Make it illegal for a company that sells it's own sotfware, from including clauses in the vein of "we aren't responsible if it breaks, and costs you money"
That immediately puts every commercial software "company", from microsoft down to the lowliest shareware author, out of business. Is that a good thing?
If they want to bundle other applications, they should charge for those apps, and include the invoice of all the apps that the consumer is paying for. All this with the option of NOT buying certain apps for the consumer. This, I think would force MS to drop the price Windows. Figure, the total bundles price is, oh say $100, with all the bundled stuff included. Start peling off the bits you don't want, what's the price then?
Your goal here is not fairness to the consumer. Don't pretend it is. You want microsoft to be forced to create a product that is so much of a pain in the ass people don't want to install it or one that won't have enough of a feature set for people to give a damn about. Honestly, if microsoft had "played nice" and stuck to selling just the base operating system I'd be typing this on a Mac and the icon next to the story would be Steve Jobs photoshopped to look like a borg. And if not them, then who? No one? Well in that world we're all using Linux and all the downtrodden microfucked software companies who you pretend to champion are STILL out of business because instead of WMP bundled, it's MPlayer or whatever the decent FREE player for Linux happens to be this week. Net gain to said companies who are getting this protection? None. They are still irrevelent.
I can imagine some base install and then a web activation (yeah I know, we all love those) where a customer picks all the apps he wants to install, have the installer say something to the effect of "all those extra apps are gonna cost $xxx enter credit card info here:"
More crap solely aimed at pissing off customers. If Microsoft did not want business they would have adopted the "RealNetworks" model of customer irritation long ago. They do, so they didn't. Sorry it pisses you off. Sorry commercial vendors do not port to your OS. But hey, even if you do manage to put MS out of business they are still not going to write for your OS. They're going to go out of business right next to MS because the fact of the matter is that you people don't like to pay for software and have proven that you'll do nearly anything to avoid doing so.
For the case of F/OSS, tack on a clause that apps where the client can obtain source, and fix it himself (or audit it before using), is not requred to be warrantied by the author.
Well it's good to see that there will still be paying jobs for software engineers. Pity they'll all be maintenance. Also a shame for joe business owner when he needs to have something fixed or added and finally realizes that even though he's been using 'free' software that the 40 hours of development work he's about to fund would have covered a years worth of closed source that most likely would have done what he wanted out of the box.
How about this as an alternative: Govenment stays the hell out of it. Seems to me that the windows monopoly is either a myth or the people who swear that unix already won the internet (bind? apache? inn? sendmail?) or the database market (oracle? db2?) are full of shit. Which is it? Does MS own the world or do they not? Methinks they don't. And with the goverment out of it if a company wants to sell a media player they had better make one worth paying the money for.
Good point, that about foriegn businesses. I've worked in three jobs where the owners were not-american and all three have had one thing in common. Two brothers in charge. One set of indians, one set of lebonese, and a set of singaporians. Seems to work pretty damned good for them.
Heh, you got me there. Never considered joining one of those things so it was not something I even considered. I guess someone needs to talk the open source people into coming up with a decent DRM scheme but for some reason I think it'd be more likely to talk dubya into making out with ashcroft sitting on lincolns lap at the memorial.
The product would also have to be worthwhile. When I see the Real logo I say "fuck it" and move on. If the quality of the software is the same across platforms I would imagine most users of said platforms would do the exact same thing.
Besides, if people do not want to lose music when switching platforms should use a format that is well supported on all platforms to begin with. Like MP3.
I'd do my best not to antagonize the everloving shit out of my customers. I'd do my best to build a better product. Maybe that's what THEY should have done.
At least with open source you still have the _option_ of hiring someone else to fix your issues.
EVERYTHING is open source to a talented developer with a disassembler. Hell, a semi-popular (if you were an OS/2 user) shareware (closed source) program I wrote had patches written for it every time I made a release. EVERY time. Granted, in all cases, save one, these patches turned off the registration check. On that other occaision, which occured after I had stopped supporting the product, a nasty bug was actually fixed.
If I develop something for pay because I need to pay the rent or have something to eat how does it suddenly become something that I need to support until the end of time?
