Well, anyone who has a user base of real users (e.g. average, non-techie people) has to accept mail from AOL, because all those users likely communicate with AOLers.
I think AOL is really being blamed for a lot of spam it shouldn't be. Lots of common spamware forges aol.com at various places in the headers. Real mail sent through an external mail server while signed onto AOL has an "X-Apparently-From:" header inserted by AOL. That header contains the actual AOL screen name of the account being used to send the mail. Ergo, AOL isn't really a good choice for spammers to begin with.
-MFS
Re:Luxuries during economic downturn.
on
Apple Reports Q1 Loss
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You're absolutely right, and I can back that statement up with a case in point.
My mother's been using "hand-me-up" Macs for years now; that is, every time I bought a new Mac, I gave her the one it was replacing. This had been working quite well, because as a fairly modest user, she never needed the latest and greatest. She does a bit of word processing, web surfing, and email... A Mac from three or four years ago is more than sufficient.
In recent months, the monitor on her Mac started borking. After about 10 minutes the picture would begin to fade, getting gradually worse until it was impossible to read anything. I suggested a new monitor, but she decided that if she was going to spend the money on a new monitor, she might as well spring for a new computer as well. After several months of putting it off for financial reasons, she did.
This week she went down to the Apple store and bought a brand new iMac with a flat-screen monitor (and a 40 gig HD that she'll never come close to using, sigh!). Point being, she was doing just fine with what she had until extenuating circumstances - the monitor going out - made her upgrade. If it hadn't been for the fact that money's a bit tight, she would have bought the new Mac months ago. On the other hand, if it hadn't been for the bad monitor, she'd have waited until there was a bit more juice in the bank before upgrading.
When the economy gets rolling again, there will be a lot of people in similar situations who buy again when they see their bank balances level out. I'll be one of them. Having to setup and configure OS X to my mom's liking on the new Mac has got me hooked... As soon as I can afford it (yes, I'm literally too broke to spend $129) I'll be buying myself a copy of OS X for my G4. And yes, one day I'll buy another Mac or three.
Apple's far from dead. They're just suffering along with the rest of us until 2004.
There's a similar handy tool on the web. Check out the Rosetta Stone for UNIX whenever you're trying to remember whether it's adduser or useradd on $OS.
FYI, the deadline for submissions is January 31st. You can submit a proposal here, and speakers should have at least two lectures to present. The topics covered at the conference will include:
General PHP
PHP & Business
PHP & Databases
PHP Design
PHP Extensions
PHP & XML
PHP-GTK
Oh, and anyone who's invited to be a speaker/presenter will have their way paid by the conference.
You forgot a link in that quagmire!
on
Hardware Block
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The word "Coffee" should have pointed to www.starbucks.com...
I'm using IE 6.0.2800.1106 and his site doesn't give me any errors. I have the requisite ActiveX junk disabled, and JavaScript set to "prompt." CNN and MSNBC give me errors, but his site doesn't, nor does it prompt me for anything.
It probably sounds crazy, but you have to start by faking it. The AC with FP is 100% correct when he says that "Getting people to participate in a new/quiet public forum is hard."
One of the more interesting (and ingenius) business tidbits I ever came across involved Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express. When he started the company, he had precisely one airplane. However, legend has it that painted on the side of that plane was the number 7. Why? People who saw the plane got the impression that FedEx had at least seven planes! It was all about making the company look bigger, which acted as a sort of subconscious trust/value/goodwill builder for potential customers.
You can apply this same principle to your (and any new or stagnant) community site. People are more confident when the numbers are larger. Nobody's going to bother commenting on a story if they get the impression that no one else will ever read what they have to say. And if your site gets few or no comments, visitors do have the impression that no one is reading, regardless of what your access_log says. A Google search shows copious links to your site, so there's no doubt that you're getting traffic. You just need to motivate that traffic.
I used to do some work for AOL, and when a new message board got created in our channel, it wasn't unusual for informal email to go out to various channel staff asking people to go generate some chatter in the new board. Even with an AOL audience of millions of eyeballs possibly checking out your forum, you still have to plant the seed yourself! Having created a couple of sites which focused on web-based message boards, I can tell you that I had to do the same thing there before "real people" began posting.
The first thing you need to do is create some conversations on your site, and the easiest way to do that is to invent those conversations yourself. Register a few accounts at your site and start logging in as various personalities, posting comments and replies throughout each day. Don't be afraid to make outlandish comments and present radical opinions - in fact, these are the sorts of things which are most likely to motivate other people to comment! And, since you'd be posting them under various nicknames, nobody would know it was you making the crazy statements to begin with.
