[quote]There's a lot of other things that, if you're running MS systems, really make a difference. NT4, if IIS hangs, you're rebooting (and that might take 30 minutes unless you hit the power switch because the processor locks).[/quote]
Nice thought, but not true.
If IIS4 on NT4 takes a dive and becomes completely unresponsive to attempts to restart the service, 9 out of 10 times you can still fix it in ~20 seconds or so without a reboot simply by killing both the web publishing service and the inetinfo.exe process using the 'kill.exe' command line tool that is found in NT4's option pack. (It also works great on win2000/XP))
Indispensible utility, most of the processes that are 'unkillable' from the task manager can succesfully be stopped with it.
For those who hadn't noticed yet: try reloading the http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com site a few times. (Hm... Would that be considered a Serial-Slashdotting?)
There are a number of different fashions in which the earth gets obliterated -- Not sure how many there are total, but I've seen at least 7 different ones.
"If we see a courtroom victory against IBM, than obviously that number will jump up significantly."
Interesting choice of words: so far SCO appeared to have convinced themselves (and trying to convince the market) that it wasn't a matter of "if", but "when". Are they slowly coming to the realiziation that the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a train on a collision course?
Back when I was 15 or so, I once was watering a hanging plant, which was hooked to the ceiling close to my (first) computer. Too much water.
After starting to walk away, I hear a noise and turned around just in time to see the outer pot of the plant that held the excess water slip out of the little clamps that hold it up, and fall down (in extreme slow-motion of course) onto a VCR right next to the computer... Then tip, and at least a full cup of water streams out straight into the ventilation slots on top of my monitor, which was actually turned on at the time.
Immediately turned it off. (maybe not the brightest idea in hindsight, but luckily didn't electrocute myself there)
After unplugging it, I opened up the monitor itself (probably another bad idea) and had a large fan blow straight onto the electronics inside for a day or two to completely dry it out... Screwed everything back together again, and miraculously it actually worked for several more years.
With 'bonus cards' in general, it can pay to read the entire form first. When I got my Albertson's club card after they first introduced them, I skimmed through it before filling anything out, and noticed the checkbox at the bottom that said "I prefer not to give out any personal information, but give me a bonus card anyway"
Three seconds, one checkmark, no personal info, and no need to make up bogus info.
It did confuse the heck out of the cashier that was supposed to 'process' the 'application' and hand out the card - He had never even -seen- that option himself on the form, let alone that anyone had ever checked it. At first he must have just thought that I was a moron and didn't know how to fill out a form or something, until I pointed it out to him.
Of course everyone else in line happily fills out their entire life story at the prospect a small discount.
On the other hand, I do have an old safeway card in my real name myself, but that had some other interesting results: Apparently my last name is too long for their cash registers to process. (18 characters including two spaces, in Dutch) Any time it would get scanned the cash register would crash and none of the cashiers had any clue how to unlock it again since that never happened to anyone else. After a couple of times, I could tell the poor cashiers exactly which buttons to press to 'fix' their register again. On top of that, instead of them calling me by my name after the transaction, all I would normally get was a blank stare with people noticably thinking to themselves that they wouldn't even *try* to pronounce it. They probably thought that it must have been a fake last name anyway.
There is always the option of simply filling out a bogus name and address info of course, which can be amusing as well. My father-in-law has a Safeway clubcard in the name of "Mickey Mouse", which is funny since their cashiers are required to wish you a good day by name after checking out, and it sure makes them look very puzzled for a bit, before addressing him as "Mr. Mouse"
I looked at the unicast website, and after following one of the links for their 'full screen superstitial example' ads, I am pleased to say that it didn't exactly work as advertised -- so much for the "guaranteed to work on any computer".
Using Avant Browser on Win2000, all it did for me was open another (non-fullscreen) window (in another tab), that stayed blank for a second or 20, and then closed itself again. No video, no ad, no full-screen nothing. Trivial to close.
Several attempt to view the different ads all did the same, although one of the times the window did not close itself but remained open. (Great going guys! Thanks for locking grannie out of her system if this ad truly would have taken over the entire screen on her computer)
Now... Unless they conveniently forgot to mention that you need at least shockwave version 2 and a half million or so for these ads to work, I am not terribly impressed with their new "technology".
