Re:Same with the ipods back when they hit 1 mil.
on
A Million Zunes Sold
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· Score: 1
OK, I don't understand the iPod scratch thing. I've got a 4GB iPod mini and it has a few scratches, but for the most part its fine. I use it all the time. I store it in an iPod sock and its in my backpack, pocket, or car most of the time. The battery still lasts for more hours than a single car trip. (4+)
My wife has a 3G iPod 40GB. The battery died last June. It does have a few scratches, but the screen is still in good shape. People who complain about iPods scratching must abuse them. Do you drop them regularly? Do you put them in your pocket with keys and change? What do you guys do? I've had far more problems with my cell phone getting scratched up which is a bigger problem. The camera lens on it sucks, the print has worn off and its hard to read the screen. That thing stays in my pocket all the time. My iPod has faired better. As for the battery, I saw a replacement on ebay express for $12.50 yesterday. That's not too bad for a rechargeable battery pack that lasts a few years.
Squid doesn't proxy everything. Most large scale bandwidth issues are related to streamed multimedia content and P2P traffic. ISPs always oversell their connections. That will never change.
Differentiate between HOME and BUSINESS comcast accounts. My mail server is blocked because I'm on a comcast business package. There is a big difference between the $45 account and a business grade $160 account. I can't afford a big pipe and i'm punished for it. As for reverse dns, try getting comcast to properly setup the ptr record for you.
Upon random checks of spam lately, most of it is coming from IPs with valid A/PTR records that are also mail servers. Botnets still exist, but I think spammers are focusing on using existing mail servers to circumvent lists of cable/dsl ips.
True. Look how the apple stores have helped Apple. My favorite thing is when there is a Dell booth near an Apple store. Around back to school season, you can seen 20 customers compare Dell boxes to Macs and walk out with a new MacBook or iMac. With the right linux distro and proper marketing, its possible some people might buy linux machines. It would be an interesting experiment to setup shop in a mall and see what consumers pick. Apple's increase in market share shows some people don't care if they run Windows.
Most applications that do update checks I've used only do so from the administration interface. e107 and jforum both check for updates. (php and java apps) Its possible to do the checks. However, downloading updates means the webapp has to have space to download files automatically. From a security perspective, it seems stupid to add this feature unless the webapp already needs writable space. The update feature could introduce an additional attack vector.
Speaking of leaving data in the open, I recall a situation at a former employer. My boss had a CGI script to setup hosting customers at a small ISP. It collected the credit card data, account info, and domain name. The file had 777 permissions and one day a new customer found the file on our linux server. He called up very pissed off. My boss was out which left me to deal with the guy. I agreed that we were idiots and so forth and offered him a refund. I also had my boss change the permissions on the file as soon as he got back. That guy was honest, but how many other people found that file before he did? It was periodically deleted and recreated as billing imported accounts. The webserver still had full access to the file. My boss ran EVERYTHING as nobody back then. If you exploited one service, you had them all.
Working there was very strange. We had someone gain root access on the linux machines at least once a year. The Windows server was the most secure as I attempted to follow security guidelines, patched everything, etc. I was put in charge of the Windows servers without knowing anything about system administration and yet I managed to secure them better than my boss using redhat. I always figured people targeted the easiest machines on the network. Luckily our billing database was in SQL Server so he didn't completely administer that server. After I left, the billing database was attacked as well. He called me up freaking out.
Moral of the story is to be careful who you do business with. Don't think a server is safe because of software running on it. Idiots can break a perfectly secure software package with misuse.
RSS isn't for everyone. I only use it for a limited number of sites. Most often I use it with slashdot to see if there are new stories I want to read. I can just hit the menu in firefox and see if I care about any story. Other sites like CNN.com are not quite as useful with RSS. They don't give you much information and the titles are often misleading. Plus, I refuse to watch stories that are video only with the exception of the WIFI story today. Their video feeds work only in a handful of configurations and not in firefox 2 + vista's media player. Changing to IE to watch a video story is lame.
