What do you do when the apparent beneficiary of the spam claims they were joe-jobbed?
If only the courts relied on humans to make judgment calls about who's telling the truth, rather than using a strictly algorithmic, deterministic parser that would be fooled by a joe job!
Michael, pray tell, what, exactly, about providing a machine-readable, easily-parseable list of valid, active e-mail addresses - in order to STOP spam - is a working concept?
Under Steve Case, pushed its customers in every way possible to get money from them.
Actually, that was in large part due to Bob Pittman. He was the crass commercializer - and that's what he was brought in to be. (As Jim Kimsey put it, AOL needed "adult supervision.") In the old days, at least, Steve was always all about the member experience, community, doing the Right Thing. Unfortunately, he rarely seemed to hire executives who shared that vision - Pittman, Brandt, Schuler, all had Bugs Bunny dollar signs in their eyes.
It's sad that, just as Ted Leonsis is back on top, giving new life to the old values, Steve had to step aside. This is a big blow to AOL's chances.
I did something similar, but much more effective. My PC is on an outside wall, and it is in enclosed cabinetry. There is a 4" hole in back of the cabinet with an AC muffin fan mounted on it. The hole opens to a 4" round pipe leading out to a dryer-style vent opening. It works wonderfully; the cabinet stays cool even in summer, and I have two original-model Cheetah X15s.
I have to agree with other posters that venting to "the wall" is unlikely to work, since you're really only venting to a single stud bay - which probably doesn't leak enough to allow much airflow, and if it does, a good portion of that is leaking right back into the room anyway. Can't win either way.
You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address
Actually, having just tried a demo of CD-R Diagnostic (an excellent program, btw), I'd like to point out that you send FOUR. Two in quick succession when the demo is downloaded, one three days later, and one five days after that.
The last e-mail says that you delete all evaluation e-mail addresses after 14 days, but the others give no indication of when it will end, there are no remove instructions, there is no explanation of how you got my address, etc. If I got this because someone typed in my e-mail address, I'd probably report you too. You should read up on the Ten Rules for Permission-Based Marketing.
Antibacterial soap contains Triclosan, a disinfectant. It doesn't contain antibiotics.
Wrong! Triclosan is an antibacterial, not a disinfectant. According to the APUA:
The EPA classifies public health antimicrobials as bacteriostats, sanitizers, disinfectants and sterilizers based on how effective they are in destroying microorganisms. Bacteriostats inhibit bacterial growth in inanimate environments. Sanitizers are substances that kill a certain percentage of test microorganisms in a given time span. Disinfectants destroy or irreversibly inactivate all test microorganisms, but not necessarily their spores. Sterilizers destroy all forms of bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms and their spores.
The only difference between "antibacterial" and "antibiotic" is that, traditionally, the former refers to something man-made, and the latter to something grown from natural substances. These days, the line is blurred. In fact, in the latest APUA newsletter, some researchers recommended calling all antibiotics "antibacterials", since the name is more specific, and might reduce the pressure to use antibiotics for bacterial infections.
Both Intacs and Lasik have a risk of night-vision halos and reduced contrast, so I've been holding back myself. See Clearly Now, as others posted, seems to be a scam.
In the past few months, a new type of extended-wear contact lens was approved. Only Novartis/Cibavision is making it; it's called "Focus Night & Day". The contacts are made of a new material that lets 6x more oxygen into your eye than regular contacts, attracts your tears to keep itself moist, and has a special coating that prevents bacteria (and possibly virus) buildup. After 30 days, there's no noticeable buildup on the lens.
Basically, these solve all the problems that the 1980s extended-wear contacts had. You can keep these in for up to 30 days! (And then you throw them away: no care required.) It's actually better for your eye health than regular contacts due to the increased oxygen flow. A year's supply costs around $250, cheaper than daily disposables.
I have an appointment tomorrow to get these. I never end up wearing my contacts because I take lots of naps, am lazy, hate splashing saline all over the counter, get dry eyes, etc. So for me, it sound like it will solve the inconvenience and mess of contacts without any of the risks of today's surgeries.
