picking up the phone makes sure you KNOW your complaint has been heard
In any large (even medium) organisation, there is no guarantee that your complaint has been heard *by the right person*. That's like serving verbal notice on McDonalds by talking to the guy who gives you your fries.
Email leaves a permanent record. It's a much better medium than the phone for this sort of thing, and AOL are meant to be an internet company. Normally, I would say registered mail - but in this case, it appears that AOL registered this email specifically, in accordance with the law, and then changed it/neglected to check the old one.
Smart fuel economy is around 60mpg (combined city/country) - although not the absolute best, that's still pretty good. I was in Italy last year and they were absolutely everywhere, definitely the single most popular car. I'd say every tenth car that I saw in Rome was a Smart. Understandable when you see the size of the streets they have to drive down! Not so many in the north of the country however.
Seriously, though, this looks not unlike a typical small commuter car that you might see in Europe every day. The accenting on the headlights is the only thing that stands out.
Volvo's new concept car, launched at the Geneva motor show, is a car designed by women for women. [...] [The car] was designed by a team of women keen to change the way most cars are designed with male drivers in mind. [...] And for women with ponytails, there is even a split in the middle of the headrest. "It is very uncomfortable to drive with a ponytail," said Ms Christiansen.
"I'm a worker who needs a powerful computer. I need/want to take said computer home from time to time, with all my stuff handily available. I don't want a big PC at home and want to be able to store this away in a drawer. I commute to and from work in a car. So my total lugging with this 16lb beast is work door to car to home door. That would suit me fine."
Personally I have a sub-2lb ultralight (less powerful than this, but more expensive) and cycle to work, but that's just what suits me. I don't just dogmatically shout 16lbs, no-one will want that, because it doesn't fit my personal situation. If I wanted to transport something powerful to and from work, I'd prefer it was this than my Shuttle, which is a very small desktop, together with 17" LCD. Besides simple weight considerations, this folds up to a more convenient size and you don't have a ton of wires to gather together.
It suggests backing up over the network. Why is this an unreasonable answer?
It has USB2 - so it has the option of backing up on an external USB2 hard disk, or CD/DVD burner, etc., etc. They mention using USB2 for backup on the very same page that you quote. But they think backing up over the network is the best solution, if it is possible. And I think most of the people who are likely to be using such a device as their 'only computer' will be using this for work purposes, with access to a network.
How do you back up an ultralight laptop which doesn't have an CD/DVD-R? How did we back up laptops before laptop CD/DVD-Rs were inexpensive and generally available (*not that long ago*, and don't say 'use a floppy' - 1.44mb has been too small for a long time). Personally, I back my laptop over the network, and would recommend this as a first option to anyone who asked.
Seriously though, that case that you make of finding someone else's media is the one case where you have a point for analog - you could call it the 'archaeologist case'. With many forms of digital media, *someone* has to care enough to keep the systems going to preserve the information. While this isn't a problem if it is your own stuff, I grant that it is a problem after you are gone.
That ad up the top is really pissing me off, I'm too lazy to dump ads.osdn.com into my hosts file, and too tight to spend the money to become a subscriber. TIA!
Backups require human intervention and, knowing what lazy bastards human beings (myself included) in general are, that means that backups aren't done as often as we should or they're are not done at all.
Well, my laptop backs itself up automatically over Wifi whenever I'm at home. My home server in turn backs itself up onto an external hard drive as a scheduled task. All of this without any intervention from me. My work folders are backed up over the network when I'm at work. Any good backup system will not require user action, as you are right, users will not remember.
With film you don't have to keep on doing backups.
No, you just need to store the film carefully in a controlled environment.
Yeah, well done there. That single ad in the print version was really burning my eyes out, thanks for taking the hit for all of us. And you never know, Wired could be slashdotted.
With the ever increasing use of digital photography, I've become wary of the same problem that plagues digital media in general: it's so volatile.
Properly stored original film negatives last decades, whereas digital media is gone in a blink of an eye when your harddrive/memory card breaks down or you accidentally erase your media.
That's why we have this handy thing called *backups*, something that is impossible with analog media (you will always have generational loss).
I have documents sitting on my laptop from the mid-80s and due to this sterling innovation of lossless copying I have never in all that time suffered a serious data loss. Every time I get a new computer, anything of importance moves across, and is stored at a minimum on two seperate hard disks and optical media also.
It's also a great advantage to be able to manage all of my digital information easily, and in one place. By contrast, I have both lost and damaged many negatives from only the last few years. Through my negligence, I will grant, but this never would have happened if they had been digital.
