A similar technology: 1986 WordPerfect on VAX/VMS
on
GTK+ TTY Port
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Back in the minicomputer days, WordPerfect corporation created a reasonable port of WP onto the VAX/VMS environment. It supported a number of terminals, many of which were text-only.
Mind you, this was in the days of DOS WordPerfect dominance, WPWin was relatively new.
But the coolest thing was graphics mode for non-graphics terminals. They abused the font download capabilities of the VT220-series terminals that were the standard for the day to create 'mosaics'. Decent pictures of bitmaps could be created. I could recognize B&W bitmaps pretty well. Lousy for pr0n, but good enough that a letter-writing system we set up had recognizable signatures.
Hurrah! WordPerfect's not Canadian-owned anymore!
on
Corel Goes Private
·
· Score: 2, Informative
That sounds like a strange headline... but WP's Canadian ownership hsa been a thorn in the side of companies that have to deal with the Canadian government.
In a ploy to keep jobs in Canada, they require documents sent to them to be in WP format, versus the international standards of PDF for virtually every other country, or at least the MS Word standard used by virtually every major corporation.
As a specialist in electronic submissions for a pharmaceutical company, it will greatly reduce my workload if Canada stops requiring WordPerfect.
I have to go find the statistics, but I think that each time WordPerfect was sold (from WP Corp to Novell, to Corel, and now to VC), it was worth much much less.
FF1, Dragon Warrior I-IV, Zelda, Link (I know, they're not RPG's, but they're close) and a lot of the old games gave the illusion of non-linearity. There were areas you could get to, but it was a little too tough to really manage. You could wander pretty far across mountains, woods, plains, various encounter types, and it felt like you had freedom.
It usually got a little narrower feeling as the game progressed: you knew exactly where you had to go next, because there was that locked door, blocked mountain, etc. You might have to backtrack to near the beginning where something suddenly opened up, but you could go all over the place in the meantime.
With FF7 and other 'modern' games, you traverse a limited number of pretty rooms, and it feels claustrophobic. Then, you fight the big fight, and you're somewhere else! No wandering allowed, thank you.
And yes, I insulted Fallout 2. In Fallout 1, I could select a couple of skills, and probably make it. If you select poorly in Fallout 2, or specialize in something interesting but not critical, you may find yourself just plain stuck. I lost interest about midway through, when I realized I needed a guidebook/cheatsheet to find the guy who would get me to the next place in each encounter. The world got big, and that important encounter is sometimes just too hard to find. When the easter eggs got to be more fun than the plot, I knew it wasn't a great game.
To continue the RPG complexity discussion: Final Fantasy I, on NES, was a blast: you chose characters, picked from a small selection of spells, and in general wandered wherever you wanted.
The SNES FF's were less fun: they had static plots that had to be followed, and some battles that always went the same way. Yawn.
I stopped playing them at FF7: you had a bazillion choices on how to equip your character with crystals and things, but no choice on what to do next.
Fallout was fun, Fallout 2 had some corollary problems: So many choices that the character development was tedious.
The points above are well taken: I intend on spiffing up my procmail recipes, but only as I am able to understand them.
The enhancements suggested above are simple to implement, but are still crude band aids. While I doubt I would ever *really* want to receive an executable attachment (heck -- most places won't even let me SEND it, let alone receive it), I might want to
(a) log it (b) bounce a 'hey stoopid' message back a legit senders to tell them that if they need to send me something, it shouldn't be an executable (that's why god made ZIP)
There are some more complex procmail filters out there that specifically target certain worms. Is that more effective? I don't know. I can't understand them yet. I will soon. None of the procmail FAQs and "getting started" docs describe all those messy flags and things. I've got some more reading to do.
Meanwhile, this one lets me get work done other than downloading and deleting SOBIG messages. A few other worms will slip through, but at least it's manageable.
Our computers aren't getting infected: between virus scan, ZoneAlarm, ancient e-mail client and knowing not to open the stupid attachments, we've not gotten infected.
But >1000 100K e-mails per day to a single address were swamping our ability to do anything but download and delete.
It took two days of querying tech support at my ISP before they'd admit that procmail would work, and a quickie recipe dumps all the infected files. Yay. I should have just done it without checking tech support, for all they helped.
This was listed in a previous thread, but it's worth repeating: In a.procmailrc file, put:0 B
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr)"/dev/null
This deletes any message with a pif, exe or scr attachment.
