While it is very easy to make "jokes" about cloning XP's interface (comparing it to Hitler's clone, anone?!); but we must not forget that such an interface will prove ver useful in helping a lot of newbies help migrate to Linux.
Many people feel uncomfortable "re-learning computers" to do the same things. This project will provide visual continuiyt even as the underpinning is Linux instead of Windows.
Microsoft plots Macromedia coup against Java By ComputerWire Posted: 23/12/2002 at 09:47 GMT
Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc, lining up a deal that would throw enterprise Java into a spin, Gavin Clarke writes.
Industry and analyst sources believe Microsoft covets San Francisco, California-based Macromedia's Flash vector graphics design tool and player, which was radically updated this year.
Microsoft's own scripting efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform Flash, which now supports XML, Unicode, MP3 and HTML and which was taken closer towards Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2002. The Flash Player, meanwhile, is compatible with most browsers and used on nearly 90% of desktops.
Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering.NET.
An acquisition, though, would be seen as a hostile move deliberately designed to thwart J2EE uptake. Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which - through Macromedia's changes this year - took a step closer to J2EE.
Macromedia adopted the MX brand for Flash to emphasize integration with ColdFusion MX, also launched this year. ColdFusion MX is a web and server development environment and application server updated to sit on top of J2EE application servers. Macromedia partners include IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The ColdFusion web application server is regarded as superior to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASPs) and even Santa Clara, California-based Sun's Java Server Pages (JSPs) because of its simplicity, power and completeness. ColdFusion MX, meanwhile, uses ColdFusion Mark-up Language (CFML) tags that compile to Java.
Flash MX and Cold Fusion MX were presented by Macromedia as a means by which programmers could build in Java, but avoid the complexity of Java.
The J2EE community sorely lacks a programming environment that can make Java more accessible to mainstream developers. San Jose, California-based BEA Systems Inc has come close with WebLogic Workshop but this is more for Java-based web services.
Macromedia, meanwhile, said it was bringing its estimated 300,000-strong community of developers to J2EE, potentially expanding the pool of J2EE programmers.
A Microsoft acquisition of Macromedia would inevitably see Flash, and Macromedia's other cross-platform tools, tailored purely for Windows and.NET.
Analysts believe Macromedia is ripe for acquistion. Revenue for the most recent four quarters has been flat while net income is in the red. Macromedia reported an $11.6m net loss, down from $70.7m, for the fiscal quarter to September 30 on revenue that fell 2.2% to $85.4m. For the six months period, Macromedia has narrowed its loss from $182.4m to $13.6m while revenue fell 3.4% to $169m.
Neither Macromedia or Microsoft were available for comment.
CHEAP STORAGE MAKES it feasible to save voice recordings of many of our meetings, teleconferences, interviews, and other conversations. In some environments -- call centers and certain sectors of finance and government -- that already happens. But audio surveillance isn't yet routine, and the thorny legal, social, and cultural issues it raises haven't yet been widely debated. That's because, until now, there was no practical way to mine voice data.
As with other forms of practical obscurity, this artificial barrier was bound to topple, and now it has. Fast-Talk Communications' revolutionary phonetic indexing and search technology brings the magic of full-text search to the formerly opaque realms of audio recordings and video soundtracks. If you consider the way in which Google has already become everyone's indispensable "outboard brain," and extrapolate that to all the voice data that exists -- and to the vast quantities that soon will exist -- it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fast-Talk is one of the most disruptive technologies in the pipeline.
A phonetic search engine
What Fast-Talk sells is an engine and a software development kit, not an end-user product. The kit includes a "technology demo," however, which is a fully functional tool that has changed how I work in a dramatic way. Though I've been a journalist on and off for many years, I had never integrated audio recording into my routine. Finding quotes in those recordings was a painful process, and sending them out for transcription (as my InfoWorld colleagues routinely do) incurred delay and expense. So, being a fast typist, I just captured what I needed live. That technique was stressful, not always accurate, and obviously not appropriate for most people. So when I interviewed Antarctica Systems CTO Tim Bray recently for InfoWorld's CTO Zone (see "Mapping the future"), I used Fast-Talk to record, index, and then search the conversation.
