Passport has gotten a lot of bad press, but there's three other major single signon systems in circulation that nobody talks about...
AOL's ScreenName Service is used on all Time Warner web properties and partners, including AIM, the Netscape sites, all of the magazines they own and EA's Pogo games site.
Disney's Go Network may have failed as a portal, but every web domain Disney owns still redirects to a subdomain of go.com such as ABC.go.com and ESPN.go.com. Therefore, there's a full network of news content, e-mail, and a few shopping sites contained there, all of which are Disney-owned properties.
Yahoo also has a full "network" of sites within the Yahoo.com domain... e-mail, an IM client, games, shopping, and let's not forget there's a serach engine there too. Yahoo lets several partners have your entire account infomation simply by offering a one-click registration into a site such as WorldWinner.com from their games section.
So, while all the bad press is being aimed at MS... several just as invasive services have quietly gained power.
Ramzi's segment is a pure comedy bit... so you clearly didn't get the joke.
TechTV did get a permit to play with some thermite outside of their studio once. Kevin Rose set a HD on fire for TSS, Morgan Webb set an overpriced Playstation controler that they gave a bad review to on X-Play ablaze, and "Paul the Scientist" melted a toy bunny for a poorly done Unscrewed bit.
Theoretically, a torrent cannot handle more than 2000 users without a performance downgrade, and I think today we're seeing the proof of that theory. The protocol basically is sendign around so much metadata about who's available that it's starting to drown out the actual signal.
While this has been plugged a few times on TSS on TechTV, I always got the feeling that it was not officially endorsed by TechTV.
Exactly. This is more or less people from TechTV doing a show that TechTV rejected the concept of just for the fun of doing it. Dan answers the phones at TSS and does an occasional segment, Kevin Rose has just been promoted to co-host of TSS as Leo Laporte will be focusing his efforts on a revamped Call For Help show starting in a couple weeks. They're also working with some of their cameraman friends from TechTV.
Even Mitnick has a TechTV connection. Darci Wood, Kevin's girlfriend used to be a contributor on TSS, and they met on the set. She left the show in order to move to L.A. to live with him.
That's a +5 on Slashdot... but a troll elsewhere. It's not about freedom, it's about content. If little Jimmy wants the Spongebob Squarepants game, and that's only on one platform, that's the one that mom and dad will feel required to buy...
This (troll?) is analagous to the argument that anybody who doesn't keep their servers patched 100% up to date deserves to get hax0r3d. Not everybody has manpower to handle the server patching (not to mentioned downtime it creates), and not everybody can afford security guards and closed-cicruit video surveillance at their sites.
And therefore, those don't have the security guards are more likely to get robbed than those who do. Sure, the police will respond and possibly investigate, but that's cleaning up the disruption after it has happened, not before it. Usually, it's hard to get reimbursed for the money lost from the theives even if they're caught...
Never. The goal of marketing is to attract attention, and the most successful marketers are unfortunately the ones who are most annoying and do illegal practices. The key in breaking the rules is not being caught...
One of the biggest problems with "guerrilla marketing" organizations is that they're basically made up of college students working in sitations where it's hard to veryify what they actually did. I remember in 1999 walking accross the Syracuse University campus seeing several.com's URLs written on the sidewalks on the Quad. That's a no-no according to the University rules, but the.com's blamed students who had been told to put the chalk writing in high-traffic public sidewalk locations, not on private property. Students were just too dense to understand that the Quad belongs to the University, not the government, but the company wasn't helping them any by pointing that out.
The strength of VB is really in the fact that it really makes using ActiveX to boss around other programs very easy, and also the ability to make system-level DLL calls. VBA adds the extra damage of being able to hide code in a file format that some people might not expect to be executable.
VBA doesn't actually have anything much missing from the VB6 command set. The only thing it's really missing is the ability to make compiled executables, that VBA programs can only be embeded in certain MS filetypes. It's a much bigger power tool than most people expect...
Just what is an executable attachment these days? It used to be possible to say that Word files could never carry a virus, but ever since the Word Macro engine grew up into a full power Visual Basic for Applications that's not so true anymore.
It used to be possible to say an e-mail with no attachments was safe, but today's virus of the day is proving that wrong... just using an IE bug in an HTML e-mail is enough to cause trouble.
So, really... nothing's safe. I'm sure somebody will find a buffer exploit for plaintext mail in Outlook someday...
