If a tower has a range of 30 miles, that means a coverage area of nearly 3,000 sq miles.
They don't say if that range is diameter or radius. Considering the marketing hyperbole already in the article, I'd guess diameter, which puts the coverage area at more like 800 sq. miles than 3000.
No one is claiming WiMax isn't a cool technology, but it's still just broadband. This announcement is as meaningful as if a satellite phone provider started offering call waiting.
If 50-100 lines of Vonage service were bundled into the price at no extra cost, that would be HUGE and a great value. But TFA does not say that the company is bundling that many Vonage lines with the service.
TFA doesn't specify exactly how this is to operate. With Vonage's SoftPhone (or Skype, or other services), the VOIP application is entirely CPU based without the need for external boxen, so that means as long as you have some sort of broadband access coming into your PC, you're good to go. I have Vonage SoftPhone and it works via Cable, DSL, WiFI, etc.
At current prices (TowerStream charges $600 a month for a 1.5Mbps connection), I don't see how this becomes a challenge to DSL, WiFi, etc. It doesn't even challenge cellphones (EVDO for the laptop and a high level of "anytime" minutes on a separate phone are cheaper than TowerStream's WiMax and have a greater range). It just sounds like TowerStream is bundling it as an added value feature of its existing service.
TFA is chock-full of inaccurate marketing hyperbole, like claiming that 75Mbps is more than 20x faster than "the fastest wired broadband available commercially." Really? Comcast is at 4Mbps and heading up. I've got 6Mbps through Speakeasy. This chart shows multiple cable companies offering 8Mbps with 20 on the way (and that's not counting Verizon's FIOS).
Laughably, News.com just uses the hyperbole in their "news" story a couple of days after publishing that chart. I sent an e-mail to the "reporter" and asked him if he was using the "Parroting A Press Release Without Checking My Facts" mathematical theorem to come to the conclusion that 75 is more than 20 times faster than 8.
Anyhoo, unless there's something I'm missing, this is non-news. It's just an ISP that is bundling Vonage. BFHD.
According to an article linked from the SuSE site, the whole OpenSuSE push (a.k.a. "lizard blizzard") is intended to push Linux into more mainstream usability, i.e. so it can be easily installed and deployed by "non-technical" users.
It seems more that SuSE has decided to gun for Mandrake/MandRiva/MandCorRiva, Ubuntu, Linspire, and other desktop-focused distros than going after more "Geeky" distros like Fedora, Gentoo, etc.
I'll be interested to see the SuSE Professional 10.0 beta they'll be distributing next week and which is considered the kick-off point for this initiative.
Without the explanation in TFA, I would have interpreted "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" as the motto of people still hanging onto their pre-pentium machines, unwilling to upgrade to any GUI until they couldn't run their old DOS apps anymore. There were quite a number in the '90s who wouldn't upgrade to Windows 3.10 or 95 because, heck, they didn't see a need.
I doubt many of those people still exist 10 years later, but I'm sure there are a few people happily clacking away on their Wangs, saving to floppies, printing with 9-pin dot matrix, and happy because that's all they need.
What version? Can WINE run CS or CS2? Last time I tried to install them CS and CS2 said 'you need a newer operating system' or words to that effect because WINE emulates Windows 98.
Actually, when I tried CS, I found that some shortcuts and other basic UI stuff had changed and slowed me down. I didn't see enough new and cool stuff in CS to make the upgrade compelling.
Photoshop 7 does everything I need, I'm comfortable in its environment, and I don't upgrade without a compelling reason. So I'm happy to stick with Photoshop 7.
Honestly, you can switch, but if you've got a Windows system, locked it down, know how to keep it clean and safe, and have it running just the way you want to, you might as well stick with it for now. It's when you buy your next machine that you buy it without an OS or with Linux pre-installed.
When you do switch...
OpenOffice.org is a very reasonable and usable replacement for MS Office with next to no learning curve to switch over.
Photoshop has a silver certification under CrossOver Office, and supposedly runs really well under Cedega (formerly WineX, but now focused toward the gaming community). Both CrossOver Office and Cedega have a cost involved, though.
Many people have already switched to Firefox for browsing. That's free. So is Thunderbird, which is a great mail client, but it lacks some of the Calendar/PIM functions of Outlook.
So since SCO have questionably violated the GPL with the Linux kernel, aren't they not allowed to distribute the GPL-licensed components like KDE and MySQL with their product?
