One of the coolest places I've been was a little bar/restaraunt/coffeeshop in Auburn, Alabama called (IIRC) Java.net. There were plans, not realized as of the last time I was there (but then that was over a year ago) to set up some internet connected computers for web, email, etc. (Thus the joke behind the name). They had places set up for the computers to go, but other things came first.
Previously, the space seemed to have been a used bookstore, so the walls were lined with shelves and lots of books (classic literature, philosophy, art, etc that you'd expect in a college town -- I didn't see any O'Reilly books...:), which you were free to peruse & buy. At the back was a little deli where you could get sandwiches, soft drinks, coffee, tea, and beer. Scattered all over the place were chairs, recliners, sofas, etc that could be moved around freely. Up front -- this was the best part -- was an area that would every now and then be cleared out so that rock bands could play, and none of that whiny Don McLean acoustic cover shit either.
That place had a great mix. Too many rock clubs are just flat out dingy, depressing places. Too many of the places you can go late at night will give you a choice between either a cup of coffee or a glass of beer -- you typically can one or the other, but not both from one establishment. This mix isn't really something "geek specific" -- maybe "me specific" more like:) -- but I thought this was an awesome place, and it sucks that it's well over 1000 miles from here (Boston). I would put it as a near ideal setup for a "geek bar"...
I've read claims that pr0n is actually one of the driving areas in both development and acceptance of new technology. You point out how the porn sites are pioneering ad strategies, streaming media technologies, etc., but it goes back much farther than that.
One of the main reasons that VCRs became such a common household item in the 80s was that all the new Video Rental Huts [1] had that famous "back room", with titles like "Debbie Does Dallas" and "Penthouse's Playmate of the Year Exposed." That trend was a big part of why triple X theatres largely went out of business in most cities at around the same time, and the exact same trend is also driving a lot of DVD player growth today.
People don't like to admit it in public, but the numbers don't lie -- this stuff is a big part of what drives the growth of these things. Without porn, where would we be now?
I'd bet that at least some of us may not have been born at all...;)
[1] The joke there being a la "Akbar & Jeff's Video Hutt", with our "children's section" featuring Animal Farm. This is much funnier if you're familiar with Matt Groening's Life in Hell comics... Heh heh heh...
On the other hand, for some people it isn't such a bad idea. Just to give one anecdotal example, my cousin spent several years in the Air Force, working in their Space Command operations. They paid for him to finish his degree, helped him find a place for his family to live, and when he graduated he was in a position where he was turning down six figure salary job offers. I'm guessing that having experience with satellite systems had a lot to do with that, though whatever security clearance he may have had could have been a factor too (I've never gotten into details with him).
Obviously the military isn't for everyone, and the poster above makes excellent points that I don't dispute. But for some people, it can be a great career move (or a transition to one, as the case may be). Consider the points above and keep in mind that, unless you want it to be, the military isn't generally a whole career, but rather a good first job with some unusual perks & drawbacks, and those can in turn set you up for a great career later.
Assuming, that is of course, that you don't have a problem carrying out dubious orders etc. I for one could never do it -- I just don't have a problem with the Iraqi people and don't feel that shooting near (but not at) their military does a whole lot to help them. But you may not have such objections...
As I understand things, the convention in the UK & Europe, as well as some fields here in the US (medicine, law, etc) is to have two documents: a resume, which provides a broad overview and works as a cover sheet, and a CV [curriculum vitae -- "life's work"] that goes into detail about the various things you've done.
The latter can be very similar to an artist's portfolio, in that (in the case of IT workers) it might have things like code samples, screenshots of various projects, etc. It's okay for it to be fairly long too, because the resume complements it with a short version that hiring personnel can use to weed out clearly inappropriate candidates, while the CV can be used to provide a fairly detailed snapshot of your experience.
Having these two documents isn't AFAIK common practice in the American IT sector, but it seems like a good idea to me, and I would think that most potential employers wouldn't be put off by receiving two documents like this.
Yes, I like Flash ads. At work I use IE5 on NT (works on IE5/Mac too), with all ActiveX controls set to be displayed only if I allow it. I made this setting with some half-formed notion that it would make my computer ever-so-slightly more secure, but it has had the pleasant side effect of allowing me to disable all the annoying Flash sites out there, including ads.
Now whenever I go to, for example, a news article at c|net (random example), I get a friendly little warning about accepting activex controls & plugins. I saw no, it goes away, I get a nice sedate page. The ad is still huge, but at least it's calm & easily handled. A better solution would be of course to tinker around with something like Junkbuster, but I haven't had the time.
Of course the obvious question at this point is "isn't that a pain? Aren't things less interesting without Flash?" to which the answers are "yes, and absolutely not." Examples of Flash files being actually useful are exceedingly rare, and I don't mind the encumbrance if I can filter them out of all the other pages. For the occasional file that I go to specifically for the Flash content (say, those wacky Mahir, Hatten, & AYBABTU movies...) it's easy enough to just click "yes" ever once in a while.