It's well known that the #1 factor in the Google PageRank sorting routine is the count of links to your page from sites that have no relation to you. Therefore, blocking other site's refererals will just lead to them not to linking you, and your placement in Google to drop.
How many times have you pretended not to hear the kiosk operator at the mall asking what you think of your current cell phone company? That's a marketing pitch you didn't really want, and you slam away.
Conversely, anybody who spends more than a few seconds on RackSpace's site is likely pretty serious about buying a dedicated Internet server. So, having somebody come up to them and talk to them will keep them from falling off the path to becoming a customer. It helps them retain potential customers by preventing them from derailing, but it can't start customers on the path... it's the first human contact, but it's in no way the first contact.
50% of new customers have originated from the chat feature
No, 50% of new customers were willing to speak with the rep on the way in. This might help keep people on the path that leads them to becoming a customer, but it doesn't start them on it. They had to get to the site somehow...
Re:Ebay has let users work to close these fakes do
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
eBay could very easily design a "Click here if this looks bogus" button for registered users, and then place the auctions that are reported in a queue for moderator review, with additional trust given to those who have successfully reported violations in the past, and less value given to those who false report.
Actually, the "imaginary girlfriend" services are sort of ingenious when you know what you're actually getting. They send messages, flowers, etc. as if you really did have a distant girlfriend (all of which, of course, you've paid for and then some) for the sake of creating the illusion that there's really somebody sending this stuff... useful for fooling an ex if they are still close enough to be observing such deliveries such as at an office.
Re:Expensive Electronics Cheap Scams, not taken do
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 5, Informative
These are the latest variant on a pyramid scheme. Basically, people are paying today for a wait list for a product that will be delivered whenever the waiting list gets long enough to have enough money to buy your item. Early people on the list will in fact get their items, but as the list gets longer, the wait gets exponentially longer until the world runs out of fools to supply and the list stops growing. The people caught "below the line" when the scheme colapses end up paying to wait in a line that has stopped moving... they'll never get their stuff.
One reason why people are able to place a $2.5 million bid to try to kill off an auction they think is fraudulent is that it doesn't cost anything to place a over-high bid on eBay.
Maybe eBay should set some threshholds at which point bids require a deposit in escrow in order to justify a large bid, money that is returned if the bid doesn't win, but is lost if the transaction doesn't close because its withdrawn while being the high bidder.
eBay's job is to prevent these things...
on
eBay Fraud Vigilantes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The reason people pay to use eBay rather than setup their own auction script on their web site is because eBay is providing a regulated marketplace, one where eBay makes the rules and enforces them to prevent fraudulent activities from affecting buyers and sellers.
If eBay can't get a grip on their fraud problems, then the door will be wide open for another marketplace to challenge them.
Just being dominant today is no promise of future domination. TiVo's thhe word people use for PVRs, but we just had an article proclaim that TiVo's going to die yesterday...
Re:The DirecTiVo is the cheapest PVR out there...
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 1
It's really hard to say that either Dish or DirecTV are making money with their PVRs or not, because both are selling them for less than they cost to make. The theory, of course, is that they can write the loss on the hardware off as a customer aquisition cost because those who have PVRs tied to a service are going to be less likely to dump that service.
Nothing in the TiVo deal prevents Rupert from launching his own PVR for DirecTV right now. TiVo's been challenged on the DirecTV platform before by Microsoft's Ultimate TV which was a dual-tuner DirecTV box, and that just crashed and burned. TiVo's present status as the only DirecTV tied PVR right now is one of default, not exclusivity. When it comes down to it, TiVo's already here, and any challenger has got a lot of development work to do just to duplicate what TiVo's already doing before they can start advancing the technology.
The DirecTiVo is the cheapest PVR out there...
on
TiVo Will Die
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The present "street price" of a "DirecTV DVR with TiVo Serivce" is only $99, with only a $4.95 per household DVR service fee that is waived for subscribers to DirecTV's highest programming plan and is not charged multiple times if there is more than one DirecTiVo in the same household. There is of course a one year committment required to avoid a $300 early cancelation fee, but that's standard for all new DirecTV units.
So, let's not compare apples to oranges. The standalone TiVo risks getting priced out of the market, and the HD TiVo is not yet ready for mass distribution, but the DirecTV model is flying off the shelves. The Moxi product isn't available to consumers outside of limited testing markets yet, and News Corp's yet to release a US-aimed PVR or even say they're going to do so so all that product has is speculation by pundits. When your biggest competitors are pure vaporware, I'd say your company is doing pretty good.
