The guy that wrote the article against Open Source wasn't a professor - he was the "Manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach". In other words, he was IT staff rather than someone from the CS department. The original story is here.
It's sad but true that a lot of the legitimate businesses that use spammers don't even realise that they're doing something wrong. When they're after business, the spammers don't tell them that they're using dictionary attacks and harvesting addresses from web pages. They'll pull the same "opt in" crap that they do to everyone else, and say that everyone on their mailing list of 5 million customers has agreed to receive advertising.
A lot of the people that hire "bulk e-mail advertisers" to market their business have no idea that they're spamming until people start to complain.
The problem you describe is a direct result of the high DVD prices in Japan. The only people who will spend $50 for one or two episodes are the obsessive fans, so the market becomes polarised towards these people. And, as more and more anime is aimed at Otaku, it gets less and less palletable to the average person, so the effect is self-reinforcing.
As a result, most of the anime produced today is either "one loser guy surrounded by loads of beautiful girls, all of whom love him", or "scantily clad women fighting monsters-of-the-week, with gratuitous cleavage and panty shots".
Re:Well... It's up to us... again.
on
Browser Wars Mark II
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· Score: 5, Insightful
We shouldn't allow Microsoft to take over the net. When doctoring your none-geeks friends machine, simply remove all MS-conspiracy related trash you can find
Have you ever tried removing something from someone's machine? They complain enough if you get rid of their Bonzi Buddy or Comet Cursor, let alone their browser.
Seriously though, removing their programs is not the way to go, and will just make people annoyed. The reaction you get if you introduce them to Firefox or Opera as a 'cool new browser' is totally different to what you get for lecturing them with your tinfoil hat on. If you give people a better alternative, they will (probably) use it, but if you try to preach about W3C standards they'll just ignore you.
Re:I'm with linus torvalds on this one
on
Browser Wars Mark II
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· Score: 5, Insightful
[Flash sites] are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
So what? The fact is, people use them, and it's a lot more convenient for them to load up in your browser window than to have to load a new program just to browse a site that someone has written in Flash. The most important thing about a browser to most people isn't stability or even features - it's convenience. If you had to load up a seperate program to see a movie trailer or listen to a song sample, it would annoy people to the extent that most of them wouldn't want to use your browser.
But it doesn't work. If you're not logged in it sends you to the login page, and if you're logged in with an account that didn't get invited the address redirects you to http://blogspot.com/home.pyra.
Google Webquotes is one of Google Labs' projects; to quote the blurb it "annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites. This offers a convenient way to get a third party's opinion about each of the returns for your search, providing you with more information about that site's credibility and reputation."
Sad to say, the news isn't good. Check out this forum thread for a comprehensive bashing.
Although, reading it again, I don't agree that "He's saying that the leaked code is the same as the code in their version control system". He's just saying that Microsoft's own copy hasn't been tampered with.
According to a report on ITVibe, Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive and President of Microsoft has said in a statement:
"I can assure you that we know there has been no compromise of the integrity of the source code; that it has not been modified or tampered with in any way."
Quoting directly from the article,
"Any charges for the use of these standards are going to lead to
fragmentation, delay in deployment, and in effect a lack of
standardization. In particular, those users who depend upon
multi-lingual or non-English language services will suffer."
People using their own standards is what the author was concerned about. Old software won't recognise the language "deutch" or "english-usa".
"Permanant" means nothing in this context. No government can bind its sucessors, especially with a law like this. The next time the Democrats get in, if they're looking for some extra revenue, it will be easy for them to just repeal this law and start charging Broadband Tax. Or even Bush himself, when it finally dawns on him just how much money he's losing.
>>Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere
They're hardly doing anything about the flood of spam coming from China - only six percent of the blocked servers are in their own country. It smells to me like just another excersise in Taiwan-bashing.
It doesn't much matter what you can do with an inkjet printer. You won't get anywhere close to what is being done professionally, in mass production.
That might be the case now, but that's what they said about CD writers in personal computers. Printer quality is going to get higher and higher over the next five or ten years, and they're right to try to tackle the problem as of the now, before it starts to be a major problem.
I very much doubt that spammers would obey the rules. It wouldn't be that hard to find out someone else's name and passport number, so we'd have innocent people being prosecuted and the spammers getting away with it. And I bet that the burden of proof would be on the person whose identity was stolen to prove that it wasn't them.
Slashdot Mirror
The guy that wrote the article against Open Source wasn't a professor - he was the "Manager of Technology Strategy and Outreach". In other words, he was IT staff rather than someone from the CS department. The original story is here.
