Don't search for "xenu.net Scientology", search for "site:xenu.net Scientology". You have to include the "site" keyword. The notice is at the bottom of the results page.
I don't think many people are going to see these DMCA notifications, because I don't think that many people search this way. If they know a given site has information on a topic, most of them go straight to the site, don't they?
Seriously, they took example.com live a while back. http://example.com/ resolves to a page saying "These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration."
I don't think they've got any mail server set up, though, so it's still safe to use them for fake mail addresses. I think.
Already happens, sort of, maybe.
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Google Juice
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Write a perl script using an automatic comment generator to post comments to all your favoirte weblogs and blogs (Not as hard to generate seemingly relavant comments as you think!)
Of course, I doubt it really helps the spammer that much, since I doubt Google gives much weight to guestbooks. On the other hand, guestbooks are easy targets, since I don't think most of them are actually being read by human beings.
For example, this page at whump.com linked to the strip using "how to handle those attachments" as the text of the link. There are presumably other pages with links that contribute to the effect.
Goggle itself admits this is the cached version of that User Friendly page. I actually see this a lot when looking at the cached versions of sites I've found through Google.
I don't know ICANN policy on this, but I would hope that no country code will ever be withdrawn.
You're about 10 years late on that one. The IANA, (who has the authority for these things until ICANN takes it away) already has deleted several "obsolete" ccTLDs from its official list. Here's last year's announcement about the deletion of.zr after Zaire changed its name to "Democratic Republic of Congo".
Similarly,.cs (Czechoslovakia),.dd (East Germany), and.su (Soviet Union) were officially wiped off the face of the Earth after their associated nations were disolved, although some.su domains are reported to still resolve.
Or rather, the original registrant of sucks.com, Zbig Tyrlik, tried it back around 1994. (I believe he was also the original registrant of "suck.com", selling it to the Automatic Media gang when he realized there's no money in subdomains.) He did get alt.fan.zbig-tyrlik newsgroup out of the deal, though.
Here, found a old Usenet article mentioning Zbig's folly. Didn't find anything by Zbig himself. If I recall correctly, he did most of his advertising in the oh.* and cle.* netnews hiearchies. That was probably part of his sales problem right there....
Just to be pedantic: ICANN makes all new gTLDs "block" a special set of reserved names that can't be registered by normal joes off the street. Of course, they include "icann" in the list, thus protecting us from the potential horrors of "icann.museum".
If they can make a completely disposable instant camera along the lines of the disposable 35MM, they might have a sustainable niche.
It's the Polaroid PopShots (their biCapitalization, not mine). It's been around for over a year now, and retails for about $20 USD (which is only 5-10 bucks cheaper than the basic Polaroid OneStep that most people are familiar with). I don't know how well it's selling.
This is symptomatic of Polaroid problem, really. There are half-dozen posts in this thread proposing a "miracle product" to get Polaroid back on track. The problem is, Polaroid already makes most of those products. They make digital cameras. They make photo-printers. They make high-end cameras with good lenses. Etc, etc. They even produce (in a joint venture with Olympus) a hybrid camera that stores pictures digitally and prints them on Polaroid film. It's a cool concept that nobody (even here on a gadget-happy site like Slashdot) seems to know about. Their R&D department isn't the problem.
Polaroid makes the stuff, they just can't seem to market it worth a damn. They're either going after the wrong market niche, or just not advertising at all. They only people who knew Polaroid was making new cameras were kids (the iZone is Polaroid's biggest seller now) and people who work in camera stores (that's my excuse).
Two factors affect phone battery life that I haven't seen mentioned here yet, so I'll inject them here. (I used to have a job selling Sprint and AT&T cell phones, so I learned more of this than normal people want to know.)
1) Part of it is just the age of your phone. Newer phones have more efficient power saving systems. No great surprise there.
2) Many newer phones (and virtually all the cheap ones that some phone companies give to new customers) only use digital cell networks. Phones using all-digital networks need less power than analog cell phones. Given the same amount of stored energy in a battery, the digital phone often lasts twice as long as the analog one.
It sounds like zulux has a dual-mode phone (as do I). When a dual-mode phone loses its connection to the digital cell towers (which are still rather rare outside cities), it switches to analog (and drains its battery faster). If it can't get a good signal at all, it then switches to power-save mode. Dual-mode phones thus have wider coverage areas than all digital phones, at the cost of a shorter battery life outside urban areas.
