>> There is a rather nasty precedent set here that a person does not have an intrinsic right to use their own name if
someone else has it also
that person is more famous than they are
they are both in similar businesses.
Sorry, wrong on two counts:
The first registrant was Lyle Frampton, not another Peter Frampton, and did not even identify himself as Peter Frampton when seeking business partners to exploit the PeterFrampton.com web site
Fame is certainly an aspect of the law and this ruling, though a huge disparity is required
This is not a case of two people in similar businesses. The first registrant (Lyle) was not in any music-related business, other than promoting sales (though links to commercial web sites) of items associated with the famous musical artist Peter Framption.
>> By this reasoning, If you are named William Gates, and are not the famous one, you better not start a website called billgates.com that has to do with software.
Absolutely correct: if the Microsoft founder registered his name as a trademark used in association with the sale of computer software, then "other" Bill Gates would likely lose, but the first Bill couldn't get the registration if the other Bill had earlier been actively selling software under that name.
>> There is a fair indication that the unfamous frampton was trying to cash in on the famous one's name, and this may indicate a
certain amount of bad faith. The remedy was wrong, however. At worst, the site might have been required to say, "We are not associated with the untalented former guitarist of the Eagles, Peter Frampton".
I think the "bad faith" is pretty severe, in this case, but I also agree that there are some troubling aspects to the law and some of the analysis in the published opinion.
>> A person should always have a right to their own name. You'll also note that the respondent was 61 years old. He has a claim of
prior usage! On the other hand, in reading the complaint, it does seem that the respondent was a bit of a loon.
Yes, never under-estimate the "loon effect" in litigation. Loons usually lose, often simply because they are too loony to argue their case effectively.
I found it troubling (but the court apparently did not) that Lyle Frampton failed to present any evidence that he has ever been known as "Peter Frampton" or that Peter is his middle name. No driver's license? No birth certificate? No deed to property? Nothing at all?
I simply don't view this as a bad decision, but I certainly will defend to the death (okay, maybe not quite that far) my right to control and maintain my domain name at MarkWelch.com -- it is my name, and indeed I am pretty famous online under this name.
If some 17-year-old named Mark Welch burns some rap CDs, even if his album becomes the best-selling live album of all time, and then if in 2003 the punk registers his name as a trademark for music sales, and then sued to take over my domain name, I would be quite annoyed at having to fight, but the law is pretty clear that I would win and I would get to keep my domain name -- unless I decided to flush all my current content and create a page that just promotes the rap music and profit from the other fellow's reputation.
There are other Mark Welches out there, hundreds of them. At one time, I even created a domain at MarkWelch.net to help people find the "right" Mark Welch they were looking for (then my ISP went belly-up and I lost access, and didn't want to jump through Verisign's hoops to regain control).
As a self-employed consultant, I don't get paid vacations at all, and when I did get paid vacations I usually didn't use all the days.
When I was a reporter working on a monthly magazine, I got paid vacation (I think 1 week for the first year, 2 weeks per year after that) but guess what, during the month when I took the vacation I pretty much had to write the same number of words.
Later, when I was an attorney, I got paid vacation time but again, my billable hour 'guidelines' for the year didn't really seem to reflect any weeks off. (Later, working for the same law firm, I switched to a straight model of getting paid per billable hour, instead of a salary, and ever since then I've had no paid vacations at all, nearly 10 years now).
Ultimately, paid vacation is just something you negotiate for, and it's part of the equation for how much your employer thinks it can pay. Unfortunately, vesting rules for vacation days often create a perverse incentive for a manager to actually fire someone (just before the days vest).
I suspect that a majority of Slashdot's readers can really pick their own vacation schedules, and if they wanted 5 weeks of vacation, they'd get it, but they'd get paid 3/52nds less than if they just took 2 weeks of paid vacation, all other things being equal. A substantial minority may work for anal-retentive corporations that won't allow any special cases, even unpaid days off during periods when there is no critical need for that labor.
Sigh. Last September, I took my first real vacation in more than 5 years -- and my first-ever vacation to Europe. Surprise! My week-long vacation was extended to two weeks because my original return flight was scheduled for September 12. I'm sure that 90% of employers would be understanding in that extraordinary situation, though it's unclear how many would give extra paid days of vacation.
I must admit that vacation and days off are less important to me, than for many folks, because I don't have a spouse or kids. Trying to book vacations when there are so many schedules to work with, and when so many "personal days" may pop up to deal with kids' medical needs or competitions or whatever, must be a nightmare.
Finally, my understanding is that the way much of Europe deals with those four weeks of vacation, is that everybody has to take them at the same time, and business essentially shuts down during the month of August. Is that the model we aspire to?
The notion that someone named "Peter Frampton" could lose the domain "PeterFrampton.com" sounds pretty bizarre, until you read the published opinion.
Though I don't agree with some of the statements in the opinion, I found it completely persuasive on the relevant points:
The first registrant's real name was "Lyle Frampton" and not "Peter Frampton" (the court seems to accept that the registrant's full name is "Lyle Peter Frampton" but notes that no proof was actually given)
The web site showed logos copied from the web site of the music artist Peter Frampton
The web site contains commercial links to resellers of music and music equipment associated with the "famous music artist" and not the original registrant
Although the web site does not offer the domain for sale, the web site's text (as quoted in the opinion) reads like a classic "join with me to exploit this famous domain" instead of being a page about the registrant (Mr. Frampton):
Frampton Enterprises, Inc.
Entertainment!/Income Opportunities!/Shopping!
@ WWW.PETERFRAMPTON.COM
A Monster Business Development Opportunity!
Unlimited Income Potential!
"A New Life" You Must See This!
FRAMPTON4U@AOL.COM
Please! Send: Your Full Name/Address/ Phone #/ Your Resume in Text Only!
Then Call (ASAP)
Mr. Frampton
(727)584-0395
For Your Lifetime Career Opportunity Interview!
Now Hiring for Key Corporate Regional / Filed Manager Positions in USA.
The first-registrant is not some kid named Peter Frampton who posted a home page about his hobbies, nor a guy named Peter Frampton who engages in some business under that name. Instead, it is someone who doesn't normally answer to the name "Peter Frampton," and whose sole use of the domain is to exploit and profit from the professional fame of the washed-up music artist named Peter Frampton.
This doesn't sound like a close case to me, unless you hide or distort some of the facts as stated in the published opinion.
I have to take issue with this statement:
>> "The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the merger never should have happened"
In fact, this all depends on your perspective.
If you were a Time-Warner who kept your stock instead of selling out during the merger, you are certainly annoyed: your stock, which once represented a share in a company with genuine assets and occasionally real income, was diluted with an immense credit for meaningless goodwill, all in a marketplace that grossly overvalued internet stocks like AOL.
But if you were an AOL shareholder, holding grossly overvalued stock with no reasonable prospect of generating a meaningful return (via dividends or earnings), then buying the Time-Warner assets was a huge improvement. Of course, if you bought those shares at post-1997 prices, you are annoyed, but you are still probably better off than if the merger didn't happen.
Sure, there has been a huge "failure of synergy" and none of the expected benefits of the merger have been obtained, and sloshing the numbers around shows that only an idiot would hold stock in AOL-TW now. (No offense intended -- I was one of the idiots who held AT&T and Lucent and even Enron stock as they plummetted, I just never bought any dot-com stocks, except for a two-week excursion when I was included on a "friends and family" list.)
As others have suggested, if you want to be free of restrictions, you would want to own your own servers (thus you can tweak them any way you want, without affecting other users), and either bring in a high-speed wire to your location, or "colocate" your equipment at a facility which provides colocation service.
Late last year, I decided that I wanted the ability to execute.ASP scripts within.htm
files. You can do that, but only by tweaking
IIS so that every.htm file is interpreted as
an ASP file. That would represent a huge change
and would slow down a shared server.
So I decided it was time to re-establish colocation service. In the past, I have had my own servers colocated at Above.net (now MFN), and later at Maxim.net (later merged into another firm).
I bought a 1U Compaq server at the Webvan auction ($1,830, including tax).
The benefits of colocation are that the colo firm takes responsibility for making sure you have power (usually with UPS battery and generator backup), and they usually sell you bandwidth (though some colo facilities require that you contract for bandwidth directly with the provider, and the colo facility runs the wire from your box to your bandwidth provider's equipment at the facility. Another benefit, is that you can generally add bandwidth, or add more servers, very quickly (you can always add more servers at your own location, space permitting, but adding bandwidth may be more troublesome if you rely on a T1 or DSL line with inherent limits of 1.5 or 1.1 mbps).