The one disadvantage: It won't help if you have astigmatism greater than 1.5, as torics are not yet available in the US (I think they may be in other countries). It sounds like the fit may take a bit of getting used to as well.
Getting between the airport, hotels, and convention centers doesn't use the highway at all
I dunno, it might become quicker to get from Copley to the airport using the Pike instead of surface streets.. going westbound I don't remember seeing an exit 22, now that I think of it.
Lots of cities have terrible traffic problems. I'm stuck halfway between Baltimore and D.C., both could use a new multi-billion dollar traffic infrastructure.
Well, D.C. at least is getting a nearly-a-billion-dollar infrastructure improvement: the redesigned Mixing Bowl.
I don't understand how the software developers are holding up laying of the infrastructure. One would have thought that the software would be fairly independent of the media on which it operates.
What I gathered from the article was that both software developers AND cable-pullers were running late, not that the pullers were late because of the developers.
The pullers were probably delayed by the flooding in the temporary Fort Point Channel tunnels, as was everyone else.
Well, I think it's not very easy, so it IS as easy as I think. It might not be as easy as someone else thinks, though. But it gets easier with practice and good libraries.
At AOL, nearly all of our servers were single-threaded, based on a standard kernel of state-managing, event-calling support functions. We had non-blocking sockets, non-blocking database I/O, non-blocking DNS, really everything with the possible exception of local disk I/O (which is rarely necessary on a production server, and which can be solved with a cluster of "worker" processes doing the actual I/O).
I worked on the mail system, so that's the part I know best. The difference in performance between sendmail (which forks multiple processes) and our own mail server (which ran single-threaded) was nothing short of astounding. Our days-late delivery problems disappeared almost instantly. This was on Suns and HPs; granted, we're now talking about forked processes rather than threads, and I don't know how the Sun and HP schedulers compare to Linux's, but the main point is that it's possible to write such a complex app single-threaded. I think the only significant thread-based app at AOL is AOLServer, which was developed independently.
Writing single-threaded servers certainly takes skill and experience. Given the state-management problem, I had assumed that it was also more error-prone than writing threaded code, but from what I am learning about thread-safety, that may not be the case. But, no matter how little overhead you have doing a context switch, you have even less without it. At some performance level, that matters.
Ergo, I'm curious, then - What is the point of traffic encryption, if not to stop somebody that's able to sniff your connection from reading your traffic?
That is, under what circumstances could somebody read your unencrypted traffic, but not now be able to perform a man-in-the-middle and read the encrypted traffic too?
I doubt it, as I understand it the popup killing code is part of Netscape/Mozilla not Gecko the rendering engine.
Wouldn't matter anyway, as those popups are rendered by the AOL client, not the browser. (Even if they're HTML windows now, they're still launched by the client, not other browser windows.)
However, that doesn't matter, because since 1996 you have been able to disable all popups at keyword MARKETING PREFS.
Because the last two times they started doing that, it failed miserably.
America Online, the service, was developed by AOL (then called Quantum Computer Services) exclusively for Apple as "AppleLink Personal Edition", complementing the existing AppleLink, which would become known as "AppleLink Developer Edition". After about a year, Apple decided they did not want any part of the service. A naming contest was held, the name was changed to America Online, and the rest is history. Apple paid AOL their fees and got out of the deal.
In 1993, Apple saw that the online world was really hitting its stride, so they commissioned AOL to build a new service called eWorld. This time, it would be run by Apple, using AOL's software, with AOL providing technical support and launch guidance. AOL developed many new features at Apple's request. eWorld failed miserably, and eWorld customers ended up migrating over to AOL in a matter of months IIRC. (On the upside, AOL gained Unsend, Mail Controls, and quite a few other features.) Apple paid AOL their fees and got out of the deal.
The only reason for Apple to buy AOL would be so that, when the third deal went sour, they would not have to once again pay AOL to do nothing.
Why would AOL use something as simple as customer survey?:-)
They wouldn't. I'm sure surveys show, and have always shown, that people hate popups. Why wouldn't they?