I'll get more sophisticated later once I learn more about procmail, but for now, this does the job, without having to worry about SHELL and PATH settings.
Hmm... probably less relevant to this discussion, but the Apple ][ floppy driver had some other interesting de-optimizations:
The way I was told the story, Apple was buying lower-quality components than those on more expensive drives, and to compensate, would do each disk operation (like a read) seven times, and vote on the result.
Several patched drivers came out that merely read 5 or, if you were willing to risk data errors, 3 times. Greatly improved performance.
Of course, no mention of Apple ][ disks would be complete without the mention that a blank floppy would cause some sort of infinite loop because the directory table couldn't be found. Hence:
What I'm really surprised is that there hasn't been a more lethal payload.
SYN flooding Microsoft? And the wrong domain anyway? That's just lazy. Where's the work ethic the hackers had ten years ago when a virus would wipe you out completely?
Now, I patched within a week of the original notice, I have a NAT-based router in the way, and I'm running ZoneAlarm. I may be wrong, but any one of those ought to have prevented infection. With that many 'proofs' against it, and other possibilities (including XP's own firewall), I'm truly surprised there are so many infected machines out there.
Then again, at least my corporation is using this as an excuse to finally patch our Win2K-based machines to SP3, while installing the RPC patch. And they're certainly firewalled... but there are folks who use their company laptops to dial AOHell, and got blasted. *sigh*
Well, for computers that have a CPU 100X those of 10 years ago (without counting 16 vs 32 vs 64 bit, pipelining, etc.), bazillion times the storage, etc. etc. it seems all to have gotten gobbled up.
Does Windows boot any faster than it ever has?
That's my biggest gripe. My 3-year-old palm is approximately equal to a Mac II, and boots (from reset) in a few seconds. That's good. WinXP loads waaaay to much dren, and keeps right on loading.
Yeah, yeah, linux linux... but I'm talking apples to apples here.
Yes apps run faster -- no doubt about that. But I just replaced my inlaws' 150MHz Pentium (at least 8 years since the upgrade to that) with a 2.4GHz Celeron, and boot times aren't significantly better.
My friend with the native American name Talks-Through-His-Ass says the cure to that is boot roms. Feh. Sleep mode? Still sux.
Yeah, it's stupid, but there's a lot of machines that won't get patched:
Dialup -- those patches are big
FUD about Windows Update watching your machine for bootleg licenses
but most of all, warnings from folks such as Brian Livingston and Woody Leonhard about flawed patches prompt folks like me to delay installation of just about any patch for at least a week, to see if they'll patch the patches.
Now, I didn't get hit -- between the firewall, ZoneAlarm and the patches, I think I'm Ok.
If this book ends up anything like Woody Leonhard's Annoyances series from O'Reilly, such as Word '97 Annoyances, they'll be useful to more than just your average joe with a problem.
Those books take a critical look at how things work versus how you think they're working, and how to solve that cognitive dissonance. They may not solve every problem possible -- that's a cookbook that you probably couldn't lift. But it will give you avenues to understanding where the problems are coming from. To me, that's even more valuable.
Odds are, it won't have the same authors: Woody is a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft addict, with all the usual love-hate (and there's plenty of hate). Hopefully O'Reilly will use the same editorial goals, though.
Go take a gander at the original BBC article with the photos. The one with the blue dye in the water showing the eddies created by the movement is practically a natural reproduction of Van Gogh's brushwork!
It's like having insects do impressionist painting. Truly beautiful. If I can find a high-res photo, I think I've got my new wallpaper.
Currently, I'm only paying for the use of two sites:
1) The Perl Journal, an extremely inexpensive highly technical magazine. Sure, it's a little thin compared to, say, Doctor Dobbs', but it's also a lot less money. I don't really see that as 'online content', because I read it offline as I would a 'real' magazine (although I don't print it out).
2) Geocaching.com premium membership. Here, I am paying for content. $30/yr gets you up to 10 daily downloads of queries off their database in a more complete format than is available to non-members (they basically get names and coordinates, subscribers get full descriptions, log data, etc.). It's also a community forum, and it felt worthwhile to subscribe.
So, would I pay to get at the back issues of magazines? I kind of doubt it. I currently don't even buy e-books for my Palm, I only download those that are free because they're past copyright or freely given by the author or publisher. That's limiting, but I'm not disappointed in the selection.
