There's also "joe jobs" where a spammer intentionally advertises a website of an enemy or competitor in an attempt to get the site yanked by the ISP.
I've also gotten "newsletter spam" where there are dozens of websites with different owners, none of whom are related to the spammer, nor given permission to have their website advertised in such a manner. I got one for a bunch of casinos - none of whom were thrilled at the attention. Since my complaint was CC'd to all of them, they had a handy mailing list to band together and take the spammer to court for defamation of character in a class action suit...
Verizon is one of the SOURCES of spam. They don't act on complaints, and willing let scumbags and thieves operate on their network.
If the 1997 bill didn't stop them, I don't see what this new one will do, unless AOL decides to sue Verizon. Hah...I'd fly out to sit in the audience for that trial...
I don't see what the big point is, other than what happend to the "exclusive" contract Rockstar had with Sony...
Anyways, most people only buy one console. If the contract runs out on a popular game, it would only make sense to port it to other consoles in order to get additional sales - especially if the work required was negligible.
Unfortunatly, too many ports end up being inferior to their original. Grandia 2 on the PS2 looks worse than the Dreamcast version, for instance.
However, other ports tend to add extra features/levels/characters in order to entice people to buy the new version.
Some stores DO enforce the game ratings, such as not letting kids buy M-rated games.
Not that this has too much of an effect... Usually the kid goes and gets the parental unit who comes into the store, buys the game, and chews out the minimum-wage slave clerk for not doing his job by selling the kid the game.
Some cities/states want to make this a law, though I don't really see how it'll prevent 10-14 year olds from getting a hold of M-rated games... All they have to do is get someone to buy the game for them, or buy the game from an internet site.
Same goes with movie theaters. None of the theaters I've been to have turned away unescorted kids from buying tickets to R movies. In fact, when I went to see Matrix, I was probably one of the oldest people in the theater - and I was 28 at the time!
Of course, this isn't to say that the game ratings are 100% accurate, nor is what they list the real objectionable material - which would be pretty hard to do with an epic-length RPG.
So, what you're saying is that you should duct tape your Ionic Breeze to the top of your Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, so the cleaner will move around the room while your floors get vacuumed!;)
Maybe when they release the movie on DVD, you can go to the options screen and change the "age" setting which would affect the movie the same way it did in the games;)
There's a plot to DOA? (well, yeah, there is - but it's mostly stuff you'd read in the game manual and elsewhere.)
I don't know anyone who plays DOA (or any fighter, for that matter) for its story...
Still, I have to wonder about the DOA movie. The website said they're going for PG-13, while every DOA game released has gotten an M for sexual content.
Are we talking about the same game here? I'd think a DOA movie would be rated R - especially if they got ILM to do the mammary effects with CG. (and they'll have to - no living woman moves like that.)
If excite wants to shake off its image of being a host for so many spammers, maybe they should listen to complaints and boot their misbehaving customers off?
Sorry, but excite earned their reputation all by themselves. No mail from excite.com's IP#s is allowed into my mailbox, because there's a 99.99...% chance it's spam.
First off, it tries to call *ALL* commercial messages "spam" which is incorrect.
The generally accepted definition of spam is "Unsolicited commercial email." Some also go with "Unsolicited bulk email."
That first word is the most important one - UNSOLICITED.
I'm on a couple of commercial lists with vendors whom I trust. They respect my privacy (no selling my name) send me only stuff when I've signed up for it, etc.
Now tell me how any of the companies (including excite) listed in the article deal with solicited commercial email. They don't. They make their money from indiscriminatly sending ads to millions and millions of users who never asked to be on the list in the first place - in other words, opt-out spam.
Anyone who thinks opt-out spam is "OK" need only consider your local yellow pages, and all the 1000s of companies contained within. If opt-out spam becomes "OK", how much spam are you willing to deal with? 50/day? 100/day? 2000/day?? Kiss email, and for the most part, the internet goodbye.
It's a social problem. It's a problem of greed, laziness, and a general disrespect for anyone and everyone.
No matter what sort of technological wizardry is concocted, spammers, like cockroaches, will slip in between the cracks.
I don't care about filtering spam. I want a system that will prevent the stuff from ever being transmitted in the first place (like maybe a keyboard that would explode, mortally wounding the user if the keyboard detected that the user was going to spam...)
Been there, done that. Check Google for defunct companies that did just that, got caught selling their lists to spammers, and claimed "hacker x" did it...
Really now...if folks don't trust the government, do you really think some group of marketters is going to be any more trustworthy?
What ISPs do you think are supporting pink contracts?
