Yeah, there are some things that products like SecureCRT just do better then PuTTY. Like a tabbed interface, better session management, the ability to do XMODEM/ZMODEM file transfers without switching over to WinSCP. Better logging capability, better interface for working with session profiles, etc.
I use both PuTTY and SecureCRT, but spend 90% of my time in SecureCRT.
(Note - I haven't yet looked at what PuTTY 0.61 improved upon.)
b) Prioritize. Do you really need game XYZ, that you play about once a quarter, installed? Why not 7Zip the install folder to another drive then restore it when you actually do want to play. Or if you have Steam, 7Zip it for posterity, offload it to a external drive, then uninstall/reinstall using Steam. Or put the less frequently used data on an older, slower, larger disk.
Consumer grade SSD is a bit below $2.00/GB finally. And WD still makes those 10k RPM SATA drives (which are still pretty good for a lot less then a SSD). I have SSD on the laptop and the 10k RPM on the desktop, both are about equal in terms of feel (although it's possible to bury the 10k RPM SATA).
Replace that with (3) 25W bulbs, 4 hours a day and you save about $15/yr with $0.14/kWh prices around these parts. So while it's not a huge power savings (compared to the cost of running a fridge / computer / TV / other electronics) it is definitely more then a tiny blip.
Incandescent bulbs are rather easy to justify replacing. The new bulb just has to cost less then $5 and last for more then a year.
CRT monitors, however, are still a tough sell. Old units towards the end of the era where they got more efficient were in the 75-90W range for 17". To replace that with a 19" LCD you only save maybe 60W. Assume 2000 hours per year of use (typical 9-5 office work hours) and $0.14/kWh and it is only $17/year savings. A new LCD monitor (quality one that will last as long as the CRT did) is about $150. That's about an eight year payback. Although I guess if you include the heat that the CRTs throw off, it could be lower like 5 years.
XP was just a theme for windows 2000, and look how well it did.
Much more then that. Remember back before 802.11(abcdef...) was built into every machine? Well that was the situation back in 2000 when Windows 2000 rolled out. Most of the time you had to install add-in cards, or the manufacturer had some brain-dead, completely proprietary way of connecting to the access point and for managing the WiFi radio.
Windows 2000, was completely clueless about it all and treated it like a dumb network device.
Windows XP got rid of all of that (except for the NIH Thinkpad people...) and centralized connecting to a wireless access point into a standard GUI interface. Sure, it didn't have all of the bells and whistles of the proprietary tools - but it was a darned bit more convenient when you didn't have to train users on three different makes and models of WiFi software.
(Just one of the many improvements between Win2000 and WinXP. Not to mention things like better compatibility with Win9x era programs then Win2000 had. A lot of games wouldn't run on Win2000, while they ran find on XP and Win9x. And a bunch of other little improvements over Win2k.)
Then you've never been a heavy user of calendars to schedule meetings / events where you need to quickly check whether:
a) Everyone can actually meet on that date (no matter what was said before hand, until you put a date down on the calendar people simply don't check)
b) The resource is open at that time (useful in situations where you need to reserve a meeting room)
c) Change an event to a new location / time and not end up with a few people showing up at the wrong place or the wrong time
etc.
By tying the calendar process into the communication client (and *everyone* has an email client), you give the calendar application a way to communicate quickly with those people who are scheduled to attend an event. Since everyone uses email, it's a natural fit.
(If *everyone* had the same brand of instant messenger, then we could use that instead.)
Archive by year, it's faster. And search tools are generally good enough in the email clients now that you can quickly pull up any message from any year.
I gave up trying to categorized email a few years ago. Because it was a PITA, I'd put it off and end up with an overflowing inbox. So I switched to just stuffing it into yearly folders.
You see, unlike some other MMOs, you start off at level 1 in the full shared environment, where your automated bot software can run your little level 1 tushie over to the nearest major city and start doing/shout and/say spam in addition to spamming the trade chat.