The much more revealing data point is whether people are *cancelling* en masse because of popups. AOL has long been a firm believer in objective market testing; it's their greatest success. Take two groups of new registrations, vary their experience, and measure which one brings in more revenue. This is how AOL's pricing plans were always determined. Given what I've read in the press recently, it sounds like cancellations due to popups finally rose to the point that they no longer were offset by increased revenue from popup-based sales.
I'm quite sure AOL has been doing testing like this ever since popups were first introduced, but they simply never announced that "Based on revenue patterns, we have decided to increase the number of popups our members receive." When popups go DOWN, that obviously merits an announcement.
It sounds like you're talking about a standard API for IM clients. That would be nice, but it's not what the interoperability requirement is about - AOL has to interoperate with other IM *services*.
Sharing presence information is a much bigger challenge than interconnecting phone systems. Phone systems are more like e-mail; a call goes from here to there, you route it, you're done.
In IM, your server is constantly checking everyone who signs on to see if they're on a buddy list somewhere, then checking if that buddy list's owner is signed on, and if so, updating their buddy list. Scaling that type of full-mesh matrix chatter up to an infinite number of geographically-dispersed, independently-run servers is a very tricky task. It's amazing enough that it works today on one system with over 1.5 million simultaneous users! There was a time we couldn't get past 8,000 because of lock contention.
I suspect that, marketing reasons aside, there are true technical reasons that make this difficult.
the music companies are in violation of the Fair Use Act
No, they aren't. That is exactly the problem. The fair-use exemption does NOT grant us any additional rights; it merely says that fair use is not a violation of copyright. If you make a fair-use backup, a publisher cannot sue you for violating copyright. That's all.
But nothing in the fair-use exemption prohibits publishers from using technology to inhibit fair use, and that is what Boucher is trying to address.
Slashdot Mirror
What do you do when the apparent beneficiary of the spam claims they were joe-jobbed?
If only the courts relied on humans to make judgment calls about who's telling the truth, rather than using a strictly algorithmic, deterministic parser that would be fooled by a joe job!
Oh, wait.
Michael, pray tell, what, exactly, about providing a machine-readable, easily-parseable list of valid, active e-mail addresses - in order to STOP spam - is a working concept?
Thank you, Simone.
Under Steve Case, pushed its customers in every way possible to get money from them.
Actually, that was in large part due to Bob Pittman. He was the crass commercializer - and that's what he was brought in to be. (As Jim Kimsey put it, AOL needed "adult supervision.") In the old days, at least, Steve was always all about the member experience, community, doing the Right Thing. Unfortunately, he rarely seemed to hire executives who shared that vision - Pittman, Brandt, Schuler, all had Bugs Bunny dollar signs in their eyes.
It's sad that, just as Ted Leonsis is back on top, giving new life to the old values, Steve had to step aside. This is a big blow to AOL's chances.
I did something similar, but much more effective. My PC is on an outside wall, and it is in enclosed cabinetry. There is a 4" hole in back of the cabinet with an AC muffin fan mounted on it. The hole opens to a 4" round pipe leading out to a dryer-style vent opening. It works wonderfully; the cabinet stays cool even in summer, and I have two original-model Cheetah X15s.
I have to agree with other posters that venting to "the wall" is unlikely to work, since you're really only venting to a single stud bay - which probably doesn't leak enough to allow much airflow, and if it does, a good portion of that is leaking right back into the room anyway. Can't win either way.
Funny you should mention this. I gave up using my Palm about 2 years ago. It's strictly a toy.
Yeah, I got a girlfriend too.
I always thought that people that said GIF with a hard 'G' sounded like the people who pronounce Warez "war-ezz"
Ditto. Plus:
GIF was invented by CompuServe.
The people at CompuServe say "jif".
Therefore.
At the risk of being flammed to death
Ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, ba-DUM, baaaaaooooouuuuuurrrrrrllllggh!
You send one single email to an unconfirmed email address
Actually, having just tried a demo of CD-R Diagnostic (an excellent program, btw), I'd like to point out that you send FOUR. Two in quick succession when the demo is downloaded, one three days later, and one five days after that.
