When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he'll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site's phrase. "But you'll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don't know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page."
Of course, who knows if he's telling the truth or not - he is a spammer. But if it's true, it's an interesting phenomenon - perhaps a habit of people who are used to scrolling past the "paid listings" of other search engines.
And what is quite important (and no one seems to get) is that it didn't always work this way, and there was no notification that the bidding rules changed. (at least, not that I received).
I've been an eBay user for at least five years, and when bidding on items, I often constantly changed my maximum bid during the course of an auction without my current bid being affected.
The first time I saw the behavior described in the parent post, I thought "WTF?" Of course, once I saw it happen the first time, I assumed they changed the system and I now am careful to pay attention to my maximum bid. But that's at least one instance in which I was screwed over for a couple dollars. Multiply that by however many millions of users eBay has, and consider the people who let this happen to them 2 or 3 times before realizing the new policy.
The movie has an entry on IMDB, with comments dating as far back as 1999.
How did these people see the movie?
phozz
That's because they actually discovered the movie back in 2001. They didn't try to obtain a DVD distributor until last year, but apparently some VHS copies are in circulation.
For now, you can sign up for audible and have the current NPR shows automatically sync to your iPod every time you dock it. And you can listen to them any time you like, and rewind/ff as much as you want. And some of the shows are available before they are aired locally.
It's expensive (but not that expensive) and it's not a replacement for FM, but for people who like me never listen to the radio anyway (with the exception of some NPR shows), audible is a decent option.
It's not really a problem with these players. They spin up for a few seconds, read the entire song into memory, and spin down. And even if you aggressively shake the player while it's buffering, it doesn't seem to stall the reading (i'm not sure what's different about Sony's anti-shock system, but it's superb). Battery life is great too, about 10-15 hours.
Sure, size a factor, but Sony already has cd players that are barely larger in circumference than the size of the CD and less than 1cm thick. If they extended that design to the 3" CD-Rs like Philips and others, they could probably make something pocket-sized.
Also, the disposable (or collectible) media is a huge advantage over solid-state media. I hate reloading music onto my player with my pc every time I want to listen to something different.
and has also stopped the flow of any apps that help to do so *ala, virtual pc*, even though apple's hardware is far superior.
What are you talking about? Microsoft just released a new, far superior version of Virtual PC which is a G4 optimized (last version was not), native OS-X application. It's 20% faster, puts a start menu in the dock, supports copy/paste between windows/mac, supports seamless networking between win/mac, etc.
Just FYI: I don't think that AOL filters mail based on the relaying server's IP. Instead, AOL often makes sure that your reverse DNS maps to the domain name that you report when greeting the SMTP server.
This is a problem for a lot of linux users, because they like to give their machine a dns name that is really an alias (for example, I can give my machine a name of pokka.org when my dns is really something like cust127-0-0-1.dsl.verizon.net.
Now, when I connect to AOL, postfix reports "HELO pokka.org". AOL then reverse maps my DNS, sees that it's not pokka.org (even though pokka.org maps to my IP), and rejects the mail.
According to the RFC, it should not reject the mail for this reason; however, I think it's reasonable to do so, since the relaying machine should be configured correctly in the first place.
It may be complicated for a mom & pop store to manually calculate sales tax for 50 states, but it's trivial for them to purchase or download software which does 98% of the work automatically. I could see this being an issue before software was cheap and readily available, but do you really think it's a problem today?
The spam I get which can be traced to a U.S. business (i.e. does not originate from a foreign country) ALWAYS has correct subject and from info. It's typically a from field of "Our company " and the subject is "Let us translate your web site into 5 languages". What's misleading about that? Spammers are stupid, but not enough so to get easily sued.
The WA state law is worthless. Basically, mail is only considered spam if it contains false information in the headers. Therefore, if the headers are legitimate, I can track them down, but it's not considered spam. If the headers are false, the originating IP is usually in some foreign country, which means I can't track them down anyway.
99.9% of the spammers fall into one of the above two categories. There are very few spammers who fake headers AND have a real name/address attached to their business.
A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired.
IEEE Spectrum magazine has a timely article
It's kind of funny how articles about the power grid appear in magazines across the world every month of every year, but the ones that just happened to appear this month are "eerily prophetic".:)
Who wins here? The company selling the adaptor. No one else.
1) The percentage of CPUs which are overclocked are very small (less than 1%). And the percentage of users who damage the CPUs is a very small fraction of that 1%.
Even if this adaptor decreased the ability to detect damage due to overclocking, it would not significantly impact sales or prices of the CPUs.
I agree that it's a "buyer-beware" market, and HP certainly has the right to sell at any price they want.