Slashdot Mirror
Passport has gotten a lot of bad press, but there's three other major single signon systems in circulation that nobody talks about...
AOL's ScreenName Service is used on all Time Warner web properties and partners, including AIM, the Netscape sites, all of the magazines they own and EA's Pogo games site.
Disney's Go Network may have failed as a portal, but every web domain Disney owns still redirects to a subdomain of go.com such as ABC.go.com and ESPN.go.com. Therefore, there's a full network of news content, e-mail, and a few shopping sites contained there, all of which are Disney-owned properties.
Yahoo also has a full "network" of sites within the Yahoo.com domain... e-mail, an IM client, games, shopping, and let's not forget there's a serach engine there too. Yahoo lets several partners have your entire account infomation simply by offering a one-click registration into a site such as WorldWinner.com from their games section.
So, while all the bad press is being aimed at MS... several just as invasive services have quietly gained power.
Ramzi's segment is a pure comedy bit... so you clearly didn't get the joke.
TechTV did get a permit to play with some thermite outside of their studio once. Kevin Rose set a HD on fire for TSS, Morgan Webb set an overpriced Playstation controler that they gave a bad review to on X-Play ablaze, and "Paul the Scientist" melted a toy bunny for a poorly done Unscrewed bit.
Theoretically, a torrent cannot handle more than 2000 users without a performance downgrade, and I think today we're seeing the proof of that theory. The protocol basically is sendign around so much metadata about who's available that it's starting to drown out the actual signal.
Kevin Rose could try to talk his girlfriend into getting involved... she did recently get an offer from Playboy afterall.
While this has been plugged a few times on TSS on TechTV, I always got the feeling that it was not officially endorsed by TechTV.
Exactly. This is more or less people from TechTV doing a show that TechTV rejected the concept of just for the fun of doing it. Dan answers the phones at TSS and does an occasional segment, Kevin Rose has just been promoted to co-host of TSS as Leo Laporte will be focusing his efforts on a revamped Call For Help show starting in a couple weeks. They're also working with some of their cameraman friends from TechTV.
Even Mitnick has a TechTV connection. Darci Wood, Kevin's girlfriend used to be a contributor on TSS, and they met on the set. She left the show in order to move to L.A. to live with him.
That's a +5 on Slashdot... but a troll elsewhere. It's not about freedom, it's about content. If little Jimmy wants the Spongebob Squarepants game, and that's only on one platform, that's the one that mom and dad will feel required to buy...
This (troll?) is analagous to the argument that anybody who doesn't keep their servers patched 100% up to date deserves to get hax0r3d. Not everybody has manpower to handle the server patching (not to mentioned downtime it creates), and not everybody can afford security guards and closed-cicruit video surveillance at their sites.
And therefore, those don't have the security guards are more likely to get robbed than those who do. Sure, the police will respond and possibly investigate, but that's cleaning up the disruption after it has happened, not before it. Usually, it's hard to get reimbursed for the money lost from the theives even if they're caught...
Warchalking already exists... AMD's just a bit late attaching their logo to it.
See, AMD chips always do run hotter than Intel chips...
When will they learn?
Never. The goal of marketing is to attract attention, and the most successful marketers are unfortunately the ones who are most annoying and do illegal practices. The key in breaking the rules is not being caught...
One of the biggest problems with "guerrilla marketing" organizations is that they're basically made up of college students working in sitations where it's hard to veryify what they actually did. I remember in 1999 walking accross the Syracuse University campus seeing several .com's URLs written on the sidewalks on the Quad. That's a no-no according to the University rules, but the .com's blamed students who had been told to put the chalk writing in high-traffic public sidewalk locations, not on private property. Students were just too dense to understand that the Quad belongs to the University, not the government, but the company wasn't helping them any by pointing that out.
The strength of VB is really in the fact that it really makes using ActiveX to boss around other programs very easy, and also the ability to make system-level DLL calls. VBA adds the extra damage of being able to hide code in a file format that some people might not expect to be executable.
VBA doesn't actually have anything much missing from the VB6 command set. The only thing it's really missing is the ability to make compiled executables, that VBA programs can only be embeded in certain MS filetypes. It's a much bigger power tool than most people expect...
Just what is an executable attachment these days? It used to be possible to say that Word files could never carry a virus, but ever since the Word Macro engine grew up into a full power Visual Basic for Applications that's not so true anymore.
It used to be possible to say an e-mail with no attachments was safe, but today's virus of the day is proving that wrong... just using an IE bug in an HTML e-mail is enough to cause trouble.
