Network Solutions has a very bad reputation. 1997 is a long time ago but actually I remember having a very suspicious experience with a domain checking site (can't remember which) around 1996.
Apparently NetSol/Verisign is the same as SnapNames.
A quote: "Another good thing of late is they done a deal with NameZero and what NameZero are in the middle of doing is handing over the names to SnapNames customers (for a small fee) for any names that customers of there's have asked for but not yet paid for.. so that's some 1.2 million names as I understand it."
Didn't it seem *suspicious* to you that somebody had registered it minutes before?
Many of the sites which claim to offer free domain name lookup services are *actually* in the business of *selling* your desired names to people who contract to grab domain names automagically based on certain rules. I'm guessing that when you checked the name a second time it triggered a grab. He probably paid about 50 cents to grab the name. What was the site you used to check/register your new domain?
It may well be that reading through *all* the docs can answer a question. Indeed, one could say that the docs are incomplete *until* they can answer any question.
However, the FAQ exists to provide an *alternate* indexing system to the standard docs so that people can get the answers they *frequently* need without having to mentally (with zero errors) compile a local index of the entire docs.
I think your story encapsulates my own major complaint about most documentation, certainly most man pages: it is necessary to read through the whole damn thing to figure out anything useful.
Maybe the reason why this phenomenon is starting to cause problems now is because the equipment fans *don't have filters*.
Thirty years ago industrial equipment usually had fans with nice tool-free pop-off covers so you could easily replace the filters. Often, you could replace the fans easily too.
Datacenter equipment used to be designed similarly.
Now even so-called "enterprise grade" models have a random selection of fans in hard-to-access places, and 99% have no filters at all. I don't know what the spec on such filters is, but I'll bet it wouldn't be hard to stop zinc whiskers.
Many posters seem to think nobody should be using POTS modems now anyway. However, I have several times installed ethernet/POTS interfaces, for these reasons:
1. Sometimes the wideband fails
2. It makes it easy to provide service to multiple machines
3. You don't need to install any software or leave the account info on the hard disk (and all account info is in one place so if you change an ISP you only have to update one place)
4. Some wideband adapters include a POTS port with builtin failover
Such adapters are not supercheap, but how often have you set up a POTS interface this year and had to reconfigure a machine? Or several? What is your time worth?
Re:Where're the Semantics?
on
Practical RDF
·
· Score: 1
A few years ago I did some work on XML and reached similar conclusions. I decided XML needed a standard for joining and extending the schemas. This proposal is as far as I got:
Cooperative Data Assembly
My own guess is that the real target of this move is not individual file sharers but ISPs.
Look at it this way: some estimates say more than half an ISP's bandwidth is file sharing. How tough can it be for an ISP to set up its own filesharing box inside its network, so all its users (unknowingly -- the ISP can easily spoof the IP) can use it for high-quality warez that don't cost the ISP a penny in uplink charges? And there's *millions* in those uplink charges.
Your message reminds me of the old joke: "The golden age of science fiction is 13".
Fifty years ago people were complaining about clueless fans and their effect on standards. Read for instance "What Mad Universe" by Fredric Brown. I don't want to give away the plot, but you'll certainly see what I mean!
One time I was on a pier on the North Shore (Massachusetts -- Salem I think). It was late afternoon; the sun was at an angle of around 20-30 degrees from the horizon. The moon had just risen, at an angle of 10 degrees or so above the horizon. The sun was roughly 90 degrees horizontally from the moon.
The strange thing was that the terminator, the line separating light and shadow on the moon, was pointing down, ie at a light source below the horizon. The angle was about 20 degrees below horizontal.
There's a Heinlein story about an experience like that; the hero starts off in an insane asylum...
I read a science-fiction story along the lines of your mountain-climbing story around 40 years ago. The details are hazy in my mind but it went something like this: a hotshot general grabs a bunch of scientists and shows them a fuzzy movie of a secretive inventor showing off something; I forget what it was, maybe a magnetic flying pack. The movie ends with confusion and disorder as the inventor smashes into the ground, dying and blowing up the pack.
They struggle at top speed to figure out what the inventor's fragmentary notes and pompous handwaving lectures could possibly have meant, and finally come up with something -- at which, of course, the general reveals the hoax.
