all this Spam would stop is people STOPPED BUYING FROM THE SPAMMERS
Sorry, this is false. Spammers make the bulk (pun intended) of their money by selling the "service" to the shady businesses. This is money they recieve up front. Because return rates are so low, it is not really possible to make significant money by taking a piece of the action.
In summary: even if nobody bought any product or service solicited via spam, spam would still continue, and would still be profitable for the spammers as long as there are new marks willing to pay to send the spam in the first place.
Re:MS Office is the standard
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
OK, so now we have 2 data points. So I guess we can just extrapolate a line to prove that nobody uses MS Office format anyway.:)
Seriously, when it comes to number of users, or number of documents in a non MS Office format, we "alternate office suite" folks are just statistical noise. Let's not fool ourselves.
Re:MS Office is the standard
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
It isn't a standard because it is not publicly documented (in its entirety) and not implementable by anyone but Microsoft.
This is incorrect 2 ways:
Even if it were publicly documented, it would just be a publicly documented proprietary format.
Open Office, Star Office, and AbiWord are 3 implementations by organizations other than Microsoft.
But you are missing the point. When you own 98% of the market, you are the standard. I am not saying that I like it, or that it is a good thing. That's just life in the big city.
Apparently folks didn't get the [ humor | sarcasm ] in my original post about setting standards for office suites data format. There is no committee which sets any standard. All there is is de-facto standards.
IE is not a standard.
Uh, yeah it is - a de-facto standard. While you are correct in stating the obvious that IE is a web browser, there is no standard for "Web browser." Different web browsers make attempts to implement different standards. You may cite certain three-letter-acronym "standards" that IE either does not implement, or implements in a broken way, but all that is 100% irrelevent: at the end of the day, 98% of the users use the broken, non-committee-standards compliant browser.
If your paycheck depends on paying customers coming to your website, and 98% of them use IE, then you code to IE, warts and all. You work around its limitations, its different object model.
I'd love to see you start up some mission-critical website, coding only to "committee standards" (IE be damned), and see how long you would last. You'd change your tune then.
MS Office is the standard
on
PC Annoyances
·
· Score: 1
MS Office is NOT a standard format
According to whom? The Inter-office Memo Standards board? The Clippy Commission? Friends of ASCII? The I-Hate-Microsoft Committee?
The poster was completely correct when he asserted that MS Office is a de-facto standard. For your information, that means that while it has not been officially blessed by some lofty standards board, the indisputable fact is that everyone uses it.
Even those who do not use MS Office, and use other such as Open Office, Star Office, etc., save their documents in MS Office format. I have yet to see anybody who uses an alternate office suite save their documents in the native format of that package. It's always in MS Office format. Further, any office package that does not have at least a minimal level of interoperability with.doc files is dead-on-arrival.
You have raised a valid point about the intentional breakage that is periodically introduced to force upgrades, but that is a separate question.
Since we're veering off topic here, I'll just mention that it is the exact same situation with Internet browsers - IE is the standard. That's what 98% of the universe uses, that what 98% of all internet sites are written for. And we still get the whiners who just keep pissing into the wind, complaining about compliance with some "standard" or another.
The fact of the matter is that when you command a large enough slice of the market, you become the standard. Period.
The parent comment reminds me of one of the funniest Dilber cartoons that I can remember. I did a quick look around the net for the Dilbert comic, but couldn't find it, so you'll just have to use your imagination.
Panel 1
Pointy Haired Boss (PHB) approaches Dilbert, who is sitting at his computer, and announces that he want to be more of a hands-on manager.
Panel 2
PHB begins micro-managing Dilbert to the point where he is directing him mouse movements. "Now move the mouse. Click it! CLICK IT!!"
Panel 3
Dilbert apparently doesn't do the right thing, and the PHB explodes:
"Oh no! You IDIOT!!!"
Dilbert (thinking): "This has long day written all over it."
Since 1996, I have had a Peet Bros. Ultimeter 500 weather station hooked up to a serial port of a Linux box, faithfully recording wind and temperature readings from the top of my house.
Check it out at http://www.mccrew.com/apps/Latest.jsp. There is downloadable Linux software, as well as an online Java client that gives a realtime view of the wind speed, direction, and outdoor temperature.
Don't open Emails that you have no clue who they came from. This is just common sense.
I tried to e-mail to you, but I didn't get a reply...<bud-dum-dum> Thanks, I'm here all week.