When you sign a contract for colocation services, you pay for a specific level of bandwidth -- currently I am paying $200 per month to host a 1U server at Hurricane Electric (he.net) with 95% usage not to exceed 128Kbps of bandwidth. I am actually plugged in to a 10mbps ethernet connection, and I can spike my bandwidth (I often see spikes to as much as 640K in my traffic reports), but I pay no surcharge unless my server is using more than 128Kbps more than 5% of the time. (Currently I run from 75K to 100Kbps at the 95% average.)
Freedom is pretty broad, but of course each colocation facility has its own restrictions and each bandwidth provider also has its own restrictions -- spamming is always prohibited by all backbone providers (since the demise of AGIS), and or course nobody wants your server to be doing damaging things (like launching DNS attacks, distributing viruses, threatening the president's life, etc.). But most colo facilities will allow things like porn (though I'm sure there are companies that will draw the line short of what the First Amendment allows). Probably the most troublesome area would be "file sharing," if you operate a service that allows (or encourages) people to illegally download copyrighted works (free copies of Microsoft Office, click here!).
No matter what promises you may get, don't expect any colocation facility to stick with you if there is a substantial threat of litigation. You may be in the right, but the colo facility or bandwidth provider doesn't want to get sucked into a Napster-style lawsuit, nor branded as supporters of child-pornographers.
In addition, my experience is that you rarely get what you pay for, when buying colocation services. At Above.net, I paid a premium because they promised fast response time -- for example, someone could run out and cycle the power within 15 minutes. After a few months, however, Above.net was overwhelmed (too many promises, not enough staff to fulfill) and I often had to wait 40 minutes and talk to 3 different people, before finding someone who could just walk out and check if the power was on to my server! The final straw was when I began experiencing multiple outages each day, and Above.net simply denied that there were any outages. It took more than a month before they conceded that my mountain of proof was adequate, and then they simply agreed to let me terminate my contract early -- no credits or adjustments in my favor. I was mostly pleased with the service at Maxim.net (until they merged and announced a huge rate spike, which was justified by new service levels but wasn't worthwhile for me). I've been very pleased with the service at Hurricane Electric so far.
Darn, I just typed a very, very, very long reply detailing my experiences in several internet cafes in London, and then I did something and lost all that work.
Anyway, my suggestions in a much shorter version:
Visit as many cyber cafes as you can in as many different environments (tourist, college, city, small town).
Surf the web to see the web sites offering information about cyber cafes. Often they include helpful pictures showing layout and amenities. They almost always detail the available software, and indicate what other business activities (cell-phone, photo processing, bookstore, coffee) are at the same business. And they will also identify any special capabilities (for me, it was important to be able to plug in my USB camera, install its driver, and download pictures to burn onto a CD-R disc -- which only one cyber cafe in all of London allowed (it was on Edgeware Road).
As others have suggested, do your market research.
Consider taking a job in a cyber cafe somewhere for a few weeks (for example, sign on just as the students all quit at end of semester). (Talk to a solicitor/lawyer if you do this, and don't sign any non-disclosure employment agreements!)
Use common sense. For example, if you sell coffee at the cyber cafe, anticipate problems with coffee getting into the equipment (I know from personal experience that Coca-Cola [TM] is fatal for a keyboard.)
You recognize that security is an issue. Some cyber-cafes give customers access to just the keyboard and display, not the computer itself (which is on the other side of a wall or in a wooden box), but this makes it pretty hard to save to disk.
Anticipate some key issues: what if someone wants to upload 400 megabytes of digital images as attachments to email? (The receiving server may reject it, and then the customer will be annoyed after paying you for all that time). What if someone logs in and starts broadcasting spam from your equipment? (Suddenly your IP addresses are all blacklisted!)
I decided it was finally time to buy one of these gizmos (a personal video recorder, or PVR), and proceeded last weekend to try to buy one.
Surprise: you can't buy them. ReplayTV is not carried in any store, and your only option is to mail-order it at a price of $700 for a 30-hour machine that requires a broadband connection to use.
By comparison, TiVo is promoting a $400 box that stores 60 hours of programs, but it lacks a commercial-skip or even a skip-30-seconds button, and it adds that $13-per-month subscription. And TiVo made the odd decision to sign an exclusive deal with Best Buy, but Best Buy won't show the unit "in use" -- all you can do is watch a canned infomercial on a fuzzy TV screen -- and Best Buy buries the thing mid-aisle (and the topper is that it's not actually in stock).
Finally, there's UltimateTV, which requires a DirecTV satellite and subscription ($48 plus tax per month is the minimum subcription, including the $32 base price, plus $6 more for local channels, plus $10 per month for the UltimateTV service). I was attracted to the $199 RCA version. Again, you can't actually see it in use -- not at Best Buy (again, you can watch a fuzzy infomercial), nor at Radio Shack (where it's not in stock anyway), nor at Circuit City (also out of stock). Call and ask UltimateTV and they'll give you a long list of other retail stores (including Wal-Mart) -- none of which actually sell UltimateTV. The most amusing call was to the Sony store at the Sony Metreon center in San Francisco -- they have never even heard of the Sony UltimateTV unit.
To their credit, Good Guys had an RCA UltimateTV unit on display, connected to a satellite and able to record two channels at once and display the (limited) picture-in-picture mode. After a few minutes, a clerk tracked down the remote control. After a few minutes, I was impressed enough to say "okay, I'll buy it." Surprise: it's not in stock, and the store has no idea when it will be back in stock.
Best Buy had a stack of units in stock (all resealed-opened boxes), but when I tried to buy one, they announced that I'd have to sign a "commitment agreement" binding myself to a minimum one year of service. Since their in-store price tags and brochures made no mention of this $400 "extra," I objected and refused to sign, and they refused to sell me the unit at ANY price. (Yeah, I could sue them since their practice is illegal, like so many other Best Buy bait-and-switch tactics -- but it's not worth the effort).
See also
http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/pvr.htm (I wrote that commentary on Sunday, before I managed to see the UltimateTV at The Good Guys, and before I tried to buy it at Best Buy).
I can't imagine reading most of the documents that are presented to me each week.
EULAs are just the start: every Microsoft patch and fix, on both my workstation AND my server, requires acceptance of yet another "license agreement" (and sometimes a single patch requires two acceptances of two different things). Ditto for my anti-virus software. Add a couple dozen different software applications (Quicken, Photoshop, PC Anywhere, Roxio Easy CD Creator, Eudora, Netscape, etc. etc.), each updated once or twice a year. Then add all the terms and conditions and privacy policies on each of the web sites I visit (hundreds? thousands?).
What about the policies and terms for each email newsletter subscription? Don't forget online banking, online payment for my electric bill, separate online payment for my cable modem bill, and separate online payment systems for several other things. Then there's eBay, and its separate online billing (BillPoint) system, each with its own complex terms & policies. And PayPal.
Offline: And that's just the online crap. Every other credit-card bill contains a multi-panel brochure with tiny 6-point type, likewise my bank statements.
Don't forget the fine print warranties for every product we buy, plus the terms of any service contracts we buy for the equipment we buy, and the return policies at every store where we shop, and the agreement for our supermarket-club-cards.
And don't even get me started on insurance policies: my health insurance company has sent me 3 complete policy revisions this year, 50+ pages each, plus every month new qualifiers, restrictions, and special terms, and then they reject valid claims and approve fraudulent claims anyway! Then there's car insurance, homeowners, life insurance, each of which are revised at least once a year. And who ever reads the fine-print waivers when you visit a doctor or hospital?
God forbid you are a member of anything, even a homeowner's association, because then you have even more agreements and bylaws and policies. Or you are foolish enough to have kids, the paperwork multiplies again.
And that doesn't cover everything, by far.
Has anyone ever tried adding up the word counts for all these documents?
I doubt that it is physically possible to actually read all this stuff.
I paid $99 for my Mustek A3 EP scanner (11x17) a couple years ago, at Fry's Electronics. I used to see them frequently on eBay in the $50 to $150 range.
I believe Fujitsu makes scanners in this size, priced around $1,000 - $1,500 (that may include a sheet feeder), and Kodak makes a very expensive ($23,000) but VERY fast scanner in this size (we had some technical problems with one we had in on evaluation in mid-2000). My consulting client needed to scan about 50,000 11x14 color images, along with about 20,000 poster images (mostly 27x41 movie posters), and ultimately decided to buy a couple of $25,000 52-inch Contex sheet-fed scanners.
