I like to run my own SMTP mail server on my local machine. It's behind my firewall, so no one can connect to it from outside. I trust it much more than I trust that my ISPs mail server to deliver my mail. The problem is, I'm finding more and more companies/people that I deal with are automatically blocking my mail sent this way, because it originates on a dial-up IP block.
Now I know that plenty of spammers use throw-away dial-up accounts, but maybe ISPs should have some sort of blacklist that they share, such that they don't keep selling accounts to known spammers. Maybe they should have harsh fines in their user agreements for spammers. Who knows... I just hate having legitimate email returned because it didn't come from an ISP's mail server.
Think about it - if you can punch in your favorite show/actor/subject, you'll have plenty to watch whenever you want, without having to sit there and flip through all the channels to see what's on. This means that you'll probably stick with the shows you already watch and like, and you may not bother with new shows, or whatever happens to be on at the moment. It will mean less and less to boost a show by putting it on after Friends, for example, because people will stop caring when the shows are actually broadcast.
Personally, I'm all for complete pay-per-view. I'd gladly pay a buck or so per half hour of TV, if I could whatever I wanted to watch on-demand. I can't see that ever happening though, since people would stop sitting on their asses in front of the tube all night (horrors!)
Since I've uninstalled their VirusScan product, the EULA doesn't apply to me any more, so I guess it's safe to say this...
The product sucks. It was full of bugs, it caused my machine to be unstable and crash, and I'll never buy another product from them as long as I live.
If they didn't have that clause in the EULA, they would be out of business by now. (ok, I'm not actually naive enough to believe that). Given all the positive reviews in the big magazines, it's obvious they didn't use the product for more than a few days.
Just include some text imbedded on the images on your site with your URL. That way, if another site links to your image, at least you get some advertising out of it.
Now here's a related question... if I take someone else's picture and convert it to colored HTML text, like the random babe @sciifyer, is that considered fair use?
The unit itself (ExpressVu 5100) is really nice. I've seen a couple of little glitches, but nothing major. It really does change the way you watch TV. And being able to play back a show while recording another is really nice. The biggest advantage of this over something like a separate Tivo box is that this one stores the already-compressed signal without any recompression, so when you play it back, the quality is exactly the same as the original. Unfortunately this means you have a fixed 30 hours of record time, but that's not too bad.
Even my wife, who couldn't believe I spent $600 on it when we already had a perfectly good satellite receiver and VCR, now admits that she really likes it.
That's what they tell you. Have you seen the database? I'm not saying it's not aggregated... it may well be, but if they can aggregate the data, then they also have the ability to not aggregate it...
Because now they know how many people flip when ads come one, and how many people don't flip, but how accurate are those stats? Maybe the people that don't flip are getting a beer from the fridge, or going to the bathroom, or the remove is out of reach...
There are countless reasons that I might leave an ad playing or change channels during the ads, other than just "like to watch that ad/don't like to watch that ad".
It kind of disturbs me that they can tell exactly which time slice I might be pausing/replaying. Stats by show I can understand, but I find this a bit Orwellian.
Probably 90% of the people who don't like this, don't like it because it will make them pay more for their copyright-infringing illegal activities. I'm not saying that's everybody, but I'm sure it's a good portion.
Can't stand paying an extra $40 a month because you're too cheap to buy games/movies/music? Sucks to be you...
I'm all for charging by the byte.
"We're not sure what it is that makes some Morpheus members vulnerable to this"
Could it be that those users were just stupid enough to tell morpheus to share their entire c: drive? It wouldn't surprise me...
Um, ok, so according to that web site, you get can get a list of files that user is sharing already... big whoop de doo. How is this any different than picking a user out of the search results in Morpheus, right-clicking, and choosing "find more from same user"?
What's next, will we see newspapers reporting that all email servers are vulnerable to "hacking" because they can be logged into via telnet?
Just because you can interact with a service using a client other than the one intended, doesn't mean it's a hack...
I'd rather see advances in backbone speed than last mile speed, thank you. Cable modems are already capped at a fraction of their potential because of insufficient capacity at the ISP side. Give the ISP a couple of gigabit connections, open up the cablemodems to 10mbits, and I'll be perfectly happy, for a couple of months anyway...
Which is when my son will be old enough for me to buy myself some without the wife complaining. I'm looking forward to gigabit wireless ultra-wide-band network communications between Mindstorms bots and my central server.
Maybe I'll be able to use Mindstorms to measure the distance to the moon to the nearest millimetre, or the speed of light.... or I'll just have fun building them and making them hurt eachother. Yeah, that's it... Robot Wars with Mindstorms... who care's about running a stupid lego web server?
Reminds me of something interesting I saw on TechTV recently. Can't remember what school (probably MIT), but they had a number of self-contained snap-together "blocks" that each had some smarts and a single rotating joint (no, not that kind of joint... a pivoting one!). They could snap the modules into a snake-like configuration, or an insect, or a something else entirely, and it would self-configure for it's new purpose. Very cool.