Interestingly, AoC has less of an issue with this because every new character starts out in an isolated instance and until they hack/slash their way to the starter city they have no access to a mailbox or many of the chat channels. (The starter area acts as a tutorial for AoC, and you're level 4 or 5 by the time you finish it in about an hour.)
Blizzard *could* have done something similar when they remade the world, but they failed to.
Look back to the advent of dual-core CPUs in the mid-2000s.
Intel offerings were server-only chips, all well over $300. AMD offered something that did the same thing, had better performance, and broke the $200 barrier.
It wasn't until AMD started mopping the floor with their Opteron / Athlon64 X2 chips that Intel got its act together and released affordable multi-core offerings. And it took them even longer to jump on the 64bit wagon that AMD had been pulling for 2+ years prior.
Remember - Intel's vision of the future for 64bit computing was Itanium.
I think the issue comes that all of those PLEX count as liabilities against future revenues in some fashion (much like gamecards).
CCP needs to provide some sort of PLEX sink to take PLEX out of the game without having to provide actual game time in return. Hence, the introduction of the PLEX -> Aurum conversion and using Aurum for the "NEX" (noble exchange) store.
But, being CCP, they've totally misjudged the market and the playerbase (again) and are charging way too much for a monocle that is barely visible in the character portrait. Then, being CCP, they've totally bungled up the PR response to the question in everyone's mind of "will Aurum-purchased items result in a gameplay advantage?".
(Keeping in mind that EVE is one of the most cutthroat PvP games out there, where losing in a PvP battle means that you lose the ship you are flying which may have taken you anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks worth of play to earn. If an in-game advantage can be bought via Aurum, people *will* buy it, and it will shift the landscape drastically. The game will become extremely unbalanced unless you have the cash to buy Aurum to buy balance-changing items.)
My estimates have always been: 10,000 commonly used words, 200-300k in a large dictionary.
Most people tend to pick words that are familiar to them, that they probably use in everyday speech or hear regularly. Not many will crack open a random dictionary or book and pull a word out at random from the other 97% of the word list.
Now, identifying the 3% most commonly used words? That's a bit more of a guessing game.
When you design a security system that relies on passwords - you need to make the assumption that the attacker has either the password hash or the binary file that is being protected. In which case, they are not subject to any delays or lockouts and they can ramp up the brute-force rate to whatever they can afford. They may even have access to a 10k machine botnet, in which case their resources will far exceed your own. So you should also make the assumption that the attacker has more resources then you, probably at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more then you do.
It doesn't require all that much more effort to make sure you can survive against an attacker who can run a brute-force rate of a few billion attempts per second. Mostly, you just make sure that minimum password lengths are increased out to 10 or 12 characters and that you enforce complexity rules. Don't allow users to enter short passwords that are dictionary words. Maybe even maintain a list of the top 10,000 known passwords in the wild and check against that list before accepting a user's password.
Secondly, you make sure to store the passwords as hashes (not plaintext) and that you use a unique salt (of at least 12-16 bits) for each account. That way, if the hashes are stolen, they can't just generate a single rainbow table for the entire password list. Instead, they will have to brute force each individual password by itself.
Third, you need to design the system so that it never sends hashes over the network where they can be sniffed. And make sure that all communication is over encrypted channels.
As an example, "This is a fourty two character passphrase!" is a fourty two character passphrase. It's not unreasonable to blind-type something like that into a password field for someone with a reasonable amount of typing skill.
Except that your passphrase is not 80^42 (8.5e79 or about 265 bits) possibles. It's more like (10,000^7) * 2 * 12 (2.4e29 or 97.6 bits) because all of the words are fairly common ones and probably exist in a shortened dictionary of the 10,000 most common words. They're also all lowercase, except that the first is capitalized half the time (which is the x2 factor). Humans tend to always put spaces between words in a passphrase, and they tend to use whole words instead of fragments or misspelled versions. And if there's punctuation on the end, it's usually one of about 12 possibilities (which is the x12 factor).
No matter how long an individual word is, if it's a common word then it only has about 13.3 bits of entropy at the upper end. And if it's a shorter word, that could be as little as 3 bits per character. If it's a rarer word, then it might be one out of 300,000 (18.2 bits per word).