I don't need my A3 EP scanner any more, so perhaps I should post it for sale on eBay. But then I guess I'd need to set it up. It does have a small crack in the glass. Maybe I should just put it out at my condo complex yard sale this Saturday.;-)
Hey, Anonymous Coward: if you're in the Bay Area, give me a call, maybe I'll donate it to your insitution. I think it uses one of those pass-through parallel port connections.
Before you select your solution, you need to determine the actual application before buying anything. How fast does it need to be? (Trust me, manually positioning 50,000 pages on a flatbed scanner is going to take a long, long, long, long, long time.) What resolution, and what kind of color range? How accurate must the color mapping be?
Finally, note that there are service bureaus that will scan a bunch of documents, sometimes even come to your office and scan them right there, for prices ranging from 50 cents to $2 or more per image (depending on condition, size, color/monochrome, etc). One firm in Vacaville was doing this for government agencies: send in 3 guys with 3 wide-format scanners ($10,000 each) and scan for a few weeks, then deliver the document images on CD-ROM or tape.
As a university, you might find some alumnus or other supporter who would lend you this kind of equipment for a specific project -- ask around. Check if another department (engineering? public planning?) might have a scanner, or maybe there's even a scanner like this in the basement of the bursar's office.
Well, IAAL*, and indemnify generally means to assume liability for any valid claims, and for expenses associated with such claims.
That's what "indemnify" means -- a guarantee of reimbursement in the event of specified events. The dictionary definitions:
Merriam-Webster: 1: to secure against hurt, loss, or damage 2: to make compensation to for incurred hurt, loss, or damage.
Microsoft Encarta: 1. insure against loss: to provide somebody with protection, especially financial protection, against possible loss, damage, or liability 2. reimburse after loss: to pay compensation to somebody for damage, loss, or liability incurred.
It sounds as if you interpret the term as a promise not to sue the IEEE, which arguably is included under "hold harmless" (certainly the contract makes clear that the author, by signing, waives the right to sue IEEE alleging that the publication of his work was not authorized).
The issue here, because of the precise language of the IEEE contract, is whether the author will be required to "indemnify" against unsuccessful claims (e.g. pay the costs to defend a lawsuit, if the defense wins). That's what your auto insurance policy does: covers all costs associated with claims, including defense costs, regardless of the outcome (except for certain exclusions).
* IAAL = I Am A Lawyer (IANAL = "I Am Not A Lawyer"). This is NOT legal advice, and I withdrew from the full-time practice of law in 1998, but I'm pretty sure the legal meaning of the word "indemnify" has not changed since 1997.
"The undersigned further warrants that the
publication or dissemination of the Work shall
not violate any proprietary right or the
Digital Copyright Millennium Act"
xpccx writes:
Maybe the IEEE just wants to protect itself from DMCA lawsuits, but I hope their intention is not to abandon authors who get sued.
What's the difference? The IEEE is asking authors
to "warrant" that their works don't violate the DCMA, which means the author is accepting full responsbility if the work does violate the DCMA.
What was NOT quoted was this: "The undersigned agrees to indemnify and hold
harmless IEEE from any damage or expense that may arise in the event of a breach of any of the
warranties set forth above."
This is interesting language -- it requires the
author to pay any damages or expense arising from
a breach, so if the DCMA is violated, the author
is responsible for all attorney's fees and damages. The IEEE does not expressly require that the author pay all defense costs from the time an action is filed, nor at all if there is no breach.
The bottom line, though, is that if a lawsuit is filed, the IEEE and author will need to somehow hire an attorney to defend against the claim, and if the ultimate verdict is that the "work" violates copyright, DCMA, or other laws, then the author is on the hook for all the fees, costs, and damage awards.
This is "chilling effect" is not the IEEE's fault, it is an intrinsic, intentional feature of the DCMA and other recent changes to intellectual-property laws in the USA. The goal is not to actually outlaw everything, but to create a cloud of uncertainty that will cause most people to simply avoid the "cloud" entirely.
After quoting new contract language:
> "The undersigned further warrants that the
> publication or dissemination of the Work shall
> not violate any proprietary right or the
> Digital Copyright Millennium Act"
xpccx writes:
> Maybe the IEEE just wants to protect itself
> from DMCA lawsuits, but I hope their intention
> is not to abandon authors who get sued.
What's the difference? The IEEE is asking authors
to "warrant" that their works don't violate the DCMA, which means the author is accepting full responsbility if the work does violate the DCMA.
What was NOT quoted was this:
> "The undersigned agrees to indemnify and hold
> harmless IEEE from any damage or expense that > may arise in the event of a breach of any of the
> warranties set forth above."
This is interesting language -- it requires the
author to pay any damages or expense arising from
a breach, so if the DCMA is violated, the author
is responsible for all attorney's fees and damages. The IEEE does not expressly require that the author pay all defense costs from the time an action is filed, nor at all if there is no breach.
The bottom line, though, is that if a lawsuit is filed, the IEEE and author will need to somehow hire an attorney to defend against the claim, and if the ultimate verdict is that the "work" violates copyright, DCMA, or other laws, then the author is on the hook for all the fees, costs, and damage awards.
This is "chilling effect" is not the IEEE's fault, it is an intrinsic, intentional feature of the DCMA and other recent changes to intellectual-property laws in the USA. The goal is not to actually outlaw everything, but to create a cloud of uncertainty that will cause most people to simply avoid the clouds entirely.
Well, that is a good point. Indeed, I'm sure that all affiliates (including authors, but also including tens of thousands of 'regular' affiliates) would prefer if Amazon offered an "entry page mode" that did NOT display used items (or other non-commissionable items, including zShops merchandise and drugstore.com stuff).
Amazon won't do it because they perceive that they will make more money by NOT doing it. Not enough authors or affiliates are voting with their feet.
The.Nihilist wrote: >>
"to be sold on the 'used' list, the books had to have been bought, right? Which means the author already got their share of the sale. If this is after-market purchasing, it falls under classic copyright laws, which give the owner the right to sell such material for whatever price they deem. I can see their point of 'prominently placing' the link to used books next to newer releases, but maybe it's just me: I never buy used books."
Well, there it is, in a nutshell. No used books can be sold unless they were first bought new, and the authors and publishers earned money from that transaction. The right to resell books (the "first sale" doctrine) is protected by law in the USA.
Hey, authors: don't bitch about a company providing good service to its customers.
I have bought about 30 books through Amazon.com, one of which was an in-print used book (it was a title I didn't feel was worth the list price). When you buy a used book through Amazon, it takes MUCH longer to get it delivered. And you don't know what condition it will really be in. But Amazon offers this service anyway (and yes, they profit from it, maybe even more than from sales of new copies of books).
I buy another 40-50 new books per year in local bookstores, paying list price (despite the availability of a lower price online). Instant gratification.
I buy another 40-50 used books per year, almost all of them out-of-print mystery titles.
Authors: if you don't like the way Amazon does business, then put a clause in your next book contract providing that new copies of the book cannot be sold by to Amazon.com, until and unless it removes the "used book" link.
The real issue was that while reading a book, even a nonfiction book, one expects a buildup to a climax and then resolution, and an "ending."
A good analogy here, is a movie I saw late last year -- it was beautifully filmed, and quite enjoyable, but then the movie ended without resolving any of the tangled plot lines. (Of course, I am speaking about "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.").
I knew the movie was the first part of a trilogy; I expected more of an "ending" while reading the MouseDriver Chronicles.
Actually, I always assumed, while reading the book, that the product would be a crappy and ergonomically-incorrect mouse, especially reading the account of refining the design during the manufacturing process. And quite honestly, this isn't a product I'd ever buy for myself or anyone else.
But as others have noted, specialty mice are moderately popular as gift items, and they work fine for infrequent computer use.* Just last week, I handled a MouseDriver for the first time,** and I immediately confirmed my original conclusion: the MouseDriver is not a very comfortable mouse to use.
* I recall interviewing with a prestigious law firm back in 1987, and noticing that all the law firm partners had brand new, fast, powerful computers, while the secretaries all had ancient machines. I asked one partner how the computer was working out, and he confessed that he hadn't used it once in the month since it was installed. For him, a mouse shaped like a golf-driver would fit in well with the "computer as status symbol" mentality at the firm. (They offered me a job, but I declined.)
** I got the MouseDriver in a box from John Lusk, as a "thank you" for having posted this review at my web site and at Amazon.com (where you'll no longer find it, for reasons not relevant here). I'll donate the MouseDriver (and t-shirt and mouse pad) to be included in my Rotary Club's charity auction, on May 4 in Pleasanton. Note that this review was submitted to Slashdot back on February 3, and I certainly didn't expect any 'reward.'
I do agree with this point -- if this book is intended to help sell their product, they don't do a very good follow-through.