If you choose to buy my buggy software that I released rather than that of my competitor that's your choice. Not my responsibility.
The government is tiptoeing through the laws with MS in any circumstance, so how long will it be before the next MS release has implemented functions that will (by default) play these filetypes on IE by default.
It's not much of an issue with flash (the product generally works as expected, is unobtrusive, etc) but this can't happen soon enough to quicktime. My god, what a peice of shit. It's sad, I own an iPod and can't even use iTunes because it would install quicktime and hose things up.
I can. Other browsers do infringe, but were/are safe from litigation due to the single minded hatred of MS by the nice people over at Eolas. Funny, too, because when they first published the method (Dr. Dobbs Journal First article on this page, sorry you'll have to pay to see it) they stated that the only reason for the having the patent issued was to stop someone else from doing it first and squeezing the competetion.
Re:What about Non-PCs?
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Now THAT is an interesting question that even has me a bit stumped. My guess, though, is that the cell phone company might be happy to step up and do the computation for you. For a fee, of course. They love to charge for nonsense anyway, so it'd fit their existing model to a T.
Re:Why would anyone adopt it?
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Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
By being a HUGE FUCKING COMPANY with 9X% market penetration and no problem whatsoever with giving it away for free in each and every service pack and upgrade for every peice of software they release from here until the end of time.
Duh.
PS. They'll likely make the transition easier by still offering transparent (spam laden) support for plain old SMTP. Certain hints in the Outlook/OE interfaces will coax you to begin using the new system. Also, look for MS to release a unix based (open source, too) server implementing the new protocol. Shocking I know, but it's the only chance in hell they have of getting any large ISP's agreeing to support it. Or maybe hotmail will be the only server (farm) that supports it. Either way, get ready to have a bite.
Re:My system for spam.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
And you could add some checks on your keyserver systems too -- if the same IP or subnet connects for more than, say, 1000 keys in an hour, simply refuse to reply to that address for 24 hours. .....
I could do LOTS of stuff, but i'd still just rather have someone else do it for me and at the same time do it for the majority of people I correspond with.
Re:My system for spam.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
My grandmother and all of the other clueless idiots I have the pleasure of corresponding with on a daily basis will not have the patience (or the smarts) to install something like this. What's needed here is for Microsoft to code it and get it out in a server pack and/or OS upgrade. It's then easy to use, a defacto standard, and largely transparent. Yay.
Re:Solves the wrong problem.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Because it's the recieving server that demands payment. Your choices are to allow this new mail service to store while lists for end points on the server or to have seperate channels for different sorts of mail. I like the idea of seperate channels.
One channel which is pretty much just like old SMTP (hell, maybe it IS smtp). Filter it to death, whitelist the ones you love. No charge. When a co-worker, or someone you know, but have not communicated with contacts you via email for the first time they use the next channel...
The next channel requires senders to pay computationally. Moderate filtering may be necesary, but a receiving email server can implement rules to keep out the real scum (windows zombies pumping spam) by over charging servers running inside of the userland IP blocks of big ISPs.
Our third channel would be for wanted commercial mailings. Perhaps with certificates allowing you to authenticate the sender. Any commercial entity could send you a query on this channel, but you could be set to ignore certificateless requests, or to ignore subsequent requests sent within a certain timeframe from the same certificate holder. Or block all future requests from a particular certificate holder. Or or or. Point is that your mail software would be prepared to deal with these requests, present ones which meet your criteria, and allow you to whitelist them. No charge for sending the actual messages. Amazon, your mailing list, etc, would attempt to contact you on this channel. You'd say yes, and no one has to quit sending you email.
Mail software could then aggragate all of these channels into a unified set of messages for you, making it very uncomplicated and magic seeming to the end user.
Re:Great, free built in DOS!
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Make it a psuedo-stateless service.
