Direct Marketing to people based on their intrests is far more economical than mass emailing... Most people take no intrest in junk email that they receive.
If it was nearly as effective as you say it is, then there wouldn't be laws, nor people up in arms about it.
Keep in mind, there is a difference between direct marketing and spamming. I, personally, have no problems getting the continuous specials from SouthWest, or the weekly hardware sales pitch from Sears.
Where on earth do you get the concept that it's mass emailing is an effective way to market a product? Do you have any numbers to back this up?
I wouldn't be surprised if half of them aern't selling anything at all, but trying to harvest emails from unsuspecting users trying to "remove" themselves from a list.
Looks like a dynamic URL generated just for me, with attributes unique to my particular user settings. Is this really what they're being permitted to patent? If so, what well put together database driven site ISN'T in violation of this patent?
Show me an admin who can evaluate the total dammage to his site based on the "appearance" of a web page.
Please.. the point remains, they said it cost them 17 Grand, thats more than reasoanble. Running an e-commerice site ain't runnin' your Mamma's home page.. A compromised site could potentially means there's potenitally so much more to do, other than removing a line or two of "malicious" code from a page you can see .
Do you just assume that the one page is all that's effected? I think not.
It seems fairly reasonable that this escapade cost them about 17 grand. Who knows what else they didn't have access to while their site was down..
Of course the estimate is high, what do you expect? Do you think they're going to say, "Well, it was a quiet week, our dev teams needed a vacation and the web master was bored.. so.. no harm no foul."
Are you saying that small businesses don't deserve the same protections afforded to a CNN or a Yahoo?
How are they any less timely than anyone else? Or how have they ever been? Bad press is a powerful motivater I'm sure..
Curious,.. I wonder if all those complaining about the "timely" releases of patches actually code for a living, or know anything about OS architecture for that matter.
The general experience has been about two weeks.. Strikes me as fair... I'd rather have it done right once, then done poorly and repatched several times.
Alot of MS bashing out there.. (Not to say I haven't thrown a stone or two myself).. I'd just like to say, MS isn't the only OS that requires the occassional patch or two..
That's pretty defeatist reasoning. Why bother patching if there's the chance that you can be hacked.
What happened to the good old Floppy Disk?
If this is another catch 22, why not request a patch on CD or floppy from MS? What are they going to do? Say No? (Actually, aern't they legally required to do so? anyone?)
That's not the point tho.. The point is, this flaw by no means warrants an entire recall. To suggest that M$ recall an entire product line over a single security flaw is ludicrous. (Why not tell the Redhat people to redist. their CDs because of SSH or wu-ftp vulnerabilities.. *ok, thats little weak, but you see my point eh?)
A Consumer Recall? For what? Something that can be fixed by the end user? That's like recalling tires because they're low on air.
Please, owning a PC comes with a certain amount of responsibility, as well as maintaining an internet connection. MS Couldn't hand hold you any more through their patch process than they do alreayd without actually sending someone to your house to wipe your ass for you.
That being said, MS, IMHO, has a responsibility to, (at the very least) NOTIFY the user by some means. (But yet, we tell them, you CANT know anything about us, we want PRIVACY!.. sort of a catch-22 eh?).. but they can't be exepcted to recall the OS for a single, simple flaw.
Consider, even if there was, some sort of nation wide recall (.. and yes Homer, Germany is the land of chocolate!.. ), You would STILL have your "clueless" users who didn't even know they had a system that needed patching.. and thus, your patch never gets applied.
Whats to stop people from simply running their servers on different ports?
It doesn't seem like a battle the cable companies can conceivably win.
I personally REJECT the cox "service spiders" at my firewall.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
·
· Score: 1
".. Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these?.. "
I doubt it.. You have about as much right to own a tactile nuke.
Even on the issue of "improvised" weapons, see how considerate your local police are of a potatoe gun.
I'm curious as to if any of our constitutional scholars can shed some light on the exact legal definition of "arms". I hate to sound constituionally obtuse here, but is there a legal definition between say, your gun shop hand-gun, and say.. a shoulder launched anti-tank missle?.. (You know.. for protecting your home.. from other bigger more aggressive homes.)
I suggest, to my fellow./ers that they check the laws in their local areas regarding telemarketing practices. I believe, nationally, you can request that you be removed, AND they send you written confirmation of the removal. Right there, you're costing a firm some 30 cents (perhaps less if they send out a bunch and CASS certify 'em at the same time) just to mail you.
In some cases, I believe they have to offer certain information up front by law! If they don't I believe there are also legal remedies that can be employed.(For instance, in Fl. there are significant fines placed on people who call folks on the states' do-not-solicit list.)
