it's small change though.. in the past two weeks, I've sent amazon 14,316 clicks and 8952 unique visitors.. 46 items ordered. For that I'll see about $40 (my current revenue only displays items shipped not ordered, so no exact numbers there, 37 items shipped is $28.57, so I might be a little optimistic).
A cost-per-click banner ad that only pays $0.05 per click would have cost Amazon $715.80. In this case, the cost is closer to $0.0027 per click. It's quite cheap advertising compared to almost anything else on the web currently.
Factor in the fact that affliates don't get referral fees for used items, auction items, and several other categories and you realize that their 5% referral is coming off their highest profit items. Any time a visitor buys a used item from Amazon, they don't have to ship anything, just collect a payment.
imagine getting to be a guine pig for the corporation I pay to provide me with hosting. And I get to pay for the benefit of finding their bugs for them.
Don't get me wrong, Netscape 6.X has come light years in the past year or so, but I'm still not convinced it's ready for prime time yet... no idea how much better the Mozilla releases have been though, but they sound only incrementally better than the official Netscape releases.
I had a very similar experience with Verisign holding onto a domain name, despite having sent them maybe 3 or 4 faxes and a dozen emails. It took me close to 4 months to resolve the problem, so that I could switch registrar's and get as far away from them as possible.
I got their notice last week, and put it aside to check to make sure I didn't still have a domain with them. That's how they almost fooled me, I thought I had switched all my domains already, but paniced and thought maybe I missed one.
It is definitely deceptive, and should certainly get investigated for fraud.
the heating properties alone look great to me.. I live on a hill, and my sidewalk is always a nightmare in the winter.. how much do these concrete pavers the article mentions run and where can I buy them? I'm sick of using a sled to get to the bottom of my sidewalk!
I've done some simple stuff in it, I'm by no means a Flash expert. But, from what I've experienced of it, I can see why so many poorly designed sites which use it heavily, are poorly designed.
The new Flash they talk about is supposed to have a lot of the navigational elements built in, like scroll bars and buttons. That would be a major improvement, right now, you have to design your own for each project. Even if you do use their built in library to reuse items, it tends to crash too often to make it not worth the effort.
Placing a link between frames, is a major effot. You want a text link to another screen? Define a button (with four layers), and then edit the script for the button to point to the next page. HTML takes about twenty seconds either in a text editor or some GUI nonesense editor. Flash takes about 5 minutes.
Flash was created for graphic designers. Graphic designers have no place desiging sites. Individual pages, no problem, not entire sites. Nothing Flash has ever done, would make for a consistent design within a site. It decreases the usability of a site, because each site you visit which is developed using it, comes up with it's own paradigm for navigation. Sure, within the site it's consistent, but even then, it's some graphic design artist who thinks you should know that clicking the orange flame brings you to the homepage, or some other non-convention they just thought of.
from the article: "I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days"
Why does it need to be done at a protocol layer? If I need to submit something to a server that is going to take 5 days to get back to me, I should probably have an account with that server, and when I log back in, can get that information.
It sounds to me like he's fishing for an excuse to design a new protocol for a need no one really has.
I don't think the checksums are as infalable as you claim. Especially if the code is available to the public. And you don't need to add garbage to the email, you can easily run a filter which changes various adjectives to similar adjectives, etc. without changing the meaning of the message. It's not like most spam is well written to begin with.
Either way, it's easy enough for the spammer to determine the checksum of the spam without even sending it. The spammer sends out 20,000 spams, changes the mail enough to generate a new checksum, sends out another 20,000. Even if it's 200,000 chances are good that there's not enough people looking at checksums to block every part of the spamming run. If everyone used it, sure that might work.
What does the spammer care if the email bounces? You make it sound like they're going to get the bounced messages.. They aren't. Most of them use hacked mail servers and open relays anyways. Sure, it wastes some of their time, but I'm sure if they suddenly find 20,000 email addresses on one domain, they're going to treat it as suspect anyways, and not add it.
Not to mention the effect it has if the domain names aren't safe to use (ie. the domain names used in the poison database refer to a real domain, which now gets hammered with a ton of undeliverable spam). Even if they aren't valid domains, the spammer will most likely have a bogus return address that does point to a valid domain, which in turn floods that domain with the useless bounce messages.