We should be encouraging the banner ad makers to be inventive, and use flash and the like, rather than just being more obvious and intruding.
Yes. Surely some stupid Flash animation couldn't be any more obvious & intruding than an animated gif. Suuuure.....
Encouraging marketers to take advantage of what the web medium is capable of isn't a bad idea, but what it actually ends up meaning is making the page more obnoxious, which is a bad idea. I showed the c|net example (a Sun ad, as it happened) to our marketing agency (whose background is primarily from print advertising) and they were impressed that it kept everything within the page. That is, there was no page to click through, but rather you were shown more information without leaving the current article. It ended up being less of a distraction than normal banners, which try to get you to abandon whatever you were looking at previously.
On a semi-related note <really free associating now>, it occurred to me that day that a fundamental difference between marketing on the web and marketing in other media is that the latter force you to have one clearly defined message that can be conveyed in a short space (a sound bite, a slogan, a couple of lines of text, etc), while the web doesn't really have that restriction. Rather than one clearly defined message, it's possible a medley of messages, variations on a theme, such that one customer, drawn to one topic, may go after one part of your site, while other customers can be drawn to other messages etc. That is, traditional media force you to have depth and not breadth, or perhaps vice versa, whereas with the web you aren't forced to make a choice -- you can have either and at best you should have both.
I am not really sure how this plays into the ideas behind web marketing (I'm not so naive as to think that I'm the first one to have thought of this), but it seems like it opens up a peephole into a much more interesting and dynamic kind of marketing. For example, a "banner" for a weather related site might be not just one image to click on, but an image map of a geographic map -- "don't just tell me about your weather abilities, tell me what the weather is going to be in Boston!" Ditto for news sites, etc. It's kind of a waste to have a banner -- especially the big banners this article is warning about -- to only link to one place. Better by far would be for it to allow many links, and compressed information, that would genuinely interest people, rather than just trying to be shinier than all the competitors. It should be obvious by now that most people see right through that kind of crap...</free associating / thinking aloud>
Some things just plain transcend law, and are a matter of decency and courtesy. Whatever you want to do in your own space is fine, but I'd rather you didn't try to share your lung cancer with me, thanks. I've got enough to deal with without having your damn tumors to think about...
...I think he's the one that told the joke I'm thinking of here:
A little kid walks into a pet store saying "hey, I just bought this stupid turtle [mouse, whatever:)] and the stupid thing won't come out of it's shell. What's the deal?"
The clerk politely informs the little brat that this is normal, because turtles are shy animals and are naturally reluctant to come out whenever big, scary humans are around. Nonetheless, to make the little bastard feel better, the clerk agrees to let the boy exchange his turtle for another one, and the happy little monster runs gleefully out of the store.
An hour later, however, the boy comes back with the same complaint. The clerk is a little bit surprised by this -- but no matter, he gives the boy another turtle and off he goes, with a warning about trying to be nicer to this turtle.
The third time the boy walks in, however, the clerk is really annoyed. "Look, what are you doing to these turtles that makes them so afraid to come out of their shells?" "Nuthin," the boy insists, "just playin' with it." "Show me how," the clerk demands. The boy gets down on his hands & knees and, scraping the turtle rapidly back & forth starts yelling BROOOOM! BROOOOOOM! RACECAR!"
Har har har. The punchline is of course a bit easier to deliver out loud rather than in print, but that's not the point.
The point is -- what the hell are you doing to these mice! I've had the same mouse on my PC since the day I got it, and the only reason I replaced the mouse on my Mac was because it drove me nuts to shuffle a hockey puck around the desk (that & the clear LCD mouse just seemed really cool...:).
What could you possibly be doing that wears out a mouse after only a couple of months? You say you clean it regularly -- with what, a good hard scrub with a steel wool pad followed up by a sulfuric acid bath? It's inconceivable to me that anyone could be destroying their equipment so quickly. <parent>Don't you realize that this stuff is delicate & expensive equipment? What's wrong with you?</parent>
My suggestion to you would be to look into whatever mice Fisher-Price might be offering these days. With any luck they'll have a nice durable hard-shell plastic model (in shiny red, yellow & blue) that you can chew on all day without breaking. If they're not in the PC market -- and I really don't know if they are or not (though I doubt it) -- then you're pretty much out of luck. All I can say in that case is you really need to learn to take care of this stuff better. Sheesh...
Like, say, AvantGo? I'd love to see what these dimwits want to cram onto my Palm Pilot.
The fact is, you need simple, backwards compatible pages not because you're desparately hoping that the portion of Lynx users will someday rise about 3%, but because you have to face the reality that more and more people are going to start accessing the web from lightweight, portable platforms such as palmtop computers and WAP-esque phones.
