IBM has no intention of building a proprietary client solution for a platform dedicated to open standards. What they're doing instead is opening maximum possibilities on the Domino server using standards-based clients, including IMAP, HTTP and LDAP. iNotes is simply the next phase of that. (iNotes is really just some packaging of an extremely complex DOM application that could never even have dreamed of seeing the light of day on Linux before Mozilla was released.)
You can read why they don't want to build a native client from the horse's mouth at LDD Today
For those that want to see a Domino Designer for platforms other than Windows, I'd ask a simple question: what do you think DXL is for?
To understand the motives here, it's important to understand Disney's business model. Disney does not simply create new content -- it systematically recycles old content on a periodic basis.
Why? Because the bulk of the Disney library is targetted at children. And every 7-10 years, there is an entirely new batch of children who are now the new target market for old Disney productions.
Have you followed the "re-release" of classics like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Fantasia over the last few years? They're coming on DVD now, but they had similar rereleases on VHS about 10 years ago. A new generation of children comes along, the same set of Disney films gets marketed to those children.
This makes the constitutional clause particularly interesting. "To promote the progress of... useful Arts..." doesn't apply. These Arts aren't progressing. They are being recycled.
Disney's business plan is, admittedly, brilliant. But it's also entirely dependent on the continued extension of copyrights into those new generations.
I find myself wondering about the concept of requiring that a copyright be assignable to an individual, rather than a corporation. The individual can still contractually grant proceeds from the work to the corporation, but the original terms of copyrights -- tied to the lifetime of the author -- would apply.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Disney had to assign a copyright to the Director or Producer of a film, and the copyright were tied to that person's lifespan? This would certainly put a new spin on their relationship with employees!
Talked to a fellow there named Matt Potter to get a little more personal connection to this stuff.
The Notice of Proposed Settlement is available at: http://www.musiccdsettlement.com/english/notice.ht m and includes both the individual state's AGs on the case, as well as actually listing the URL for the website itself.
Mr. Potter stated that the detail of information is to ensure that fradulent claims aren't filed -- primarily by attempting to prevent the same person from filing multiple times.
I suggested they put in a privacy notice. We'll see.
I also warned him of the impending Slashdotting. He didn't know what I meant. hehe
Puh-lease. "Liberal" is a term that was hijacked in the early 20th century by those looking to proclaim their looting of the public treasury as "progressive." And you can pin it on those Roosevelts pretty squarely.
Putting people like JFK and Clinton in a list with Jefferson and Franklin has to be one of the most absurdly short-sighted remarks I've seen in quite some time. Two Renaissance men who CREATED a country being associated with a pair of spoiled kids who used a haircut, a wife and the worship of television to hijack a country? Gimme a break.
Domino on its own doesn't have a web server you need to use and can use Apache, IIS, or WebSphere with domino.
Wrong. A Domino server out of the box includes full HTTP services. This is part of the generic install. No additional HTTP software is needed, although you *can* configure Domino to use an alternative HTTP stack if you prefer.
Why isn't there a moderation setting for "incorrect?"
He lost a prior suit for the same patent against American Airlines in 1994, charging that the SABRE online reservation system (and the Travelocity offshoot) infringed on his patent, according to this article.
Show me the compelling reason that was threatening productivity and was going to collapse the company into chaos..
As a mobile user stuck in a company who's still using NT4, I can give you one simple answer: power management. NT4 has *zero*. Machines run hot and therefore wear down faster. Battery-based operation is nearly useless, because you shut down without any warning.
Maybe not collapsed into chaos, but certainly a significant reason to upgrade to 2K.
As for desktop users, well, it's mostly about compatibility and consistency in a corporate environment. But I'll agree that there's no true *necessity* to do it there.
I can't believe they didn't even bother to open the film at their flagship theater at Pleasure Island here in Orlando. And I'm sure they'll make a point of establishing their ownership of it for the next 500 years.
We look back on the original three films with rose-tinted glasses, when really the dialogue sucked, the plots were generic, and acting not up to scratch.
Okay, plot and acting have some issues, but how down on the original trilogy's dialog can you get? How many memorable lines do we have from that series?
That's no moon. That's a space station.
Red 5, standing by.
We're passing through the magnetic shield.
But I wanted to go to Tatchi Station and pick up some power converters!
Someone's admiring your handiwork.
Jumping through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, kid. You fly too close to a black hole or a supernova and that'll end your trip real quick.
"Nerfherder"
Laugh it up, fuzzball.
All right... try it... *BZZZZZZZZTTTTT*... TURN IT OFF! TURN IT OFF!
Leia: What are you doing? Han: We're taking off. Leia: I think we should discuss this. If those Star Destroyers are still out there... Han: No time to put this to a committee, sweetheart. Leia: I am NOT a COMMITTEE!!
Han: How we doin? Luke: Same as always. Han: That bad, huh?
It ain't Shakespeare, but these and a lot of other lines are definitely memorable and witty dialog. Lando has some great lines as well. And I'm not even quoting the deliciously villanous bad guys!