(1) I'd be willing to be the Voice of America is jammed. As the article stated, they changed their location for broadcast, and prevented jamming.
(2) I'm sure if the government stepped in, it wouldn't be public knowledge. It would invalidate a lot of what the station already does if it was known that they sponsored the station. So how a politician is going to raise it as an issue, would be moot.
(3) Always a problem, but how does the average person watching know they aren't sponsored by the government already?
I always assume the government wants to blow stuff up, they have a long history of doing it.
the spammer gets wise to the checksums. Then, all it has to do, is generate a checksum on his spam, monitor the checksum repository, and when the checksum appears, change the spam going out.
Or better yet, create the spam, run the checksum algorithm (it is open source after all). Then run the spam through an algorithm which changes x amount of words to various synonyms or pads the message so that each successive spam sent generates a unique checksum. Probably wouldn't add that much overhead to the spam bot when doing a mailing. Boy, that would flood the checksum database in no time.
It's just like an arms war. As long as you try and build a better mouse trap, someone else is building a better mouse.
I think it's amazing the US govt isn't interested
on
The Satellite Subversives
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
The biggest export of the US as far as impact, is entertainment. Here, they have an audience hungry for content, and a station that would be happy to take support and attack a regime they clearly have a problem with.
One cruise missile could fund this station for a year, and would do more to improving relations with the people of the goverment. Why sacrifice our people fighting a useless war with them? Or attacking their government when their own people clearly dislike it.
I guess it doesn't play as well in the polls for the politicians to say "We fund pirate TV stations" as it is to say "We decided to go in and blow sh*t up!". Let's face it, the current administration has all but declared they want to go in and wage war.
Soon to be lining discount bins everywhere! Why pay more to record something on digital tape for good definition when you can do it with a TIVO.
This is supposed to be targetted for HDTV, which the article claims DVD doesn't support. Not 100% correct, isn't DVD 700 lines of resolution? I know HDTV can do higher resolutions, but I could never figure out the point to it. HDTV is like quadrophonic stereos, and this new D-VHS will be like the 8-tracks you used to play it (remember needing the funky quad-decks?)
Plus look at the dreck they've used for the first release on this format. Not exactly the stuff cinema buffs watch, more like Joe six-pack.
CD jukebox interfaces are awful, if you don't buy one with keyboard entry for the artist and album titles you'll never find anything (was cd 192 Def Leppard or Bach.. hmmm) and most jukeboxes make you enter the info yourself, with a very finite number of discs retained in memory.. even with a CDDB connection, it's still not easy to use..
of course $20,000 for something you'd have to feed all your discs to seems a little excesssive as well..
Can I second that? I have Charter as well, and while I do occasionally suffer from times when the service isn't 100% accessible, it's not that much more expensive than dial up (cheaper if you want to keep a second line inorder to prevent tying up your phone with a dialup).
Charter helped offset the cost of their cable modem service, by upgrading the lines and pushing digital cable heavily. If a cable company upgraded lines solely to sell highspeed Internet access, they deserve to go under. It's called putting all your eggs in one basket, which has always proven to be a bad idea.
They also have a tiered method, where if 500K isn't fast enough, for an extra $20 I can get a 1500K connection and a non-dynamic IP address. It's called paying for what you need. These other providers could easily offer a 100K service or something for $10 or $15 to hook subscribers and blow the dialups out of the water. After all, bandwidth not being used, is revenue lost.
this guy seems to have made a lot more money patenting strange and unique ways to work with a lot of different materials. (At least, it's a lot more than the people who waste their time posting to SlashDot make)..
Revolutions in design have rarely come out of corporations... considering this site is supposed to be Linux based, I thought I would see more support for anyone trying to solve the energy crisis outside of the regular channels, since it's highly unlikely it will come from the gas companies anytime soon.
The only oddity here, is why this was moded up to 1. People have been collecting coins for centuries.. this isn't a recent turn of events.
The reason the mints put out coins like the quarters is to raise money, because they know it will encourage people to keep them out of circulation. Why they don't mint more JFK's in this regard, is beyond me.
Judging by how long the average clerk takes to figure out your change when the register doesn't spell it out for them... I think the credit card is getting quicker everyday.