No amount of Flash-DOM-whatever insanity can be crammed into a platform that small, and that's fine with me. Whine all you want to about how these "luddites" are holding back your web designers masturbatory portfolio fantasies, but in this case the best way to prepare for the future (xhtml, css, etc) means carefully *not* rejecting the past. In this case, moving simultaneously forward *and* backwards is both possible and necessary.
Telling your designers to force people to upgrade or be left out is both wrongheaded and short sighted. It's fine for someone on a moderately new PC/Mac/Foonix system (as long as there's an alternative to Mozilla, which sucks too badly to put into words; guess that rules out Foonix...), but anyone on oldish hardware or a (currently) "exotic" platform such as a palmtop or a cell phone has no choice in the matter. Don't ignore that.
Playing off ideas from Bruce Schneier's writings, there are three different people you want to protect yourself against here: casual snooopers, experienced hackers, and dedicated experts.
The casual snooper is someone like, say, my mom, who is baffled by Windows Explorer. You strategy will handle people like this very well, for the most part. If however you're trying to "really" wipe out the hard drive though, that's not enough.
The next person is the moderately adept hacker, who probably has the smarts but doesn't necessarily have the tools to get everything. This kind of person might be able to, for example, mount your hard drive on a Linux system and use various filesystem tools to retreive the contents of the disc. This is easier to do than you might think (anecdote: on my last computer, I went through various partitioning schemes to make room for Win95, BeOS, and Linux. I was surprised to find that one of my reinstalls brought me back to an earlier state of the disc, because the "new" partitioning was one I had used before, and the data was now accessible again. What I thought I had thrown away forever was once again accessible). A quick format might or might not fend off this level of cracker, but don't get your hopes up. A more thorough defense here would be to rewrite the whole drive at least once, if not a handful of times, with something like 1010101010101010101 etc.
The third level of cracker is someone with both the expertise and the tools needed to get whatever they want from your drive. Apparently, the magnetic field on the disc stores an imprint of the last dozen or so writes, thus the above 101010101 strategy only masks the contents of the disc, but it does not remove them. Slightly more clever destruction attacks add more entropy to what you're writing to the disc (add in enough variation to disrupt the magnetic field in various ways: 0000000111111111000000001111111) but even still you're just sweeping over your tracks, not really eliminating them. For this level of attacker, the only sure defence is really to thoroughly destroy the disc -- break it, burn it, scratch it up & cast the remains to the four corners of the world.
So, the short answer to the original question would be something like: "yes, it's possible to *really* erase a disc, but you have to know who you're trying to hide things from and how far you're willing to go to hide it."
Has sort of the same feel as Bloom County (similar but farther-left politics, theme of "kids are far smarter than adults", etc) with some nice growth -- a hint of anime-esque drawing, nods to Calvin & Hobbes, etc. Easily my favorite "mainstream" comic strip now.
A 'net strip. Wonderfully weird. My favorite -- and one the Slashdot crowd might like -- is
new media new arse. I dunno, there's just something great about semi-sad stick figures. Really not like Bloom County at all, but since the thread is about comics I thought it was worth plugging it.
No no, it's always summer on the sun (regardless or hemisphere or time of year:) -- just like California [tm]! Of course, that doesn't make migrations any more likely...
Then again, it would be a rare breed of bird that could put up with the multi-million degree temperatures anyway. If you had a chicken that lived in a place like that, how would you cook it? What good would a 400 degree stove do? Cool it off? Good thing I'mn a vegetarian, and need not deal with such culninary dangers...:)
(I'm still stunned that I got a first post. First time for everything...)
... pretty funny. Obviously they're getting a bit tired of having to refute claims that their greatest accomplishment was nothing more than some sort of "2001 remade as some kind of nationalistic publicity stunt" hoax. The writeoff at the end is best though:
Meanwhile, back in the 21st century, the STS-98 crew is preparing to come home [....]
Heh. They've been trying to shoot this down since 1977, yet people still give them a hard time about it. I'd be annoyed too. Hell, I *am* annoyed. Why do people fall for this kind of crap?
One of my professors in schoool was the guy responsible for calculating the trajectory from Earth to the Moon (& back). Once the vehicle left earth orbit, it followed a path charted out by William Owen, now PhD and a professor at the University of South Alabama.
There had to have been dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people like him that had a direct role in getting the spacecraft there & back again. If this whole thing was a hoax, he probably would have known it, and a whole lot of other people besides him would have known it. Swearing such a large group of people -- mostly civilians, mind you -- to secrecy is probably just about impossible.
How then can it have remained such a big secret? Aside from Dan Ackroyd's character in "Sneakers" [1], this is a pretty minor conspiracy theory, and one with far less supporting evidence than some of the others. The people at Fox seem to have spent too much time watching the X-Files and believing every minute of it.
