I'd have preferred a little more rebuttal than "whatever." That is -- could Verizon be telling the truth here? Are there security holes in bluetooth's serial port and file-transfer functions? What about in motorola's implementation in this particular phone? If not, then OK -- this is a shameless money grab and nothing more, hiding under a false veneer of "maintaining user privacy."
Considering you can bypass the phone's PIN security by pressing END, I'd say Bluetooth security isn't the pressing concern with this phone.
Personally - and especially at this point in time - I'd bet that the ratio is at least 50/50, and likely to rise after the slashdot exposure.
You're not from the recording industry by any chance, are you? I think we'll be able to sort a lot of it out in our analysis. Give us a little credit in the creative ways we can filter trolls. =) Even if it were as bad as 50/50, I've seen almost $200,000 in the past 6 hours. I suspect within a month's time, we'll see quite a bit more - even if you cut it in half, it's significant. But like I said, there are plenty of ways to filter out trolls.
Naturally, the results are only as useful as the honesty of the individuals reporting the information. There will obviously be a small "troll margin" of people who put subtle entries in the database and no way to identify their authenticity. This will be mentioned in any final results posted. The obvious bogus entries will be removed after human review.
While I'm certain there are some trolls among us, I doubt they are more than a small percentage.
Sorry about any initial problems with the numbers - the catalog was working, but the script to tabulate totals had a couple minor bugs. Everything has been corrected and the logs are being totaled properly now. I've added a few filters to filter out the bogus entries, and had to put in a 2 minute delay between submissions to spearhead flooding. Anyway, all is now up and running =)
After the technology had earned the trust of once highly skeptical customers, an amazing transformation began to take place: Face-to-face business became face-to-interface, and it changed the way people consumed.
Ironically, the same thing happened with sex around the same time.
I suspect these figures don't account for the machines shipped with windows pre-loaded (such as mine), where the owner installs another operating system over it. So by 2010 they'll sell 400 million more machines pre-loaded with windows, and I suspect by then all 400 million will also be running Linux:)
3 days is more than reasonable IMHO. If people can't wait that long, they've got some serious instant gratification issues to deal with. If you're unsure about what you want, then go visit a brick and morter store to find what you want - then go order it over the Internet...or at least price compare. If you can find it $50 or $100 cheaper off the Internet, then it'd be very stupid to buy it from Best Buy...3 days waiting is well worth both the savings and the satisfaction of not buying anything from Best Buy. I say, if they're going to treat their customers like this, use their store to browse (while it's still legal) and buy what you want somewhere else. You might be surprised to find that the camera you priced out at Best Buy is already obsolete for a newer model you can get for the same price online.
As for people calling to push plans, I don't think I've ever had anyone call me to try and upsell me something. Depends where you buy from I guess - there are plenty of legitimate companies on the Internet that won't pester you - I've bought six laptops and desktops through CDW, and have only been called to confirm credit cards and such - never pestered. They also happen to give me the best prices on what I order, and all the knowledge I need online - their only upsell are the little corner of the screen where they list accessories for whatever I'm buying, which I think is more helpful than an annoying sales rep.
As far as knowledge transfer, who says these store employees know anything about anything - most of the time the employees are just as clueless about their products as we are. I make it my responsibility to know more than the sales employees at any store about what it is I want to buy - if I don't know more about the product than some $10/hr employee, I'm being an idiot with my money. Two words: goo. gle. Make yourself as knowledgeable about a product as you can before you shell out for it...don't waste time asking clueless sales reps.
Best Buy has obviously forgotten all about what it means to be a retailer, and so they can just pay the price.
Don't forget to add Microsoft's Double Click Patent and Mcafee's patent on Bayesian spam Filtering (filed months after Paul Graham's paper was published). I'm not quite fond of AOL's patent on "evil points" either.
approach to fighting spam. 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 ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) 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 ( ) Users of email will not put up with it (X) Microsoft will not put up with it (X) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) 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 (X) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes (X) 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 ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft (X) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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 (X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? (X) 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 (X) 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. ( ) Nice try, l0ser! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Quicken 2002 works great in wine. And if you don't want to run wine, check out a program called MoneyDance, which is a native Linux application (actually I think it's Java) that does online banking flawlessly.
The purpose of running an alt-OS is to run what _you_ want, and to be able to do it with free software. Gnome is flexible enough to look however _you_ want it to...it's both attractive, and it's free.