Soon enough you'll find that your bogus conversations are attracting real replies. From there on out, it's a snowball process.
All that said, you might try tweaking your site design and layout a bit as well. My constructive criticism with regards to that would be to shrink the Valiant Etc banner at the top of each page to perhaps half or 2/3 of its current height, move the "Welcome..." text to an About page, move the poll (which is a very good topic) above the login box so that it's more readily visible when the page is loaded, and go for consistency in the font sizes of story description text.
Donning my end-user hat, when I land on your site I'm sort of confused as to what's what, and the welcome text/mission statement prevents any of the stories from showing without me having to scroll down. That is, the real content of your site is hidden by a large banner and introductory message - neither of which are helpful to repeat visitors. If I were designing the site, the top story "Site-Based School Improvement" and the poll would be the first things greeting new visitors.
Good luck!
Anti-WAP?
on
802.11 RF Amp
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I wonder when ISPs are going to stop soft-pedaling the anti-NATing provisions in their terms of service
Check SpeakEasy DSL. Not only don't they care about NAT, they don't mind wireless connecting sharing either, so long as none of the people (ab)using your connection are violating the AUP. As with any ISP you're responsible for anyone using your connection. In other words, setup your WAP, secure it to trusted friends and family only, and you're A-OK.
And I'm not even a SpeakEasy customer. I wish RoadRunner would implement similarly "with-it" policies...
To me, it seems more logical that repeated ads for the same product means that it is selling. I wouldn't think spammers have the resources to repeatedly spam something that isn't making them immediate cash flow. It makes much more sense to me that the repeated ads are the result of the spammers seeing something sell and just getting greedy (and/or lazy).
The article seems to imply that the spammers are "subcontractors" in a way for the manufacturer - that the manufacturer sells a spammer a lot of X thousand minicars, and then the spammer has to sell those minicars. If the spam was really working, you'd think the spammer would have sold his lot in the first run. If the spam was really working, there would be no need to spam again.
One good analogy I can think of is that a local furniture store chain which has been in business for 50+ years is going out of business. They've been "going out of business" for several months now (their situation is real, the patriarch gambled away the store's assets in the casinos, and they really are bankrupt and going out of business). The thing is, there are commercials on TV every day for the last few months screaming "we're closing our doors forever and we must get rid of our inventory! This week is your last chance to get amazing deals!" Yet week after week is the "last week" to buy. If the ads were working - if they were actually selling off the inventory - this whole thing would have wrapped up weeks if not months ago. It's the fact that they aren't selling the product that keeps them advertising.
Remember, spammers have unlimited resources - that's how they operate, by abusing other peoples' resources. It doesn't cost a spammer any more to make 10 spam runs than it costs him to make 1 spam run. The furniture store has to pay for their television ads and even they're still running commercials... Because they aren't selling their stock.
I tend to believe that spam I receive over and over indicates a product that's not selling, thus the need to keep re-advertising for it.
I was a bit dismayed to see that this article seemed to glorify spamming without mentioning any of the negative/annoying side effects. It was one big "spam works, spam == sales" promotion. The author essentially makes the case for spamming as a profitable enterprise - portraying spammers as ethikul bidnezmen - and I'm afraid that articles like this will only help to encourage the "mainsleaze" spammers.
From the article,
"If you see a product more than a couple of times on e-mail, that means that product is selling," Finn said. "No one would be sending it repeatedly if was not selling."
I say it's more like "No one would be sending it repeatedly if they'd actually sold out their product." Anything that needs to be spammed over and over, ad nauseum, isn't selling, thus requiring repeated spam runs in order for the spammer to make a decent ROI.
I groan at the thought of how many professional marketing types will read this article and decide that spam is the way to make _their_ product next year's must-have Christmas gift.
why do I need to check if a host is still there? Who really cares? It's content that I'm looking for, not a particular servent.
But that content is being hosted at particular servents, no?
One of my biggest beefs about the Gnutella network is that, in general, there doesn't seem to be enough checking to determine whether or not specific hosts are still active. If I run Gnutella for a few hours to get some files, then shut it off for a week, I'm still getting hit with thousands of download requests per day a week later.
