I do something similar, but by creating a subdomain too, so for example: mail@slashdot.org.mydomain.com That way, not only do i know who ratted me out, but i can also change the MX records to point back at their own servers.
As for public boards, they should not really be posting plain email addresses. Tho it's fairly easy to identify when this has happened rather than someone ratting out my address.
On the other hand, slashdot's mail obfuscation has some interesting results, i quite often get mails to things like nospam.slashdot.org.mydomain.com etc.
If anything, while the combined market share would bring them to 20% in the short term, i think it would drop after that... A merger would change both sides, and not necessarily for the better thus driving users away... Microsoft would be keen to migrate yahoo's services to run on their technology, a process which would be expensive in terms of manpower and hardware resources, even if they dont need to pay for any of the software (same thing happened with hotmail), and would undoubtedly have teething troubles. They would also be keen to eliminate redundancy to improve efficiency, which could result in things users like getting lost. Also some there is a lot more anti-microsoft sentiment on the internet than there is anti-yahoo or anti-google, so the merger would undoubtedly drive away some yahoo users right off the bat.
Well Yahoo, like hotmail, run all their stuff on FreeBSD... You can bet yahoo would go the same way, migrating to windows, spending a ridiculous amount on new hardware and suffering significant problems in the process.
Yes, in business that is invariably the case... The best you can hope to achieve is to serve the lesser evil, or to serve an evildoer who does as much good as possible as a side effect, as in this case.
Well yes, the potential market is much bigger, but the percentage of healthy people who will buy sexual enhancement medication is much lower than the percentage of AIDS sufferers who will purchase AIDS medication. And then consider, what is the percentage of people who, once cured of AIDS would buy sexual enhancement medication? I'm sure a lot of them, after a period of time having no sex, would need no additional stimulus.
So by curing AIDS, you'd get a few more healthy people, but only a small number of them would buy sexual enhancement drugs. But most of them will buy AIDS medication for as long as they continue to suffer from AIDS.
Regardless of what happens to those suffering from AIDS, you can still sell your ED drugs to those who aren't suffering any sexually transmitted illness.
I think that, especially with the ease of developing the interface discussed in the article, the frontend should be customisable and ship with a different default depending on the target device. Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devices, from blackberry devices with a full qwerty keyboard, to devices like the iphone where virtually all interaction is through the touch screen. A one size fits all approach isn't really suitable for the embedded space.
Anyway, what did Apple really do? They switched their OS9 for one of the oldest OS'es still around? Apple did NOT write new code, they used existing code, existing ANCIENT code. Age has nothing to do with it, if code was well designed 20 years ago it will still be well designed today. The problem with OS9 and MS is they didn't have a good design to start with, and ended up with layers and layers of cruft as they had to introduce new better designed ways of doing things, while still keeping the old crufty methods for backwards compatibility, thus introducing ridiculous levels of bloat and still keeping the original design flaws.
Yeah pretty much, install the minimal core of the OS to get networking up, and retrieve the latest versions of everything you actually need over the network. So long as it give you a choice as to what you want to install. Kinda like the netinstall images you get for freebsd or debian etc.
The UK is quite strategically placed too, a significant portion or USAEurope cabling goes via the UK, and they carry a significant amount of traffic. If you cut off the UK, you would significantly reduce transatlantic capacity too.
A patient suffering from AIDS will need to get medication for it, and will likely get it from his existing healthcare service. A patient not suffering from AIDS may or may not want sexual enhancement drugs, many people have perfectly adequate sex lives without needing additional drugs.
Drugs companies will make a lot more money from AIDS medication than sexual enhancement drugs.
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"...
IBM's actions benefit many, while Microsoft's actions benefit few. You can't expect corporations to behave like charities, IBM's actions are better than most.
Taken to it's ultimate conclusion, consider the end result of IBM's action:
All software people use day to day is free, and some help can be obtained online for free. For everything you might want to do, there is a choice of applications which all interoperate using standard formats. For businesses who want accountability and someone they can demand immediate help from, there are still consultancy services but they are now capable of providing more complete support (code fixes etc).