It gets worse if it's a popular phrase, or if you can use a Markov chain to predict what word is likely to follow the previous word. Which makes your searching more efficient.
Dictionaries are still useful even though people's passwords tend to more than just a word these days. A lot of people use two words and a character, so that is far more gussable than trying to just brute force every single option in a 10-12 character keyspace.
Specifically: 10,000 * 10,000 * 90 - assuming that both words are in the set of 10,000 commonly used words. If you assume uncommon words are in use, you may have to look at 200-300k words for each position unless you know that they stuck to the shorter words.
FSVS is very cool technology. We use it on all of our Linux servers to track configuration changes.
Make some config file change under/etc or edit a script in/usr/local/sbin. Then do a fsvs commit with a comment of why you changed XYZ.
# cd/
# fsvs ci -m "changed XYZ to allow for ABC to happen"/etc/some/path
Two years later, when you're trying to remember how you made ABC happen, you just browse the SVN logs and look at the diffs. That feature alone makes it indispensable (we don't even use it to synchronize changes across servers, just to track changes).
Backing up the configuration of a modern Linux box takes anywhere from a few dozen megabytes (only/etc and a few select paths under/usr/local or other locations) up to 1-3GB if you also version control the binaries and libraries.
Problem with it is that it's not good with binary data, so, not a solution for keeping different versions of your pictures, heh.
SVN has absolutely zero issues storing binary data. It compresses and it does deltas. Which works amazingly well for things like Microsoft Access MDB files (which are big binary blobs). Change a record in an Excel file or an Access database or a few lines in a Word document (the old 2003 formats), and the SVN delta is typically under a few kilobytes, even for a multi-megabyte binary blob.
Image files are a problem for pretty much any VCS because most of the file formats are such that if you make a small change in a portion of the image, it can change the entire file stream when you write it out (especially with lossy codecs like JPEG). There's generally no way to do a binary delta on that. But if you were to store the images as lossless uncompressed BMP, then changing a few pixels would probably result in a very small binary delta.
The other half of the issue, however, is that SVN working copies always contain a pristine copy of the file in addition to the one that you are making changes to. So a 20MB TIFF is going to eat up 40MB of disk space in the local working copy. It's fine up on the server where it will only take 20MB, but does make things more difficult on a client where disk space is at a premium.
(No local storage of pristines is on the development roadmap, but not in the upcoming 1.7 release.)
But snide comments aside, I kinda predict the shooter to be a big source of griefing. Why? Because EvE players will get the game, join the opposing team and try to lose deliberately (since losing is arguably easier than winning) to get an edge in EvE. Let's see how CCP plans to counter that.
That assumes that you can pick where you're fighting and what team you're on. Get enough simultaneous games running, or run them on a time delay to make it harder to guess, and it's a lot more difficult to sabotage a particular match.
I wonder... is the conversion rate dropping because people are smarter, or because the sheer amount of spam has risen?
Yes, a bit from column A and probably a bit from column B.
Plus, spam filters keep getting better and better, which makes it even harder for your spam to land in the respondent's mailbox.
If, in 2001, you had to send out 100,000 spams, of which only 10,00 would land in someone's mailbox and only 500 (5%) of those would convert, you probably count that as a 200:1 ratio.
Now, what if the spam filters block 99% of your messages? Now, only 1,000 of your 100k spam blast is seen, and people are a bit smarter so only 3% click through. You end up with only 30 suckers and have a ratio of 3333:1.
That's probably true. But if I understood this right, the point is to make the authors more visible on the internet - for example if I find a blog I like, I can easily find more writings by the same author, no matter what site they're on.
Unless the author has a common name like John Doe...
The only way a tag like this *might* work would be to make the tag value a public-key signature of the content enclosed inside the tag. Which would allow you to see that content A was signed by key XYZ, as was content B and C, but not D.
This will get abused, just like meta tag keywords got abused.
