Just my 2 cents worth: I considered this issue when I bought my last printer, got a Canon printer with individual ink tanks. Very easy to refill (drill a small hole in the side above the ink line, fill and seal) and there is no chip counting drops of ink used or stopping you from removing the print haed assembly for cleaning, transporting, storage or other reasons. I'm extremely happy with it.
I'll bet its still going cheaper - a bottle of everclear that lasts a year is not all that expensive, even with with the tax. If
undergrad can afford it, cost is not an issue;-)
Actually, I should have said ethanol, not methanol, but otherwise the argument holds and you really miss the point. Maybe if you don't use the laptop much a bottol of everclear will last a while, but in heavy use this is just not the case. More importantly, should this fule cell technology be limited to just geek laptops, or should we be able to use it in our cars as a renewable clean "burning" source of power to replace the dwindeling and dirty oil supplies? Say a car gets 30 mpg on gas. Even with a highly efficent fuel cell it's not likely to get more than 60 mpg, particularly when the energy content of ethonol is lower than gasoline (12,800 btu/lb vs 20,000+ btu/lb). So unless you like the idea of a fuel for your car that will cost over $100 per gallon ($1500+ a fill-up), I submit that the tax on ethanol is a serious issue.
So here is the next question: a denaturing agent destroys the fuel cell. The (US) tax on non-denatured methanol is so excessive that it prohibits the use of these fuel cells in laptops, not to mention much better uses of the fuel cells, like clean running cars (where even with a road tax the tax would be much lower). So the question is, do we change the law to support this new clean technology, or do we keep an aribratary tax that is both about raising excessive revenue as well as about telling people how to live their lives? And if we get rid of a tax on alcohol to permit these fuel cells, what other rediculous law can replace it to show people that big brother can run their lives better than they can? And can I get laptop methanol without paying a road tax on it? And do methanol and programming really mix?
In addition to the Linux, Mac, and generic hardware issues (does my hard drive need an Xp logo?), it certainly will apply to hardware with drivers. And with Microsoft selling more and more of it's own hardware (for example wireless networking products), do you think they will be as fast to certify the drivers for a competitor's wireless lan card or other hardware as they will be for their own? Could a few months or more extra advantage in marketing a new product give them an unfair advantage? Could requiring their direct competitors to turn over information to Microsoft to get that certification give them an unfair advantage? Could the fact that Microsoft is known to be still using undocumented API calls that their competitors don't have access to to write logo certified drivers give them an unfair advantage? This is just another step in the plan for total world domination, and it is certainly a result of presure from Microsoft.
Anyone who thinks Microsoft isn't behind this just hasn't been paying attention. And if you think it's a free market where Microsoft is concerned you haven't been paying attention. They have been found guilty in court of monopolistic practices. Sure, they just decided they were not going to accept the sentence, and actually managed to get a ruling that changed their punishment to effectively "just do whatever you want", but the fact that they were found guilty still remains. It's not a free market when a major monopoly gains it's power by illegal means and used that power for illegal unfair trade practices. Given all past history, and the wording of the Office Depot letter (requiring the XP logo and not just a Windows logo, for example) it's extremely likely that Microsoft simply did business as usual and used their monopoly power to force Office Depot to do this, and will soon force others to do the same.
I just bought a notebook, and although I searched I was not able to buy one with the features I wanted in the price range without paying the extra Microsoft XP tax. Don't tell me it's a free market when a company found guilty of these monopolistic practices in federal court can continue to do business as usual.
Won't this just increase the rate at which software is pirated?
Perhaps it might, particularly if the trend moves to other retailers. Office Depot isn't the first place I think of to get software, but apparently some people do buy there, and as a low profile seller they might have been a good place to start this practice, then when it shows up at the major retailers it can be dismissed as "nothing new".
But in asking if it will not just increase piracy, you should also ask who is behind this, who would be hurt by piracy and who would indirectly benefit. While OfficeMax didn't outright say so, I would bet that there was pressure from Microsoft to put this policy in place. So what software might this cause an increase in piracy of? Software not officially blessed and approved by Microsoft. Might this not be a small side benefit that Microsoft actually would welcome, putting another nail in the coffin in the little guy that will not play by Bill's rules? Clearly all Microsoft products will have the logos (even if, as is many times the case, they don't meet the same standards that independent developers are required to have to get that logo!) so this will not increase their piracy, only that of the competition.