For a while now, almost every e-mail worm sends out e-mail to addresses found in the victim's address book. In other words, a huge amount of viruses and worms are, or appear to be, coming from people that you know and trust.
Short of reviewing the Recieved: headers on every e-mail, you really have no clue who they came from, even if you think that you do. So which mails am I supposed to open again?
The parent has been moderated to 5 as 'Funny,' but really I think it is both insightful and informative. Having patents on the disposable aspect of the invention is really huge, regardless whether they actually produce the product or not. This potentially puts them in the position of "king maker" for this technology.
On top of that, having a single button for automatically calling 911 may also be something that they will patent, and allow them to go around extracting a pound of flesh from all telephone manufacturers and service providers, and not just cellular telephone providers either.
-Steve (who has been working with his employer's patent attorneys a lot in the last few weeks...)
1. Spammers make their money by selling their "service" to businesses. While there may be a per-sale kickback from the businesses to the spammers, response rates are so pathetic that spammers cannot count on this as the main revenue stream. Therefore, spammers don't care whether anybody buys the products from these businesses - they already got paid to put the junk into your inbox.
2. Bandwidth costs money. Big servers cost money. If a service provider is inspecting every message, then visiting links contained in the message, it consumes a larger amount of expensive bandwidth, and it requires the service provider to have to buy more and higher capacity servers to handle the increased load. Again, expensive.
So when you say that it "would get pretty expensive, pretty fast," you are correct, except that the expense would be bourne by the ISP, not the spammer.
Say the spam message contains an anchor containing an image:
<img src="http://spammer.com/ad.gif?id=90128735">
It should be patently obvious that if you, your ISP, or anybody else retrieves this image from the server via the supplied URL, then you will in fact be validating the address. It is irrelevent WHO retrieves the URL, the fact is that the spammer will be able to update his database to say that the e-mail address associated with id 90128735 is valid and should continue to recieve spam.
Anything that makes IE harder to use, would make alternative browsers all the more attractive to the inherently stupid lazy average PC user.
Ahhh, but you conveniently forget that alternative browsers are infringing too. The issue here isn't about browser A versus browser B, but some interloper patenting something that is obvious and holding all users of browser A and browser B hostage.
Are you still rooting for Eolas when they start litigation against mozilla.org for supposed infringement in Mozilla, Galeon, Firebird, and any other Mozilla-derived browser? I bet you'll change your tune then.
"First they came for Internet Explorer, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't an InternetExplorer user.
"Next they came for the CrazyBrowser users, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't an CrazyBrowser user.
"Then they came for the Opera users, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't an Opera user.
"Finally they came for my browser, and there was nobody left to speak up."
While you are correct that there is nothing to stop the Google management from issuing stock to valued employees right now, it would be mostly just an interesting intellectual exercise. This is because there is no market for the employee to go to and convert that stock into cash.
The <IMG> link {to a CGI script which puts out image data} must take a parameter to tell it what image to display, since it can't return any data to the calling page
Not at all. Look at any web application environment, ASP, JSP/servlet, PHP, and so forth, and they all support the concept of server-side session state.
The server can generate the image and send it down to the client, and retain the plaintext "answer" in the session on the server. The plaintext answer never crosses the wire, only the generic session identifier that is passed as either an HTTP cookie or other method, like being embedded in the URLs. The plaintext answer lives as long as the server session lives, which is typically until the user explicitly logs out or the session hits a predetermined time of inactivity.
I think the parent poster is being too modest. For years now, the best browsing experience by a long shot has been Galeon, which was one of the early champions of tabbed browsing, among other things.
Light, responsive, highly usable, rock solid, Galeon is by far the best browser, in my non-so-humble opinion. It has a very high degree of "fit and finish" on even the small features that comes from having been around lonig enough to learn from its, and others', mistakes.
I have to scratch my head every time I read here where everyone is getting all excited about some new, unfinished, unpolished Mozilla offshoot *cough*Phoenix*cough* is all the rage, which will one day have all the good stuff that Galeon has today.
People do a request for a site, e.g. intranet.internal.foo.org. The external DNS servers fail in that they don't come back with an answer, and then the client continues through its list of DNS servers until it gets to the internal servers where it gets an answer.
Not quite. Assuming foo.com is a valid, registered domain, then the DNS administrator for the foo.com domain can add his own wildcard record (as [s]he could always have done). The Verisign ploy will not work in this situation.