I consider RSS to be like the IE 4 active channels or whatever they were called. Netscape had something similar. I happened to like them but really it was just a different view of the same data. Websites can be much more interactive and entertaining. The only advantage to RSS over the previous technologies is that its easier to generate content automatically. As a website maintainer, I found it annoying to distribute multiple versions of the same website. Just throwing it in a database wasn't always enough. The downside is that RSS does not offer anything to visitors beyond avoiding a lot of crap on sites. The IE 4 feature allowed you to enhance content since you knew you were targeting a rich client with lots of support for newer web technologies. (at the time) RSS readers might be very simple; images, audio, video and other content might not be supported in a feed reader.
No, it wasn't that interesting. I don't know how the other two feel. I don't care about benchmarks right now. I just want stable drivers when I have to use vista.
Yes, that is the issue. Explain to a typical user that they can't walk into Best Buy, Gamestop, Target or any other store with software and buy anything off the shelf. This problem currently applies to vista users too. The difference is that eventually there will be Vista software. As much as the OSS crowd likes free software, we need to realize that computer users want all types of software and sometime there isn't the resources to create a free application.
The solution to the problem is to get open source gaming projects. We need some first person shooters, strategy games, fantasy games, etc. This will at least draw in gamers who might be willing to dual boot provided there were some fun non-windows games. The gamer rig they just bought has to work too.
Yes, and its taking forever. I've been waiting for wireless washtenaw for some time. Since I don't live on top of the university of michigan I can't easily try what they do have up. I'm looking at it as a second connection for surfing and things so I don't waste bandwidth on more interesting tasks. (No, I don't mean P2P)
We are transitioning to all Apple hardware at work. Previously we have a 50/50 mix of iMacs and dell optiplex systems. What I'm curious to see is what OS ends up as the most popular. Apple's move is risky . If OS X does not fare well, they did sell hardware but why buy apple boxes long term of OS X is dead? I like OS X better than Windows, but I realize some people prefer Windows.
In the western world, you are right about how stupid it is. However, in say india where they work for practically nothing it would be some real money. They could buy a village or something.
"Right now the strongest weapon in the defense against web spam is the CAPTCHA"
Lets fix this.. Right now the strongest weapon in the defense against web spam and letting blind people read websites is the CAPTCHA.
If you offer an alternative, it is usually hackable by bots. It also slows down the user and causes confusion. I hate CAPTCHA. I think the development of CAPTCHA gave spammers the ideas to use these image spams in the first place.
How many are being used? Isn't that the real question. How many of those people got the new PC and put XP on it? How many loaded linux or BSD? Not every computer shipped with Windows runs that version of Windows. IT people might have bought a site license to run Vista Business but bought Vista home, etc. Everybody get out your jump to conclusions board.
Selling != using
So the claim that Vista users will out pace Mac or Linux users so quickly is not true. Its not even possible to get an accurate number on that. I didn't RTFA, but I also wonder what Mac OS sales figures they are using. Are they just comparing 10.4 sales to vista? Are they comparing Mac hardware sales? I upgraded my laptop to 10.4. Is that in there? Not all my Macs even run Mac OS. I have one running OpenBSD exclusively.
How are they comparing Linux users? Is it redhat and suse sales? If so, that's a very small percentage of total linux users.
I can tell most people posting have never worked for a hosting company. The company I worked for did not have much information on clients to "test" them. We did require that they send us email from their original sign-up address. Here is the problem though. Often, an account would be setup by one employee sometimes in their own name for a company. That employee would them leave and the business would be stuck with no login and inaccurate account information. What do we do then? Of course they knew her name, but not much else. In the case of customers outside the US, we had a policy that we could not call them. So we had to take incoming calls or emails only. Sometimes the customer changed their contact address to their website. This means that if their email is not working, we could of course not receive an email from them about their account!
Obviously for many accounts, it is possible to get accurate, useful information. Then again, when a company views it that you are holding their website hostage they get a little upset too! We have several lawyers get froggy with us on behalf of their clients when we did try to verify things. Also, with so many hosting companies its a very cut throat business. Its hard to make money when you get $10 a month at best from most customers. That's less than most Internet access accounts.
