Not all email marketing is spam. I get regular emails from a mail order company, advertising their wares. I get them because I asked for them, and occasionally buy something. That's not spam. Spam is unsolicicted commercial email.
There were things that were worse, such as IE 5. If the instalation failed at just the wrong time, the user would reboot to a blank desktop. No taskbar, no icons, nothing. As our ISP software installed it, we were responsible for fixing it. Much worse.
I had a DataLink too. I used it until one of the posts holding the strap in place broke, and there's no way to fix it. What did I replace it with? Another DataLink. It's a good watch, carries the phone numbers I need most, and does what I want, the way I want it done. Major geek value. Giving it a Dishonerable Mention was just a cheap shot.
Unlike the article, you got one thing very wrong: it's not "Windows ME," it's "Windows Me." Having done tech support for Win 95, 98, 2k and XP, the one I always hated the most was Me. Win 98 (especially SE) was what 95 would have been if Nanolimp had known in 95 what they'd learned in the next three years. Me was a great big step backwards, taking much of the good things they'd added back out and replacing it with junk that made life harder. Win 98 has, as an example, scanreg, to help keep your registry clean and restore an earlier version at need eaisly and efficiently. It's not in Me. Most of the other new things are just semantic quibbles, such as changing the names of menu items without changing their functunality. It was, and remains, a pain in the fundiment to support, partially because you need to remember a pointlessly different terminology just to be able to tell the users what to click on, and extra steps to do important (to tech support) things like replacing files from the.cab files. Even when it was new, I'd never have reccomended it to anybody, even my worst enemy.
Don't try to construct too many "if" sentences, since they'll be brushed away with "won't happen, don't care" too easily, even if that "if" does actually mean "when".
In that case, if you mean "when that happens..." write it that way. Don't say "if" because they'll think it will never happen. "When" tells them it will happen, sooner or later. Say what you mean, not almost what you mean.
I don't know if it's still true, but at one time, all the franchises had special menus for NYC with higher prices. Between rents, unions and taxes, the cost of doing business there were so high they couldn't do otherwise and make a profit. Not only that, but during and after the time I heard about that (from an accountant who had clients with multiple franchises) I was seeing documentaries about how parts of the NYC infrastructure were falling apart and nobody was doing anything about it. Things like bridge abutments crumbling from salt air, streets that hadn't been resurfaced in decades, shutoff valves in the water system that hadn't been tested in so long they were almost certainly frozen and so on. If I weren't such a cynic, I'd wonder how all that tax money was being spent.
but the whole thing about not upgrading your hardware was pretty dumb. Don't tell me not to upgrade my hardware.
I think you misunderstood. There's no reason not to upgrade your hardware if you want to, and every reason why you should. However, you shouldn't be forced to upgrade simply because some game won't run properly unless you have the Latest And Greatest of everything. If game deveopers want the biggest market possible, write so that your product will run acceptably on whatever is mainstream at the time. Let them have features that need the best hardware, but don't make it a minimum requirement.
There's one game I play that needs a fairly advanced graphics card to get the best out of it, but there are options to turn off features as needed until it's down to whatever you have can handle. Most of them are simply eye candy anyway. The core of the game is fully functional with none of them enabled. That's the right way to do it, and that's how it should be. The game is FOSS, so the developers aren't getting anything except egoboo from it, but they're still writing for as many people as possible. Why can't commercial developers be as considerate?
That regional accent will have to be Chuck Norris (yes, he has his own region).
I'd prefer a Leonard, from Redneck Rampage. The idea is that if some backwoods country boy who thinks a crossbow with dynamite duct-taped to the quarrels is high-tech can spot what's happening it must be important.
However, I think that it also underlines a serious flaw in the Windows security model. Almost everybody runs with administrator privileges because too many things just don't work otherwise.