In the situation you describe above, the responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of foo.com's DNS administrator, not evil Verisign. The Verisign problem only comes into play when the part immediately before the '.com' is not registered, for example, lkjfsd8934hf.com.
> host lkjfsd8934hf.com
lkjfsd8934hf.com has address 64.94.110.11
> host lkjfsd8934hf.yahoo.com
Host lkjfsd8934hf.yahoo.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
-Steve, who has a wildcard record set up for his domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, this is false. Spammers make the bulk (pun intended) of their money by selling the "service" to the shady businesses. This is money they recieve up front. Because return rates are so low, it is not really possible to make significant money by taking a piece of the action.
In summary: even if nobody bought any product or service solicited via spam, spam would still continue, and would still be profitable for the spammers as long as there are new marks willing to pay to send the spam in the first place.
No doubt he meant remuneration.
That's an exclusive Slashdot value-add.
Seriously, when it comes to number of users, or number of documents in a non MS Office format, we "alternate office suite" folks are just statistical noise. Let's not fool ourselves.
This is incorrect 2 ways:
But you are missing the point. When you own 98% of the market, you are the standard. I am not saying that I like it, or that it is a good thing. That's just life in the big city.
Apparently folks didn't get the [ humor | sarcasm ] in my original post about setting standards for office suites data format. There is no committee which sets any standard. All there is is de-facto standards.
IE is not a standard.
Uh, yeah it is - a de-facto standard. While you are correct in stating the obvious that IE is a web browser, there is no standard for "Web browser." Different web browsers make attempts to implement different standards. You may cite certain three-letter-acronym "standards" that IE either does not implement, or implements in a broken way, but all that is 100% irrelevent: at the end of the day, 98% of the users use the broken, non-committee-standards compliant browser.
If your paycheck depends on paying customers coming to your website, and 98% of them use IE, then you code to IE, warts and all. You work around its limitations, its different object model.
I'd love to see you start up some mission-critical website, coding only to "committee standards" (IE be damned), and see how long you would last. You'd change your tune then.
According to whom? The Inter-office Memo Standards board? The Clippy Commission? Friends of ASCII? The I-Hate-Microsoft Committee?
The poster was completely correct when he asserted that MS Office is a de-facto standard. For your information, that means that while it has not been officially blessed by some lofty standards board, the indisputable fact is that everyone uses it.
Even those who do not use MS Office, and use other such as Open Office, Star Office, etc., save their documents in MS Office format. I have yet to see anybody who uses an alternate office suite save their documents in the native format of that package. It's always in MS Office format. Further, any office package that does not have at least a minimal level of interoperability with .doc files is dead-on-arrival.
You have raised a valid point about the intentional breakage that is periodically introduced to force upgrades, but that is a separate question.
Since we're veering off topic here, I'll just mention that it is the exact same situation with Internet browsers - IE is the standard. That's what 98% of the universe uses, that what 98% of all internet sites are written for. And we still get the whiners who just keep pissing into the wind, complaining about compliance with some "standard" or another.
The fact of the matter is that when you command a large enough slice of the market, you become the standard. Period.
Panel 1
Pointy Haired Boss (PHB) approaches Dilbert, who is sitting at his computer, and announces that he want to be more of a hands-on manager.
Panel 2
PHB begins micro-managing Dilbert to the point where he is directing him mouse movements. "Now move the mouse. Click it! CLICK IT!!"
Panel 3
Dilbert apparently doesn't do the right thing, and the PHB explodes:
"Oh no! You IDIOT!!!"
Dilbert (thinking): "This has long day written all over it."
Check it out at http://www.mccrew.com/apps/Latest.jsp. There is downloadable Linux software, as well as an online Java client that gives a realtime view of the wind speed, direction, and outdoor temperature.
-Steve
"Go ahead and put in <inelegent crufty shortcut>, nobody will be using this program in a few years anyway."
I tried to e-mail to you, but I didn't get a reply...<bud-dum-dum> Thanks, I'm here all week.
For a while now, almost every e-mail worm sends out e-mail to addresses found in the victim's address book. In other words, a huge amount of viruses and worms are, or appear to be, coming from people that you know and trust.
Short of reviewing the Recieved: headers on every e-mail, you really have no clue who they came from, even if you think that you do. So which mails am I supposed to open again?
I see reuse and avoiding the common all-too-common hubris of wanting to reinvent the wheel.
I'd hire him over you.