There now exists the technology to open the airwaves to the public. Slashdot has covered all of the relevant advances of broadband, multi-spectrum radio communication. Yet encroachment of these resources has already occured, and the establisment is entrenched and not interested in the technology that could put the airwaves back in the control of the people, where it belongs. Will we hear a public discussion of this travesty in the mainstream (ahem "liberal") media?
Are you aware of the fact that the Cato Institute opposes the FCC "sale" of radio frequencies? No? I didn't think so.
Palmer focuses on the elements of Bollier's essay that are bad logic because it's bad logic that has to be destroyed. When Microsoft publishes some marketing schlock about XP, do Linux advocates sit around and find all the things in it that they agree with?
If Palmer really shared Bollier's concerns he wouldn't shoot the messenger, he would write a better message. But, Palmer's crocadile tears reveals his true position - corporate psychophant.
What bunk. Are you familiar with Tom Palmer's work? Have you read his better messages? With Cato, and earlier with the Institute for Humane Studies, Tom Palmer has been a consistent messenger of open societies.
Sharing someone's concern over an effect does not necessitate sharing their concern over a cause. You and I might agree that it's a bad idea to drop bombs on Third World villages, but if I say it's a bad idea because it kills innocent people, and you say it's a bad idea because it wastes ammunition -- are we in agreement? Hardly.
TCO studies are generally commissioned by the compared companies. Witness, for example, the TCO messaging studies comparing Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange.
If there's going to be a real TCO study to compare, say, W2K and Linux, someone's going to have to pony up the cash to IDC or Giga or some other similar market research firm to do the leg work. It's gotta be a big firm with plenty of credibility in the market for the TCO numbers to mean anything to the enterprise.
Who's gonna pay? RedHat? IBM? The UnitedLinux group?
It's also worth pointing out that Linux might not come out ahead in a TCO study. It almost certainly isn't on the desktop, where training and support issues will be highlighted by interoperability problems across the enterprise. Even if the study is focused on server solutions, you still have to compare apples-to-apples. Are you comparing, say, web services? If so, are you running the gambit of Linux/Apache/MySQL as compared to W2K/IIS/SQL Server? If it's network services, then you're talking Linux/Samba compared to W2K, right? Nobody in TCO research cares *only* about the OS -- because the OS has no relevant *total* cost. TCO is focused on cost to solve some generalized need.
Bear in mind that Linux knowledge is more expensive to hire than MS knowledge. Everybody's brother-in-law is an MCSE. But finding readily available OSS implementation experts can be very difficult for a corporate HR group. Sure, you can go out and learn from the source code & discussion groups easily enough, but then you're talking 6 months of *training* someone to be an expert.
Any IT solution is an ongoing support expense, and it's certainly true that license cost is a trivial aspect of enterprise TCO. Microsoft isn't making a typically falacious claim there. It's just that the comparison is very, very difficult. And it might just turn out that the support, training, and integration efforts involved in the real world of corporate computing add up in favor of MS. Until the OSS generation of CS students hit the marketplace, at least.
Too true. It really sucks, but the IE DOM and CSS support are substantially better than competing browsers.
Mozilla addresses some of this, but there's still a lot left to be desired.
Your plain text message leaped out, sure. It's hard to believe that anyone could be so stupid as to defend spamming.
It's hard to believe that anyone could be so stupid as to claim that "I don't wanna get stuff in my email that I didn't ask for" is a realistic way to participate on the internet. If all of your email you receive that you want to keep is actually solicited, then I'll be pretty impressed.
OK, so you might be a spammer who "only" sends me a 1k message. So are the other two hundred-odd spam emails I get every day. After only ten days a 2M free web-based email account is full, and that assumes there was nothing stored there to begin with.
*sigh* Even Yahoo gives you 6MB for free. And pre-sorts your bulk mail.
I pay for using the "free" web-based email service by viewing content the provider wants to show me.
So I guess Yahoo should be giving spammers kickbacks for forcing their users to stay on ad pages for longer? Why is this relevant?
You on the other hand steal space on that service to show me garbage that is of no interest to me and of no benefit to the entity that pays for the connectivity and the drive space.
One of the reasons why constant address sourcing is courteous. If it's a problem for Yahoo on an infrastructural level, they can block it.
You are a parasite. What, only the spammer who sent the message that sends the acount over the line is to blame? Even you don't believe that.
Argumentum ad hominem is so effective and gets so much done. Let's use it some more!
You know that spam is shotgunned out to every email address possible - probably some are made up, when you have a huge user base like yahoo or hotmail you could even send an email to every word in the dictionary @yahoo.com. What's the best way to generate a list of confirmed email addresses? Simple, harvest the ones that reply asking to be removed. Are you really that naive?
Are you reading this thread? The system I'm describing honored removal lists, didn't send to random or made-up addresses, and came from a tracable source. Drive out the credible solicitor and you simply invite the abuser.
Should I set up an auto-spamkiller? What if it accidentally deletes a message from an old friend and I never hear from them again?
So you might actually get an unsolicited mail you really want, right? How is someone supposed to know the difference? Thousands of people *do* want these messages, y'know.
Unfortunately each message has to be reviewed. If I didn't have a large network of people who know my email address I'd dump the account and get another one, hopefully with less spam.
I know exactly how you feel. 150 bulk emails a day and counting.
Why should anyone have to change email accounts just so you and others can advertise for free?