What really is the cost of a magazine anyway. I may be wrong, but my gut feeling is that subscription prices for paper magazines and newspapers basically cover the delivery, and maybe the dead trees. The content is paid for by the advertisers -- not quite the same model as TV, but close.
With e-content, there's no dead trees, and delivery is pretty darn cheap when bought in quantity. It's just that the ads have to be more obnoxious to bring in the corresponding revenue.
Obviously not everything in print is available online for free. So what kinds of 'zines might be worth paying for? I can only think of highly technical, specialized stuff like TPJ above, or whatever your profession might make worthwhile.
General news is waaaay to easy to snarf up on Google. Entertainment details are easily available on places such as IMDB or Amazon. Sports? Business data? Restaurant reviews? It's going to be hard to get someone to pay when someone else will provide it for the ad revenue alone. Unless web advertising crashes, I don't see this venture as being worthwhile.
Being in the US, and shopping in legitimate stores, I don't think I've ever come across a pirate CD. I think that blaming piracy for US record sales is a little silly.
I do know that when I was in college (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), I could buy three vinyl LP's for under $20 when they were on sale, and I'd do that on a pretty regular basis, probably every two weeks or so. These days, 20 CD's in a year is probably an overestimate.
CD's cost too much. They probably cost a bit more than the old vinyl, but should be cheaper to produce than cassettes. And why does the latest pop pap cost $19, or maybe $13 on sale, yet the record labels will push a disc out to BestBuy for $7 or $9 for a hot new artist? They must be able to make money on that, so why not all the time?
I buy a fair amount from BMG music club. Their shipping prices suck, but it's a good way to catch up on back catalog, when they've got "Buy one, get three free" or "Buy one, everything else for $1.99" sales.
I don't download music. I hate headphones, and my current car CD player won't play CDRs, nor will my DVD player attached to the home theater. Yeah, I could replace those, but I'm not in a hurry.
So where's the problem here? I'd buy more if I knew I was getting a decent disc. WXRT in Chicago used to be a bastion of new music, digging deep into the tracks on a disc. Now, they're barely above the level of a top-40 station, but to a different demographic. And they answer to Viacom. And they're advertising more.
At this rate, I'll be like my parents: listening to the same dozen artists for the rest of my life, because I can't stand to turn on the radio to find out if anything's better.
But there's cool new stuff out there, and I've been lucky to find it:
Mary Lee's Corvette -- could be the next Lucinda Williams
How do you find it? Stay away from the mega-stadiums, and visit a club, coffeehouse, small theater. Actually listen to the opening act! They're often at higher energy than the headliners, because they've got more to gain.
I'm probably waaaay too late to make a difference here, but it seems to me that to make it effective over the internet, there's going to have to be a protocol for carrying the content:
Some of these have begun to disappear: the Interstate system of highways discourages stopping for tourist attractions.
Go read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman, and then you'll have to stop at Rock City near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and especially House on the Rock which must be seen to be believed. If anything, Gaiman downplays its true strangeness.
Imagemagick made me look like a miracle worker. 10,000 1.5MB bitmaps had to be delivered to the Food and Drug Administration in their original format and resolution (they needed to see things exactly as they were reviewed in a drug safety study), but wanted a visual 'menu' of the images, by patient over time.
Using the index of the images, I was able to create a labeled page-per-patient visual menu in PDF (FDA's preferred format -- but it would be a 3-character change to make it anything else). Using other tools, the same index was munged into a CSV file that was applied as hyperlinks atop the PDF menu (non-Open-Source tool, but I might have been able to find an open-source one).
In one day, the entire set of 15GB of data could be processed. In fact, putting it on a tape took longer than the image assembly.
We'll take personal checks, so long as they carry North American routing codes (those magnetic ink OCR numbers on the bottom of the check). That's good for anyone who has a bank in the US (such as servicemen, state dept. workers, etc., and folks working overseas for their company), plus Can/Mex and a few other countries. We don't take TeleCheck at this time.
And international postal money orders are good as gold.
But we won't ship until we've received it, and probably not until we've cleared a personal check.