Note the use of "the Program" in the language. While they violate the GPL in regards to the Linux kernel, violating it for one program does not terminate your rights to use other GPL'ed software for which you're in compliance.
What I'd be interesting in seeing is if they had to make any source changes/additions to the GPL software packages to make it run with OpenServer and if those source mods have been distributed under the GPL as required.
Aside from the legal questions regarding SCO trying to claim the GPL isn't viable in court, then releasing a product where they benefit from the GPL, TFA makes a good point... this is only really useful if you're upgrading from a previous SCO install. It's not really competitive with Linux in a head to head.
I guess that leads to SCO's demonstrated philosophy... "If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em."
SCO: Inferior products beefed up via a license we claim is invalid.
TFA doesn't discuss how the sites were shut down: whether this was a DDOS, the government got the hosts to yank them, or if the sites themselves were hacked somehow.
If the government got the hosts to yank them, then the government's hand would be tipped because they'd have to get legal orders which would eventually be released by some leak. But if it's through hacking or DDOS'ing, it raises the question of whether the government really did it (or if public-spirited hackers went vigilante), and if the government did it, where do we draw the line on the illegality of such tactics?
Can a judge issue an order allowing the takedown of foreign sites via hack or DDOS if they are deemed harmful to national security? Can such an order be sealed and kept from the public?
Perhaps the point is moot as no one has surfaced a smoking gun, pointing to British intel. TFA just quotes Israeli sources saying the hand of British intel was detected, but not stating that any direct evidence has been presented to prove this.
I'll be interested in seeing how the story develops. There's a certain visceral satisfaction in seeing advocates of hate and violence silenced, but at the same time it's frightening to think of any government covertly silencing voices of dissent, as that starts a society down a slippery slope of oppression.
I'd be much more willing to believe that the Israelis have a covert and capable corps of hackers than the British. And if these corps, regardless of national origin, were capable of initiating DDOS attacks, I'd be curious as to where/how they got their zombies. It would be sad to think that a source of worms and viruses were government-paid hackers, building bot nets for black ops.
An interesting view point, which is quite pervasive.
So why should you get free continued support?
Now, if you had paid a maintenance fee (quarterly, yearly,..), then you would of course get updates for the life of the maintenance contract.
But free?
It's supposed to be free because that's how Microsoft has done it. If they want to change it, change it. But define that change clearly and prominently at the time of sale.
Lots of smaller software companies sell you A & B & C packages:
A: Software only
B: Software + updates for X period
C: Software + updates for X period + plus priority/personal support.
If Microsoft wants to follow that model, fine. Do it... on all new copies of XP they've sold. But for the prior ones, stop adding hoops and checks to make sure I paid. I bought it, I installed it, activated it, I've done enough to qualify for my updates.
Just tried it and it works (after Microsoft forced me to download the Genuine Advantage update).
Sadly, Microsoft will issue a new version of Genuine Advantage that disables the hack and make you use the new version before you can use Microsoft update, so I believe this is only a temporary reprieve. I guess it will be a back and forth between MS and and hackers until MS has secured Genuine Advantage.
I've got a licensed, genuine version of Windows, but F them for making me jump through hoops to receive continued support. I paid for this and I shouldn't have to keep wasting my time to soothe their paranoid brows.
Just another reason to keep trying new Linux distros and updates on my testbed system until I find one I like enough to switch (tried so far: Ubuntu, SuSE, CentOS 3.3, Linspire, Knoppix, Mandrake 10). Already using OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird and have a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) set-up for development work. Going to Linux is a small step, but there are a few apps (like video editing, graphics editing) where I just don't have the patience to spend a whole bunch of time learning Linux apps that are 'almost' there in terms of their UI. Maybe I'll hit the Crossover Office site to see if they've gone to gold level support on some of my must-have Windows apps yet.
All in all, whether your goals are open source or closed source, you can benefit from the OS community's efforts. There are a lot of bright ideas out there, being developed at no cost to you. The great thing is that if a project can find one motivated developer, it doesn't need to pass muster in a committee or get management buy in. Stuff that would get dismissed in a corporate environment can get made in an OS environment. Things that might not look good on paper, but are actually really cool once realized, get realized.
I'm not going to say that corporate environments stifle innovation, but the motivation to innovate in a corporate environment is necessarily dollar-driven. The motivation to innovate in an OS environment is desire driven. If enough people desire to see it done and turn that desire into action, it gets done.