[1] And let's not forget some of Mr Ackroyd's other wacky ideas, e.g. all the nutty stuff he said in everything from "Ghostbusters" to "Grossse Pointe Blank" -- that wasn't just part of the script, he really believes in astral projection, Gozer, etc. Hardly a good spokesperson for a solid scientific discussion...
Heh. Look, you guys have the wrong idea here. I am not -- N. O. T. -- saying this is a good idea. I'm not saying it would be fast, or feasible, or fun. I'm not saying there aren't better and more efficient ways of accomplishing the task at hand -- indeed there are such ways. Much as you want to drill on it, I got the point a while ago (sophomore year data structures class actually, several years ago. thanks for asking.).
What I'm saying is that ideas like this -- a crude incremental search, name by name, or a more clever search that sticks to just dictionary words, with at most minor variations (3733T haXXorspeak, doodz!), is profitable and therefore will be attempted, and indeed is attempted and, to a limited extent, used.
Much as you'd like to out-pedant me here, we're basically talking about a password cracking scheme, and password cracking schemes are not as computationally complex as the travelling salesman problem. Sorry, but you just made that up -- admit it. Indeed, these things get used pretty regularly -- just ask RandalSchwartz.
The fact of the matter is, you guys are belittling this strategy for the list generation aspect of it, when in fact that could be done once and the result can be dumped into a file for future usage. Is there some work involved in getting that? Of course there is -- just look at the everyicon project. But you can take steps that control the complexity of the work involved, and cause the total execution time to be Not That Bad. Once you've done it once and dumped the result to disc somewhere, you never have to do it again. Then just start sending out the spam as per usual and Mr Marketer is happy.
Is this hard? Is this complex? Yes and yes. But keep in mind that how hard it is to legitimately harvest a large pool of targets^H^H^H^H^H^H^Haddresses. It is also hard and complex, and arguably its a lot more expensive. (Anything that costs a lot is more expensive than something that possibly cannot be done, or at least not completely...). Given the choice, I don't see why it's such a mystery to you guys why a lot of people would want to try this, and indeed, why a lot of people do try it.
DOn't turn your vitriol against me, turn it to the boneheaded managers & marketers that are having people do this stuff. Question the theory if you want to, but it's being done, and I'm just reporting that fact. Back off.
I understand what you're saying, but I still think these aren't particularly large numbers. Keep in mind that these people aren't polite, they just realize that they can generate such a list in a relatiively short span of time (faster with a smart algorithm, faster still if trying to stick close to dictionary words -- think password cracking strategies).
So what, four letter combinations works out to 500,000 permutations: a modern PC should be able to generate that list in a matter of seconds. I would think an enterprising spammer would be willing to leave the program running long enough to get a longer list than this, and wouldn't be bothered flooding the networks by trying to send mail to some large subset of these names. If it generates enough sales leads, they're doing their job -- they're happy. Ways to do it faster are appreciated but sort of beside the point, because they're going to try it anyway...
What was the email's domain name? I'm curious because a lot of spammers can independently come up with addresses without resorting to buying the lists from Amazon or anyone else. Basically, just send a message to
...up through all combinations of 12 characters or 24 characters or whatever the upper limit is there. Kind of a pain, but nothing that half a dozen lines of Perl code couldn't generate pretty quickly.
Repeat the cycle with all AOL addresses and already you have tens of millions of addresses. Send a message to each of 'em and the mail systems will "courtesously" let you know which ones don't actually exist; take that abbreviated list as a starting point for round two. Anyone that angrily replies "no spam!" is a target, because you know that person both reads & pays attention to their email account. The no replies are trickier -- they're either dormant or crafty enough not to nibble. No matter, keeping them on the list is cheap and potentially profitable, so they all get spammed too.
About the only real way I know of to keep off the lists is to have an unusual domain name that you don't publicize anywhere that it could end up being harvested this way -- friends & family get to use the obscure one, and a public address goes on mailing lists, web sites, etc as the necessary target for spammers. You still don't avoid spam, but you can at least minimize &/or ignore it that way...
Interestingly, my unobfuscated Slashdot address gets basically no spam. It seems that this site isn't worth the effort to trawl for addresses, because I for one never get any Slashdot themed spam. *shrug*.
Anyway, to come back to the original point, if you had some obscure address ("myxtylpl1x@nevergonnaguessthis.net") and started getting spam, then Amazon is suspect. If however it was with an at all common domain, you may have just been an innocent target here.
"Scientists have discovered a huge magnetic anomaly..."
Fancy that, just over a month into 2001 and we dig up a "magnetic anomaly" in some remote place. Anyone wanna bet that we'll find a huge shrieking black monolith at the center of it?
text is a very poor notation system for the concepts of a high-level language.