Advertising something as the Next Big Thing (tm) that works on Every Computer, Guaranteed when it quite obviously doesn't work as advertised here is actually kind of amusing.
To be fair, I also tried their 'demo ' in Internet Explorer, and while it did maximize the window to cover the entire desktop area (while leaving the taskbar, FWIW) the window did remain all white, with no video. (On a T1, so no bandwidth issues on this side)
The 'regular' (non-fullscreen) superstitial ads on the unicast website -did- play video on my system by the way, in a 640x480 popup window or so.
Anyway, any site that actually employs fulls screen superstitial ads *deserves* to have their visitors leave them behind in droves.
Let's get extreme and start dropping packets from entire/24s from which spam is originating
Nice... Except you need to be *very* cautious about which/24's you're willing to drop, because part of the problem of spam these days is that is originates everywhere.Zombies, free trial accounts, hit-and-run dialup spammers, open relays, etc. Spam is something that affects every ISP these days, to greater or lesser extend.
As soon as you start blocking AOL and Earthlink's IP blocks because of the high volume of spam you get from them, you will also lose customers by the droves because all of a sudden they can't receive mail from their grandma anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for spam filtering, as well as hitting the spammers themselves where it hurts, but 'extreme blocking' will hurt you and your own customers more than it will hurt the spammer.
Most spammers won't even see the rejections caused by your networks, since some other poor guy will be on the receiving end of all their bounces, and they truly won't care.
I personally use SpamBayes (Free, open source) for my spam filtering, which does an unbelievably good job of detecting spam, with no false positives so far.
Written in Python, runs on Windows as well as Linux. http://spambayes.sourceforge.net
However, if you're a retailer and you know you have X allocation of iPods, and you can sell them all at full retail, why discount?
To set yourself aside from the other retailers?
Even if you have a loss-leader to get people in the door, it can still be profitable because many people buy accessories or other products at the same time as the cheap advertised product -- but you need to get them in the store first.
Also, getting a 'good' price makes you more likely to return to the same store in the future when you're ready to buy other products.
It is not always necessary to make a profit on every item you sell to come out ahead in the long run.
Wonder if Symantec, McAfee, etc., will offer a remote storage service in the future? Does everybody really need to store the same list of virus definitions on C: ?
Since you *need* the data from that list to actually detect virusses, that would be kind of pointless. Do you realy want to download this every single time you start your virus scanner?
A local copy makes *much* more sense...
ew product tags equipped with microchips and tiny antennas could one day make it easy to scan all the groceries in a bag simultaneously, allow businesses to locate any item in a warehouse instantly and enable the Defense Department to better manage inventories of mundane necessities like meals and spare boots.
Military boots with RFID tags?
Sure... And how long before there will be landmines with a simple RFID-reader built into them?
Re:I've said this before and I'll repeat myself...
on
P2P Spam?
·
· Score: 1
Already happening - I've come across users that managed to get their Outlook Express signature files infiltrated by [IFRAME]statements that opened a bunch of questionable websites...
There are two *huge* differences when it comes to spam:
1) Your local pizza place actually has to spend money on each and every one of those menus they dump on your doorstep, which means that it is in their best interest not to dump 10 copies every day there, unlike some spammers do.
2) And something that is often overlooked in these kind of analogies: There are at best a few hundred businesses within driving distance to your house to which it could make sense to send you promotional snailmail. On the internet, *everyone* is local. That means potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of 'companies' who could send you their 'special promotions', for virtually no charge to them.
Spam levels are horrible these days -- I am the administrator of several mailservers at an ISP, and they receive hundred thousand spam messages a DAY, combined. Currently about 70% of all incoming mail gets flagged as spam by our spam filters, up from ~50% little over a year ago.
The total number of spam sent still increases every month, according to the numbers by the major anti-spam companies like Postini and Brightmail. Just for a moment, imagine how bad it would be if there had been noone trying to put an end to it...
They are the ones who programmed the executable handlers to not check what type of file was there (whether it be an exe posing as a pif file, or a screensaver).
As far as a screensaver is concerned: not really much they can do, since a.SCR screeensaver *is* a normal.EXE, by design -- That may (or may not) have been a stupid decision, but the only thing necessary to make an 'official' windows screensaver is to rename the extension, and respond to certain command-line parameters to bring up the config window, demo mode, etc.
