I heard some guy from Microsoft talking about some of MS's spam plans, after billg committed the company to stopping spam by 2006. They seem to really like the idea of hash cash, which certainly seems like the most reasonable bolt-on solution.
I think the best bet for Microsoft's anti-spam campaign would be to be as open as possible with the process. If they could come up with a standard for hash cash, enable it on every Exchange server, as well as provide it for every Sendmail, Qmail and Postfix server, they would have a huge PR victory. Everyone would be focusing on how Microsoft cured spam and they could start to shake their buggy image.
They've got two temptations they'll have to avoid if they want to win this battle though. The first is their culture: they're notorious for only using standards when it suits their needs. They need to be political about getting the standard accepted everywhere, which means playing nice with the Internet as a whole. The second is to try and use this to throw their monopoly weight around. If they say "only Exchange servers can user our powerful anti-spam techniques" people will turn off the spam protection so that they can get mail from Linux mail servers. I'm pretty sure they're too smart for the second one.
Basically, this is intuitive to most Slashdot readers. Open networks are bigger than closed networks and a network's value is exponential of its size. If MS can make an open spam solution they'll have helped build a very valuable network.
Voice recognition works well in the SOCOM series. For the single player campaign, you can order your 3 squadmates around, telling them to hold fire, escort you to a waypoint or cover an area. It's a gimmick, but it's a fun gimmick and probably provides enough leverage to get people on the mics for the online game.
Karaoke Revolution provides a sort of inverse fun to this. It matches pitch but doesn't bother with voice recognition. This means when you're playing with your friends, you can suddenly in the position of improvising clever lyrics to a cheesy song.
NBC has been doing this for quite a while, well before TiVo came out. The recent change wasn't with the shows, but with their guide data to reflect the reality of the situation. They do this to keep people watching NBC once they start.
Before the guide data was fixed, shows would get cut off because of NBC's screwy primetime timing. TiVo simply codifies the desired result: watching NBC because you (or your TiVo) started watching it.
NBC is an investor in TiVo (which is why you see so many "Thumbs Up To Record" widgets on ads for their shows) so it would seem dumb for them to try and fight it. Not that I would base my argument on the logic of the entertainment industry...
100 years from now, should anyone be forced to accidentally stumble over goatse?
The fact that you and I can refer to goatse and people know what we're talking about means that it's an important part of our shared culture. I think that anything that archives the good and bad of a culture is worth keeping around.
"...this is a game in which you play as a foreign soldier and try to kill troops from your own country. I bet that you couldn't even sell a game like this overseas."
I couldn't have said it better myself. Now I'm going to go play SOCOM (or Counter-Strike) and hope that I don't get stuck on the terrorist side.
Because they broke Windows 3.1 running under DR-DOS and made it look like an DR-DOS error. This was an attempt to get people to use MS-DOS instead. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Yeah, there's speculation and innuendo, but the story has been around for over a month and there hasn't been too much movement. Don't expect a SlashBack reversal anytime soon...
Not to mention, maybe Fedex decides they don't like Joe Blo's module and DMCA him- everyone looses their Fedex module.
Sounds like it's B.A.D. - Broken As Designed. Like DRM or DVD players that don't skip commercials, they're not designed for the end user so much as they are designed to keep the end user in line.
It's not dumb if you think that your employer will respect the law. Section 2870 (linked in the story) says that the clauses you mention don't cover creations made on your own time with your own equipment, which I assume that this guy did because he's claiming 2870. From the law:
Any provision in an employment agreement which provides that an employee shall assign, or offer to assign, any of his or her rights in an invention to his or her employer shall not apply to an invention that the employee developed entirely on his or her own time without using the employer's equipment
Why should he have to hide his identity if he's not doing anything wrong?
You beat me to it. That is an awesome RSS feed to watch, I get all sorts of deals on games through them, like SOCOM 2 for $40 instead of $50, or Robotech for the GC collectors edition for $5.
I don't think everyday life interests the casual reader. Quite the opposite, it only interests interested parties. Minutiae like my nephew being born or me being in a car accident are interesting to my family members, but are just another baby and car accident to most people.
I don't expect the world to care, and find it odd that you expect the world to write to entertain the casual reader. Some of us have other audiences in mind when writing.
Speaking of self-absorbed, you seem to think that they are writing for you. The writer's opinions on Timmy are very important to that writer's circle of friends; that is the audience they are writing for.