You want to send me a mail message with a particular guid? Ok, here is your question, come back and talk to me when you have an answer. Click. I'll just be holding on to this Guid and answer. I think routers do something similar to group together UDP packets in log files and websites can do something similar to maintain session state. All in the absense of persistant connections! By the way, looking at rfc-822 I notice that the default timeout for the reciving end on most commands if five minutes. I'm sure someone somewhere found someway to get around the problem that could cause to the existing mail infrastructure. Maybe they throttle concurrent connections from a single host? I see you work on INN. I know most ISPs have it set up to only allow a fixed number of connections from a single host. You didn't even have to use your imagination, only look to a peice of software you actively develop. Tsk. Tsk.
You get a callback, recognize the guid, and the answer is good, then you deliver the mail. Otherwise it all times out after a specified period of time.
Of course there will be more too it than this. Servers sending hundreds of thousands (or millions) of messages a day certainly dont want to make and break that many connections. Batches, ya know. These 200 users want to send emails, here's the batch. Ok, fine here are your questions. The sending server then passes these back to the clients and hangs up on them. When the client is ready it passes the message body, guid, and answer. The sending server then queues these up into batches (perhaps flushing at specified time intervals if it's a slow day) and delivers them back to the reciving server.
Tangent here but since I'm rabling like an idiot I may as well go with it..... Perhaps the message body goes with the initial request to the recv server and it calculates a score using one of them l33to beysian things and comes up with a tougher problem if the mail is extremly likely to be spam.
I think that for end users, the calculation would be done by the ISP. ISPs should accept email from their users without question anyway (with appropriate alarms to detect someone sending bulk email etc), and the ISP would then have to do another calculation when sending it to the destination anyway.
Mail servers could accept 'free' mail from each other, perhaps. ISP A and ISP B each know each others policies regarding relaying and have some faith that they are making sure customers are not abusing their respective systems. Well these two companies whitelist each others mail servers and the client is not asked to perform a calculation.
Or something slightly more restrictive. The first 100 messages per host/ip/etc coming from this trusted ISP are free. After that, they cost.
If they're coming from an unknown server perhaps the first 100 a day are free, after that it costs.
I think the biggest problem is the huge resource of worm infected computers just waiting for spammers to lauch a distributed spam run. The calculation becomes not-their-problem, it just makes it harder for legitimate email senders.
Get creative. Lets face it, the bulk of spam zombies are running on clueless windows ME users boxes. And what do clueless ME users do for an ISP? The big boys. You're a mail server hosted inside of an AOL IP block? You're giving me a 100+ digit prime for every email you even speculate thinking about sending, bitch.
The other problem is the huge difference in computational power of servers out there. There isn't much need for fp and integer math performance in a mail server currently, just a reasonable amount of I/O throughput. The difference in processing time for todays P4 and yesterdays P2 would be quite noticable.
True. The only solutions I can think of for this are akward to say the least, but I'm sure there are smarter people than me working on it.
Actually something just occured to me. If suddenly you need a fast server to send mail, there will be a lot of hardware upgrades required, which will involve a lot of software upgrades too... but maybe i'm being cynical... the latest round of spam filtering software is reasonably computationally expensive anyway.
If the server is the creator of the email, then yes, this is a problem. If it's end user generated thats where you push the cost. Perhaps what we need is a few different email-like services running in tandem. One for commercial mailings with a strictly defined opt in procedure to generate a whitelist on the end users machine. Mailing lists would also fall under this category and slimeballs would not be able to get whitelisted. One using a payment system, allowing anyone who can 'do the math' to send out emails to anywhere. Perhaps a third, completely unregulated so that those who want to handle their own spam handling can deal with it. Mail servers and clients would all have to know how to communicate over all three systems and end users could choose which they wanted to participate in. I'd likely turn off the unrestricted, and let those folks get bounce messages. Some might opt for a whitelist system on the open channel, moving folks over as they trust them.
Re:Cha ching, reloaded.
on
Gates on Spam
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· Score: 1
Perhaps design it in such a way that they connect with the destination mail server, it asks for the computation payment, and the hotmail service then passes the request along to the client for computation. Javascript (yes, I know, it would be horribly slow), Java craplet, or ActiveX control could process and then post to a page passing a token relating the answer to the email being sent. Webmail server then uses this answer to make the destination mail server happy.
Try not to look at everything Microsoft does or says going under the assumption that no one there is as (or more) clever than you.