(Incidentally, many dual-mode phones allow the user to deactivate mode switching, so it's all or nothing. This is useful in those freak zones where you're too close to an analog tower, and the phones switches modes when it doesn't need to.)
Summing up my rambling:
1) Analog phones (which are fairly rare nowadays) buried in the WTC rubble are almost certainly out of juice. Two or three days is about it for analog phones.
2) Digital and dual-mode phones might still have juice, depending on the obvious variables like battery capacity, power-saving technology, and whether the phones are wasting juice trying to connect to the analog network.
3) It's always a good idea to keep your phone batteries fully charged, and it's OK to splurge and buy the extra long-life batteries, if that's an option for your phone.
This has been a public service annoucement from your friendly neighborhood ex-phone salesman.
Re:emergency staircase
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More WTC News
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The junior high school I attended in Michigan actually had fire escape slide -- a large metal tube that ran (at a 45-degree angle) from the second floor to the ground outside. It was attached to a building built in 1911, but both ends had been sealed off by the time I attended junior high in the 1980s. It's probably not a practical system for a 110-storey building, though.
If I recall correctly, the exit for the slide wasn't that far from the school's abandoned fallout shelter. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I don't get it.
This test was done before pregnancy to see what there risk was
Where do get that? An earlier report (from May, when they didn't explicitly call it a Y2K error) says:
These tests are carried out
in early pregnancy and are used to indicate if a woman has a low or high risk of carrying a child with Down's syndrome. (emphasis added)
(That's the third paragraph from the end of the May 30 article.)
Stops raising the damn prices of CDs!!!! They have been slowly yet steadily raising the price, ugh! It now costs the same to download a CD as it used to buy one, grrrr.
Are you sure that's all MP3.com's fault? According to their Help section for musicians, the artists are setting prices on their own CDs. MP3.com just sets the limits on the minimum/maximum price (currently $3.99 and $30.00, respectively) for the downloaded CDs, then adds $3.99 to determine the price of the physical CD.
Maybe too many artists bought into the hype they can get rich off the Internet? Or (more likely), they raised their CD prices to compensate for not being in the "Pay for Play" system?
Musicians don't always make sensible business choices when it comes to pricing CDs. (After all, if they knew everything about selling music, they'd probably run a record company.) For example, I've found one singer who charges $6.99 and $10.98 for the netCD and DAM versions of her CD, when the real thing only costs $6.49 through her label's web site. I like her music, but I have to wonder what she's thinking there....
We don't have enough good old-fashioned Mad Scienists in America anymore. If we don't do something to increase the ranks of Mad Scientists soon, we're going to fall behind Europe in the Mad Science Race.
Fortunately, I have no doubt that Dr. Richard Steiner will make a fine example of an American Mad Scientist. According to his biography, he's devoted the last seven years of his professional life to replacing a hunk of metal with a hunk of metal surrounded by a two-story high machine! Even the project's name is brilliant in its silliness. Imagine meeting this guy at a party:
You: So, what do you, Richard?
Richard: I'm building the ELECTRONIC KILOGRAM! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Igor, fetch me a drink!
Mark my words: In ten years, he'll be swinging from a balcony on the side of the Electronic Kilogram screaming "At the Academy, they called me mad! Mad? I'll show them!", as superstitious anti-Metric villagers storm the lab.
I, for one, feel better about America knowing we have men like Richard Steiner and his colleagues on the job. After all, even cold fusion and Raelian clones pale in comparison to the might of the ELECTRONIC KILOGRAM! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
The primary difference here is that Kodak is placing their service within a product that the consumer must already have chosen. i.e. The user has already chosen to use Kodak to take photos, and presumably to edit them too.
Yep, that very important to Kodak because they've built their business on brand loyalty and repeat business. Kodak cameras are generally underpriced compared to Canon/Nikon/Olypmus/Pentax/etc, but they make it up in the long run because:
1) People with Kodak camera buy Kodak film. (Really, I worked in a camera store. Their customers are like sheep.)
2) Photo labs buy photo printers, paper, and chemicals from Kodak.
Up to this point, it should be noted that Fuji has the exact same business plan: Sell cheap cameras, make the real money on film and processing. Kodak goes one better with:
3) Miscellaneous crap. How sheeplike are some Kodak customers? They buy Kodak photo magazines. Seriously, it's nothing but a 30-page advertorial for Kodak cameras and film, and people money for it. Kodak liked the results so much, they went into the tripod business. Kodak users buy Kodak crap. Any crap.