The Fast-Talk engine can work with multiple audio formats, using pluggable "media accessors" to encapsulate them. The technology demo supports only WAV files, which it indexes to create PAT (phonetic audio track) indexes. If you want to search video, Fast-Talk recommends using VirtualDub, an open-source program, to extract the audio track as a WAV file. You can use Fast-Talk's demo to index pre-existing WAV files or, as I did, to index a WAV file while recording. This near-real-time indexing meant I was able to begin searching the index as soon as the 45-minute conversation ended. That was true because Fast-Talk's phonetic technology is orders of magnitude faster than the conventional alternative: speech-to-text translation followed by text indexing.
Like many great innovations, Fast-Talk is simple to describe. Phonemes are the basic units of sound in a language, and North American English has 39 of them. You can look up a word's phonetic spelling in the Carnegie Mellon dictionary (see Kevin Lenzo's Web site at www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict). "Dictionary," for example, works out to "D IH K SH AH N EH R IY." Fast-Talk's indexer recognizes phonemes and notes the time of their occurrence. The searcher converts text input to phoneme strings, looks for them, and returns their time-codes. It's as simple -- and brilliant -- as that.
Fast-Talk in action
When my interview with Tim Bray was done, the first segment I looked for was the one where Bray said, "Jean Paoli spent four hours showing me XDocs." The name "Jean Paoli" was, not surprisingly, ineffective as a search term. But "four hours" found the segment instantly, as did "fore ours" -- which of course resolves to the same string of phonemes. "Zhawn Powli" also worked, illustrating what will soon become a new strategy for users of voice-aware search engines: When in doubt, spell it out phonetically. In practice, I find myself resorting to this strategy less often than I'd have expected. And it was fairly obvious when to do so. I guessed correctly that "MySQL" would not work, for example, but that "my sequel" would.
The query language is dead simple, but there's an interesting twist on proximity. In a conventional search engine, proximity means "find a word within so many words of another word." In Fast-Talk's engine, it means "find a string of phonemes within so many seconds of another string of phonemes."
I was unable to find any variant of "XDocs," but I chalk that up to the recording's poor quality -- I was testing an IP phone at the time. There were some dropouts, and "XDocs" came during one of them. The marginal recording quality was, in fact, an excellent test. Like most people, I have no special audio engineering skill and no special recording equipment. To succeed in the real world, Fast-Talk will have to work well with whatever raw material it can get -- and it does. Although it is tuned for North American English, the international nature of our industry made it inevitable that I would push those limits. Sure enough, the accents I threw at it included Ximian CTO Miguel de Icaza's (Mexican), OpenLink Software CEO Kingsley Idehen's (Nigerian/British), and Systinet CEO Roman Stanek's (Czech), with usable results in each case. It's preferable, of course, to have a high-quality recording of a native speaker of North American English. When I indexed a well-modulated phone conversation that Test Center Director Steve Gillmor had with Microsoft's Mark Lucovsky, the results were simply uncanny.
Developers will find Fast-Talk to be a clean, well-documented toolkit. The engine is packaged as a static link library for use in Microsoft's C++ environment, and from other languages by way of a COM (Component Object Model) wrapper. (There's not yet a managed interface for.Net, but C# or Visual Basic.Net programmers can use the COM API.) The API supports multithreading so that indexing and search tasks can be parceled out to a set of processors. Non-Windows packaging of the engine, when needed, will be straightforward to produce.
Call centers are obvious first candidates for the Fast-Talk treatment. "Think about running a support center," says Patrick Taylor, Atlanta-based Fast-Talk's vice president of sales and marketing. In theory, answers to hard questions are written down in a knowledge base. In practice, that rarely happens. "It's compelling to just index everything that's said by the best experts," suggests Taylor, "so you can instantly find where they mention, say, NT kernel error 304."
Clearly, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The implications are both exhilarating and frightening. "This business of recording everything scares the bejesus out of me," says Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks in Beverly, Mass. With entry-level deployment of Fast-Talk starting at $10,000, routine meetings and phone calls won't be indexed anytime soon. But it's coming, and it is scary. As always, great power brings great responsibility. The genie's out of the lamp, though, so we'll just have to learn to use this new power well.