Same here. No software related crashes. I have had 3 crashes since XP was released, though. All three have been in the last month and happen when the DVD player spends a few hours ripping non-stop until the machine (a Dell inspriron 5100) gets so hot that it shuts off. It seems to be a fairly common problem with the model. Do you think if I "upgraded" to linux and spent the time learning to use the command line tools it would aleviate the overheating problems?
Also, while I don't play any interactive 3d games I do do development work while ripping and can not notice any speed difference or UI unresponsiveness. Perhaps you're thinking about windows 95 or one of the other DOS shells MS released.
I'll even offer an example. The main computer lab at the college I attend (working on masters) is a WinXP lab. It's recently been updated. The biggest change I've noticed is to the Alt+Tab window switching. On previous editions of Windows going back to Win95 and KDE-3.x.x, holding down Alt and tapping Tab pulls up a small window that shows all the windows available to you. The window selected is the window you used previous to the one you're using now. Let go of Alt and it'll swap you to that window. This operation can be done very fast, making multitasking very efficient. In the new WinXP, some fuckup decided that it would be better if the small, lithe window were replaced with a large window with mouse clickable icons, accompanied by a miniature drawing of the default window!
Must be an option somewhere, and one that was specifcally enabled by some user of that machine because this copy of XP exhibits the same behavior as 2k and NT before it (no idea about how it worked in the dos shells). Alt+Tab brings up a little window, holding or tapping tab to cycle through the windows.
This post (and its parent), albeit humorous enough, go straight to the underlying problem with Linux at present: a wilfull disdain for the non-savvy user. "Joe Sixpack" should be embraced rather than disdained (figuratively, of course).
Indeed, but these people ARE idiots. Someone would have to pay me money to cater to the likes of them. Oh hell, they're already paying someone. Microsoft. And Microsoft, liking said money, seems to have no qualms about apeasing said users.
Slashdot Mirror
Make it illegal for a company that sells it's own sotfware, from including clauses in the vein of "we aren't responsible if it breaks, and costs you money"
That immediately puts every commercial software "company", from microsoft down to the lowliest shareware author, out of business. Is that a good thing?
If they want to bundle other applications, they should charge for those apps, and include the invoice of all the apps that the consumer is paying for. All this with the option of NOT buying certain apps for the consumer. This, I think would force MS to drop the price Windows. Figure, the total bundles price is, oh say $100, with all the bundled stuff included. Start peling off the bits you don't want, what's the price then?
Your goal here is not fairness to the consumer. Don't pretend it is. You want microsoft to be forced to create a product that is so much of a pain in the ass people don't want to install it or one that won't have enough of a feature set for people to give a damn about. Honestly, if microsoft had "played nice" and stuck to selling just the base operating system I'd be typing this on a Mac and the icon next to the story would be Steve Jobs photoshopped to look like a borg. And if not them, then who? No one? Well in that world we're all using Linux and all the downtrodden microfucked software companies who you pretend to champion are STILL out of business because instead of WMP bundled, it's MPlayer or whatever the decent FREE player for Linux happens to be this week. Net gain to said companies who are getting this protection? None. They are still irrevelent.
I can imagine some base install and then a web activation (yeah I know, we all love those) where a customer picks all the apps he wants to install, have the installer say something to the effect of "all those extra apps are gonna cost $xxx enter credit card info here:"
More crap solely aimed at pissing off customers. If Microsoft did not want business they would have adopted the "RealNetworks" model of customer irritation long ago. They do, so they didn't. Sorry it pisses you off. Sorry commercial vendors do not port to your OS. But hey, even if you do manage to put MS out of business they are still not going to write for your OS. They're going to go out of business right next to MS because the fact of the matter is that you people don't like to pay for software and have proven that you'll do nearly anything to avoid doing so.
For the case of F/OSS, tack on a clause that apps where the client can obtain source, and fix it himself (or audit it before using), is not requred to be warrantied by the author.
Well it's good to see that there will still be paying jobs for software engineers. Pity they'll all be maintenance. Also a shame for joe business owner when he needs to have something fixed or added and finally realizes that even though he's been using 'free' software that the 40 hours of development work he's about to fund would have covered a years worth of closed source that most likely would have done what he wanted out of the box.
