The concept of antivirus software is inherently flawed. Antivirus software can never keep up with the latest virus. There are far better ways of protecting a system than detecting known virus signatures.
Execution protection, user permission controls and good firewalling are far more effective methods of defending against such attacks. All of these things are built into Vista, and in fact are most of what is new that is in Vista-- showing Microsoft "gets it" at least regarding this sort of security. Even on XP, all of these things are available except useful user permission controls.
Even before this latest Vista flak, Symantec and McAfee have been going into FUD PR mode in order to save their market-- their latest conflict of interest due to the fact that they are mostly out of business if the above facts about effective virus protection gets out. They're dead men walking, having painted themselves into a corner and now they're whining about it. Pathetic.
And they'll really like it when the HW automatically informs ASCAP what's been played on the machine. A lot easier than reading in radio station playlists...
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence."
Yeah there is-- it's owned by Flaming Republicans...
Frankly, if their values include it being OK to telephone you with SPAM, then they're worth voting against. Especially if they do it repeatedly. Here in California, I'm not a Republican but I wouldn't vote for Democrat Betty Karnette if you took a gun to my head. I get several spam snail-mails (about one per day in the last week), automated phone calls and this time even emails trying to argue her case and as far as I'm concerned, based solely on that she's complete scum. I'll probably vote the Libertarian ticket on that race. If it continues I may even vote Republican (gasp!) just because it's so clear to me she deserves to lose, and lose badly.
In fact it looks like I'll be voting Libertarian on most everything-- the idea that the Democrats are any better than the Republicans would be hilarious if it didn't tend to actually get them voted in by people who should know better. I'll also be voting NO on most of the funding bills, even those for good causes because it's clear the bureaucracy can't manage it's money worth s**t and it'd just be throwing good money after bad.
IMHO-- politics in the US is not just an embarrasment anymore, it's a complete catastrophe as the general populace just doesn't get it-- keeps playing the "my team's better than your team" and "my team right or wrong" that's got us dug into the immense crater we're in now-- and just keeps electing these crooks back into office year after year. Just how darn bad do things have to get before voters will learn that choosing Republican *or* Democrat on the ticket is just a recipe for another round of abuse and corruption?
"Would you like me to give you a formula for...success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure... You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all...You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success. On the far side of failure."
Who cares what the "industry" sees? The real value of a practical 3D VR system is that individuals can create their own content just like they can in the web today-- "industry" be damned.
Accusing of being in a high horse the guy that sugested that the wikipedia should also preserve things that are important to the other 6,226,726,049 people instead of just the stuff important for the 298,444,215 americans is ridiculous, a little sad and shows the side of many Americans which is most despised by the vast majority of those 6,226,726,049 non-US-citizen people - the outspoken belief that you're inherently superior, more worthy and more important than everybody else.
I didn't see anyone claim that U.S. textbooks should be preserved in lieu of non-U.S. textbooks, or that they're somehow superior-- just that textbooks are a useful resource for some people. The fact that someone immediately turned it into a cause-ce'lebre`, seems an attitude considerably more "inherently superior, worthy and more important than everybody else," IMHO...
A nice cosy little world we live in. I had thought that Wikpedia was for the world's use, but i see now that I am wrong. By the flavour of the posts above, it is very much an American resource.
Oh give me a break. Anything that doesn't have international appeal is off limits? That would disqualify most everything.
However, it appears they make quite a bit of money from selling access online, so it's doubtful it would be cost effective to acquire any of these. Often you have to pony up a significant subscription fee to have access, and not everyone can justify that for a periodic interest in researching some subject (or fixing an old piece of gear).
Then again, such things may be the main thing that will eventually keep brick-and-mortar libraries alive. I can still go into the library and check these things out if I don't want to pay for online access...
not to mention that signature based antivirus is going to die, and companies who do av/as right (don't let unknown stuff run in the first place, instead of trying to clean up after the fact) are going to eat symantec/mcafee's lunch (bit9, etc.)