It now occurs to me that this concept is somewhat the reverse of the "moon landing in Burbank" ploy.
A few weeks ago I was in a supermarket and the antitheft detectors kept beeping every time I tried to pass through.
When the security droid came over it transpired that there was a little metal gizmo embedded in my shoe which was causing the problem. The droid had to peel up the insole to reach it. It was about an inch long; I should have kept it but he went off with it rapidly.
It occurs to me that when I took some plane trips shortly after 9-11 I was stopped and searched every time. I remember wondering "why do they want to take my shoes away out of my sight?"
My Casio (F-28 W, just says "water resist" with no rating) didn't die down to about 15 m, according to my dive instructor. He also said that Casios are reasonably reliable (which is why I wore it on the dive), but if I remember rightly he said the ones with higher ratings don't perform any better than the others.
About two weeks ago I was leaving a store and the alarms went off. The security showed up and asked me to show the contents of my bags. I put them down and walked through: bzzt. I turned out my pockets: bzzt. I took off my belt and spectacles: bzzt.
Eventually they told me to take off my shoes. It turned out one shoe contained some sort of tag under the sole. Fortunately, I had bought the shoes months before and they appeared worn. The shoe had to be disassembled to reach the tag; I don't know how the store that originally sold the shoes was supposed to do this.
A few months ago a guard at an airport in DC told me to remove my shoes. I don't know what he did with them.
I wish I'd kept the tag.
Re:Screw more laws, just ban IPs via smart network
on
As the Spam Turns
·
· Score: 1
I'm not in general in favor of laws, but here's a proposal for one: all commercial email, not just unsolicited (due to problems of definition), has to be marked in the header.
So if you like you can easily delete all (legal) spam; if you do want email from certain sites (like Tigerdirect) you can easily enable it in your spamblocker without enabling all the email from the spammers that those twerps sell your email addr to; and spammers that don't mark email can easily be prosecuted.
This doesn't directly address the issue of wasted bandwidth before the emails get rejected, but I think it would have the result that many fewer spams would be sent anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
First rule of dating tax chicks:
Never, never dump one.
I remember a cartoon published in "Punch" magazine in England during WW2.
A suspicious bobby has stopped a spiv driving an enormous car (it was very difficult to get petrol because of rationing).
The spiv explains: "Nah! Nah! It runs on 10,000 torch batteries!"
I should explain that while gasoline was hard to get, flashlight batteries were *impossible* to get.
Network Solutions has a very bad reputation. 1997 is a long time ago but actually I remember having a very suspicious experience with a domain checking site (can't remember which) around 1996.
Here's a link to a discussion:
webhostingtalk.com
Apparently NetSol/Verisign is the same as SnapNames.
A quote: "Another good thing of late is they done a deal with NameZero and what NameZero are in the middle of doing is handing over the names to SnapNames customers (for a small fee) for any names that customers of there's have asked for but not yet paid for.. so that's some 1.2 million names as I understand it."
Didn't it seem *suspicious* to you that somebody had registered it minutes before?
Many of the sites which claim to offer free domain name lookup services are *actually* in the business of *selling* your desired names to people who contract to grab domain names automagically based on certain rules. I'm guessing that when you checked the name a second time it triggered a grab. He probably paid about 50 cents to grab the name. What was the site you used to check/register your new domain?
Is that a troll?
It may well be that reading through *all* the docs can answer a question. Indeed, one could say that the docs are incomplete *until* they can answer any question.
However, the FAQ exists to provide an *alternate* indexing system to the standard docs so that people can get the answers they *frequently* need without having to mentally (with zero errors) compile a local index of the entire docs.
I think your story encapsulates my own major complaint about most documentation, certainly most man pages: it is necessary to read through the whole damn thing to figure out anything useful.
Read the whole damn thing? Yes No Cancel
Maybe the reason why this phenomenon is starting to cause problems now is because the equipment fans *don't have filters*.
Thirty years ago industrial equipment usually had fans with nice tool-free pop-off covers so you could easily replace the filters. Often, you could replace the fans easily too.
Datacenter equipment used to be designed similarly.
Now even so-called "enterprise grade" models have a random selection of fans in hard-to-access places, and 99% have no filters at all. I don't know what the spec on such filters is, but I'll bet it wouldn't be hard to stop zinc whiskers.