I seem to recall reading a study (newscientist.com?) showing that infants and young people in general could only describe their memories using words which they knew at the time the memory was acquired.
Memory is a funny thing though.
I grew up in The Netherlands, speaking Dutch. Four years ago, when I was 23, I moved to the US. When switching between languages, it takes a little while before you start to think in the new language as well; For a while I caught myself switching back and forth in my mind, sometimes even mid-thought.
More recently, I started noticing that many of my memories have started to change as well -- when I recall certain events, dialogs, discussions, etc. I actually *remember* them in English, even though I know for a fact they happened in Dutch at the time.
Definitely kind of a weird sensation, the first time you realize that.
My earliest memories are between ages 1 and 2, but no sounds or dialogs... Just visual blurbs.
If a machine, no matter how old, is working, and you paid a lot of cash for it, no business will get rid of it to get something new just because its new/flashy.
Of course this does not work indefinitely -- at some point the hardware is outdated to the extend that it may be near impossible to find reliable replacement parts for it.
From that point of view, it can definitely be worth it to have a planned migration to a new/different platform on your own terms, rather than scrambling to put something together when the old beast finally does blow up...
Unless Microsoft 'forgot' to keep track of the MAC addresses of previously released machines, I bet it will be only a matter of time for them to simply compare the MAC address of a connecting xbox against a database of 'valid' MAC addresses...
(Much like the Battle.net server checking the validity of CD-keys, for Warcraft, Starcraft, etc.)
Of course 'not buying their products' alone will not do you much good either - the industry will just cry that CD sales slumped, 'because of pirating' -- and make even more of a push for DRM.
How far can a company possibly alienate their customer base?
A day after our first baby was born, we received a baby-package from the hospital -- Aside from the obligatory baby wipes, diaper samples, bottles, etc, the package also contained an AOL CD.
Riiiiiight.
Slashdot Mirror
[quote]There's a lot of other things that, if you're running MS systems, really make a difference. NT4, if IIS hangs, you're rebooting (and that might take 30 minutes unless you hit the power switch because the processor locks).[/quote] Nice thought, but not true. If IIS4 on NT4 takes a dive and becomes completely unresponsive to attempts to restart the service, 9 out of 10 times you can still fix it in ~20 seconds or so without a reboot simply by killing both the web publishing service and the inetinfo.exe process using the 'kill.exe' command line tool that is found in NT4's option pack. (It also works great on win2000/XP)) Indispensible utility, most of the processes that are 'unkillable' from the task manager can succesfully be stopped with it.
For those who hadn't noticed yet: try reloading the http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com site a few times. (Hm... Would that be considered a Serial-Slashdotting?) There are a number of different fashions in which the earth gets obliterated -- Not sure how many there are total, but I've seen at least 7 different ones.
"open eyes"
"If we see a courtroom victory against IBM, than obviously that number will jump up significantly."
Interesting choice of words: so far SCO appeared to have convinced themselves (and trying to convince the market) that it wasn't a matter of "if", but "when". Are they slowly coming to the realiziation that the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a train on a collision course?
Back when I was 15 or so, I once was watering a hanging plant, which was hooked to the ceiling close to my (first) computer. Too much water.
After starting to walk away, I hear a noise and turned around just in time to see the outer pot of the plant that held the excess water slip out of the little clamps that hold it up, and fall down (in extreme slow-motion of course) onto a VCR right next to the computer... Then tip, and at least a full cup of water streams out straight into the ventilation slots on top of my monitor, which was actually turned on at the time.
Immediately turned it off. (maybe not the brightest idea in hindsight, but luckily didn't electrocute myself there)
After unplugging it, I opened up the monitor itself (probably another bad idea) and had a large fan blow straight onto the electronics inside for a day or two to completely dry it out... Screwed everything back together again, and miraculously it actually worked for several more years.
My dad keeps saying, in a few years they are going to send you targeted advertisements based on your buying habbits
Some stores already do, in a way - Some safeways occasionally print out a coupon for you upon checkout, based on certain items you may have bought.
