Sigh... even more reasons that I hadn't heard yet that Communitech sucks. I never had a problem with ZIP files (and my sites use them extensively), so I'm guessing that they just had a grudge on you and that was the best excuse they could come up with. They do that a lot. BTW, there's absolutely no way you have to pay any of that extra money just because they want you to do so. Ask them to pay you $5000. Tell them the reason, "just because" - after all, that's the reason they're demanding money from you. The only power they have over you is a) the TOS and the agreement you signed, which most certainly doesn't mention anything about additional fees that were never agreed upon, and b) they can take down your website, which they had already done, so they relinquished that power. They have no right to request that money, and you have the right to sue them (well, at least threaten that) or report them to BBB, attorney generals, etc.
BTW, if you're serious about the site dedicated to "showing the truth" behind CT (or possibly, a general site to uncover dark secrets of other bad companies) then I'll definitely join you. My CT hell ended over a year ago, so my hatred for them has somewhat dampened, but I'm still enraged when I think of their company.
I used communitech for a little over a year, and my experience was awful. They kept on taking away services that were promised when I signed up, and refusing to refund anything. They suspended my accounts twice; their policy for suspension is to immediately take the site down and leave a "forbidden" page, then ask questions later. One of the times it was because I was using too much bandwidth - one of the primary reasons I used communitech was because of their promise of "unlimited bandwidth" (I believe they've since changed their policy, without notice of course). The second time it was because I alerted them of a security hole in their system. ALERTED them - I simply wanted it fixed, but they suspended my site. When I called soon after, they threatened to call the police. They guaranteed 99.5% uptime when I signed up, but never met that - later, when questioned, they said that they were working towards that goal, but it wasn't in actually a guarantee (even though it was advertised on their front page). Customer support was horrendous - I'll leave it at that. When I finally canceled my accounts, they continued billing me. They wouldn't stop until I threatened to call the Attorney General of their state (after that, of course, they quite willingly stopped). I could keep going, but I'll leave it at that. Please, whatever you do, get away from Communitech. If you don't, I assure you that you'll regret it later.
This is why I find the Internet so wonderful. The anonymity means that you are judged by skill (which I hold more important than even experience), not by age, race, gender, etc. True, most jobs aren't conducted over the Internet so it's not a good solution to the problem in the workplace, but when a brilliant young person hides behind the Internet and is later exposed as a competent teen (or any minority), it should help to dispel stereotypes. In answer to your question, yes. I've experienced the same problem, though I haven't had much of the normal workplace environment. It's a problem, but it is getting better, at least in the world of technology.
Thanks for pointing that out - I wasn't aware of it. I think it just goes to show that it's the programming that's weak, not the intentions - if perfect coding was available for blocking software, THEN it would be interesting to see which sites were blocked - we'd be able to judge the blocks based on intent and not on lack of competency. Until then, we can't try to guess at their motives and piss ourselves off assuming things we don't understand.
Nope, sorry, Greylark was correct, this is a repeat of news that was already old the FIRST time slashdot posted it. I hate to be one of those idiots who complains about the news slashdot posts, but this one is pushing my limits.
I definitely support the feelings surrounding the paper, I just wish the author had thought about it a little bit more. I am entirely against such filtering - in my opinion, pornography should be blocked from high schools and elementary schools, and only a little bit more is up for debate. My high school had awful restrictions - including all mail services (free services and even mailstart.com, which lets you check pop3s), as well as many educational sites - researching mushrooms for a biology report couldn't be done from school computers.
On the other hand, the paper is misleading. I am particularly concerned about the author bashing the blocking of translation sites, implying that they are blocked BECAUSE they are educational and useful. Let's be honest here - the filtering software is not DESIGNED to block good sites, even though many are surely blocked inadvertently. It's quite clear to me, and probably to most slashdot readers, that translation sites are not blocked because they provide useful translation services, but because they could be used to beat the system and "unblock" pages. Of course, this represents poor and inadaquate software, but nonetheless, a safety precaution to make sure that 7th grade boys aren't viewing pornography websites translated from English to German.