But changing pricing structures in a way that intentionally misleads the customer is not something that a reputable company should do. HP is generally trusted by consumers, and they are taking advantage of that trust. They even go so far as to pad the 10ml cartridge boxes with extra cardboard to make them look the same size! How could you say that's ethical? Do you work for HP?
As you all probably know: ink prices average around $30 US per cartridge.
Did you know that most of the $50 printers use 10mL ink cartridges, while the more expensive ones use 40+ mL cartridges?
The strange thing is that when it's time to refill the ink, the 10mL cartridges cost almost the same price as the 30 mL that are used in more expensive models. So while you saved a little money by getting the dirt-cheap printer, you're now paying 3 times as much for the ink!
This is (in my opinion) a very unethical way to trick consumers into thinking that they are saving money by buying a cheaper printer. I've heard many people say that "it's cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy the refill cartridges". But it turns out that this is not true.
Don't believe me? Check out the HP deskjet 3300 series ($40 printer). It uses 10mL cartridges that cost $17.00, which is $1.70 per milliliter.
Now check the Deskjet 6127, a $299 printer. It uses 42mL cartridges @ $29.00, which is only $0.69/mL! The ink for the $40 printer is 2.4 times as expensive.
By the way, this does not apply to Canon printers, but does apply to most others.
It sounds like a good idea, but most TiVo users who wanted to have more space or convert their collection to DVD have already figured out how to do so with minimal investment (TiVoNet, DVD-R, hard drive) -- much less than the price of this new TiVo.
Another reason I wouldn't buy one is that I know the HDTV-based models are due out sometime in the near future, so investing $1,200 in something that will be obsolete in 1-2 years seems like a bad idea.
Still, it's nice for brand new users who have never owned a PVR and don't know how to use telnet.
If you want to build your own system, go to Advantech and choose "Biscuit SBCs". They have fanless, VIA-based 667mhz computers that are roughly the size of 3.5" Hard drives. The computers include almost everything you need: audio, ethernet, VGA, TV out, IRDA, USB, IDE, and CompactFlash support. The only things you need to do yourself would be finding/building a case and finding a stable 5VDC power supply.
The parent post might be modded as a troll, but it's the truth.
The main argument of those supporting P2P services is that they have legal uses. The courts seem to agree; P2P is here to stay.
So now the RIAA is only going after those using the service for illegal purposes. Now, the illegal file shares can't ruin p2p for everyone. Independent artists can use p2p to promote their music without fear of getting shut down for no reason. Why are you still complaining? Shouldn't everyone consider this to be a victory?
If you don't like the RIAA and their practices, then don't buy their music. But don't pretend like what they are doing right now is any more unethical than the people stealing music.
there are plenty of people out there who are using windows 98 on a modem.
Over the last 2 years they have allowed windows update to drip the updates to them. Last week Joe's hard drive crashed and he reinstalled.
So what? That's Joe's problem. I guarantee you that if I pull out my old Redhat 6.2 discs and do a fresh install, the machine will be cracked before I have time to download the patches. And the same can be said for almost any version of any old, unpatched OS.
The problem here is not the software, it's a person who thinks he's computer literate when he's not. If Joe doesn't know how to properly install software, he should pay someone who's qualified to do so.
At the school I attended (Georgia Tech), all of the computer science classes I took focused on writing code that compiled on Unix or Linux machines (with the exception of a few intro classes). You could use Visual Studio to compile your C-based project, but if it didn't compile and run on the school's boxes (usually SunOS, but sometimes Linux), then your grade would suffer.
The computer engineering projects, however, were mostly based on software for
Windows. I guess that's my point -- If you were a freshman at GT, you would probably want to see what students in your major were using before you bought your computer and software, because it varied by major.
You need to get a feel for your college's environment before you know what computer you need. Some colleges are strictly Windows, others are strictly Linux, and most are somewhere in-between.
I would recommend just bringing along whatever computer you currently have. It will be good enough for the first few weeks, and will give you time to find out what kinds of computers upperclassmen are using. That "standard dell package" that your school recommends might be overkill, or it might not be right for your major.
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From The Register's Interview with a link spammer
When Sam begins a spam run, he has one target, though he'll accept any of six. Principal one: come top of the search engines for his chosen site's phrase. "But you'll accept coming in at 1,2 or 3, or if you come at 8,9 or 10. Actually, 8, 9 and 10 have better conversion rates. I don't know why. Maybe the eyes fix on it when you scroll down the page."
Of course, who knows if he's telling the truth or not - he is a spammer. But if it's true, it's an interesting phenomenon - perhaps a habit of people who are used to scrolling past the "paid listings" of other search engines.