I'm no Micro$oft fanboi, but don't blame Bill the Gates for this. Blame lazy deveopers who can't be bothered to Do It Right. They run their bleeding edge machines as Admin and never test to see if their bloatware will run any other way. Not only that, they write programs that need every bit of RAM, every CPU cycle and every possible bit of graphics they have so that when they're finished, you have a program that can only be run on a maxed-out machine as Admin. Last, they look down their noses at you if you complain because you're "too cheap" to buy the hardware needed for their precious program. They don't understand that saying, "It works on my machine!" doesn't cut it if the average user can't afford to match their hardware or wants to keep their copmuter safe by not running as Admin.
My advice is, just say NO to programs requiring Admin and never, under any circumstances, upgrade your hardware just to play the newest game. I'm not a Libratarian, but if enough people follow my advice, the market will, indeed, take care of it.
And if they decide to transfer data to some other country how are they going to achieve that.. is data transfer on Internet feasible for 30 TB per night of data ?
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway.
They have to conserve and go slow precisely because they are not given the funding, resources, or payload size that the human missions are.
Wrong. They have to conserve fuel because there's no way to send them more. They go slowly because they have to wait for their data to reach Earth. Then, the data has to be evaluated, decisions made as to what to do next, the new instructions programmed and sent back. All this takes time because a robot can't react to something its designers didn't expect and exploration is nothing more than looking for the unexpected. One human can do more exploration than a fleet of robots simply because the human has initiative and the ability to change its own plans as needed without waiting for instructions.
How is this going to stop patent trolls? Granted, they'll have more trouble finding bogus patents, but that's not all they do. Patent trolls also buy up valid patents that haven't been marketed yet and either sue whoever tries to implement the idea (not knowing about the patent) or charge extortionate royalties. All this will do is cut down on the crap patents for them to feed off of, it won't stop them.
I used the template because it came reasonably close to what I wanted to say.
Second, reputable mailing lists don't send attachments. They are accompanied by a server containing the documents they wish to reference. Other email users can be allowed to pass documents on a server share.
Many reputable mailing lists do, in fact, allow attachments. The other points are my opinion of the idea and you're free to disagree if you wish. I'm not really interested in arguing about it, because neither of us will ever prove our side to the other's satisfaction. Thank you, however, for bringing up your points in such a rational way; so many/. posters would have flamed me about it.
approach to fighting spam, worms and virusus. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected ( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (x) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists ( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (x) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email (x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches ( ) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (x) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering (x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks (x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. (x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
The one thing they never expected
on
Back to the Moon
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've read quite a few stories and books from the '30s, '40s and '50s about first trips to the Moon. Some of them are well thought out and tried to get everything right. All of them had their own take on it and tried to predict something nobody had ever mentioned before. The one thing they never predicted is that after a handful of trips we'd turn our back on the Moon for over forty years, but that's what actually happened.
Jerry Pournelle likes to say that he always hoped he'd live to see the first trip to the Moon, but he never expected to see the last one. It's about time we started exploring the Universe again!
Buckaroo Banzai? Oh, please! He's just a pale imitation of a real action hero like Doc Savage, with all the charisma of a dead fish. Doc Savage was a scientist, inventor, adventurer and detective as well as a brilliant surgeon. Not only that, he really did have charisma.
In a perfect world, you'd probably be right. Alas, this isn't a perfect world, it never will be and what would work in a perfect world is irrrelevant. Just because using a screen reader in a GUI is slower than using a program designed for the blind would be is no reason not to use it until and unless such a program is, in fact, written. Currently, using a screen reader is considerably faster than sitting there with folded hands waiting until somebody designs, codes, debugs and distrubutes a perfect program for you. If you're so deturmined that all blind people should be able to use programs designed for them, why don't you write them?
Writing a new, specialized word processor and getting all the needed features in it would take years. What are blind people supposed to do in the mean time? And once you've written a word procesor, you'll need a spread sheet, a database, etcetera, etectrea, etcetera. Isn't it easier just to make what we already have work with the screen readers we already have? What you don't seem to understand is that most blind people don't want special programs, they want a way to work with what's already there. Unlike you, they know that special programs just marginalize them even further.
Why have the dialog pop up at all? That's just stupid. It's slower that way.