BOTTOM LINE
Fast-Talk's phonetic searching EXECUTIVE SUMMARY With Fast-Talk Communication's revolutionary phonetic indexing and search engine, you can instantly find words and phrases buried in many hours of spoken recordings. It's a major breakthrough that will forever transform voice data.
TEST CENTER PERSPECTIVE Google has become the "outboard brain" that we increasingly cannot function without. However, while Google is a voracious reader, it can't hear a thing. Fast-Talk's technology promises to remedy that handicap someday soon. It's a dizzying, if sobering, prospect.
We can already search currently though it doesn't work as well because the search depends on the filename. Most of the video's stored on net (porn?) are rather cryptical like vid01.mpg
How do ou know what's in that file? What if there are more than one version of the same file? Finall, if we use this process for videos, I wonder what will be the processing overheads....
Even more so, How long before people start listing false "videos" signature to improve their ratings...
How long before this technolog is actually banned under DMCA? After all, if you *need* to search music by electronic means then you are obviously a *thief*.....
I am SICK and tired of this new Logitech keboard. Can't get used to it. If this fuking "Y" key lets me down one more time, I am gonna do something crazy....I am sick of offering apologies for this keboard...
Not all, obviously. But my observation has been that a large number of people using services like Livejournal etc. are in realit indulging in escapism. They are faced with certain situations in life that they don't want to face. The virtual identit gives them a clean slate working on which the can interact with fellow users (lusers?) and bolster their ego.
I call this the cleaning the system syndrome. Most newbies to such services actuall use it to dump out their anxieties. There are exceptions, alright. And it would seem a natural conclusion that job uncertainity will only provoke more people to "blog".
WTF!?! Whatever about big labour?! All I am saying is
1. Make spammers pay. By law. To all parties involved, i.e. the recipient, and the ISP(s) as well. 2. Enforce the law. 3. Watch as spam becomes less b magnitudes. (or Profit; it's the same thing...)
Re:If this is what a small world is all about....
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
This is interesting observation. I get a lot of spam from "western" organizations trying to sell me property, mortgage, selling viagra, diplomas etc.
Anway, agreed that a lot of spam might be originating out of US legilative power, but that is surely no reason not to get our house back in order. Aln Ralsky and Co. are still offering their "services". Atleast we can take lead and stop spammers in US and also set examples for others at the same time.
I full agree with your sentiment that ISP's should take action against spammes. They may not have control over who can send them spam, but they can surely make sure that their networls are not abused. However, this does not abloish the need for strict legislation because:
1. The maximum an ISP can do now days to kill the account of a spammer. Clearl this is not enough. THey have been doing this for quite some time, it doesn't work. The spammers simpl get another account. Tracking spammers need human resources and that costs money. However, if there was a law that said a spammer has to pay say x$ per spam(and this can be tiered so that the charge per spam increases as the volume), and probably a token sentence of one month, then this will act as a very strong deterent. Now, if an ISP tracks and pursues one case, other spammers will fear they are in danger too. Secondly, the ISP will be interested in tackling spammers as it gives them money!
2. Even so, many spammers are able to set up their own servers as "fly-by-night" operators. Action has to be taken against them too.
Quite how this comment got moderated as +3,"Insightful" is beyond me. I request moderators to kindly browse at a lower threshold. I also don't hold any grudge against USER No. 457178; it's just that I am dejected by the hopeless attitude potrayed by him.
Keep whining and nothing happens
on
ISP Chief on Spam
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Quote: We're victims of crime, and nobody gives a damn.
This happens because the people who are in position to make laws and policies are directly affected. All the whining goes on in the technical community, but talk to your elected representative and ask them where spam figures in their priority.
Secondly, to get laws passed, you need a lobby. Hell, even *IAA managed to get asinine laws passed because they lobbied as a group: they were able to highlight (rightly/wrongly) how their financial interests were being compromised.
Unless a lobby is formed and pressure sustained, we can whine all day on/. We can send 100 spam's to Alan Ransky. We CAN'T end spamming.
If you are observing a decline in quality, maybe you are buying the lowest rung of "chinese" electronics. I don't intend this as offence to any Chinese nationals (pr0pz to you) but more to highlight the fact that Japan too suffered from this problem in formative years of it's massive electronics and manufacturing industry.
