If your application is very simple, you can probably just get away with doubling everything.
But if you're writing something even moderately complicated, you should look at doing custom interfaces for both. Why? A number of reasons.
The big one is that interaction styles in desktop and touchscreen environments are generally pretty different. Early touchscreen proponents ignored this, resulting in a lot of problems, including gorilla arm. Fingers are also much bigger and less precise than mouse pointers. This suggests that touchscreens should work hard to make common choices much bigger, to give more macro-ish buttons that perform common sequences, and generally make frequent activities very easy.
Another important reason is that people sitting at a desk are generally in a very different frame of mind then people at a kiosk or running a big piece of machinery. At a desk, you are generally physically comfortable and familiar with your environment; you're also likely to have fewer distractions and be more familiar with the software. In common touchscreen environments, though, people are usually standing or just stopping for a moment, and they're much more likely to be inexpert users. So with a touchscreen, you should probably make the basic interface much simpler: enlarge or emphasize more important information; shrink or remove less important information; relegate rarely used options to other pages; make on-line help more simple and direct; and so on.
Also, a number of the standard GUI widgets don't work as well in touch-screen environments. You'll note that most kiosks only have buttons, with the occasional radio button or checkbox set; there are no pull-down menus (and especially no hierarchical menus), few pop-up lists, scrolling lists, or tabs. And any text or number entry field has to provide a pop-up keyboard.
But if you really can't afford to develop two UIs, then there's a very simple solution: use the touchscreen monitor at a low resolution. An interface that works pretty well at 640x480 on a 15" touchscreen should be adequate on a 1280x1024 17" desktop. But if you do a combined desktop+touchscreen interface, you must do some user testing. Jakob Nielsen's site useit.com has many good hints, including an articles on doing budget user testing plus boss-friendly explanations of why spending a little money on user testing has big payoffs in the long run.
Not only is this painfully redundant, but it's also not very smart.
I don't know about the rest of y'all, but most of the junk mail I get is from companies I would never deal with. Credit card companies, periodicals, mail-order vendors, and businesses that happen to share a zip code with me. Ergo, sending them garbage may harm their other customers, but it's no skin off of my nose.
Moreover, the reason that these companies send out tons of junk mail is because it works. They may only get a 1% response rate, but that's enough to cover the costs and make a little profit. The only way to reduce junk mail is to make it a) less effective, and b) more expensive for the sender.
Not buying from junk mailers does the first; sending back useless replies on their nickel does the second. To get rid of fruit flies or cockroaches, you find and destroy their food source. The same goes for marketroids.
Note that the poster didn't mention anything about company loyalty; that's only in the headline.
From reading the actual question, it looks like the querent is much more concerned about a different kind of loyalty, loyalty to his employees and colleagues. Good bosses know that they have a responsiblity towards the people they hire and lead; bad ones leave at five o'clock and say "it's the company's problem."
This guy sounds like a good boss, one who is trying to balance two apparently contradictory things, his own self-interest and his concern for the people he works with. Other posters have suggested many ways that he can get some of both; hopefully one of the compromises will fit his situation. Your notion that he should give not at moment's thought to people who depend on him is sad; I can only hope that your future bosses treat you with more respect and concern than you advocate here. And I hope you never manage people until you learn the difference.
---
And what, by the way, is wrong with serving bagels? What makes those people so worthy of your contempt? I have friends who work service jobs and like it a lot. They don't think they're saving the world or anything, but they can make people's lives a bit better by doing their jobs with skill and spirit. And it's not like they're stealing, selling smack, or doing marketing; selling bagels is a positive-sum game.
When I used to work in a factory, I was proud of making useful stuff. These days I design and build software; I'm still proud to be making making useful stuff. If you're not proud of what you're doing and why you're doing it, perhaps you should look elsewhere.
Taking away our rights to speak and be heard in order to 'protect' us from spam is a complete violation of the first amendment.
Only the government is bound by the first amendment, as you'd know if you had bothered to actually read it. If the feds were mandating use of the RBL, it might possibly be illegal. But luckily the only people using it are private owners of mail servers. Don't like it? Don't use it on your mail server.
[...] cutting off blocks of the internet from email as championed by MAPS/ORBS/etc will accomplish nothing [...]
Actually, it accomplishes quite a lot as far as keeping spammers off the net.
This poster has some good advice, but it's a little extreme for my tastes.
If at all possible, I encourage you to take up some contract work on the side, and not to quit your day job until you have enough in the way of clients to live on. Building up a client base takes time, and keeping your day job will let you learn about marketing yourself and managing a business without risking everything.
I also found Janet Ruhl's The Computer Consultant's Guide pretty helpful; it's a little dated now, but still worth the dough.
Note that you are unlikely to find a lot of telecommuting work if you're just starting out. But once you've established a decent relationship with a company, they will consider arrangements that they would never do with a stranger.