As far as I'm concerned, signature based antivirus is alreadyK?i> dead. But McAfee and Symantec love it because it means subscription-based revenue. Techniques that don't require it can often only be charged for once, so never mind what techniques may actually work better.
...ube at all. No doubt they had a hand in reporting the programs and surely will not stop there. They would like to see all foreign programs barred for whatever reason simply because an eyeball glued to YouTube is NOT an eyeball glued to the major networks. If they could ban the home videos on YouTube they'd like to see that done too.
They perhaps are beginning to realize that the drop in their revenue is not so much because of media piracy, but because there's just so darn much competition that's been enabled by the internet and they're getting beat up. And unfortunately, it's not like there's just one upstart that they can buy-out and assimilate, there's millions of individual, independent content sources out there that's diluting their monopoly. Boo-hoo about that, but watch out because they've got their claws out, and I expect there are some underhanded moves in store up ahead...
The youth market is no doubt severely affected-- the draw of internet media or video games is dragging the eyeballs away from the dinosaur networks in droves and they're pretty darn scared about it-- or if they aren't, they ought to be. They certainly deserve to be...
I have a pile of MP3s ripped from CDs that I currently own, but find that I no longer even purchase CDs. I was formerly a HUGE fan of taking my music on the go...and am quite a tech gadget guy...but the RIAA and DRM in general have driven me away. I find that I just listen to the radio more now. Perhaps I am in the minority. [...]
Well, you may be in the minority but you're certainly not alone. I used to spend $100 a week on CDs, and before that LPs. I remember when the CD was first announced-- LPs were around $8, and all the scuttlebut WRT CDs was how much cheaper they were to produce. CDs came out, and they were $14-$16 ea. I've never forgotten that little screw-over. In addition, there was this tendency to re-buy LPs I had on CD for the convenience.
For the last couple of years though, I've probably bought a dozen new CDs at the most. I don't pirate not because I would feel at all guilty about it, but more because I'm pissed that risking illegal activity has become a so much better way to get music than legally buying it-- it has soured my taste in acquiring music entirely. Fortunately, I now have a relatively huge collection that I can continue to enjoy, and I do download legally free music from the internet sites that support independents such as Garage Band, etc., though the quality is often poor, I do find a gem now and then. So, I'm slowly converting all my CDs to mp3 files, and have a portable music player (Archos w/Rockbox) for on the go and a large network drive that I use for jukeboxing at home. I will never buy DRM'ed media of any kind, and if there comes a day where there is no legal media that is not DRM'ed I'll still have umpteen gig of converted CDs. Essentially, like the way we'd like to wean ourselves off of transportation dependence on oil, I've been able to wean myself off of dependence on media companies for music.
And, I'm in the process of doing something very similar for video. I spend more time watching YouTube or some other ad-free internet content now than TV (and use a very effective ad blocker for web pages), and have amassed a relatively large number of legal DVDs of content. I buy lots of budget DVDs where I find them, such as 99 cent stores and 50-movie packages (I prefer old movies for the most part anyway), and buy lots of stuff used. Eventually I'll archive all of that to hard disks as well I figure. Interestingly though, unlike music the main reason I've soured off of the other channels for picture content is not DRM at this point, but the fact that I will no longer put up with the advertising-- the lure of Cable TV in the early days was the lack of commercials, but now it is pretty common for the movie channels (especially the "classic" movie channels) to now include commercial breaks. So, I stopped my Cable TV and now almost exclusively watch DVD. By the time the new HDTV and DRMed based content comes out I'll probably have collected enough unwatched media on DVD to last me the rest of my life-- and my eyes probably won't be good enough to tell the HD difference. I will have weaned myself off of content corporations entirely, including not only the DRM but the advertising.
The lack of net neutrality may foster attempts to block independent content in favor of the majors, but that approach is ignorant of the fact that the internet is not a static entity-- it is subject to change and adaptation around such underhanded tactics to "deliver eyeballs." YouTube sprang up because people wanted a fun alternative to corporate packaged content, and if ultimately corporate interests start taking it over, inserting junk advertising or attempting to supplant it via internet anti-neutrality, some other inventive new means of sidestepping the corporate teat will crop up (though that's not to say net-neutrality legislation isn't necessarily a bad idea)...