Now if you pay verio through the roof for hosting they will go through quite a few steps to verify you are you but they won't keep spam off their network. I had an account with them a few years ago and they actually had an open relay setup. Anyone could impersonate your website and if you had an account, it was easy to enumerate the domains on the server your site was on. Some of this might be resolved with their costly VPS services, but its also resolved with a dedicated server you can lock down yourself too. These days I won't run anything on a server I do not control. I've also found that ISPs are much more careful with dedicated server or VPS account customers.
As far as listing companies, I think most people are scared of lawsuits these days. Since I happened to pick on my verio experience, I should be just as unfair to my own former employer. http://www.customweb.net/ (myeasyhost.com now i believe) There is something wrong with every hosting company. The trick is finding one that you can live with.
How about they work on something more useful like preventative measures for identity theft. I'm not talking about the consumer level, but rather the banking industry. There are banks I will not do business with because of their track record losing data unencrypted off of UPS trucks, etc. How about retail chains who have employees steal checking accounts and make new checks with their name on it! Fraud is much worse than a little copyright infringement.
1. It does effect the general public due to identity theft, spam, and spyware slowing down their PC. 2. spam and spyware often send porn content to children.
The problem is that people think computers are so complex that they don't think its possible to fix security problems. Some people don't relate the problems above to Microsoft's weak security. If we could convince media types that its Microsoft's fault then people might get serious about asking for fixes. Good luck with that.
The problem with making demands on patching is that it effects the open source community too. Sure big projects like the Linux kernel can patch their bugs very quickly because there are so many developers. Small projects might get so bogged down with security issues that they never get a chance to add features or improving things. Microsoft can then spread FUD that Open Source is not as reliable since these small projects can't compete with their enormous number of developers. And before someone says well you can look at the source, remember people have to CARE ENOUGH to look at the source and patch it!
Yes, that was real fun when I worked ISP support. The best part is that many companies don't include the Windows CD/DVD so there is no way to install Windows again without buying it. This advice often results in buying a new computer or buying Windows again. Perhaps they should change it to upgrade to Linux/BSD. You don't need anti-spyware software and that alone will speed up your computer.
Of course the same people that call for this were the types that bitched about not getting 56k.
No, I think the teachers should have criminal charges against them. If a person makes a bomb threat and get caught, they serve jail time. These teachers did something similar by making a gunman threat. It caused panic and a child could have been killed in a crowd of children flooding out the door, etc. Its also a waste of the school day.
Web 2.0 is a marketing approach to sell new books by publishing companies and to single out some sites as "better" because they are new and improved. We've just relauched IE4. DHTML and IE channels are back again with new names and slightly new/different feature sets.
Your technical analysis is correct, but the pentium D is so cheap on newegg that it replaced the celeron line out in october. Its now a good entry level dual core chip. My Pentium D 805 outperforms a Dell Precision 650 with 2 2Ghz Xeon chips. As bad as the Pentium D is, there as still a little progress. Cooling it is another issue all together.
Yes, the later SL models had great gas millage. However, the IONs which according to wikipedia will be discontinued soon, get at best 35 MPG highway. My wife has a 2005 ION 2. My 1996 SL2 gets 33 MPG these days on the expressway. GM does not make efficient cars anymore and they certainly don't care about some of their customers. I'm hoping to replace my car in the next year and there isn't an offering from GM for car buyers who want an efficient, small car. They only care about expensive, large vehicles that have high profit margins. I'm not sure what to buy since I don't like Toyota that much. Price is a big factor and car prices have increased with gas prices.