Like, say, English? If the first principle these people are starting from is that text is a bad way to express ideas, then I have a very hard time imagining what it is that could be better. Pantomime? Grunts & gestures? Pictograms? From their page:
Clean good (C, Java, Scheme); monstrous and messy bad (C++, Perl, Ada).
Hey, different strokes for different folks and all that rubbish, but the thing I like most about Perl (for one) is that it is *intentionally* messy, just like human languages. You can tell that a linguist came up with it. Complex problems simply don't always map well against simplistic solutions. A complex language, and the rich expressiveness that it allows, is often just the thing that is needed. English & Perl both work so well because they are flexible, adaptable, messy, and dynamic.
"Orthogonal" languages are so hell-bent on rigorous mathematical structure that they often get in the way of more natural (to humans) ways of conceptualizing they problems at hand.
It also bugs me that I can't find any samples of the source code (or whatever -- graphical flow charts, who knows) of this language. The best I've found so far is a high level description of their design criteria, which is all well and good, but if they can't even formulate their concepts well enough to express them in something looking like code, then I can't imagine how they expect anyone to wnat to use it. "I know, they'll just, like, think really hard about stuff, and it'll work better." "Radical man, really radical. Hey, pass me that willya, I need another hit..."
What? No it isn't. Who cares what your business associates are doing? As long as they're able to do what they're supposed to do, the software should not and in fact does not matter -- at all.
The question wasn't "which ad agency runs the coolest software", it was more like "which ad agency is most likely to deliver on their promises". I don't see what apache/mod_perl has to do with their ability or willingness to pay up for what they're offering.
This is like asking which bank is the best one to go to for a loan, and being told that $foo are good because their tellers use Linux terminals. So what? That has nothing to do with their interest rates, customer service, etc. You're answering the wrong question here.
That said, yes, it is cool that they run that, but I have no idea who would be the best ad agency. Any idea if any of the old school "atoms before bits" 5th Ave type agencies have had any impact on the web etc? Are we stuck with the likes of DoubleClick? Who runs Slashdot's banners -- are they any good?
Well, yeah, but Apple would be doing this from a position of strength, whereas Be has always been a largely unknown underdog. I think that changes things somewhat, though whether that's enough to matter is anyone's guess. If it's to be done anyway -- if there will be an Intel OSX -- I don't see any reason not to do it. All I'm suggesting is that they keep the bar set high as far as hardware support goes...
Slashdot Mirror
Previously, the space seemed to have been a used bookstore, so the walls were lined with shelves and lots of books (classic literature, philosophy, art, etc that you'd expect in a college town -- I didn't see any O'Reilly books... :), which you were free to peruse & buy. At the back was a little deli where you could get sandwiches, soft drinks, coffee, tea, and beer. Scattered all over the place were chairs, recliners, sofas, etc that could be moved around freely. Up front -- this was the best part -- was an area that would every now and then be cleared out so that rock bands could play, and none of that whiny Don McLean acoustic cover shit either.
That place had a great mix. Too many rock clubs are just flat out dingy, depressing places. Too many of the places you can go late at night will give you a choice between either a cup of coffee or a glass of beer -- you typically can one or the other, but not both from one establishment. This mix isn't really something "geek specific" -- maybe "me specific" more like :) -- but I thought this was an awesome place, and it sucks that it's well over 1000 miles from here (Boston). I would put it as a near ideal setup for a "geek bar"...
One of the main reasons that VCRs became such a common household item in the 80s was that all the new Video Rental Huts [1] had that famous "back room", with titles like "Debbie Does Dallas" and "Penthouse's Playmate of the Year Exposed." That trend was a big part of why triple X theatres largely went out of business in most cities at around the same time, and the exact same trend is also driving a lot of DVD player growth today.
People don't like to admit it in public, but the numbers don't lie -- this stuff is a big part of what drives the growth of these things. Without porn, where would we be now?
I'd bet that at least some of us may not have been born at all... ;)
[1] The joke there being a la "Akbar & Jeff's Video Hutt", with our "children's section" featuring Animal Farm. This is much funnier if you're familiar with Matt Groening's Life in Hell comics... Heh heh heh...
Obviously the military isn't for everyone, and the poster above makes excellent points that I don't dispute. But for some people, it can be a great career move (or a transition to one, as the case may be). Consider the points above and keep in mind that, unless you want it to be, the military isn't generally a whole career, but rather a good first job with some unusual perks & drawbacks, and those can in turn set you up for a great career later.
Assuming, that is of course, that you don't have a problem carrying out dubious orders etc. I for one could never do it -- I just don't have a problem with the Iraqi people and don't feel that shooting near (but not at) their military does a whole lot to help them. But you may not have such objections...
The latter can be very similar to an artist's portfolio, in that (in the case of IT workers) it might have things like code samples, screenshots of various projects, etc. It's okay for it to be fairly long too, because the resume complements it with a short version that hiring personnel can use to weed out clearly inappropriate candidates, while the CV can be used to provide a fairly detailed snapshot of your experience.
