1. It's quite overpriced. If you listen to their stuff and other mid-fi equipment, the comparable stuff costs 1/3 - 1/5 what the Bose equipment does.
2. It is not good at handling difference types of spaces -- like your living room. Talk to the guys at Best Buy or wherever Bose is sold -- they'll tell you that they have to bend over backwards to set up the demo system exactly according to the manufacturer's specifications. This isn't because Best Buy just wants it to sound good -- they have to sign a contract with Bose to be allowed to sell the Bose systems. There may be other stipulations to this contract, but I don't want to speculate.
That about sums it up.
Audiophiles tend to dislike Bose because the Bose selling philisophy doesn't jive at all with the audiophile buying philosophy. If I'm going to buy a component for my stereo, I want to do a lot of critical listening. I want to try out the component with a number of other ones (eventually with my own system, which I'll bring into the store). I want to listen to my own music on it.
They also dislike it for a foolish but understandible reason. Bose has done a good job with advertising and public relations, and so there is a mass public perception that Bose is good. People buy Bose systems and talk about their cool stereos. People with friends with Bose talk about their friend with the great stereo. This can be frustrating to the stereo geek who believes that his system sounds a lot better than a Bose (even a more expensive one). I know I've had to bit my tongue a couple of times when people have bragged about systems I've considered weak or cheesy.
For the other audiophiles out there, I've got: * California Audio Labs Icon Mk II cd player * Transparent Link 100 interconnects * Creek 6060 integrated amp * Tara Labs RSC Prime cable * B&W DM302 loudspeakers (totally outclassed -- I've got my eye on some Vandersteens, but, alas, rent comes first, and since I burnt out on programming and became a cab driver, I'm not raking in the dough any more).
First of all, I should state for the record that I'm an avowed audiophile. My stereo is worth more than my car, and listening to music is a major passtime for me. Still, I think the same rules for a music system apply pretty well to a movie setup.
1. Listen to stuff. This may sound like a no brainer, but a lot of people seem to forget about it. Don't buy any system you don't have a chance to hear first. Bring a DVD along with you when you go shopping so you can see a movie you like on systems you're considering buying. If a store won't let you do this, run away.
2. Bring a notepad and write down your observations. It's hard to remember a bunch of systems and components at the end of a long day of listening.
3. Steer clear of Bose. Their stuff is way overpriced, and it doesn't hold up well to real world conditions (like your living room).
4. If you bring it home and it doesn't sound right, don't be afraid to return it.
5. There is probably a high end audio store somewhere near where you live. A shop like this will cater to the customer far more than Best Buy would; you can reasonably expect for a salesperson to spend an hour or two helping you find the right system for you.
6. Don't buy a great system and cripple it with bad cables. At your local high end store, get them to do a demo for you and show you how much difference good cables can make. (My speaker cables cost $250, and it was totally worth it.) Similarly, consider buying stands for your speakers if you go with a sub/monitor setup.
All that said, I'd suggest checking out Marantz for the amp and Klipsch for the speakers. I don't own any of that stuff (my amp is a Creek 6060 and my speakers B&Ws, and the cd player a Cal Icon, for anyone who cares), but the warm rich sound of a Marantz, along with a clear midrange (for voices) would be nice for a home theater system. Denon is also worth considering. Klipsch makes decent speakers that can be both loud and crisp; I've heard them do movies to good effect.
The important thing is how you go about buying your system. The key is how it sounds, not what the box says it does.
I've already got the perfect computer desk for me.
I went to Home Depot and bought a 4x8 sheet of 3/4" laminated plywood (laminated for easy cleanup of spilled drinks/food). I cut it to about 3.5' x 5' (the largest object that will fit in my car flat). Then I added folding banquet table legs to the bottom. The result? A large, plain, flat, white table with more than enough room for a 20" monitor, a printer, a scanner, and a lot of misc paperwork as well.
Seriously, though, linking directly to the PDF was a pretty big blunder. I wonder how many of the no-pay downloads were actually from people on/. who followed an inopportune link.