The one thing I forgot to mention is how fraud resistant our store is because of one reason: Who wants to steal kids' books? They're heavy to ship, low in value, and not easily fenced. It's when someone orders 10 copies of each of the Adventures of TinTin or Asterix and Obelix collections (European comic strips), or dictionaries and almanacs, that we know something fishy may be going on.
My wife runs an internet children's book shop (I won't plug it here), and while there are no countries we have 'banned' there are several areas we flag as high risk: Eastern Europe, especially Rumania, and Southeast Asia, especially Singapore and Indonesia.
An order from there, especially multiple copies of items, books oriented toward teens such as comic book collections, etc., will raise a red flag, especially if a US credit card is used.
There's a issue with the credit card processors: They charge more for handling ex-US shipments, because of a higher risk, but if you put a foreign address in they make no attempt to verify the address. But what do they care? They don't accept any risk, except for the customer payment of the card. Everything else is risk to the merchant.
So our typical response is to request a photocopy of both sides of the credit card e-mailed or faxed to us. Often, the customer never replies in cases where we suspect fraud. We've only had one customer refuse to fax us the card (hey, we already had her number, what's the big deal), and she ordered it to her home in the US and shipped it overseas herself.
Some enterprising young/.er is probably thinking right now that it's less than ten billion total phone numbers (by the time you screen out non-US area codes, toll-free and service numbers it's probably on the order of 6 or 7 billion), a bunch of random domains and e-mails can be created to add EVERY SINGLE phone number to the list, and even automate the e-mail reply with a procmail line. (Actually, since business phone numbers aren't covered by the DNC list, it's probably less than 3 billion possible numbers.)
Don't.
No, really.
If the registry is a complete set of the US phone system, some telemarketer will sue claiming that there's false data in there, and that the majority of the people on the list never opted out.
They'll have to scrap the whole thing, and start over again with an even-more-invasive registration procedure.
Someone above quoted the FAQ that lists the exempt industries. (He also left off the second part: "You may still receive calls from political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors or companies with which you have an existing business relationship.")
I think it sucks too, but there's a reason for it: The Federal Trade commission is the one creating this list, and only those industries regulated by them are controllable by this list. For instance, phone companies are regulated by the FCC.
*&$% Congress should have plugged this hole by unifying a do-not-call across the various regulatory agencies.
You can bet that congressional campaigns were probably specifically exempted by the bill, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the minicomputer days, WordPerfect corporation created a reasonable port of WP onto the VAX/VMS environment. It supported a number of terminals, many of which were text-only.
Mind you, this was in the days of DOS WordPerfect dominance, WPWin was relatively new.
But the coolest thing was graphics mode for non-graphics terminals. They abused the font download capabilities of the VT220-series terminals that were the standard for the day to create 'mosaics'. Decent pictures of bitmaps could be created. I could recognize B&W bitmaps pretty well. Lousy for pr0n, but good enough that a letter-writing system we set up had recognizable signatures.
That sounds like a strange headline... but WP's Canadian ownership hsa been a thorn in the side of companies that have to deal with the Canadian government.
In a ploy to keep jobs in Canada, they require documents sent to them to be in WP format, versus the international standards of PDF for virtually every other country, or at least the MS Word standard used by virtually every major corporation.
As a specialist in electronic submissions for a pharmaceutical company, it will greatly reduce my workload if Canada stops requiring WordPerfect.
I have to go find the statistics, but I think that each time WordPerfect was sold (from WP Corp to Novell, to Corel, and now to VC), it was worth much much less.
FF1, Dragon Warrior I-IV, Zelda, Link (I know, they're not RPG's, but they're close) and a lot of the old games gave the illusion of non-linearity. There were areas you could get to, but it was a little too tough to really manage. You could wander pretty far across mountains, woods, plains, various encounter types, and it felt like you had freedom.
It usually got a little narrower feeling as the game progressed: you knew exactly where you had to go next, because there was that locked door, blocked mountain, etc. You might have to backtrack to near the beginning where something suddenly opened up, but you could go all over the place in the meantime.
With FF7 and other 'modern' games, you traverse a limited number of pretty rooms, and it feels claustrophobic. Then, you fight the big fight, and you're somewhere else! No wandering allowed, thank you.