The quality of products, if anything, has only gone up. That is, if you are willing to pay for it. Manufacturers are under increasing pressure to provide "value" oriented products so maybe that explains your dilenma regarding quality of Sony product. It's a bit unfair to expect top class quality in a $ 49 DVD player, don't you think? Kinda wanting the E-class engineering in your Accord.
Want good quality DVD product? Stay away from Sony and try Samsung. Or if you MUST get Sony, try other products in their range.
/me Babbles something about people buying Sony when better products are out there...
Re:Solution from a problem that doesn't exist
on
VRRP
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Wasn't intended as a troll. Not everyone is as "eleet" as you are, many are still learning, ok?
Solution from a problem that doesn't exist
on
VRRP
·
· Score: -1, Troll
Come on now. Who cares if you get disconnected on a dial-up? It wasn't meant to be treated as a leased line. Same holds true for DSL too. Besides, services that require 99.999% reliability have always operated on leased/dedicated lines not your regular networks.
Personally, this seems like a solution looking from a problem to fix. Sure, more reliablity will be better, but we are already pushing for miniscule benefits. I would be more interested in any news concerning Ipv6 whose implementation will far outperform any "solutions" to an already suffocated system.
So mod me down. but here's the proof from DAlnet's website iiself.
It is a sad fact that it has been somewhat difficult to connect to DALnet for some time. There are several reasons for this, including ongoing attacks and a loss of servers.
This weekend, these problems have increased. DALnet has been under an unusually strong, unusually persistent attack. These attacks are directed at all DALnet client servers, rather than just a few.
The DALnet administration is working with service providers and with law enforcement to stop these attacks, but this is not an easy task. We apologize for the disruption, and ask that you bear with us through these difficult times.
Why am I mentioning this? BEcause this is probably the biggest DOS attack against such a major network that has been going on for, hold your breath, over 48 hours. If slashdot was attacked similarly, we wouldn't be reading it. I even doubt a massive service like livejournal can take such an attack.
Even Livejournal, a separate service, isn't working, And the Internet is slow. Am I the only person on the internet? Could it be that there is some great tradegy going on in some parts of the world that we might be unaware of? God help me...
WOW. Livejournal (that lame service) is also not available. What is happening? Am I the only peron online? Is there some great tradegy going on in great parts of the world that I might be unaware of?
But the point remains that making wind in public isn't considered polite!! And don't even talk about the smell of a few geeks trying to "power" themselves...
Slashdot Mirror
It is not intended to "emulate" XP; rather to provide a visually similar enviornment to ease the learning curve. Kindly see my comment here.
Many people feel uncomfortable "re-learning computers" to do the same things. This project will provide visual continuiyt even as the underpinning is Linux instead of Windows.
Microsoft plots Macromedia coup against Java
.NET.
.NET.
By ComputerWire
Posted: 23/12/2002 at 09:47 GMT
Microsoft Corp is believed to have trained its acquisition crosshairs on Macromedia Inc, lining up a deal that would throw enterprise Java into a spin, Gavin Clarke writes.
Industry and analyst sources believe Microsoft covets San Francisco, California-based Macromedia's Flash vector graphics design tool and player, which was radically updated this year.
Microsoft's own scripting efforts are regarded as relatively inferior to the cross-platform Flash, which now supports XML, Unicode, MP3 and HTML and which was taken closer towards Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) in 2002. The Flash Player, meanwhile, is compatible with most browsers and used on nearly 90% of desktops.
Flash would give Microsoft access to tools for building rich interfaces on both desktops and mobile devices, furthering
An acquisition, though, would be seen as a hostile move deliberately designed to thwart J2EE uptake. Flash is a powerful and rich development environment, which - through Macromedia's changes this year - took a step closer to J2EE.
Macromedia adopted the MX brand for Flash to emphasize integration with ColdFusion MX, also launched this year. ColdFusion MX is a web and server development environment and application server updated to sit on top of J2EE application servers. Macromedia partners include IBM and Sun Microsystems Inc.