A) it isn't free; B) the nature of email is that you can either refuse to accept any unrequested messages, you can filter, or you can accept everything. The answer to your "why" is "because that's how the protocol was designed."
There is a stated standard in California, it's ADV: - but nobody uses it.
Should I ever become involved in a similar venture again, rest assured that I will. And I have seen this on messages I've received.
At the end of the day, that's what makes you such a reprehensible prick
Mmmmm... you are *so* constructive.
you selfishly do what you know is against people's wishes and you use other people's resources to do it.
Except that the reason we sent message and the reason *anyone* spams is because there are THOUSANDS of people who *DO* want to receive and respond to offers. If there were no response, no one would send in the first place.
I love the way people cry that it costs them to receive mail, but it's free to send. Lord, how our accountant used to wish it was free to send. But those server leases and high-speed connections used to add up every day.
Even if you did use "ADV:" you'd still be a waste of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how much.
Of course it matters how much. Signal to noise ratios are imperfect precisely because making them perfect isn't worth the cost. Putting up with the noise is a lesser cost. For *most* ISPs, this remains the case. When it's not, they'll get serious about implementing e-postage.
No doubt you'd like to say it's negligible, but it isn't when you consider the multipliers - thousands of spammers and millions of recipients.
Why am I responsible for everyone else's behavior?
When you spam you are an abuser.
From now on I'll make sure I ask people's permission before I contact them. So if I'm going to send you an email, I'll give you a call first to see if it's okay. Oh wait, then I'll be calling you and taking your time to answer the phone! Okay, I guess I'll just sit here and hope you decide to call me.
It doesn't matter that you allowed people to find you in order to call you an abuser.
Of course it does. The definition of "abuse" entails such things.
It doesn't matter how many emails you send or how small they are.
Of course it does. If I send you an email in response to this discussion, does that make me a spammer? No. The number, nature and accountability of mails is precisely what defines and spammer.
It doesn't matter whether you disagree with the definition of spam or whether you think you represent some kind of honorable minority.
It matters if the point is to identify an actual *problem* and potential solutions, rather than to just gripe all the time.
Yeah, let's set up e-postage, and just like the ADV: convention the spammers will ignore it.
How could I ignore it if my ISP sent me a bill for every SMTP packet that routed over my connection?
Send your message only to people who opt in.
Like TV and billboard advertisers? Is watching a show or driving down the street opting-in? Then isn't simply *having* an email address opting-in?
If you can't afford that you don't have a viable business in the first place.
I'm sure you're an expert in business model evaluation.
You were never interested in dealing honestly and fairly, you were only interested in making someone else pay for what you wanted.
Hmmm... so millions of dollars paid out to happy consumers, and I'm the parasite. Fascinating.
Nothing else will work because people prepared to send spam are either morally bankrupt anyway, or have some seriously flawed thinking concerning why spam is OK. I suppose you are the latter, but it's no better than the former. You're just a spammer and there is only one kind.
I guess that's why you just defined two kinds. Very clear thinking on your part.
And you bring to mind the paedophiles from NAMBLA who like to argue that they're not all that bad.
Commercial email solicitations = child-molestation. You must work at the DoJ.
Piffle. I get maybe two or three pieces of snail junk mail per day. The only cost to me is maybe a negligible increase in the amount of trash hauling per week.
So you're telling me it takes you longer to press the DELETE key than it does to get up and throw a piece of paper in the trash? Interesting.
The cost of that bulk mailing not only pays for itself, but subsidizes First Class USPS mail.
Wanna charge for email? I've got no problem with that.
Spam is different. The majority of the cost is borne by the recipient in the form of bandwidth and storage costs and download times.
For large, obtrusive, untracable messages, I would agree. But what's the difference, in principle, if I send you an unsolicited email from a business address, and send you an unsolicited email by replying to what you've posted here?
Individually, these may be trivial, but in the aggregate they can be quite significant. In 1999 or 2000 Verizon's network in CA was brought to it's knees, and email delivery was delayed several days by the sheer number of spam emails it was processing.
A great reason not to drive out legitimate businesses who send tracable and identifiable messages if I've ever heard it!
I can't find the citation on the web right now, but the conventional wisdom is currently that if even a small fraction of the small businesses in the country sent out one spam per year, you'd wind up with several hundreds spam emails PER DAY. How much of this unsolicited advertising can i be expected to receive and pay for? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
As there are about 1.5 million SMBs in the US, the number would be more like 4000, assuming they *all* sent messages and you were on *every* list.
And of course, this would be completely ineffectual, because ISPs would implement "locked" email addresses where you have to give permission for people to send you email in the first place. Which is actually the *ONLY* way to counteract your claim that someone is costing you by contacting you.
That process takes about 1-2 minutes for each SPAM message received. I get paid about 45 cents/minute, so that means that for each SPAM message I receive it costs my company 45-91 cents (per message per user).. still assuming an ideal opt-out world (which doesn't exist)..
Is it standard practice at Slashdot not to read the entirety of the parent post? Feels like it today.
Messages were kept small to minimize download time. If it really takes 30 seconds to download 1K from your mail server, may I suggest an upgrade? I *know* you're exaggerating on that.