And yes, I insulted Fallout 2. In Fallout 1, I could select a couple of skills, and probably make it. If you select poorly in Fallout 2, or specialize in something interesting but not critical, you may find yourself just plain stuck. I lost interest about midway through, when I realized I needed a guidebook/cheatsheet to find the guy who would get me to the next place in each encounter. The world got big, and that important encounter is sometimes just too hard to find. When the easter eggs got to be more fun than the plot, I knew it wasn't a great game.
To continue the RPG complexity discussion: Final Fantasy I, on NES, was a blast: you chose characters, picked from a small selection of spells, and in general wandered wherever you wanted.
The SNES FF's were less fun: they had static plots that had to be followed, and some battles that always went the same way. Yawn.
I stopped playing them at FF7: you had a bazillion choices on how to equip your character with crystals and things, but no choice on what to do next.
Fallout was fun, Fallout 2 had some corollary problems: So many choices that the character development was tedious.
The points above are well taken: I intend on spiffing up my procmail recipes, but only as I am able to understand them.
The enhancements suggested above are simple to implement, but are still crude band aids. While I doubt I would ever *really* want to receive an executable attachment (heck -- most places won't even let me SEND it, let alone receive it), I might want to
(a) log it
(b) bounce a 'hey stoopid' message back a legit senders to tell them that if they need to send me something, it shouldn't be an executable (that's why god made ZIP)
There are some more complex procmail filters out there that specifically target certain worms. Is that more effective? I don't know. I can't understand them yet. I will soon. None of the procmail FAQs and "getting started" docs describe all those messy flags and things. I've got some more reading to do.
Meanwhile, this one lets me get work done other than downloading and deleting SOBIG messages. A few other worms will slip through, but at least it's manageable.
Our computers aren't getting infected: between virus scan, ZoneAlarm, ancient e-mail client and knowing not to open the stupid attachments, we've not gotten infected.
.procmailrc file, put :0 B /dev/null
But >1000 100K e-mails per day to a single address were swamping our ability to do anything but download and delete.
It took two days of querying tech support at my ISP before they'd admit that procmail would work, and a quickie recipe dumps all the infected files. Yay. I should have just done it without checking tech support, for all they helped.
This was listed in a previous thread, but it's worth repeating:
In a
* ^ *Content-Disposition: attachment;
* filename=".*\.(pif|exe|scr)"
This deletes any message with a pif, exe or scr attachment.
I'll get more sophisticated later once I learn more about procmail, but for now, this does the job, without having to worry about SHELL and PATH settings.
Hmm... probably less relevant to this discussion, but the Apple ][ floppy driver had some other interesting de-optimizations:
The way I was told the story, Apple was buying lower-quality components than those on more expensive drives, and to compensate, would do each disk operation (like a read) seven times, and vote on the result.
Several patched drivers came out that merely read 5 or, if you were willing to risk data errors, 3 times. Greatly improved performance.
Of course, no mention of Apple ][ disks would be complete without the mention that a blank floppy would cause some sort of infinite loop because the directory table couldn't be found. Hence:
On a clear disk you can seek forever!
What I'm really surprised is that there hasn't been a more lethal payload.
SYN flooding Microsoft? And the wrong domain anyway? That's just lazy. Where's the work ethic the hackers had ten years ago when a virus would wipe you out completely?
Now, I patched within a week of the original notice, I have a NAT-based router in the way, and I'm running ZoneAlarm. I may be wrong, but any one of those ought to have prevented infection. With that many 'proofs' against it, and other possibilities (including XP's own firewall), I'm truly surprised there are so many infected machines out there.
Then again, at least my corporation is using this as an excuse to finally patch our Win2K-based machines to SP3, while installing the RPC patch.
And they're certainly firewalled... but there are folks who use their company laptops to dial AOHell, and got blasted. *sigh*
Well, for computers that have a CPU 100X those of 10 years ago (without counting 16 vs 32 vs 64 bit, pipelining, etc.), bazillion times the storage, etc. etc. it seems all to have gotten gobbled up.
Does Windows boot any faster than it ever has?
That's my biggest gripe. My 3-year-old palm is approximately equal to a Mac II, and boots (from reset) in a few seconds. That's good. WinXP loads waaaay to much dren, and keeps right on loading.
Yeah, yeah, linux linux... but I'm talking apples to apples here.
Yes apps run faster -- no doubt about that. But I just replaced my inlaws' 150MHz Pentium (at least 8 years since the upgrade to that) with a 2.4GHz Celeron, and boot times aren't significantly better.