Yes, and people tend to assume when doing these calculations that gamers only buy one console. Nintendo is selling to grandma who may not have a console, but also to some gamers who also buy xbox or playstation consoles. I have about 8 game consoles in my home right now and do not own anything from the current generation of consoles yet. Its a safe bet I'll buy a Wii and I'm considering buying an xbox 360. Most people are hoping for price drops on the more expensive consoles that haven't bought one yet. In the case of the Wii, its all about supply and demand. There is very little supply right now. I was out shopping today and did not see a single Wii at 4 stores that sell game consoles including Gamestop and ebgames. They did have plenty of PS3s though.:)
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OK, I don't understand the iPod scratch thing. I've got a 4GB iPod mini and it has a few scratches, but for the most part its fine. I use it all the time. I store it in an iPod sock and its in my backpack, pocket, or car most of the time. The battery still lasts for more hours than a single car trip. (4+)
My wife has a 3G iPod 40GB. The battery died last June. It does have a few scratches, but the screen is still in good shape. People who complain about iPods scratching must abuse them. Do you drop them regularly? Do you put them in your pocket with keys and change? What do you guys do? I've had far more problems with my cell phone getting scratched up which is a bigger problem. The camera lens on it sucks, the print has worn off and its hard to read the screen. That thing stays in my pocket all the time. My iPod has faired better. As for the battery, I saw a replacement on ebay express for $12.50 yesterday. That's not too bad for a rechargeable battery pack that lasts a few years.
Squid doesn't proxy everything. Most large scale bandwidth issues are related to streamed multimedia content and P2P traffic. ISPs always oversell their connections. That will never change.
Differentiate between HOME and BUSINESS comcast accounts. My mail server is blocked because I'm on a comcast business package. There is a big difference between the $45 account and a business grade $160 account. I can't afford a big pipe and i'm punished for it. As for reverse dns, try getting comcast to properly setup the ptr record for you.
Upon random checks of spam lately, most of it is coming from IPs with valid A/PTR records that are also mail servers. Botnets still exist, but I think spammers are focusing on using existing mail servers to circumvent lists of cable/dsl ips.
True. Look how the apple stores have helped Apple. My favorite thing is when there is a Dell booth near an Apple store. Around back to school season, you can seen 20 customers compare Dell boxes to Macs and walk out with a new MacBook or iMac. With the right linux distro and proper marketing, its possible some people might buy linux machines. It would be an interesting experiment to setup shop in a mall and see what consumers pick. Apple's increase in market share shows some people don't care if they run Windows.
Most applications that do update checks I've used only do so from the administration interface. e107 and jforum both check for updates. (php and java apps) Its possible to do the checks. However, downloading updates means the webapp has to have space to download files automatically. From a security perspective, it seems stupid to add this feature unless the webapp already needs writable space. The update feature could introduce an additional attack vector.
Speaking of leaving data in the open, I recall a situation at a former employer. My boss had a CGI script to setup hosting customers at a small ISP. It collected the credit card data, account info, and domain name. The file had 777 permissions and one day a new customer found the file on our linux server. He called up very pissed off. My boss was out which left me to deal with the guy. I agreed that we were idiots and so forth and offered him a refund. I also had my boss change the permissions on the file as soon as he got back. That guy was honest, but how many other people found that file before he did? It was periodically deleted and recreated as billing imported accounts. The webserver still had full access to the file. My boss ran EVERYTHING as nobody back then. If you exploited one service, you had them all.
Working there was very strange. We had someone gain root access on the linux machines at least once a year. The Windows server was the most secure as I attempted to follow security guidelines, patched everything, etc. I was put in charge of the Windows servers without knowing anything about system administration and yet I managed to secure them better than my boss using redhat. I always figured people targeted the easiest machines on the network. Luckily our billing database was in SQL Server so he didn't completely administer that server. After I left, the billing database was attacked as well. He called me up freaking out.
Moral of the story is to be careful who you do business with. Don't think a server is safe because of software running on it. Idiots can break a perfectly secure software package with misuse.
RSS isn't for everyone. I only use it for a limited number of sites. Most often I use it with slashdot to see if there are new stories I want to read. I can just hit the menu in firefox and see if I care about any story. Other sites like CNN.com are not quite as useful with RSS. They don't give you much information and the titles are often misleading. Plus, I refuse to watch stories that are video only with the exception of the WIFI story today. Their video feeds work only in a handful of configurations and not in firefox 2 + vista's media player. Changing to IE to watch a video story is lame.