The dude who wrote this article is the author of the (pen and paper) RPG Toon. I'm not sure whether the game is in print any more, but I am prety sure it's no longer supported by SJG. I wonder what he'd think about people who weren't able to find a copy making a photocopy of a freind's book?
Software isn't the only much-loved thing that is abandoned.
Okay, first of all, I am not usually a Jon Katz flamer. I read his stuff, some of it is okay, I disagree with some of it, I'm never incensed about it.
This tim, though. Man oh man, this is bullshit. Okay, hear me out before you moderate me down for swearing. He's saying that it's wrong for a band to sue the individuals who are giving away their music. Now, I agree completely with the arguments against the attacks on Napster, DeCSS, etc. -- they're simply tools, and they have legitimate purposes as well as illegitimate ones. But a user who is using Napster to serve up someone else's not-for-free music is doing something pretty lame.
Okay, let's look at it like this: Let's say a band shouldn't sue Napster ('cause that really is dumb) and shouldn't sue the users using it to give away their music (because information wants to be free). What recourse do they have? Do they have to just sit there and watch as people download their music? When does this become a problem? When is it okay for them to take some action against this?
We really have to watch out for that "How dare they sue those innocent kids!" gag reflex. Sometimes the "innocent kids" are actually doing something they should be doing.
FULL keyboard and mouse support. I'd like to be able to perfrom every single operation with the keyboard. I'd also like to perform every operation (except text entry) with the mouse. Mac OS is bad for this because there's a lot of mouse only stuff. Windows, for all that it sucks, is actually not too bad.
Good memory management. Don't you just hate it when you have to sit and wait for a window to refresh?
Configurability. I might not want my system to look like yours. I might not like a taskbar and a start button. Or I might. Nobody else should choose for me. This should also apply to what the mouse buttons do.
The ability to save/backup the desktop and all configuration settings.
The ability to escape back to a command prompt when necessary.
I wish I had more moderator points so I could bump up this post. You should write a short Feature describing this situation so everybody understands what could happen if the DoJ splits up Microsoft. Thanks for informing me.
If Microsoft is broken up, it would be the first time the Justice Department shattered a company in this way since the 1984 breakup of telephone monopoly AT&T. Launched in 1974, the landmark antitrust suit . ..
Okay, I don't remember when the Microsoft trial started, but it hasn't been ten years yet. Plus, remember, litigation has only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't be surprised if this takes fifteen years.
Y'know, I meant this to be funny, but I realize now that it might not be that far off. Hope I'm wrong.
a practical use for the exploding CDROM
on
Quickielanche
·
· Score: 1
I was thinking about this a bit. Having a CDROM that explodes on command is useful but only in a small number of cases. Trying to come up with something other than "Oh shoot, they're here, blow up the CDs," I came up with the following idea:
* Manufacturer a special drive with a detonator. Make there be some other minor differences as well. * Make explodable CDs that can only be read by the type of drive with the built in detonator. * In a normal CDROM drive, the disc does nothing (unreadable). * In a detonator-enabled drive, it asks for your private key and checks it against the public key used for the disc. If they match, you're good to go. * If they don't match, burn baby burn.
A more secure (paranoid) way to send bulk amounts of data around.
Not really. The fifth amendment protects someone charged with a crime from being forced to testify against himself. He must still give up any evidence that might implicate him. If you are a murder suspect, and you own a gun, you cannot refuse to turn in the gun because it might incriminate you.
On another note, this wouldn't matter anyway in this case. The 5th amendment only applies to criminal cases. A lawsuit is a civil case, so the protection of the 5th doesn't apply.
I'm sad to say I have yet to find a desktop replacement to replace my current one, a Toshiba Tecra 780dvd. (Yes, the Thinkpad 770d is a titch better, but not enough to justify an upgrade.) While there are many excellent notebooks out there, there don't seem to be any coming out that are as full featured as I would like to see.
What are the features that matter to me?
A big, bright, 1024x768 screen. My current Tecra's is 13.3", 1024x768, and it's great. A little bigger wouldn't hurt at all, but I don't want one with higher resolution, as I would then have to stretch 1024x768 to fill the screen.