Should be based on how much time you're playing
on
Pay to Play
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't have a problem with pay for play, god knows I played Everquest a lot. What I didn't like was paying $70 for the game, and then having to pay per month, whether I was playing or not. I got busy doing some other stuff, and probably would have kept my subscription if it was based on how long I spent playing rather than a flat fee, since then I wouldn't have to pay for months that I didn't play.
I'd like to see a game have a pay by the hour scheme, with a monthly maximum, and a low shelf-price. That way those that only play for a short while don't get screwed.
Even for single player games that you don't play over the network, it would be nice to have such a scheme. Then I wouldn't be so worried about spending all that money on a game that sucked. It would also be an incentive to game companies to make games that don't suck.
Actually, when you play everquest, real-world time continues outside of your frame of reference, but it stops for you. You don't eat, you don't sleep, you don't do anything except play (I personally believe you don't even age while playing). When you finally stop playing, perhaps because you've fallen exhausted and unconscious from your chair, you find that weeks, perhaps months, have gone by in the real world, while you have merely sat at your desk for what seemed like only a moment or two. And then as soon as you've managed to wolf down whatever presented itself for consumption at the front of the fridge, you do it some more.
You have to figure, with all these people getting addicted, not showing up for work, getting divorced, being kicked out of college, not eating, etc, all because they're hopelessly addicted, that there would be some measurable affect on the real world economy.
A team of 4 students from Devry Technical Institute cobbled together a nuclear submarine using parts scavenged from the set of Junkyard Wars, and a $300 grant from Kmart. Said the leader of the project, "We expected this thing to immediately sink to the bottom and begin its cycle of ocean-killing, but amazingly enough, it went down at a 30-degree angle, taking almost 3 times longer to sink, and it looks like it might pollute the ocean for many more years than we expected. It's quite incredible!"
Is that it shows that just about anyone with a couple hundred grand can put some junk in orbit. Where will it end? If I can't watch TV because a "real" satellite gets knocked out of orbit by a collision with some university's space-junk, I'll be mighty peeved. Will the $50,000 cover the lawsuit when the thing de-orbits and crashes through my house?
Slashdot Mirror
But that would mean I'd then have to trust my ISP's server again.
I like to run my own SMTP mail server on my local machine. It's behind my firewall, so no one can connect to it from outside. I trust it much more than I trust that my ISPs mail server to deliver my mail. The problem is, I'm finding more and more companies/people that I deal with are automatically blocking my mail sent this way, because it originates on a dial-up IP block.
Now I know that plenty of spammers use throw-away dial-up accounts, but maybe ISPs should have some sort of blacklist that they share, such that they don't keep selling accounts to known spammers. Maybe they should have harsh fines in their user agreements for spammers. Who knows... I just hate having legitimate email returned because it didn't come from an ISP's mail server.
Think about it - if you can punch in your favorite show/actor/subject, you'll have plenty to watch whenever you want, without having to sit there and flip through all the channels to see what's on. This means that you'll probably stick with the shows you already watch and like, and you may not bother with new shows, or whatever happens to be on at the moment. It will mean less and less to boost a show by putting it on after Friends, for example, because people will stop caring when the shows are actually broadcast.
Personally, I'm all for complete pay-per-view. I'd gladly pay a buck or so per half hour of TV, if I could whatever I wanted to watch on-demand. I can't see that ever happening though, since people would stop sitting on their asses in front of the tube all night (horrors!)
What about linking to a picture on another site, in which that other site is already breaking the copyright?
According to 2 or 3 emails I get a day, you can copy any DVD really easily...
Since I've uninstalled their VirusScan product, the EULA doesn't apply to me any more, so I guess it's safe to say this...
The product sucks. It was full of bugs, it caused my machine to be unstable and crash, and I'll never buy another product from them as long as I live.
If they didn't have that clause in the EULA, they would be out of business by now. (ok, I'm not actually naive enough to believe that). Given all the positive reviews in the big magazines, it's obvious they didn't use the product for more than a few days.
Just include some text imbedded on the images on your site with your URL. That way, if another site links to your image, at least you get some advertising out of it.
Now here's a related question... if I take someone else's picture and convert it to colored HTML text, like the random babe @sciifyer, is that considered fair use?
The unit itself (ExpressVu 5100) is really nice. I've seen a couple of little glitches, but nothing major. It really does change the way you watch TV. And being able to play back a show while recording another is really nice. The biggest advantage of this over something like a separate Tivo box is that this one stores the already-compressed signal without any recompression, so when you play it back, the quality is exactly the same as the original. Unfortunately this means you have a fixed 30 hours of record time, but that's not too bad.
Even my wife, who couldn't believe I spent $600 on it when we already had a perfectly good satellite receiver and VCR, now admits that she really likes it.
That's what they tell you. Have you seen the database? I'm not saying it's not aggregated... it may well be, but if they can aggregate the data, then they also have the ability to not aggregate it...