I'm not sure it was a Vector Graphic, but something like that in the 1980s. I remember that the computer was up on a stage and there was some applause or something and a man who said "What a mind" and then a woman says "what a body." Hilarious at the time, no doubt ultra-camp now. Probably the Vector 4
The problem here is the cure is worse than the disease. It undermines the reliability of EVERYONE's email, including many innocent parties, in a pathetic, impotent, would-be-Fascist attempt to "educate" ISPs. It is an attempt to make SPAM the ISPs problem-- when it is in fact the SPAMMER who is responsible yet is relatively unaffected by this "solution". Just because all ISPs don't agree with you about the right way to deal with the problem doesn't make them rogues, and attempts to enforce the "right" solution on them makes Spamhaus far worse than the spammers in my book. Frankly, blocking their domain name is just the dose of their own medicine they deserve. Spamhaus has simply opportunistically sold some folks a bill of goods-- that their RBL technique will actually fix the spam problem. Well, it won't. It doesn't really even mitigate it-- instead merely tranforming the spam problem into a couple of differentr problems. It is snake-oil, plain and simple.
Now, Spamhaus comes along and blacklists the netblock he's in. A lot of your legitimate customers now find themselves unable to send mail. They start to complain to you. Now you're facing a business decision: do you drop the one spammer, or do you watch many of your customers leave for other ISPs that don't host spammers? Action's much more likely when the people complaining are actually your paying customers.
By doing this, Spamhaus is trading one problem for another-- trading spam off against the reliability of legitimate email. This makes them significantly part of the problem, not the solution. They translate a problem the solution of which they derive a revenue stream from, into a different problem which has no effect on their revenue stream.
A more extreme version of this technique would be to shut down the entire internet everytime anyone sent a spam message on the theory that eventually the spammers will quit because they derive no benefit from an otherwise nonexistent internet. What you are describing only differs in degree, but it essentially the same disfunctional approach to the problem.
I'd look at the psychology of each's management...
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
With Microsoft, you clearly have a management who believes that producing a truly better product is too hard for them to either implement or effectively comprehend and therefore must resort to underhanded lock-in or other anticompetitive schemes. Either that, or they're simply too enamoured with creating such schemes. And in this regard Microsoft looks to be a really poor loser, though in their favor they're known to come out then winner often.
On the other hand, there's Google, whos management appears to be quite confident in their ability to innovate. They seem to encourage experimentation and freedom within the corporate culture. On the downside, it's really not very clear what their success rate is-- at this point it's too soon to tell. Working for Google might be riskier, but could be very rewarding.
Having worked in IT for about 25 years though, I would say that no matter who you choose to work for, there are a couple of things you should be aware of:
1. A company hires you because they need to fill a position, and am looking for a best-fit for that position. It is often the case that you may have far more abilities than the company you work for can readily utilize. While you might get really lucky and find an incredibly great fit, the situation may be more typical and you will find out that you have all kinds of abilities that they have either no particular use for or they may not be equipped to take effective advantage of them. While your job could be a life-long profession, and you may find a good company willing to hire you to do a job that you're well suited to do, keep in mind that you could spend much of your life underutilized because you have talents they don't know what to do with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but idealists right of college may be picturing how they can do all this wonderful stuff for a company that they're excited about but end up appreciated for far less than that they feel they could contribute.
2. It's often the case that you get hired for one thing but by the time you walk in the door they need you for something else that has higher priority. That's not particularly a bad thing but I've had it happen to me at virtually every programming job I've ever had, so all I'm saying is don't be too surprised if that happens. In my case, every thing I ended up doing was just about as interesting so I had no problem with it.
3. Younger companies tend to be more unstructured-- often you have to invent procedures for doing things for the first time. Older companies often have their "way" of doing things that you may have to conform to. Depending on your own personality, you have to decide what makes you more comfortable-- and, that might change as you become more "seasoned".