Not just a fast processor but an adequate amount of cache as well. Far too many notebooks pinch pennies in this department.
PCI bus. Fast RAM. Quick hard disk. (Noticing a trend?)
A built in modem. I've gotten spoiled by the port right in the side of the Tecra. Unlike the Tecra, though, I don't want a lousy winmodem.
Audio line in and line out. Some sort of video out and in (preferably composite video).
I know I'm probably dreaming here, but I'd like separate mouse and keyboard PS2 ports without having to use a dockin station.
A touchstick style pointing device.
A DVD-ROM drive (and MPEG decoder board).
Okay, that seems like a lot. On the other hand, there are a number of things that don't really matter to me.
Weight? I don't need to juggle the thing. I expect part of the "price" of a true desktop replacement to be that it's quite heavy.
Parallel ports and serial ports are a thing of the past. With USB, I just don't need 'em.
A floppy drive is also unessential. Yeah, it's hard to give them up, but really, how often do people even have files that fit on them? I move files around over networks or with flash cards.
I've never used my infrared port.
I won't be getting a docking bay, so a place for one is not important.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
I believe SGI made a notebook a couple of years ago with a gigantic (17" or so) screen. It was in four parts, and opening the case caused the screen to fold out and come together.
Is this some bizarre dream, or does anyone else remember this?
I don't think the issue is what OS you put on it. Really, anything you'd like to use has the potential to work. The "magic answer" to making the computer work for him is to constantly keep in mind "this is grandpa's computer" as you're setting it up for him.
This seems obvious. I know from experience, however, that it is not. An example: an ex-girlfriend's little brother set up her computer for her. It was a 486/66 with 8 MB of RAM -- not too bad when she started college in 1994, pretty slow a couple of years later. Anyway, I stepped in to fix it up in 1996, I believe. She had mentioned that she never used her computer because it took too long to boot. I was suspicious but took a look at it.
He had Windows 95 running on it. As if that weren't enough, he had a lot of stuff running on startup. A lot of stuff she was never ever going to use. And, yes, it took over five minutes from switch on to being able to do anything. It was awful. (As an aside, he had this huge tray of a main board with onboard SCSI controller: it could only run her chip at 33 MHz. He had an 800 MB hard disk in there: her BIOS had the 500-something limit. Doofus)
Anyway, I found a copy of Windows 3.1, put Word 2, Netscape 3, and Tera Term on there, and she was good to go. She actually did papers in her room again. (Of course, the next time he saw the computer, he "fixed" it, but that's another story.)
The moral of this long-winded story? Don't set up a computer with things that you want/need/think are cool. Put on it only the things that its user will have to have.
The Toughbook has made a certain amount of noise given it's slightly lower target audience and price points. The one that really impresses me, thought is Fieldworks.
I had read about them in an article on rugged notebooks a couple of years ago. Earlier this year, I had a consulting gig at Rollerblade (handling the data migration off of their IRIX network when the company was shipped out to New Jersey). On my way in to RB one day, something that had been nagging at me for the past couple of weeks finally came to a head; Fieldworks was less than a block down the street from RB.
I mentioned this, excited, to a couple of the R&D guys there with whom I had become friends. They told me about a former RB R&D guy who had left to go work at Fieldworks, and they asked if I'd like them to try to set up a tour.
Fun fun, we got to go there later that week. It's an amazing place. Every computer is assembled and tested by hand there in Eden Prarie, Minnesota. They run them overnight in a room hot enough that I only lasted a minute before I fled in fear that I might pass out. And that was only one of the horrors to which these are subjected.
It gets better. The customer is able to choose a number of different levels of "ruggedness" for the computers they're purchasing. Going up north? They have special measures to make the computer (and the LCD) behave just fine in far colder temperatures than an unshielded human could handle.
Best of all, these notebooks are upgradable. They have PCMCIA slots, but they also have room for standard ISA cards (I don't remember about VESA or PCI). This allows a number of companies to use these for highly specific purposes.