I still do not understand why people with hotmail accounts dont just block anyone not in their address books. Think of it this way, with that feature you get to control who gets to talk to you. -bb
Let me try to explain it to you. Sometimes you need or want to get an e-mail from someone who you haven't got an e-mail from before. You might need to get a tech support response. You might need to get an order confirmation for something you bought on-line. You might subscribe to a news letter or other information that you want but don't know the exact e-mail address it will be sent from (and that might even change some day). You might receive e-mail from an old friend or classmate who is trying to track you down, and perhaps they even got your address from a common friend. You might want to use your address publicly for a legitimate reason, like in a newsgroup to request information. You simply might think that you should have the right to make yourself findable for legitimate contact without opening yourself to hundreds of vulgar and dishonest spam messages every day.
Or, you might really dislike spam, and not want to hand over your address book with your friend's valid e-mail addresses in it to a known spammer -
Microsoft.
Lets make sure we have the facts: Here's a free service that costs
either $9.95 or $24.95 a year depending on the file size limitation you select(You want a file size limitation imposed on your e-mail, don't you?) and then they take your name and sell it to people to send you the exact thing you're paying to avoid. Sure, that makes sense, but how well will it work? I've considered the challange and response system, but how many valid e-mails will be missed from valid businesses you are doing business with? Do you think Tech Support people you are trying to get a response from will fool with this system, or just delete a validation request that comes back to them? How about rebate confirmation notices? Or adding yourself to a newsletter distribution list? I received an order confirmation for a new notebook just last Friday that came from a "do not reply to this address" e-mail address; I certainly wanted the information in the confirmation message, and I don't expect major on-line retailers will change the way they send confirmations just to suit Mailblocker. How many other important e-mails would you miss if you trusted this system?
Sure, something has to be done about the problem, but paying for a bad system that will just sell your name to other spammers and will block legitimate e-mail isn't much of a solution and should not be accepted in a desperate I'll try anything approach. I would propose that a simple open season on spammers, with perhaps a six spammer limit so every hunter gets a chance, and even a small license fee to help pay down the national debt, would be a much better approach.
While there certainly needs to be educational focus on this subject, Microsoft is absolutely not the organization to do it. Aside from their demonstrated inability to address these issues, and a history of code that is neither secure nor stable, there is a serious concern that no one can be that bad by accident, and that their repeated flaws my be part of the largest software company's plan to take over the Internet (and eventually everything) rather than the less creditable story that a company so rich and successful could make such bad products by bungling.
I believe their real motive in offering such a course would be to teach programmers to code for security the Microsoft way, so that things continue to get worse. Their definition of security of your machine is much like their definition of digital rights of your machine; they are not looking after your digital rights, and they are not looking after your security.
This man has lost all credibility. He still claims the latest movie's problem was that others were good (and "Die another day" wasn't even all that good), rather than admit that it was a weak story poorly told that any fan would rather never had hit the ST universe. Look at every thing he had told us would be good. Look at how good he told us the first year of Enterprise would be. Maybe by his standards the next year will not suck, but by his standards all of the others things that did suck were great programming.
Time for a massive fan letter writing campaign to the studio to take a series off the air!
Ah, if only that same standard was applied to all advertising. Can't provide independent verification of your claims? Then pull the ad.
The funny thing here is that independent verification isn't required unless everyone already knows the claim is a lie. Also worth noting is that a company with 1/1000th the cash that M$ has could get independent verification for anything they wanted (we've all seen the court cases where the sleazy side has their expert witnesses). Heck, even M$ bought some expert witnesses for their antitrust trial. But even M$ couldn't find anyone who was able to claim M$ software is secure with a straight face.
"As crappy as it sounds, charging some tiny fee per email would cut spam dramatically. 207 of the buggers so far today. Hundreds of megs a month.
I'd love to see something done. "
Charging this way for e-mail will do nothing at all positive to stop spam, it will in fact have just the opposite effect.