Home users would get software included when they bought a computer, and would get it supported by geeky friends/family, just like they do now... they would get a much larger selection of software included tho, and be able to install newer versions (or have the geeky friends do it) for free. The customer would get a lot more for their money, and have a choice of software just like they currently have a choice of hardware. Companies selling computers would still provide support to their customers, just like they do now.
Microsoft are the only ones who would lose out. Unless you receive money from Microsoft, it's almost certainly in you're interest to support IBM's actions.
Not only that, but the blogs are open to comment.. Microsoft is free to respond to the published flaws in their format... They're also free to contribute to the ODF format and always have been, it was them who chose not to.
No, because the customers have a limited budget, the less they spend on software the more they can spend on consultancy. Also if the software is open source or internal IBM closed source, IBM's consultancy division can provide a full level of support for it themselves, including code fixes for bigger customers. If they use proprietary software from a third party vendor, then a certain percentage of support (and thus revenue) will have to be farmed out to the software vendor, reducing IBM's profit margins.
On the other hand, IBM are competing in a free market for consultancy, any other consultancy will have exactly the same level of access to open source code as IBM does, and likely a lot less bureaucracy, lower costs and a more personal service. I would rather compete against IBM who's only advantage over me is name recognition and budget, than MS who can always ensure that my service is inferior and more expensive than theirs.
So Microsoft are complaining about IBM pushing for the use of ODF, a format which benefits them (and others), when they themselves are pushing hard for OOXML, a format which only benefits them at the expense of the users and other companies, and which is late to the party among other things.
IBM are pushing for a neutral format that probably benefits Sun more than it does IBM... In fact it benefits pretty much everyone except MS.
The complaints would be more reasonable if IBM were trying to push a proprietary IBM format, but they're pushing an ISO standardised open format supported by many other vendors. It may benefit IBM, but it will benefit many more people a lot more. This is a clear case of corporate self interest coinciding with the public good.
1) If you are large enough to have 500 users and your IT guy(s) cant keep track of 500 keys you should fire them. 500 keys for each product... unnecessary extra burden.
2) For large numbers of installs you would typically get a site license anyways.
3) If the product is installed on your computer it probably wanted a product key on installation. This means its on the computer, you cant lose it so if you get audited you dont have to worry about missing cd keys. As long as you didnt break the rules when you installed you are ok. Until you come to reinstall the machine, and need to look up the original key again...
It's all a load of unnecessary hassle that only disrupts legit users... Pirates won't have any problems anyway.
Hookers don't want to have AIDS, and make quite a lot of money from their work... They would be among the first people to use an AIDS cure if one became available.
How much money do you think big drugs companies would pay to bury your AIDS cure? If something like that got out, it would be a massive profit hit to some very large companies.
Which is exactly why drug research should not be done by commercial companies...
It is more profitable to provide a drug that temporarily alleviates the symptoms, than one that cures the problem. Look at the HIV/AIDS medications, sufferers are expected to take a cocktail of drugs which will suppress the virus and delay the onset of full blown AIDS from HIV... But it won't cure the problem, the sufferer will take these drugs for many years but will still eventually develop full blown AIDS and die an excruciating death. They are also still able to infect others, and thus unlikely to have a fulfilling sex life or to have kids.
The years that the HIV/AIDS sufferer continues taking these drugs, means continuous profit for the drugs companies selling them, which is good for business.
However a vaccine that cured HIV, and allowed the sufferer to continue their life as normal would be a one-shot treatment, and would eliminate the risk of the sufferer infecting others.
Medical research should _NOT_ be conducted by for-profit companies, it is in their interest to keep as many patients suffering for as long as possible so as to generate more profit. Research into medicine should be done by government and charity, and released into the public domain for the greater good. You could also tax for-profit medical providers, insurers etc, to provide money for research.
Companies providing medical insurance would still be better off, as drugs would be cheaper and the drugs would be developed with the aim of curing the patient rather than keeping them suffering. Same for non-profit or nationalised healthcare, who would save a lot of money not only in the price of drugs, but by the reduced volume of patients.
They are also more concerned with making drugs that temporarily alleviate symptoms, rather than drugs which actually cure the ailment. Being commercial businesses that need to make profit for their shareholders, it is far more profitable to sell someone a cocktail of drugs that only alleviate some of the symptoms, such that the patient has to keep using them indefinitely, rather than providing a cure...