Progress, shmogress.
Many posters seem to think nobody should be using POTS modems now anyway. However, I have several times installed ethernet/POTS interfaces, for these reasons:
1. Sometimes the wideband fails
2. It makes it easy to provide service to multiple machines
3. You don't need to install any software or leave the account info on the hard disk (and all account info is in one place so if you change an ISP you only have to update one place)
4. Some wideband adapters include a POTS port with builtin failover
Such adapters are not supercheap, but how often have you set up a POTS interface this year and had to reconfigure a machine? Or several? What is your time worth?
A few years ago I did some work on XML and reached similar conclusions. I decided XML needed a standard for joining and extending the schemas. This proposal is as far as I got: Cooperative Data Assembly
My own guess is that the real target of this move is not individual file sharers but ISPs.
Look at it this way: some estimates say more than half an ISP's bandwidth is file sharing. How tough can it be for an ISP to set up its own filesharing box inside its network, so all its users (unknowingly -- the ISP can easily spoof the IP) can use it for high-quality warez that don't cost the ISP a penny in uplink charges? And there's *millions* in those uplink charges.
Your message reminds me of the old joke: "The golden age of science fiction is 13".
Fifty years ago people were complaining about clueless fans and their effect on standards. Read for instance "What Mad Universe" by Fredric Brown. I don't want to give away the plot, but you'll certainly see what I mean!
The strange thing was that the terminator, the line separating light and shadow on the moon, was pointing down, ie at a light source below the horizon. The angle was about 20 degrees below horizontal.
There's a Heinlein story about an experience like that; the hero starts off in an insane asylum...
I read a science-fiction story along the lines of your mountain-climbing story around 40 years ago. The details are hazy in my mind but it went something like this: a hotshot general grabs a bunch of scientists and shows them a fuzzy movie of a secretive inventor showing off something; I forget what it was, maybe a magnetic flying pack. The movie ends with confusion and disorder as the inventor smashes into the ground, dying and blowing up the pack.
They struggle at top speed to figure out what the inventor's fragmentary notes and pompous handwaving lectures could possibly have meant, and finally come up with something -- at which, of course, the general reveals the hoax.
It now occurs to me that this concept is somewhat the reverse of the "moon landing in Burbank" ploy.
This transponder technology has a lot of uses.
A few weeks ago I was in a supermarket and the antitheft detectors kept beeping every time I tried to pass through.
When the security droid came over it transpired that there was a little metal gizmo embedded in my shoe which was causing the problem. The droid had to peel up the insole to reach it. It was about an inch long; I should have kept it but he went off with it rapidly.
It occurs to me that when I took some plane trips shortly after 9-11 I was stopped and searched every time. I remember wondering "why do they want to take my shoes away out of my sight?"
My Casio (F-28 W, just says "water resist" with no rating) didn't die down to about 15 m, according to my dive instructor. He also said that Casios are reasonably reliable (which is why I wore it on the dive), but if I remember rightly he said the ones with higher ratings don't perform any better than the others.
About two weeks ago I was leaving a store and the alarms went off. The security showed up and asked me to show the contents of my bags. I put them down and walked through: bzzt. I turned out my pockets: bzzt. I took off my belt and spectacles: bzzt.
Eventually they told me to take off my shoes. It turned out one shoe contained some sort of tag under the sole. Fortunately, I had bought the shoes months before and they appeared worn. The shoe had to be disassembled to reach the tag; I don't know how the store that originally sold the shoes was supposed to do this.
A few months ago a guard at an airport in DC told me to remove my shoes. I don't know what he did with them.
I wish I'd kept the tag.
I'm not in general in favor of laws, but here's a proposal for one: all commercial email, not just unsolicited (due to problems of definition), has to be marked in the header.
So if you like you can easily delete all (legal) spam; if you do want email from certain sites (like Tigerdirect) you can easily enable it in your spamblocker without enabling all the email from the spammers that those twerps sell your email addr to; and spammers that don't mark email can easily be prosecuted.
This doesn't directly address the issue of wasted bandwidth before the emails get rejected, but I think it would have the result that many fewer spams would be sent anyway.