On top of that, having a single button for automatically calling 911 may also be something that they will patent, and allow them to go around extracting a pound of flesh from all telephone manufacturers and service providers, and not just cellular telephone providers either.
-Steve
(who has been working with his employer's patent attorneys a lot in the last few weeks...)
1. Spammers make their money by selling their "service" to businesses. While there may be a per-sale kickback from the businesses to the spammers, response rates are so pathetic that spammers cannot count on this as the main revenue stream. Therefore, spammers don't care whether anybody buys the products from these businesses - they already got paid to put the junk into your inbox.
2. Bandwidth costs money. Big servers cost money. If a service provider is inspecting every message, then visiting links contained in the message, it consumes a larger amount of expensive bandwidth, and it requires the service provider to have to buy more and higher capacity servers to handle the increased load. Again, expensive.
So when you say that it "would get pretty expensive, pretty fast," you are correct, except that the expense would be bourne by the ISP, not the spammer.
-Steve
Say the spam message contains an anchor containing an image:
<img src="http://spammer.com/ad.gif?id=90128735">
It should be patently obvious that if you, your ISP, or anybody else retrieves this image from the server via the supplied URL, then you will in fact be validating the address. It is irrelevent WHO retrieves the URL, the fact is that the spammer will be able to update his database to say that the e-mail address associated with id 90128735 is valid and should continue to recieve spam.
Ahhh, but you conveniently forget that alternative browsers are infringing too. The issue here isn't about browser A versus browser B, but some interloper patenting something that is obvious and holding all users of browser A and browser B hostage.
Are you still rooting for Eolas when they start litigation against mozilla.org for supposed infringement in Mozilla, Galeon, Firebird, and any other Mozilla-derived browser? I bet you'll change your tune then.
"First they came for Internet Explorer, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't an InternetExplorer user.
"Next they came for the CrazyBrowser users, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't an CrazyBrowser user.
"Then they came for the Opera users, but I didn't speak up because I wasn't an Opera user.
"Finally they came for my browser, and there was nobody left to speak up."
Steve
Shatner said it best...
"Will you people get a life?"
While you are correct that there is nothing to stop the Google management from issuing stock to valued employees right now, it would be mostly just an interesting intellectual exercise. This is because there is no market for the employee to go to and convert that stock into cash.
Um, yeah, could I get some fries with that?
Not at all. Look at any web application environment, ASP, JSP/servlet, PHP, and so forth, and they all support the concept of server-side session state.
The server can generate the image and send it down to the client, and retain the plaintext "answer" in the session on the server. The plaintext answer never crosses the wire, only the generic session identifier that is passed as either an HTTP cookie or other method, like being embedded in the URLs. The plaintext answer lives as long as the server session lives, which is typically until the user explicitly logs out or the session hits a predetermined time of inactivity.
-Steve
Light, responsive, highly usable, rock solid, Galeon is by far the best browser, in my non-so-humble opinion. It has a very high degree of "fit and finish" on even the small features that comes from having been around lonig enough to learn from its, and others', mistakes.
I have to scratch my head every time I read here where everyone is getting all excited about some new, unfinished, unpolished Mozilla offshoot *cough*Phoenix*cough* is all the rage, which will one day have all the good stuff that Galeon has today.
Canada Tax Form 2003
1. How much money did you make in 2003? ___________________
2. Send it in.
So would that be aitch-tee-tee-pee-colon-antislash-antislash dubya-dubya-dubya-dot-antislashdot-dot-com?
Those of you with a weak stomach might not want to click on Stallman singing.
Not quite. Assuming foo.com is a valid, registered domain, then the DNS administrator for the foo.com domain can add his own wildcard record (as [s]he could always have done). The Verisign ploy will not work in this situation.
In the situation you describe above, the responsibility rests squarely on the shoulders of foo.com's DNS administrator, not evil Verisign. The Verisign problem only comes into play when the part immediately before the '.com' is not registered, for example, lkjfsd8934hf.com.
> host lkjfsd8934hf.com
lkjfsd8934hf.com has address 64.94.110.11
> host lkjfsd8934hf.yahoo.com
Host lkjfsd8934hf.yahoo.com not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
-Steve, who has a wildcard record set up for his domain.
Go ride 10 miles on a mountain bike with wide, knobby tires. Then borrow a friend's road bike, with high-pressure narrow tires, and do 10 more miles.
After that, you should have a intrinsic feel for what is meant by the term "low-resistance tires."
-Steve