Messages were from a constant address, and the subject line was something along the lines of "We're looking for consumers in the [state] area." Without getting unnecessarily bulky, I think this made the basic intent pretty clear, eliminating the need to actually *open* the message.
Given that the source address was constant, you could also simply filter the message. I know that most major email packages (which you're likely to be using at work) allow this in about 3 menu clicks.
If you truly go through the trouble of reading the message and determining that you aren't interested, and file a removal request, then there is at least some allocation of resources on your part that is your decision, not mine.
Yes, this does become a catastrophe. I know people in other states whose only form of communication with me is e-mail. Your company (yes, yours... I blame it all on you;) ) forces me to constantly change this address, or possibly skip over expected messages.
I can assure you that when I was working for the company, this would not be the case. *ALL* remove requests were honored in perpetuity. Messages were kept small and with a constant source, precisely because I sought to minimize the nuisance effect of them.
When someone's trying to be nice about something and you slap them, sometimes they'll go away. But the next person to come along is simply less likely to be nice about it.
If e-mail accounts all came with a reliable "unsolicited e-mail on" and "unsolicited e-mail off" button, this would not be so bad. But they don't. I wish they did. I wish you did.
You would find no faster advocate of such a practice than I.
Billboards, TV commercials, etc do not impare my communication with friends, family, and business. The billboards to not hop in my glove box and impare my driving. The TV commercials (although sometimes distracting my gf from her mouthful of my *%&#^%) do not impare my beer-drinking.
I love it when people say this kinda stuff.
Normal everyday advertising *does* have a cost, at the margin. But you don't consider the marginal cost to be a relevant concern -- as most people don't. Are you telling me you've never had a conversation with someone interrupted by a distracting TV ad? Ever try to talk about a particularly tense scene in the X-Files when a car dealership ad comes on? That's a cost. It's a tiny, marginal one, but so is a 1K email from a constant address.
My point, truly, was that you don't *request* these solicitations, either. But you accept them as part of living in modern society.
You, however, impare the sanity of decent web-surfers like me. Humph.
Again, minimization of nuisance value was always a high-priority for me. Constant source addresses, small messages, honored removal requests -- all of these were about dealing with an audience as fairly as possible. If you want to say that these things don't matter, then you're simply encouraging me not to worry about being polite in my next venture. (Not that I'll ever venture into that arena again anyway, but we're talking incentives here.)
Well I see you have no problems with the rest of my post.
No response = agreement? Yeah, that's an interesting rule for Slashdot. Sheesh.
Magazine and TV advertisements can't stop me from getting the messages I'm looking out for. When your spam fills up my incoming mailbox I can't get any more.
Hence the reason I mentioned that the messages were kept small, to the point, and from a constant address, making them inexpensive and filterable. Also why we honored removal requests in perpetuity.
Are you really suggesting that a single 1K email pushes your quota over the line? That would have been all you ever got from me.
Magazine ads just make for a fatter magazine.
1K emails just make for a fatter mailbox.
TV ads are gone in seconds.
It takes you hours to press "Delete?"
Banner ads get ignored.
But my plain text message somehow leaped out of your screen and slapped you in the face?
Every single spam email has to be looked at and deleted.
I though Slashdot was a gathering place for the technically-savvy. Are you telling me you don't know how to use a mail filter? Are you telling me that you can't hit "Reply", type "REMOVE", then hit "Send?" Are you telling me that when the message comes from "HelpWanted@mysteryshopper.org", you *must* open it and read the entire thing to determine you aren't interested in mystery shopping?
If filth like you would prefix every spam with "ADVERTISEMENT" they could be automatically deleted - but then nobody would get the message, right?
Is there a stated standard for such things? I would have been willing to do that if I'd known that there was a standardized practice for it.
Of course, knee-jerk reaction to polite interaction drives out politeness, not abuses. So when we sent emails from a constant, truthful, identifiable address and honored remove requests, we were nevertheless labelled as an "abuser." Which is exactly why people who might otherwise be interested in dealing honestly and fairly with their intended audience end up resorting to bulk remailers who tap into relay servers and disguise source addresses to avoid ISP complaints.
Businesses that place advertisements on Slashdot, TV and Magazines all pay the publisher to display the ads. A medium that I would otherwise have to pay for, or pay a higher rate for, is subsidised. Rather than a cost to me they are a financial benefit - I might not like the interruptions but I don't want to pay thousands for basic cable service. If you want to put yourself in those same shoes you would have to pay a subsidy towards my connectivity every time you send me spam.
I have advocated such a practice right here on this thread. Let's set up e-postage at the core backbone providers. I think that's a fine idea. Can you work out the transaction model, please?
I'm totally serious. The nature of our business model was such that if I were paying a penny a message, it would have worked out quite nicely, precisely because there was a legitimate ROI involved for participating parties. Such a strategy would also make honoring remove lists very important for mailers. Bob Metcalfe has only been claiming we need this for the last 8 years.
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but you're seeing TV commercials and/. banner ads in exchange for the content you are not paying for (ie, the TV program, the/. stories and comments). There is a world of difference between these examples and spam e-mail.