But I assume the problem is the traditional one of "channel conflict" -- if you sell direct, some dealers will gripe that you are competing with them (even if you sell only at list price with a huge shipping fee).
To their credit, the authors do provide an "ordering" page linking to Amazon and three specialty merchants where the product can be purchased online (and I assume they'd add any dealer who asked to be listed on that page).
Finally, I love how Slashdot posted these two reviews together, and I would encourage this in the future whenever possible.
By "hijacking" the affiliate referral links from content-based web sites, Morpheus and other "parasite-ware" seek to remove one of the few remaining revenue sources for content sites, and thus it directly threatens the availability of certain types of free content on the internet.
If it looks like c|net is taking a stand in this article, perhaps it's because c|net's reporters will lose their jobs if c|net can't generate income through affiliate links. Note that many of the banner and button ads you see on c|net and other web sites (probably including Slashdot) are actually affiliate links -- the site is not getting paid unless sales are generated and tracked to the content site.
When Morpheus or any other app checks the URLs and replaces other affiliate codes with its own, Morpheus is trying to take revenue from someone else, without providing any benefit to the consumer or anyone else.
The good news is that most affiliate managers refuse to pay commissions to any "affiliate" who uses "predatory methods" like this. The affiliate managers realize that smart affiliate sites won't do business with any merchant who pays the "hijackers" in this situation.
The bad news is that if the hijacker replaces the affiliate link, even if the hijacker does not get paid, there is no way for the sale to be credited to the "real" affiliate. The hijacker is also likely to mis-manage the multiple redirects that often happen when a link passes through two or more ad servers (common with affiliate links that look just like paid banner or button advertising).
In the end, if these predatory software tools become more pervasive, content providers will lose all incentive to provide "free" content on the internet.
This issue is not unique to "predatory browser add-ins." Other content providers are threatened with loss of "the benefit of their bargain" in other ways. For example, that the TV networks have battled hard to discourage marketing of TiVo and ReplayTV as "commercial skippers" because if too many people find ways to skip TV commercials, then the advertisers won't pay the rates, and the networks eventually won't be able to spend $10 million on the next episode of "E.R."
Maybe, in the end, we just won't have advertising-supported content like we do now.
Certainly, the current revenue model isn't working to pay the salaries of content producers: even with intrusive pop-up and pop-under advertising, and rows of banners and buttons, big content sites often earn net rates of a few pennies per thousand visitors, and some earn only a few mils (tenths of a cent) per thousand visitors. Those earnings might be enough to cover the server and bandwidth costs, but not to pay a single part-time reporter's salary.
So maybe in the end, the only free content will be sponsored directly by big corporations, who have good reason to pay to control the content and viewpoints of the news we read.
Or maybe some of us will break down and start paying for web content, if only someone would come up with some workable mechanism to allow micropayments (payments of a few mils or a penny to view a web site for a day, or to read an article).
So if I bring my minicam and handheld PC, I can re-transmit the movie over the web as it's shown in the theater? I bet that's not something they planned for (but the studios would probably go crazy at the idea).
I checked some of my sites at Alexa, which tries to identify "related" sites.
Sometimes, it shows mostly my other sites (since most of my sites link to each other).
But often, it actually seemed to identify sites that are in fact "similar" or "related" in ways that seem correct. Note that Alexa uses actual user-activity data from its toolbar users, but it also appears to integrate that data along with keywords and links within sites.
Try it with your own sites, or a site representing a particular community of interest, and see what results you get:
http://info.alexa.com/
I think the opening paragraph about the eBay changes is misleading, and misses the point.
Omarius wrote that eBay "can share your auction history with anyone..." What's new about that? Auction bidding has long been public, though eBay has recently started hiding some data about bidders (it says to reduce spam, some say to impair competition). Sure, I might be embarassed that someone can do a search on eBay and see what items I bid on (a Monkees LP?), and what items I bought (a porn video?), but that's been a feature of the service for years.
The real change isn't about auction activity. The "real" issues, as I understand them, are these changes:
First, eBay is broadening its right to disclose customers' "personal information" to others. The operative language is that eBay now says it can release your personal information "as we in our sole discretion determine necessary or appropriate to maintain a level of trust and safety in our community and to enforce our user agreement, privacy policy and any posted policies or rules applicable to services you use through our site." That is simply an unlimited right to do anything they want with your personal information (which I assume includes your email, address, phone, etc., and could easily include sharing your address and credit card number with any eBay merchants whose auctions you've won).
Second, eBay now reserves the right to "suspend customers if eBay believes their actions may cause a financial loss to the company, other customers or themselves." This language could be construed to mean that anyone who criticizes eBay or any of its merchants, could be suspended because their comments might cause harm (reduced sales) to eBay or its merchant customer.
Re:Pay-Per-Click Search Listings on Yahoo, et al.
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 1
No, this is NOT a seller's perspective. The search engines are so cluttered with garbage using product names and categories as "lures" that you can't find those reviews or unbiased reports you talk about. And in fact, a number of content sites use Overture to drive traffic, using the specific subject of a review or product comparison as the search term.
I do like your idea of including the word "price" to find actual product listings instead of spam, but alas many sites don't use the word "price" but instead just show the price ("Driving Gloves, FK45, leather/black, $14.95"). One more thing to mention to my clients: include the word price (and the word 'shipping') on the product pages.
I certainly agree that if I type "Dodge trucks" I would expect to see the manufacturer's web site as one of the first few listed. I did a search on Google and it appears that the first matching site (4adodge.com) is a Chrysler site (though it doesn't actually say so).
Try typing the name of your favorite book into the search engines, and even add words like "price" and "buy", and see what you get. Probably in the top ten results, you'll get the Amazon listing for the book, plus five Amazon affiliate pages linking to the same Amazon product info, plus a page from B&N or Borders.com. You will almost certainly NOT find the author's site, the publisher's site, or any reviews of the book (other than the reviews listed on Amazon).
And THAT is where the paid search engines are more useful.
Of course, consumers might be expected to go to a price-comparison engine, but it turns out that the price-comparison services are all buried under spam, with lots of fake listings, prices that aren't honored, and of course extremely dubious merchants.
Pay-Per-Click Search Listings on Yahoo, et al.
on
Search Engine Payola
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Someone asked: "Does anyone actually click on that garbage anyway?"
The answer is yes, definitely. A well-optimized campaign of paid search terms at Overture (formerly GoTo.com), can result in huge increases in relevant traffic and sales.
Many search engines, including Google, don't provide relevant information because they are bloated with spam (spoofed web pages, often for porn sites) and they also can't keep up with new submissions (so relevant content never gets indexed). Google certainly remains the best place to find certain types of information, but if you use Google to search for a specific consumer product, you'll get mostly garbage.
In late 2000, I designed the paid-search strategy for MovieGoods.com, which sells movie posters. We submitted about 450,000 unique search terms (including several variations for each actor/actress name, director, movie title, and movie theme), and GoTo.com approved about 27,000 of them (they won't let you buy a search term unless their records show that it has been searched more than 10 times in the past 90 days).
Of course, for a company like MovieGoods, a huge portion of traffic comes from people who search for simple terms like "movie poster" (the top ten search terms probably drive 60% of the GoTo/Overture-sourced traffic). But the other 25,000 search terms (like "Fellowship of the Ring movie poster" or "Antonio Banderas posters") drive a lot of sales, and usually at a very low cost.
For a merchant like MovieGoods, the key is to carefully track the performance of each search term: I determined how many dollars of sales were generated by each search phrase, and how much we spent, and we achieved a simple balance: for every $1 we spent at GoTo/Overture, we generated $6 in sales.
And consumers also benefitted by finding exactly what they were looking for. Yes, Overture does allow some off-topic bidding, but they are trying to crack down on it so that only genuinely responsive links come up in the paid listings.
Of course, some consumers ignore the paid results on search engines (including Google, which does sell top-of-list placement and right-margin AdWords, so they are NOT so much holier than the others). But like so many "bad things" on the internet, paid results work for the merchants and often for the consumer.
There are some interesting issues: for example, if I search for "MovieGoods" and a competitor bids for the #1 position for that term, there are some real concerns. There have even been lawsuits over this issue (really not much different, legally, than the "Meta Keyword" disputes).
Of course, if the result said "Click Here for MovieGoods" and instead the consumer is misdirected to a competitor (or to a porn site), then it's just not right, but I haven't seen much of this type of abuse (and Overture prohibits it, though as you'd expect they don't check all listings as carefully as some folks would like).