Where do you draw the line-- if you say a friend that you think this businessperson is a crook, is that legal slander? What if you say it to all your friends? What if you have 100000 friends? 100M? At what exact point does your circle of friends become "in public?"
Perhaps the problem here is the fact that the internet blurs the distinction between publishing and "mere" communication.
Actually, I think perhaps Google is taking a longer term view of this-- eventually web-videos will be as ubiquitous as phone conversations. Are you stealing money from a music company if you have your stereo on in the background while you're on the phone with someone? Or if you sing along? People will not stand for the content police impeding their ability to communicate with their friends, just as they wouldn't stand for someone butting into their phone conversations and bleeping out copyrighted or trademarked phrases they may utter. The difference in the internet is only a matter of the number of "friends" one has and can talk to at once-- but the process is essentially the same.
And sure, this is at odds with a lot of things the content corporations have been taking for granted, but I think there's a good chance they're on the losing end of the argument of whether or not people are free to express themselves in public-- simply because that expression is recorded when it's on the internet is not enough excuse to block that expression, IMHO. If I walk down the street singing the latest top 40 tune, am I guilty of copyright violation? If so, is that in the spirit of the original copyright intentions and of the concept of free speech in a free country?
Except for mathematicians and programmers, most think of "random" in a *very* different way from its technical definition. To most humans, saying that a particular sequence is "random" means *guaranteeing* certain things about it. Among them: the same element does not occur back-to-back, EVER, even if there are only a few elements total to choose from.
With this sort of definition, you will probably find that "random" means something different to just about everybody. It sounds like what you want in music sequencing is something that is a little more equally distributed-- that is, all the artists are equally distributed over the total playing time of the entire shuffle sequence. Or maybe what you really want is to have all the "moods" equally distributed. Or tempo, or genre, or... To achieve that sort of thing you probably want some kind of permutation and not a complete dice-roll, with just a dice-roll to get you to the first choice in the permutation so sequential runs won't get you the exact same sequence... Still, people will then complain because every time they hear Dylan song A it's always followed by Britney Spears' song B, as that's something that they'll notice before long. That suggests a more complex form of permutation combined with a dice-roll is in order.
Randomness or apparent-randomness is not as simple as many people think. I've been programming computers for over 20 years now, and I've seen a lot of code written by programmers who clearly didn't understand randomness very well-- in the "early days" you'd be amazed at the really bad random number generators that were built into many languages. It wasn't uncommon to just walk a pointer through all of memory and pick up whatever bytes were found as a random number source, which produces really abysmal results. Also, it can make a surprising difference in the quality of the results of programs dependent on them. There's a lot of non-intuitive things that come into play almost immediately when you delve into the subject. (see This Book for some juicy ones). And while I don't consider myself an expert on the subject I have gained a respect for the complexity of seemingly simple problems in randomness-- and avoid inventing ad-hoc randomizing solutions.
One example of subtlety is the easy-to-implement "swap" method of mentioned in related threads above doesn't really give you very good shuffling if you only pass over the deck once, and gets worse the shorter the card deck is. I've always preferred sorting an array of random data along with the indices and utilizing the indicies as the shuffled deck, though that too could have some non-obvious quirks-- certainly it's very dependent on the quality of the random number generator being used.
With regards to music shuffling-- I don't think it's a very good idea in the first place, as you'll always be likely to set tunes with completely different moods against each other which will be likely to grate even if you like both tunes. It's better to take the time and manually make some good playlists, IMHO-- they don't pay radio station program directors the big bucks for nothing...
Sometimes they're just deluded. To expouse a delusion that you believe to be the truth is not quite the same as lying, as the intent is different.
A more interesting test would be one that could tell if the speaker actually believes what he is saying or not, independent from the accuracy of the statement.
Slashdot Mirror
The concept of antivirus software is inherently flawed. Antivirus software can never keep up with the latest virus. There are far better ways of protecting a system than detecting known virus signatures.