Finally, a bit I found amusing. A number of police departments use Fieldworks machines. They'll send one in every once in a while to have it cleaned. Seems the officers with these mounted in their cars often use the keyboard as a nice flat place to set coffee or a donut. Now, this doesn't do any damage or anything, but eventually enough sugar/syrup/spilled coffee/etc accumulated to clog up the keys of the keyboard. They send it in, FW sprays it out with a hose, tests it, ships it back.
I am not an employee, customer, client, or contractor for or of Fieldworks. I just think they're cool.
Did you contact his or her web host and file a complaint? Most reputable hosts have an agreement not to spam in their TOS and will warn or simply evict anyone who breaks that rule. I would nail the spammer to the wall.
It seems to me that Mr. Jaffe did a pretty darn good job with this article. He's not a technical writer, yet it seems that he has kept himself fairly well informed about the state of the OS market. (Is "market" the right word for a system containing a free product? Hurm. Might "situation" be better?)
He talked about Windows 2000 in ways that would make sense to businessmen, and I bet they wouldn't like what he said. Similarly, he talked about Linux in comprehensible terms, and he painted quite a pretty picture of it. While errors and misinformation are not good, in this case, he made Linux look *better* because of it -- he wasn't saying "There is no GUI," but rather "Look how quickly they made a GUI!"
This article is exactly the sort of thing Linux needs if it is to gain credibility in the business world. System administrators need opinions like Jaffe's as ammunition to fire at the managment of their corporations in order to convince them that Linux is a workable responce to their needs.
I'll be pretty disappointed if his next column is about how he was brutally flamed for one minor error in an otherwise sterling article.
This one used to piss me off a lot; I was going to register my last name (which is also my consulting firm's name) and found it registered by one of these companies. On further reflection, however, I don't really think this is a bad thing.
If I registered it, it would have ended up costing me $15/month, and nobody else with my name would have been able to use it. As it is now, anyone has the capacity to use it, and it costs each of them less. While it still frustrates me (and I didn't sign up), I believe it to be a fair business rather than a shameless squatter.
I think this is going to push television into the same realm as many other industries today. People want to get the thing they want at the imt they want it in the way they want it. Period.
Pay per view programming seems like the obvious answer, but that's pretty unattractive to a lot of people, particularly ones who want to spend hours and hours watching television. A relatively simple compromise for this would be to grant users viewing credit for watching commercials; it could be set up on such a scale that the current setup -- 43 minute show/17 minutes of commercials -- would result in no fee. Credit could be saved up by watching more commercials and used to watch movies uninterrupted.
Better still, you could choose your commercials the same way you chose your shows. You'd submit a list of the products you were interested in seeing advertised, thus making the commercials more likely to be appealing to you. Don't want a new car? No commercials for car dealerships. Advertisers would be happy to reach one tenth the audience they are now if they were sure those people were interested.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if anyone will actually shell out $25k+ for this puppy.
1. It's quite overpriced. If you listen to their stuff and other mid-fi equipment, the comparable stuff costs 1/3 - 1/5 what the Bose equipment does.
2. It is not good at handling difference types of spaces -- like your living room. Talk to the guys at Best Buy or wherever Bose is sold -- they'll tell you that they have to bend over backwards to set up the demo system exactly according to the manufacturer's specifications. This isn't because Best Buy just wants it to sound good -- they have to sign a contract with Bose to be allowed to sell the Bose systems. There may be other stipulations to this contract, but I don't want to speculate.
That about sums it up.
Audiophiles tend to dislike Bose because the Bose selling philisophy doesn't jive at all with the audiophile buying philosophy. If I'm going to buy a component for my stereo, I want to do a lot of critical listening. I want to try out the component with a number of other ones (eventually with my own system, which I'll bring into the store). I want to listen to my own music on it.