A cured patient will buy the cure once, and then not need any more drugs... A patient still suffering will continue to buy the drugs that temporarily alleviate some of his symptoms for the rest of his life.
If one of these companies discovered a cure to AIDS, they would keep it to themselves. If they released it they would make a lot of short term profit, that is until AIDS was completely eradicated, at which point they would no longer be able to make any profit from AIDS sufferers. It's also in their interests to make drugs with side effects, so that they can sell additional drugs to combat the side effects.
Commercial pharmaceutical research is completely corrupt by it's very nature, the goals of a commercial business are completely at odds with the patient's needs.
Pharmaceutical research should be performed by government and charities, with full accountability and no commercial bias. It is in the interest of government to have a healthy populace, as unhealthy citizens don't earn any money for the country... Even more so in a country with nationalised healthcare, as unhealthy citizens are an additional burden. If a national healthcare system could put AIDS sufferers on a short course of drugs so they could continue to live a healthy life after a month or two of treatment, instead of feeding them expensive drugs for 30-40 years until they die, the healthcare system would benefit greatly.
Pharmaceutical companies should be relegated to lowest-bidder manufacturing of publicly available drugs.
And just how practical is it to install 500 separate systems with 500 separate product keys, and also to keep track of 500 separate product keys and which machines they belong to for when these machines break and need to be wiped and reinstalled?
Product keys are a huge pain in the ass, i know many people who have bought software but lost the product key, and been told to buy it all again, or who have to reinstall for whatever reason and spend hours searching for all the product keys among all the other bullshit literature.
You used an Amiga at school? Where did you go to school? Wordperfect was never very popular on Amiga, people tended to prefer graphical apps like Kindwords, Wordworth and Final Writer... The Amiga as a whole was generally geared towards graphical apps.
But things like Apple upgrades give you a choice... You can *choose* to buy an expensive upgrade from apple, or you can buy a cheaper but otherwise identical one from somewhere else. Some people may be lazy, require all their hardware be vendor approved, not be capable/willing of installing the upgrade, or just plain stupid.
The point is that telco's operate a closed loop, with a cartel to keep prices of messages artificially high, you often have no choice but to use their service at whatever price they set.
When it's no longer possible to buy upgrades from anywhere other than apple, let me know.
Slashdot Mirror
"pretty cheap" ? You pay extra for such simple features as that?
I do something similar, but by creating a subdomain too, so for example:
mail@slashdot.org.mydomain.com
That way, not only do i know who ratted me out, but i can also change the MX records to point back at their own servers.
As for public boards, they should not really be posting plain email addresses. Tho it's fairly easy to identify when this has happened rather than someone ratting out my address.
On the other hand, slashdot's mail obfuscation has some interesting results, i quite often get mails to things like nospam.slashdot.org.mydomain.com etc.
If anything, while the combined market share would bring them to 20% in the short term, i think it would drop after that...
A merger would change both sides, and not necessarily for the better thus driving users away... Microsoft would be keen to migrate yahoo's services to run on their technology, a process which would be expensive in terms of manpower and hardware resources, even if they dont need to pay for any of the software (same thing happened with hotmail), and would undoubtedly have teething troubles. They would also be keen to eliminate redundancy to improve efficiency, which could result in things users like getting lost.
Also some there is a lot more anti-microsoft sentiment on the internet than there is anti-yahoo or anti-google, so the merger would undoubtedly drive away some yahoo users right off the bat.
Well Yahoo, like hotmail, run all their stuff on FreeBSD...
You can bet yahoo would go the same way, migrating to windows, spending a ridiculous amount on new hardware and suffering significant problems in the process.
And most of those products went down hill in various ways after being bought...
Yes, in business that is invariably the case...
The best you can hope to achieve is to serve the lesser evil, or to serve an evildoer who does as much good as possible as a side effect, as in this case.
Well yes, the potential market is much bigger, but the percentage of healthy people who will buy sexual enhancement medication is much lower than the percentage of AIDS sufferers who will purchase AIDS medication.