Also, every major search engine (including Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, Lycos, and more) is pretty clear at distinguishing the "paid" results from the regular results. Usually the paid listings are in a different font style or size, bold or not, indented differently, or boxed to stand apart from other results.
Finally, note that on many search engines, there are multiple paid-placement opportunities. For example, on Yahoo, there are pay-per-click results from Overture, then there are paid "sponsored links," and then there are the "most popular links" which generally are the paid sponsors since the sponsor links are shown first and thus get clicked most often. On Google, there are left-margin "AdWords" as well as top-of-list placements. And everybody sells banner ads and often buttons also.
These days, most of my time is spent on designing "cost-effective marketing" campaigns, with strong emphasis on optimizing paid-search-engine placements, affiliate programs, and of course traditional search-engine-optimization strategies.
The key is that I can achieve that $5 return on every dollar spent on these strategies, but banner ads and other types of advertising rarely return even $2 in sales for every dollar spent (and often the return is pennies on the dollar). That explains why banner ad rates have plummetted so far, so fast. And it explains why the content-versus-advertising borders are getting fuzzier.
(Here on Slashdot, people complain all the time about those FatBrain links in book reviews, which will vanish in a day or two since B&N acquired FatBrain and is discontinuing the generous FatBrain affiliate program.)
I've bounced back and forth between hosting with an ISP and using a colocated server.
Until recently, neither my home nor office could get a DSL connection faster than 128K so I didn't consider that an option; recently I did consider an SDSL connection at 384K (both ways) but the price was only $35 per month less than colocation.
Colocation has the advantage of having reduntant backbone connections AND backup power in the event of an outage.
As noted, the server itself does cost money: I managed to snag a nice 1U Compaq DL360 server at the WebVan auction for $1,830 (including tax).
I'm paying $200 per month for colocation, which includes a 10mbps connection (I pay a surcharge if my server uses more than 128K bandwidth more than 5% of the time, currently my 95% usage is only 50K so this isn't an issue).
If you have a 128K-uplink DSL connection, consider how slow your site may look when someone else with a DSL or cable modem connection is accessing it, especially if you have large image files or bloated HTML (common if you don't hand-code).
The real question is, how important is it that the server be up 24/7? I've heard lots of horror stories about DSL connections being inexplicably cut, and it takes 24-48 hours for the Phone Company to fix.
Don't forget Murphy's Law: even if you generally don't care about outages that make your server unavailable 1% of the time, what if the outage occurs just as the search engine is looking for your site? No response, removed from index, bam. Or if the outage occurs when that key client or potential employer is looking for your site?
Of course, one downside of colocation is that your server is somewhere else. In my case, my server is colocated at Hurricane Electric in Fremont, about 15 miles from my house (that's just 20 minutes away at 11pm, but during commute hours it's a 60-90 minute drive). And even colocation has its glitches: someone working on another client's equipment jostled my server's power cord loose (this is actually a frighteningly common complaint, if you don't have your own locked cabinet). I didn't notice the problem until I got an outage notice from a service I hired (about 3 hours after the plug was pulled), then I had to call and have someone walk out to the cabinet, check the server, push the plug back in, and hit the power button.
Also, if you run your own server (where-ever), you'll need to take responsibility for security issues. My server was attacked less than 15 minutes after it was plugged in, and every day my server is probed hundreds of times by script-kiddies.
-- Mark Welch, Internet Performance Marketing Consultant
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/consult.htm
Slashdot Mirror
- someone else has it also
- that person is more famous than they are
- they are both in similar businesses.
Sorry, wrong on two counts:- The first registrant was Lyle Frampton, not another Peter Frampton, and did not even identify himself as Peter Frampton when seeking business partners to exploit the PeterFrampton.com web site
- Fame is certainly an aspect of the law and this ruling, though a huge disparity is required
- This is not a case of two people in similar businesses. The first registrant (Lyle) was not in any music-related business, other than promoting sales (though links to commercial web sites) of items associated with the famous musical artist Peter Framption.
Absolutely correct: if the Microsoft founder registered his name as a trademark used in association with the sale of computer software, then "other" Bill Gates would likely lose, but the first Bill couldn't get the registration if the other Bill had earlier been actively selling software under that name. I think the "bad faith" is pretty severe, in this case, but I also agree that there are some troubling aspects to the law and some of the analysis in the published opinion. Yes, never under-estimate the "loon effect" in litigation. Loons usually lose, often simply because they are too loony to argue their case effectively.I found it troubling (but the court apparently did not) that Lyle Frampton failed to present any evidence that he has ever been known as "Peter Frampton" or that Peter is his middle name. No driver's license? No birth certificate? No deed to property? Nothing at all?
I simply don't view this as a bad decision, but I certainly will defend to the death (okay, maybe not quite that far) my right to control and maintain my domain name at MarkWelch.com -- it is my name, and indeed I am pretty famous online under this name.
If some 17-year-old named Mark Welch burns some rap CDs, even if his album becomes the best-selling live album of all time, and then if in 2003 the punk registers his name as a trademark for music sales, and then sued to take over my domain name, I would be quite annoyed at having to fight, but the law is pretty clear that I would win and I would get to keep my domain name -- unless I decided to flush all my current content and create a page that just promotes the rap music and profit from the other fellow's reputation.
There are other Mark Welches out there, hundreds of them. At one time, I even created a domain at MarkWelch.net to help people find the "right" Mark Welch they were looking for (then my ISP went belly-up and I lost access, and didn't want to jump through Verisign's hoops to regain control).
Read the law, read the opinions in these cases.
When I was a reporter working on a monthly magazine, I got paid vacation (I think 1 week for the first year, 2 weeks per year after that) but guess what, during the month when I took the vacation I pretty much had to write the same number of words.
Later, when I was an attorney, I got paid vacation time but again, my billable hour 'guidelines' for the year didn't really seem to reflect any weeks off. (Later, working for the same law firm, I switched to a straight model of getting paid per billable hour, instead of a salary, and ever since then I've had no paid vacations at all, nearly 10 years now).
Ultimately, paid vacation is just something you negotiate for, and it's part of the equation for how much your employer thinks it can pay. Unfortunately, vesting rules for vacation days often create a perverse incentive for a manager to actually fire someone (just before the days vest).
I suspect that a majority of Slashdot's readers can really pick their own vacation schedules, and if they wanted 5 weeks of vacation, they'd get it, but they'd get paid 3/52nds less than if they just took 2 weeks of paid vacation, all other things being equal. A substantial minority may work for anal-retentive corporations that won't allow any special cases, even unpaid days off during periods when there is no critical need for that labor.
Sigh. Last September, I took my first real vacation in more than 5 years -- and my first-ever vacation to Europe. Surprise! My week-long vacation was extended to two weeks because my original return flight was scheduled for September 12. I'm sure that 90% of employers would be understanding in that extraordinary situation, though it's unclear how many would give extra paid days of vacation.
I must admit that vacation and days off are less important to me, than for many folks, because I don't have a spouse or kids. Trying to book vacations when there are so many schedules to work with, and when so many "personal days" may pop up to deal with kids' medical needs or competitions or whatever, must be a nightmare.
Finally, my understanding is that the way much of Europe deals with those four weeks of vacation, is that everybody has to take them at the same time, and business essentially shuts down during the month of August. Is that the model we aspire to?
Though I don't agree with some of the statements in the opinion, I found it completely persuasive on the relevant points:
- The first registrant's real name was "Lyle Frampton" and not "Peter Frampton" (the court seems to accept that the registrant's full name is "Lyle Peter Frampton" but notes that no proof was actually given)
- The web site showed logos copied from the web site of the music artist Peter Frampton
- The web site contains commercial links to resellers of music and music equipment associated with the "famous music artist" and not the original registrant
- Although the web site does not offer the domain for sale, the web site's text (as quoted in the opinion) reads like a classic "join with me to exploit this famous domain" instead of being a page about the registrant (Mr. Frampton):
The first-registrant is not some kid named Peter Frampton who posted a home page about his hobbies, nor a guy named Peter Frampton who engages in some business under that name. Instead, it is someone who doesn't normally answer to the name "Peter Frampton," and whose sole use of the domain is to exploit and profit from the professional fame of the washed-up music artist named Peter Frampton.This doesn't sound like a close case to me, unless you hide or distort some of the facts as stated in the published opinion.
>> "The conclusion, not surprisingly, is that the merger never should have happened" In fact, this all depends on your perspective.
If you were a Time-Warner who kept your stock instead of selling out during the merger, you are certainly annoyed: your stock, which once represented a share in a company with genuine assets and occasionally real income, was diluted with an immense credit for meaningless goodwill, all in a marketplace that grossly overvalued internet stocks like AOL.