They also dislike it for a foolish but understandible reason. Bose has done a good job with advertising and public relations, and so there is a mass public perception that Bose is good. People buy Bose systems and talk about their cool stereos. People with friends with Bose talk about their friend with the great stereo. This can be frustrating to the stereo geek who believes that his system sounds a lot better than a Bose (even a more expensive one). I know I've had to bit my tongue a couple of times when people have bragged about systems I've considered weak or cheesy.
For the other audiophiles out there, I've got:
* California Audio Labs Icon Mk II cd player
* Transparent Link 100 interconnects
* Creek 6060 integrated amp
* Tara Labs RSC Prime cable
* B&W DM302 loudspeakers (totally outclassed -- I've got my eye on some Vandersteens, but, alas, rent comes first, and since I burnt out on programming and became a cab driver, I'm not raking in the dough any more).
Anyway, hope that answers your questions.
-michael-
First of all, I should state for the record that I'm an avowed audiophile. My stereo is worth more than my car, and listening to music is a major passtime for me. Still, I think the same rules for a music system apply pretty well to a movie setup.
1. Listen to stuff. This may sound like a no brainer, but a lot of people seem to forget about it. Don't buy any system you don't have a chance to hear first. Bring a DVD along with you when you go shopping so you can see a movie you like on systems you're considering buying. If a store won't let you do this, run away.
2. Bring a notepad and write down your observations. It's hard to remember a bunch of systems and components at the end of a long day of listening.
3. Steer clear of Bose. Their stuff is way overpriced, and it doesn't hold up well to real world conditions (like your living room).
4. If you bring it home and it doesn't sound right, don't be afraid to return it.
5. There is probably a high end audio store somewhere near where you live. A shop like this will cater to the customer far more than Best Buy would; you can reasonably expect for a salesperson to spend an hour or two helping you find the right system for you.
6. Don't buy a great system and cripple it with bad cables. At your local high end store, get them to do a demo for you and show you how much difference good cables can make. (My speaker cables cost $250, and it was totally worth it.) Similarly, consider buying stands for your speakers if you go with a sub/monitor setup.
All that said, I'd suggest checking out Marantz for the amp and Klipsch for the speakers. I don't own any of that stuff (my amp is a Creek 6060 and my speakers B&Ws, and the cd player a Cal Icon, for anyone who cares), but the warm rich sound of a Marantz, along with a clear midrange (for voices) would be nice for a home theater system. Denon is also worth considering. Klipsch makes decent speakers that can be both loud and crisp; I've heard them do movies to good effect.
The important thing is how you go about buying your system. The key is how it sounds, not what the box says it does.
-michael-
I've already got the perfect computer desk for me.
I went to Home Depot and bought a 4x8 sheet of 3/4" laminated plywood (laminated for easy cleanup of spilled drinks/food). I cut it to about 3.5' x 5' (the largest object that will fit in my car flat). Then I added folding banquet table legs to the bottom. The result? A large, plain, flat, white table with more than enough room for a 20" monitor, a printer, a scanner, and a lot of misc paperwork as well.
I love it.
It cost me about $40 in materials.
-michael-
I hope that this would be used as an auxillary or backup system to the standard radars and air traffic controllers.
Seriously, though, linking directly to the PDF was a pretty big blunder. I wonder how many of the no-pay downloads were actually from people on /. who followed an inopportune link.
The dude who wrote this article is the author of the (pen and paper) RPG Toon. I'm not sure whether the game is in print any more, but I am prety sure it's no longer supported by SJG. I wonder what he'd think about people who weren't able to find a copy making a photocopy of a freind's book?
Software isn't the only much-loved thing that is abandoned.
Okay, first of all, I am not usually a Jon Katz flamer. I read his stuff, some of it is okay, I disagree with some of it, I'm never incensed about it.
This tim, though. Man oh man, this is bullshit. Okay, hear me out before you moderate me down for swearing. He's saying that it's wrong for a band to sue the individuals who are giving away their music. Now, I agree completely with the arguments against the attacks on Napster, DeCSS, etc. -- they're simply tools, and they have legitimate purposes as well as illegitimate ones. But a user who is using Napster to serve up someone else's not-for-free music is doing something pretty lame.