And then consider, what is the percentage of people who, once cured of AIDS would buy sexual enhancement medication? I'm sure a lot of them, after a period of time having no sex, would need no additional stimulus.
So by curing AIDS, you'd get a few more healthy people, but only a small number of them would buy sexual enhancement drugs. But most of them will buy AIDS medication for as long as they continue to suffer from AIDS.
Regardless of what happens to those suffering from AIDS, you can still sell your ED drugs to those who aren't suffering any sexually transmitted illness.
I think that, especially with the ease of developing the interface discussed in the article, the frontend should be customisable and ship with a different default depending on the target device.
Consider that it will end up running on lots of different devices, from blackberry devices with a full qwerty keyboard, to devices like the iphone where virtually all interaction is through the touch screen. A one size fits all approach isn't really suitable for the embedded space.
Yeah pretty much, install the minimal core of the OS to get networking up, and retrieve the latest versions of everything you actually need over the network. So long as it give you a choice as to what you want to install.
Kinda like the netinstall images you get for freebsd or debian etc.
The UK is quite strategically placed too, a significant portion or USAEurope cabling goes via the UK, and they carry a significant amount of traffic. If you cut off the UK, you would significantly reduce transatlantic capacity too.
A patient suffering from AIDS will need to get medication for it, and will likely get it from his existing healthcare service.
A patient not suffering from AIDS may or may not want sexual enhancement drugs, many people have perfectly adequate sex lives without needing additional drugs.
Drugs companies will make a lot more money from AIDS medication than sexual enhancement drugs.
Actually, quite a lot of the sites i see advertised in spam require IE!
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few"...
IBM's actions benefit many, while Microsoft's actions benefit few. You can't expect corporations to behave like charities, IBM's actions are better than most.
Taken to it's ultimate conclusion, consider the end result of IBM's action:
All software people use day to day is free, and some help can be obtained online for free.
For everything you might want to do, there is a choice of applications which all interoperate using standard formats.
For businesses who want accountability and someone they can demand immediate help from, there are still consultancy services but they are now capable of providing more complete support (code fixes etc).
Home users would get software included when they bought a computer, and would get it supported by geeky friends/family, just like they do now... they would get a much larger selection of software included tho, and be able to install newer versions (or have the geeky friends do it) for free. The customer would get a lot more for their money, and have a choice of software just like they currently have a choice of hardware.
Companies selling computers would still provide support to their customers, just like they do now.
Microsoft are the only ones who would lose out. Unless you receive money from Microsoft, it's almost certainly in you're interest to support IBM's actions.
Not only that, but the blogs are open to comment.. Microsoft is free to respond to the published flaws in their format...
They're also free to contribute to the ODF format and always have been, it was them who chose not to.
No, because the customers have a limited budget, the less they spend on software the more they can spend on consultancy.
Also if the software is open source or internal IBM closed source, IBM's consultancy division can provide a full level of support for it themselves, including code fixes for bigger customers. If they use proprietary software from a third party vendor, then a certain percentage of support (and thus revenue) will have to be farmed out to the software vendor, reducing IBM's profit margins.
On the other hand, IBM are competing in a free market for consultancy, any other consultancy will have exactly the same level of access to open source code as IBM does, and likely a lot less bureaucracy, lower costs and a more personal service. I would rather compete against IBM who's only advantage over me is name recognition and budget, than MS who can always ensure that my service is inferior and more expensive than theirs.
So Microsoft are complaining about IBM pushing for the use of ODF, a format which benefits them (and others), when they themselves are pushing hard for OOXML, a format which only benefits them at the expense of the users and other companies, and which is late to the party among other things.
IBM are pushing for a neutral format that probably benefits Sun more than it does IBM... In fact it benefits pretty much everyone except MS.
The complaints would be more reasonable if IBM were trying to push a proprietary IBM format, but they're pushing an ISO standardised open format supported by many other vendors. It may benefit IBM, but it will benefit many more people a lot more. This is a clear case of corporate self interest coinciding with the public good.
Wasn't there a quote by Michael Dell a few years ago saying that innovation was dead?
It's all a load of unnecessary hassle that only disrupts legit users... Pirates won't have any problems anyway.