It seems like none of the popular servents give a damn that they've gotten an RST packet for each of the last 10,000 requests for file X from servent Y. They just keep plugging blindly away trying to get the file, and worse, some of the servents now store incompleted download data between sessions and resume their blind download attempts the next time the program is run. So this issue is no longer solved by natural transiency of nodes!
I feel sorry for the dialup users who dial in and wind up getting the IP address of someone who was sharing stuff on Gnutella a few hours ago (or even a week ago). Must be impossible to use such a connection.
I agree that you have a point about "proprietary," but I think the word "commercial" in the article and synopsis is accurate. There are three types of Gnutella clients:
a) Those which are free to download, free to use, and open-source
b) Those which cost money to download and use (e.g. "BearShare Pro")
c) Those which are free to download, free to use, closed-source, and invariably "ad-supported"
It's category c being referred to as "commercial" Gnutella clients. They're the ones who are in it to make some sort of a profit or at least to generate revenue - the software comes bundled with some adware or another - thus they are indeed "commercial" in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, anyone who has a user base of real users (e.g. average, non-techie people) has to accept mail from AOL, because all those users likely communicate with AOLers.
I think AOL is really being blamed for a lot of spam it shouldn't be. Lots of common spamware forges aol.com at various places in the headers. Real mail sent through an external mail server while signed onto AOL has an "X-Apparently-From:" header inserted by AOL. That header contains the actual AOL screen name of the account being used to send the mail. Ergo, AOL isn't really a good choice for spammers to begin with.
-MFS
You're absolutely right, and I can back that statement up with a case in point.
My mother's been using "hand-me-up" Macs for years now; that is, every time I bought a new Mac, I gave her the one it was replacing. This had been working quite well, because as a fairly modest user, she never needed the latest and greatest. She does a bit of word processing, web surfing, and email... A Mac from three or four years ago is more than sufficient.
In recent months, the monitor on her Mac started borking. After about 10 minutes the picture would begin to fade, getting gradually worse until it was impossible to read anything. I suggested a new monitor, but she decided that if she was going to spend the money on a new monitor, she might as well spring for a new computer as well. After several months of putting it off for financial reasons, she did.
This week she went down to the Apple store and bought a brand new iMac with a flat-screen monitor (and a 40 gig HD that she'll never come close to using, sigh!). Point being, she was doing just fine with what she had until extenuating circumstances - the monitor going out - made her upgrade. If it hadn't been for the fact that money's a bit tight, she would have bought the new Mac months ago. On the other hand, if it hadn't been for the bad monitor, she'd have waited until there was a bit more juice in the bank before upgrading.
When the economy gets rolling again, there will be a lot of people in similar situations who buy again when they see their bank balances level out. I'll be one of them. Having to setup and configure OS X to my mom's liking on the new Mac has got me hooked... As soon as I can afford it (yes, I'm literally too broke to spend $129) I'll be buying myself a copy of OS X for my G4. And yes, one day I'll buy another Mac or three.
Apple's far from dead. They're just suffering along with the rest of us until 2004.
There's a similar handy tool on the web. Check out the Rosetta Stone for UNIX whenever you're trying to remember whether it's adduser or useradd on $OS.
- General PHP
- PHP & Business
- PHP & Databases
- PHP Design
- PHP Extensions
- PHP & XML
- PHP-GTK
Oh, and anyone who's invited to be a speaker/presenter will have their way paid by the conference.The word "Coffee" should have pointed to www.starbucks.com...
Thought it said digital pornography comparison. I've never clicked on a Slashdot story so fast in my life!
I'm using IE 6.0.2800.1106 and his site doesn't give me any errors. I have the requisite ActiveX junk disabled, and JavaScript set to "prompt." CNN and MSNBC give me errors, but his site doesn't, nor does it prompt me for anything.
:)
It must be you...
It probably sounds crazy, but you have to start by faking it. The AC with FP is 100% correct when he says that "Getting people to participate in a new/quiet public forum is hard."
..." text to an About page, move the poll (which is a very good topic) above the login box so that it's more readily visible when the page is loaded, and go for consistency in the font sizes of story description text.
One of the more interesting (and ingenius) business tidbits I ever came across involved Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express. When he started the company, he had precisely one airplane. However, legend has it that painted on the side of that plane was the number 7. Why? People who saw the plane got the impression that FedEx had at least seven planes! It was all about making the company look bigger, which acted as a sort of subconscious trust/value/goodwill builder for potential customers.