Okay, let's look at it like this: Let's say a band shouldn't sue Napster ('cause that really is dumb) and shouldn't sue the users using it to give away their music (because information wants to be free). What recourse do they have? Do they have to just sit there and watch as people download their music? When does this become a problem? When is it okay for them to take some action against this?
We really have to watch out for that "How dare they sue those innocent kids!" gag reflex. Sometimes the "innocent kids" are actually doing something they should be doing.
Okay, now moderate it down if you'd like.
Punch
Check out http://www.textfiles.com/ -- it's got lots of stuff I remember from the BBSing days of yore (and lots more I'd never seen before).
I wish I had more moderator points so I could bump up this post. You should write a short Feature describing this situation so everybody understands what could happen if the DoJ splits up Microsoft.
Thanks for informing me.
Okay, I don't remember when the Microsoft trial started, but it hasn't been ten years yet. Plus, remember, litigation has only gotten worse since then. I wouldn't be surprised if this takes fifteen years.
Y'know, I meant this to be funny, but I realize now that it might not be that far off. Hope I'm wrong.
I was thinking about this a bit. Having a CDROM that explodes on command is useful but only in a small number of cases. Trying to come up with something other than "Oh shoot, they're here, blow up the CDs," I came up with the following idea:
* Manufacturer a special drive with a detonator. Make there be some other minor differences as well.
* Make explodable CDs that can only be read by the type of drive with the built in detonator.
* In a normal CDROM drive, the disc does nothing (unreadable).
* In a detonator-enabled drive, it asks for your private key and checks it against the public key used for the disc. If they match, you're good to go.
* If they don't match, burn baby burn.
A more secure (paranoid) way to send bulk amounts of data around.
Not really. The fifth amendment protects someone charged with a crime from being forced to testify against himself. He must still give up any evidence that might implicate him. If you are a murder suspect, and you own a gun, you cannot refuse to turn in the gun because it might incriminate you.
On another note, this wouldn't matter anyway in this case. The 5th amendment only applies to criminal cases. A lawsuit is a civil case, so the protection of the 5th doesn't apply.
I'm sad to say I have yet to find a desktop replacement to replace my current one, a Toshiba Tecra 780dvd. (Yes, the Thinkpad 770d is a titch better, but not enough to justify an upgrade.) While there are many excellent notebooks out there, there don't seem to be any coming out that are as full featured as I would like to see.
What are the features that matter to me?
Okay, that seems like a lot. On the other hand, there are a number of things that don't really matter to me.
If anyone has any thoughts, I'd love to hear them.
I believe SGI made a notebook a couple of years ago with a gigantic (17" or so) screen. It was in four parts, and opening the case caused the screen to fold out and come together.
Is this some bizarre dream, or does anyone else remember this?
This seems obvious. I know from experience, however, that it is not. An example: an ex-girlfriend's little brother set up her computer for her. It was a 486/66 with 8 MB of RAM -- not too bad when she started college in 1994, pretty slow a couple of years later. Anyway, I stepped in to fix it up in 1996, I believe. She had mentioned that she never used her computer because it took too long to boot. I was suspicious but took a look at it.
He had Windows 95 running on it. As if that weren't enough, he had a lot of stuff running on startup. A lot of stuff she was never ever going to use. And, yes, it took over five minutes from switch on to being able to do anything. It was awful. (As an aside, he had this huge tray of a main board with onboard SCSI controller: it could only run her chip at 33 MHz. He had an 800 MB hard disk in there: her BIOS had the 500-something limit. Doofus)
Anyway, I found a copy of Windows 3.1, put Word 2, Netscape 3, and Tera Term on there, and she was good to go. She actually did papers in her room again. (Of course, the next time he saw the computer, he "fixed" it, but that's another story.)
The moral of this long-winded story? Don't set up a computer with things that you want/need/think are cool. Put on it only the things that its user will have to have.
I had read about them in an article on rugged notebooks a couple of years ago. Earlier this year, I had a consulting gig at Rollerblade (handling the data migration off of their IRIX network when the company was shipped out to New Jersey). On my way in to RB one day, something that had been nagging at me for the past couple of weeks finally came to a head; Fieldworks was less than a block down the street from RB.