The ColdFusion web application server is regarded as superior to Microsoft's Active Server Pages (ASPs) and even Santa Clara, California-based Sun's Java Server Pages (JSPs) because of its simplicity, power and completeness. ColdFusion MX, meanwhile, uses ColdFusion Mark-up Language (CFML) tags that compile to Java.
Flash MX and Cold Fusion MX were presented by Macromedia as a means by which programmers could build in Java, but avoid the complexity of Java.
The J2EE community sorely lacks a programming environment that can make Java more accessible to mainstream developers. San Jose, California-based BEA Systems Inc has come close with WebLogic Workshop but this is more for Java-based web services.
Macromedia, meanwhile, said it was bringing its estimated 300,000-strong community of developers to J2EE, potentially expanding the pool of J2EE programmers.
A Microsoft acquisition of Macromedia would inevitably see Flash, and Macromedia's other cross-platform tools, tailored purely for Windows and
Analysts believe Macromedia is ripe for acquistion. Revenue for the most recent four quarters has been flat while net income is in the red. Macromedia reported an $11.6m net loss, down from $70.7m, for the fiscal quarter to September 30 on revenue that fell 2.2% to $85.4m. For the six months period, Macromedia has narrowed its loss from $182.4m to $13.6m while revenue fell 3.4% to $169m.
Neither Macromedia or Microsoft were available for comment.
ANALYSIS by John_udell A T infoworld d o t com
.Net, but C# or Visual Basic .Net programmers can use the COM API.) The API supports multithreading so that indexing and search tasks can be parceled out to a set of processors. Non-Windows packaging of the engine, when needed, will be straightforward to produce.
The power of voice
By Jon Udell
December 13, 2002
CHEAP STORAGE MAKES it feasible to save voice recordings of many of our meetings, teleconferences, interviews, and other conversations. In some environments -- call centers and certain sectors of finance and government -- that already happens. But audio surveillance isn't yet routine, and the thorny legal, social, and cultural issues it raises haven't yet been widely debated. That's because, until now, there was no practical way to mine voice data.
As with other forms of practical obscurity, this artificial barrier was bound to topple, and now it has. Fast-Talk Communications' revolutionary phonetic indexing and search technology brings the magic of full-text search to the formerly opaque realms of audio recordings and video soundtracks. If you consider the way in which Google has already become everyone's indispensable "outboard brain," and extrapolate that to all the voice data that exists -- and to the vast quantities that soon will exist -- it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Fast-Talk is one of the most disruptive technologies in the pipeline.
A phonetic search engine
What Fast-Talk sells is an engine and a software development kit, not an end-user product. The kit includes a "technology demo," however, which is a fully functional tool that has changed how I work in a dramatic way. Though I've been a journalist on and off for many years, I had never integrated audio recording into my routine. Finding quotes in those recordings was a painful process, and sending them out for transcription (as my InfoWorld colleagues routinely do) incurred delay and expense. So, being a fast typist, I just captured what I needed live. That technique was stressful, not always accurate, and obviously not appropriate for most people. So when I interviewed Antarctica Systems CTO Tim Bray recently for InfoWorld's CTO Zone (see "Mapping the future"), I used Fast-Talk to record, index, and then search the conversation.
The Fast-Talk engine can work with multiple audio formats, using pluggable "media accessors" to encapsulate them. The technology demo supports only WAV files, which it indexes to create PAT (phonetic audio track) indexes. If you want to search video, Fast-Talk recommends using VirtualDub, an open-source program, to extract the audio track as a WAV file. You can use Fast-Talk's demo to index pre-existing WAV files or, as I did, to index a WAV file while recording. This near-real-time indexing meant I was able to begin searching the index as soon as the 45-minute conversation ended. That was true because Fast-Talk's phonetic technology is orders of magnitude faster than the conventional alternative: speech-to-text translation followed by text indexing.
Like many great innovations, Fast-Talk is simple to describe. Phonemes are the basic units of sound in a language, and North American English has 39 of them. You can look up a word's phonetic spelling in the Carnegie Mellon dictionary (see Kevin Lenzo's Web site at www.speech.cs.cmu.edu/cgi-bin/cmudict). "Dictionary," for example, works out to "D IH K SH AH N EH R IY." Fast-Talk's indexer recognizes phonemes and notes the time of their occurrence. The searcher converts text input to phoneme strings, looks for them, and returns their time-codes. It's as simple -- and brilliant -- as that.