The parent post explains the issue perfectly.
And what is quite important (and no one seems to get) is that it didn't always work this way, and there was no notification that the bidding rules changed. (at least, not that I received).
I've been an eBay user for at least five years, and when bidding on items, I often constantly changed my maximum bid during the course of an auction without my current bid being affected.
The first time I saw the behavior described in the parent post, I thought "WTF?" Of course, once I saw it happen the first time, I assumed they changed the system and I now am careful to pay attention to my maximum bid. But that's at least one instance in which I was screwed over for a couple dollars. Multiply that by however many millions of users eBay has, and consider the people who let this happen to them 2 or 3 times before realizing the new policy.
Forms of government don't kill people, people do!
oh, nevermind. I didn't see the "1999" part :)
The movie has an entry on IMDB, with comments dating as far back as 1999.
How did these people see the movie?
phozz
That's because they actually discovered the movie back in 2001. They didn't try to obtain a DVD distributor until last year, but apparently some VHS copies are in circulation.
For now, you can sign up for audible and have the current NPR shows automatically sync to your iPod every time you dock it. And you can listen to them any time you like, and rewind/ff as much as you want. And some of the shows are available before they are aired locally. It's expensive (but not that expensive) and it's not a replacement for FM, but for people who like me never listen to the radio anyway (with the exception of some NPR shows), audible is a decent option.
The problem is, its not solid state.
It's not really a problem with these players. They spin up for a few seconds, read the entire song into memory, and spin down. And even if you aggressively shake the player while it's buffering, it doesn't seem to stall the reading (i'm not sure what's different about Sony's anti-shock system, but it's superb). Battery life is great too, about 10-15 hours.
Sure, size a factor, but Sony already has cd players that are barely larger in circumference than the size of the CD and less than 1cm thick. If they extended that design to the 3" CD-Rs like Philips and others, they could probably make something pocket-sized.
Also, the disposable (or collectible) media is a huge advantage over solid-state media. I hate reloading music onto my player with my pc every time I want to listen to something different.
hi how r u? u gtg
u hv 4hr 2 get ur
stf out of ur dsk
hv a gr8 day cya
and has also stopped the flow of any apps that help to do so *ala, virtual pc*, even though apple's hardware is far superior.
What are you talking about? Microsoft just released a new, far superior version of Virtual PC which is a G4 optimized (last version was not), native OS-X application. It's 20% faster, puts a start menu in the dock, supports copy/paste between windows/mac, supports seamless networking between win/mac, etc.
Just FYI: I don't think that AOL filters mail based on the relaying server's IP. Instead, AOL often makes sure that your reverse DNS maps to the domain name that you report when greeting the SMTP server.
This is a problem for a lot of linux users, because they like to give their machine a dns name that is really an alias (for example, I can give my machine a name of pokka.org when my dns is really something like cust127-0-0-1.dsl.verizon.net.
Now, when I connect to AOL, postfix reports "HELO pokka.org". AOL then reverse maps my DNS, sees that it's not pokka.org (even though pokka.org maps to my IP), and rejects the mail.
According to the RFC, it should not reject the mail for this reason; however, I think it's reasonable to do so, since the relaying machine should be configured correctly in the first place.
It may be complicated for a mom & pop store to manually calculate sales tax for 50 states, but it's trivial for them to purchase or download software which does 98% of the work automatically. I could see this being an issue before software was cheap and readily available, but do you really think it's a problem today?
The spam I get which can be traced to a U.S. business (i.e. does not originate from a foreign country) ALWAYS has correct subject and from info. It's typically a from field of "Our company " and the subject is "Let us translate your web site into 5 languages". What's misleading about that? Spammers are stupid, but not enough so to get easily sued.
The WA state law is worthless. Basically, mail is only considered spam if it contains false information in the headers. Therefore, if the headers are legitimate, I can track them down, but it's not considered spam. If the headers are false, the originating IP is usually in some foreign country, which means I can't track them down anyway.
99.9% of the spammers fall into one of the above two categories. There are very few spammers who fake headers AND have a real name/address attached to their business.
A little ironic that this article on a world wide power grid was published in the September issue of Wired.
:)
IEEE Spectrum magazine has a timely article
It's kind of funny how articles about the power grid appear in magazines across the world every month of every year, but the ones that just happened to appear this month are "eerily prophetic".
Are you on crack? The question you should have asked is this: Has anyone hacked the Tivo yet to run NetBSD?
Yeah, I would have asked that, but I heard somewhere that NetBSD is dying.