Verizon/BBN/Genuity, UUNet, MCI/Worldcom, Sprint, AT&T, SBC, etc. are either giving out pink contracts, or have adopted the "We don't have to care - we're the phone company" attitude for their ISP branch.
Yeah, the idea of blocking 4.0.0.0/8 sounds like a good idea, but I doubt many other ISPs would do it...
A few ISPs *are* blocking entire providers. Check out SPEWS.org, then check out the usenet group news.admin.net-abuse.email and the SPEWS-related threads there.
The internet is slowly being divided into two parts - the part that's made up of the spammers and the ISPs who host them, and the other half that is staunchly anti-spam. It's rather sad that things have gotten to the point where internet users are saying "If you're not anti-spam, you're a spammer."
Unfortunatly, some ISPs have realized that they can make money from spam, or at least the spammers.
These ISPs charge spammers much more for their connectivity in return for the ISP *not* disconnecting the spammer, no matter how many complaints are received. Protected by these so-called "pink contracts" the spammer is free to do just about whatever he wants and his ISP will do nothing.
Nice, eh?
This doesn't even address the chronic problem of malconfigured/secured proxy servers around the world. These are machines that spammers (or others) can use to relay mail through, making it impossible for the receiver to figure out where the message actually came from. The country of korea is currentally in the lead for open proxies, with *ALL* of their servers (even those belonging to the government!) having the same brain-damaged configuration.
Living on the west coast, Fox's schedule is very inconsistant...
Firefly was regularly pre-empted or rescheduled during baseball - in many cases an episode would air unannounced Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Not a good way to build up a regular viewing base for a new show (then again, this seems to have been Fox's goal...)
Also, if I blindly set my VCR to record Futurama at 7pm and Simpsons at 8pm, I'd never get them. Most of the time, my FOX affiliate runs an old Simpsons episode at 8, then a new one at 8:30 - assuming they run them at all. Futurama shows up sporadically. Basically if Fox has nothing else to show, they might choose a random episode. Tivo has missed episodes of both due to Fox's inaccurate schedules.
Then there's Fox's favorite prank of playing new episodes of shows on totally random timeslots. So instead of getting what's normally scheduled for Tuesdays night at 8pm, Fox would do a "special presentation" of another show from a toally different day/time - for instance, a new Malcolm In The Middle on Thursday night? Why not! If you *really* like the show, you'll know about it because you'll have..um...ESP! Yeah, that's it, ESP.
Maybe it's just my taste in TV, but many of the shows I like get bounced around like crazy:
Simpsons, Futurama, The Tick, Invader Zim, Firefly (well, OK, that show was killed off before I could form an opinion...)
Simpsons and Futurama hardly have regular schedules - what with all the sports and editted movies Fox would rather run... Actually the same goes for any show on FOX. John Doe doesn't run every week, neither does Malcolm In The Middle, and so on - and these are supposed to be Fox's big shows?? Either Fox has fully embraced the Tivo way of life prematurely, of their VP of programming seems to think random schedule changes will build a stronger viewer base...
The Tick never aired in the same time slot twice, yet my Tivo managed to get every episode.
Nickelodeon never advertised The Invader Zim Christmas Special, that only ran once. My Tivo found it, and recorded it for me. Nickelodeon does actually run Invader Zim at random (and I do mean random) times on weekends, but you'd never know it. My Tivo picks up an old episode about once a month or so.
ReplayTV will skip over commercials while playing. Tivo doesn't provide anything other than the fast-forward button by default. You can enable a backdoor hack to turn one of the buttons one the Tivo remote into a "30 sec. skip" button, but that's about it.
In either case, the commercials get recorded. You'll have to use an editor to cut them out.
A lot of the network's big shows will do things like go for a few extra minutes one week, then start a few extra minutes the next, but only be a "normal" sized episode.
Then there's Fox... A network where it seems that no show ever airs regularly. How many times have they shown "a special episode" of your favorite show at the last minute? Unless you scan the TV listings on a daily (or even hourly) basis so you can update your VCR, you'll miss stuff.
Note that this would also be a problem for a normal PVR as well. Much of what makes PVR a "Tivo" is its ability to record shows based on their name - not their timeslot.
Why pay the monthly fee? Pay the lifetime fee and be done with it. Besides, it's cheaper.
If Tivo does go out of business, I can continue using my Tivo as a "dumb" PVR. I just won't have the guide or the features it enabled.