This looks to me like Windows '95, which is really Apple '86. Sorry, I don't mean to flame, but honestly - why would anyone want to pay for that when you can make your desktop look so much better with free, GPL'd products?
Basically gnome is great, but it lacks attention to detail IMO. I think future versions should focus more on detailed quality and not on expanding featureset.
1. The Menus should be much more customizable; treated like folders that you can click and drag into (I hate to say this, but "Like Windows").
2. Better Video control properties; take advantage of XFree's extended features and have options like TV switching and such.
3. Better preferences; the control panels are quite lacking.
4. Other aesthetic enhancements that will make gnome pretty enough to compete with other window environments (like win XP's or OSX's). Smooth scrolling, the zoom-on-hover icons in OSX are sweet, and _drop shadows on windows_ would be real nice.
5. Some kind of Linux-version-of-Active-Desktop would be real nice, so I could have an IRC session running as part of my wallpaper,anchor the weather channel radar map to the background, etcetera.
McDonalds and Sony are teaming up to offer free music downloads to customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value Meal
This is sad, before I started reading the article the first thing that came to mind was making a joke that they would be offering free music downloads to customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value Meal.
The point wasn't that clicky-clicky works for most users - both *nix and *ders have clicky-clicky interfaces that will allow users to do what you're suggesting. The point was that the commands are just as (if not more) cryptic on *ders, and the error messages are even worse. Some commands on *nix may be cryptic, but that can be resolved for the average newbie with a couple of aliases.
As opposed to...
WORD.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN CODE CHUNK 0xBADC0D3 AND PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION
00 FF AA 00 EE WW TT FF
JJ 00 00 SU X0 RZ BA HA
Then all our patents would be classified as "Overrated", "Funny", or "Troll"...and there'd be at least one mention of soviet russia in every schematic.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have preferred a little more rebuttal than "whatever." That is -- could Verizon be telling the truth here? Are there security holes in bluetooth's serial port and file-transfer functions? What about in motorola's implementation in this particular phone? If not, then OK -- this is a shameless money grab and nothing more, hiding under a false veneer of "maintaining user privacy."
Considering you can bypass the phone's PIN security by pressing END, I'd say Bluetooth security isn't the pressing concern with this phone.
Personally - and especially at this point in time - I'd bet that the ratio is at least 50/50, and likely to rise after the slashdot exposure.
You're not from the recording industry by any chance, are you? I think we'll be able to sort a lot of it out in our analysis. Give us a little credit in the creative ways we can filter trolls. =) Even if it were as bad as 50/50, I've seen almost $200,000 in the past 6 hours. I suspect within a month's time, we'll see quite a bit more - even if you cut it in half, it's significant. But like I said, there are plenty of ways to filter out trolls.
Naturally, the results are only as useful as the honesty of the individuals reporting the information. There will obviously be a small "troll margin" of people who put subtle entries in the database and no way to identify their authenticity. This will be mentioned in any final results posted. The obvious bogus entries will be removed after human review.
While I'm certain there are some trolls among us, I doubt they are more than a small percentage.
Hi,
Sorry about any initial problems with the numbers - the catalog was working, but the script to tabulate totals had a couple minor bugs. Everything has been corrected and the logs are being totaled properly now. I've added a few filters to filter out the bogus entries, and had to put in a 2 minute delay between submissions to spearhead flooding. Anyway, all is now up and running =)
After the technology had earned the trust of once highly skeptical customers, an amazing transformation began to take place: Face-to-face business became face-to-interface, and it changed the way people consumed.
Ironically, the same thing happened with sex around the same time.
I suspect these figures don't account for the machines shipped with windows pre-loaded (such as mine), where the owner installs another operating system over it. So by 2010 they'll sell 400 million more machines pre-loaded with windows, and I suspect by then all 400 million will also be running Linux :)
3 days is more than reasonable IMHO. If people can't wait that long, they've got some serious instant gratification issues to deal with. If you're unsure about what you want, then go visit a brick and morter store to find what you want - then go order it over the Internet...or at least price compare. If you can find it $50 or $100 cheaper off the Internet, then it'd be very stupid to buy it from Best Buy...3 days waiting is well worth both the savings and the satisfaction of not buying anything from Best Buy. I say, if they're going to treat their customers like this, use their store to browse (while it's still legal) and buy what you want somewhere else. You might be surprised to find that the camera you priced out at Best Buy is already obsolete for a newer model you can get for the same price online.