Hit 'em in the wallet if you want to get their attention. Find out what laws are protecting you in your area. Get yourself on a do not call list for God's sake.
Perhaps, if enough time is taken out of their day, they'll practice better target marketing. You can protect yourself.. anyone who says "they won't take me off their list", may simply not be placing their energies in the correct channels.
Look man, follow your heart. Life is too short not to be happy doing what you're doing. It's always ok to come back to something else later on. There's no rule that says your CS degree needs to come in consecutive semesters.
You seem to be under the impression that the field doesn't pay well anymore. It still does, you just have to EARN IT! Simply being able
to touch type and spell Java doesn't entitle you
to 150k/yr out of the gate. (If someone knows where it does, tell me where to send my Resume!)
You have the opportunity to do whatever you like right now.. take it. You might also want to give some consideration to dealing with your problem and how you feel right now. It's not so easy to just get up and walk away once you have a mortgage and little ones on the way.
.. Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?)...
It's true.
A programmer should never ever assume he/she/it has found all the bugs in their software.IMHO, what they should assume, is even if they have found them all, they'll never know it.
Bugs are a part of software. They always will be. You can't make any assumptions about what some other dumbfuck has done in/with memory.. Whereas in building bridges a similiar analogy would be.. "hey.. these bolts just don't fit.. "
I'm not at all saying some pieces of software aern't poorly tested and implemented.(I swear, I come across one more buffer overflow..) A Bridge is a fixed object that can be watched and maintained, airplanes are actively serviced on an ongoing basis. Whereas a single piece of software can be distributed acrosss a myriad of machines and configurations. (And software IS often patched too)
Although I'm in agreement with you when it comes to liability in some of these cases. I don't see how you can compare building, say a 50 million dollar bridge, or a 10 million dollar airplane to something that's say as common place as a 49.99 piece of software on a cd or dvd.
Did I miss something here? Won't the MP3s you download through Napster only be playable on the PC you downloaded them to?
Did they work around this? Or are there "copy proof" (ha!) formats out there?
Slashdot Mirror
Horsehockey! They do not!
Direct Marketing to people based on their intrests is far more economical than mass emailing... Most people take no intrest in junk email that they receive.
If it was nearly as effective as you say it is, then there wouldn't be laws, nor people up in arms about it.
Keep in mind, there is a difference between direct marketing and spamming. I, personally, have no problems getting the continuous specials from SouthWest, or the weekly hardware sales pitch from Sears.
Where on earth do you get the concept that it's mass emailing is an effective way to market a product? Do you have any numbers to back this up?
I wouldn't be surprised if half of them aern't selling anything at all, but trying to harvest emails from unsuspecting users trying to "remove" themselves from a list.
That reads an awful like "any dynamically created URL for a user".
p ly &threshold=1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=2783448
Take for instance..
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25602&op=Re
Looks like a dynamic URL generated just for me, with attributes unique to my particular user settings. Is this really what they're being permitted to patent? If so, what well put together database driven site ISN'T in violation of this patent?
Show me an admin who can evaluate the total dammage to his site based on the "appearance" of a web page.
Please.. the point remains, they said it cost them 17 Grand, thats more than reasoanble. Running an e-commerice site ain't runnin' your Mamma's home page.. A compromised site could potentially means there's potenitally so much more to do, other than removing a line or two of "malicious" code from a page you can see .
Do you just assume that the one page is all that's effected? I think not.
$17,000 in business and damages
.. no harm no foul."
I certainly don't code for free.. Do you?
It seems fairly reasonable that this escapade cost them about 17 grand. Who knows what else they didn't have access to while their site was down..
Of course the estimate is high, what do you expect? Do you think they're going to say, "Well, it was a quiet week, our dev teams needed a vacation and the web master was bored.. so
Are you saying that small businesses don't deserve the same protections afforded to a CNN or a Yahoo?
How are they any less timely than anyone else? Or how have they ever been? Bad press is a powerful motivater I'm sure..
.. I wonder if all those complaining about the "timely" releases of patches actually code for a living, or know anything about OS architecture for that matter.
Curious,
The general experience has been about two weeks.. Strikes me as fair... I'd rather have it done right once, then done poorly and repatched several times.
Alot of MS bashing out there.. (Not to say I haven't thrown a stone or two myself).. I'd just like to say, MS isn't the only OS that requires the occassional patch or two..
That's pretty defeatist reasoning. Why bother patching if there's the chance that you can be hacked.
What happened to the good old Floppy Disk?
If this is another catch 22, why not request a patch on CD or floppy from MS? What are they going to do? Say No?