So yes, these censoring programs are evil, overprotective, and poorly programmed, but in some cases, the intent has been lost. They're not intentionally trying to screw over their customers - their job is to make absolutely sure that no user of their software can access inappropriate material. They do a good job at that, even though there are unpleasant side effects.
"In a recent techies.com compensation survey, tech services and equipment took three of the five top spots for best fringe benefits." It's not the three out of five that surprise me, it's the other two. So far it's not phrased as a bad thing by any reports, as is reasonable. It's good that techies are so fascinated by what they do that they'd choose more of the same (ie. technology) over entertainment (nice headline from techies.com, "Techies want more than entertainment"). I'm glad that everyone's passion for their work shows through in this survey.
What, how can you call that a troll? When reading it, I was thinking that I wished I had mod points so I could moderate it up... obviously you didn't understand the point of it. Linked lists do not do what he asked... they do allow you to insert things into the middle of a list, but they do not change the memory locations of any of the other nodes. He wants to be able to insert something into a specific place in memory, and have anything currently in that place be shifted. Presumably that would allow you to have the advantages of linked lists but be rid of most of the disadvantages - it could behave like a resizable array.
There's an idea. An analog memory system that allows for overlaps of data points without data corruption. Build me that and I'll solve your NP vs P problem. That summarizes the original point, and I don't know how you could think a linked list is the solution. Maybe you didn't finish reading his post? In the future, please don't bash something that you don't understand. It's disrespectful and doesn't help anyone.
Someone tell me how these URLs could be mistaken for the Guinness beer website
As was stated in the original rant by the owner of the questionable domains, Guiness owns guinesssucks.com. guinesssucks.com and guiness-really-sucks.com are quite alike, so there's definitely confusion. If I were trying to go to guinnesssucks.com, it's quite likely that I'd go to guinness-sucks.com by accident.
But I doubt Guiness has a trademark on "guinesssucks[.com]"
I'm with the WIPO on this one. It isn't fair that an individual profits off of the success of other people. I'm sure you've done quite a lot of work on slashdot, and you said yourself that it pissed you off when people frame slashdot with extra ads, but they're all like that. If they all happily redirected to the correct page, then a) it wouldn't be a problem where the WIPO would have to intervene and b) nobody would care enough to do it because they wouldn't gain anything. Though I didn't read the article, I'm sure that it was NOT a typo domain that simply redirected to altavista.com. You can't just be in favor of the "good intentioned" typo sites, those aren't the ones causing the controversy.
These typo domains are helping nobody but the culprit, and most likely, they're hurting other people. These people are cheating off of other people's hard work. How can you support that?
I've been waiting since July to purchase an expired domain name. A few months back, I sent Network Solutions an E-Mail asking about timeframe for purchasing expired domain names. After responding to their rediculous autoresponder that said they needed the name of the domain that I was referring to, they sent me this:
Thank you for contacting Network Solutions.
The expiration date that shows in WHOIS is not the date that a domain
name becomes available to be registered by another party.
The expiration date appears in the WHOIS database so that the registrant
may be able to verify how long they have locked in there domain name
registration. The registrant still has until the end of the billing
cycle
before the domain name is deleted, and released to be registered by the
public.
We do not release the date a domain name will be deleted from our
database to third parties. Please continue to check the availability of
the domain name on a day to day basis. As long as it is registered our
system will not allow you to register the name. Once it is deleted, the
name is able to be registered on a first come first serve basis.
There are no waiting list for domain name registrations.
Best Regards,
Larry W.
Network Solutions Registration Services
I don't think that billing cycle could possibly be as long as the four months it's been since the domain expired. And "day to day" checking has become tiresome. This Alabama resident is right on - I hadn't thought of it in terms of cybersquatting, but now that he mentions it, that's the obvious conclusion. It's not fair to the other registrars or to the people who want to buy some of the dead domain names of Network Solutions is allowed to keep the domains for an extended period of time. I hope the suit will open the eyes of more people so they can see NSI's evil business practices.