The OS community may not be regularly churning out Adobe killers or MS killers, but you get tweaks, utilities, apps, and sometimes that off the wall genius idea that ends up defining a new industry segment because no CYA suit saw the value in it until a passionate OS developer/group proved it.
As for the GPL, remember that it is not an exclusive license. There are a variety of licenses out there and a number of projects offer different licenses depending on your intended use of their code and whether you'll pay for the license.
It's an older beta version I put up publicly for some friends to try. The current version isn't so easy, but it's not currently up anywhere I'd want to post publicly.
It can be defeated. It's not simple to do it, but you can.
All someone has to do is proxy the image bar and word sequence to the user (they could screen capture it if nothing else), get the click sequence (i.e. 12434), and then have a device that repeats that click sequence on your site.
See my journal for an e-mail address if you want to discuss this privately.
Never said it was, but as opposed to a "show an image and type its contents" CAPTCHA, it requires a more complex workaround. It would defeat their standard bot and require them to code a new workaround for my specific CAPTCHA. If they did as many do, and followed the path of least resistance, they'd never go to the trouble of defeating my CAPTCHA via remoting.
My best concept for an unremotable CAPTCHA was one that used motion (like "punch the monkey"), timestamps, and other devices to force it to be solved from the page it was on by the original requester. But that could become onerous to the user.
IMO, the trick in CAPTCHA design is to create something complex enough to baffle the spammers, but not so complex as to discourage legitimate users from completing the task (registering, posting, etc.). If anyone wants to discuss CAPTCHAs with me privately, I've posted an e-mail address in my Slashdot journal.
I've considered opening up the code (it's in PHP), but the photos came out of a clip-art collection, so I wouldn't be able to redistribute them. I'd have to get contributors to provide their photos under GPL.
The alternative is to provide it as a remotely hosted service, in which case I'm within the bounds of the license on the images, and since I already set it up that way for myself, expanding it wouldn't be tough.
That means you're saying people only have a valuable opinion or can provide useful information if they're willing to pay you to listen to them.
Alternately, you're saying that you have no interest in what poor people have to say.
Actually, before these sites became such a wasteland of porn spam and malware, I stopped visiting them because they were some of the worst abusers of pop-ups, pop-unders, and other annoying advertising methods. The growing abuse of these services by spammers and other scum merely cemented my resolve to avoid them.
Sure, you lose out on some gems, but there is MORE than enough out there in the areas I will visit to compensate for what I'm missing. The amount of interesting information on the Internet increases faster than any one human can keep up with (except for my friend who, after a badly broken leg and 3 months on bedrest, came back to work and said he used all that time to "finish reading the Internet"). If my filters leave out some valuable voices in the free-web-o-sphere, I've still got LOTS of interesting and valuable choices remaining.
On the other hand, I've also heard about defeating the test by starting a porn site and then taking the image and showing it to visitors and basically just having them type the right answer and they get to see 10 pictures or something. What we ended up doing was a word riddle, like "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy ___s" or "3 + 5 = _"
Even then, porn spammers can just show the question to users and get them to answer it. If someone is dedicated enough, they can remote any captcha to a human. The trick is to make the remoting difficult enough that they'll go elsewhere.
My answer to the CAPTCHA problem is a multi-picture deal where you have to click on photos that correspond to words in the same sequence that the words appear. Demo here.
But even that could be remoted if a spammer wanted to do the work. Heck, I developed it so I can host it in one place and then use it on multiple sites. I racked my brains for some time, trying to come up with something a spammer couldn't remote, but every idea either fell down when I put my black hat on, or wouldn't stand up in a usability test (i.e. it would be so difficult and complex to just do at my site, many people would give up).
They make you type in a word that has been obscured as an image to stop them from being set up automatically
Does anyone know how effective these schemes really are? Is there a study that measures how effective this is?
The type-in is called a CAPTCHA (an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"). They can be fairly effective, but all they do is block robots from setting up an account. If I need 10 accounts, I don't necessarily need to automate it. CAPTCHAs are more often used effectively to block bulk botting stuff like blog spam, signups for free mail accounts, or other services (like whois at Netsol.com or Godaddy.com) prone to abuse and they can work well if well designed. But, again, they're to prevent robots from doing something, not humans.
Now, as CAPTCHA's get more obscured to try to defeat more sophisticated OCR elements, they become more difficult for humans to read. I recently developed one that I may use on some of my sites that uses identifying the contents of pictures. Demo here. Some of the people I've had test it said it was fun and they actually played it like a game.