The amazing thing about weblogs and personal homepages is that it allows people to broadcast to groups of people. Usually that group tends to be the author's social group, and so if you don't care about what's going on in that group it'll come off as boring and self indulgent.
You probably don't care about my recently born nephew, but when I post to my LiveJournal or family weblog about him it provides useful information and news to friends and family members. Luckily, I'm not writing it in hopes that EverDense on Slashdot will approve of what I have to say on the subject.
I saw Captured! By Robots at the Elbow Room in beautiful downtown Ypsilanti, MI and it rocked my socks off. The concept is cool, and the execution is flawless. JBOT is hilarious and really knows how to work the crowd. This is not something to miss. My buddy posted some pictures from the show that you check out.
My only regret is missing the 10 Commandments show that he's touring now.
Yeah, that's why I'm using James Seng's other anti-comment-spam plugin, mt-Bayesian. It does the same Bayesian algorithms that anti-email spam programs do. The only change I would make would be for it to do Bayesian analysis for links as well as comment content, because comment spam is largely about the linked sites.
That's called a CAPTCHA, and James Seng wrote a Moveable Type plugin to do this with MT. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, you can read more in this story
Yeah, I was trying to figure out if this was Slashdot in 2003 or 2600 in 1994. Damn daylight savings time, what with the screwing up of the time and the glaven
I oversimplified the Slashdot audience, but that's because I was addressing the comments in general. At the time that I posted I hadn't seen a single comment pointing out the other side of the story. I didn't mean to imply that all Slashdotters think the same, I just meant to imply that the loud ones do:)
This still kind of sucks. Yeah, yeah, we hated their ads, but anyone on this site should have figured out by now that almost all browsers offer pop-up blocking (IE being the sole exception that I can think of).
But what about the rest of the story? I'm going out to Radio Shack tonight to buy a bunch of X10 stuff, because it actually works. It's getting dark out in the mornings so I'm going to use their alarm clock and a plug module to turn my light on in the morning. I'll probably stock up on a couple things for future expansion. Currently I have two lamps in my living room and a coffee machine on a remote control thanks to the Slashdot X10 deal.
The other problem is that someone patented pop-under ads. This seems like yet-another-bad-software-patent, but I guess Slashdotters pick and choose which bad software patents to get upset about. If this affected Microsoft it would be a valid software patent, but if it affected Linux it would be an abomination. The ends don't justify the means and you can't root for software patents when they happen to bankrupt someone you don't like.
Slashdot Mirror
I heard some guy from Microsoft talking about some of MS's spam plans, after billg committed the company to stopping spam by 2006. They seem to really like the idea of hash cash, which certainly seems like the most reasonable bolt-on solution.
I think the best bet for Microsoft's anti-spam campaign would be to be as open as possible with the process. If they could come up with a standard for hash cash, enable it on every Exchange server, as well as provide it for every Sendmail, Qmail and Postfix server, they would have a huge PR victory. Everyone would be focusing on how Microsoft cured spam and they could start to shake their buggy image.
They've got two temptations they'll have to avoid if they want to win this battle though. The first is their culture: they're notorious for only using standards when it suits their needs. They need to be political about getting the standard accepted everywhere, which means playing nice with the Internet as a whole. The second is to try and use this to throw their monopoly weight around. If they say "only Exchange servers can user our powerful anti-spam techniques" people will turn off the spam protection so that they can get mail from Linux mail servers. I'm pretty sure they're too smart for the second one.
Basically, this is intuitive to most Slashdot readers. Open networks are bigger than closed networks and a network's value is exponential of its size. If MS can make an open spam solution they'll have helped build a very valuable network.
Voice recognition works well in the SOCOM series. For the single player campaign, you can order your 3 squadmates around, telling them to hold fire, escort you to a waypoint or cover an area. It's a gimmick, but it's a fun gimmick and probably provides enough leverage to get people on the mics for the online game.
Karaoke Revolution provides a sort of inverse fun to this. It matches pitch but doesn't bother with voice recognition. This means when you're playing with your friends, you can suddenly in the position of improvising clever lyrics to a cheesy song.
NBC has been doing this for quite a while, well before TiVo came out. The recent change wasn't with the shows, but with their guide data to reflect the reality of the situation. They do this to keep people watching NBC once they start.
Before the guide data was fixed, shows would get cut off because of NBC's screwy primetime timing. TiVo simply codifies the desired result: watching NBC because you (or your TiVo) started watching it.