The last e-mail says that you delete all evaluation e-mail addresses after 14 days, but the others give no indication of when it will end, there are no remove instructions, there is no explanation of how you got my address, etc. If I got this because someone typed in my e-mail address, I'd probably report you too. You should read up on the Ten Rules for Permission-Based Marketing.
Wrong! Triclosan is an antibacterial, not a disinfectant. According to the APUA:
The only difference between "antibacterial" and "antibiotic" is that, traditionally, the former refers to something man-made, and the latter to something grown from natural substances. These days, the line is blurred. In fact, in the latest APUA newsletter, some researchers recommended calling all antibiotics "antibacterials", since the name is more specific, and might reduce the pressure to use antibiotics for bacterial infections.
Both Intacs and Lasik have a risk of night-vision halos and reduced contrast, so I've been holding back myself. See Clearly Now, as others posted, seems to be a scam.
In the past few months, a new type of extended-wear contact lens was approved. Only Novartis/Cibavision is making it; it's called "Focus Night & Day". The contacts are made of a new material that lets 6x more oxygen into your eye than regular contacts, attracts your tears to keep itself moist, and has a special coating that prevents bacteria (and possibly virus) buildup. After 30 days, there's no noticeable buildup on the lens.
Basically, these solve all the problems that the 1980s extended-wear contacts had. You can keep these in for up to 30 days! (And then you throw them away: no care required.) It's actually better for your eye health than regular contacts due to the increased oxygen flow. A year's supply costs around $250, cheaper than daily disposables.
I have an appointment tomorrow to get these. I never end up wearing my contacts because I take lots of naps, am lazy, hate splashing saline all over the counter, get dry eyes, etc. So for me, it sound like it will solve the inconvenience and mess of contacts without any of the risks of today's surgeries.
The one disadvantage: It won't help if you have astigmatism greater than 1.5, as torics are not yet available in the US (I think they may be in other countries). It sounds like the fit may take a bit of getting used to as well.
CIBA has a web site: www.nightanddaycontacts.com
Can you tell I'm excited?
Getting between the airport, hotels, and convention centers doesn't use the highway at all
I dunno, it might become quicker to get from Copley to the airport using the Pike instead of surface streets.. going westbound I don't remember seeing an exit 22, now that I think of it.
Lots of cities have terrible traffic problems. I'm stuck halfway between Baltimore and D.C., both could use a new multi-billion dollar traffic infrastructure.
Well, D.C. at least is getting a nearly-a-billion-dollar infrastructure improvement: the redesigned Mixing Bowl.
I don't understand how the software developers are holding up laying of the infrastructure. One would have thought that the software would be fairly independent of the media on which it operates.
What I gathered from the article was that both software developers AND cable-pullers were running late, not that the pullers were late because of the developers.
The pullers were probably delayed by the flooding in the temporary Fort Point Channel tunnels, as was everyone else.
Just one word:
Chapsticks.
Not as easy as you think.
Well, I think it's not very easy, so it IS as easy as I think. It might not be as easy as someone else thinks, though. But it gets easier with practice and good libraries.
At AOL, nearly all of our servers were single-threaded, based on a standard kernel of state-managing, event-calling support functions. We had non-blocking sockets, non-blocking database I/O, non-blocking DNS, really everything with the possible exception of local disk I/O (which is rarely necessary on a production server, and which can be solved with a cluster of "worker" processes doing the actual I/O).
I worked on the mail system, so that's the part I know best. The difference in performance between sendmail (which forks multiple processes) and our own mail server (which ran single-threaded) was nothing short of astounding. Our days-late delivery problems disappeared almost instantly. This was on Suns and HPs; granted, we're now talking about forked processes rather than threads, and I don't know how the Sun and HP schedulers compare to Linux's, but the main point is that it's possible to write such a complex app single-threaded. I think the only significant thread-based app at AOL is AOLServer, which was developed independently.
Writing single-threaded servers certainly takes skill and experience. Given the state-management problem, I had assumed that it was also more error-prone than writing threaded code, but from what I am learning about thread-safety, that may not be the case. But, no matter how little overhead you have doing a context switch, you have even less without it. At some performance level, that matters.