So, really... nothing's safe. I'm sure somebody will find a buffer exploit for plaintext mail in Outlook someday...
It's well known that the #1 factor in the Google PageRank sorting routine is the count of links to your page from sites that have no relation to you. Therefore, blocking other site's refererals will just lead to them not to linking you, and your placement in Google to drop.
How many times have you pretended not to hear the kiosk operator at the mall asking what you think of your current cell phone company? That's a marketing pitch you didn't really want, and you slam away.
Conversely, anybody who spends more than a few seconds on RackSpace's site is likely pretty serious about buying a dedicated Internet server. So, having somebody come up to them and talk to them will keep them from falling off the path to becoming a customer. It helps them retain potential customers by preventing them from derailing, but it can't start customers on the path... it's the first human contact, but it's in no way the first contact.
I asked the poor guy manning the site on what they likely thought would be a slow Saturday "How does it feel to be slashdotted?".
His reponse was "Great. We love the Linux community."
50% of new customers have originated from the chat feature
No, 50% of new customers were willing to speak with the rep on the way in. This might help keep people on the path that leads them to becoming a customer, but it doesn't start them on it. They had to get to the site somehow...
eBay could very easily design a "Click here if this looks bogus" button for registered users, and then place the auctions that are reported in a queue for moderator review, with additional trust given to those who have successfully reported violations in the past, and less value given to those who false report.
Actually, the "imaginary girlfriend" services are sort of ingenious when you know what you're actually getting. They send messages, flowers, etc. as if you really did have a distant girlfriend (all of which, of course, you've paid for and then some) for the sake of creating the illusion that there's really somebody sending this stuff... useful for fooling an ex if they are still close enough to be observing such deliveries such as at an office.
These are the latest variant on a pyramid scheme. Basically, people are paying today for a wait list for a product that will be delivered whenever the waiting list gets long enough to have enough money to buy your item. Early people on the list will in fact get their items, but as the list gets longer, the wait gets exponentially longer until the world runs out of fools to supply and the list stops growing. The people caught "below the line" when the scheme colapses end up paying to wait in a line that has stopped moving... they'll never get their stuff.
One reason why people are able to place a $2.5 million bid to try to kill off an auction they think is fraudulent is that it doesn't cost anything to place a over-high bid on eBay.
Maybe eBay should set some threshholds at which point bids require a deposit in escrow in order to justify a large bid, money that is returned if the bid doesn't win, but is lost if the transaction doesn't close because its withdrawn while being the high bidder.
The reason people pay to use eBay rather than setup their own auction script on their web site is because eBay is providing a regulated marketplace, one where eBay makes the rules and enforces them to prevent fraudulent activities from affecting buyers and sellers.
If eBay can't get a grip on their fraud problems, then the door will be wide open for another marketplace to challenge them.
Just being dominant today is no promise of future domination. TiVo's thhe word people use for PVRs, but we just had an article proclaim that TiVo's going to die yesterday...
It's really hard to say that either Dish or DirecTV are making money with their PVRs or not, because both are selling them for less than they cost to make. The theory, of course, is that they can write the loss on the hardware off as a customer aquisition cost because those who have PVRs tied to a service are going to be less likely to dump that service.
Nothing in the TiVo deal prevents Rupert from launching his own PVR for DirecTV right now. TiVo's been challenged on the DirecTV platform before by Microsoft's Ultimate TV which was a dual-tuner DirecTV box, and that just crashed and burned. TiVo's present status as the only DirecTV tied PVR right now is one of default, not exclusivity. When it comes down to it, TiVo's already here, and any challenger has got a lot of development work to do just to duplicate what TiVo's already doing before they can start advancing the technology.
The present "street price" of a "DirecTV DVR with TiVo Serivce" is only $99, with only a $4.95 per household DVR service fee that is waived for subscribers to DirecTV's highest programming plan and is not charged multiple times if there is more than one DirecTiVo in the same household. There is of course a one year committment required to avoid a $300 early cancelation fee, but that's standard for all new DirecTV units.
So, let's not compare apples to oranges. The standalone TiVo risks getting priced out of the market, and the HD TiVo is not yet ready for mass distribution, but the DirecTV model is flying off the shelves. The Moxi product isn't available to consumers outside of limited testing markets yet, and News Corp's yet to release a US-aimed PVR or even say they're going to do so so all that product has is speculation by pundits. When your biggest competitors are pure vaporware, I'd say your company is doing pretty good.