Having these two documents isn't AFAIK common practice in the American IT sector, but it seems like a good idea to me, and I would think that most potential employers wouldn't be put off by receiving two documents like this.
...which I'm sure you've heard before...
Nyuk nyuk nyuk...
With all the typographic tools used machine-gun style to drive home the point... :)
Giving someone lung cancer is rude too. Try losing a relative to it and see if your opinion doesn't change just a little bit...
Now whenever I go to, for example, a news article at c|net (random example), I get a friendly little warning about accepting activex controls & plugins. I saw no, it goes away, I get a nice sedate page. The ad is still huge, but at least it's calm & easily handled. A better solution would be of course to tinker around with something like Junkbuster, but I haven't had the time.
Of course the obvious question at this point is "isn't that a pain? Aren't things less interesting without Flash?" to which the answers are "yes, and absolutely not." Examples of Flash files being actually useful are exceedingly rare, and I don't mind the encumbrance if I can filter them out of all the other pages. For the occasional file that I go to specifically for the Flash content (say, those wacky Mahir, Hatten, & AYBABTU movies...) it's easy enough to just click "yes" ever once in a while.
Yes. Surely some stupid Flash animation couldn't be any more obvious & intruding than an animated gif. Suuuure.....
Encouraging marketers to take advantage of what the web medium is capable of isn't a bad idea, but what it actually ends up meaning is making the page more obnoxious, which is a bad idea. I showed the c|net example (a Sun ad, as it happened) to our marketing agency (whose background is primarily from print advertising) and they were impressed that it kept everything within the page. That is, there was no page to click through, but rather you were shown more information without leaving the current article. It ended up being less of a distraction than normal banners, which try to get you to abandon whatever you were looking at previously.
On a semi-related note <really free associating now>, it occurred to me that day that a fundamental difference between marketing on the web and marketing in other media is that the latter force you to have one clearly defined message that can be conveyed in a short space (a sound bite, a slogan, a couple of lines of text, etc), while the web doesn't really have that restriction. Rather than one clearly defined message, it's possible a medley of messages, variations on a theme, such that one customer, drawn to one topic, may go after one part of your site, while other customers can be drawn to other messages etc. That is, traditional media force you to have depth and not breadth, or perhaps vice versa, whereas with the web you aren't forced to make a choice -- you can have either and at best you should have both.
I am not really sure how this plays into the ideas behind web marketing (I'm not so naive as to think that I'm the first one to have thought of this), but it seems like it opens up a peephole into a much more interesting and dynamic kind of marketing. For example, a "banner" for a weather related site might be not just one image to click on, but an image map of a geographic map -- "don't just tell me about your weather abilities, tell me what the weather is going to be in Boston!" Ditto for news sites, etc. It's kind of a waste to have a banner -- especially the big banners this article is warning about -- to only link to one place. Better by far would be for it to allow many links, and compressed information, that would genuinely interest people, rather than just trying to be shinier than all the competitors. It should be obvious by now that most people see right through that kind of crap...</free associating / thinking aloud>
Some things just plain transcend law, and are a matter of decency and courtesy. Whatever you want to do in your own space is fine, but I'd rather you didn't try to share your lung cancer with me, thanks. I've got enough to deal with without having your damn tumors to think about...
Har har har. The punchline is of course a bit easier to deliver out loud rather than in print, but that's not the point.
The point is -- what the hell are you doing to these mice! I've had the same mouse on my PC since the day I got it, and the only reason I replaced the mouse on my Mac was because it drove me nuts to shuffle a hockey puck around the desk (that & the clear LCD mouse just seemed really cool... :).
What could you possibly be doing that wears out a mouse after only a couple of months? You say you clean it regularly -- with what, a good hard scrub with a steel wool pad followed up by a sulfuric acid bath? It's inconceivable to me that anyone could be destroying their equipment so quickly. <parent>Don't you realize that this stuff is delicate & expensive equipment? What's wrong with you?</parent>
My suggestion to you would be to look into whatever mice Fisher-Price might be offering these days. With any luck they'll have a nice durable hard-shell plastic model (in shiny red, yellow & blue) that you can chew on all day without breaking. If they're not in the PC market -- and I really don't know if they are or not (though I doubt it) -- then you're pretty much out of luck. All I can say in that case is you really need to learn to take care of this stuff better. Sheesh...
The fact is, you need simple, backwards compatible pages not because you're desparately hoping that the portion of Lynx users will someday rise about 3%, but because you have to face the reality that more and more people are going to start accessing the web from lightweight, portable platforms such as palmtop computers and WAP-esque phones.