How about this as an alternative: Govenment stays the hell out of it. Seems to me that the windows monopoly is either a myth or the people who swear that unix already won the internet (bind? apache? inn? sendmail?) or the database market (oracle? db2?) are full of shit. Which is it? Does MS own the world or do they not? Methinks they don't. And with the goverment out of it if a company wants to sell a media player they had better make one worth paying the money for.
Good point, that about foriegn businesses. I've worked in three jobs where the owners were not-american and all three have had one thing in common. Two brothers in charge. One set of indians, one set of lebonese, and a set of singaporians. Seems to work pretty damned good for them.
Heh, you got me there. Never considered joining one of those things so it was not something I even considered. I guess someone needs to talk the open source people into coming up with a decent DRM scheme but for some reason I think it'd be more likely to talk dubya into making out with ashcroft sitting on lincolns lap at the memorial.
The product would also have to be worthwhile. When I see the Real logo I say "fuck it" and move on. If the quality of the software is the same across platforms I would imagine most users of said platforms would do the exact same thing.
Besides, if people do not want to lose music when switching platforms should use a format that is well supported on all platforms to begin with. Like MP3.
I'd do my best not to antagonize the everloving shit out of my customers. I'd do my best to build a better product. Maybe that's what THEY should have done.
At least with open source you still have the _option_ of hiring someone else to fix your issues.
EVERYTHING is open source to a talented developer with a disassembler. Hell, a semi-popular (if you were an OS/2 user) shareware (closed source) program I wrote had patches written for it every time I made a release. EVERY time. Granted, in all cases, save one, these patches turned off the registration check. On that other occaision, which occured after I had stopped supporting the product, a nasty bug was actually fixed.
If I develop something for pay because I need to pay the rent or have something to eat how does it suddenly become something that I need to support until the end of time?
If you choose to buy my buggy software that I released rather than that of my competitor that's your choice. Not my responsibility.
Really... we'd like to know what motivates black hats, because we'd like to find a way to get them to play on the white team.
Desire to compete coupled with a strong fear of rejection. All you have to do to 'win' is be hated.
Quicktime is crippled. Crippled by its developers, whose skill levels seem to be at or below that of first year students. First year of high school.
The government is tiptoeing through the laws with MS in any circumstance, so how long will it be before the next MS release has implemented functions that will (by default) play these filetypes on IE by default.
It's not much of an issue with flash (the product generally works as expected, is unobtrusive, etc) but this can't happen soon enough to quicktime. My god, what a peice of shit. It's sad, I own an iPod and can't even use iTunes because it would install quicktime and hose things up.
I can. Other browsers do infringe, but were/are safe from litigation due to the single minded hatred of MS by the nice people over at Eolas. Funny, too, because when they first published the method (Dr. Dobbs Journal First article on this page, sorry you'll have to pay to see it) they stated that the only reason for the having the patent issued was to stop someone else from doing it first and squeezing the competetion.
Now THAT is an interesting question that even has me a bit stumped. My guess, though, is that the cell phone company might be happy to step up and do the computation for you. For a fee, of course. They love to charge for nonsense anyway, so it'd fit their existing model to a T.
By being a HUGE FUCKING COMPANY with 9X% market penetration and no problem whatsoever with giving it away for free in each and every service pack and upgrade for every peice of software they release from here until the end of time.
Duh.
PS. They'll likely make the transition easier by still offering transparent (spam laden) support for plain old SMTP. Certain hints in the Outlook/OE interfaces will coax you to begin using the new system. Also, look for MS to release a unix based (open source, too) server implementing the new protocol. Shocking I know, but it's the only chance in hell they have of getting any large ISP's agreeing to support it. Or maybe hotmail will be the only server (farm) that supports it. Either way, get ready to have a bite.
And you could add some checks on your keyserver systems too -- if the same IP or subnet connects for more than, say, 1000 keys in an hour, simply refuse to reply to that address for 24 hours.
.....
