisher).
==================
which is the part that IE5 couldn't see.
http://secunia.com/Internet_Explorer_Address_Bar_
In my observation there are two basic types of geeks (either of which can still be a lazy fat ass):
1) Normal geeks, who have a life outside of being a geek.
2) Abnormal geeks, who have absolutely no other life.
I've learned to run away when I see the latter type coming!!
It has more to do with frightening people away from LEGAL downloads. After all, if you're afraid of downloading *any* content, that makes it harder for an *independent* artist to distribute his own content via the net. And the RIAA is not about creation, it's about maintaining a *distribution monopoly*. If artists find other ways to get their product into customers' hands, the RIAA becomes redundant.
So... scare the customers away from those alternative channels, preferably before they become the preferred method for new artists.
ARGH! Terrorists killed my parrot!!!
Now that you mention it, I believe those were wireless Linksys units. I'll see if my buddy remembers which model it was... tho at a guess, whatever is the newest consumer model suitable for a small office.
:) Will keep an eye out for one. Gotta do a computer swapmeet soon anyway, good time to pick one up below retail.
I like the sound of that unit with the serial port more all the time
I have a tested-perfect ear and was taught all the Music Stuff thru many years of required classes, but still there is something missing when I try to read music -- I can puzzle it out, but it never really connects with the notes that I *know* it represents. Like someone who can figure out words one letter at a time, but can't extract meaning from it. Turns out that's a real syndrome, "word blindness"... I think I'm "music blind", in the same manner.
My friend has run into more than one these Linksys routers with the weird issues, no AV involved. He couldn't figure it out either, and he does this sort of thing for a living. After some head-scratching he replaced 'em with another router, and the problem went away.
:) but for sure that's nice to have when you're gunning for certification. Nothing beats hands-on experience.
Serial port on the Snapgear unit would sure be useful; any real reason why a person couldn't run regular dialup thru it? Personally I am never fully comfy with letting an XP machine run around loose; unlike W9x, where I can keep an eye on everything without much trouble (to me, any unusual activity on 9x sticks out like a whole handful of sore thumbs), there's just too much background activity on XP, and one evil process more or less can readily go unnoticed.
A basement full of Cisco gear would be overkill for me (besides... no basement!
I had similar thoughts. I looked at the linked download-sales sites, and concluded:
Why would I buy a download that is timebombed and can't be archived to DVD, when for the same or less money I could pick up the real-DVD at WalMart, and be able to watch it whenever and wherever I want?
Offer a significantly cheaper download with no strings attached (I don't care if it's watermarked, I just don't want it timebombed or tied to a single medium or player), and then I'm interested. And when you price it, remember that *the customer* is absorbing the time, cost, and bother of making a DVD for storage and later viewing.
Considering that most DVDs wind up priced in the $8 to $18 range once they hit the discount rack, $3 to $5 is probably a fair price for an unencumbered download of a reasonably current film.
I suppose it's largely a matter of whether they develop the "more logic" in-house (one-time cost) or license it from someone else (fee for every unit). ISTM the cable-modem mfrgs. have their market over a barrel, thus not much incentive to offer more features than the next guy.
[looks at SnapGear Lite2+] Seems to have more than plenty features, and the first price I found was $60, not bad. Thanks for the recommendation.
I don't expect to EVER live where broadband is available over a wire, so whatever I get will have to work with fixed wireless (if that ever reaches out this far... mutter, grumble). I did look at satellite, but soon ran away screaming!
As to Linksys, a friend who deals with this sort of gear all the time reports that their current routers have some weird issues -- stripping all attachments and throttling your connection down to modem speeds; at a guess, something is set wrong by default, and there doesn't seem to be any way to configure it back to normal. He used to like LinkSys too, but is avoiding them for now.
And as everyone knows, a day without sunshine is like night!
(And why is it so dark in this basement??)
Oh, no, this is just an attempt to get all the Star Wars slash authors to come out from the underground, so Lucas can stomp the genre into oblivion. After all, Lucas himself said, "There is no sex in the Star Wars universe".
;)
[Actually, this is close to truth. Lucas DID sic lawyers on the slash community, which is why all SW slash is published underground.)
Hmm. Slash. Slashdot. Coincidence?
Yeah, 3Com only had USR for a couple years before they decided this wasn't the deal for them. Which was probably just as well for all concerned.
:)
Good info, thanks -- archived for reference. I'll remember you when I next feel baffled about this router and packet stuff [g] tho nothing specific I can think to ask about at the moment. (BTW my email is plastered all over my websites, so I'm easy to find.)
Other than... Recommendations on ordinary consumer routers??
I've only messed with two, on clients' DSL lines:
USR that was literally plug it in and everything instantly works. Change password, done. ZA has recorded ZERO dings since then (down from 300 or so per hour), so I guess it's doing the job.
D-Link that required quite a lot of confirming this or that; other than the password, I let it do as it liked. This guy's ZA wasn't getting dinged before, so no "after" to compare.
Why don't they put a firewall in cable modems, if it's already being half a router anyway??
A contrariness common in SF fandom: Someone with no ability to recognise when they're boring their audience rattles on ad tedium about their current interest; the listener, normal or not, may suddenly turn and leave without a word.
This abandon-the-conversation thing is so common that it's ordinary behaviour, not considered rude or unusual -- probably developed because otherwise you may be trapped for hours by endless exposition on some topic of absolutely no interest to you. I've found myself doing it, almost as a reflex. (And no, I'm not autistic).
Someone down below had a similar idea, except they thought the pricing structure should be reversed, thus DVDs would be cheaper at the theatre, if only to bring more warm bodies into the facility. That could work too -- the market would just have to experiment until it found its sweet spot.
I know if theatre-sold DVDs were in the $10 range, I'd not hesitate to buy a copy on the spot, if I liked what I'd just watched on the big screen well enough.
Concert venues do a killer business in CDs sold to concert-goers -- same principle!!
It seems to me that theatres (and studios) are missing out on a good market -- selling DVDs of the films that are NOW PLAYING. When people come out of a good movie they're often hot to buy a copy for their own library, and are more likely to pay new-release prices for it, too.
Yeah, the other retailers will whine, but that's just tough. If they keep their prices enough lower than theatre-vended DVDs, they'll still have their same post-theatre sales.
[inspects docsource] Appears to have started life as a Word document, subsequently run thru (at a guess) both Dreamweaver, and something like Trellix or NetObjects Fusion, having been edited by at least 3 different people, one with a clue and two without. It's a mix of HTML, XML, and CSS, with assloads of orphaned tags, which is why nothing matches. The wonder is that it displays as well as it does!
And what with all the free publicity painting a big red target on their butts, it'll then be about 10 minutes til the site is hacked. Too bad we probably won't see the assault this guy then makes on Microsoft. ;D
I hadn't heard any of this, but allowing the thread to be the forecast of general aviation restrictions to come, my first thought was... what happens to all those cropdusters and puddle-jumpers, most of which are strictly visual and don't even have radios? getting too restrictive could ground a whole class of pilots, and put them and their support industries out of work.
Recently I've noticed a LOT of TV ads, even in national prime time, for sleeze products that previously I'd never heard of outside of spam. Prime time ad space goes for 6 figures a minute. Goes to show how much money is being made, for sure... far more than ANY sort of "email tax" could ever put a dent in.
Besides, as I said above, all that would happen is that spammers, if forced to post a bond or buy into a whitelist, would pass the cost on to their customers (the people they sell ad-delivery to, who are NOT the spam's recipients).