Execution protection, user permission controls and good firewalling are far more effective methods of defending against such attacks. All of these things are built into Vista, and in fact are most of what is new that is in Vista-- showing Microsoft "gets it" at least regarding this sort of security. Even on XP, all of these things are available except useful user permission controls.
Even before this latest Vista flak, Symantec and McAfee have been going into FUD PR mode in order to save their market-- their latest conflict of interest due to the fact that they are mostly out of business if the above facts about effective virus protection gets out. They're dead men walking, having painted themselves into a corner and now they're whining about it. Pathetic.
And they'll really like it when the HW automatically informs ASCAP what's been played on the machine. A lot easier than reading in radio station playlists...
"Surely if Diebold can make a secure ATM there is no reason why it cannot make secure and reliable e-voting apparatus in which the public has confidence."
Yeah there is-- it's owned by Flaming Republicans...
1) the chickensh*ts
and
2) everybody else...
Frankly, if their values include it being OK to telephone you with SPAM, then they're worth voting against. Especially if they do it repeatedly. Here in California, I'm not a Republican but I wouldn't vote for Democrat Betty Karnette if you took a gun to my head. I get several spam snail-mails (about one per day in the last week), automated phone calls and this time even emails trying to argue her case and as far as I'm concerned, based solely on that she's complete scum. I'll probably vote the Libertarian ticket on that race. If it continues I may even vote Republican (gasp!) just because it's so clear to me she deserves to lose, and lose badly.
In fact it looks like I'll be voting Libertarian on most everything-- the idea that the Democrats are any better than the Republicans would be hilarious if it didn't tend to actually get them voted in by people who should know better. I'll also be voting NO on most of the funding bills, even those for good causes because it's clear the bureaucracy can't manage it's money worth s**t and it'd just be throwing good money after bad.
IMHO-- politics in the US is not just an embarrasment anymore, it's a complete catastrophe as the general populace just doesn't get it-- keeps playing the "my team's better than your team" and "my team right or wrong" that's got us dug into the immense crater we're in now-- and just keeps electing these crooks back into office year after year. Just how darn bad do things have to get before voters will learn that choosing Republican *or* Democrat on the ticket is just a recipe for another round of abuse and corruption?
"Would you like me to give you a formula for...success? It's quite simple, really. Double your rate of failure... You're thinking of failure as the enemy of success. But it isn't at all...You can be discouraged by failure - or you can learn from it. So go ahead and make mistakes. Make all you can. Because, remember that's where you'll find success. On the far side of failure."
-- Thomas J. Watson, Sr.
Who cares what the "industry" sees? The real value of a practical 3D VR system is that individuals can create their own content just like they can in the web today-- "industry" be damned.
Accusing of being in a high horse the guy that sugested that the wikipedia should also preserve things that are important to the other 6,226,726,049 people instead of just the stuff important for the 298,444,215 americans is ridiculous, a little sad and shows the side of many Americans which is most despised by the vast majority of those 6,226,726,049 non-US-citizen people - the outspoken belief that you're inherently superior, more worthy and more important than everybody else.
I didn't see anyone claim that U.S. textbooks should be preserved in lieu of non-U.S. textbooks, or that they're somehow superior-- just that textbooks are a useful resource for some people. The fact that someone immediately turned it into a cause-ce'lebre`, seems an attitude considerably more "inherently superior, worthy and more important than everybody else," IMHO...
A nice cosy little world we live in. I had thought that Wikpedia was for the world's use, but i see now that I am wrong. By the flavour of the posts above, it is very much an American resource.
Oh give me a break. Anything that doesn't have international appeal is off limits? That would disqualify most everything.
However, it appears they make quite a bit of money from selling access online, so it's doubtful it would be cost effective to acquire any of these. Often you have to pony up a significant subscription fee to have access, and not everyone can justify that for a periodic interest in researching some subject (or fixing an old piece of gear).
Then again, such things may be the main thing that will eventually keep brick-and-mortar libraries alive. I can still go into the library and check these things out if I don't want to pay for online access...
not to mention that signature based antivirus is going to die, and companies who do av/as right (don't let unknown stuff run in the first place, instead of trying to clean up after the fact) are going to eat symantec/mcafee's lunch (bit9, etc.)