The reason that people take some joy in this is that UUNET is considered to be pretty lackadaisical about fighting spam. Whatever their corporate mouthpieces say, their behavior suggests that they don't consider spam to be that big a problem. Or at least that they consider it to be somebody else's problem. Now perhaps they'll take it more seriously.
Note that this is probably not "an eye for an eye", in that nobody spammed them specifically to punish them for their previous spammer-friendly behavior; it appears that they just got buried in a normal spam run, the same kind of spam run that originates from their network all too frequently.
This is more akin to a policeman on the night watch who parks his squad car and takes an illicit nap, finding on waking that somebody stole his tires. There is a certain poetic justice that's less "an eye for an eye" than "what goes around, comes around".
Few would vote for raping the rapist, but equally few will shed tears for the rapist who, in spite of our efforts to prevent rape, is raped by a bigger, meaner rapist. Buddhists work to end the suffering of all sentient beings, but that doesn't mean they can't appreciate the beautiful symmetry of karmic balance.
more spam gets spewed through UUNET than from all the other Internet service providers combined
Gee, could this be because of the size of UUNet and it's placement as a backbone provider?
This is doubtful. Sure, UUNET is big, but not that big. If I look at the hit logs from the (large, J.-Random-User-oriented) web sites that I have access to, spam from UUNET dialups is way out of proportion to the hits from them.
And that doesn't explain why UUNET is also such a popular place to host spammer sites. The more likely explanation is that fighting spam isn't a priority for them. In spam-fighting circles, they're not known as "Spew-U-NET" for nothing.
Go take a look at the stats at Spamcop or at Spamhaus and it's pretty obvious that some big vendors are much worse than others about spam.
When the topics are technical, Slashdot has a really good signal/noise ratio. Smart things get modded up; stupid things get modded down and/or stomped on.
Here, though, we see what happens when it's a topic where people don't know much about. The volume is just as high, the opinions are just firm. But most people are just talking out their asses, and moderators are giving big points to Limbaugh-like rants without a scrap of fact in 'em.
Since this article already has enough opinion, I'll just stick to a few facts and some interesting links.
I live in San Francisco, so I've been following this closely. A very interesting site for the curious is the California Independent System Operator, an organization responsible for the long-distance high-voltage lines and the power that flows over them. They have a FAQ, a diagram that shows how the power flows, and an up-to-the-minute graph showing projected and actual power load. (I say we all pick a time tomorrow to turn off everything and see if we can make the graph drop.)
Personally, I use 100% renewable power from utility.com. (I actually pay less than others, but I'd happily pay more for my green preferences.) They are certified by Green-e, a non-profit that verifies the power content. (The typical mix for California uses only 12% renewables, with 20% coal, 20% large hydroelectric, 31% natural gas, and 16% nuclear. (Yes, large hydroelectric is counted separately; it's not considered very environmentally friendly these days.)
There are several good articles in the New York Times about all this, including one on following the money. There is also one on how Texas plans to do it differently. And as subscribers to The Economist know, California's deregulation was a pretty shoddy job compared to other utility deregulations around the world.
So those of you who lay the blame entirely on environmental regs from California's own special blend of fruits, nuts, and flakes should research a little further. You'll find a picture that's much more interesting and complex: political dithering, a lack of foresight, corporate greed, and plenty of plain old stupidity are involved.
I've owned an Addams Family machine for a few years, and I've never tired of it. I don't play it every day, but it has outlasted a number of (software) video games I have owned.
Some pinball makers had the right idea by adding lots of lights and pseudo-video-game displays to the machines, but they never took it far enough, and the same boring slap-the-ball gameplay was the core of the game. Sorry, but I'm not a retard. I need something a bit more challenging[...]
Saying that pinball is just "slap-the-ball gameplay" is like saying that video games are just "press-the-buttons gameplay" or that role playing games are just "rolling some dice". Although on one level it's true, you're mainly missing the point.
Note that people have managed to find entertainment for years with things as simple as a slab of wood and bunch of black and white stones (the game of Go). Also consider athletes; runners do nothing more than put one foot in front of another, but there's no shortage of people who find challenge and reward in it.
So instead of saying "X is for retards", try saying "X is not my cup of tea". Because acting like you're the final arbiter of all that is interesting is, well, for retards.
The reason that Lucent focuses on Windows clients for their PBXes is more likely that 99% of office workers in companies large enough to buy serious PBX installations use Windows. Thus, the client software for PBX users is also on Windows.
This has very little to do with the internal running of PBX itself; you can bet that Lucent wrote the OS for the phone switch themselves, just exposing a (proprietary) API for the user and admin tools. I'm sure the poster doesn't give a damn about that; he just wants to use all of the switch's features from his non-Windows desktop machine.
If they don't currently have Windows boxes, why should they be forced to get some just to make their telephones go?
For those who are wondering what PCBs are, here's an EPA site about 'em. They're also an important part of Neal Stephenson's novel Zodiac.