It's sad but true that a lot of the legitimate businesses that use spammers don't even realise that they're doing something wrong. When they're after business, the spammers don't tell them that they're using dictionary attacks and harvesting addresses from web pages. They'll pull the same "opt in" crap that they do to everyone else, and say that everyone on their mailing list of 5 million customers has agreed to receive advertising.
A lot of the people that hire "bulk e-mail advertisers" to market their business have no idea that they're spamming until people start to complain.
The problem you describe is a direct result of the high DVD prices in Japan. The only people who will spend $50 for one or two episodes are the obsessive fans, so the market becomes polarised towards these people. And, as more and more anime is aimed at Otaku, it gets less and less palletable to the average person, so the effect is self-reinforcing.
As a result, most of the anime produced today is either "one loser guy surrounded by loads of beautiful girls, all of whom love him", or "scantily clad women fighting monsters-of-the-week, with gratuitous cleavage and panty shots".
We shouldn't allow Microsoft to take over the net. When doctoring your none-geeks friends machine, simply remove all MS-conspiracy related trash you can find
Have you ever tried removing something from someone's machine? They complain enough if you get rid of their Bonzi Buddy or Comet Cursor, let alone their browser.
Seriously though, removing their programs is not the way to go, and will just make people annoyed. The reaction you get if you introduce them to Firefox or Opera as a 'cool new browser' is totally different to what you get for lecturing them with your tinfoil hat on. If you give people a better alternative, they will (probably) use it, but if you try to preach about W3C standards they'll just ignore you.
[Flash sites] are mostly games and fancy bloated intros mostly anyway.
So what? The fact is, people use them, and it's a lot more convenient for them to load up in your browser window than to have to load a new program just to browse a site that someone has written in Flash. The most important thing about a browser to most people isn't stability or even features - it's convenience. If you had to load up a seperate program to see a movie trailer or listen to a song sample, it would annoy people to the extent that most of them wouldn't want to use your browser.
Could someone post the url for the blogger gmail "YES" hyperlink? Maybe a non-selectee would be able to follow the link without being authenticated.
http://blogspot.com/gmail.pyra
But it doesn't work. If you're not logged in it sends you to the login page, and if you're logged in with an account that didn't get invited the address redirects you to http://blogspot.com/home.pyra.
Google Webquotes is one of Google Labs' projects; to quote the blurb it "annotates the results of your Google search with comments from other websites. This offers a convenient way to get a third party's opinion about each of the returns for your search, providing you with more information about that site's credibility and reputation."
Sad to say, the news isn't good. Check out this forum thread for a comprehensive bashing.
Oops! You're right, of course. How embarassing.
Although, reading it again, I don't agree that "He's saying that the leaked code is the same as the code in their version control system". He's just saying that Microsoft's own copy hasn't been tampered with.
According to a report on ITVibe, Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive and President of Microsoft has said in a statement:
"I can assure you that we know there has been no compromise of the integrity of the source code; that it has not been modified or tampered with in any way."
It looks like you might have a point - at the moment, the second and third highest ranked articles are about Microsoft themselves.
>However I don't reckon that we have IMAX cinemas over here in the good ol' U of K.
There are IMAX cinemas in London, Bristol, Bournemouth, Birmingham, Bradford, Manchester and Glasgow.
For some reason, they seem to be unusually heavily concentrated in cities beginning with B. Coincidence? I think not!
Quoting directly from the article, "Any charges for the use of these standards are going to lead to fragmentation, delay in deployment, and in effect a lack of standardization. In particular, those users who depend upon multi-lingual or non-English language services will suffer." People using their own standards is what the author was concerned about. Old software won't recognise the language "deutch" or "english-usa".
"Permanant" means nothing in this context. No government can bind its sucessors, especially with a law like this. The next time the Democrats get in, if they're looking for some extra revenue, it will be easy for them to just repeal this law and start charging Broadband Tax. Or even Bush himself, when it finally dawns on him just how much money he's losing.
From the article,
>>Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere
They're hardly doing anything about the flood of spam coming from China - only six percent of the blocked servers are in their own country. It smells to me like just another excersise in Taiwan-bashing.
It doesn't much matter what you can do with an inkjet printer. You won't get anywhere close to what is being done professionally, in mass production.
That might be the case now, but that's what they said about CD writers in personal computers. Printer quality is going to get higher and higher over the next five or ten years, and they're right to try to tackle the problem as of the now, before it starts to be a major problem.
I very much doubt that spammers would obey the rules. It wouldn't be that hard to find out someone else's name and passport number, so we'd have innocent people being prosecuted and the spammers getting away with it. And I bet that the burden of proof would be on the person whose identity was stolen to prove that it wasn't them.