As far as I'm concerned, signature based antivirus is alreadyK?i> dead. But McAfee and Symantec love it because it means subscription-based revenue. Techniques that don't require it can often only be charged for once, so never mind what techniques may actually work better.
...ube at all. No doubt they had a hand in reporting the programs and surely will not stop there. They would like to see all foreign programs barred for whatever reason simply because an eyeball glued to YouTube is NOT an eyeball glued to the major networks. If they could ban the home videos on YouTube they'd like to see that done too.
They perhaps are beginning to realize that the drop in their revenue is not so much because of media piracy, but because there's just so darn much competition that's been enabled by the internet and they're getting beat up. And unfortunately, it's not like there's just one upstart that they can buy-out and assimilate, there's millions of individual, independent content sources out there that's diluting their monopoly. Boo-hoo about that, but watch out because they've got their claws out, and I expect there are some underhanded moves in store up ahead...
The youth market is no doubt severely affected-- the draw of internet media or video games is dragging the eyeballs away from the dinosaur networks in droves and they're pretty darn scared about it-- or if they aren't, they ought to be. They certainly deserve to be...
I have a pile of MP3s ripped from CDs that I currently own, but find that I no longer even purchase CDs. I was formerly a HUGE fan of taking my music on the go...and am quite a tech gadget guy...but the RIAA and DRM in general have driven me away. I find that I just listen to the radio more now. Perhaps I am in the minority. [...]
Well, you may be in the minority but you're certainly not alone. I used to spend $100 a week on CDs, and before that LPs. I remember when the CD was first announced-- LPs were around $8, and all the scuttlebut WRT CDs was how much cheaper they were to produce. CDs came out, and they were $14-$16 ea. I've never forgotten that little screw-over. In addition, there was this tendency to re-buy LPs I had on CD for the convenience.
For the last couple of years though, I've probably bought a dozen new CDs at the most. I don't pirate not because I would feel at all guilty about it, but more because I'm pissed that risking illegal activity has become a so much better way to get music than legally buying it-- it has soured my taste in acquiring music entirely. Fortunately, I now have a relatively huge collection that I can continue to enjoy, and I do download legally free music from the internet sites that support independents such as Garage Band, etc., though the quality is often poor, I do find a gem now and then. So, I'm slowly converting all my CDs to mp3 files, and have a portable music player (Archos w/Rockbox) for on the go and a large network drive that I use for jukeboxing at home. I will never buy DRM'ed media of any kind, and if there comes a day where there is no legal media that is not DRM'ed I'll still have umpteen gig of converted CDs. Essentially, like the way we'd like to wean ourselves off of transportation dependence on oil, I've been able to wean myself off of dependence on media companies for music.
And, I'm in the process of doing something very similar for video. I spend more time watching YouTube or some other ad-free internet content now than TV (and use a very effective ad blocker for web pages), and have amassed a relatively large number of legal DVDs of content. I buy lots of budget DVDs where I find them, such as 99 cent stores and 50-movie packages (I prefer old movies for the most part anyway), and buy lots of stuff used. Eventually I'll archive all of that to hard disks as well I figure. Interestingly though, unlike music the main reason I've soured off of the other channels for picture content is not DRM at this point, but the fact that I will no longer put up with the advertising-- the lure of Cable TV in the early days was the lack of commercials, but now it is pretty common for the movie channels (especially the "classic" movie channels) to now include commercial breaks. So, I stopped my Cable TV and now almost exclusively watch DVD. By the time the new HDTV and DRMed based content comes out I'll probably have collected enough unwatched media on DVD to last me the rest of my life-- and my eyes probably won't be good enough to tell the HD difference. I will have weaned myself off of content corporations entirely, including not only the DRM but the advertising.