This behavior doesn't appear to be unusual; recently in San Francisco, where the Navy has an old shipyard that's filled with random toxic waste, an underground fire burned for a month without public notice. See the SF Cronicle article here.
redir seems to finally have made a real attempt to do better, but for some reason he posted as an
anonymous coward. [...]
Ooh! If that is really redir (and it looks like it is), that's an excellent catch. Thanks for noticing it!
This is where the web is a little scary. I hope this doesn't permanently hurt either of them. Do I
trust ReviewBoard.com? Not at all. But I am not sure that should equal a lifetime ban on employment for those two.
For me, the hiring decision would have a lot to do on whether or not they came clean in public. I don't mind hiring people who have made mistakes; failure teaches some lessons that success never does. But people who can't admit their errors are dangerous, and likely to repeat them over and over.
If the post you found was really from Phillip Ferreira, I hope he comes back and posts it again with his handle and his proper email address.
Chris Chabot and reviewboard.com still have a lot to answer for, of course. Even if redir's subsequent defense was a understandable youthful mistake, the original articles and Chabot's disingenuous spin control does a lot to suggest that the rot at reviewboard.com goes much deeper than an overdefensive sysadmin.
You forget to mention that your "good friend" redir has already been proven to be Philip Ferreira, your coworker at reviewboard.com. And you also forgot to mention that his "defense" of you included blatant falsification of dates, facts, and numerous email exchanges with an "editor" who was probably himself.
You also don't account for the fact that during the controversy, the date in the story at reviewboard was changed from 12/29/00 to 3/29/00. Did your "user in question" also break into your site and change that, just to make you look bad? You also fail to explain how that even though you only heard about the problem this morning, that someone took down a piece of evidence at http://rb.chabotc.com/Section/Cover/E10k, a domain that sure appears to be yours.
Sure, it's convenient to explain this as some "user in question". The appearance, though, is that you and your buds got caught plagiarizing and then tried to cover it up. Does anybody really believe that you take user reviews without giving them the tiniest bit of credit and put them under your byline without checking for quality?
The only question in my mind is whether your site is mainly stolen from Epinions or if this was an unusual occurence. You might as well own up and claim it was a one-time mistake; you and your site might escape with at least a little credibility.
The lesson for the rest of us, of course, is that whenever Phillip Ferreira or Chris Chabot go to get a job in the future, a quick search on their names will show this whole sordid tale. Would you hire them? It's an interesting thing to think about...
Those of you crusing at >1 should check out this post.
This is a brilliant bit of research, proving that the guy who submitted the article to Slashdot is the same guy who runs the site, although he now is trying to hide the connection. And he's the only guy who's arguing vociferously that the plagiarism claims are bunk. Very curious!
If I could give this poster some of my karma, I would. But I can't. Could a moderator please throw him a bone?
Now these may all go by different names (surcharges, access fees, interest rates, etc.) but what they all are is a privately levied tax. It's not illegal either because the consumer is free to not buy/use said product and shop elsewhere.
Uh... sure. You can call that a tax if you want. Heck, you can call it a flooblezoop if you please. But the normal meaning of tax is different. People will use it metaphorically like that, of course. Unless, of course, you expect the MasterCard Police to come and arrest you if you don't pay your cash advance fee, in which case you'd be correct.
But State governments cannot lobby other State governments to pass laws. That is an attempt to regulate interstate commerce which is a power explicitly granted to the Federal gov't by the Constitution, and therefore illegal for states to exercise.
Are you sure that states can't try to influence other states? That strikes me as a far cry from regulation, and presumably there are many matters where commerce isn't affected. Evidence, please!
Also, in this case the states aren't really trying to regulate each other; they're just coordinating changes to their own state law. My notion is that they do this all the time. Note, for example, the existence of the Uniform Commercial Code. Or the National Conference of Commisioners on Uniform State Laws. So it sounds like the constitution is applied with more subtlety than you (and a disapointing other number of people on Slashdot) seem to think it should be.
In this debate, it's important to note that even i f you don't pay tax on a out-of-state purchase, AFAIK every state with a sales tax still says that you are supposed to pay them something called a use tax; they just can't force the company to collect.
For example in this Texas government FAQ, you find the quote
Do I owe Texas tax on mail-order merchandise?
Yes, tax is due on items purchased out of state and used in Texas. If the mail-order company has a Texas use tax permit, the company
will collect Texas tax. And Texas use tax is due even if the mail-order company doesn't have a permit and doesn't collect tax.
A white paper at CommerceNet gives extensive information on the California law, and mentions that this is pretty common. For the curious, here is a table of State Sales Tax Rates, which mentions that Alaska, Deleware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Orgeon have no state sales tax.
<opinion>
Personally, I favor raising the sales tax and dropping the income tax. As a general rule of thumb, taxing something tends to discourage it (e.g., cigarette tax), so it seems silly to tax something like income. I'd much rather tax consumption, and I'm even more interested in taxing things that are environmentally bad. If society is going to allow pollution, we might as well get paid for it.
you are confusing two wholly diffrent ideas... speach and communication speach does not require a reciver...