Because the programs weren't written for blind people anymore than Windows was. The screen reader doesn't change that, it just reads off whatever the program displays.
Yes, a GUI isn't exactly the right thing for the blind, but considering that almost every program in use today uses one, what are the blind supposed to do? Not use computers because the interface isn't convenient?
I take it, then, that you have no experience with them. When I did tech support for a major ISP, our call center had a small number of computers reserved for blind techs only, so that nobody messed with the screen readers. They worked fine, and the techs that needed them were able to use their computers just as well as the rest of us. If a dialog came up, they were able to hear what it said, just like they could hear what they'd written, or the other responses from the computer. As long as nobody messed with the software, they were just as productive as anybody else, and handled just as many calls per day.
Like you, I never cared for diet soda. Then I developed Type II diabetes and had no choice. I soon learned to love Hansen's diet sodas. All Handen's sodas use all natural flavorings and no coloring. The diet ones all use Splendra for sweetining, and that's my preferred non-sugar. They have a great taste and zero calories. Alas, they also don't use caffine, but you can't always have everything. If you have to drink a diet soda, I reccoemend theirs. If you don't need a diet soda, try their regular mixtures, they're just as good.
And with all the features they've had to pull from it, there is no reason to update to it...
How true. Of course, I've yet to see a feature they've left in that would make me want to upgrade so the featurectomies haven't changed my mind. I'm already dual-booting into Linux, and if there's anything I can't run under Win98SE, there's always Wine.
I did tech support once for a small company. Their product had what should have been an excellent manual. It was well-written, carefully editied and highly accurate. Alas, it was written for other techs, not for the clerks and managers that made up their customer base. At least a third of our tech calls were from people who couldn't understand the manual because it wasn't written for them. Whenever possible, we were expected to fax or email "faqs" on various topics, but most of them were simply quotes from the manual, and didn't do one bit of good.
Proofreading is sometimes more important that the initial writing.
Proofreading doesn't mean running it through a spelling checker and maybe a grammar checker. It means reading the material and making sure that every word is the one you wanted. Spelling checkers don't know that you typed "their" when you needed "there," and grammar checkers only know the most simple forms of syntax; once you've learned the basics, they're almost useless. Not only that, neither can tell you when the word you've used doesn't mean quite what you need, and as Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and a word that's almost right is like the difference between a fire and a firefly."
I have been privy to a few discussions about "problem" employees. A few times it was mentioned that they found the employee's resume online. My question has always been, if we are allowed to post job listings then why are we not allowing our employees to do similar?
If I were in such a discussion, and somebody mentioned finding the subject's resume on line, my response would be, "Well, we might not have a problem much longer."
Slashdot Mirror
Not all email marketing is spam. I get regular emails from a mail order company, advertising their wares. I get them because I asked for them, and occasionally buy something. That's not spam. Spam is unsolicicted commercial email.
No it wasn't, and don't call me Shirley.
There were things that were worse, such as IE 5. If the instalation failed at just the wrong time, the user would reboot to a blank desktop. No taskbar, no icons, nothing. As our ISP software installed it, we were responsible for fixing it. Much worse.
I had a DataLink too. I used it until one of the posts holding the strap in place broke, and there's no way to fix it. What did I replace it with? Another DataLink. It's a good watch, carries the phone numbers I need most, and does what I want, the way I want it done. Major geek value. Giving it a Dishonerable Mention was just a cheap shot.
Unlike the article, you got one thing very wrong: it's not "Windows ME," it's "Windows Me." Having done tech support for Win 95, 98, 2k and XP, the one I always hated the most was Me. Win 98 (especially SE) was what 95 would have been if Nanolimp had known in 95 what they'd learned in the next three years. Me was a great big step backwards, taking much of the good things they'd added back out and replacing it with junk that made life harder. Win 98 has, as an example, scanreg, to help keep your registry clean and restore an earlier version at need eaisly and efficiently. It's not in Me. Most of the other new things are just semantic quibbles, such as changing the names of menu items without changing their functunality. It was, and remains, a pain in the fundiment to support, partially because you need to remember a pointlessly different terminology just to be able to tell the users what to click on, and extra steps to do important (to tech support) things like replacing files from the .cab files. Even when it was new, I'd never have reccomended it to anybody, even my worst enemy.