With 'bonus cards' in general, it can pay to read the entire form first. When I got my Albertson's club card after they first introduced them, I skimmed through it before filling anything out, and noticed the checkbox at the bottom that said "I prefer not to give out any personal information, but give me a bonus card anyway"
Three seconds, one checkmark, no personal info,
and no need to make up bogus info.
It did confuse the heck out of the cashier that was supposed to 'process' the 'application' and hand out the card - He had never even -seen- that option himself on the form, let alone that anyone had ever checked it. At first he must have just thought that I was a moron and didn't know how to fill out a form or something, until I pointed it out to him.
Of course everyone else in line happily fills out their entire life story at the prospect a small discount.
On the other hand, I do have an old safeway card in my real name myself, but that had some other interesting results: Apparently my last name is too long for their cash registers to process. (18 characters including two spaces, in Dutch) Any time it would get scanned the cash register would crash and none of the cashiers had any clue how to unlock it again since that never happened to anyone else. After a couple of times, I could tell the poor cashiers exactly which buttons to press to 'fix' their register again.
On top of that, instead of them calling me by my name after the transaction, all I would normally get was a blank stare with people noticably thinking to themselves that they wouldn't even *try* to pronounce it. They probably thought that it must have been a fake last name anyway.
There is always the option of simply filling out a bogus name and address info of course, which can be amusing as well. My father-in-law has a Safeway clubcard in the name of "Mickey Mouse", which is funny since their cashiers are required to wish you a good day by name after checking out, and it sure makes them look very puzzled for a bit, before addressing him as "Mr. Mouse"
I looked at the unicast website, and after following one of the links for their 'full screen superstitial example' ads, I am pleased to say that it didn't exactly work as advertised -- so much for the "guaranteed to work on any computer".
Using Avant Browser on Win2000, all it did for me was open another (non-fullscreen) window (in another tab), that stayed blank for a second or 20, and then closed itself again. No video, no ad, no full-screen nothing. Trivial to close.
Several attempt to view the different ads all did the same, although one of the times the window did not close itself but remained open. (Great going guys! Thanks for locking grannie out of her system if this ad truly would have taken over the entire screen on her computer)
Now... Unless they conveniently forgot to mention that you need at least shockwave version 2 and a half million or so for these ads to work, I am not terribly impressed with their new "technology".
Advertising something as the Next Big Thing (tm) that works on Every Computer, Guaranteed when it quite obviously doesn't work as advertised here is actually kind of amusing.
To be fair, I also tried their 'demo ' in Internet Explorer, and while it did maximize the window to cover the entire desktop area (while leaving the taskbar, FWIW) the window did remain all white, with no video. (On a T1, so no bandwidth issues on this side)
The 'regular' (non-fullscreen) superstitial ads on the unicast website -did- play video on my system by the way, in a 640x480 popup window or so.
Anyway, any site that actually employs fulls screen superstitial ads *deserves* to have their visitors leave them behind in droves.
Let's get extreme and start dropping packets from entire /24s from which spam is originating
/24's you're willing to drop, because part of the problem of spam these days is that is originates everywhere.Zombies, free trial accounts, hit-and-run dialup spammers, open relays, etc. Spam is something that affects every ISP these days, to greater or lesser extend.
Nice... Except you need to be *very* cautious about which
As soon as you start blocking AOL and Earthlink's IP blocks because of the high volume of spam you get from them, you will also lose customers by the droves because all of a sudden they can't receive mail from their grandma anymore.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for spam filtering, as well as hitting the spammers themselves where it hurts, but 'extreme blocking' will hurt you and your own customers more than it will hurt the spammer.
Most spammers won't even see the rejections caused by your networks, since some other poor guy will be on the receiving end of all their bounces, and they truly won't care.
I personally use SpamBayes (Free, open source) for my spam filtering, which does an unbelievably good job of detecting spam, with no false positives so far. Written in Python, runs on Windows as well as Linux. http://spambayes.sourceforge.net
However, if you're a retailer and you know you have X allocation of iPods, and you can sell them all at full retail, why discount?
To set yourself aside from the other retailers? Even if you have a loss-leader to get people in the door, it can still be profitable because many people buy accessories or other products at the same time as the cheap advertised product -- but you need to get them in the store first.
Also, getting a 'good' price makes you more likely to return to the same store in the future when you're ready to buy other products.