I'm not confusing the two here; I'm separating them. My point is that 'free speech' isn't about the legal right to open your mouth and make noises. It's about the legal right to communicate freely, without the government trying to stop communication to suppress ideas it doesn't like.
if you wanted to stand outside my aprtment building preaching the vertues of whatever your selling, you can do that, but i better be able to sleep at night.
Agreed. Spam isn't wrong because of the ideas expressed in the messages; it's wrong because of how the message is delivered. When people yell about how blocking spammers is censorship, they miss this point.
I have an Edison Gold Moulded Records cylinder that looks to be from 1905 or so. It also comes with a license agreement:
This record is sold by the NATIONAL PHONOGRAPH COMPANY upon the condition that it shall not be sold to any unauthorized dealer or used for duplication and that it shall not be sold, or offered for sale, by the original or any subsequent purchaser (except by an authorized
jobber to an authorized retail dealer) for less than thiry five (35) cents apiece.
I presume that the price mentioned is the original retail price; that would effectively prevent people from opening used wax cylinder stores. I guess that's why we don't see such stores today, eh?
MAPS started by listing the spammer sites. After six months of trying to get the ISP to clean up their act and being given the runaround, they gave up, and have concluded the ISP is spam-friendly. Since they have been the top listing at spamhaus.org for months, this seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion.
I'm sure that the people at MAPS think that peacefire is a swell thing. But they have concluded that the ISP is spam-friendly, and so they have listed it as such. It's a shame that Peacefire is using a spam-friendly ISP, but they have the right to decide for themselves, eh?
And since when does AboveNet have the right to blacklist entire domains and IP blocks anyway?
AboveNet is only blocking the stuff on their own networks. ISPs who have other routes to Media3 are not affected. An
Suppose I decide that you and the people in your apartment building are ripe for induction into my MLM scheme; all you need is a little more information about it. So I go buy the biggest loudspeaker system I can find and set it out front. I then rant continuously for days at a time, using pals to keep up a continuous stream of sales pitch. Neither you nor your neighbors are interested, and you are all trying your best not to hear.
When people are talking about nonconsentual communications, that's what they mean. You're welcome to have a different name for it, of course.
The entire point of Free (as in liberty) speech
is that you have the unfettered right to communicate.
I am sad to say that you are again off the mark.
Communication requires at least two participants. If I stand alone in the woods and speak my mind, that isn't communication. And if I stand alone in the woods and just listen to the wind in the trees, that isn't communication, either. Communication only happens when there is a speaker and a listener.
Freedom of speech means that nobody (especially the government) should come between two people trying to communicate. It does not mean the act of flapping ones lips should be at all times protected. If, despite your requests to stop, I chase you down the street shouting obscenities and nonsense words, that's just harassment; free speech never enters into it.
Although I'm also fond of WebImage, it hasn't been updated in three years. After I gave these guys my money, I never heard a peep out of them until yesterday, when they spammed me.
Oh, sorry, they put me, without asking, on an "opt-in" news headline list, where they get revenue for every clickthrough. And even better, I can sign people up for it and get money for their clickthroughs! Feh. And when I contacted them, they of course told me that since I had given them my e-mail in 1997 (where the require it on every order), that they had put me on their "marketing" list. And since I was a customer, it couldn't be spam!
I am not saying that AboveNet is trying to prevent people from learning about what relay blocking is. I am saying that they are
censoring the specific exchange of information needed to do the relay checking (albeit with some lame excuse).
Note that there are other relay checkers which they do allow, MAPS RSS being the most popular one. What exactly is it that you feel they are trying to censor?
Also note that what you consider to be a "lame excuse" is seen by a lot of other people, including many strong anti-spam advocates, as a reasonable argument. See, for example, the archive of SPAMTOOLS from around the end of May. Your adamant refusual to see any merit whatsoever in their position doesn't make you convincing; it makes you look clueless.
This would be akin to allowing a few books on what democracy is but not allowing people to actually communicate to implement it.
Well, you seem to be doing a pretty fair imitation of communicating about it.
Or if you wish to prove your point that it's the information rather than the actions, then set up an ORBS secondary within AboveNet's network. I'm sure ORBS would cooperate; you'd just need to find somebody to secondary the data so you could reach it.
So, it would not be reasonable for AboveNet to claim that allowing ORBS probes is just too much work for just one customer request.
Well, they still could claim that it's too much work (or, more likely, too risky for their routers) to allow ORBS probes for just a few customer requests. Indeed, if routing table size is what worries them, then a larger number of requests would be worse, not better.
And, yes, we do intend to vote with our dollars, losing our setup costs after our annual contract with our AboveNet-based ISP expires.
And just to follow up, somebody has now decided that my original post was a troll, which is a post "designed to attract predictable responses or flames". Given that I'm the only one to respond to it, does this mean that somebody thinks I fell for my own troll? Or was this just to demonstrate my point that some moderators are apparently clue-deficient?