The big time spammers are tightly in league with their service providers, this "postage" cost will not be a real cost for them at all, but it will have major impacts on any legitimate use of e-mail. Shoestring organizations that link hundreds or a few thousand worldwide members with useful, informative e-mail messages will be put out of action cold. New business models that automatically e-mail you important information that you want (such as confirmation of delivery, or news or sports information) will have to rethink their options and either cut back such inovative services or charge additional for it.
Even individuals will be less likely to send quick acknowledgments when they know the will eventually be bled dry by snowballing small charges.
Meanwhile, the spammers who don't really pay these charges at all (either because they are in league with their ISP, they are their own ISP and so pay themselves, or they are using a temporary account, viouating it's terms of service, and intend to abandon it and pay nothing) will claim that because of this bogus e-mail postage charge they
somehow have a paid for right to overflow your in-box to the point that you can't get legitimate e-mail and waste even more of your time sorting through their deceptive crap so that you don't happen to miss that rare but important legitimate message.
Given that this lame idea will not prevent any spam, and will certainly have negative impacts on legit users, it should not at all be encouraged as "anything as long as it might fight spam" or "I'd love to see something done." but rather but rather be actively discouraged as the bad idea that it is.
allows vendors to license their products until so many millions are made, then agree to release the code under GPL. This sounds like a good bridge
One only has to look at the accounting pratices of the recording industry or the TV and motion picture industry to see what is wrong with this concept. There are accountants out there that will swear that even a movie that makes over $200 million in a few weeks NEVER breaks even if a actor, director or another party has a stake in a percentage of the profits.
This type of GPL license only insures that the work of dedicated programmers will be stolen and used for profit against the intention of the original author. The bottom line is that it is clearly not needed. Most GPL authors support sharing of code, not making millions from it until some magic threshold is reached (at which time the corporation advocating such a scheeme will either lie about the numbers, or just create a "completely different product" right before the threshold is hit and start selling that).
Heck with urges, you'll really be damned if you mistype a URL and get hijacked to a never-ending set of porn sites, each one opening two others when you try to kill it. Of course, the people who will panic most about this are just the people who would bother to send someone else their web logs and say look how riyious I am and what holy sites I'm visiting", which in a way servers them right.
The whole concept seems pretty damn lame, certainly didn't merit mention as "stuff that matters".
I saw the info, but what they have is the minimal "glue" to hook a C64 up to an "embedded ethernet controler" that they got somewhere else. Try following the link they give, it just gives garbage. If you can't get the "embedded controler" then their schematics and board layout for their "glue" to hook it to a C64 isn't any use.
It looks like there may only be 1 ethernet adapter in the world for the C64 too. Found the info on their site for it, but they use an "embedded controler" from someone else and their own "glue logic" and the link to the embedded controler site returns nothing readable. (And the only one they have was apparently taken off an on-line C64 so they could use it for something else). Unless there is software compatable ethernet hardware for the C64, this is pretty useless. With ethernet I wouldn't mind playing with it, but there's not enough information provided to let one duplicate their ethernet interface.
is 60,000 lawsuits against the university for using those S.S. numbers. I can understand a student who is trying to get accepted to the school being afraid to confront them and not supply it even though they have no legitimate use for it, but they should be held responsiable for their misuse of the numbers. 60,000 lawsuits would be a good start, and send a message to outhers who careless abuse these numbers at great risk to the individuals who own them.
A physics grad student in the UK has come up with the mathematical formula...... The BBC has the details."
Sure, knowing the formula is exactly the same things as being able to do is, but didn't anyone else notice that they didn't actually give this "formula" that they claim is so important?
Given the timeframe, the data density on those tapes was likely 800 bits per inch, almost certainly no more than 1600 bits per inch. A large reel of tape likely held less than a flopp disk. That is a far cry from the data densities used on the tapes in question. It's not hard to understand that an 800 bpi tape, properly stored, might be readable after decades, but you can't apply that to all magnetic media. My experience with magnetic media is far different. I have so many unreadable floppies that a while ago I started copying any driver or other software that came on a floppy and was likely to be needed in the future to CDR (web downloading can't be counted on when even major maker one year can be gone the next). And way too many times I've tried to use various back-up tapes only to find that the tape wasn't viable when you needed it.
Clearly there are two different almost religious views on this, but many of us have been burned by tape backups too many times to keep putting blind faith in them.