Slashdot Mirror
it's small change though.. in the past two weeks, I've sent amazon 14,316 clicks and 8952 unique visitors.. 46 items ordered. For that I'll see about $40 (my current revenue only displays items shipped not ordered, so no exact numbers there, 37 items shipped is $28.57, so I might be a little optimistic).
A cost-per-click banner ad that only pays $0.05 per click would have cost Amazon $715.80. In this case, the cost is closer to $0.0027 per click. It's quite cheap advertising compared to almost anything else on the web currently.
Factor in the fact that affliates don't get referral fees for used items, auction items, and several other categories and you realize that their 5% referral is coming off their highest profit items. Any time a visitor buys a used item from Amazon, they don't have to ship anything, just collect a payment.
imagine getting to be a guine pig for the corporation I pay to provide me with hosting. And I get to pay for the benefit of finding their bugs for them.
Don't get me wrong, Netscape 6.X has come light years in the past year or so, but I'm still not convinced it's ready for prime time yet... no idea how much better the Mozilla releases have been though, but they sound only incrementally better than the official Netscape releases.
I had a very similar experience with Verisign holding onto a domain name, despite having sent them maybe 3 or 4 faxes and a dozen emails. It took me close to 4 months to resolve the problem, so that I could switch registrar's and get as far away from them as possible.
I got their notice last week, and put it aside to check to make sure I didn't still have a domain with them. That's how they almost fooled me, I thought I had switched all my domains already, but paniced and thought maybe I missed one.
It is definitely deceptive, and should certainly get investigated for fraud.
the heating properties alone look great to me.. I live on a hill, and my sidewalk is always a nightmare in the winter.. how much do these concrete pavers the article mentions run and where can I buy them? I'm sick of using a sled to get to the bottom of my sidewalk!
I've done some simple stuff in it, I'm by no means a Flash expert. But, from what I've experienced of it, I can see why so many poorly designed sites which use it heavily, are poorly designed.
The new Flash they talk about is supposed to have a lot of the navigational elements built in, like scroll bars and buttons. That would be a major improvement, right now, you have to design your own for each project. Even if you do use their built in library to reuse items, it tends to crash too often to make it not worth the effort.
Placing a link between frames, is a major effot. You want a text link to another screen? Define a button (with four layers), and then edit the script for the button to point to the next page. HTML takes about twenty seconds either in a text editor or some GUI nonesense editor. Flash takes about 5 minutes.
Flash was created for graphic designers. Graphic designers have no place desiging sites. Individual pages, no problem, not entire sites. Nothing Flash has ever done, would make for a consistent design within a site. It decreases the usability of a site, because each site you visit which is developed using it, comes up with it's own paradigm for navigation. Sure, within the site it's consistent, but even then, it's some graphic design artist who thinks you should know that clicking the orange flame brings you to the homepage, or some other non-convention they just thought of.
from the article: "I need a way to send a request to a server and not the get result for five days"
Why does it need to be done at a protocol layer? If I need to submit something to a server that is going to take 5 days to get back to me, I should probably have an account with that server, and when I log back in, can get that information.
It sounds to me like he's fishing for an excuse to design a new protocol for a need no one really has.
I don't think the checksums are as infalable as you claim. Especially if the code is available to the public. And you don't need to add garbage to the email, you can easily run a filter which changes various adjectives to similar adjectives, etc. without changing the meaning of the message. It's not like most spam is well written to begin with.
Either way, it's easy enough for the spammer to determine the checksum of the spam without even sending it. The spammer sends out 20,000 spams, changes the mail enough to generate a new checksum, sends out another 20,000. Even if it's 200,000 chances are good that there's not enough people looking at checksums to block every part of the spamming run. If everyone used it, sure that might work.
What does the spammer care if the email bounces? You make it sound like they're going to get the bounced messages.. They aren't. Most of them use hacked mail servers and open relays anyways. Sure, it wastes some of their time, but I'm sure if they suddenly find 20,000 email addresses on one domain, they're going to treat it as suspect anyways, and not add it.
Not to mention the effect it has if the domain names aren't safe to use (ie. the domain names used in the poison database refer to a real domain, which now gets hammered with a ton of undeliverable spam). Even if they aren't valid domains, the spammer will most likely have a bogus return address that does point to a valid domain, which in turn floods that domain with the useless bounce messages.