It is not always necessary to make a profit on every item you sell to come out ahead in the long run.
Wonder if Symantec, McAfee, etc., will offer a remote storage service in the future? Does everybody really need to store the same list of virus definitions on C: ? Since you *need* the data from that list to actually detect virusses, that would be kind of pointless. Do you realy want to download this every single time you start your virus scanner? A local copy makes *much* more sense...
ew product tags equipped with microchips and tiny antennas could one day make it easy to scan all the groceries in a bag simultaneously, allow businesses to locate any item in a warehouse instantly and enable the Defense Department to better manage inventories of mundane necessities like meals and spare boots.
Military boots with RFID tags?
Sure... And how long before there will be landmines with a simple RFID-reader built into them?
Already happening - I've come across users that managed to get their Outlook Express signature files infiltrated by [IFRAME]statements that opened a bunch of questionable websites...
Comparing spam with menus left on your doorstep??
There are two *huge* differences when it comes to spam:
1) Your local pizza place actually has to spend money on each and every one of those menus they dump on your doorstep, which means that it is in their best interest not to dump 10 copies every day there, unlike some spammers do.
2) And something that is often overlooked in these kind of analogies: There are at best a few hundred businesses within driving distance to your house to which it could make sense to send you promotional snailmail. On the internet, *everyone* is local. That means potentially hundreds of thousands or even millions of 'companies' who could send you their 'special promotions', for virtually no charge to them.
Spam levels are horrible these days -- I am the administrator of several mailservers at an ISP, and they receive hundred thousand spam messages a DAY, combined. Currently about 70% of all incoming mail gets flagged as spam by our spam filters, up from ~50% little over a year ago.
The total number of spam sent still increases every month, according to the numbers by the major anti-spam companies like Postini and Brightmail. Just for a moment, imagine how bad it would be if there had been noone trying to put an end to it...
They are the ones who programmed the executable handlers to not check what type of file was there (whether it be an exe posing as a pif file, or a screensaver).
.SCR screeensaver *is* a normal .EXE, by design -- That may (or may not) have been a stupid decision, but the only thing necessary to make an 'official' windows screensaver is to rename the extension, and respond to certain command-line parameters to bring up the config window, demo mode, etc.
As far as a screensaver is concerned: not really much they can do, since a
I seem to recall reading a study (newscientist.com?) showing that infants and young people in general could only describe their memories using words which they knew at the time the memory was acquired.
Memory is a funny thing though.
I grew up in The Netherlands, speaking Dutch. Four years ago, when I was 23, I moved to the US. When switching between languages, it takes a little while before you start to think in the new language as well; For a while I caught myself switching back and forth in my mind, sometimes even mid-thought.
More recently, I started noticing that many of my memories have started to change as well -- when I recall certain events, dialogs, discussions, etc. I actually *remember* them in English, even though I know for a fact they happened in Dutch at the time.
Definitely kind of a weird sensation, the first time you realize that.
My earliest memories are between ages 1 and 2, but no sounds or dialogs... Just visual blurbs.
If a machine, no matter how old, is working, and you paid a lot of cash for it, no business will get rid of it to get something new just because its new/flashy.
Of course this does not work indefinitely -- at some point the hardware is outdated to the extend that it may be near impossible to find reliable replacement parts for it.
From that point of view, it can definitely be worth it to have a planned migration to a new/different platform on your own terms, rather than scrambling to put something together when the old beast finally does blow up...
It never hurts to have a contingency plan.
Unless Microsoft 'forgot' to keep track of the MAC addresses of previously released machines, I bet it will be only a matter of time for them to simply compare the MAC address of a connecting xbox against a database of 'valid' MAC addresses...
(Much like the Battle.net server checking the validity of CD-keys, for Warcraft, Starcraft, etc.)
We can punish the entertainment industry by not buying their products.
Of course 'not buying their products' alone will not do you much good either - the industry will just cry that CD sales slumped, 'because of pirating' -- and make even more of a push for DRM.
How far can a company possibly alienate their customer base?
A day after our first baby was born, we received a baby-package from the hospital -- Aside from the obligatory baby wipes, diaper samples, bottles, etc, the package also contained an AOL CD. Riiiiiight.
Well, at least it would take you very long to come up with 'prior art' in that case, now would it?