No amount of Flash-DOM-whatever insanity can be crammed into a platform that small, and that's fine with me. Whine all you want to about how these "luddites" are holding back your web designers masturbatory portfolio fantasies, but in this case the best way to prepare for the future (xhtml, css, etc) means carefully *not* rejecting the past. In this case, moving simultaneously forward *and* backwards is both possible and necessary.
Telling your designers to force people to upgrade or be left out is both wrongheaded and short sighted. It's fine for someone on a moderately new PC/Mac/Foonix system (as long as there's an alternative to Mozilla, which sucks too badly to put into words; guess that rules out Foonix...), but anyone on oldish hardware or a (currently) "exotic" platform such as a palmtop or a cell phone has no choice in the matter. Don't ignore that.
Playing off ideas from Bruce Schneier's writings, there are three different people you want to protect yourself against here: casual snooopers, experienced hackers, and dedicated experts.
The casual snooper is someone like, say, my mom, who is baffled by Windows Explorer. You strategy will handle people like this very well, for the most part. If however you're trying to "really" wipe out the hard drive though, that's not enough.
The next person is the moderately adept hacker, who probably has the smarts but doesn't necessarily have the tools to get everything. This kind of person might be able to, for example, mount your hard drive on a Linux system and use various filesystem tools to retreive the contents of the disc. This is easier to do than you might think (anecdote: on my last computer, I went through various partitioning schemes to make room for Win95, BeOS, and Linux. I was surprised to find that one of my reinstalls brought me back to an earlier state of the disc, because the "new" partitioning was one I had used before, and the data was now accessible again. What I thought I had thrown away forever was once again accessible). A quick format might or might not fend off this level of cracker, but don't get your hopes up. A more thorough defense here would be to rewrite the whole drive at least once, if not a handful of times, with something like 1010101010101010101 etc.
The third level of cracker is someone with both the expertise and the tools needed to get whatever they want from your drive. Apparently, the magnetic field on the disc stores an imprint of the last dozen or so writes, thus the above 101010101 strategy only masks the contents of the disc, but it does not remove them. Slightly more clever destruction attacks add more entropy to what you're writing to the disc (add in enough variation to disrupt the magnetic field in various ways: 0000000111111111000000001111111) but even still you're just sweeping over your tracks, not really eliminating them. For this level of attacker, the only sure defence is really to thoroughly destroy the disc -- break it, burn it, scratch it up & cast the remains to the four corners of the world.
So, the short answer to the original question would be something like: "yes, it's possible to *really* erase a disc, but you have to know who you're trying to hide things from and how far you're willing to go to hide it."
Then again, it would be a rare breed of bird that could put up with the multi-million degree temperatures anyway. If you had a chicken that lived in a place like that, how would you cook it? What good would a 400 degree stove do? Cool it off? Good thing I'mn a vegetarian, and need not deal with such culninary dangers... :)
(I'm still stunned that I got a first post. First time for everything...)
Heh. They've been trying to shoot this down since 1977, yet people still give them a hard time about it. I'd be annoyed too. Hell, I *am* annoyed. Why do people fall for this kind of crap?
One of my professors in schoool was the guy responsible for calculating the trajectory from Earth to the Moon (& back). Once the vehicle left earth orbit, it followed a path charted out by William Owen, now PhD and a professor at the University of South Alabama.
There had to have been dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people like him that had a direct role in getting the spacecraft there & back again. If this whole thing was a hoax, he probably would have known it, and a whole lot of other people besides him would have known it. Swearing such a large group of people -- mostly civilians, mind you -- to secrecy is probably just about impossible.
How then can it have remained such a big secret? Aside from Dan Ackroyd's character in "Sneakers" [1], this is a pretty minor conspiracy theory, and one with far less supporting evidence than some of the others. The people at Fox seem to have spent too much time watching the X-Files and believing every minute of it.
[1] And let's not forget some of Mr Ackroyd's other wacky ideas, e.g. all the nutty stuff he said in everything from "Ghostbusters" to "Grossse Pointe Blank" -- that wasn't just part of the script, he really believes in astral projection, Gozer, etc. Hardly a good spokesperson for a solid scientific discussion...
So they're going to abandon Java & embrace .NET?
What I'm saying is that ideas like this -- a crude incremental search, name by name, or a more clever search that sticks to just dictionary words, with at most minor variations (3733T haXXorspeak, doodz!), is profitable and therefore will be attempted, and indeed is attempted and, to a limited extent, used.
Much as you'd like to out-pedant me here, we're basically talking about a password cracking scheme, and password cracking schemes are not as computationally complex as the travelling salesman problem. Sorry, but you just made that up -- admit it. Indeed, these things get used pretty regularly -- just ask Randal Schwartz.
The fact of the matter is, you guys are belittling this strategy for the list generation aspect of it, when in fact that could be done once and the result can be dumped into a file for future usage. Is there some work involved in getting that? Of course there is -- just look at the everyicon project. But you can take steps that control the complexity of the work involved, and cause the total execution time to be Not That Bad. Once you've done it once and dumped the result to disc somewhere, you never have to do it again. Then just start sending out the spam as per usual and Mr Marketer is happy.