I don't consider this at all obvious. Nor do I consider it true. You *are* paying for the TV program by paying a carrier to get it to you (unless you're still using rabbit ears.) The advertiser pays, in part, for the infrastructure necessary to permit that communication. As a commercial 'net participant, the company I worked for was paying for connectivity, and thus paying for part of the communications infrastructure itself.
Please understand, my *original* point was that some "spam" actually does contain an offer for a legitimate and apparently widely desirable business transaction. I am not defending the practice as such. It's one of the reasons I left the company -- because my boss wanted to expand the practice beyond what I considered ethical boundaries.
Alright, if this is the definition of "spam", then I'll agree. You have defined yourself into a favorable argument.
However, if unsolicited commercial email is all spam is, then I contend that spam as such is not a bad thing. I get unsolicited commercial transaction requests everytime I drive down the highway, turn on the TV, stop by the mall or check my snail mail. Is this some kind of catastrophe?
legitimate businesses take the cost of distributing their advertising on themselves rather than forcing ISPs and end users to pay for it.
So when you're favorite TV program is interrupted by commercials, that has no cost to you? When you're flipping through a magazine, and you have to turn extra pages to get to the next article because there are ads, that takes no time? When you check out Slashdot and the banner ad chews up 15K of downstream, that's free to you?
Slashdot Mirror
You can read why they don't want to build a native client from the horse's mouth at LDD Today
For those that want to see a Domino Designer for platforms other than Windows, I'd ask a simple question: what do you think DXL is for?
Why? Because the bulk of the Disney library is targetted at children. And every 7-10 years, there is an entirely new batch of children who are now the new target market for old Disney productions.
Have you followed the "re-release" of classics like Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Fantasia over the last few years? They're coming on DVD now, but they had similar rereleases on VHS about 10 years ago. A new generation of children comes along, the same set of Disney films gets marketed to those children.
This makes the constitutional clause particularly interesting. "To promote the progress of... useful Arts..." doesn't apply. These Arts aren't progressing. They are being recycled.
Disney's business plan is, admittedly, brilliant. But it's also entirely dependent on the continued extension of copyrights into those new generations.
I find myself wondering about the concept of requiring that a copyright be assignable to an individual, rather than a corporation. The individual can still contractually grant proceeds from the work to the corporation, but the original terms of copyrights -- tied to the lifetime of the author -- would apply.
Wouldn't it be interesting if Disney had to assign a copyright to the Director or Producer of a film, and the copyright were tied to that person's lifespan? This would certainly put a new spin on their relationship with employees!
The Notice of Proposed Settlement is available at: http://www.musiccdsettlement.com/english/notice.ht m and includes both the individual state's AGs on the case, as well as actually listing the URL for the website itself.
Mr. Potter stated that the detail of information is to ensure that fradulent claims aren't filed -- primarily by attempting to prevent the same person from filing multiple times.
I suggested they put in a privacy notice. We'll see.
I also warned him of the impending Slashdotting. He didn't know what I meant. hehe
Rust Consulting, Inc. (YKMILXKTDD) 501 MARQUETTE AVE STE 700 MINNEAPOLIS, MN 55402-1208 US
http://www.networksolutions.com/cgi-bin/whois/whoi s?STRING=musiccdsettlement.com&SearchType=do
Putting people like JFK and Clinton in a list with Jefferson and Franklin has to be one of the most absurdly short-sighted remarks I've seen in quite some time. Two Renaissance men who CREATED a country being associated with a pair of spoiled kids who used a haircut, a wife and the worship of television to hijack a country? Gimme a break.
Are you aware of the irony of being an LLC and claiming you get it right the first time?
Okay. Good answer. Hadn't thought about that. Thanks. :)
Wrong. A Domino server out of the box includes full HTTP services. This is part of the generic install. No additional HTTP software is needed, although you *can* configure Domino to use an alternative HTTP stack if you prefer.
Why isn't there a moderation setting for "incorrect?"
5935 Folsom Drive.
La Jolla, CA 92073
619/454-4475
According to this brief.
He lost a prior suit for the same patent against American Airlines in 1994, charging that the SABRE online reservation system (and the Travelocity offshoot) infringed on his patent, according to this article.
I'm still hunting for other information.
As a mobile user stuck in a company who's still using NT4, I can give you one simple answer: power management. NT4 has *zero*. Machines run hot and therefore wear down faster. Battery-based operation is nearly useless, because you shut down without any warning.
Maybe not collapsed into chaos, but certainly a significant reason to upgrade to 2K.
As for desktop users, well, it's mostly about compatibility and consistency in a corporate environment. But I'll agree that there's no true *necessity* to do it there.
I can't believe they didn't even bother to open the film at their flagship theater at Pleasure Island here in Orlando. And I'm sure they'll make a point of establishing their ownership of it for the next 500 years.
*sigh*
Okay, plot and acting have some issues, but how down on the original trilogy's dialog can you get? How many memorable lines do we have from that series?
It ain't Shakespeare, but these and a lot of other lines are definitely memorable and witty dialog. Lando has some great lines as well. And I'm not even quoting the deliciously villanous bad guys!
Are you aware of the fact that the Cato Institute opposes the FCC "sale" of radio frequencies? No? I didn't think so.