But if you were an AOL shareholder, holding grossly overvalued stock with no reasonable prospect of generating a meaningful return (via dividends or earnings), then buying the Time-Warner assets was a huge improvement. Of course, if you bought those shares at post-1997 prices, you are annoyed, but you are still probably better off than if the merger didn't happen.
Sure, there has been a huge "failure of synergy" and none of the expected benefits of the merger have been obtained, and sloshing the numbers around shows that only an idiot would hold stock in AOL-TW now. (No offense intended -- I was one of the idiots who held AT&T and Lucent and even Enron stock as they plummetted, I just never bought any dot-com stocks, except for a two-week excursion when I was included on a "friends and family" list.)
Late last year, I decided that I wanted the ability to execute .ASP scripts within .htm
files. You can do that, but only by tweaking
IIS so that every .htm file is interpreted as
an ASP file. That would represent a huge change
and would slow down a shared server.
So I decided it was time to re-establish colocation service. In the past, I have had my own servers colocated at Above.net (now MFN), and later at Maxim.net (later merged into another firm).
I bought a 1U Compaq server at the Webvan auction ($1,830, including tax).
The benefits of colocation are that the colo firm takes responsibility for making sure you have power (usually with UPS battery and generator backup), and they usually sell you bandwidth (though some colo facilities require that you contract for bandwidth directly with the provider, and the colo facility runs the wire from your box to your bandwidth provider's equipment at the facility. Another benefit, is that you can generally add bandwidth, or add more servers, very quickly (you can always add more servers at your own location, space permitting, but adding bandwidth may be more troublesome if you rely on a T1 or DSL line with inherent limits of 1.5 or 1.1 mbps).
When you sign a contract for colocation services, you pay for a specific level of bandwidth -- currently I am paying $200 per month to host a 1U server at Hurricane Electric (he.net) with 95% usage not to exceed 128Kbps of bandwidth. I am actually plugged in to a 10mbps ethernet connection, and I can spike my bandwidth (I often see spikes to as much as 640K in my traffic reports), but I pay no surcharge unless my server is using more than 128Kbps more than 5% of the time. (Currently I run from 75K to 100Kbps at the 95% average.)
Freedom is pretty broad, but of course each colocation facility has its own restrictions and each bandwidth provider also has its own restrictions -- spamming is always prohibited by all backbone providers (since the demise of AGIS), and or course nobody wants your server to be doing damaging things (like launching DNS attacks, distributing viruses, threatening the president's life, etc.). But most colo facilities will allow things like porn (though I'm sure there are companies that will draw the line short of what the First Amendment allows). Probably the most troublesome area would be "file sharing," if you operate a service that allows (or encourages) people to illegally download copyrighted works (free copies of Microsoft Office, click here!).
No matter what promises you may get, don't expect any colocation facility to stick with you if there is a substantial threat of litigation. You may be in the right, but the colo facility or bandwidth provider doesn't want to get sucked into a Napster-style lawsuit, nor branded as supporters of child-pornographers.
In addition, my experience is that you rarely get what you pay for, when buying colocation services. At Above.net, I paid a premium because they promised fast response time -- for example, someone could run out and cycle the power within 15 minutes. After a few months, however, Above.net was overwhelmed (too many promises, not enough staff to fulfill) and I often had to wait 40 minutes and talk to 3 different people, before finding someone who could just walk out and check if the power was on to my server! The final straw was when I began experiencing multiple outages each day, and Above.net simply denied that there were any outages. It took more than a month before they conceded that my mountain of proof was adequate, and then they simply agreed to let me terminate my contract early -- no credits or adjustments in my favor. I was mostly pleased with the service at Maxim.net (until they merged and announced a huge rate spike, which was justified by new service levels but wasn't worthwhile for me). I've been very pleased with the service at Hurricane Electric so far.
Anyway, my suggestions in a much shorter version:
Surprise: you can't buy them. ReplayTV is not carried in any store, and your only option is to mail-order it at a price of $700 for a 30-hour machine that requires a broadband connection to use.
By comparison, TiVo is promoting a $400 box that stores 60 hours of programs, but it lacks a commercial-skip or even a skip-30-seconds button, and it adds that $13-per-month subscription. And TiVo made the odd decision to sign an exclusive deal with Best Buy, but Best Buy won't show the unit "in use" -- all you can do is watch a canned infomercial on a fuzzy TV screen -- and Best Buy buries the thing mid-aisle (and the topper is that it's not actually in stock).
Finally, there's UltimateTV, which requires a DirecTV satellite and subscription ($48 plus tax per month is the minimum subcription, including the $32 base price, plus $6 more for local channels, plus $10 per month for the UltimateTV service). I was attracted to the $199 RCA version. Again, you can't actually see it in use -- not at Best Buy (again, you can watch a fuzzy infomercial), nor at Radio Shack (where it's not in stock anyway), nor at Circuit City (also out of stock). Call and ask UltimateTV and they'll give you a long list of other retail stores (including Wal-Mart) -- none of which actually sell UltimateTV. The most amusing call was to the Sony store at the Sony Metreon center in San Francisco -- they have never even heard of the Sony UltimateTV unit.
To their credit, Good Guys had an RCA UltimateTV unit on display, connected to a satellite and able to record two channels at once and display the (limited) picture-in-picture mode. After a few minutes, a clerk tracked down the remote control. After a few minutes, I was impressed enough to say "okay, I'll buy it." Surprise: it's not in stock, and the store has no idea when it will be back in stock.
Best Buy had a stack of units in stock (all resealed-opened boxes), but when I tried to buy one, they announced that I'd have to sign a "commitment agreement" binding myself to a minimum one year of service. Since their in-store price tags and brochures made no mention of this $400 "extra," I objected and refused to sign, and they refused to sell me the unit at ANY price. (Yeah, I could sue them since their practice is illegal, like so many other Best Buy bait-and-switch tactics -- but it's not worth the effort).
See also http://www.markwelch.com/perspective/pvr.htm (I wrote that commentary on Sunday, before I managed to see the UltimateTV at The Good Guys, and before I tried to buy it at Best Buy).
EULAs are just the start: every Microsoft patch and fix, on both my workstation AND my server, requires acceptance of yet another "license agreement" (and sometimes a single patch requires two acceptances of two different things). Ditto for my anti-virus software. Add a couple dozen different software applications (Quicken, Photoshop, PC Anywhere, Roxio Easy CD Creator, Eudora, Netscape, etc. etc.), each updated once or twice a year. Then add all the terms and conditions and privacy policies on each of the web sites I visit (hundreds? thousands?). What about the policies and terms for each email newsletter subscription? Don't forget online banking, online payment for my electric bill, separate online payment for my cable modem bill, and separate online payment systems for several other things. Then there's eBay, and its separate online billing (BillPoint) system, each with its own complex terms & policies. And PayPal.
Offline: And that's just the online crap. Every other credit-card bill contains a multi-panel brochure with tiny 6-point type, likewise my bank statements.
Don't forget the fine print warranties for every product we buy, plus the terms of any service contracts we buy for the equipment we buy, and the return policies at every store where we shop, and the agreement for our supermarket-club-cards.
And don't even get me started on insurance policies: my health insurance company has sent me 3 complete policy revisions this year, 50+ pages each, plus every month new qualifiers, restrictions, and special terms, and then they reject valid claims and approve fraudulent claims anyway! Then there's car insurance, homeowners, life insurance, each of which are revised at least once a year. And who ever reads the fine-print waivers when you visit a doctor or hospital?
God forbid you are a member of anything, even a homeowner's association, because then you have even more agreements and bylaws and policies. Or you are foolish enough to have kids, the paperwork multiplies again.
And that doesn't cover everything, by far.
Has anyone ever tried adding up the word counts for all these documents?
I doubt that it is physically possible to actually read all this stuff.
I believe Fujitsu makes scanners in this size, priced around $1,000 - $1,500 (that may include a sheet feeder), and Kodak makes a very expensive ($23,000) but VERY fast scanner in this size (we had some technical problems with one we had in on evaluation in mid-2000). My consulting client needed to scan about 50,000 11x14 color images, along with about 20,000 poster images (mostly 27x41 movie posters), and ultimately decided to buy a couple of $25,000 52-inch Contex sheet-fed scanners.
I don't need my A3 EP scanner any more, so perhaps I should post it for sale on eBay. But then I guess I'd need to set it up. It does have a small crack in the glass. Maybe I should just put it out at my condo complex yard sale this Saturday. ;-)
Hey, Anonymous Coward: if you're in the Bay Area, give me a call, maybe I'll donate it to your insitution. I think it uses one of those pass-through parallel port connections.