I like to go camping. Good luck finding a charger for an ebook reader in the woods. Batteries for a flashlight, or a nicely bright campfire, and a real book please.
My 3-year old PRS-505 can still hold a charge for 2 weeks and is good for many hours/days of leisure reading. The major power drains are (a) use of a SD card (b) to a lesser extent, use of a Memory Stick card and (c) the major drain of reformatting a book.
(The last issue can be solved by doing the pagination index for all three font sizes on the computer before transferring it to the reader. The Sony software is supposed to do that automatically, but I don't remember if Calibre also does it.)
While generally I don't share the same extreme views of RMS I must say that I am finding very hard to warm up to ebooks.
I've been considering a Kindle for a while now, but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back.
Then don't get a Kindle. Go for one of the other e-readers that support the more open formats (ePub) and find a store that sells you books without DRM (such as Webscription or Fictionwise). Or buy from a store where the DRM is easily removed with a 3rd party program.
I have a strong dislike for the Amazon/Kindle relationship. Yes, it's super convenient, but Amazon has shown repeatedly that they cannot be trusted. When I use a non-connected reader like the Sony PRS-505 (today's equivalent would be the 350 or 650 models), unless someone hooks up a USB cable there's no way to remove content without my permission.
It's not the format (paper vs electronic) that is the problem - it's the DRM.
(I have owned a PRS-505 for a few years now. I love it for cover-to-cover leisure reading in the evenings.)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm still using 5.2 SecureCRT (or something from the 5.x era).
Personally, since I spent a few hours each day in terminal windows, SecureCRT is worth the cost.
But not worth upgrading every year. I only upgrade every few years.
Yeah, there are some things that products like SecureCRT just do better then PuTTY. Like a tabbed interface, better session management, the ability to do XMODEM/ZMODEM file transfers without switching over to WinSCP. Better logging capability, better interface for working with session profiles, etc.
I use both PuTTY and SecureCRT, but spend 90% of my time in SecureCRT.
(Note - I haven't yet looked at what PuTTY 0.61 improved upon.)
Consider a 10k RPM SATA or 10k RPM SAS drive instead. Access times are much higher then a 7200 RPM, without prices being unreasonable.
Just make sure you have good airflow...
a) Stop being a data pack rat.
b) Prioritize. Do you really need game XYZ, that you play about once a quarter, installed? Why not 7Zip the install folder to another drive then restore it when you actually do want to play. Or if you have Steam, 7Zip it for posterity, offload it to a external drive, then uninstall/reinstall using Steam. Or put the less frequently used data on an older, slower, larger disk.
Consumer grade SSD is a bit below $2.00/GB finally. And WD still makes those 10k RPM SATA drives (which are still pretty good for a lot less then a SSD). I have SSD on the laptop and the 10k RPM on the desktop, both are about equal in terms of feel (although it's possible to bury the 10k RPM SATA).
(3) 100W bulbs, 4 hours a day = a lot of energy.
Replace that with (3) 25W bulbs, 4 hours a day and you save about $15/yr with $0.14/kWh prices around these parts. So while it's not a huge power savings (compared to the cost of running a fridge / computer / TV / other electronics) it is definitely more then a tiny blip.
Incandescent bulbs are rather easy to justify replacing. The new bulb just has to cost less then $5 and last for more then a year.
CRT monitors, however, are still a tough sell. Old units towards the end of the era where they got more efficient were in the 75-90W range for 17". To replace that with a 19" LCD you only save maybe 60W. Assume 2000 hours per year of use (typical 9-5 office work hours) and $0.14/kWh and it is only $17/year savings. A new LCD monitor (quality one that will last as long as the CRT did) is about $150. That's about an eight year payback. Although I guess if you include the heat that the CRTs throw off, it could be lower like 5 years.
XP was just a theme for windows 2000, and look how well it did.
Much more then that. Remember back before 802.11(abcdef...) was built into every machine? Well that was the situation back in 2000 when Windows 2000 rolled out. Most of the time you had to install add-in cards, or the manufacturer had some brain-dead, completely proprietary way of connecting to the access point and for managing the WiFi radio.