I have a Bell Expressvu PVR. It's not connected to the phone line. I can pause/replay/salivate all I want without them knowing a thing.
Because now they know how many people flip when ads come one, and how many people don't flip, but how accurate are those stats? Maybe the people that don't flip are getting a beer from the fridge, or going to the bathroom, or the remove is out of reach...
There are countless reasons that I might leave an ad playing or change channels during the ads, other than just "like to watch that ad/don't like to watch that ad".
It kind of disturbs me that they can tell exactly which time slice I might be pausing/replaying. Stats by show I can understand, but I find this a bit Orwellian.
Probably 90% of the people who don't like this, don't like it because it will make them pay more for their copyright-infringing illegal activities. I'm not saying that's everybody, but I'm sure it's a good portion.
Can't stand paying an extra $40 a month because you're too cheap to buy games/movies/music? Sucks to be you...
I'm all for charging by the byte.
Maybe they wouldn't need to fix their service as often if it wasn't for the 10% of users using 70% of the capacity...
"We're not sure what it is that makes some Morpheus members vulnerable to this" Could it be that those users were just stupid enough to tell morpheus to share their entire c: drive? It wouldn't surprise me...
Um, ok, so according to that web site, you get can get a list of files that user is sharing already... big whoop de doo. How is this any different than picking a user out of the search results in Morpheus, right-clicking, and choosing "find more from same user"?
What's next, will we see newspapers reporting that all email servers are vulnerable to "hacking" because they can be logged into via telnet?
Just because you can interact with a service using a client other than the one intended, doesn't mean it's a hack...
Since they always want to do things on a budget, I told him I could build a Lego tape changer for a mere pittance. He wouldn't go for it though.
Something about not being fault tolerant...
I'd rather see advances in backbone speed than last mile speed, thank you. Cable modems are already capped at a fraction of their potential because of insufficient capacity at the ISP side. Give the ISP a couple of gigabit connections, open up the cablemodems to 10mbits, and I'll be perfectly happy, for a couple of months anyway...
Which is when my son will be old enough for me to buy myself some without the wife complaining. I'm looking forward to gigabit wireless ultra-wide-band network communications between Mindstorms bots and my central server.
Maybe I'll be able to use Mindstorms to measure the distance to the moon to the nearest millimetre, or the speed of light.... or I'll just have fun building them and making them hurt eachother. Yeah, that's it... Robot Wars with Mindstorms... who care's about running a stupid lego web server?
Reminds me of something interesting I saw on TechTV recently. Can't remember what school (probably MIT), but they had a number of self-contained snap-together "blocks" that each had some smarts and a single rotating joint (no, not that kind of joint... a pivoting one!). They could snap the modules into a snake-like configuration, or an insect, or a something else entirely, and it would self-configure for it's new purpose. Very cool.
I don't have a problem with pay for play, god knows I played Everquest a lot. What I didn't like was paying $70 for the game, and then having to pay per month, whether I was playing or not. I got busy doing some other stuff, and probably would have kept my subscription if it was based on how long I spent playing rather than a flat fee, since then I wouldn't have to pay for months that I didn't play.
I'd like to see a game have a pay by the hour scheme, with a monthly maximum, and a low shelf-price. That way those that only play for a short while don't get screwed.
Even for single player games that you don't play over the network, it would be nice to have such a scheme. Then I wouldn't be so worried about spending all that money on a game that sucked. It would also be an incentive to game companies to make games that don't suck.
Actually, when you play everquest, real-world time continues outside of your frame of reference, but it stops for you. You don't eat, you don't sleep, you don't do anything except play (I personally believe you don't even age while playing). When you finally stop playing, perhaps because you've fallen exhausted and unconscious from your chair, you find that weeks, perhaps months, have gone by in the real world, while you have merely sat at your desk for what seemed like only a moment or two. And then as soon as you've managed to wolf down whatever presented itself for consumption at the front of the fridge, you do it some more.
You have to figure, with all these people getting addicted, not showing up for work, getting divorced, being kicked out of college, not eating, etc, all because they're hopelessly addicted, that there would be some measurable affect on the real world economy.
A team of 4 students from Devry Technical Institute cobbled together a nuclear submarine using parts scavenged from the set of Junkyard Wars, and a $300 grant from Kmart. Said the leader of the project, "We expected this thing to immediately sink to the bottom and begin its cycle of ocean-killing, but amazingly enough, it went down at a 30-degree angle, taking almost 3 times longer to sink, and it looks like it might pollute the ocean for many more years than we expected. It's quite incredible!"
This truly is a great day for amateur scientists.
Is that it shows that just about anyone with a couple hundred grand can put some junk in orbit. Where will it end? If I can't watch TV because a "real" satellite gets knocked out of orbit by a collision with some university's space-junk, I'll be mighty peeved. Will the $50,000 cover the lawsuit when the thing de-orbits and crashes through my house?