The lack of net neutrality may foster attempts to block independent content in favor of the majors, but that approach is ignorant of the fact that the internet is not a static entity-- it is subject to change and adaptation around such underhanded tactics to "deliver eyeballs." YouTube sprang up because people wanted a fun alternative to corporate packaged content, and if ultimately corporate interests start taking it over, inserting junk advertising or attempting to supplant it via internet anti-neutrality, some other inventive new means of sidestepping the corporate teat will crop up (though that's not to say net-neutrality legislation isn't necessarily a bad idea)...
I'm not sure it was a Vector Graphic, but something like that in the 1980s. I remember that the computer was up on a stage and there was some applause or something and a man who said "What a mind" and then a woman says "what a body." Hilarious at the time, no doubt ultra-camp now. Probably the Vector 4
The problem here is the cure is worse than the disease. It undermines the reliability of EVERYONE's email, including many innocent parties, in a pathetic, impotent, would-be-Fascist attempt to "educate" ISPs. It is an attempt to make SPAM the ISPs problem-- when it is in fact the SPAMMER who is responsible yet is relatively unaffected by this "solution". Just because all ISPs don't agree with you about the right way to deal with the problem doesn't make them rogues, and attempts to enforce the "right" solution on them makes Spamhaus far worse than the spammers in my book. Frankly, blocking their domain name is just the dose of their own medicine they deserve. Spamhaus has simply opportunistically sold some folks a bill of goods-- that their RBL technique will actually fix the spam problem. Well, it won't. It doesn't really even mitigate it-- instead merely tranforming the spam problem into a couple of differentr problems. It is snake-oil, plain and simple.
Now, Spamhaus comes along and blacklists the netblock he's in. A lot of your legitimate customers now find themselves unable to send mail. They start to complain to you. Now you're facing a business decision: do you drop the one spammer, or do you watch many of your customers leave for other ISPs that don't host spammers? Action's much more likely when the people complaining are actually your paying customers.
By doing this, Spamhaus is trading one problem for another-- trading spam off against the reliability of legitimate email. This makes them significantly part of the problem, not the solution. They translate a problem the solution of which they derive a revenue stream from, into a different problem which has no effect on their revenue stream.
A more extreme version of this technique would be to shut down the entire internet everytime anyone sent a spam message on the theory that eventually the spammers will quit because they derive no benefit from an otherwise nonexistent internet. What you are describing only differs in degree, but it essentially the same disfunctional approach to the problem.
With Microsoft, you clearly have a management who believes that producing a truly better product is too hard for them to either implement or effectively comprehend and therefore must resort to underhanded lock-in or other anticompetitive schemes. Either that, or they're simply too enamoured with creating such schemes. And in this regard Microsoft looks to be a really poor loser, though in their favor they're known to come out then winner often.
On the other hand, there's Google, whos management appears to be quite confident in their ability to innovate. They seem to encourage experimentation and freedom within the corporate culture. On the downside, it's really not very clear what their success rate is-- at this point it's too soon to tell. Working for Google might be riskier, but could be very rewarding.
Having worked in IT for about 25 years though, I would say that no matter who you choose to work for, there are a couple of things you should be aware of:
1. A company hires you because they need to fill a position, and am looking for a best-fit for that position. It is often the case that you may have far more abilities than the company you work for can readily utilize. While you might get really lucky and find an incredibly great fit, the situation may be more typical and you will find out that you have all kinds of abilities that they have either no particular use for or they may not be equipped to take effective advantage of them. While your job could be a life-long profession, and you may find a good company willing to hire you to do a job that you're well suited to do, keep in mind that you could spend much of your life underutilized because you have talents they don't know what to do with. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but idealists right of college may be picturing how they can do all this wonderful stuff for a company that they're excited about but end up appreciated for far less than that they feel they could contribute.
2. It's often the case that you get hired for one thing but by the time you walk in the door they need you for something else that has higher priority. That's not particularly a bad thing but I've had it happen to me at virtually every programming job I've ever had, so all I'm saying is don't be too surprised if that happens. In my case, every thing I ended up doing was just about as interesting so I had no problem with it.
3. Younger companies tend to be more unstructured-- often you have to invent procedures for doing things for the first time. Older companies often have their "way" of doing things that you may have to conform to. Depending on your own personality, you have to decide what makes you more comfortable-- and, that might change as you become more "seasoned".