Patent application for the practice of transacting rectangular paper items with pecuniary value. Such items were produced and manufactured by the laborious and painstaking research on behalf of the aforementioned company. In the event that other parties would, in the future, wish to license the process of transaction of these monetary bills, a per-transaction fee will be issued, which in turn will also warrant an additional fee.
I wish that the issue that we focus on is not who deserves "credit" for the open source movement but on improving it and working towards it. Sure, we could spend our days arguing about who is Mr. Open Source or drooling over our god Linus, but none of that is productive. If you really care about the open source movement, then go code something fantastic and open its source - don't sit around bickering about who deserves credit for what.
It pisses me off when geeks/coders think they're above the law. A while ago there was an article about some people whining that they were getting sued over creating a bad website that didn't fit any of the criteria in contract. Well, uh, yeah - even though you get paid a lot for what you do doesn't mean you're not responsbile for obeying laws of decency. Give me a break - you can't turn complaints against your low quality product into a fight for "freedom on the web" - that's ridiculous.
I'll admit that it's different when dealing with open sourced software that nobody's paying for. But we still hold creator responsible for virii, don't we? Its the same sort of thing. If you're going to do something bad, and you know it, then you should be prepared to face the concequences. Don't think that you're above everyone and everything and every law in the land just because you visit slashdot regularly and occasionally understand what an article talking about.
If I'm understanding correctly, someone's suing because the service that they paid for was inadequate? So what? That's not an attack on the web, or on freedom - if there's a contract and one side doesn't produce the expected (and recorded) results, then they're doing something wrong. This is the same thing as a contractor being commissioned to create, say, a house - and building something that didn't fit any of the specifications. "Could this set a precendent for the quality required for custom built software?" - if it is, then so what? The programmer SHOULD be required to produce the software they promised to write. Do you think that programmers or computer developers should somehow be exempt from giving their customers quality service?
What? A proposal, not a "Sure thing, we'll get right on it." I really doubt this will go through for the same reasons that the submittor suggested - this would apply only to a small community on the web. Most of the people who use the web have never heard of GNU. TLDs are needed to support huge numbers of domains... but the great majority of people who want domain names for their sites do not want.gnu But they've heard of "commercial" "organization" and "network." Yes, it would be wonderful for us, but I doubt it will come to be.
I don't wnat to discourage this, I just want to be realistic.
Give me a break - you don't go to the movie theater just to watch a movie. Are you going to invite a date over to your house to watch your computer? I bet when people started renting movies for their home VCR, people feared the end of movie theaters, but they're still going strong. The big screen just can't compare.
I agree with what you say but not with your opinion. I admit, the first thought that came across my mind when I saw this was "great - another new language I can easily master and add to my resume." But then as I learned more about "C#" I found that it was really just a Java for Windows to immorally get Microsoft out of its trouble with Sun. As I read through the hundreds of Slashdot comments, I see that NONE of the "geeks" - the programmers, the people who are the most capable computer users, and the people Microsoft needs program in this language and to make this language a success, are all disgusted by it.
How can Microsoft succeed with such a language is the majority of the programming elite refuses to accept it? I'm sure a lot of us are going to, begrudgingly or enthusiastically, learn the language. But I suspect that since this language won't have the excessively user friendly interface of the Visual Series (click the mouse key and press 'G' - you've "programmed" Space Invaders!) yet it also won't have the power, or at least the support, of Java - then it is going to lose both audiences, the programming kiddies and the programming elite.
I agree with you. But we did learn a lot from AI Bot project and we are going to make sure that it doesn't happen this time. If I had written this Slashdot article I wouldn't have mentioned the AI Bot project; we are trying to keep the two as distantly related as possible.
Kinda like when my site got slashdotted and so the host of my virtual server at the time (moved to dedicated now:) suspended the account because it was getting to many requests. Sigh.