Slashdot Mirror
If your application is very simple, you can probably just get away with doubling everything.
But if you're writing something even moderately complicated, you should look at doing custom interfaces for both. Why? A number of reasons.
The big one is that interaction styles in desktop and touchscreen environments are generally pretty different. Early touchscreen proponents ignored this, resulting in a lot of problems, including gorilla arm. Fingers are also much bigger and less precise than mouse pointers. This suggests that touchscreens should work hard to make common choices much bigger, to give more macro-ish buttons that perform common sequences, and generally make frequent activities very easy.
Another important reason is that people sitting at a desk are generally in a very different frame of mind then people at a kiosk or running a big piece of machinery. At a desk, you are generally physically comfortable and familiar with your environment; you're also likely to have fewer distractions and be more familiar with the software. In common touchscreen environments, though, people are usually standing or just stopping for a moment, and they're much more likely to be inexpert users. So with a touchscreen, you should probably make the basic interface much simpler: enlarge or emphasize more important information; shrink or remove less important information; relegate rarely used options to other pages; make on-line help more simple and direct; and so on.
Also, a number of the standard GUI widgets don't work as well in touch-screen environments. You'll note that most kiosks only have buttons, with the occasional radio button or checkbox set; there are no pull-down menus (and especially no hierarchical menus), few pop-up lists, scrolling lists, or tabs. And any text or number entry field has to provide a pop-up keyboard.
But if you really can't afford to develop two UIs, then there's a very simple solution: use the touchscreen monitor at a low resolution. An interface that works pretty well at 640x480 on a 15" touchscreen should be adequate on a 1280x1024 17" desktop. But if you do a combined desktop+touchscreen interface, you must do some user testing. Jakob Nielsen's site useit.com has many good hints, including an articles on doing budget user testing plus boss-friendly explanations of why spending a little money on user testing has big payoffs in the long run.
Not only is this painfully redundant, but it's also not very smart.
I don't know about the rest of y'all, but most of the junk mail I get is from companies I would never deal with. Credit card companies, periodicals, mail-order vendors, and businesses that happen to share a zip code with me. Ergo, sending them garbage may harm their other customers, but it's no skin off of my nose.
Moreover, the reason that these companies send out tons of junk mail is because it works. They may only get a 1% response rate, but that's enough to cover the costs and make a little profit. The only way to reduce junk mail is to make it a) less effective, and b) more expensive for the sender.
Not buying from junk mailers does the first; sending back useless replies on their nickel does the second. To get rid of fruit flies or cockroaches, you find and destroy their food source. The same goes for marketroids.
Note that the poster didn't mention anything about company loyalty; that's only in the headline.
From reading the actual question, it looks like the querent is much more concerned about a different kind of loyalty, loyalty to his employees and colleagues. Good bosses know that they have a responsiblity towards the people they hire and lead; bad ones leave at five o'clock and say "it's the company's problem."
This guy sounds like a good boss, one who is trying to balance two apparently contradictory things, his own self-interest and his concern for the people he works with. Other posters have suggested many ways that he can get some of both; hopefully one of the compromises will fit his situation. Your notion that he should give not at moment's thought to people who depend on him is sad; I can only hope that your future bosses treat you with more respect and concern than you advocate here. And I hope you never manage people until you learn the difference.
---
And what, by the way, is wrong with serving bagels? What makes those people so worthy of your contempt? I have friends who work service jobs and like it a lot. They don't think they're saving the world or anything, but they can make people's lives a bit better by doing their jobs with skill and spirit. And it's not like they're stealing, selling smack, or doing marketing; selling bagels is a positive-sum game.
When I used to work in a factory, I was proud of making useful stuff. These days I design and build software; I'm still proud to be making making useful stuff. If you're not proud of what you're doing and why you're doing it, perhaps you should look elsewhere.
Taking away our rights to speak and be heard in order to 'protect' us from spam is a complete violation of the first amendment.
Only the government is bound by the first amendment, as you'd know if you had bothered to actually read it. If the feds were mandating use of the RBL, it might possibly be illegal. But luckily the only people using it are private owners of mail servers. Don't like it? Don't use it on your mail server.
[...] cutting off blocks of the internet from email as championed by MAPS/ORBS/etc will accomplish nothing [...]
Actually, it accomplishes quite a lot as far as keeping spammers off the net.
This poster has some good advice, but it's a little extreme for my tastes.
If at all possible, I encourage you to take up some contract work on the side, and not to quit your day job until you have enough in the way of clients to live on. Building up a client base takes time, and keeping your day job will let you learn about marketing yourself and managing a business without risking everything.
I also found Janet Ruhl's The Computer Consultant's Guide pretty helpful; it's a little dated now, but still worth the dough.
Note that you are unlikely to find a lot of telecommuting work if you're just starting out. But once you've established a decent relationship with a company, they will consider arrangements that they would never do with a stranger.