Tivo does remember what it's recorded - to a point. If the same episode (description, etc.) shows up within a certain amount of time, Tivo won't re-record it. You can also tell Tivo not to record reruns. Unfortunatly this relies on the guide data being accurate - something that many of the channels don't do (Comedy Central is particularly bad with The Daily Show, for instance.)
Yes, the multiple people & 1 Tivo problem comes up a lot. Still, what product is perfect? Both Tivo and users have come up with workarounds while Tivo tries to figure out how to solve this.
You can get your Tivo to use your network connection instead. In fact, Tivo prefers this as it's cheaper for them than having your unit call in everyday.
For adding storage, it took me an hour - most of which was spent waiting for the disk copy to finish mirroring the Tivo software from the small 30GB drive, to the larger 60GB drive I bought. Later, I bought a 100GB drive, formatted it, stuck into the Tivo, and the Tivo did the rest. Ooh, that was "hard." Yes, you do have to open the case, and you will violate your warranty doing this, but I fail to see how this is "hard" - especially among a group of folks who can probably assemble PCs while blindfolded and asleep.
Sony has always pushed the Playstation as becoming the center of your entertainment system.
The PS2's built-in ability to play DVD movies is the first step towards this, with rumors of the PS3 being capable of operating as a PVR.
A QCast-like product makes a lot of sense, since many people will already have a large collection of media files on their PC, while also having a nice entertainment setup elsewhere.
Sounds like all that is needed now is to work on the UI and functionality issues.
Why use a streaming solution for XBox? I've heard you can get a hack which will let you load a Divx player onto the HD directly and play CDRs directly?
Well, I don't have a Powerbook, and hooking my laptop up to my TV is a major pain since I have to modify my laptop's screen settings, and even then, the picture is fuzzy - even using s-video. (this is using a Dell Inspirion from 3 years ago - maybe things are better now?)
Even so, most people aren't going to want to have their laptop connected to their entertainment unit, so the QCast + PS2 solution fits well.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also "joe jobs" where a spammer intentionally advertises a website of an enemy or competitor in an attempt to get the site yanked by the ISP.
I've also gotten "newsletter spam" where there are dozens of websites with different owners, none of whom are related to the spammer, nor given permission to have their website advertised in such a manner. I got one for a bunch of casinos - none of whom were thrilled at the attention. Since my complaint was CC'd to all of them, they had a handy mailing list to band together and take the spammer to court for defamation of character in a class action suit...
Verizon is one of the SOURCES of spam. They don't act on complaints, and willing let scumbags and thieves operate on their network.
If the 1997 bill didn't stop them, I don't see what this new one will do, unless AOL decides to sue Verizon. Hah...I'd fly out to sit in the audience for that trial...
I don't see what the big point is, other than what happend to the "exclusive" contract Rockstar had with Sony...
Anyways, most people only buy one console. If the contract runs out on a popular game, it would only make sense to port it to other consoles in order to get additional sales - especially if the work required was negligible.
Unfortunatly, too many ports end up being inferior to their original. Grandia 2 on the PS2 looks worse than the Dreamcast version, for instance.
However, other ports tend to add extra features/levels/characters in order to entice people to buy the new version.
Some stores DO enforce the game ratings, such as not letting kids buy M-rated games.
Not that this has too much of an effect... Usually the kid goes and gets the parental unit who comes into the store, buys the game, and chews out the minimum-wage slave clerk for not doing his job by selling the kid the game.
Some cities/states want to make this a law, though I don't really see how it'll prevent 10-14 year olds from getting a hold of M-rated games... All they have to do is get someone to buy the game for them, or buy the game from an internet site.
Same goes with movie theaters. None of the theaters I've been to have turned away unescorted kids from buying tickets to R movies. In fact, when I went to see Matrix, I was probably one of the oldest people in the theater - and I was 28 at the time!
Of course, this isn't to say that the game ratings are 100% accurate, nor is what they list the real objectionable material - which would be pretty hard to do with an epic-length RPG.
So, what you're saying is that you should duct tape your Ionic Breeze to the top of your Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, so the cleaner will move around the room while your floors get vacuumed! ;)
What about PG-13 DOA?
;)
Maybe when they release the movie on DVD, you can go to the options screen and change the "age" setting which would affect the movie the same way it did in the games
There's a plot to DOA? (well, yeah, there is - but it's mostly stuff you'd read in the game manual and elsewhere.)
I don't know anyone who plays DOA (or any fighter, for that matter) for its story...
Still, I have to wonder about the DOA movie. The website said they're going for PG-13, while every DOA game released has gotten an M for sexual content.