Windows 2000, was completely clueless about it all and treated it like a dumb network device.
Windows XP got rid of all of that (except for the NIH Thinkpad people...) and centralized connecting to a wireless access point into a standard GUI interface. Sure, it didn't have all of the bells and whistles of the proprietary tools - but it was a darned bit more convenient when you didn't have to train users on three different makes and models of WiFi software.
(Just one of the many improvements between Win2000 and WinXP. Not to mention things like better compatibility with Win9x era programs then Win2000 had. A lot of games wouldn't run on Win2000, while they ran find on XP and Win9x. And a bunch of other little improvements over Win2k.)
I never understood the email-calendar connection.
Then you've never been a heavy user of calendars to schedule meetings / events where you need to quickly check whether:
a) Everyone can actually meet on that date (no matter what was said before hand, until you put a date down on the calendar people simply don't check)
b) The resource is open at that time (useful in situations where you need to reserve a meeting room)
c) Change an event to a new location / time and not end up with a few people showing up at the wrong place or the wrong time
etc.
By tying the calendar process into the communication client (and *everyone* has an email client), you give the calendar application a way to communicate quickly with those people who are scheduled to attend an event. Since everyone uses email, it's a natural fit.
(If *everyone* had the same brand of instant messenger, then we could use that instead.)
Archive by year, it's faster. And search tools are generally good enough in the email clients now that you can quickly pull up any message from any year.
I gave up trying to categorized email a few years ago. Because it was a PITA, I'd put it off and end up with an overflowing inbox. So I switched to just stuffing it into yearly folders.
It truly is because of the gold spammers.
/shout and /say spam in addition to spamming the trade chat.
You see, unlike some other MMOs, you start off at level 1 in the full shared environment, where your automated bot software can run your little level 1 tushie over to the nearest major city and start doing
Interestingly, AoC has less of an issue with this because every new character starts out in an isolated instance and until they hack/slash their way to the starter city they have no access to a mailbox or many of the chat channels. (The starter area acts as a tutorial for AoC, and you're level 4 or 5 by the time you finish it in about an hour.)
Blizzard *could* have done something similar when they remade the world, but they failed to.
Look back to the advent of dual-core CPUs in the mid-2000s.
Intel offerings were server-only chips, all well over $300. AMD offered something that did the same thing, had better performance, and broke the $200 barrier.
It wasn't until AMD started mopping the floor with their Opteron / Athlon64 X2 chips that Intel got its act together and released affordable multi-core offerings. And it took them even longer to jump on the 64bit wagon that AMD had been pulling for 2+ years prior.
Remember - Intel's vision of the future for 64bit computing was Itanium.
I think the issue comes that all of those PLEX count as liabilities against future revenues in some fashion (much like gamecards).
CCP needs to provide some sort of PLEX sink to take PLEX out of the game without having to provide actual game time in return. Hence, the introduction of the PLEX -> Aurum conversion and using Aurum for the "NEX" (noble exchange) store.
But, being CCP, they've totally misjudged the market and the playerbase (again) and are charging way too much for a monocle that is barely visible in the character portrait. Then, being CCP, they've totally bungled up the PR response to the question in everyone's mind of "will Aurum-purchased items result in a gameplay advantage?".
(Keeping in mind that EVE is one of the most cutthroat PvP games out there, where losing in a PvP battle means that you lose the ship you are flying which may have taken you anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks worth of play to earn. If an in-game advantage can be bought via Aurum, people *will* buy it, and it will shift the landscape drastically. The game will become extremely unbalanced unless you have the cash to buy Aurum to buy balance-changing items.)
My estimates have always been: 10,000 commonly used words, 200-300k in a large dictionary.
Most people tend to pick words that are familiar to them, that they probably use in everyday speech or hear regularly. Not many will crack open a random dictionary or book and pull a word out at random from the other 97% of the word list.
Now, identifying the 3% most commonly used words? That's a bit more of a guessing game.
Where is the practical relevance?!