Is this hard? Is this complex? Yes and yes. But keep in mind that how hard it is to legitimately harvest a large pool of targets^H^H^H^H^H^H^Haddresses. It is also hard and complex, and arguably its a lot more expensive. (Anything that costs a lot is more expensive than something that possibly cannot be done, or at least not completely...). Given the choice, I don't see why it's such a mystery to you guys why a lot of people would want to try this, and indeed, why a lot of people do try it.
DOn't turn your vitriol against me, turn it to the boneheaded managers & marketers that are having people do this stuff. Question the theory if you want to, but it's being done, and I'm just reporting that fact. Back off.
So what, four letter combinations works out to 500,000 permutations: a modern PC should be able to generate that list in a matter of seconds. I would think an enterprising spammer would be willing to leave the program running long enough to get a longer list than this, and wouldn't be bothered flooding the networks by trying to send mail to some large subset of these names. If it generates enough sales leads, they're doing their job -- they're happy. Ways to do it faster are appreciated but sort of beside the point, because they're going to try it anyway...
Repeat the cycle with all AOL addresses and already you have tens of millions of addresses. Send a message to each of 'em and the mail systems will "courtesously" let you know which ones don't actually exist; take that abbreviated list as a starting point for round two. Anyone that angrily replies "no spam!" is a target, because you know that person both reads & pays attention to their email account. The no replies are trickier -- they're either dormant or crafty enough not to nibble. No matter, keeping them on the list is cheap and potentially profitable, so they all get spammed too.
About the only real way I know of to keep off the lists is to have an unusual domain name that you don't publicize anywhere that it could end up being harvested this way -- friends & family get to use the obscure one, and a public address goes on mailing lists, web sites, etc as the necessary target for spammers. You still don't avoid spam, but you can at least minimize &/or ignore it that way...
Interestingly, my unobfuscated Slashdot address gets basically no spam. It seems that this site isn't worth the effort to trawl for addresses, because I for one never get any Slashdot themed spam. *shrug*.
Anyway, to come back to the original point, if you had some obscure address ("myxtylpl1x@nevergonnaguessthis.net") and started getting spam, then Amazon is suspect. If however it was with an at all common domain, you may have just been an innocent target here.
Fancy that, just over a month into 2001 and we dig up a "magnetic anomaly" in some remote place. Anyone wanna bet that we'll find a huge shrieking black monolith at the center of it?
;)
Like, say, English? If the first principle these people are starting from is that text is a bad way to express ideas, then I have a very hard time imagining what it is that could be better. Pantomime? Grunts & gestures? Pictograms? From their page:
Hey, different strokes for different folks and all that rubbish, but the thing I like most about Perl (for one) is that it is *intentionally* messy, just like human languages. You can tell that a linguist came up with it. Complex problems simply don't always map well against simplistic solutions. A complex language, and the rich expressiveness that it allows, is often just the thing that is needed. English & Perl both work so well because they are flexible, adaptable, messy, and dynamic. "Orthogonal" languages are so hell-bent on rigorous mathematical structure that they often get in the way of more natural (to humans) ways of conceptualizing they problems at hand.
It also bugs me that I can't find any samples of the source code (or whatever -- graphical flow charts, who knows) of this language. The best I've found so far is a high level description of their design criteria, which is all well and good, but if they can't even formulate their concepts well enough to express them in something looking like code, then I can't imagine how they expect anyone to wnat to use it. "I know, they'll just, like, think really hard about stuff, and it'll work better." "Radical man, really radical. Hey, pass me that willya, I need another hit..."
Riiiight.....
Of course, in third grade the name Chuck was by far the funniest one to use in the name game, just for the third line... :)
The question wasn't "which ad agency runs the coolest software", it was more like "which ad agency is most likely to deliver on their promises". I don't see what apache/mod_perl has to do with their ability or willingness to pay up for what they're offering.
This is like asking which bank is the best one to go to for a loan, and being told that $foo are good because their tellers use Linux terminals. So what? That has nothing to do with their interest rates, customer service, etc. You're answering the wrong question here.
That said, yes, it is cool that they run that, but I have no idea who would be the best ad agency. Any idea if any of the old school "atoms before bits" 5th Ave type agencies have had any impact on the web etc? Are we stuck with the likes of DoubleClick? Who runs Slashdot's banners -- are they any good?
Well, yeah, but Apple would be doing this from a position of strength, whereas Be has always been a largely unknown underdog. I think that changes things somewhat, though whether that's enough to matter is anyone's guess. If it's to be done anyway -- if there will be an Intel OSX -- I don't see any reason not to do it. All I'm suggesting is that they keep the bar set high as far as hardware support goes...