Free sites are used as gateways to all sorts of dodgy propositions... malware, porn spam, etc. It's because they're so easy to get with fake identity info. Maybe they record your IP address, but you can start building your site at some free hosts without even having your e-mail address confirmed, and it's possible to disguise your IP address.
I'd say that the gov't should make these companies provide more authentication, but all it would do is prove a barrier against legitimate users while the criminals would just find a way around.
Outlawing free/homesteading sites would be likely be found unconstitutional in the U.S. and it would be a big fight to remove the safe harbor provisions for such sites to make them responsible for their users' malicious activities. I really don't know what we could do at a legislative level. At a personal level, I just refuse to visit any sites at angelfire, geocities, et al.
This is a really interesting map. It's also missing the houses of everyone who was mean to Bill Gates in high school. The FSF headquarters have been replaced with a pirate ship, OSDL is replaced with an image of a black hole, and there's real time tracking of Linus Torvalds' location with a bullseye symbol.
I think it depends on when the person had to buy their own equipment and software. By the mid-90s all the best stuff for Mac had become available for PC (Adobe Photoshop, Pagemaker, Quark). So people used to Mac were slowly wooed away when they realized they could stay close to their comfort zone, but spend $1,000 less on hardware.
Now, if you were a big house with tens of thousands of dollars invested in software, this was an incentive to stay the Mac course. But if you were a new house or an indie who was going to have to buy the software anyway, the hardware price savings on the PC boxes would be attractive.
And, of course, there were always various little utilities so you could read Mac floppies and Zip disks if you needed to, so you could still work with Mac-only houses, despite being Intel-based.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't say if that range is diameter or radius. Considering the marketing hyperbole already in the article, I'd guess diameter, which puts the coverage area at more like 800 sq. miles than 3000.
No one is claiming WiMax isn't a cool technology, but it's still just broadband. This announcement is as meaningful as if a satellite phone provider started offering call waiting.
If 50-100 lines of Vonage service were bundled into the price at no extra cost, that would be HUGE and a great value. But TFA does not say that the company is bundling that many Vonage lines with the service.
At current prices (TowerStream charges $600 a month for a 1.5Mbps connection), I don't see how this becomes a challenge to DSL, WiFi, etc. It doesn't even challenge cellphones (EVDO for the laptop and a high level of "anytime" minutes on a separate phone are cheaper than TowerStream's WiMax and have a greater range). It just sounds like TowerStream is bundling it as an added value feature of its existing service.
TFA is chock-full of inaccurate marketing hyperbole, like claiming that 75Mbps is more than 20x faster than "the fastest wired broadband available commercially." Really? Comcast is at 4Mbps and heading up. I've got 6Mbps through Speakeasy. This chart shows multiple cable companies offering 8Mbps with 20 on the way (and that's not counting Verizon's FIOS).
Laughably, News.com just uses the hyperbole in their "news" story a couple of days after publishing that chart. I sent an e-mail to the "reporter" and asked him if he was using the "Parroting A Press Release Without Checking My Facts" mathematical theorem to come to the conclusion that 75 is more than 20 times faster than 8.
Anyhoo, unless there's something I'm missing, this is non-news. It's just an ISP that is bundling Vonage. BFHD.
It seems more that SuSE has decided to gun for Mandrake/MandRiva/MandCorRiva, Ubuntu, Linspire, and other desktop-focused distros than going after more "Geeky" distros like Fedora, Gentoo, etc.
I'll be interested to see the SuSE Professional 10.0 beta they'll be distributing next week and which is considered the kick-off point for this initiative.
I doubt many of those people still exist 10 years later, but I'm sure there are a few people happily clacking away on their Wangs, saving to floppies, printing with 9-pin dot matrix, and happy because that's all they need.
- Greg
Actually, when I tried CS, I found that some shortcuts and other basic UI stuff had changed and slowed me down. I didn't see enough new and cool stuff in CS to make the upgrade compelling.
Photoshop 7 does everything I need, I'm comfortable in its environment, and I don't upgrade without a compelling reason. So I'm happy to stick with Photoshop 7.
- Greg
When you do switch...
OpenOffice.org is a very reasonable and usable replacement for MS Office with next to no learning curve to switch over.
Photoshop has a silver certification under CrossOver Office, and supposedly runs really well under Cedega (formerly WineX, but now focused toward the gaming community). Both CrossOver Office and Cedega have a cost involved, though.