There is nothing inherent in digital media that makes it more volatile than analog media, and indeed the fact that it is digital, and thus allows perfect copies, makes the media ultimately irrelevant.
Are we back in 1999? Because if we are, I've got a really good business plan to show you...
I've got this device that makes smells, which will interoperate well with the 3D VRML interweb. The only trick with this thing is reaching critical mass of eyeballs - no, scratch that, noseholes - so we'll have to give them out for free, and eat the GBP250 ($464 - yes, you read that right, that's what this thing costs - can you believe it's so cheap!) How, you ask. Simple. We'll get advertisers to pay for it! Quote: "Telewest say it could be used by supermarkets to tempt people with the smell of fresh bread or by holiday companies seeking to stir up images of sun-kissed beaches.
I thought this kind of behavior was reserved for companies that could afford to lose customers or that had an existing customer base. What do they wish to gain? Slander is difficult to pin on someone especially new organizations if you're in the public eye.
They have no intent to sue. They just hoped that by sending a threatening letter they might get HardOCP to take down an article that might scare away the venture capitalists that they want to extract money from.
Easy - those thousands of people who don't know each other also send email *back* to the mailing list. Only a few dummies send email back to the spammers.
Most mailinglists and newsletters are one way - I'm not talking about discussion lists or listservs, but rather about the bot that sends me Slashdot headlines, Jakob Nielsens' Alertbox, Fred Langa's newsletter, and even commercial speech that I am signed up to and want to hear such as Komplett's weekly offers, or Ryanair's cheap flights, etc.
A mailing list would have multiple folks in the To: line, which would be easy to spot automatically.
Not necessarily, indeed most professional ones avoid this. While many spams do contain multiple people in the To: field (but also many don't). One way or the other, I don't think this is relevant if we are trying to compare the graph of a mailing list to that of a spammer. To take an example, user slashdot-headlines@newsletters.osdn.com sends thousands of emails to people *who don't know each other*. User enlargeyourdong@hotmail.com has exactly the same pattern. How do you tell these apart?
Sorry, that is a link the entire pdf of the article. This is the abstract, which you may as well have here if I'm posting again (on the linked page, you also have other formats available, as well as mirrors):
We provide an automated graph theoretic method for identifying individual users' trusted networks of friends in cyberspace. We routinely use our social networks to judge the trustworthiness of outsiders, i.e., to decide where to buy our next car, or to find a good mechanic for it. In this work, we show that an email user may similarly use his email network, constructed solely from sender and recipient information available in the email headers, to distinguish between unsolicited commercial emails, commonly called "spam", and emails associated with his circles of friends. We exploit the properties of social networks to construct an automated anti-spam tool which processes an individual user's personal email network to simultaneously identify the user's core trusted networks of friends, as well as subnetworks generated by spams. In our empirical studies of individual mail boxes, our algorithm classified approximately 53% of all emails as spam or non-spam, with 100% accuracy. Some of the emails are left unclassified by this network analysis tool. However, one can exploit two of the following useful features. First, it requires no user intervention or supervised training; second, it results in no false negatives i.e., spam being misclassified as non-spam, or vice versa. We demonstrate that these two features suggest that our algorithm may be used as a platform for a comprehensive solution to the spam problem when used in concert with more sophisticated, but more cumbersome, content-based filters.
You can read an abstract, and download the full (e.g. original) article here in a variety of formats.
From what I can make out, this system graphs correspondent pairs into correspondence maps, and notes that while normal people all email each other and thus have dispersed graphs, (high clustering coefficient) spammers have a distinct pattern, e.g. 1 person emailing a few million others (low clustering coefficient). There are figures in the article that make this point well.
The system would be ideal for implementation at a fairly high level, (e.g. the ISP level) where systems can aggregate email headers across many different users in order to come up with meaningful graphs. The advantage it claims of no false positives means that it would be feasible at this level.
I'm impressed; it looks like a very clever idea. My only question concerns how this would deal with mailing lists, which must appear to it like spam?
It only works on 50%, but it claims *no false positives* on that 50%. That means that that 50% can be deleted immediately; no-one has to check in case there is a false positive. By contrast, Bayesean filters *will* produce the occasional false positive, so you have to trawl through your spam folder occasionally to check against this. If I could reduce my spam folder checking from 200 mails a day to 100, I'd be very happy.
I've seen copies of the GPL with computer hardware before, too. I guess the reason I was making point about this projector in particular was that it is a home theatre projector rather than a computer/presentation one, and this was the first time I'd seen a copy of the GPL bundled with a consumer device.