Come on people - layoffs are an inevitable part of the corporate world. It happens to all companies - slashdot and its readers don't need to get all hysterical just because the lastest round happened to be a Linux-related company. If the Coca-Cola company also fired some of it's empolyees in the same manner, would we care? Why is this any different? Are computer geeks so spoiled by well paying, stable jobs that they can't face the prospect of *gasp* losing a job?
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh... even more reasons that I hadn't heard yet that Communitech sucks. I never had a problem with ZIP files (and my sites use them extensively), so I'm guessing that they just had a grudge on you and that was the best excuse they could come up with. They do that a lot. BTW, there's absolutely no way you have to pay any of that extra money just because they want you to do so. Ask them to pay you $5000. Tell them the reason, "just because" - after all, that's the reason they're demanding money from you. The only power they have over you is a) the TOS and the agreement you signed, which most certainly doesn't mention anything about additional fees that were never agreed upon, and b) they can take down your website, which they had already done, so they relinquished that power. They have no right to request that money, and you have the right to sue them (well, at least threaten that) or report them to BBB, attorney generals, etc.
BTW, if you're serious about the site dedicated to "showing the truth" behind CT (or possibly, a general site to uncover dark secrets of other bad companies) then I'll definitely join you. My CT hell ended over a year ago, so my hatred for them has somewhat dampened, but I'm still enraged when I think of their company.
Psst... remove the space between "2000" and "-June."
I used communitech for a little over a year, and my experience was awful. They kept on taking away services that were promised when I signed up, and refusing to refund anything. They suspended my accounts twice; their policy for suspension is to immediately take the site down and leave a "forbidden" page, then ask questions later. One of the times it was because I was using too much bandwidth - one of the primary reasons I used communitech was because of their promise of "unlimited bandwidth" (I believe they've since changed their policy, without notice of course). The second time it was because I alerted them of a security hole in their system. ALERTED them - I simply wanted it fixed, but they suspended my site. When I called soon after, they threatened to call the police. They guaranteed 99.5% uptime when I signed up, but never met that - later, when questioned, they said that they were working towards that goal, but it wasn't in actually a guarantee (even though it was advertised on their front page). Customer support was horrendous - I'll leave it at that. When I finally canceled my accounts, they continued billing me. They wouldn't stop until I threatened to call the Attorney General of their state (after that, of course, they quite willingly stopped). I could keep going, but I'll leave it at that. Please, whatever you do, get away from Communitech. If you don't, I assure you that you'll regret it later.
2001-03-26 13:14:00 is my guess.
This is why I find the Internet so wonderful. The anonymity means that you are judged by skill (which I hold more important than even experience), not by age, race, gender, etc. True, most jobs aren't conducted over the Internet so it's not a good solution to the problem in the workplace, but when a brilliant young person hides behind the Internet and is later exposed as a competent teen (or any minority), it should help to dispel stereotypes. In answer to your question, yes. I've experienced the same problem, though I haven't had much of the normal workplace environment. It's a problem, but it is getting better, at least in the world of technology.
Thanks for pointing that out - I wasn't aware of it. I think it just goes to show that it's the programming that's weak, not the intentions - if perfect coding was available for blocking software, THEN it would be interesting to see which sites were blocked - we'd be able to judge the blocks based on intent and not on lack of competency. Until then, we can't try to guess at their motives and piss ourselves off assuming things we don't understand.
Nope, sorry, Greylark was correct, this is a repeat of news that was already old the FIRST time slashdot posted it. I hate to be one of those idiots who complains about the news slashdot posts, but this one is pushing my limits.
I definitely support the feelings surrounding the paper, I just wish the author had thought about it a little bit more. I am entirely against such filtering - in my opinion, pornography should be blocked from high schools and elementary schools, and only a little bit more is up for debate. My high school had awful restrictions - including all mail services (free services and even mailstart.com, which lets you check pop3s), as well as many educational sites - researching mushrooms for a biology report couldn't be done from school computers.