The reason that people take some joy in this is that UUNET is considered to be pretty lackadaisical about fighting spam. Whatever their corporate mouthpieces say, their behavior suggests that they don't consider spam to be that big a problem. Or at least that they consider it to be somebody else's problem. Now perhaps they'll take it more seriously.
Note that this is probably not "an eye for an eye", in that nobody spammed them specifically to punish them for their previous spammer-friendly behavior; it appears that they just got buried in a normal spam run, the same kind of spam run that originates from their network all too frequently.
This is more akin to a policeman on the night watch who parks his squad car and takes an illicit nap, finding on waking that somebody stole his tires. There is a certain poetic justice that's less "an eye for an eye" than "what goes around, comes around".
Few would vote for raping the rapist, but equally few will shed tears for the rapist who, in spite of our efforts to prevent rape, is raped by a bigger, meaner rapist. Buddhists work to end the suffering of all sentient beings, but that doesn't mean they can't appreciate the beautiful symmetry of karmic balance.
This is doubtful. Sure, UUNET is big, but not that big. If I look at the hit logs from the (large, J.-Random-User-oriented) web sites that I have access to, spam from UUNET dialups is way out of proportion to the hits from them.
And that doesn't explain why UUNET is also such a popular place to host spammer sites. The more likely explanation is that fighting spam isn't a priority for them. In spam-fighting circles, they're not known as "Spew-U-NET" for nothing.
Go take a look at the stats at Spamcop or at Spamhaus and it's pretty obvious that some big vendors are much worse than others about spam.
When the topics are technical, Slashdot has a really good signal/noise ratio. Smart things get modded up; stupid things get modded down and/or stomped on.
Here, though, we see what happens when it's a topic where people don't know much about. The volume is just as high, the opinions are just firm. But most people are just talking out their asses, and moderators are giving big points to Limbaugh-like rants without a scrap of fact in 'em.
Since this article already has enough opinion, I'll just stick to a few facts and some interesting links.
I live in San Francisco, so I've been following this closely. A very interesting site for the curious is the California Independent System Operator, an organization responsible for the long-distance high-voltage lines and the power that flows over them. They have a FAQ, a diagram that shows how the power flows, and an up-to-the-minute graph showing projected and actual power load. (I say we all pick a time tomorrow to turn off everything and see if we can make the graph drop.)
Personally, I use 100% renewable power from utility.com. (I actually pay less than others, but I'd happily pay more for my green preferences.) They are certified by Green-e, a non-profit that verifies the power content. (The typical mix for California uses only 12% renewables, with 20% coal, 20% large hydroelectric, 31% natural gas, and 16% nuclear. (Yes, large hydroelectric is counted separately; it's not considered very environmentally friendly these days.)
There are several good articles in the New York Times about all this, including one on following the money. There is also one on how Texas plans to do it differently. And as subscribers to The Economist know, California's deregulation was a pretty shoddy job compared to other utility deregulations around the world.
So those of you who lay the blame entirely on environmental regs from California's own special blend of fruits, nuts, and flakes should research a little further. You'll find a picture that's much more interesting and complex: political dithering, a lack of foresight, corporate greed, and plenty of plain old stupidity are involved.
Pinball is not very fun.
I've owned an Addams Family machine for a few years, and I've never tired of it. I don't play it every day, but it has outlasted a number of (software) video games I have owned.
Some pinball makers had the right idea by adding lots of lights and pseudo-video-game displays to the machines, but they never took it far enough, and the same boring slap-the-ball gameplay was the core of the game. Sorry, but I'm not a retard. I need something a bit more challenging[...]
Saying that pinball is just "slap-the-ball gameplay" is like saying that video games are just "press-the-buttons gameplay" or that role playing games are just "rolling some dice". Although on one level it's true, you're mainly missing the point.
Note that people have managed to find entertainment for years with things as simple as a slab of wood and bunch of black and white stones (the game of Go). Also consider athletes; runners do nothing more than put one foot in front of another, but there's no shortage of people who find challenge and reward in it.
So instead of saying "X is for retards", try saying "X is not my cup of tea". Because acting like you're the final arbiter of all that is interesting is, well, for retards.
Don't be silly.
The reason that Lucent focuses on Windows clients for their PBXes is more likely that 99% of office workers in companies large enough to buy serious PBX installations use Windows. Thus, the client software for PBX users is also on Windows.
This has very little to do with the internal running of PBX itself; you can bet that Lucent wrote the OS for the phone switch themselves, just exposing a (proprietary) API for the user and admin tools. I'm sure the poster doesn't give a damn about that; he just wants to use all of the switch's features from his non-Windows desktop machine.
If they don't currently have Windows boxes, why should they be forced to get some just to make their telephones go?
Wow! Great post!
For those who are wondering what PCBs are, here's an EPA site about 'em. They're also an important part of Neal Stephenson's novel Zodiac.