As you pointed out, their competitors, who also sent floppys, fizzled and died. So writeable media doesn't have an apparent advantage. Also note, you got those floppies in the mail; there wasn't a display with them free for the taking at most major retailers in your town. AOL had no other option that floppy disks at the time, short of just anoying people by removing the plastic tab there is no write once floppy technology. When the CDR option became viable they jumped to it and soon started placing the media where anyone who wanted them could take them. I doubt very much if they would switch to an option where people have an incentive to empty their display space of media.
Actually, I'm very unimpressed by this technology. Anyone who wants to use it could simply write the first session of a multi-session CDR and leave the rest available. Might take a little longer to make tens of thousands of, but there are some repo houses that are up to it and wouold gladly take on the work, likely at a low cost than this hybred CDR-ROM novilty.
It may sound funny, but if AOL
started sending out CD's like this I might just start keeping them around."
Sure, I would grab lots of free AOL CDR-ROMs everytime I saw their display. Use them when I needed to archive away a modest amount of data. What good would that do AOL, to have a few geeks who know better than to use their "service" snarf up all their free media? Strikes me as the last thing they would want.
The only people who are likely to use these are people who see them as yet another way to impose copy protection and further restrictions on the users. Install and write to the CDR-ROM. Information already written there? Opps, you need to buy another copy of the tax software to use on this computer. What, you say you bought a new computer? -- too bad, but another copy. You say you need to recover your tax data from 2 years ago and the 2 year old version is no longer sold in stores? Too bad, our copy protection prevents you from installing again.
The article talks about how this priceless
artifact as well as many others, from the same civilisation that invented writing
and the wheel, could be threatened by the impending war."
Doesn't really matter, it's probably a dead battery by now anyway.
No, wait, before you mod me down for trolling, what I should have said is if Iraq has this old dead battery we should let Sadam build any weapons he wants and pretty much do anything he wants.
Slashdot Mirror
Just my 2 cents worth: I considered this issue when I bought my last printer, got a Canon printer with individual ink tanks. Very easy to refill (drill a small hole in the side above the ink line, fill and seal) and there is no chip counting drops of ink used or stopping you from removing the print haed assembly for cleaning, transporting, storage or other reasons. I'm extremely happy with it.
Actually, I should have said ethanol, not methanol, but otherwise the argument holds and you really miss the point. Maybe if you don't use the laptop much a bottol of everclear will last a while, but in heavy use this is just not the case. More importantly, should this fule cell technology be limited to just geek laptops, or should we be able to use it in our cars as a renewable clean "burning" source of power to replace the dwindeling and dirty oil supplies? Say a car gets 30 mpg on gas. Even with a highly efficent fuel cell it's not likely to get more than 60 mpg, particularly when the energy content of ethonol is lower than gasoline (12,800 btu/lb vs 20,000+ btu/lb). So unless you like the idea of a fuel for your car that will cost over $100 per gallon ($1500+ a fill-up), I submit that the tax on ethanol is a serious issue.
So here is the next question: a denaturing agent destroys the fuel cell. The (US) tax on non-denatured methanol is so excessive that it prohibits the use of these fuel cells in laptops, not to mention much better uses of the fuel cells, like clean running cars (where even with a road tax the tax would be much lower). So the question is, do we change the law to support this new clean technology, or do we keep an aribratary tax that is both about raising excessive revenue as well as about telling people how to live their lives? And if we get rid of a tax on alcohol to permit these fuel cells, what other rediculous law can replace it to show people that big brother can run their lives better than they can? And can I get laptop methanol without paying a road tax on it? And do methanol and programming really mix?
Thigpen wasn't this week, wasn't even last week, was the week before that. And hardly of specific interest to slashdotters.
In addition to the Linux, Mac, and generic hardware issues (does my hard drive need an Xp logo?), it certainly will apply to hardware with drivers. And with Microsoft selling more and more of it's own hardware (for example wireless networking products), do you think they will be as fast to certify the drivers for a competitor's wireless lan card or other hardware as they will be for their own? Could a few months or more extra advantage in marketing a new product give them an unfair advantage? Could requiring their direct competitors to turn over information to Microsoft to get that certification give them an unfair advantage? Could the fact that Microsoft is known to be still using undocumented API calls that their competitors don't have access to to write logo certified drivers give them an unfair advantage? This is just another step in the plan for total world domination, and it is certainly a result of presure from Microsoft.