As ordinary consumer devices become more computerised, we will likely see more GPL code embedded in such devices as it's cheaper than developing from scratch for the manufacturer. What I'd worry about is whether we will see the GPL included in cases where it is not externally obvious that the device contains GPL code (e.g. what about a digital media player that contains a GPL'ed codec - how would you know?)
Slashdot Mirror
In any large (even medium) organisation, there is no guarantee that your complaint has been heard *by the right person*. That's like serving verbal notice on McDonalds by talking to the guy who gives you your fries.
Email leaves a permanent record. It's a much better medium than the phone for this sort of thing, and AOL are meant to be an internet company. Normally, I would say registered mail - but in this case, it appears that AOL registered this email specifically, in accordance with the law, and then changed it/neglected to check the old one.
Original text from Harlan here, perhaps someone reply with a bit of SHIFT-F3.
Smart fuel economy is around 60mpg (combined city/country) - although not the absolute best, that's still pretty good. I was in Italy last year and they were absolutely everywhere, definitely the single most popular car. I'd say every tenth car that I saw in Rome was a Smart. Understandable when you see the size of the streets they have to drive down! Not so many in the north of the country however.
If you want to download the full pages of a patent from the USPTO, "you must install and use a browser plug-in..."
Seriously, though, this looks not unlike a typical small commuter car that you might see in Europe every day. The accenting on the headlights is the only thing that stands out.
How about suing Bank of America? No - let's make it Daimler-Chrysler. They're German linux loving hippies.
Replace All.
Can be found here with picture of the thing here. Apparently it plays DivX too.
Volvo's new concept car, launched at the Geneva motor show, is a car designed by women for women. [...] [The car] was designed by a team of women keen to change the way most cars are designed with male drivers in mind. [...] And for women with ponytails, there is even a split in the middle of the headrest. "It is very uncomfortable to drive with a ponytail," said Ms Christiansen.
"I'm a worker who needs a powerful computer. I need/want to take said computer home from time to time, with all my stuff handily available. I don't want a big PC at home and want to be able to store this away in a drawer. I commute to and from work in a car. So my total lugging with this 16lb beast is work door to car to home door. That would suit me fine."
Personally I have a sub-2lb ultralight (less powerful than this, but more expensive) and cycle to work, but that's just what suits me. I don't just dogmatically shout 16lbs, no-one will want that, because it doesn't fit my personal situation. If I wanted to transport something powerful to and from work, I'd prefer it was this than my Shuttle, which is a very small desktop, together with 17" LCD. Besides simple weight considerations, this folds up to a more convenient size and you don't have a ton of wires to gather together.
It has USB2 - so it has the option of backing up on an external USB2 hard disk, or CD/DVD burner, etc., etc. They mention using USB2 for backup on the very same page that you quote. But they think backing up over the network is the best solution, if it is possible. And I think most of the people who are likely to be using such a device as their 'only computer' will be using this for work purposes, with access to a network.
How do you back up an ultralight laptop which doesn't have an CD/DVD-R? How did we back up laptops before laptop CD/DVD-Rs were inexpensive and generally available (*not that long ago*, and don't say 'use a floppy' - 1.44mb has been too small for a long time). Personally, I back my laptop over the network, and would recommend this as a first option to anyone who asked.
Seriously though, that case that you make of finding someone else's media is the one case where you have a point for analog - you could call it the 'archaeologist case'. With many forms of digital media, *someone* has to care enough to keep the systems going to preserve the information. While this isn't a problem if it is your own stuff, I grant that it is a problem after you are gone.
That ad up the top is really pissing me off, I'm too lazy to dump ads.osdn.com into my hosts file, and too tight to spend the money to become a subscriber. TIA!
Well, my laptop backs itself up automatically over Wifi whenever I'm at home. My home server in turn backs itself up onto an external hard drive as a scheduled task. All of this without any intervention from me. My work folders are backed up over the network when I'm at work. Any good backup system will not require user action, as you are right, users will not remember.
With film you don't have to keep on doing backups.
No, you just need to store the film carefully in a controlled environment.
Yeah, well done there. That single ad in the print version was really burning my eyes out, thanks for taking the hit for all of us. And you never know, Wired could be slashdotted.
Properly stored original film negatives last decades, whereas digital media is gone in a blink of an eye when your harddrive/memory card breaks down or you accidentally erase your media.
That's why we have this handy thing called *backups*, something that is impossible with analog media (you will always have generational loss).