I could do LOTS of stuff, but i'd still just rather have someone else do it for me and at the same time do it for the majority of people I correspond with.
My grandmother and all of the other clueless idiots I have the pleasure of corresponding with on a daily basis will not have the patience (or the smarts) to install something like this. What's needed here is for Microsoft to code it and get it out in a server pack and/or OS upgrade. It's then easy to use, a defacto standard, and largely transparent. Yay.
Because it's the recieving server that demands payment. Your choices are to allow this new mail service to store while lists for end points on the server or to have seperate channels for different sorts of mail. I like the idea of seperate channels.
One channel which is pretty much just like old SMTP (hell, maybe it IS smtp). Filter it to death, whitelist the ones you love. No charge. When a co-worker, or someone you know, but have not communicated with contacts you via email for the first time they use the next channel...
The next channel requires senders to pay computationally. Moderate filtering may be necesary, but a receiving email server can implement rules to keep out the real scum (windows zombies pumping spam) by over charging servers running inside of the userland IP blocks of big ISPs.
Our third channel would be for wanted commercial mailings. Perhaps with certificates allowing you to authenticate the sender. Any commercial entity could send you a query on this channel, but you could be set to ignore certificateless requests, or to ignore subsequent requests sent within a certain timeframe from the same certificate holder. Or block all future requests from a particular certificate holder. Or or or. Point is that your mail software would be prepared to deal with these requests, present ones which meet your criteria, and allow you to whitelist them. No charge for sending the actual messages. Amazon, your mailing list, etc, would attempt to contact you on this channel. You'd say yes, and no one has to quit sending you email.
Mail software could then aggragate all of these channels into a unified set of messages for you, making it very uncomplicated and magic seeming to the end user.
Make it a psuedo-stateless service.
You want to send me a mail message with a particular guid? Ok, here is your question, come back and talk to me when you have an answer. Click. I'll just be holding on to this Guid and answer. I think routers do something similar to group together UDP packets in log files and websites can do something similar to maintain session state. All in the absense of persistant connections! By the way, looking at rfc-822 I notice that the default timeout for the reciving end on most commands if five minutes. I'm sure someone somewhere found someway to get around the problem that could cause to the existing mail infrastructure. Maybe they throttle concurrent connections from a single host? I see you work on INN. I know most ISPs have it set up to only allow a fixed number of connections from a single host. You didn't even have to use your imagination, only look to a peice of software you actively develop. Tsk. Tsk.
You get a callback, recognize the guid, and the answer is good, then you deliver the mail. Otherwise it all times out after a specified period of time.
Of course there will be more too it than this. Servers sending hundreds of thousands (or millions) of messages a day certainly dont want to make and break that many connections. Batches, ya know. These 200 users want to send emails, here's the batch. Ok, fine here are your questions. The sending server then passes these back to the clients and hangs up on them. When the client is ready it passes the message body, guid, and answer. The sending server then queues these up into batches (perhaps flushing at specified time intervals if it's a slow day) and delivers them back to the reciving server.
Tangent here but since I'm rabling like an idiot I may as well go with it..... Perhaps the message body goes with the initial request to the recv server and it calculates a score using one of them l33to beysian things and comes up with a tougher problem if the mail is extremly likely to be spam.
I think that for end users, the calculation would be done by the ISP. ISPs should accept email from their users without question anyway (with appropriate alarms to detect someone sending bulk email etc), and the ISP would then have to do another calculation when sending it to the destination anyway.
Mail servers could accept 'free' mail from each other, perhaps. ISP A and ISP B each know each others policies regarding relaying and have some faith that they are making sure customers are not abusing their respective systems. Well these two companies whitelist each others mail servers and the client is not asked to perform a calculation.
Or something slightly more restrictive. The first 100 messages per host/ip/etc coming from this trusted ISP are free. After that, they cost.
If they're coming from an unknown server perhaps the first 100 a day are free, after that it costs.
I think the biggest problem is the huge resource of worm infected computers just waiting for spammers to lauch a distributed spam run. The calculation becomes not-their-problem, it just makes it harder for legitimate email senders.