Many people have already switched to Firefox for browsing. That's free. So is Thunderbird, which is a great mail client, but it lacks some of the Calendar/PIM functions of Outlook.
- G
Note the use of "the Program" in the language. While they violate the GPL in regards to the Linux kernel, violating it for one program does not terminate your rights to use other GPL'ed software for which you're in compliance.
What I'd be interesting in seeing is if they had to make any source changes/additions to the GPL software packages to make it run with OpenServer and if those source mods have been distributed under the GPL as required.
- Greg
I guess that leads to SCO's demonstrated philosophy... "If you can't beat 'em, sue 'em."
SCO: Inferior products beefed up via a license we claim is invalid.
- G
If the government got the hosts to yank them, then the government's hand would be tipped because they'd have to get legal orders which would eventually be released by some leak. But if it's through hacking or DDOS'ing, it raises the question of whether the government really did it (or if public-spirited hackers went vigilante), and if the government did it, where do we draw the line on the illegality of such tactics?
Can a judge issue an order allowing the takedown of foreign sites via hack or DDOS if they are deemed harmful to national security? Can such an order be sealed and kept from the public?
Perhaps the point is moot as no one has surfaced a smoking gun, pointing to British intel. TFA just quotes Israeli sources saying the hand of British intel was detected, but not stating that any direct evidence has been presented to prove this.
I'll be interested in seeing how the story develops. There's a certain visceral satisfaction in seeing advocates of hate and violence silenced, but at the same time it's frightening to think of any government covertly silencing voices of dissent, as that starts a society down a slippery slope of oppression.
I'd be much more willing to believe that the Israelis have a covert and capable corps of hackers than the British. And if these corps, regardless of national origin, were capable of initiating DDOS attacks, I'd be curious as to where/how they got their zombies. It would be sad to think that a source of worms and viruses were government-paid hackers, building bot nets for black ops.
- Greg
So why should you get free continued support?
Now, if you had paid a maintenance fee (quarterly, yearly, ..), then you would of course get updates for the life of the maintenance contract.
But free?
It's supposed to be free because that's how Microsoft has done it. If they want to change it, change it. But define that change clearly and prominently at the time of sale.
Lots of smaller software companies sell you A & B & C packages:
If Microsoft wants to follow that model, fine. Do it... on all new copies of XP they've sold. But for the prior ones, stop adding hoops and checks to make sure I paid. I bought it, I installed it, activated it, I've done enough to qualify for my updates.
- Greg
Good one. Ought to submit this to Bartlett's Quotations. :-)
All well and good if I want to make the sequel to "Sky Captain", but not quite the simplicity of Premiere Elements.
- Greg
Sadly, Microsoft will issue a new version of Genuine Advantage that disables the hack and make you use the new version before you can use Microsoft update, so I believe this is only a temporary reprieve. I guess it will be a back and forth between MS and and hackers until MS has secured Genuine Advantage.
I've got a licensed, genuine version of Windows, but F them for making me jump through hoops to receive continued support. I paid for this and I shouldn't have to keep wasting my time to soothe their paranoid brows.
Just another reason to keep trying new Linux distros and updates on my testbed system until I find one I like enough to switch (tried so far: Ubuntu, SuSE, CentOS 3.3, Linspire, Knoppix, Mandrake 10). Already using OpenOffice, Firefox, and Thunderbird and have a WAMP (Windows, Apache, MySQL, PHP) set-up for development work. Going to Linux is a small step, but there are a few apps (like video editing, graphics editing) where I just don't have the patience to spend a whole bunch of time learning Linux apps that are 'almost' there in terms of their UI. Maybe I'll hit the Crossover Office site to see if they've gone to gold level support on some of my must-have Windows apps yet.
- Greg
I'm not going to say that corporate environments stifle innovation, but the motivation to innovate in a corporate environment is necessarily dollar-driven. The motivation to innovate in an OS environment is desire driven. If enough people desire to see it done and turn that desire into action, it gets done.
The OS community may not be regularly churning out Adobe killers or MS killers, but you get tweaks, utilities, apps, and sometimes that off the wall genius idea that ends up defining a new industry segment because no CYA suit saw the value in it until a passionate OS developer/group proved it.
As for the GPL, remember that it is not an exclusive license. There are a variety of licenses out there and a number of projects offer different licenses depending on your intended use of their code and whether you'll pay for the license.
- Greg
All someone has to do is proxy the image bar and word sequence to the user (they could screen capture it if nothing else), get the click sequence (i.e. 12434), and then have a device that repeats that click sequence on your site.