Before you select your solution, you need to determine the actual application before buying anything. How fast does it need to be? (Trust me, manually positioning 50,000 pages on a flatbed scanner is going to take a long, long, long, long, long time.) What resolution, and what kind of color range? How accurate must the color mapping be?
Finally, note that there are service bureaus that will scan a bunch of documents, sometimes even come to your office and scan them right there, for prices ranging from 50 cents to $2 or more per image (depending on condition, size, color/monochrome, etc). One firm in Vacaville was doing this for government agencies: send in 3 guys with 3 wide-format scanners ($10,000 each) and scan for a few weeks, then deliver the document images on CD-ROM or tape.
As a university, you might find some alumnus or other supporter who would lend you this kind of equipment for a specific project -- ask around. Check if another department (engineering? public planning?) might have a scanner, or maybe there's even a scanner like this in the basement of the bursar's office.
That's what "indemnify" means -- a guarantee of reimbursement in the event of specified events. The dictionary definitions:
1: to secure against hurt, loss, or damage
2: to make compensation to for incurred hurt, loss, or damage.
1. insure against loss: to provide somebody with protection, especially financial protection, against possible loss, damage, or liability
2. reimburse after loss: to pay compensation to somebody for damage, loss, or liability incurred.
It sounds as if you interpret the term as a promise not to sue the IEEE, which arguably is included under "hold harmless" (certainly the contract makes clear that the author, by signing, waives the right to sue IEEE alleging that the publication of his work was not authorized).
The issue here, because of the precise language of the IEEE contract, is whether the author will be required to "indemnify" against unsuccessful claims (e.g. pay the costs to defend a lawsuit, if the defense wins). That's what your auto insurance policy does: covers all costs associated with claims, including defense costs, regardless of the outcome (except for certain exclusions).
* IAAL = I Am A Lawyer (IANAL = "I Am Not A Lawyer"). This is NOT legal advice, and I withdrew from the full-time practice of law in 1998, but I'm pretty sure the legal meaning of the word "indemnify" has not changed since 1997.
xpccx writes:
What's the difference? The IEEE is asking authors to "warrant" that their works don't violate the DCMA, which means the author is accepting full responsbility if the work does violate the DCMA.
What was NOT quoted was this: "The undersigned agrees to indemnify and hold harmless IEEE from any damage or expense that may arise in the event of a breach of any of the warranties set forth above."
This is interesting language -- it requires the author to pay any damages or expense arising from a breach, so if the DCMA is violated, the author is responsible for all attorney's fees and damages. The IEEE does not expressly require that the author pay all defense costs from the time an action is filed, nor at all if there is no breach.
The bottom line, though, is that if a lawsuit is filed, the IEEE and author will need to somehow hire an attorney to defend against the claim, and if the ultimate verdict is that the "work" violates copyright, DCMA, or other laws, then the author is on the hook for all the fees, costs, and damage awards.
This is "chilling effect" is not the IEEE's fault, it is an intrinsic, intentional feature of the DCMA and other recent changes to intellectual-property laws in the USA. The goal is not to actually outlaw everything, but to create a cloud of uncertainty that will cause most people to simply avoid the "cloud" entirely.
After quoting new contract language: > "The undersigned further warrants that the > publication or dissemination of the Work shall > not violate any proprietary right or the > Digital Copyright Millennium Act" xpccx writes: > Maybe the IEEE just wants to protect itself > from DMCA lawsuits, but I hope their intention > is not to abandon authors who get sued. What's the difference? The IEEE is asking authors to "warrant" that their works don't violate the DCMA, which means the author is accepting full responsbility if the work does violate the DCMA. What was NOT quoted was this: > "The undersigned agrees to indemnify and hold > harmless IEEE from any damage or expense that > may arise in the event of a breach of any of the > warranties set forth above." This is interesting language -- it requires the author to pay any damages or expense arising from a breach, so if the DCMA is violated, the author is responsible for all attorney's fees and damages. The IEEE does not expressly require that the author pay all defense costs from the time an action is filed, nor at all if there is no breach. The bottom line, though, is that if a lawsuit is filed, the IEEE and author will need to somehow hire an attorney to defend against the claim, and if the ultimate verdict is that the "work" violates copyright, DCMA, or other laws, then the author is on the hook for all the fees, costs, and damage awards. This is "chilling effect" is not the IEEE's fault, it is an intrinsic, intentional feature of the DCMA and other recent changes to intellectual-property laws in the USA. The goal is not to actually outlaw everything, but to create a cloud of uncertainty that will cause most people to simply avoid the clouds entirely.
Amazon won't do it because they perceive that they will make more money by NOT doing it. Not enough authors or affiliates are voting with their feet.
I have bought about 30 books through Amazon.com, one of which was an in-print used book (it was a title I didn't feel was worth the list price). When you buy a used book through Amazon, it takes MUCH longer to get it delivered. And you don't know what condition it will really be in. But Amazon offers this service anyway (and yes, they profit from it, maybe even more than from sales of new copies of books).
I buy another 40-50 new books per year in local bookstores, paying list price (despite the availability of a lower price online). Instant gratification.
I buy another 40-50 used books per year, almost all of them out-of-print mystery titles.
Authors: if you don't like the way Amazon does business, then put a clause in your next book contract providing that new copies of the book cannot be sold by to Amazon.com, until and unless it removes the "used book" link.
A good analogy here, is a movie I saw late last year -- it was beautifully filmed, and quite enjoyable, but then the movie ended without resolving any of the tangled plot lines. (Of course, I am speaking about "Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring.").
I knew the movie was the first part of a trilogy; I expected more of an "ending" while reading the MouseDriver Chronicles.
But as others have noted, specialty mice are moderately popular as gift items, and they work fine for infrequent computer use.* Just last week, I handled a MouseDriver for the first time,** and I immediately confirmed my original conclusion: the MouseDriver is not a very comfortable mouse to use.
* I recall interviewing with a prestigious law firm back in 1987, and noticing that all the law firm partners had brand new, fast, powerful computers, while the secretaries all had ancient machines. I asked one partner how the computer was working out, and he confessed that he hadn't used it once in the month since it was installed. For him, a mouse shaped like a golf-driver would fit in well with the "computer as status symbol" mentality at the firm. (They offered me a job, but I declined.)
** I got the MouseDriver in a box from John Lusk, as a "thank you" for having posted this review at my web site and at Amazon.com (where you'll no longer find it, for reasons not relevant here). I'll donate the MouseDriver (and t-shirt and mouse pad) to be included in my Rotary Club's charity auction, on May 4 in Pleasanton. Note that this review was submitted to Slashdot back on February 3, and I certainly didn't expect any 'reward.'
But I assume the problem is the traditional one of "channel conflict" -- if you sell direct, some dealers will gripe that you are competing with them (even if you sell only at list price with a huge shipping fee).
To their credit, the authors do provide an "ordering" page linking to Amazon and three specialty merchants where the product can be purchased online (and I assume they'd add any dealer who asked to be listed on that page).
Finally, I love how Slashdot posted these two reviews together, and I would encourage this in the future whenever possible.
If it looks like c|net is taking a stand in this article, perhaps it's because c|net's reporters will lose their jobs if c|net can't generate income through affiliate links. Note that many of the banner and button ads you see on c|net and other web sites (probably including Slashdot) are actually affiliate links -- the site is not getting paid unless sales are generated and tracked to the content site.
When Morpheus or any other app checks the URLs and replaces other affiliate codes with its own, Morpheus is trying to take revenue from someone else, without providing any benefit to the consumer or anyone else.
The good news is that most affiliate managers refuse to pay commissions to any "affiliate" who uses "predatory methods" like this. The affiliate managers realize that smart affiliate sites won't do business with any merchant who pays the "hijackers" in this situation.
The bad news is that if the hijacker replaces the affiliate link, even if the hijacker does not get paid, there is no way for the sale to be credited to the "real" affiliate. The hijacker is also likely to mis-manage the multiple redirects that often happen when a link passes through two or more ad servers (common with affiliate links that look just like paid banner or button advertising).
In the end, if these predatory software tools become more pervasive, content providers will lose all incentive to provide "free" content on the internet.
This issue is not unique to "predatory browser add-ins." Other content providers are threatened with loss of "the benefit of their bargain" in other ways. For example, that the TV networks have battled hard to discourage marketing of TiVo and ReplayTV as "commercial skippers" because if too many people find ways to skip TV commercials, then the advertisers won't pay the rates, and the networks eventually won't be able to spend $10 million on the next episode of "E.R."