I just bought a notebook, and although I searched I was not able to buy one with the features I wanted in the price range without paying the extra Microsoft XP tax. Don't tell me it's a free market when a company found guilty of these monopolistic practices in federal court can continue to do business as usual.
Perhaps it might, particularly if the trend moves to other retailers. Office Depot isn't the first place I think of to get software, but apparently some people do buy there, and as a low profile seller they might have been a good place to start this practice, then when it shows up at the major retailers it can be dismissed as "nothing new".
But in asking if it will not just increase piracy, you should also ask who is behind this, who would be hurt by piracy and who would indirectly benefit. While OfficeMax didn't outright say so, I would bet that there was pressure from Microsoft to put this policy in place. So what software might this cause an increase in piracy of? Software not officially blessed and approved by Microsoft. Might this not be a small side benefit that Microsoft actually would welcome, putting another nail in the coffin in the little guy that will not play by Bill's rules? Clearly all Microsoft products will have the logos (even if, as is many times the case, they don't meet the same standards that independent developers are required to have to get that logo!) so this will not increase their piracy, only that of the competition.
Let me try to explain it to you. Sometimes you need or want to get an e-mail from someone who you haven't got an e-mail from before. You might need to get a tech support response. You might need to get an order confirmation for something you bought on-line. You might subscribe to a news letter or other information that you want but don't know the exact e-mail address it will be sent from (and that might even change some day). You might receive e-mail from an old friend or classmate who is trying to track you down, and perhaps they even got your address from a common friend. You might want to use your address publicly for a legitimate reason, like in a newsgroup to request information. You simply might think that you should have the right to make yourself findable for legitimate contact without opening yourself to hundreds of vulgar and dishonest spam messages every day.
Or, you might really dislike spam, and not want to hand over your address book with your friend's valid e-mail addresses in it to a known spammer - Microsoft.
Sure, something has to be done about the problem, but paying for a bad system that will just sell your name to other spammers and will block legitimate e-mail isn't much of a solution and should not be accepted in a desperate I'll try anything approach. I would propose that a simple open season on spammers, with perhaps a six spammer limit so every hunter gets a chance, and even a small license fee to help pay down the national debt, would be a much better approach.
9 Democrat's course on Tax Cuts.
8 Anna Kournikova course on Improving your Tennis Game by Posing Nude (even if you have never won a match).
7 Winona Ryder course on Shopping.
6 Michel Jackson course on Buying and Raising a White Child.
5 France's course on Opposing Dictators.
4 Anna Nicole Smith course on Dieting.
3 George W. Bush course on Speachizing Distincacurately.
2 Bill Clinton course on Ethics.
1 Microsoft course on Secure Computing.
I believe their real motive in offering such a course would be to teach programmers to code for security the Microsoft way, so that things continue to get worse. Their definition of security of your machine is much like their definition of digital rights of your machine; they are not looking after your digital rights, and they are not looking after your security.
This man has lost all credibility. He still claims the latest movie's problem was that others were good (and "Die another day" wasn't even all that good), rather than admit that it was a weak story poorly told that any fan would rather never had hit the ST universe. Look at every thing he had told us would be good. Look at how good he told us the first year of Enterprise would be. Maybe by his standards the next year will not suck, but by his standards all of the others things that did suck were great programming.
Time for a massive fan letter writing campaign to the studio to take a series off the air!
The funny thing here is that independent verification isn't required unless everyone already knows the claim is a lie. Also worth noting is that a company with 1/1000th the cash that M$ has could get independent verification for anything they wanted (we've all seen the court cases where the sleazy side has their expert witnesses). Heck, even M$ bought some expert witnesses for their antitrust trial. But even M$ couldn't find anyone who was able to claim M$ software is secure with a straight face.
Charging this way for e-mail will do nothing at all positive to stop spam, it will in fact have just the opposite effect.