In that case, if you mean "when that happens..." write it that way. Don't say "if" because they'll think it will never happen. "When" tells them it will happen, sooner or later. Say what you mean, not almost what you mean.
I don't know if it's still true, but at one time, all the franchises had special menus for NYC with higher prices. Between rents, unions and taxes, the cost of doing business there were so high they couldn't do otherwise and make a profit. Not only that, but during and after the time I heard about that (from an accountant who had clients with multiple franchises) I was seeing documentaries about how parts of the NYC infrastructure were falling apart and nobody was doing anything about it. Things like bridge abutments crumbling from salt air, streets that hadn't been resurfaced in decades, shutoff valves in the water system that hadn't been tested in so long they were almost certainly frozen and so on. If I weren't such a cynic, I'd wonder how all that tax money was being spent.
I think you misunderstood. There's no reason not to upgrade your hardware if you want to, and every reason why you should. However, you shouldn't be forced to upgrade simply because some game won't run properly unless you have the Latest And Greatest of everything. If game deveopers want the biggest market possible, write so that your product will run acceptably on whatever is mainstream at the time. Let them have features that need the best hardware, but don't make it a minimum requirement.
There's one game I play that needs a fairly advanced graphics card to get the best out of it, but there are options to turn off features as needed until it's down to whatever you have can handle. Most of them are simply eye candy anyway. The core of the game is fully functional with none of them enabled. That's the right way to do it, and that's how it should be. The game is FOSS, so the developers aren't getting anything except egoboo from it, but they're still writing for as many people as possible. Why can't commercial developers be as considerate?
I'd prefer a Leonard, from Redneck Rampage. The idea is that if some backwoods country boy who thinks a crossbow with dynamite duct-taped to the quarrels is high-tech can spot what's happening it must be important.
I'm no Micro$oft fanboi, but don't blame Bill the Gates for this. Blame lazy deveopers who can't be bothered to Do It Right. They run their bleeding edge machines as Admin and never test to see if their bloatware will run any other way. Not only that, they write programs that need every bit of RAM, every CPU cycle and every possible bit of graphics they have so that when they're finished, you have a program that can only be run on a maxed-out machine as Admin. Last, they look down their noses at you if you complain because you're "too cheap" to buy the hardware needed for their precious program. They don't understand that saying, "It works on my machine!" doesn't cut it if the average user can't afford to match their hardware or wants to keep their copmuter safe by not running as Admin.
My advice is, just say NO to programs requiring Admin and never, under any circumstances, upgrade your hardware just to play the newest game. I'm not a Libratarian, but if enough people follow my advice, the market will, indeed, take care of it.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of magnetic tapes hurtling down the highway.
Wrong. They have to conserve fuel because there's no way to send them more. They go slowly because they have to wait for their data to reach Earth. Then, the data has to be evaluated, decisions made as to what to do next, the new instructions programmed and sent back. All this takes time because a robot can't react to something its designers didn't expect and exploration is nothing more than looking for the unexpected. One human can do more exploration than a fleet of robots simply because the human has initiative and the ability to change its own plans as needed without waiting for instructions.
How is this going to stop patent trolls? Granted, they'll have more trouble finding bogus patents, but that's not all they do. Patent trolls also buy up valid patents that haven't been marketed yet and either sue whoever tries to implement the idea (not knowing about the patent) or charge extortionate royalties. All this will do is cut down on the crap patents for them to feed off of, it won't stop them.
Second, reputable mailing lists don't send attachments. They are accompanied by a server containing the documents they wish to reference. Other email users can be allowed to pass documents on a server share.
Many reputable mailing lists do, in fact, allow attachments. The other points are my opinion of the idea and you're free to disagree if you wish. I'm not really interested in arguing about it, because neither of us will ever prove our side to the other's satisfaction. Thank you, however, for bringing up your points in such a rational way; so many /. posters would have flamed me about it.