Are we talking about the same game here? I'd think a DOA movie would be rated R - especially if they got ILM to do the mammary effects with CG. (and they'll have to - no living woman moves like that.)
The first Mortal Kombat wasn't bad.
Wasn't great, but a fun flick nonetheless.
If excite wants to shake off its image of being a host for so many spammers, maybe they should listen to complaints and boot their misbehaving customers off?
Sorry, but excite earned their reputation all by themselves. No mail from excite.com's IP#s is allowed into my mailbox, because there's a 99.99...% chance it's spam.
The article makes a bunch of blunders...
First off, it tries to call *ALL* commercial messages "spam" which is incorrect.
The generally accepted definition of spam is "Unsolicited commercial email." Some also go with "Unsolicited bulk email."
That first word is the most important one - UNSOLICITED.
I'm on a couple of commercial lists with vendors whom I trust. They respect my privacy (no selling my name) send me only stuff when I've signed up for it, etc.
Now tell me how any of the companies (including excite) listed in the article deal with solicited commercial email. They don't. They make their money from indiscriminatly sending ads to millions and millions of users who never asked to be on the list in the first place - in other words, opt-out spam.
Anyone who thinks opt-out spam is "OK" need only consider your local yellow pages, and all the 1000s of companies contained within. If opt-out spam becomes "OK", how much spam are you willing to deal with? 50/day? 100/day? 2000/day?? Kiss email, and for the most part, the internet goodbye.
Spam is not a technology problem.
It's a social problem. It's a problem of greed, laziness, and a general disrespect for anyone and everyone.
No matter what sort of technological wizardry is concocted, spammers, like cockroaches, will slip in between the cracks.
I don't care about filtering spam. I want a system that will prevent the stuff from ever being transmitted in the first place (like maybe a keyboard that would explode, mortally wounding the user if the keyboard detected that the user was going to spam...)
Been there, done that. Check Google for defunct companies that did just that, got caught selling their lists to spammers, and claimed "hacker x" did it...
Really now...if folks don't trust the government, do you really think some group of marketters is going to be any more trustworthy?
What ISPs do you think are supporting pink contracts?
Verizon/BBN/Genuity, UUNet, MCI/Worldcom, Sprint, AT&T, SBC, etc. are either giving out pink contracts, or have adopted the "We don't have to care - we're the phone company" attitude for their ISP branch.
Yeah, the idea of blocking 4.0.0.0/8 sounds like a good idea, but I doubt many other ISPs would do it...
A few ISPs *are* blocking entire providers. Check out SPEWS.org, then check out the usenet group news.admin.net-abuse.email and the SPEWS-related threads there.
The internet is slowly being divided into two parts - the part that's made up of the spammers and the ISPs who host them, and the other half that is staunchly anti-spam. It's rather sad that things have gotten to the point where internet users are saying "If you're not anti-spam, you're a spammer."
Unfortunatly, some ISPs have realized that they can make money from spam, or at least the spammers.
These ISPs charge spammers much more for their connectivity in return for the ISP *not* disconnecting the spammer, no matter how many complaints are received. Protected by these so-called "pink contracts" the spammer is free to do just about whatever he wants and his ISP will do nothing.
Nice, eh?
This doesn't even address the chronic problem of malconfigured/secured proxy servers around the world. These are machines that spammers (or others) can use to relay mail through, making it impossible for the receiver to figure out where the message actually came from. The country of korea is currentally in the lead for open proxies, with *ALL* of their servers (even those belonging to the government!) having the same brain-damaged configuration.
Not that I condone violence, but it's clear to me that the only way to get some people to stop doing something is with a bullet between the eyes.
Some spammers fall into this catagory.
Living on the west coast, Fox's schedule is very inconsistant...
Firefly was regularly pre-empted or rescheduled during baseball - in many cases an episode would air unannounced Saturday or Sunday afternoon. Not a good way to build up a regular viewing base for a new show (then again, this seems to have been Fox's goal...)
Also, if I blindly set my VCR to record Futurama at 7pm and Simpsons at 8pm, I'd never get them. Most of the time, my FOX affiliate runs an old Simpsons episode at 8, then a new one at 8:30 - assuming they run them at all. Futurama shows up sporadically. Basically if Fox has nothing else to show, they might choose a random episode. Tivo has missed episodes of both due to Fox's inaccurate schedules.
Then there's Fox's favorite prank of playing new episodes of shows on totally random timeslots. So instead of getting what's normally scheduled for Tuesdays night at 8pm, Fox would do a "special presentation" of another show from a toally different day/time - for instance, a new Malcolm In The Middle on Thursday night? Why not! If you *really* like the show, you'll know about it because you'll have..um...ESP! Yeah, that's it, ESP.