My friend with the native American name Talks-Through-His-Ass says the cure to that is boot roms. Feh. Sleep mode? Still sux.
Now, I didn't get hit -- between the firewall, ZoneAlarm and the patches, I think I'm Ok.
If this book ends up anything like Woody Leonhard's Annoyances series from O'Reilly, such as Word '97 Annoyances, they'll be useful to more than just your average joe with a problem.
Those books take a critical look at how things work versus how you think they're working, and how to solve that cognitive dissonance. They may not solve every problem possible -- that's a cookbook that you probably couldn't lift. But it will give you avenues to understanding where the problems are coming from. To me, that's even more valuable.
Odds are, it won't have the same authors: Woody is a dyed-in-the-wool Microsoft addict, with all the usual love-hate (and there's plenty of hate). Hopefully O'Reilly will use the same editorial goals, though.
Go take a gander at the original BBC article with the photos. The one with the blue dye in the water showing the eddies created by the movement is practically a natural reproduction of Van Gogh's brushwork!
It's like having insects do impressionist painting. Truly beautiful. If I can find a high-res photo, I think I've got my new wallpaper.
Currently, I'm only paying for the use of two sites:
1) The Perl Journal, an extremely inexpensive highly technical magazine. Sure, it's a little thin compared to, say, Doctor Dobbs', but it's also a lot less money. I don't really see that as 'online content', because I read it offline as I would a 'real' magazine (although I don't print it out).
2) Geocaching.com premium membership. Here, I am paying for content. $30/yr gets you up to 10 daily downloads of queries off their database in a more complete format than is available to non-members (they basically get names and coordinates, subscribers get full descriptions, log data, etc.). It's also a community forum, and it felt worthwhile to subscribe.
So, would I pay to get at the back issues of magazines? I kind of doubt it. I currently don't even buy e-books for my Palm, I only download those that are free because they're past copyright or freely given by the author or publisher. That's limiting, but I'm not disappointed in the selection.
What really is the cost of a magazine anyway. I may be wrong, but my gut feeling is that subscription prices for paper magazines and newspapers basically cover the delivery, and maybe the dead trees. The content is paid for by the advertisers -- not quite the same model as TV, but close.
With e-content, there's no dead trees, and delivery is pretty darn cheap when bought in quantity. It's just that the ads have to be more obnoxious to bring in the corresponding revenue.
Obviously not everything in print is available online for free. So what kinds of 'zines might be worth paying for? I can only think of highly technical, specialized stuff like TPJ above, or whatever your profession might make worthwhile.
General news is waaaay to easy to snarf up on Google. Entertainment details are easily available on places such as IMDB or Amazon. Sports? Business data? Restaurant reviews? It's going to be hard to get someone to pay when someone else will provide it for the ad revenue alone. Unless web advertising crashes, I don't see this venture as being worthwhile.
I do know that when I was in college (a long time ago in a galaxy far far away), I could buy three vinyl LP's for under $20 when they were on sale, and I'd do that on a pretty regular basis, probably every two weeks or so. These days, 20 CD's in a year is probably an overestimate.
CD's cost too much. They probably cost a bit more than the old vinyl, but should be cheaper to produce than cassettes. And why does the latest pop pap cost $19, or maybe $13 on sale, yet the record labels will push a disc out to BestBuy for $7 or $9 for a hot new artist? They must be able to make money on that, so why not all the time?
I buy a fair amount from BMG music club. Their shipping prices suck, but it's a good way to catch up on back catalog, when they've got "Buy one, get three free" or "Buy one, everything else for $1.99" sales.
I don't download music. I hate headphones, and my current car CD player won't play CDRs, nor will my DVD player attached to the home theater. Yeah, I could replace those, but I'm not in a hurry.
So where's the problem here? I'd buy more if I knew I was getting a decent disc. WXRT in Chicago used to be a bastion of new music, digging deep into the tracks on a disc. Now, they're barely above the level of a top-40 station, but to a different demographic. And they answer to Viacom. And they're advertising more.
At this rate, I'll be like my parents: listening to the same dozen artists for the rest of my life, because I can't stand to turn on the radio to find out if anything's better.
But there's cool new stuff out there, and I've been lucky to find it:
How do you find it? Stay away from the mega-stadiums, and visit a club, coffeehouse, small theater. Actually listen to the opening
act! They're often at higher energy than the headliners, because they've got more to gain.