This behavior doesn't appear to be unusual; recently in San Francisco, where the Navy has an old shipyard that's filled with random toxic waste, an underground fire burned for a month without public notice. See the SF Cronicle article here.
redir seems to finally have made a real attempt to do better, but for some reason he posted as an
anonymous coward. [...]
Ooh! If that is really redir (and it looks like it is), that's an excellent catch. Thanks for noticing it!
This is where the web is a little scary. I hope this doesn't permanently hurt either of them. Do I
trust ReviewBoard.com? Not at all. But I am not sure that should equal a lifetime ban on employment for those two.
For me, the hiring decision would have a lot to do on whether or not they came clean in public. I don't mind hiring people who have made mistakes; failure teaches some lessons that success never does. But people who can't admit their errors are dangerous, and likely to repeat them over and over.
If the post you found was really from Phillip Ferreira, I hope he comes back and posts it again with his handle and his proper email address.
Chris Chabot and reviewboard.com still have a lot to answer for, of course. Even if redir's subsequent defense was a understandable youthful mistake, the original articles and Chabot's disingenuous spin control does a lot to suggest that the rot at reviewboard.com goes much deeper than an overdefensive sysadmin.
You forget to mention that your "good friend" redir has already been proven to be Philip Ferreira, your coworker at reviewboard.com. And you also forgot to mention that his "defense" of you included blatant falsification of dates, facts, and numerous email exchanges with an "editor" who was probably himself.
You also don't account for the fact that during the controversy, the date in the story at reviewboard was changed from 12/29/00 to 3/29/00. Did your "user in question" also break into your site and change that, just to make you look bad? You also fail to explain how that even though you only heard about the problem this morning, that someone took down a piece of evidence at http://rb.chabotc.com/Section/Cover/E10k, a domain that sure appears to be yours.
Sure, it's convenient to explain this as some "user in question". The appearance, though, is that you and your buds got caught plagiarizing and then tried to cover it up. Does anybody really believe that you take user reviews without giving them the tiniest bit of credit and put them under your byline without checking for quality?
The only question in my mind is whether your site is mainly stolen from Epinions or if this was an unusual occurence. You might as well own up and claim it was a one-time mistake; you and your site might escape with at least a little credibility.
The lesson for the rest of us, of course, is that whenever Phillip Ferreira or Chris Chabot go to get a job in the future, a quick search on their names will show this whole sordid tale. Would you hire them? It's an interesting thing to think about...
Those of you crusing at >1 should check out this post.
This is a brilliant bit of research, proving that the guy who submitted the article to Slashdot is the same guy who runs the site, although he now is trying to hide the connection. And he's the only guy who's arguing vociferously that the plagiarism claims are bunk. Very curious!
If I could give this poster some of my karma, I would. But I can't. Could a moderator please throw him a bone?
Now these may all go by different names (surcharges, access fees, interest rates, etc.) but what they all are is a privately levied tax. It's not illegal either because the consumer is free to not buy/use said product and shop elsewhere.
Uh... sure. You can call that a tax if you want. Heck, you can call it a flooblezoop if you please. But the normal meaning of tax is different. People will use it metaphorically like that, of course. Unless, of course, you expect the MasterCard Police to come and arrest you if you don't pay your cash advance fee, in which case you'd be correct.
But State governments cannot lobby other State governments to pass laws. That is an attempt to regulate interstate commerce which is a power explicitly granted to the Federal gov't by the Constitution, and therefore illegal for states to exercise.
Are you sure that states can't try to influence other states? That strikes me as a far cry from regulation, and presumably there are many matters where commerce isn't affected. Evidence, please!
Also, in this case the states aren't really trying to regulate each other; they're just coordinating changes to their own state law. My notion is that they do this all the time. Note, for example, the existence of the Uniform Commercial Code. Or the National Conference of Commisioners on Uniform State Laws. So it sounds like the constitution is applied with more subtlety than you (and a disapointing other number of people on Slashdot) seem to think it should be.
In this debate, it's important to note that even i f you don't pay tax on a out-of-state purchase, AFAIK every state with a sales tax still says that you are supposed to pay them something called a use tax; they just can't force the company to collect.
For example in this Texas government FAQ, you find the quoteA white paper at CommerceNet gives extensive information on the California law, and mentions that this is pretty common. For the curious, here is a table of State Sales Tax Rates, which mentions that Alaska, Deleware, Montana, New Hampshire, and Orgeon have no state sales tax.
<opinion>
Personally, I favor raising the sales tax and dropping the income tax. As a general rule of thumb, taxing something tends to discourage it (e.g., cigarette tax), so it seems silly to tax something like income. I'd much rather tax consumption, and I'm even more interested in taxing things that are environmentally bad. If society is going to allow pollution, we might as well get paid for it.
</opinion>
Because government gave itself a legal monopoly on charging taxes.