When you design a security system that relies on passwords - you need to make the assumption that the attacker has either the password hash or the binary file that is being protected. In which case, they are not subject to any delays or lockouts and they can ramp up the brute-force rate to whatever they can afford. They may even have access to a 10k machine botnet, in which case their resources will far exceed your own. So you should also make the assumption that the attacker has more resources then you, probably at least 1-2 orders of magnitude more then you do.
It doesn't require all that much more effort to make sure you can survive against an attacker who can run a brute-force rate of a few billion attempts per second. Mostly, you just make sure that minimum password lengths are increased out to 10 or 12 characters and that you enforce complexity rules. Don't allow users to enter short passwords that are dictionary words. Maybe even maintain a list of the top 10,000 known passwords in the wild and check against that list before accepting a user's password.
Secondly, you make sure to store the passwords as hashes (not plaintext) and that you use a unique salt (of at least 12-16 bits) for each account. That way, if the hashes are stolen, they can't just generate a single rainbow table for the entire password list. Instead, they will have to brute force each individual password by itself.
Third, you need to design the system so that it never sends hashes over the network where they can be sniffed. And make sure that all communication is over encrypted channels.
As an example, "This is a fourty two character passphrase!" is a fourty two character passphrase. It's not unreasonable to blind-type something like that into a password field for someone with a reasonable amount of typing skill.
Except that your passphrase is not 80^42 (8.5e79 or about 265 bits) possibles. It's more like (10,000^7) * 2 * 12 (2.4e29 or 97.6 bits) because all of the words are fairly common ones and probably exist in a shortened dictionary of the 10,000 most common words. They're also all lowercase, except that the first is capitalized half the time (which is the x2 factor). Humans tend to always put spaces between words in a passphrase, and they tend to use whole words instead of fragments or misspelled versions. And if there's punctuation on the end, it's usually one of about 12 possibilities (which is the x12 factor).
No matter how long an individual word is, if it's a common word then it only has about 13.3 bits of entropy at the upper end. And if it's a shorter word, that could be as little as 3 bits per character. If it's a rarer word, then it might be one out of 300,000 (18.2 bits per word).
It gets worse if it's a popular phrase, or if you can use a Markov chain to predict what word is likely to follow the previous word. Which makes your searching more efficient.
Dictionaries are still useful even though people's passwords tend to more than just a word these days. A lot of people use two words and a character, so that is far more gussable than trying to just brute force every single option in a 10-12 character keyspace.
Specifically: 10,000 * 10,000 * 90 - assuming that both words are in the set of 10,000 commonly used words. If you assume uncommon words are in use, you may have to look at 200-300k words for each position unless you know that they stuck to the shorter words.
Which is at least an improvement over the old process... (although emerge'ing firefox that early is a bit of overkill and makes the whole thing fake).
FSVS is very cool technology. We use it on all of our Linux servers to track configuration changes.
/etc or edit a script in /usr/local/sbin. Then do a fsvs commit with a comment of why you changed XYZ.
/ /etc/some/path
/etc and a few select paths under /usr/local or other locations) up to 1-3GB if you also version control the binaries and libraries.
Make some config file change under
# cd
# fsvs ci -m "changed XYZ to allow for ABC to happen"
Two years later, when you're trying to remember how you made ABC happen, you just browse the SVN logs and look at the diffs. That feature alone makes it indispensable (we don't even use it to synchronize changes across servers, just to track changes).
Backing up the configuration of a modern Linux box takes anywhere from a few dozen megabytes (only
Problem with it is that it's not good with binary data, so, not a solution for keeping different versions of your pictures, heh.
SVN has absolutely zero issues storing binary data. It compresses and it does deltas. Which works amazingly well for things like Microsoft Access MDB files (which are big binary blobs). Change a record in an Excel file or an Access database or a few lines in a Word document (the old 2003 formats), and the SVN delta is typically under a few kilobytes, even for a multi-megabyte binary blob.