I mentioned this, excited, to a couple of the R&D guys there with whom I had become friends. They told me about a former RB R&D guy who had left to go work at Fieldworks, and they asked if I'd like them to try to set up a tour.
Fun fun, we got to go there later that week. It's an amazing place. Every computer is assembled and tested by hand there in Eden Prarie, Minnesota. They run them overnight in a room hot enough that I only lasted a minute before I fled in fear that I might pass out. And that was only one of the horrors to which these are subjected.
It gets better. The customer is able to choose a number of different levels of "ruggedness" for the computers they're purchasing. Going up north? They have special measures to make the computer (and the LCD) behave just fine in far colder temperatures than an unshielded human could handle.
Best of all, these notebooks are upgradable. They have PCMCIA slots, but they also have room for standard ISA cards (I don't remember about VESA or PCI). This allows a number of companies to use these for highly specific purposes.
Finally, a bit I found amusing. A number of police departments use Fieldworks machines. They'll send one in every once in a while to have it cleaned. Seems the officers with these mounted in their cars often use the keyboard as a nice flat place to set coffee or a donut. Now, this doesn't do any damage or anything, but eventually enough sugar/syrup/spilled coffee/etc accumulated to clog up the keys of the keyboard. They send it in, FW sprays it out with a hose, tests it, ships it back.
I am not an employee, customer, client, or contractor for or of Fieldworks. I just think they're cool.
I believe that this is one of the domains turned over to the court pending a suit against Network Associates. Check it out at news.com
Did you contact his or her web host and file a complaint? Most reputable hosts have an agreement not to spam in their TOS and will warn or simply evict anyone who breaks that rule. I would nail the spammer to the wall.
Then again, I'm pretty vindictive.
...and that he's headed towards the side of good, not evil.
It seems to me that Mr. Jaffe did a pretty darn good job with this article. He's not a technical writer, yet it seems that he has kept himself fairly well informed about the state of the OS market. (Is "market" the right word for a system containing a free product? Hurm. Might "situation" be better?)
He talked about Windows 2000 in ways that would make sense to businessmen, and I bet they wouldn't like what he said. Similarly, he talked about Linux in comprehensible terms, and he painted quite a pretty picture of it. While errors and misinformation are not good, in this case, he made Linux look *better* because of it -- he wasn't saying "There is no GUI," but rather "Look how quickly they made a GUI!"
This article is exactly the sort of thing Linux needs if it is to gain credibility in the business world. System administrators need opinions like Jaffe's as ammunition to fire at the managment of their corporations in order to convince them that Linux is a workable responce to their needs.
I'll be pretty disappointed if his next column is about how he was brutally flamed for one minor error in an otherwise sterling article.
This one used to piss me off a lot; I was going to register my last name (which is also my consulting firm's name) and found it registered by one of these companies. On further reflection, however, I don't really think this is a bad thing.
If I registered it, it would have ended up costing me $15/month, and nobody else with my name would have been able to use it. As it is now, anyone has the capacity to use it, and it costs each of them less. While it still frustrates me (and I didn't sign up), I believe it to be a fair business rather than a shameless squatter.
Zip disks are too ubiquotous. Use a magneto-optical disk. Security through obscure media.
Pay per view programming seems like the obvious answer, but that's pretty unattractive to a lot of people, particularly ones who want to spend hours and hours watching television. A relatively simple compromise for this would be to grant users viewing credit for watching commercials; it could be set up on such a scale that the current setup -- 43 minute show/17 minutes of commercials -- would result in no fee. Credit could be saved up by watching more commercials and used to watch movies uninterrupted.
Better still, you could choose your commercials the same way you chose your shows. You'd submit a list of the products you were interested in seeing advertised, thus making the commercials more likely to be appealing to you. Don't want a new car? No commercials for car dealerships. Advertisers would be happy to reach one tenth the audience they are now if they were sure those people were interested.