(Actually, aern't they legally required to do so? anyone?)
That's not the point tho.. The point is, this flaw by no means warrants an entire recall. To suggest that M$ recall an entire product line over a single security flaw is ludicrous. (Why not tell the Redhat people to redist. their CDs because of SSH or wu-ftp vulnerabilities.. *ok, thats little weak, but you see my point eh?)
A Consumer Recall? For what? Something that can be fixed by the end user? That's like recalling tires because they're low on air.
.. ), You would STILL have your "clueless" users who didn't even know they had a system that needed patching.. and thus, your patch never gets applied.
Please, owning a PC comes with a certain amount of responsibility, as well as maintaining an internet connection. MS Couldn't hand hold you any more through their patch process than they do alreayd without actually sending someone to your house to wipe your ass for you.
That being said, MS, IMHO, has a responsibility to, (at the very least) NOTIFY the user by some means. (But yet, we tell them, you CANT know anything about us, we want PRIVACY!.. sort of a catch-22 eh?).. but they can't be exepcted to recall the OS for a single, simple flaw.
Consider, even if there was, some sort of nation wide recall (.. and yes Homer, Germany is the land of chocolate!
Whats to stop people from simply running their servers on different ports? It doesn't seem like a battle the cable companies can conceivably win. I personally REJECT the cox "service spiders" at my firewall.
".. Here's a question: is there a "right of the people" to keep and bear these? .. "
I doubt it.. You have about as much right to own a tactile nuke.
Even on the issue of "improvised" weapons, see how considerate your local police are of a potatoe gun.
I'm curious as to if any of our constitutional scholars can shed some light on the exact legal definition of "arms". I hate to sound constituionally obtuse here, but is there a legal definition between say, your gun shop hand-gun, and say.. a shoulder launched anti-tank missle?.. (You know.. for protecting your home.. from other bigger more aggressive homes.)
I suggest, to my fellow ./ers that they check the laws in their local areas regarding telemarketing practices. I believe, nationally, you can request that you be removed, AND they send you written confirmation of the removal. Right there, you're costing a firm some 30 cents (perhaps less if they send out a bunch and CASS certify 'em at the same time) just to mail you.
In some cases, I believe they have to offer certain information up front by law! If they don't I believe there are also legal remedies that can be employed.(For instance, in Fl. there are significant fines placed on people who call folks on the states' do-not-solicit list.) Hit 'em in the wallet if you want to get their attention. Find out what laws are protecting you in your area. Get yourself on a do not call list for God's sake.
Perhaps, if enough time is taken out of their day, they'll practice better target marketing. You can protect yourself.. anyone who says "they won't take me off their list", may simply not be placing their energies in the correct channels.
Look man, follow your heart. Life is too short not to be happy doing what you're doing. It's always ok to come back to something else later on. There's no rule that says your CS degree needs to come in consecutive semesters.
You seem to be under the impression that the field doesn't pay well anymore. It still does, you just have to EARN IT! Simply being able to touch type and spell Java doesn't entitle you to 150k/yr out of the gate. (If someone knows where it does, tell me where to send my Resume!)
You have the opportunity to do whatever you like right now.. take it. You might also want to give some consideration to dealing with your problem and how you feel right now. It's not so easy to just get up and walk away once you have a mortgage and little ones on the way.
.. Quite frankly I am disgusted with the attitudes of most people in the software industry that assumes that shoddy work is inevitable (all software has bugs? WTF?) ...
It's true.
A programmer should never ever assume he/she/it has found all the bugs in their software.IMHO, what they should assume, is even if they have found them all, they'll never know it.
Bugs are a part of software. They always will be. You can't make any assumptions about what some other dumbfuck has done in/with memory.. Whereas in building bridges a similiar analogy would be.. "hey.. these bolts just don't fit.. "
I'm not at all saying some pieces of software aern't poorly tested and implemented.(I swear, I come across one more buffer overflow..) A Bridge is a fixed object that can be watched and maintained, airplanes are actively serviced on an ongoing basis. Whereas a single piece of software can be distributed acrosss a myriad of machines and configurations. (And software IS often patched too)
Although I'm in agreement with you when it comes to liability in some of these cases. I don't see how you can compare building, say a 50 million dollar bridge, or a 10 million dollar airplane to something that's say as common place as a 49.99 piece of software on a cd or dvd.
Wow... Another winner from the dope smokers in the MS-beta testing dept.
Maybe the Xbox needs to be registered a-la-XP
before it'll work.
Did I miss something here? Won't the MP3s you download through Napster only be playable on the PC you downloaded them to? Did they work around this? Or are there "copy proof" (ha!) formats out there?