Which is a pretty damned good thing if you think about it. Can you imagine how much people would have to pay in tax if just anybody could start one?
you are confusing two wholly diffrent ideas... speach and communication speach does not require a reciver...
I'm not confusing the two here; I'm separating them. My point is that 'free speech' isn't about the legal right to open your mouth and make noises. It's about the legal right to communicate freely, without the government trying to stop communication to suppress ideas it doesn't like.
if you wanted to stand outside my aprtment building preaching the vertues of whatever your selling, you can do that, but i better be able to sleep at night.
Agreed. Spam isn't wrong because of the ideas expressed in the messages; it's wrong because of how the message is delivered. When people yell about how blocking spammers is censorship, they miss this point.
I presume that the price mentioned is the original retail price; that would effectively prevent people from opening used wax cylinder stores. I guess that's why we don't see such stores today, eh?
Some of them had nothing to do with spam,
MAPS started by listing the spammer sites. After six months of trying to get the ISP to clean up their act and being given the runaround, they gave up, and have concluded the ISP is spam-friendly. Since they have been the top listing at spamhaus.org for months, this seems like a pretty reasonable conclusion.
I'm sure that the people at MAPS think that peacefire is a swell thing. But they have concluded that the ISP is spam-friendly, and so they have listed it as such. It's a shame that Peacefire is using a spam-friendly ISP, but they have the right to decide for themselves, eh?
And since when does AboveNet have the right to blacklist entire domains and IP blocks anyway?
AboveNet is only blocking the stuff on their own networks. ISPs who have other routes to Media3 are not affected. An
There is no such thing as 'nonconsensual' speech.
Alas, that's not true.
Suppose I decide that you and the people in your apartment building are ripe for induction into my MLM scheme; all you need is a little more information about it. So I go buy the biggest loudspeaker system I can find and set it out front. I then rant continuously for days at a time, using pals to keep up a continuous stream of sales pitch. Neither you nor your neighbors are interested, and you are all trying your best not to hear.
When people are talking about nonconsentual communications, that's what they mean. You're welcome to have a different name for it, of course.
The entire point of Free (as in liberty) speech
is that you have the unfettered right to communicate.
I am sad to say that you are again off the mark.
Communication requires at least two participants. If I stand alone in the woods and speak my mind, that isn't communication. And if I stand alone in the woods and just listen to the wind in the trees, that isn't communication, either. Communication only happens when there is a speaker and a listener.
Freedom of speech means that nobody (especially the government) should come between two people trying to communicate. It does not mean the act of flapping ones lips should be at all times protected. If, despite your requests to stop, I chase you down the street shouting obscenities and nonsense words, that's just harassment; free speech never enters into it.
If you're interested in learning more about the nature of communication, you should read that hacker favorite, Godel, Escher, Bach.
Although I'm also fond of WebImage, it hasn't been updated in three years. After I gave these guys my money, I never heard a peep out of them until yesterday, when they spammed me.
Oh, sorry, they put me, without asking, on an "opt-in" news headline list, where they get revenue for every clickthrough. And even better, I can sign people up for it and get money for their clickthroughs! Feh. And when I contacted them, they of course told me that since I had given them my e-mail in 1997 (where the require it on every order), that they had put me on their "marketing" list. And since I was a customer, it couldn't be spam!
So beware of doing business with Group42.
I am not saying that AboveNet is trying to prevent people from learning about what relay blocking is. I am saying that they are
censoring the specific exchange of information needed to do the relay checking (albeit with some lame excuse).
Note that there are other relay checkers which they do allow, MAPS RSS being the most popular one. What exactly is it that you feel they are trying to censor?
Also note that what you consider to be a "lame excuse" is seen by a lot of other people, including many strong anti-spam advocates, as a reasonable argument. See, for example, the archive of SPAMTOOLS from around the end of May. Your adamant refusual to see any merit whatsoever in their position doesn't make you convincing; it makes you look clueless.
This would be akin to allowing a few books on what democracy is but not allowing people to actually communicate to implement it.
Well, you seem to be doing a pretty fair imitation of communicating about it.
Or if you wish to prove your point that it's the information rather than the actions, then set up an ORBS secondary within AboveNet's network. I'm sure ORBS would cooperate; you'd just need to find somebody to secondary the data so you could reach it.
So, it would not be reasonable for AboveNet to claim that allowing ORBS probes is just too much work for just one customer request.
Well, they still could claim that it's too much work (or, more likely, too risky for their routers) to allow ORBS probes for just a few customer requests. Indeed, if routing table size is what worries them, then a larger number of requests would be worse, not better.
And, yes, we do intend to vote with our dollars, losing our setup costs after our annual contract with our AboveNet-based ISP expires.
I'm glad to hear it.
And just to follow up, somebody has now decided that my original post was a troll, which is a post "designed to attract predictable responses or flames". Given that I'm the only one to respond to it, does this mean that somebody thinks I fell for my own troll? Or was this just to demonstrate my point that some moderators are apparently clue-deficient?
Sigh.