Maybe it's just my taste in TV, but many of the shows I like get bounced around like crazy:
Simpsons, Futurama, The Tick, Invader Zim, Firefly (well, OK, that show was killed off before I could form an opinion...)
Simpsons and Futurama hardly have regular schedules - what with all the sports and editted movies Fox would rather run... Actually the same goes for any show on FOX. John Doe doesn't run every week, neither does Malcolm In The Middle, and so on - and these are supposed to be Fox's big shows?? Either Fox has fully embraced the Tivo way of life prematurely, of their VP of programming seems to think random schedule changes will build a stronger viewer base...
The Tick never aired in the same time slot twice, yet my Tivo managed to get every episode.
Nickelodeon never advertised The Invader Zim Christmas Special, that only ran once. My Tivo found it, and recorded it for me. Nickelodeon does actually run Invader Zim at random (and I do mean random) times on weekends, but you'd never know it. My Tivo picks up an old episode about once a month or so.
Nothing cuts out commercials while recording.
ReplayTV will skip over commercials while playing. Tivo doesn't provide anything other than the fast-forward button by default. You can enable a backdoor hack to turn one of the buttons one the Tivo remote into a "30 sec. skip" button, but that's about it.
In either case, the commercials get recorded. You'll have to use an editor to cut them out.
You'd be surprised, actually.
A lot of the network's big shows will do things like go for a few extra minutes one week, then start a few extra minutes the next, but only be a "normal" sized episode.
Then there's Fox... A network where it seems that no show ever airs regularly. How many times have they shown "a special episode" of your favorite show at the last minute? Unless you scan the TV listings on a daily (or even hourly) basis so you can update your VCR, you'll miss stuff.
Note that this would also be a problem for a normal PVR as well. Much of what makes PVR a "Tivo" is its ability to record shows based on their name - not their timeslot.
Why pay the monthly fee? Pay the lifetime fee and be done with it. Besides, it's cheaper.
If Tivo does go out of business, I can continue using my Tivo as a "dumb" PVR. I just won't have the guide or the features it enabled.
Tivo does remember what it's recorded - to a point. If the same episode (description, etc.) shows up within a certain amount of time, Tivo won't re-record it. You can also tell Tivo not to record reruns. Unfortunatly this relies on the guide data being accurate - something that many of the channels don't do (Comedy Central is particularly bad with The Daily Show, for instance.)
Yes, the multiple people & 1 Tivo problem comes up a lot. Still, what product is perfect? Both Tivo and users have come up with workarounds while Tivo tries to figure out how to solve this.
You can get your Tivo to use your network connection instead. In fact, Tivo prefers this as it's cheaper for them than having your unit call in everyday.
For adding storage, it took me an hour - most of which was spent waiting for the disk copy to finish mirroring the Tivo software from the small 30GB drive, to the larger 60GB drive I bought. Later, I bought a 100GB drive, formatted it, stuck into the Tivo, and the Tivo did the rest. Ooh, that was "hard." Yes, you do have to open the case, and you will violate your warranty doing this, but I fail to see how this is "hard" - especially among a group of folks who can probably assemble PCs while blindfolded and asleep.
I have the same model, and it doesn't do progressive scan for movies - only for a handful of games.
The new model of PS2 will do progressive for movies as well as games (assuming the game supports progressive scan - which I suspect more will.)
One small problem with that... The linux kit will only output video to a computer monitor - NOT your TV.
The whole purpose of the Qcast is to allow you to play files stored on your computer on your TV.
Please explain how a PS2+linux kit solves this problem.
Sony has always pushed the Playstation as becoming the center of your entertainment system.
The PS2's built-in ability to play DVD movies is the first step towards this, with rumors of the PS3 being capable of operating as a PVR.
A QCast-like product makes a lot of sense, since many people will already have a large collection of media files on their PC, while also having a nice entertainment setup elsewhere.
Sounds like all that is needed now is to work on the UI and functionality issues.
Why use a streaming solution for XBox? I've heard you can get a hack which will let you load a Divx player onto the HD directly and play CDRs directly?
Well, I don't have a Powerbook, and hooking my laptop up to my TV is a major pain since I have to modify my laptop's screen settings, and even then, the picture is fuzzy - even using s-video. (this is using a Dell Inspirion from 3 years ago - maybe things are better now?)
Even so, most people aren't going to want to have their laptop connected to their entertainment unit, so the QCast + PS2 solution fits well.