Maybe, in the end, we just won't have advertising-supported content like we do now. Certainly, the current revenue model isn't working to pay the salaries of content producers: even with intrusive pop-up and pop-under advertising, and rows of banners and buttons, big content sites often earn net rates of a few pennies per thousand visitors, and some earn only a few mils (tenths of a cent) per thousand visitors. Those earnings might be enough to cover the server and bandwidth costs, but not to pay a single part-time reporter's salary.
So maybe in the end, the only free content will be sponsored directly by big corporations, who have good reason to pay to control the content and viewpoints of the news we read.
Or maybe some of us will break down and start paying for web content, if only someone would come up with some workable mechanism to allow micropayments (payments of a few mils or a penny to view a web site for a day, or to read an article).
So if I bring my minicam and handheld PC, I can re-transmit the movie over the web as it's shown in the theater? I bet that's not something they planned for (but the studios would probably go crazy at the idea).
I checked some of my sites at Alexa, which tries to identify "related" sites. Sometimes, it shows mostly my other sites (since most of my sites link to each other). But often, it actually seemed to identify sites that are in fact "similar" or "related" in ways that seem correct. Note that Alexa uses actual user-activity data from its toolbar users, but it also appears to integrate that data along with keywords and links within sites. Try it with your own sites, or a site representing a particular community of interest, and see what results you get: http://info.alexa.com/
Omarius wrote that eBay "can share your auction history with anyone..." What's new about that? Auction bidding has long been public, though eBay has recently started hiding some data about bidders (it says to reduce spam, some say to impair competition). Sure, I might be embarassed that someone can do a search on eBay and see what items I bid on (a Monkees LP?), and what items I bought (a porn video?), but that's been a feature of the service for years.
The real change isn't about auction activity. The "real" issues, as I understand them, are these changes:
I do like your idea of including the word "price" to find actual product listings instead of spam, but alas many sites don't use the word "price" but instead just show the price ("Driving Gloves, FK45, leather/black, $14.95"). One more thing to mention to my clients: include the word price (and the word 'shipping') on the product pages.
I certainly agree that if I type "Dodge trucks" I would expect to see the manufacturer's web site as one of the first few listed. I did a search on Google and it appears that the first matching site (4adodge.com) is a Chrysler site (though it doesn't actually say so).
Try typing the name of your favorite book into the search engines, and even add words like "price" and "buy", and see what you get. Probably in the top ten results, you'll get the Amazon listing for the book, plus five Amazon affiliate pages linking to the same Amazon product info, plus a page from B&N or Borders.com. You will almost certainly NOT find the author's site, the publisher's site, or any reviews of the book (other than the reviews listed on Amazon). And THAT is where the paid search engines are more useful.
Of course, consumers might be expected to go to a price-comparison engine, but it turns out that the price-comparison services are all buried under spam, with lots of fake listings, prices that aren't honored, and of course extremely dubious merchants.
The answer is yes, definitely. A well-optimized campaign of paid search terms at Overture (formerly GoTo.com), can result in huge increases in relevant traffic and sales.
Many search engines, including Google, don't provide relevant information because they are bloated with spam (spoofed web pages, often for porn sites) and they also can't keep up with new submissions (so relevant content never gets indexed). Google certainly remains the best place to find certain types of information, but if you use Google to search for a specific consumer product, you'll get mostly garbage.
In late 2000, I designed the paid-search strategy for MovieGoods.com, which sells movie posters. We submitted about 450,000 unique search terms (including several variations for each actor/actress name, director, movie title, and movie theme), and GoTo.com approved about 27,000 of them (they won't let you buy a search term unless their records show that it has been searched more than 10 times in the past 90 days).
Of course, for a company like MovieGoods, a huge portion of traffic comes from people who search for simple terms like "movie poster" (the top ten search terms probably drive 60% of the GoTo/Overture-sourced traffic). But the other 25,000 search terms (like "Fellowship of the Ring movie poster" or "Antonio Banderas posters") drive a lot of sales, and usually at a very low cost.
For a merchant like MovieGoods, the key is to carefully track the performance of each search term: I determined how many dollars of sales were generated by each search phrase, and how much we spent, and we achieved a simple balance: for every $1 we spent at GoTo/Overture, we generated $6 in sales.
And consumers also benefitted by finding exactly what they were looking for. Yes, Overture does allow some off-topic bidding, but they are trying to crack down on it so that only genuinely responsive links come up in the paid listings.
Of course, some consumers ignore the paid results on search engines (including Google, which does sell top-of-list placement and right-margin AdWords, so they are NOT so much holier than the others). But like so many "bad things" on the internet, paid results work for the merchants and often for the consumer.
There are some interesting issues: for example, if I search for "MovieGoods" and a competitor bids for the #1 position for that term, there are some real concerns. There have even been lawsuits over this issue (really not much different, legally, than the "Meta Keyword" disputes).
Of course, if the result said "Click Here for MovieGoods" and instead the consumer is misdirected to a competitor (or to a porn site), then it's just not right, but I haven't seen much of this type of abuse (and Overture prohibits it, though as you'd expect they don't check all listings as carefully as some folks would like).
Also, every major search engine (including Yahoo, Alta Vista, Google, Lycos, and more) is pretty clear at distinguishing the "paid" results from the regular results. Usually the paid listings are in a different font style or size, bold or not, indented differently, or boxed to stand apart from other results.
Finally, note that on many search engines, there are multiple paid-placement opportunities. For example, on Yahoo, there are pay-per-click results from Overture, then there are paid "sponsored links," and then there are the "most popular links" which generally are the paid sponsors since the sponsor links are shown first and thus get clicked most often. On Google, there are left-margin "AdWords" as well as top-of-list placements. And everybody sells banner ads and often buttons also.
These days, most of my time is spent on designing "cost-effective marketing" campaigns, with strong emphasis on optimizing paid-search-engine placements, affiliate programs, and of course traditional search-engine-optimization strategies.
The key is that I can achieve that $5 return on every dollar spent on these strategies, but banner ads and other types of advertising rarely return even $2 in sales for every dollar spent (and often the return is pennies on the dollar). That explains why banner ad rates have plummetted so far, so fast. And it explains why the content-versus-advertising borders are getting fuzzier.
(Here on Slashdot, people complain all the time about those FatBrain links in book reviews, which will vanish in a day or two since B&N acquired FatBrain and is discontinuing the generous FatBrain affiliate program.)
-- Mark J. Welch, Internet Performance Marketing Consultant
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/consult.htm
I've bounced back and forth between hosting with an ISP and using a colocated server.
Until recently, neither my home nor office could get a DSL connection faster than 128K so I didn't consider that an option; recently I did consider an SDSL connection at 384K (both ways) but the price was only $35 per month less than colocation.
Colocation has the advantage of having reduntant backbone connections AND backup power in the event of an outage.
As noted, the server itself does cost money: I managed to snag a nice 1U Compaq DL360 server at the WebVan auction for $1,830 (including tax).
I'm paying $200 per month for colocation, which includes a 10mbps connection (I pay a surcharge if my server uses more than 128K bandwidth more than 5% of the time, currently my 95% usage is only 50K so this isn't an issue).
If you have a 128K-uplink DSL connection, consider how slow your site may look when someone else with a DSL or cable modem connection is accessing it, especially if you have large image files or bloated HTML (common if you don't hand-code).
The real question is, how important is it that the server be up 24/7? I've heard lots of horror stories about DSL connections being inexplicably cut, and it takes 24-48 hours for the Phone Company to fix.
Don't forget Murphy's Law: even if you generally don't care about outages that make your server unavailable 1% of the time, what if the outage occurs just as the search engine is looking for your site? No response, removed from index, bam. Or if the outage occurs when that key client or potential employer is looking for your site?
Of course, one downside of colocation is that your server is somewhere else. In my case, my server is colocated at Hurricane Electric in Fremont, about 15 miles from my house (that's just 20 minutes away at 11pm, but during commute hours it's a 60-90 minute drive). And even colocation has its glitches: someone working on another client's equipment jostled my server's power cord loose (this is actually a frighteningly common complaint, if you don't have your own locked cabinet). I didn't notice the problem until I got an outage notice from a service I hired (about 3 hours after the plug was pulled), then I had to call and have someone walk out to the cabinet, check the server, push the plug back in, and hit the power button.
Also, if you run your own server (where-ever), you'll need to take responsibility for security issues. My server was attacked less than 15 minutes after it was plugged in, and every day my server is probed hundreds of times by script-kiddies.
-- Mark Welch, Internet Performance Marketing Consultant
-- http://www.MarkWelch.com/consult.htm