I consider RSS to be like the IE 4 active channels or whatever they were called. Netscape had something similar. I happened to like them but really it was just a different view of the same data. Websites can be much more interactive and entertaining. The only advantage to RSS over the previous technologies is that its easier to generate content automatically. As a website maintainer, I found it annoying to distribute multiple versions of the same website. Just throwing it in a database wasn't always enough. The downside is that RSS does not offer anything to visitors beyond avoiding a lot of crap on sites. The IE 4 feature allowed you to enhance content since you knew you were targeting a rich client with lots of support for newer web technologies. (at the time) RSS readers might be very simple; images, audio, video and other content might not be supported in a feed reader.
No, it wasn't that interesting. I don't know how the other two feel. I don't care about benchmarks right now. I just want stable drivers when I have to use vista.
Yes, that is the issue. Explain to a typical user that they can't walk into Best Buy, Gamestop, Target or any other store with software and buy anything off the shelf. This problem currently applies to vista users too. The difference is that eventually there will be Vista software. As much as the OSS crowd likes free software, we need to realize that computer users want all types of software and sometime there isn't the resources to create a free application.
The solution to the problem is to get open source gaming projects. We need some first person shooters, strategy games, fantasy games, etc. This will at least draw in gamers who might be willing to dual boot provided there were some fun non-windows games. The gamer rig they just bought has to work too.
Yes, and its taking forever. I've been waiting for wireless washtenaw for some time. Since I don't live on top of the university of michigan I can't easily try what they do have up. I'm looking at it as a second connection for surfing and things so I don't waste bandwidth on more interesting tasks. (No, I don't mean P2P)
We are transitioning to all Apple hardware at work. Previously we have a 50/50 mix of iMacs and dell optiplex systems. What I'm curious to see is what OS ends up as the most popular. Apple's move is risky . If OS X does not fare well, they did sell hardware but why buy apple boxes long term of OS X is dead? I like OS X better than Windows, but I realize some people prefer Windows.
Don't give up hope yet. Blizzard tends to leave out details when they first announce a game. They did with WoW, The Frozen Throne, etc.
In the western world, you are right about how stupid it is. However, in say india where they work for practically nothing it would be some real money. They could buy a village or something.
"Right now the strongest weapon in the defense against web spam is the CAPTCHA"
Lets fix this.. Right now the strongest weapon in the defense against web spam and letting blind people read websites is the CAPTCHA.
If you offer an alternative, it is usually hackable by bots. It also slows down the user and causes confusion. I hate CAPTCHA. I think the development of CAPTCHA gave spammers the ideas to use these image spams in the first place.
Very good point. That means any steps we take to "fix" the situation must target both voter and election fraud to be fair.
How many are being used? Isn't that the real question. How many of those people got the new PC and put XP on it? How many loaded linux or BSD? Not every computer shipped with Windows runs that version of Windows. IT people might have bought a site license to run Vista Business but bought Vista home, etc. Everybody get out your jump to conclusions board.
Selling != using
So the claim that Vista users will out pace Mac or Linux users so quickly is not true. Its not even possible to get an accurate number on that. I didn't RTFA, but I also wonder what Mac OS sales figures they are using. Are they just comparing 10.4 sales to vista? Are they comparing Mac hardware sales? I upgraded my laptop to 10.4. Is that in there? Not all my Macs even run Mac OS. I have one running OpenBSD exclusively.
How are they comparing Linux users? Is it redhat and suse sales? If so, that's a very small percentage of total linux users.
I can tell most people posting have never worked for a hosting company. The company I worked for did not have much information on clients to "test" them. We did require that they send us email from their original sign-up address. Here is the problem though. Often, an account would be setup by one employee sometimes in their own name for a company. That employee would them leave and the business would be stuck with no login and inaccurate account information. What do we do then? Of course they knew her name, but not much else. In the case of customers outside the US, we had a policy that we could not call them. So we had to take incoming calls or emails only. Sometimes the customer changed their contact address to their website. This means that if their email is not working, we could of course not receive an email from them about their account!
Obviously for many accounts, it is possible to get accurate, useful information. Then again, when a company views it that you are holding their website hostage they get a little upset too! We have several lawyers get froggy with us on behalf of their clients when we did try to verify things. Also, with so many hosting companies its a very cut throat business. Its hard to make money when you get $10 a month at best from most customers. That's less than most Internet access accounts.