Image files are a problem for pretty much any VCS because most of the file formats are such that if you make a small change in a portion of the image, it can change the entire file stream when you write it out (especially with lossy codecs like JPEG). There's generally no way to do a binary delta on that. But if you were to store the images as lossless uncompressed BMP, then changing a few pixels would probably result in a very small binary delta.
The other half of the issue, however, is that SVN working copies always contain a pristine copy of the file in addition to the one that you are making changes to. So a 20MB TIFF is going to eat up 40MB of disk space in the local working copy. It's fine up on the server where it will only take 20MB, but does make things more difficult on a client where disk space is at a premium.
(No local storage of pristines is on the development roadmap, but not in the upcoming 1.7 release.)
But snide comments aside, I kinda predict the shooter to be a big source of griefing. Why? Because EvE players will get the game, join the opposing team and try to lose deliberately (since losing is arguably easier than winning) to get an edge in EvE. Let's see how CCP plans to counter that.
That assumes that you can pick where you're fighting and what team you're on. Get enough simultaneous games running, or run them on a time delay to make it harder to guess, and it's a lot more difficult to sabotage a particular match.
Legitimate senders would pay, sure. But...
All those mailing lists that you belong to, for free? Where you get free technical help? Gone.
All those spammers who use botnets, fake domains, and host their sites on other people's machines via theft of service? No effect at all.
Not to mention the whole issue of "who would collect the money and meter the usage?".
I wonder... is the conversion rate dropping because people are smarter, or because the sheer amount of spam has risen?
Yes, a bit from column A and probably a bit from column B.
Plus, spam filters keep getting better and better, which makes it even harder for your spam to land in the respondent's mailbox.
If, in 2001, you had to send out 100,000 spams, of which only 10,00 would land in someone's mailbox and only 500 (5%) of those would convert, you probably count that as a 200:1 ratio.
Now, what if the spam filters block 99% of your messages? Now, only 1,000 of your 100k spam blast is seen, and people are a bit smarter so only 3% click through. You end up with only 30 suckers and have a ratio of 3333:1.
That's probably true. But if I understood this right, the point is to make the authors more visible on the internet - for example if I find a blog I like, I can easily find more writings by the same author, no matter what site they're on.
Unless the author has a common name like John Doe...
The only way a tag like this *might* work would be to make the tag value a public-key signature of the content enclosed inside the tag. Which would allow you to see that content A was signed by key XYZ, as was content B and C, but not D.
This will get abused, just like meta tag keywords got abused.
Well, TFA is Slashdotted, but TFS seems to indicate that these are tech bigwigs.
The TFA is now 404'd...
Now there is truly "nothing to see here, move along".
I like to go camping. Good luck finding a charger for an ebook reader in the woods. Batteries for a flashlight, or a nicely bright campfire, and a real book please.
My 3-year old PRS-505 can still hold a charge for 2 weeks and is good for many hours/days of leisure reading. The major power drains are (a) use of a SD card (b) to a lesser extent, use of a Memory Stick card and (c) the major drain of reformatting a book.
(The last issue can be solved by doing the pagination index for all three font sizes on the computer before transferring it to the reader. The Sony software is supposed to do that automatically, but I don't remember if Calibre also does it.)
While generally I don't share the same extreme views of RMS I must say that I am finding very hard to warm up to ebooks. I've been considering a Kindle for a while now, but the idea of not being able to *really* own my book is holding me back.
Then don't get a Kindle. Go for one of the other e-readers that support the more open formats (ePub) and find a store that sells you books without DRM (such as Webscription or Fictionwise). Or buy from a store where the DRM is easily removed with a 3rd party program.
I have a strong dislike for the Amazon/Kindle relationship. Yes, it's super convenient, but Amazon has shown repeatedly that they cannot be trusted. When I use a non-connected reader like the Sony PRS-505 (today's equivalent would be the 350 or 650 models), unless someone hooks up a USB cable there's no way to remove content without my permission.
It's not the format (paper vs electronic) that is the problem - it's the DRM.
(I have owned a PRS-505 for a few years now. I love it for cover-to-cover leisure reading in the evenings.)