Get creative. Lets face it, the bulk of spam zombies are running on clueless windows ME users boxes. And what do clueless ME users do for an ISP? The big boys. You're a mail server hosted inside of an AOL IP block? You're giving me a 100+ digit prime for every email you even speculate thinking about sending, bitch.
The other problem is the huge difference in computational power of servers out there. There isn't much need for fp and integer math performance in a mail server currently, just a reasonable amount of I/O throughput. The difference in processing time for todays P4 and yesterdays P2 would be quite noticable.
True. The only solutions I can think of for this are akward to say the least, but I'm sure there are smarter people than me working on it.
Actually something just occured to me. If suddenly you need a fast server to send mail, there will be a lot of hardware upgrades required, which will involve a lot of software upgrades too... but maybe i'm being cynical... the latest round of spam filtering software is reasonably computationally expensive anyway.
If the server is the creator of the email, then yes, this is a problem. If it's end user generated thats where you push the cost. Perhaps what we need is a few different email-like services running in tandem. One for commercial mailings with a strictly defined opt in procedure to generate a whitelist on the end users machine. Mailing lists would also fall under this category and slimeballs would not be able to get whitelisted. One using a payment system, allowing anyone who can 'do the math' to send out emails to anywhere. Perhaps a third, completely unregulated so that those who want to handle their own spam handling can deal with it. Mail servers and clients would all have to know how to communicate over all three systems and end users could choose which they wanted to participate in. I'd likely turn off the unrestricted, and let those folks get bounce messages. Some might opt for a whitelist system on the open channel, moving folks over as they trust them.
Perhaps design it in such a way that they connect with the destination mail server, it asks for the computation payment, and the hotmail service then passes the request along to the client for computation. Javascript (yes, I know, it would be horribly slow), Java craplet, or ActiveX control could process and then post to a page passing a token relating the answer to the email being sent. Webmail server then uses this answer to make the destination mail server happy.
Try not to look at everything Microsoft does or says going under the assumption that no one there is as (or more) clever than you.
Same here. No software related crashes. I have had 3 crashes since XP was released, though. All three have been in the last month and happen when the DVD player spends a few hours ripping non-stop until the machine (a Dell inspriron 5100) gets so hot that it shuts off. It seems to be a fairly common problem with the model. Do you think if I "upgraded" to linux and spent the time learning to use the command line tools it would aleviate the overheating problems?
Also, while I don't play any interactive 3d games I do do development work while ripping and can not notice any speed difference or UI unresponsiveness. Perhaps you're thinking about windows 95 or one of the other DOS shells MS released.
What's a kernal?[1]
It's what's left over after I microwave a bag of orville redenbaker to munch on while I watch the movie I just burned.
I guess the person who modded me up didn't realize that the scenario I described above is using Dvd Shrink + Nero + Windows.
HINT: You can post on this thread to kill the points.
Not much for current events, are you?
I'll even offer an example. The main computer lab at the college I attend (working on masters) is a WinXP lab. It's recently been updated. The biggest change I've noticed is to the Alt+Tab window switching. On previous editions of Windows going back to Win95 and KDE-3.x.x, holding down Alt and tapping Tab pulls up a small window that shows all the windows available to you. The window selected is the window you used previous to the one you're using now. Let go of Alt and it'll swap you to that window. This operation can be done very fast, making multitasking very efficient. In the new WinXP, some fuckup decided that it would be better if the small, lithe window were replaced with a large window with mouse clickable icons, accompanied by a miniature drawing of the default window!
Must be an option somewhere, and one that was specifcally enabled by some user of that machine because this copy of XP exhibits the same behavior as 2k and NT before it (no idea about how it worked in the dos shells). Alt+Tab brings up a little window, holding or tapping tab to cycle through the windows.
This post (and its parent), albeit humorous enough, go straight to the underlying problem with Linux at present: a wilfull disdain for the non-savvy user. "Joe Sixpack" should be embraced rather than disdained (figuratively, of course).
Indeed, but these people ARE idiots. Someone would have to pay me money to cater to the likes of them. Oh hell, they're already paying someone. Microsoft. And Microsoft, liking said money, seems to have no qualms about apeasing said users.