The big time spammers are tightly in league with their service providers, this "postage" cost will not be a real cost for them at all, but it will have major impacts on any legitimate use of e-mail. Shoestring organizations that link hundreds or a few thousand worldwide members with useful, informative e-mail messages will be put out of action cold. New business models that automatically e-mail you important information that you want (such as confirmation of delivery, or news or sports information) will have to rethink their options and either cut back such inovative services or charge additional for it. Even individuals will be less likely to send quick acknowledgments when they know the will eventually be bled dry by snowballing small charges.
Meanwhile, the spammers who don't really pay these charges at all (either because they are in league with their ISP, they are their own ISP and so pay themselves, or they are using a temporary account, viouating it's terms of service, and intend to abandon it and pay nothing) will claim that because of this bogus e-mail postage charge they somehow have a paid for right to overflow your in-box to the point that you can't get legitimate e-mail and waste even more of your time sorting through their deceptive crap so that you don't happen to miss that rare but important legitimate message.
Given that this lame idea will not prevent any spam, and will certainly have negative impacts on legit users, it should not at all be encouraged as "anything as long as it might fight spam" or "I'd love to see something done." but rather but rather be actively discouraged as the bad idea that it is.
One only has to look at the accounting pratices of the recording industry or the TV and motion picture industry to see what is wrong with this concept. There are accountants out there that will swear that even a movie that makes over $200 million in a few weeks NEVER breaks even if a actor, director or another party has a stake in a percentage of the profits.
This type of GPL license only insures that the work of dedicated programmers will be stolen and used for profit against the intention of the original author. The bottom line is that it is clearly not needed. Most GPL authors support sharing of code, not making millions from it until some magic threshold is reached (at which time the corporation advocating such a scheeme will either lie about the numbers, or just create a "completely different product" right before the threshold is hit and start selling that).
The whole concept seems pretty damn lame, certainly didn't merit mention as "stuff that matters".
I saw the info, but what they have is the minimal "glue" to hook a C64 up to an "embedded ethernet controler" that they got somewhere else. Try following the link they give, it just gives garbage. If you can't get the "embedded controler" then their schematics and board layout for their "glue" to hook it to a C64 isn't any use.
It looks like there may only be 1 ethernet adapter in the world for the C64 too. Found the info on their site for it, but they use an "embedded controler" from someone else and their own "glue logic" and the link to the embedded controler site returns nothing readable. (And the only one they have was apparently taken off an on-line C64 so they could use it for something else). Unless there is software compatable ethernet hardware for the C64, this is pretty useless. With ethernet I wouldn't mind playing with it, but there's not enough information provided to let one duplicate their ethernet interface.
is 60,000 lawsuits against the university for using those S.S. numbers. I can understand a student who is trying to get accepted to the school being afraid to confront them and not supply it even though they have no legitimate use for it, but they should be held responsiable for their misuse of the numbers. 60,000 lawsuits would be a good start, and send a message to outhers who careless abuse these numbers at great risk to the individuals who own them.
Sure, knowing the formula is exactly the same things as being able to do is, but didn't anyone else notice that they didn't actually give this "formula" that they claim is so important?
Clearly there are two different almost religious views on this, but many of us have been burned by tape backups too many times to keep putting blind faith in them.
Actually, I'm very unimpressed by this technology. Anyone who wants to use it could simply write the first session of a multi-session CDR and leave the rest available. Might take a little longer to make tens of thousands of, but there are some repo houses that are up to it and wouold gladly take on the work, likely at a low cost than this hybred CDR-ROM novilty.
Sure, I would grab lots of free AOL CDR-ROMs everytime I saw their display. Use them when I needed to archive away a modest amount of data. What good would that do AOL, to have a few geeks who know better than to use their "service" snarf up all their free media? Strikes me as the last thing they would want.
The only people who are likely to use these are people who see them as yet another way to impose copy protection and further restrictions on the users. Install and write to the CDR-ROM. Information already written there? Opps, you need to buy another copy of the tax software to use on this computer. What, you say you bought a new computer? -- too bad, but another copy. You say you need to recover your tax data from 2 years ago and the 2 year old version is no longer sold in stores? Too bad, our copy protection prevents you from installing again.
Doesn't really matter, it's probably a dead battery by now anyway.
No, wait, before you mod me down for trolling, what I should have said is if Iraq has this old dead battery we should let Sadam build any weapons he wants and pretty much do anything he wants.
But what if Microsoft controled all spam and I couldn't get it on my Linux machine?