Palmer focuses on the elements of Bollier's essay that are bad logic because it's bad logic that has to be destroyed. When Microsoft publishes some marketing schlock about XP, do Linux advocates sit around and find all the things in it that they agree with?
What bunk. Are you familiar with Tom Palmer's work? Have you read his better messages? With Cato, and earlier with the Institute for Humane Studies, Tom Palmer has been a consistent messenger of open societies.
Sharing someone's concern over an effect does not necessitate sharing their concern over a cause. You and I might agree that it's a bad idea to drop bombs on Third World villages, but if I say it's a bad idea because it kills innocent people, and you say it's a bad idea because it wastes ammunition -- are we in agreement? Hardly.
Just one?
These people are buying T1s for hundreds of dollars a month, then selling us a lousy 3Mbps for $80/mo.
T1 = 1.544 Mbps. UltraLink = 3Mbps
T1 = $400/mn UltraLink = $80/mn
Now, I understand good and well that the Ts are shared, etc, etc, but please -- on its face, this is hardly a ripoff.
That's a rediculous amount of profit!
Rediculous profit? Is that when you have massive losses? (Sorry, bad accounting joke.)
TCO studies are generally commissioned by the compared companies. Witness, for example, the TCO messaging studies comparing Lotus Domino and Microsoft Exchange.
If there's going to be a real TCO study to compare, say, W2K and Linux, someone's going to have to pony up the cash to IDC or Giga or some other similar market research firm to do the leg work. It's gotta be a big firm with plenty of credibility in the market for the TCO numbers to mean anything to the enterprise.
Who's gonna pay? RedHat? IBM? The UnitedLinux group?
It's also worth pointing out that Linux might not come out ahead in a TCO study. It almost certainly isn't on the desktop, where training and support issues will be highlighted by interoperability problems across the enterprise. Even if the study is focused on server solutions, you still have to compare apples-to-apples. Are you comparing, say, web services? If so, are you running the gambit of Linux/Apache/MySQL as compared to W2K/IIS/SQL Server? If it's network services, then you're talking Linux/Samba compared to W2K, right? Nobody in TCO research cares *only* about the OS -- because the OS has no relevant *total* cost. TCO is focused on cost to solve some generalized need.
Bear in mind that Linux knowledge is more expensive to hire than MS knowledge. Everybody's brother-in-law is an MCSE. But finding readily available OSS implementation experts can be very difficult for a corporate HR group. Sure, you can go out and learn from the source code & discussion groups easily enough, but then you're talking 6 months of *training* someone to be an expert.
Any IT solution is an ongoing support expense, and it's certainly true that license cost is a trivial aspect of enterprise TCO. Microsoft isn't making a typically falacious claim there. It's just that the comparison is very, very difficult. And it might just turn out that the support, training, and integration efforts involved in the real world of corporate computing add up in favor of MS. Until the OSS generation of CS students hit the marketplace, at least.
Too true. It really sucks, but the IE DOM and CSS support are substantially better than competing browsers. Mozilla addresses some of this, but there's still a lot left to be desired.
It's hard to believe that anyone could be so stupid as to claim that "I don't wanna get stuff in my email that I didn't ask for" is a realistic way to participate on the internet. If all of your email you receive that you want to keep is actually solicited, then I'll be pretty impressed.
OK, so you might be a spammer who "only" sends me a 1k message. So are the other two hundred-odd spam emails I get every day. After only ten days a 2M free web-based email account is full, and that assumes there was nothing stored there to begin with.
*sigh* Even Yahoo gives you 6MB for free. And pre-sorts your bulk mail.
I pay for using the "free" web-based email service by viewing content the provider wants to show me.
So I guess Yahoo should be giving spammers kickbacks for forcing their users to stay on ad pages for longer? Why is this relevant?
You on the other hand steal space on that service to show me garbage that is of no interest to me and of no benefit to the entity that pays for the connectivity and the drive space.
One of the reasons why constant address sourcing is courteous. If it's a problem for Yahoo on an infrastructural level, they can block it.
You are a parasite. What, only the spammer who sent the message that sends the acount over the line is to blame? Even you don't believe that.
Argumentum ad hominem is so effective and gets so much done. Let's use it some more!
You know that spam is shotgunned out to every email address possible - probably some are made up, when you have a huge user base like yahoo or hotmail you could even send an email to every word in the dictionary @yahoo.com. What's the best way to generate a list of confirmed email addresses? Simple, harvest the ones that reply asking to be removed. Are you really that naive?
Are you reading this thread? The system I'm describing honored removal lists, didn't send to random or made-up addresses, and came from a tracable source. Drive out the credible solicitor and you simply invite the abuser.
Should I set up an auto-spamkiller? What if it accidentally deletes a message from an old friend and I never hear from them again?
So you might actually get an unsolicited mail you really want, right? How is someone supposed to know the difference? Thousands of people *do* want these messages, y'know.
Unfortunately each message has to be reviewed. If I didn't have a large network of people who know my email address I'd dump the account and get another one, hopefully with less spam.
I know exactly how you feel. 150 bulk emails a day and counting.
Why should anyone have to change email accounts just so you and others can advertise for free?