Well this sucks. Has anyone hacked the Tivo yet to run Windows?
Who wins here? The company selling the adaptor. No one else.
1) The percentage of CPUs which are overclocked are very small (less than 1%). And the percentage of users who damage the CPUs is a very small fraction of that 1%.
Even if this adaptor decreased the ability to detect damage due to overclocking, it would not significantly impact sales or prices of the CPUs.
I agree that it's a "buyer-beware" market, and HP certainly has the right to sell at any price they want.
But changing pricing structures in a way that intentionally misleads the customer is not something that a reputable company should do. HP is generally trusted by consumers, and they are taking advantage of that trust. They even go so far as to pad the 10ml cartridge boxes with extra cardboard to make them look the same size! How could you say that's ethical? Do you work for HP?
One interesting fact about ink cartridges:
As you all probably know: ink prices average around $30 US per cartridge.
Did you know that most of the $50 printers use 10mL ink cartridges, while the more expensive ones use 40+ mL cartridges?
The strange thing is that when it's time to refill the ink, the 10mL cartridges cost almost the same price as the 30 mL that are used in more expensive models. So while you saved a little money by getting the dirt-cheap printer, you're now paying 3 times as much for the ink!
This is (in my opinion) a very unethical way to trick consumers into thinking that they are saving money by buying a cheaper printer. I've heard many people say that "it's cheaper to buy a new printer than to buy the refill cartridges". But it turns out that this is not true.
Don't believe me? Check out the HP deskjet 3300 series ($40 printer). It uses 10mL cartridges that cost $17.00, which is $1.70 per milliliter.
Now check the Deskjet 6127, a $299 printer. It uses 42mL cartridges @ $29.00, which is only $0.69/mL! The ink for the $40 printer is 2.4 times as expensive.
By the way, this does not apply to Canon printers, but does apply to most others.
It sounds like a good idea, but most TiVo users who wanted to have more space or convert their collection to DVD have already figured out how to do so with minimal investment (TiVoNet, DVD-R, hard drive) -- much less than the price of this new TiVo.
Another reason I wouldn't buy one is that I know the HDTV-based models are due out sometime in the near future, so investing $1,200 in something that will be obsolete in 1-2 years seems like a bad idea.
Still, it's nice for brand new users who have never owned a PVR and don't know how to use telnet.
If you want to build your own system, go to Advantech and choose "Biscuit SBCs". They have fanless, VIA-based 667mhz computers that are roughly the size of 3.5" Hard drives. The computers include almost everything you need: audio, ethernet, VGA, TV out, IRDA, USB, IDE, and CompactFlash support. The only things you need to do yourself would be finding/building a case and finding a stable 5VDC power supply.
The parent post might be modded as a troll, but it's the truth.
The main argument of those supporting P2P services is that they have legal uses. The courts seem to agree; P2P is here to stay.
So now the RIAA is only going after those using the service for illegal purposes. Now, the illegal file shares can't ruin p2p for everyone. Independent artists can use p2p to promote their music without fear of getting shut down for no reason. Why are you still complaining? Shouldn't everyone consider this to be a victory?
If you don't like the RIAA and their practices, then don't buy their music. But don't pretend like what they are doing right now is any more unethical than the people stealing music.
there are plenty of people out there who are using windows 98 on a modem. Over the last 2 years they have allowed windows update to drip the updates to them. Last week Joe's hard drive crashed and he reinstalled.
So what? That's Joe's problem. I guarantee you that if I pull out my old Redhat 6.2 discs and do a fresh install, the machine will be cracked before I have time to download the patches. And the same can be said for almost any version of any old, unpatched OS.
The problem here is not the software, it's a person who thinks he's computer literate when he's not. If Joe doesn't know how to properly install software, he should pay someone who's qualified to do so.
At the school I attended (Georgia Tech), all of the computer science classes I took focused on writing code that compiled on Unix or Linux machines (with the exception of a few intro classes). You could use Visual Studio to compile your C-based project, but if it didn't compile and run on the school's boxes (usually SunOS, but sometimes Linux), then your grade would suffer. The computer engineering projects, however, were mostly based on software for Windows. I guess that's my point -- If you were a freshman at GT, you would probably want to see what students in your major were using before you bought your computer and software, because it varied by major.
You need to get a feel for your college's environment before you know what computer you need. Some colleges are strictly Windows, others are strictly Linux, and most are somewhere in-between. I would recommend just bringing along whatever computer you currently have. It will be good enough for the first few weeks, and will give you time to find out what kinds of computers upperclassmen are using. That "standard dell package" that your school recommends might be overkill, or it might not be right for your major.