Fast-Talk in action
When my interview with Tim Bray was done, the first segment I looked for was the one where Bray said, "Jean Paoli spent four hours showing me XDocs." The name "Jean Paoli" was, not surprisingly, ineffective as a search term. But "four hours" found the segment instantly, as did "fore ours" -- which of course resolves to the same string of phonemes. "Zhawn Powli" also worked, illustrating what will soon become a new strategy for users of voice-aware search engines: When in doubt, spell it out phonetically. In practice, I find myself resorting to this strategy less often than I'd have expected. And it was fairly obvious when to do so. I guessed correctly that "MySQL" would not work, for example, but that "my sequel" would.
The query language is dead simple, but there's an interesting twist on proximity. In a conventional search engine, proximity means "find a word within so many words of another word." In Fast-Talk's engine, it means "find a string of phonemes within so many seconds of another string of phonemes."
I was unable to find any variant of "XDocs," but I chalk that up to the recording's poor quality -- I was testing an IP phone at the time. There were some dropouts, and "XDocs" came during one of them. The marginal recording quality was, in fact, an excellent test. Like most people, I have no special audio engineering skill and no special recording equipment. To succeed in the real world, Fast-Talk will have to work well with whatever raw material it can get -- and it does. Although it is tuned for North American English, the international nature of our industry made it inevitable that I would push those limits. Sure enough, the accents I threw at it included Ximian CTO Miguel de Icaza's (Mexican), OpenLink Software CEO Kingsley Idehen's (Nigerian/British), and Systinet CEO Roman Stanek's (Czech), with usable results in each case. It's preferable, of course, to have a high-quality recording of a native speaker of North American English. When I indexed a well-modulated phone conversation that Test Center Director Steve Gillmor had with Microsoft's Mark Lucovsky, the results were simply uncanny.
Developers will find Fast-Talk to be a clean, well-documented toolkit. The engine is packaged as a static link library for use in Microsoft's C++ environment, and from other languages by way of a COM (Component Object Model) wrapper. (There's not yet a managed interface for
Call centers are obvious first candidates for the Fast-Talk treatment. "Think about running a support center," says Patrick Taylor, Atlanta-based Fast-Talk's vice president of sales and marketing. In theory, answers to hard questions are written down in a knowledge base. In practice, that rarely happens. "It's compelling to just index everything that's said by the best experts," suggests Taylor, "so you can instantly find where they mention, say, NT kernel error 304."
Clearly, that's just the tip of the iceberg. The implications are both exhilarating and frightening. "This business of recording everything scares the bejesus out of me," says Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks in Beverly, Mass. With entry-level deployment of Fast-Talk starting at $10,000, routine meetings and phone calls won't be indexed anytime soon. But it's coming, and it is scary. As always, great power brings great responsibility. The genie's out of the lamp, though, so we'll just have to learn to use this new power well.
BOTTOM LINE
Fast-Talk's phonetic searching
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
With Fast-Talk Communication's revolutionary phonetic indexing and search engine, you can instantly find words and phrases buried in many hours of spoken recordings. It's a major breakthrough that will forever transform voice data.
TEST CENTER PERSPECTIVE
Google has become the "outboard brain" that we increasingly cannot function without. However, while Google is a voracious reader, it can't hear a thing. Fast-Talk's technology promises to remedy that handicap someday soon. It's a dizzying, if sobering, prospect.
How do ou know what's in that file? What if there are more than one version of the same file? Finall, if we use this process for videos, I wonder what will be the processing overheads....
Even more so, How long before people start listing false "videos" signature to improve their ratings...
/sarcasm
I am SICK and tired of this new Logitech keboard. Can't get used to it. If this fuking "Y" key lets me down one more time, I am gonna do something crazy....I am sick of offering apologies for this keboard...
I call this the cleaning the system syndrome. Most newbies to such services actuall use it to dump out their anxieties. There are exceptions, alright. And it would seem a natural conclusion that job uncertainity will only provoke more people to "blog".