NBC is an investor in TiVo (which is why you see so many "Thumbs Up To Record" widgets on ads for their shows) so it would seem dumb for them to try and fight it. Not that I would base my argument on the logic of the entertainment industry...
No, gaotse.cx has a robots.txt that disallows indexing. Wow, I never thought I would be the one linking goatse on Slashdot...
Because they broke Windows 3.1 running under DR-DOS and made it look like an DR-DOS error. This was an attempt to get people to use MS-DOS instead. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Yeah, there's speculation and innuendo, but the story has been around for over a month and there hasn't been too much movement. Don't expect a SlashBack reversal anytime soon...
Sounds like it's B.A.D. - Broken As Designed. Like DRM or DVD players that don't skip commercials, they're not designed for the end user so much as they are designed to keep the end user in line.
Why should he have to hide his identity if he's not doing anything wrong?
You beat me to it. That is an awesome RSS feed to watch, I get all sorts of deals on games through them, like SOCOM 2 for $40 instead of $50, or Robotech for the GC collectors edition for $5.
I don't think everyday life interests the casual reader. Quite the opposite, it only interests interested parties. Minutiae like my nephew being born or me being in a car accident are interesting to my family members, but are just another baby and car accident to most people.
I don't expect the world to care, and find it odd that you expect the world to write to entertain the casual reader. Some of us have other audiences in mind when writing.
Speaking of self-absorbed, you seem to think that they are writing for you. The writer's opinions on Timmy are very important to that writer's circle of friends; that is the audience they are writing for.
The amazing thing about weblogs and personal homepages is that it allows people to broadcast to groups of people. Usually that group tends to be the author's social group, and so if you don't care about what's going on in that group it'll come off as boring and self indulgent.
You probably don't care about my recently born nephew, but when I post to my LiveJournal or family weblog about him it provides useful information and news to friends and family members. Luckily, I'm not writing it in hopes that EverDense on Slashdot will approve of what I have to say on the subject.
I saw Captured! By Robots at the Elbow Room in beautiful downtown Ypsilanti, MI and it rocked my socks off. The concept is cool, and the execution is flawless. JBOT is hilarious and really knows how to work the crowd. This is not something to miss. My buddy posted some pictures from the show that you check out.
My only regret is missing the 10 Commandments show that he's touring now.
Which of those don't run on Mac OS X?
Don't forget that Miguel de Icaza of GNOME fame has a cameo...
Yeah, that's why I'm using James Seng's other anti-comment-spam plugin, mt-Bayesian. It does the same Bayesian algorithms that anti-email spam programs do. The only change I would make would be for it to do Bayesian analysis for links as well as comment content, because comment spam is largely about the linked sites.
That's called a CAPTCHA, and James Seng wrote a Moveable Type plugin to do this with MT. CAPTCHA stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, you can read more in this story
Yeah, I was trying to figure out if this was Slashdot in 2003 or 2600 in 1994. Damn daylight savings time, what with the screwing up of the time and the glaven
There's been some research on what methods work best. The CDT put out a paper in March detailing their experiment and its results. It was also covered on Slashdot.
I oversimplified the Slashdot audience, but that's because I was addressing the comments in general. At the time that I posted I hadn't seen a single comment pointing out the other side of the story. I didn't mean to imply that all Slashdotters think the same, I just meant to imply that the loud ones do :)
This still kind of sucks. Yeah, yeah, we hated their ads, but anyone on this site should have figured out by now that almost all browsers offer pop-up blocking (IE being the sole exception that I can think of).
But what about the rest of the story? I'm going out to Radio Shack tonight to buy a bunch of X10 stuff, because it actually works. It's getting dark out in the mornings so I'm going to use their alarm clock and a plug module to turn my light on in the morning. I'll probably stock up on a couple things for future expansion. Currently I have two lamps in my living room and a coffee machine on a remote control thanks to the Slashdot X10 deal.
The other problem is that someone patented pop-under ads. This seems like yet-another-bad-software-patent, but I guess Slashdotters pick and choose which bad software patents to get upset about. If this affected Microsoft it would be a valid software patent, but if it affected Linux it would be an abomination. The ends don't justify the means and you can't root for software patents when they happen to bankrupt someone you don't like.
According to this comment this is just a G3 with Alti-Vec. So it kills any speculation in the sense that the Babel fish proves that God doesn't exist.