Disable attachments.
This article advocates a
(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (x) vigilante
approach to fighting spam, worms and virusus. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may
have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal
law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(x) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(x) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential
employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
(x) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been
shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
(x) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
Jerry Pournelle likes to say that he always hoped he'd live to see the first trip to the Moon, but he never expected to see the last one. It's about time we started exploring the Universe again!
Buckaroo Banzai? Oh, please! He's just a pale imitation of a real action hero like Doc Savage, with all the charisma of a dead fish. Doc Savage was a scientist, inventor, adventurer and detective as well as a brilliant surgeon. Not only that, he really did have charisma.
In a perfect world, you'd probably be right. Alas, this isn't a perfect world, it never will be and what would work in a perfect world is irrrelevant. Just because using a screen reader in a GUI is slower than using a program designed for the blind would be is no reason not to use it until and unless such a program is, in fact, written. Currently, using a screen reader is considerably faster than sitting there with folded hands waiting until somebody designs, codes, debugs and distrubutes a perfect program for you. If you're so deturmined that all blind people should be able to use programs designed for them, why don't you write them?
Writing a new, specialized word processor and getting all the needed features in it would take years. What are blind people supposed to do in the mean time? And once you've written a word procesor, you'll need a spread sheet, a database, etcetera, etectrea, etcetera. Isn't it easier just to make what we already have work with the screen readers we already have? What you don't seem to understand is that most blind people don't want special programs, they want a way to work with what's already there. Unlike you, they know that special programs just marginalize them even further.
Because the programs weren't written for blind people anymore than Windows was. The screen reader doesn't change that, it just reads off whatever the program displays.
Yes, a GUI isn't exactly the right thing for the blind, but considering that almost every program in use today uses one, what are the blind supposed to do? Not use computers because the interface isn't convenient?
I take it, then, that you have no experience with them. When I did tech support for a major ISP, our call center had a small number of computers reserved for blind techs only, so that nobody messed with the screen readers. They worked fine, and the techs that needed them were able to use their computers just as well as the rest of us. If a dialog came up, they were able to hear what it said, just like they could hear what they'd written, or the other responses from the computer. As long as nobody messed with the software, they were just as productive as anybody else, and handled just as many calls per day.
Like you, I never cared for diet soda. Then I developed Type II diabetes and had no choice. I soon learned to love Hansen's diet sodas. All Handen's sodas use all natural flavorings and no coloring. The diet ones all use Splendra for sweetining, and that's my preferred non-sugar. They have a great taste and zero calories. Alas, they also don't use caffine, but you can't always have everything. If you have to drink a diet soda, I reccoemend theirs. If you don't need a diet soda, try their regular mixtures, they're just as good.
How true. Of course, I've yet to see a feature they've left in that would make me want to upgrade so the featurectomies haven't changed my mind. I'm already dual-booting into Linux, and if there's anything I can't run under Win98SE, there's always Wine.
I did tech support once for a small company. Their product had what should have been an excellent manual. It was well-written, carefully editied and highly accurate. Alas, it was written for other techs, not for the clerks and managers that made up their customer base. At least a third of our tech calls were from people who couldn't understand the manual because it wasn't written for them. Whenever possible, we were expected to fax or email "faqs" on various topics, but most of them were simply quotes from the manual, and didn't do one bit of good.
Proofreading is sometimes more important that the initial writing.
Proofreading doesn't mean running it through a spelling checker and maybe a grammar checker. It means reading the material and making sure that every word is the one you wanted. Spelling checkers don't know that you typed "their" when you needed "there," and grammar checkers only know the most simple forms of syntax; once you've learned the basics, they're almost useless. Not only that, neither can tell you when the word you've used doesn't mean quite what you need, and as Mark Twain said, "The difference between the right word and a word that's almost right is like the difference between a fire and a firefly."
If I were in such a discussion, and somebody mentioned finding the subject's resume on line, my response would be, "Well, we might not have a problem much longer."
If that ever happened to my references, I'd be ROTFLMAO. One of them is a well-known computer columnist...