(1) I'd be willing to be the Voice of America is jammed. As the article stated, they changed their location for broadcast, and prevented jamming.
(2) I'm sure if the government stepped in, it wouldn't be public knowledge. It would invalidate a lot of what the station already does if it was known that they sponsored the station. So how a politician is going to raise it as an issue, would be moot.
(3) Always a problem, but how does the average person watching know they aren't sponsored by the government already?
I always assume the government wants to blow stuff up, they have a long history of doing it.
the spammer gets wise to the checksums. Then, all it has to do, is generate a checksum on his spam, monitor the checksum repository, and when the checksum appears, change the spam going out.
Or better yet, create the spam, run the checksum algorithm (it is open source after all). Then run the spam through an algorithm which changes x amount of words to various synonyms or pads the message so that each successive spam sent generates a unique checksum. Probably wouldn't add that much overhead to the spam bot when doing a mailing. Boy, that would flood the checksum database in no time.
It's just like an arms war. As long as you try and build a better mouse trap, someone else is building a better mouse.
The biggest export of the US as far as impact, is entertainment. Here, they have an audience hungry for content, and a station that would be happy to take support and attack a regime they clearly have a problem with.
One cruise missile could fund this station for a year, and would do more to improving relations with the people of the goverment. Why sacrifice our people fighting a useless war with them? Or attacking their government when their own people clearly dislike it.
I guess it doesn't play as well in the polls for the politicians to say "We fund pirate TV stations" as it is to say "We decided to go in and blow sh*t up!". Let's face it, the current administration has all but declared they want to go in and wage war.
Soon to be lining discount bins everywhere! Why pay more to record something on digital tape for good definition when you can do it with a TIVO.
This is supposed to be targetted for HDTV, which the article claims DVD doesn't support. Not 100% correct, isn't DVD 700 lines of resolution? I know HDTV can do higher resolutions, but I could never figure out the point to it. HDTV is like quadrophonic stereos, and this new D-VHS will be like the 8-tracks you used to play it (remember needing the funky quad-decks?)
Plus look at the dreck they've used for the first release on this format. Not exactly the stuff cinema buffs watch, more like Joe six-pack.
CD jukebox interfaces are awful, if you don't buy one with keyboard entry for the artist and album titles you'll never find anything (was cd 192 Def Leppard or Bach.. hmmm) and most jukeboxes make you enter the info yourself, with a very finite number of discs retained in memory.. even with a CDDB connection, it's still not easy to use..
of course $20,000 for something you'd have to feed all your discs to seems a little excesssive as well..
Can I second that? I have Charter as well, and while I do occasionally suffer from times when the service isn't 100% accessible, it's not that much more expensive than dial up (cheaper if you want to keep a second line inorder to prevent tying up your phone with a dialup).
Charter helped offset the cost of their cable modem service, by upgrading the lines and pushing digital cable heavily. If a cable company upgraded lines solely to sell highspeed Internet access, they deserve to go under. It's called putting all your eggs in one basket, which has always proven to be a bad idea.
They also have a tiered method, where if 500K isn't fast enough, for an extra $20 I can get a 1500K connection and a non-dynamic IP address. It's called paying for what you need. These other providers could easily offer a 100K service or something for $10 or $15 to hook subscribers and blow the dialups out of the water. After all, bandwidth not being used, is revenue lost.
this guy seems to have made a lot more money patenting strange and unique ways to work with a lot of different materials. (At least, it's a lot more than the people who waste their time posting to SlashDot make)..
Revolutions in design have rarely come out of corporations... considering this site is supposed to be Linux based, I thought I would see more support for anyone trying to solve the energy crisis outside of the regular channels, since it's highly unlikely it will come from the gas companies anytime soon.
The only oddity here, is why this was moded up to 1. People have been collecting coins for centuries.. this isn't a recent turn of events.
The reason the mints put out coins like the quarters is to raise money, because they know it will encourage people to keep them out of circulation. Why they don't mint more JFK's in this regard, is beyond me.
Judging by how long the average clerk takes to figure out your change when the register doesn't spell it out for them... I think the credit card is getting quicker everyday.