As for people calling to push plans, I don't think I've ever had anyone call me to try and upsell me something. Depends where you buy from I guess - there are plenty of legitimate companies on the Internet that won't pester you - I've bought six laptops and desktops through CDW, and have only been called to confirm credit cards and such - never pestered. They also happen to give me the best prices on what I order, and all the knowledge I need online - their only upsell are the little corner of the screen where they list accessories for whatever I'm buying, which I think is more helpful than an annoying sales rep.
As far as knowledge transfer, who says these store employees know anything about anything - most of the time the employees are just as clueless about their products as we are. I make it my responsibility to know more than the sales employees at any store about what it is I want to buy - if I don't know more about the product than some $10/hr employee, I'm being an idiot with my money. Two words: goo. gle. Make yourself as knowledgeable about a product as you can before you shell out for it...don't waste time asking clueless sales reps.
Best Buy has obviously forgotten all about what it means to be a retailer, and so they can just pay the price.
Apparently you've never heard of the Internet.
Dude, it's supposed to be funny...or didn't you read the moderation? Get a life dude.
AOL's patent on instant messaging
Don't forget to add Microsoft's Double Click Patent and Mcafee's patent on Bayesian spam Filtering (filed months after Paul Graham's paper was published). I'm not quite fond of AOL's patent on "evil points" either.
This article advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based (X) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. 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
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) 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
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(X) Microsoft will not put up with it
(X) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(X) 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
(X) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(X) 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
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(X) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) 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
(X) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(X) 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
(X) 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.
( ) Nice try, l0ser! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
Quicken 2002 works great in wine. And if you don't want to run wine, check out a program called MoneyDance, which is a native Linux application (actually I think it's Java) that does online banking flawlessly.
to grow webbed feet (although I'm told there are implants available
Those aren't the only implants you'll find on the west coast.
The Xandros desktop is KDE 3.1, with additions that allow the system to WORK as smoothly as Windows XP.
So it causes KDE to crash intermittently and produce obscure error codes?
The purpose of running an alt-OS is to run what _you_ want, and to be able to do it with free software. Gnome is flexible enough to look however _you_ want it to...it's both attractive, and it's free.
It's all in the background, I can put windows wherever I please. gDesklets = Active Desktop on steroids.
This looks to me like Windows '95, which is really Apple '86. Sorry, I don't mean to flame, but honestly - why would anyone want to pay for that when you can make your desktop look so much better with free, GPL'd products?
Store all your passwords on a burned CD, that way they'll have a shelf-life of 3-5 years tops.
Basically gnome is great, but it lacks attention to detail IMO. I think future versions should focus more on detailed quality and not on expanding featureset.
1. The Menus should be much more customizable; treated like folders that you can click and drag into (I hate to say this, but "Like Windows").
2. Better Video control properties; take advantage of XFree's extended features and have options like TV switching and such.
3. Better preferences; the control panels are quite lacking.
4. Other aesthetic enhancements that will make gnome pretty enough to compete with other window environments (like win XP's or OSX's). Smooth scrolling, the zoom-on-hover icons in OSX are sweet, and _drop shadows on windows_ would be real nice.
5. Some kind of Linux-version-of-Active-Desktop would be real nice, so I could have an IRC session running as part of my wallpaper,anchor the weather channel radar map to the background, etcetera.
McDonalds and Sony are teaming up to offer free music downloads to customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value Meal
This is sad, before I started reading the article the first thing that came to mind was making a joke that they would be offering free music downloads to customers who buy a Big Mac Extra Value Meal.
The point wasn't that clicky-clicky works for most users - both *nix and *ders have clicky-clicky interfaces that will allow users to do what you're suggesting. The point was that the commands are just as (if not more) cryptic on *ders, and the error messages are even worse. Some commands on *nix may be cryptic, but that can be resolved for the average newbie with a couple of aliases.
"Unix is a pain. Cryptic commands
as opposed to winipcfg, netsh, and fdisk?
confusing explanations
As opposed to...
WORD.EXE CAUSED A GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT IN CODE CHUNK 0xBADC0D3 AND PERFORMED AN ILLEGAL OPERATION
00 FF AA 00 EE WW TT FF
JJ 00 00 SU X0 RZ BA HA
...and every now and then you'd open up one of the illustrations and it'd be ASCII donkey pr0n.
Then all our patents would be classified as "Overrated", "Funny", or "Troll"...and there'd be at least one mention of soviet russia in every schematic.