You can apply this same principle to your (and any new or stagnant) community site. People are more confident when the numbers are larger. Nobody's going to bother commenting on a story if they get the impression that no one else will ever read what they have to say. And if your site gets few or no comments, visitors do have the impression that no one is reading, regardless of what your access_log says. A Google search shows copious links to your site, so there's no doubt that you're getting traffic. You just need to motivate that traffic.
I used to do some work for AOL, and when a new message board got created in our channel, it wasn't unusual for informal email to go out to various channel staff asking people to go generate some chatter in the new board. Even with an AOL audience of millions of eyeballs possibly checking out your forum, you still have to plant the seed yourself! Having created a couple of sites which focused on web-based message boards, I can tell you that I had to do the same thing there before "real people" began posting.
The first thing you need to do is create some conversations on your site, and the easiest way to do that is to invent those conversations yourself. Register a few accounts at your site and start logging in as various personalities, posting comments and replies throughout each day. Don't be afraid to make outlandish comments and present radical opinions - in fact, these are the sorts of things which are most likely to motivate other people to comment! And, since you'd be posting them under various nicknames, nobody would know it was you making the crazy statements to begin with.
Soon enough you'll find that your bogus conversations are attracting real replies. From there on out, it's a snowball process.
All that said, you might try tweaking your site design and layout a bit as well. My constructive criticism with regards to that would be to shrink the Valiant Etc banner at the top of each page to perhaps half or 2/3 of its current height, move the "Welcome
Donning my end-user hat, when I land on your site I'm sort of confused as to what's what, and the welcome text/mission statement prevents any of the stories from showing without me having to scroll down. That is, the real content of your site is hidden by a large banner and introductory message - neither of which are helpful to repeat visitors. If I were designing the site, the top story "Site-Based School Improvement" and the poll would be the first things greeting new visitors.
Good luck!
And I'm not even a SpeakEasy customer. I wish RoadRunner would implement similarly "with-it" policies...
One good analogy I can think of is that a local furniture store chain which has been in business for 50+ years is going out of business. They've been "going out of business" for several months now (their situation is real, the patriarch gambled away the store's assets in the casinos, and they really are bankrupt and going out of business). The thing is, there are commercials on TV every day for the last few months screaming "we're closing our doors forever and we must get rid of our inventory! This week is your last chance to get amazing deals!" Yet week after week is the "last week" to buy. If the ads were working - if they were actually selling off the inventory - this whole thing would have wrapped up weeks if not months ago. It's the fact that they aren't selling the product that keeps them advertising.
Remember, spammers have unlimited resources - that's how they operate, by abusing other peoples' resources. It doesn't cost a spammer any more to make 10 spam runs than it costs him to make 1 spam run. The furniture store has to pay for their television ads and even they're still running commercials... Because they aren't selling their stock.
I tend to believe that spam I receive over and over indicates a product that's not selling, thus the need to keep re-advertising for it.
From the article, I say it's more like "No one would be sending it repeatedly if they'd actually sold out their product." Anything that needs to be spammed over and over, ad nauseum, isn't selling, thus requiring repeated spam runs in order for the spammer to make a decent ROI.
I groan at the thought of how many professional marketing types will read this article and decide that spam is the way to make _their_ product next year's must-have Christmas gift.
MSNBC is carrying the same article without the registration requirement.
One of my biggest beefs about the Gnutella network is that, in general, there doesn't seem to be enough checking to determine whether or not specific hosts are still active. If I run Gnutella for a few hours to get some files, then shut it off for a week, I'm still getting hit with thousands of download requests per day a week later.
It seems like none of the popular servents give a damn that they've gotten an RST packet for each of the last 10,000 requests for file X from servent Y. They just keep plugging blindly away trying to get the file, and worse, some of the servents now store incompleted download data between sessions and resume their blind download attempts the next time the program is run. So this issue is no longer solved by natural transiency of nodes!
I feel sorry for the dialup users who dial in and wind up getting the IP address of someone who was sharing stuff on Gnutella a few hours ago (or even a week ago). Must be impossible to use such a connection.
I agree that you have a point about "proprietary," but I think the word "commercial" in the article and synopsis is accurate. There are three types of Gnutella clients:
a) Those which are free to download, free to use, and open-source
b) Those which cost money to download and use (e.g. "BearShare Pro")
c) Those which are free to download, free to use, closed-source, and invariably "ad-supported"
It's category c being referred to as "commercial" Gnutella clients. They're the ones who are in it to make some sort of a profit or at least to generate revenue - the software comes bundled with some adware or another - thus they are indeed "commercial" in nature.