On the other hand, the paper is misleading. I am particularly concerned about the author bashing the blocking of translation sites, implying that they are blocked BECAUSE they are educational and useful. Let's be honest here - the filtering software is not DESIGNED to block good sites, even though many are surely blocked inadvertently. It's quite clear to me, and probably to most slashdot readers, that translation sites are not blocked because they provide useful translation services, but because they could be used to beat the system and "unblock" pages. Of course, this represents poor and inadaquate software, but nonetheless, a safety precaution to make sure that 7th grade boys aren't viewing pornography websites translated from English to German.
So yes, these censoring programs are evil, overprotective, and poorly programmed, but in some cases, the intent has been lost. They're not intentionally trying to screw over their customers - their job is to make absolutely sure that no user of their software can access inappropriate material. They do a good job at that, even though there are unpleasant side effects.
"In a recent techies.com compensation survey, tech services and equipment took three of the five top spots for best fringe benefits." It's not the three out of five that surprise me, it's the other two. So far it's not phrased as a bad thing by any reports, as is reasonable. It's good that techies are so fascinated by what they do that they'd choose more of the same (ie. technology) over entertainment (nice headline from techies.com, "Techies want more than entertainment"). I'm glad that everyone's passion for their work shows through in this survey.
What, how can you call that a troll? When reading it, I was thinking that I wished I had mod points so I could moderate it up... obviously you didn't understand the point of it. Linked lists do not do what he asked... they do allow you to insert things into the middle of a list, but they do not change the memory locations of any of the other nodes. He wants to be able to insert something into a specific place in memory, and have anything currently in that place be shifted. Presumably that would allow you to have the advantages of linked lists but be rid of most of the disadvantages - it could behave like a resizable array.
There's an idea. An analog memory system that allows for overlaps of data points without data corruption. Build me that and I'll solve your NP vs P problem. That summarizes the original point, and I don't know how you could think a linked list is the solution. Maybe you didn't finish reading his post? In the future, please don't bash something that you don't understand. It's disrespectful and doesn't help anyone.
Someone tell me how these URLs could be mistaken for the Guinness beer website
As was stated in the original rant by the owner of the questionable domains, Guiness owns guinesssucks.com. guinesssucks.com and guiness-really-sucks.com are quite alike, so there's definitely confusion. If I were trying to go to guinnesssucks.com, it's quite likely that I'd go to guinness-sucks.com by accident.
But I doubt Guiness has a trademark on "guinesssucks[.com]"
I'm with the WIPO on this one. It isn't fair that an individual profits off of the success of other people. I'm sure you've done quite a lot of work on slashdot, and you said yourself that it pissed you off when people frame slashdot with extra ads, but they're all like that. If they all happily redirected to the correct page, then a) it wouldn't be a problem where the WIPO would have to intervene and b) nobody would care enough to do it because they wouldn't gain anything. Though I didn't read the article, I'm sure that it was NOT a typo domain that simply redirected to altavista.com. You can't just be in favor of the "good intentioned" typo sites, those aren't the ones causing the controversy.
These typo domains are helping nobody but the culprit, and most likely, they're hurting other people. These people are cheating off of other people's hard work. How can you support that?
I don't think that billing cycle could possibly be as long as the four months it's been since the domain expired. And "day to day" checking has become tiresome. This Alabama resident is right on - I hadn't thought of it in terms of cybersquatting, but now that he mentions it, that's the obvious conclusion. It's not fair to the other registrars or to the people who want to buy some of the dead domain names of Network Solutions is allowed to keep the domains for an extended period of time. I hope the suit will open the eyes of more people so they can see NSI's evil business practices.
In memory of Amazon's Affiliate Program patent...
Patent application for the practice of transacting rectangular paper items with pecuniary value. Such items were produced and manufactured by the laborious and painstaking research on behalf of the aforementioned company. In the event that other parties would, in the future, wish to license the process of transaction of these monetary bills, a per-transaction fee will be issued, which in turn will also warrant an additional fee.