A) it isn't free; B) the nature of email is that you can either refuse to accept any unrequested messages, you can filter, or you can accept everything. The answer to your "why" is "because that's how the protocol was designed."
There is a stated standard in California, it's ADV: - but nobody uses it.
Should I ever become involved in a similar venture again, rest assured that I will. And I have seen this on messages I've received.
At the end of the day, that's what makes you such a reprehensible prick
Mmmmm... you are *so* constructive.
you selfishly do what you know is against people's wishes and you use other people's resources to do it.
Except that the reason we sent message and the reason *anyone* spams is because there are THOUSANDS of people who *DO* want to receive and respond to offers. If there were no response, no one would send in the first place.
I love the way people cry that it costs them to receive mail, but it's free to send. Lord, how our accountant used to wish it was free to send. But those server leases and high-speed connections used to add up every day.
Even if you did use "ADV:" you'd still be a waste of bandwidth. It doesn't matter how much.
Of course it matters how much. Signal to noise ratios are imperfect precisely because making them perfect isn't worth the cost. Putting up with the noise is a lesser cost. For *most* ISPs, this remains the case. When it's not, they'll get serious about implementing e-postage.
No doubt you'd like to say it's negligible, but it isn't when you consider the multipliers - thousands of spammers and millions of recipients.
Why am I responsible for everyone else's behavior?
When you spam you are an abuser.
From now on I'll make sure I ask people's permission before I contact them. So if I'm going to send you an email, I'll give you a call first to see if it's okay. Oh wait, then I'll be calling you and taking your time to answer the phone! Okay, I guess I'll just sit here and hope you decide to call me.
It doesn't matter that you allowed people to find you in order to call you an abuser.
Of course it does. The definition of "abuse" entails such things.
It doesn't matter how many emails you send or how small they are.
Of course it does. If I send you an email in response to this discussion, does that make me a spammer? No. The number, nature and accountability of mails is precisely what defines and spammer.
It doesn't matter whether you disagree with the definition of spam or whether you think you represent some kind of honorable minority.
It matters if the point is to identify an actual *problem* and potential solutions, rather than to just gripe all the time.
Yeah, let's set up e-postage, and just like the ADV: convention the spammers will ignore it.
How could I ignore it if my ISP sent me a bill for every SMTP packet that routed over my connection?
Send your message only to people who opt in.
Like TV and billboard advertisers? Is watching a show or driving down the street opting-in? Then isn't simply *having* an email address opting-in?
If you can't afford that you don't have a viable business in the first place.
I'm sure you're an expert in business model evaluation.
You were never interested in dealing honestly and fairly, you were only interested in making someone else pay for what you wanted.
Hmmm... so millions of dollars paid out to happy consumers, and I'm the parasite. Fascinating.
Nothing else will work because people prepared to send spam are either morally bankrupt anyway, or have some seriously flawed thinking concerning why spam is OK. I suppose you are the latter, but it's no better than the former. You're just a spammer and there is only one kind.
I guess that's why you just defined two kinds. Very clear thinking on your part.
And you bring to mind the paedophiles from NAMBLA who like to argue that they're not all that bad.
Commercial email solicitations = child-molestation. You must work at the DoJ.
So you're telling me it takes you longer to press the DELETE key than it does to get up and throw a piece of paper in the trash? Interesting.
The cost of that bulk mailing not only pays for itself, but subsidizes First Class USPS mail.
Wanna charge for email? I've got no problem with that.
Spam is different. The majority of the cost is borne by the recipient in the form of bandwidth and storage costs and download times.
For large, obtrusive, untracable messages, I would agree. But what's the difference, in principle, if I send you an unsolicited email from a business address, and send you an unsolicited email by replying to what you've posted here?
Individually, these may be trivial, but in the aggregate they can be quite significant. In 1999 or 2000 Verizon's network in CA was brought to it's knees, and email delivery was delayed several days by the sheer number of spam emails it was processing.
A great reason not to drive out legitimate businesses who send tracable and identifiable messages if I've ever heard it!
I can't find the citation on the web right now, but the conventional wisdom is currently that if even a small fraction of the small businesses in the country sent out one spam per year, you'd wind up with several hundreds spam emails PER DAY. How much of this unsolicited advertising can i be expected to receive and pay for? Ten? A thousand? A hundred thousand?
As there are about 1.5 million SMBs in the US, the number would be more like 4000, assuming they *all* sent messages and you were on *every* list.
And of course, this would be completely ineffectual, because ISPs would implement "locked" email addresses where you have to give permission for people to send you email in the first place. Which is actually the *ONLY* way to counteract your claim that someone is costing you by contacting you.
Is it standard practice at Slashdot not to read the entirety of the parent post? Feels like it today.
Messages were kept small to minimize download time. If it really takes 30 seconds to download 1K from your mail server, may I suggest an upgrade? I *know* you're exaggerating on that.
Messages were from a constant address, and the subject line was something along the lines of "We're looking for consumers in the [state] area." Without getting unnecessarily bulky, I think this made the basic intent pretty clear, eliminating the need to actually *open* the message.
Given that the source address was constant, you could also simply filter the message. I know that most major email packages (which you're likely to be using at work) allow this in about 3 menu clicks.