I'm probably waaaay too late to make a difference here, but it seems to me that to make it effective over the internet, there's going to have to be a protocol for carrying the content:
Some of these have begun to disappear: the Interstate system of highways discourages stopping for tourist attractions.
Go read "American Gods" by Neil Gaiman, and then you'll have to stop at Rock City near Chattanooga, Tennessee, and especially House on the Rock which must be seen to be believed. If anything, Gaiman downplays its true strangeness.
Imagemagick made me look like a miracle worker.
10,000 1.5MB bitmaps had to be delivered to the Food and Drug Administration in their original format and resolution (they needed to see things exactly as they were reviewed in a drug safety study), but wanted a visual 'menu' of the images, by patient over time.
Using the index of the images, I was able to create a labeled page-per-patient visual menu in PDF (FDA's preferred format -- but it would be a 3-character change to make it anything else). Using other tools, the same index was munged into a CSV file that was applied as hyperlinks atop the PDF menu (non-Open-Source tool, but I might have been able to find an open-source one).
In one day, the entire set of 15GB of data could be processed. In fact, putting it on a tape took longer than the image assembly.
Isn't the favorite part of car racing when things blow up?
That seems like a contrary goal.
We've tried to be as flexible as possible.
We'll take personal checks, so long as they carry North American routing codes (those magnetic ink OCR numbers on the bottom of the check). That's good for anyone who has a bank in the US (such as servicemen, state dept. workers, etc., and folks working overseas for their company), plus Can/Mex and a few other countries. We don't take TeleCheck at this time.
And international postal money orders are good as gold.
But we won't ship until we've received it, and probably not until we've cleared a personal check.
The one thing I forgot to mention is how fraud resistant our store is because of one reason: Who wants to steal kids' books? They're heavy to ship, low in value, and not easily fenced. It's when someone orders 10 copies of each of the Adventures of TinTin or Asterix and Obelix collections (European comic strips), or dictionaries and almanacs, that we know something fishy may be going on.
My wife runs an internet children's book shop (I won't plug it here), and while there are no countries we have 'banned' there are several areas we flag as high risk: Eastern Europe, especially Rumania, and Southeast Asia, especially Singapore and Indonesia.
An order from there, especially multiple copies of items, books oriented toward teens such as comic book collections, etc., will raise a red flag, especially if a US credit card is used.
There's a issue with the credit card processors: They charge more for handling ex-US shipments, because of a higher risk, but if you put a foreign address in they make no attempt to verify the address. But what do they care? They don't accept any risk, except for the customer payment of the card. Everything else is risk to the merchant.
So our typical response is to request a photocopy of both sides of the credit card e-mailed or faxed to us. Often, the customer never replies in cases where we suspect fraud. We've only had one customer refuse to fax us the card (hey, we already had her number, what's the big deal), and she ordered it to her home in the US and shipped it overseas herself.
I've fed it four phone numbers, and haven't gotten the confirmation e-mail yet, about four hours later.
Could Hotmail be eating them as junk mail?
I only have one thing to say about this --
Aaarrgghhh!
I just had another thought.
/.er is probably thinking right now that it's less than ten billion total phone numbers (by the time you screen out non-US area codes, toll-free and service numbers it's probably on the order of 6 or 7 billion), a bunch of random domains and e-mails can be created to add EVERY SINGLE phone number to the list, and even automate the e-mail reply with a procmail line. (Actually, since business phone numbers aren't covered by the DNC list, it's probably less than 3 billion possible numbers.)
Some enterprising young
Don't.
No, really.
If the registry is a complete set of the US phone system, some telemarketer will sue claiming that there's false data in there, and that the majority of the people on the list never opted out.
They'll have to scrap the whole thing, and start over again with an even-more-invasive registration procedure.
Someone above quoted the FAQ that lists the exempt industries. (He also left off the second part: "You may still receive calls from political organizations, charities, telephone surveyors or companies with which you have an existing business relationship.")
I think it sucks too, but there's a reason for it: The Federal Trade commission is the one creating this list, and only those industries regulated by them are controllable by this list. For instance, phone companies are regulated by the FCC.
*&$% Congress should have plugged this hole by unifying a do-not-call across the various regulatory agencies.
You can bet that congressional campaigns were probably specifically exempted by the bill, though.