Bias check...
Where do you draw the line-- if you say a friend that you think this businessperson is a crook, is that legal slander? What if you say it to all your friends? What if you have 100000 friends? 100M? At what exact point does your circle of friends become "in public?"
Perhaps the problem here is the fact that the internet blurs the distinction between publishing and "mere" communication.
Actually, I think perhaps Google is taking a longer term view of this-- eventually web-videos will be as ubiquitous as phone conversations. Are you stealing money from a music company if you have your stereo on in the background while you're on the phone with someone? Or if you sing along? People will not stand for the content police impeding their ability to communicate with their friends, just as they wouldn't stand for someone butting into their phone conversations and bleeping out copyrighted or trademarked phrases they may utter. The difference in the internet is only a matter of the number of "friends" one has and can talk to at once-- but the process is essentially the same.
And sure, this is at odds with a lot of things the content corporations have been taking for granted, but I think there's a good chance they're on the losing end of the argument of whether or not people are free to express themselves in public-- simply because that expression is recorded when it's on the internet is not enough excuse to block that expression, IMHO. If I walk down the street singing the latest top 40 tune, am I guilty of copyright violation? If so, is that in the spirit of the original copyright intentions and of the concept of free speech in a free country?
Except for mathematicians and programmers, most think of "random" in a *very* different way from its technical definition. To most humans, saying that a particular sequence is "random" means *guaranteeing* certain things about it. Among them: the same element does not occur back-to-back, EVER, even if there are only a few elements total to choose from.
With this sort of definition, you will probably find that "random" means something different to just about everybody. It sounds like what you want in music sequencing is something that is a little more equally distributed-- that is, all the artists are equally distributed over the total playing time of the entire shuffle sequence. Or maybe what you really want is to have all the "moods" equally distributed. Or tempo, or genre, or... To achieve that sort of thing you probably want some kind of permutation and not a complete dice-roll, with just a dice-roll to get you to the first choice in the permutation so sequential runs won't get you the exact same sequence... Still, people will then complain because every time they hear Dylan song A it's always followed by Britney Spears' song B, as that's something that they'll notice before long. That suggests a more complex form of permutation combined with a dice-roll is in order.
Randomness or apparent-randomness is not as simple as many people think. I've been programming computers for over 20 years now, and I've seen a lot of code written by programmers who clearly didn't understand randomness very well-- in the "early days" you'd be amazed at the really bad random number generators that were built into many languages. It wasn't uncommon to just walk a pointer through all of memory and pick up whatever bytes were found as a random number source, which produces really abysmal results. Also, it can make a surprising difference in the quality of the results of programs dependent on them. There's a lot of non-intuitive things that come into play almost immediately when you delve into the subject. (see This Book for some juicy ones). And while I don't consider myself an expert on the subject I have gained a respect for the complexity of seemingly simple problems in randomness-- and avoid inventing ad-hoc randomizing solutions.
One example of subtlety is the easy-to-implement "swap" method of mentioned in related threads above doesn't really give you very good shuffling if you only pass over the deck once, and gets worse the shorter the card deck is. I've always preferred sorting an array of random data along with the indices and utilizing the indicies as the shuffled deck, though that too could have some non-obvious quirks-- certainly it's very dependent on the quality of the random number generator being used.
With regards to music shuffling-- I don't think it's a very good idea in the first place, as you'll always be likely to set tunes with completely different moods against each other which will be likely to grate even if you like both tunes. It's better to take the time and manually make some good playlists, IMHO-- they don't pay radio station program directors the big bucks for nothing...
Philistines...
Wish the regular Google could do that...
Sometimes they're just deluded. To expouse a delusion that you believe to be the truth is not quite the same as lying, as the intent is different.
A more interesting test would be one that could tell if the speaker actually believes what he is saying or not, independent from the accuracy of the statement.
Once the RIAA realizes that they won't have to pay these things any royalties, cybersupergroups will be the order of the day...