Now if you pay verio through the roof for hosting they will go through quite a few steps to verify you are you but they won't keep spam off their network. I had an account with them a few years ago and they actually had an open relay setup. Anyone could impersonate your website and if you had an account, it was easy to enumerate the domains on the server your site was on. Some of this might be resolved with their costly VPS services, but its also resolved with a dedicated server you can lock down yourself too. These days I won't run anything on a server I do not control. I've also found that ISPs are much more careful with dedicated server or VPS account customers.
As far as listing companies, I think most people are scared of lawsuits these days. Since I happened to pick on my verio experience, I should be just as unfair to my own former employer. http://www.customweb.net/ (myeasyhost.com now i believe) There is something wrong with every hosting company. The trick is finding one that you can live with.
How about they work on something more useful like preventative measures for identity theft. I'm not talking about the consumer level, but rather the banking industry. There are banks I will not do business with because of their track record losing data unencrypted off of UPS trucks, etc. How about retail chains who have employees steal checking accounts and make new checks with their name on it! Fraud is much worse than a little copyright infringement.
I have to disagree.
1. It does effect the general public due to identity theft, spam, and spyware slowing down their PC.
2. spam and spyware often send porn content to children.
The problem is that people think computers are so complex that they don't think its possible to fix security problems. Some people don't relate the problems above to Microsoft's weak security. If we could convince media types that its Microsoft's fault then people might get serious about asking for fixes. Good luck with that.
The problem with making demands on patching is that it effects the open source community too. Sure big projects like the Linux kernel can patch their bugs very quickly because there are so many developers. Small projects might get so bogged down with security issues that they never get a chance to add features or improving things. Microsoft can then spread FUD that Open Source is not as reliable since these small projects can't compete with their enormous number of developers. And before someone says well you can look at the source, remember people have to CARE ENOUGH to look at the source and patch it!
Yes, that was real fun when I worked ISP support. The best part is that many companies don't include the Windows CD/DVD so there is no way to install Windows again without buying it. This advice often results in buying a new computer or buying Windows again. Perhaps they should change it to upgrade to Linux/BSD. You don't need anti-spyware software and that alone will speed up your computer.
Of course the same people that call for this were the types that bitched about not getting 56k.
No, I think the teachers should have criminal charges against them. If a person makes a bomb threat and get caught, they serve jail time. These teachers did something similar by making a gunman threat. It caused panic and a child could have been killed in a crowd of children flooding out the door, etc. Its also a waste of the school day.
Web 2.0 is a marketing approach to sell new books by publishing companies and to single out some sites as "better" because they are new and improved. We've just relauched IE4. DHTML and IE channels are back again with new names and slightly new/different feature sets.
Your technical analysis is correct, but the pentium D is so cheap on newegg that it replaced the celeron line out in october. Its now a good entry level dual core chip. My Pentium D 805 outperforms a Dell Precision 650 with 2 2Ghz Xeon chips. As bad as the Pentium D is, there as still a little progress. Cooling it is another issue all together.
Yes, the later SL models had great gas millage. However, the IONs which according to wikipedia will be discontinued soon, get at best 35 MPG highway. My wife has a 2005 ION 2. My 1996 SL2 gets 33 MPG these days on the expressway. GM does not make efficient cars anymore and they certainly don't care about some of their customers. I'm hoping to replace my car in the next year and there isn't an offering from GM for car buyers who want an efficient, small car. They only care about expensive, large vehicles that have high profit margins. I'm not sure what to buy since I don't like Toyota that much. Price is a big factor and car prices have increased with gas prices.
Yes, and people tend to assume when doing these calculations that gamers only buy one console. Nintendo is selling to grandma who may not have a console, but also to some gamers who also buy xbox or playstation consoles. I have about 8 game consoles in my home right now and do not own anything from the current generation of consoles yet. Its a safe bet I'll buy a Wii and I'm considering buying an xbox 360. Most people are hoping for price drops on the more expensive consoles that haven't bought one yet. In the case of the Wii, its all about supply and demand. There is very little supply right now. I was out shopping today and did not see a single Wii at 4 stores that sell game consoles including Gamestop and ebgames. They did have plenty of PS3s though. :)