See my journal for an e-mail address if you want to discuss this privately.
- Greg
Never said it was, but as opposed to a "show an image and type its contents" CAPTCHA, it requires a more complex workaround. It would defeat their standard bot and require them to code a new workaround for my specific CAPTCHA. If they did as many do, and followed the path of least resistance, they'd never go to the trouble of defeating my CAPTCHA via remoting.
My best concept for an unremotable CAPTCHA was one that used motion (like "punch the monkey"), timestamps, and other devices to force it to be solved from the page it was on by the original requester. But that could become onerous to the user.
IMO, the trick in CAPTCHA design is to create something complex enough to baffle the spammers, but not so complex as to discourage legitimate users from completing the task (registering, posting, etc.). If anyone wants to discuss CAPTCHAs with me privately, I've posted an e-mail address in my Slashdot journal.
I've considered opening up the code (it's in PHP), but the photos came out of a clip-art collection, so I wouldn't be able to redistribute them. I'd have to get contributors to provide their photos under GPL.
The alternative is to provide it as a remotely hosted service, in which case I'm within the bounds of the license on the images, and since I already set it up that way for myself, expanding it wouldn't be tough.
- Greg
Alternately, you're saying that you have no interest in what poor people have to say.
Actually, before these sites became such a wasteland of porn spam and malware, I stopped visiting them because they were some of the worst abusers of pop-ups, pop-unders, and other annoying advertising methods. The growing abuse of these services by spammers and other scum merely cemented my resolve to avoid them.
Sure, you lose out on some gems, but there is MORE than enough out there in the areas I will visit to compensate for what I'm missing. The amount of interesting information on the Internet increases faster than any one human can keep up with (except for my friend who, after a badly broken leg and 3 months on bedrest, came back to work and said he used all that time to "finish reading the Internet"). If my filters leave out some valuable voices in the free-web-o-sphere, I've still got LOTS of interesting and valuable choices remaining.
- Greg
Even then, porn spammers can just show the question to users and get them to answer it. If someone is dedicated enough, they can remote any captcha to a human. The trick is to make the remoting difficult enough that they'll go elsewhere.
My answer to the CAPTCHA problem is a multi-picture deal where you have to click on photos that correspond to words in the same sequence that the words appear. Demo here.
But even that could be remoted if a spammer wanted to do the work. Heck, I developed it so I can host it in one place and then use it on multiple sites. I racked my brains for some time, trying to come up with something a spammer couldn't remote, but every idea either fell down when I put my black hat on, or wouldn't stand up in a usability test (i.e. it would be so difficult and complex to just do at my site, many people would give up).
- Greg
Does anyone know how effective these schemes really are? Is there a study that measures how effective this is?
The type-in is called a CAPTCHA (an acronym for "completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart"). They can be fairly effective, but all they do is block robots from setting up an account. If I need 10 accounts, I don't necessarily need to automate it. CAPTCHAs are more often used effectively to block bulk botting stuff like blog spam, signups for free mail accounts, or other services (like whois at Netsol.com or Godaddy.com) prone to abuse and they can work well if well designed. But, again, they're to prevent robots from doing something, not humans.
Now, as CAPTCHA's get more obscured to try to defeat more sophisticated OCR elements, they become more difficult for humans to read. I recently developed one that I may use on some of my sites that uses identifying the contents of pictures. Demo here. Some of the people I've had test it said it was fun and they actually played it like a game.
- Greg
I'd say that the gov't should make these companies provide more authentication, but all it would do is prove a barrier against legitimate users while the criminals would just find a way around.
Outlawing free/homesteading sites would be likely be found unconstitutional in the U.S. and it would be a big fight to remove the safe harbor provisions for such sites to make them responsible for their users' malicious activities. I really don't know what we could do at a legislative level. At a personal level, I just refuse to visit any sites at angelfire, geocities, et al.
- Greg
First, CMOT Dibbler would sell counterfeit copies of Windows he imported from Quirm.
Second, they'd be "inna bun".
Third, Thud is due for release Oct 1.
- G
Now, if you were a big house with tens of thousands of dollars invested in software, this was an incentive to stay the Mac course. But if you were a new house or an indie who was going to have to buy the software anyway, the hardware price savings on the PC boxes would be attractive.
And, of course, there were always various little utilities so you could read Mac floppies and Zip disks if you needed to, so you could still work with Mac-only houses, despite being Intel-based.