Two words: Blocking IO.
Right. If you are going to use a single-threaded process, you must use non-blocking I/O.
Ergo, I'm curious, then - What is the point of traffic encryption, if not to stop somebody that's able to sniff your connection from reading your traffic?
That is, under what circumstances could somebody read your unencrypted traffic, but not now be able to perform a man-in-the-middle and read the encrypted traffic too?
From what I can gather, the answer is "none".
I doubt it, as I understand it the popup killing code is part of Netscape/Mozilla not Gecko the rendering engine.
Wouldn't matter anyway, as those popups are rendered by the AOL client, not the browser. (Even if they're HTML windows now, they're still launched by the client, not other browser windows.)
However, that doesn't matter, because since 1996 you have been able to disable all popups at keyword MARKETING PREFS.
Why wouldn't Apple jump to buy America Online
Because the last two times they started doing that, it failed miserably.
America Online, the service, was developed by AOL (then called Quantum Computer Services) exclusively for Apple as "AppleLink Personal Edition", complementing the existing AppleLink, which would become known as "AppleLink Developer Edition". After about a year, Apple decided they did not want any part of the service. A naming contest was held, the name was changed to America Online, and the rest is history. Apple paid AOL their fees and got out of the deal.
In 1993, Apple saw that the online world was really hitting its stride, so they commissioned AOL to build a new service called eWorld. This time, it would be run by Apple, using AOL's software, with AOL providing technical support and launch guidance. AOL developed many new features at Apple's request. eWorld failed miserably, and eWorld customers ended up migrating over to AOL in a matter of months IIRC. (On the upside, AOL gained Unsend, Mail Controls, and quite a few other features.) Apple paid AOL their fees and got out of the deal.
The only reason for Apple to buy AOL would be so that, when the third deal went sour, they would not have to once again pay AOL to do nothing.
Jay, AOL's ex-Mail Guy
Why would AOL use something as simple as customer survey? :-)
They wouldn't. I'm sure surveys show, and have always shown, that people hate popups. Why wouldn't they?
The much more revealing data point is whether people are *cancelling* en masse because of popups. AOL has long been a firm believer in objective market testing; it's their greatest success. Take two groups of new registrations, vary their experience, and measure which one brings in more revenue. This is how AOL's pricing plans were always determined. Given what I've read in the press recently, it sounds like cancellations due to popups finally rose to the point that they no longer were offset by increased revenue from popup-based sales.
I'm quite sure AOL has been doing testing like this ever since popups were first introduced, but they simply never announced that "Based on revenue patterns, we have decided to increase the number of popups our members receive." When popups go DOWN, that obviously merits an announcement.
Not to be confused with MC Hawking.
If he brought it to their attention as a concerned citizen, he wouldn't have brought the reporter. He wanted to get in the papers.
It sounds like you're talking about a standard API for IM clients. That would be nice, but it's not what the interoperability requirement is about - AOL has to interoperate with other IM *services*.
Sharing presence information is a much bigger challenge than interconnecting phone systems. Phone systems are more like e-mail; a call goes from here to there, you route it, you're done.
In IM, your server is constantly checking everyone who signs on to see if they're on a buddy list somewhere, then checking if that buddy list's owner is signed on, and if so, updating their buddy list. Scaling that type of full-mesh matrix chatter up to an infinite number of geographically-dispersed, independently-run servers is a very tricky task. It's amazing enough that it works today on one system with over 1.5 million simultaneous users! There was a time we couldn't get past 8,000 because of lock contention.
I suspect that, marketing reasons aside, there are true technical reasons that make this difficult.
the music companies are in violation of the Fair Use Act
No, they aren't. That is exactly the problem. The fair-use exemption does NOT grant us any additional rights; it merely says that fair use is not a violation of copyright. If you make a fair-use backup, a publisher cannot sue you for violating copyright. That's all.
But nothing in the fair-use exemption prohibits publishers from using technology to inhibit fair use, and that is what Boucher is trying to address.
Google "fair-use-act"; the law is the first hit.