1. Make spammers pay. By law. To all parties involved, i.e. the recipient, and the ISP(s) as well.
2. Enforce the law.
3. Watch as spam becomes less b magnitudes. (or Profit; it's the same thing...)
Anway, agreed that a lot of spam might be originating out of US legilative power, but that is surely no reason not to get our house back in order. Aln Ralsky and Co. are still offering their "services". Atleast we can take lead and stop spammers in US and also set examples for others at the same time.
I am an idiot. Please forgive the hundred typos in that post. Basically, I have a new keyboard and have to get used to its articulation.
1. The maximum an ISP can do now days to kill the account of a spammer. Clearl this is not enough. THey have been doing this for quite some time, it doesn't work. The spammers simpl get another account. Tracking spammers need human resources and that costs money. However, if there was a law that said a spammer has to pay say x$ per spam(and this can be tiered so that the charge per spam increases as the volume), and probably a token sentence of one month, then this will act as a very strong deterent. Now, if an ISP tracks and pursues one case, other spammers will fear they are in danger too. Secondly, the ISP will be interested in tackling spammers as it gives them money!
2. Even so, many spammers are able to set up their own servers as "fly-by-night" operators. Action has to be taken against them too.
Quite how this comment got moderated as +3,"Insightful" is beyond me. I request moderators to kindly browse at a lower threshold. I also don't hold any grudge against USER No. 457178; it's just that I am dejected by the hopeless attitude potrayed by him.
This happens because the people who are in position to make laws and policies are directly affected. All the whining goes on in the technical community, but talk to your elected representative and ask them where spam figures in their priority.
Secondly, to get laws passed, you need a lobby. Hell, even *IAA managed to get asinine laws passed because they lobbied as a group: they were able to highlight (rightly/wrongly) how their financial interests were being compromised.
Unless a lobby is formed and pressure sustained, we can whine all day on /. We can send 100 spam's to Alan Ransky. We CAN'T end spamming.
You keep saying those things. I know just how many kittens I have killed.....forgive me jebus!
The quality of products, if anything, has only gone up. That is, if you are willing to pay for it. Manufacturers are under increasing pressure to provide "value" oriented products so maybe that explains your dilenma regarding quality of Sony product. It's a bit unfair to expect top class quality in a $ 49 DVD player, don't you think? Kinda wanting the E-class engineering in your Accord.
Want good quality DVD product? Stay away from Sony and try Samsung. Or if you MUST get Sony, try other products in their range.
/me Babbles something about people buying Sony when better products are out there...
Wasn't intended as a troll. Not everyone is as "eleet" as you are, many are still learning, ok?
Personally, this seems like a solution looking from a problem to fix. Sure, more reliablity will be better, but we are already pushing for miniscule benefits. I would be more interested in any news concerning Ipv6 whose implementation will far outperform any "solutions" to an already suffocated system.
Do as I say, not as I do. I am not surprised by this attitude.
It is a sad fact that it has been somewhat difficult to connect to DALnet for some time. There are several reasons for this, including ongoing attacks and a loss of servers. This weekend, these problems have increased. DALnet has been under an unusually strong, unusually persistent attack. These attacks are directed at all DALnet client servers, rather than just a few. The DALnet administration is working with service providers and with law enforcement to stop these attacks, but this is not an easy task. We apologize for the disruption, and ask that you bear with us through these difficult times.
Please visit website for more information.
Why am I mentioning this? BEcause this is probably the biggest DOS attack against such a major network that has been going on for, hold your breath, over 48 hours. If slashdot was attacked similarly, we wouldn't be reading it. I even doubt a massive service like livejournal can take such an attack.
Even Livejournal, a separate service, isn't working, And the Internet is slow. Am I the only person on the internet? Could it be that there is some great tradegy going on in some parts of the world that we might be unaware of? God help me...
WOW. Livejournal (that lame service) is also not available. What is happening? Am I the only peron online? Is there some great tradegy going on in great parts of the world that I might be unaware of?
What the hell is wrong with DALnet? Allmost all servers are down. Are Paakistan based muslim terrorists at it again?
Small minds are easily amused.
But the point remains that making wind in public isn't considered polite!! And don't even talk about the smell of a few geeks trying to "power" themselves...