I wish that the issue that we focus on is not who deserves "credit" for the open source movement but on improving it and working towards it. Sure, we could spend our days arguing about who is Mr. Open Source or drooling over our god Linus, but none of that is productive. If you really care about the open source movement, then go code something fantastic and open its source - don't sit around bickering about who deserves credit for what.
It pisses me off when geeks/coders think they're above the law. A while ago there was an article about some people whining that they were getting sued over creating a bad website that didn't fit any of the criteria in contract. Well, uh, yeah - even though you get paid a lot for what you do doesn't mean you're not responsbile for obeying laws of decency. Give me a break - you can't turn complaints against your low quality product into a fight for "freedom on the web" - that's ridiculous.
I'll admit that it's different when dealing with open sourced software that nobody's paying for. But we still hold creator responsible for virii, don't we? Its the same sort of thing. If you're going to do something bad, and you know it, then you should be prepared to face the concequences. Don't think that you're above everyone and everything and every law in the land just because you visit slashdot regularly and occasionally understand what an article talking about.
If I'm understanding correctly, someone's suing because the service that they paid for was inadequate? So what? That's not an attack on the web, or on freedom - if there's a contract and one side doesn't produce the expected (and recorded) results, then they're doing something wrong. This is the same thing as a contractor being commissioned to create, say, a house - and building something that didn't fit any of the specifications. "Could this set a precendent for the quality required for custom built software?" - if it is, then so what? The programmer SHOULD be required to produce the software they promised to write. Do you think that programmers or computer developers should somehow be exempt from giving their customers quality service?
What? A proposal, not a "Sure thing, we'll get right on it." I really doubt this will go through for the same reasons that the submittor suggested - this would apply only to a small community on the web. Most of the people who use the web have never heard of GNU. TLDs are needed to support huge numbers of domains... but the great majority of people who want domain names for their sites do not want .gnu But they've heard of "commercial" "organization" and "network." Yes, it would be wonderful for us, but I doubt it will come to be.
I don't wnat to discourage this, I just want to be realistic.
Give me a break - you don't go to the movie theater just to watch a movie. Are you going to invite a date over to your house to watch your computer? I bet when people started renting movies for their home VCR, people feared the end of movie theaters, but they're still going strong. The big screen just can't compare.
I agree with what you say but not with your opinion. I admit, the first thought that came across my mind when I saw this was "great - another new language I can easily master and add to my resume." But then as I learned more about "C#" I found that it was really just a Java for Windows to immorally get Microsoft out of its trouble with Sun. As I read through the hundreds of Slashdot comments, I see that NONE of the "geeks" - the programmers, the people who are the most capable computer users, and the people Microsoft needs program in this language and to make this language a success, are all disgusted by it.
How can Microsoft succeed with such a language is the majority of the programming elite refuses to accept it? I'm sure a lot of us are going to, begrudgingly or enthusiastically, learn the language. But I suspect that since this language won't have the excessively user friendly interface of the Visual Series (click the mouse key and press 'G' - you've "programmed" Space Invaders!) yet it also won't have the power, or at least the support, of Java - then it is going to lose both audiences, the programming kiddies and the programming elite.
We didn't forget about them. We are going to meet to determine what to do about them shortly, look for news on the page.
I agree with you. But we did learn a lot from AI Bot project and we are going to make sure that it doesn't happen this time. If I had written this Slashdot article I wouldn't have mentioned the AI Bot project; we are trying to keep the two as distantly related as possible.
Kinda like when my site got slashdotted and so the host of my virtual server at the time (moved to dedicated now :) suspended the account because it was getting to many requests. Sigh.
Come on people - layoffs are an inevitable part of the corporate world. It happens to all companies - slashdot and its readers don't need to get all hysterical just because the lastest round happened to be a Linux-related company. If the Coca-Cola company also fired some of it's empolyees in the same manner, would we care? Why is this any different? Are computer geeks so spoiled by well paying, stable jobs that they can't face the prospect of *gasp* losing a job?
Maybe "no security hole exists" in the article above should be rephrased "this particular security hole is phony." It's Microsoft, afterall.