Hookers don't want to have AIDS, and make quite a lot of money from their work... They would be among the first people to use an AIDS cure if one became available.
How much money do you think big drugs companies would pay to bury your AIDS cure? If something like that got out, it would be a massive profit hit to some very large companies.
Which is exactly why drug research should not be done by commercial companies...
It is more profitable to provide a drug that temporarily alleviates the symptoms, than one that cures the problem. Look at the HIV/AIDS medications, sufferers are expected to take a cocktail of drugs which will suppress the virus and delay the onset of full blown AIDS from HIV... But it won't cure the problem, the sufferer will take these drugs for many years but will still eventually develop full blown AIDS and die an excruciating death. They are also still able to infect others, and thus unlikely to have a fulfilling sex life or to have kids.
The years that the HIV/AIDS sufferer continues taking these drugs, means continuous profit for the drugs companies selling them, which is good for business.
However a vaccine that cured HIV, and allowed the sufferer to continue their life as normal would be a one-shot treatment, and would eliminate the risk of the sufferer infecting others.
Medical research should _NOT_ be conducted by for-profit companies, it is in their interest to keep as many patients suffering for as long as possible so as to generate more profit. Research into medicine should be done by government and charity, and released into the public domain for the greater good. You could also tax for-profit medical providers, insurers etc, to provide money for research.
Companies providing medical insurance would still be better off, as drugs would be cheaper and the drugs would be developed with the aim of curing the patient rather than keeping them suffering. Same for non-profit or nationalised healthcare, who would save a lot of money not only in the price of drugs, but by the reduced volume of patients.
They are also more concerned with making drugs that temporarily alleviate symptoms, rather than drugs which actually cure the ailment.
Being commercial businesses that need to make profit for their shareholders, it is far more profitable to sell someone a cocktail of drugs that only alleviate some of the symptoms, such that the patient has to keep using them indefinitely, rather than providing a cure...
A cured patient will buy the cure once, and then not need any more drugs...
A patient still suffering will continue to buy the drugs that temporarily alleviate some of his symptoms for the rest of his life.
If one of these companies discovered a cure to AIDS, they would keep it to themselves. If they released it they would make a lot of short term profit, that is until AIDS was completely eradicated, at which point they would no longer be able to make any profit from AIDS sufferers.
It's also in their interests to make drugs with side effects, so that they can sell additional drugs to combat the side effects.
Commercial pharmaceutical research is completely corrupt by it's very nature, the goals of a commercial business are completely at odds with the patient's needs.
Pharmaceutical research should be performed by government and charities, with full accountability and no commercial bias. It is in the interest of government to have a healthy populace, as unhealthy citizens don't earn any money for the country... Even more so in a country with nationalised healthcare, as unhealthy citizens are an additional burden. If a national healthcare system could put AIDS sufferers on a short course of drugs so they could continue to live a healthy life after a month or two of treatment, instead of feeding them expensive drugs for 30-40 years until they die, the healthcare system would benefit greatly.
Pharmaceutical companies should be relegated to lowest-bidder manufacturing of publicly available drugs.
And just how practical is it to install 500 separate systems with 500 separate product keys, and also to keep track of 500 separate product keys and which machines they belong to for when these machines break and need to be wiped and reinstalled?
Product keys are a huge pain in the ass, i know many people who have bought software but lost the product key, and been told to buy it all again, or who have to reinstall for whatever reason and spend hours searching for all the product keys among all the other bullshit literature.
You used an Amiga at school? Where did you go to school?
Wordperfect was never very popular on Amiga, people tended to prefer graphical apps like Kindwords, Wordworth and Final Writer... The Amiga as a whole was generally geared towards graphical apps.
But things like Apple upgrades give you a choice...
You can *choose* to buy an expensive upgrade from apple, or you can buy a cheaper but otherwise identical one from somewhere else. Some people may be lazy, require all their hardware be vendor approved, not be capable/willing of installing the upgrade, or just plain stupid.
The point is that telco's operate a closed loop, with a cartel to keep prices of messages artificially high, you often have no choice but to use their service at whatever price they set.
When it's no longer possible to buy upgrades from anywhere other than apple, let me know.