I have documents sitting on my laptop from the mid-80s and due to this sterling innovation of lossless copying I have never in all that time suffered a serious data loss. Every time I get a new computer, anything of importance moves across, and is stored at a minimum on two seperate hard disks and optical media also.
It's also a great advantage to be able to manage all of my digital information easily, and in one place. By contrast, I have both lost and damaged many negatives from only the last few years. Through my negligence, I will grant, but this never would have happened if they had been digital.
There is nothing inherent in digital media that makes it more volatile than analog media, and indeed the fact that it is digital, and thus allows perfect copies, makes the media ultimately irrelevant.
It was called Smell-O-Vision. I predict that this will have at least as much success.
You can do the conversion yourself here.
I've got this device that makes smells, which will interoperate well with the 3D VRML interweb. The only trick with this thing is reaching critical mass of eyeballs - no, scratch that, noseholes - so we'll have to give them out for free, and eat the GBP250 ($464 - yes, you read that right, that's what this thing costs - can you believe it's so cheap!) How, you ask. Simple. We'll get advertisers to pay for it! Quote: "Telewest say it could be used by supermarkets to tempt people with the smell of fresh bread or by holiday companies seeking to stir up images of sun-kissed beaches.
I forsee no problems whatsoever.
They have no intent to sue. They just hoped that by sending a threatening letter they might get HardOCP to take down an article that might scare away the venture capitalists that they want to extract money from.
Most mailinglists and newsletters are one way - I'm not talking about discussion lists or listservs, but rather about the bot that sends me Slashdot headlines, Jakob Nielsens' Alertbox, Fred Langa's newsletter, and even commercial speech that I am signed up to and want to hear such as Komplett's weekly offers, or Ryanair's cheap flights, etc.
Not necessarily, indeed most professional ones avoid this. While many spams do contain multiple people in the To: field (but also many don't). One way or the other, I don't think this is relevant if we are trying to compare the graph of a mailing list to that of a spammer. To take an example, user slashdot-headlines@newsletters.osdn.com sends thousands of emails to people *who don't know each other*. User enlargeyourdong@hotmail.com has exactly the same pattern. How do you tell these apart?
We provide an automated graph theoretic method for identifying individual users' trusted networks of friends in cyberspace. We routinely use our social networks to judge the trustworthiness of outsiders, i.e., to decide where to buy our next car, or to find a good mechanic for it. In this work, we show that an email user may similarly use his email network, constructed solely from sender and recipient information available in the email headers, to distinguish between unsolicited commercial emails, commonly called "spam", and emails associated with his circles of friends. We exploit the properties of social networks to construct an automated anti-spam tool which processes an individual user's personal email network to simultaneously identify the user's core trusted networks of friends, as well as subnetworks generated by spams. In our empirical studies of individual mail boxes, our algorithm classified approximately 53% of all emails as spam or non-spam, with 100% accuracy. Some of the emails are left unclassified by this network analysis tool. However, one can exploit two of the following useful features. First, it requires no user intervention or supervised training; second, it results in no false negatives i.e., spam being misclassified as non-spam, or vice versa. We demonstrate that these two features suggest that our algorithm may be used as a platform for a comprehensive solution to the spam problem when used in concert with more sophisticated, but more cumbersome, content-based filters.
From what I can make out, this system graphs correspondent pairs into correspondence maps, and notes that while normal people all email each other and thus have dispersed graphs, (high clustering coefficient) spammers have a distinct pattern, e.g. 1 person emailing a few million others (low clustering coefficient). There are figures in the article that make this point well.
The system would be ideal for implementation at a fairly high level, (e.g. the ISP level) where systems can aggregate email headers across many different users in order to come up with meaningful graphs. The advantage it claims of no false positives means that it would be feasible at this level.
I'm impressed; it looks like a very clever idea. My only question concerns how this would deal with mailing lists, which must appear to it like spam?
It only works on 50%, but it claims *no false positives* on that 50%. That means that that 50% can be deleted immediately; no-one has to check in case there is a false positive. By contrast, Bayesean filters *will* produce the occasional false positive, so you have to trawl through your spam folder occasionally to check against this. If I could reduce my spam folder checking from 200 mails a day to 100, I'd be very happy.
As ordinary consumer devices become more computerised, we will likely see more GPL code embedded in such devices as it's cheaper than developing from scratch for the manufacturer. What I'd worry about is whether we will see the GPL included in cases where it is not externally obvious that the device contains GPL code (e.g. what about a digital media player that contains a GPL'ed codec - how would you know?)