If you truly go through the trouble of reading the message and determining that you aren't interested, and file a removal request, then there is at least some allocation of resources on your part that is your decision, not mine.
I can assure you that when I was working for the company, this would not be the case. *ALL* remove requests were honored in perpetuity. Messages were kept small and with a constant source, precisely because I sought to minimize the nuisance effect of them.
When someone's trying to be nice about something and you slap them, sometimes they'll go away. But the next person to come along is simply less likely to be nice about it.
If e-mail accounts all came with a reliable "unsolicited e-mail on" and "unsolicited e-mail off" button, this would not be so bad. But they don't. I wish they did. I wish you did.
You would find no faster advocate of such a practice than I.
Billboards, TV commercials, etc do not impare my communication with friends, family, and business. The billboards to not hop in my glove box and impare my driving. The TV commercials (although sometimes distracting my gf from her mouthful of my *%&#^%) do not impare my beer-drinking.
I love it when people say this kinda stuff.
Normal everyday advertising *does* have a cost, at the margin. But you don't consider the marginal cost to be a relevant concern -- as most people don't. Are you telling me you've never had a conversation with someone interrupted by a distracting TV ad? Ever try to talk about a particularly tense scene in the X-Files when a car dealership ad comes on? That's a cost. It's a tiny, marginal one, but so is a 1K email from a constant address.
My point, truly, was that you don't *request* these solicitations, either. But you accept them as part of living in modern society.
You, however, impare the sanity of decent web-surfers like me. Humph.
Again, minimization of nuisance value was always a high-priority for me. Constant source addresses, small messages, honored removal requests -- all of these were about dealing with an audience as fairly as possible. If you want to say that these things don't matter, then you're simply encouraging me not to worry about being polite in my next venture. (Not that I'll ever venture into that arena again anyway, but we're talking incentives here.)
Hence the reason I mentioned that the messages were kept small, to the point, and from a constant address, making them inexpensive and filterable. Also why we honored removal requests in perpetuity.
Are you really suggesting that a single 1K email pushes your quota over the line? That would have been all you ever got from me.
Magazine ads just make for a fatter magazine.
1K emails just make for a fatter mailbox.
TV ads are gone in seconds.
It takes you hours to press "Delete?"
Banner ads get ignored.
But my plain text message somehow leaped out of your screen and slapped you in the face?
Every single spam email has to be looked at and deleted.
I though Slashdot was a gathering place for the technically-savvy. Are you telling me you don't know how to use a mail filter? Are you telling me that you can't hit "Reply", type "REMOVE", then hit "Send?" Are you telling me that when the message comes from "HelpWanted@mysteryshopper.org", you *must* open it and read the entire thing to determine you aren't interested in mystery shopping?
If filth like you would prefix every spam with "ADVERTISEMENT" they could be automatically deleted - but then nobody would get the message, right?
Is there a stated standard for such things? I would have been willing to do that if I'd known that there was a standardized practice for it.
Of course, knee-jerk reaction to polite interaction drives out politeness, not abuses. So when we sent emails from a constant, truthful, identifiable address and honored remove requests, we were nevertheless labelled as an "abuser." Which is exactly why people who might otherwise be interested in dealing honestly and fairly with their intended audience end up resorting to bulk remailers who tap into relay servers and disguise source addresses to avoid ISP complaints.
Businesses that place advertisements on Slashdot, TV and Magazines all pay the publisher to display the ads. A medium that I would otherwise have to pay for, or pay a higher rate for, is subsidised. Rather than a cost to me they are a financial benefit - I might not like the interruptions but I don't want to pay thousands for basic cable service. If you want to put yourself in those same shoes you would have to pay a subsidy towards my connectivity every time you send me spam.
I have advocated such a practice right here on this thread. Let's set up e-postage at the core backbone providers. I think that's a fine idea. Can you work out the transaction model, please?
I'm totally serious. The nature of our business model was such that if I were paying a penny a message, it would have worked out quite nicely, precisely because there was a legitimate ROI involved for participating parties. Such a strategy would also make honoring remove lists very important for mailers. Bob Metcalfe has only been claiming we need this for the last 8 years.
I don't consider this at all obvious. Nor do I consider it true. You *are* paying for the TV program by paying a carrier to get it to you (unless you're still using rabbit ears.) The advertiser pays, in part, for the infrastructure necessary to permit that communication. As a commercial 'net participant, the company I worked for was paying for connectivity, and thus paying for part of the communications infrastructure itself.
Please understand, my *original* point was that some "spam" actually does contain an offer for a legitimate and apparently widely desirable business transaction. I am not defending the practice as such. It's one of the reasons I left the company -- because my boss wanted to expand the practice beyond what I considered ethical boundaries.
However, if unsolicited commercial email is all spam is, then I contend that spam as such is not a bad thing. I get unsolicited commercial transaction requests everytime I drive down the highway, turn on the TV, stop by the mall or check my snail mail. Is this some kind of catastrophe?
So when you're favorite TV program is interrupted by commercials, that has no cost to you? When you're flipping through a magazine, and you have to turn extra pages to get to the next article because there are ads, that takes no time? When you check out Slashdot and the banner ad chews up 15K of downstream, that's free to you?
Gimme a break.