Online photo services are going to be the replacement for items 1 and 2 if/when digital cameras take over the photo world. Kodak doesn't want to give that up, and suprisingly, consumers don't either. When I worked in a camera store, most people buying Kodak digital cameras didn't do much comparison shopping -- they went in planning to give themselves to Kodak, because they had a good history with Kodak. Kodak people want to be Kodak people all the way. It's the kind of loyalty rarely seen outside of certain operating system loyalists.
Microsoft isn't just shafting Kodak, it's shafting every company that sells cameras or photos and the consumers who (like dopplex says) have already made the choice to be Kodak people.
I agree that Kodak makes some awful software, so I wonder whose fault this really is. I've got a DC-265 and under Win98 it was a pain to use
The DC-265 is old, for a digital camera. Most manufacturers have better software now, and definitely easier to use than the old Kodak software.
In fact, (and what ZDNET glosses over) several manufacturers are moving towards "no-click" photo transfers. The EasyShare cameras mentioned in the article use a docking cradle. Users pop the camera in the cradle, hit a button on the camera, and the pictures are transferred without the user having to go into software. (The cradle recharges the camera battery while it's at it.) I've worked in camera stores, and I know there are people who need things that simple, and that Kodak is going to advertise these features heavily.
Som, That's the other reason Kodak is so angry. Microsoft has sabotaged Kodak's entire advertising strategy.
Are they upset simply because Microsoft beat them to the punch with the same business model?
Microsoft didn't beat anybody to the punch on ordering prints online. All four of the companies that make cameras and prints (Agfa, Fuji, Kodak, and Konica) have had online photo services for a while, and have been integrating those services into the software included with cameras. Other digital camera manufacturers have been signing deals with middleman providers like Ofoto or Snapfish. Every company in the digital camera business knew that easy online ordering of prints was important to "average" consumers.
Microsoft saw somebody else suceeding online, and tried to take all the business for themselves.
Two "stupid password system" stories: one work, one school
The work story:
I used to work for a retail company where who used the same root password for the POS (cash register) LAN in every store. Not only was it easy to dictionary-attack (a single five letter word), they published it in the employee newsletter whenever Daylight Savings Time switched, so employees in the store could reset the system clock.
Keep in mind, each local network is storing 30 days worth of sales receipts, including customer's names, credit card numbers, and expiration dates. An employee with the password could have dumped the whole mess to a floppy. Fortunately for that company, most retail employees aren't that clever.
(The primary terminal on each LAN had a password-protected "manager menu" that was used for payroll and staffing functions. With those, you could add or subtract hours on people's timecards, give individual passwords to employees, or even delete other employee's payroll records. Every manager in the company was assigned the same password, and there was no userid.)
The college story:
My alma mater didn't use individual userids for most "paperwork" accounts, like the system the registration department used to adjust student's schedules, or the one librarians used to look up people's library fines. The department userids for those accounts were all exactly three letters long (and based on the department name, like REG), and the passwords were all exactly four letters long (usually English words like "book").
All of these systems were available by dial-up. As you can imagine, the students who figured this system out had a much easier life than the rest of us, because they always got the classes they wanted, and they never had overdue library books.
Unproven relationship between narrowness & sucess
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Suck Stops Sucking
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The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people.
It's a nice idea, and one you hear a lot online, but look at all the Slash sites out there now. (Or even at one list of them.) Most of the really narrow ones don't have any commentary, just the owner-posted stories.
Smokedot. Jazz-Sax.com. Go Hogs. All very narrowcast with no serious comment traffic. (Gohogs is a college sports site. Come on, we know sports fans like to argue. Why aren't they posting?) Plastic is currently one of the busiest Slash sites outside of Slashdot. Sucess is so much more than site focus. It's attracting users (Slashdot had word-of-mouth back in the Web's word-of-mouth days. Plastic had advertising on its partner sites). It's picking stories that inspire the users to post (and getting enough of them). It's keeping the server up from day to day (a lot of the small narrowcast sites on the Slashcode.com keep falling down). And probably most importantly, it's striking the balance between broad and narrow.
Slashdot is actually pretty broad when compared to the less-sucessful sites: tech discussions, political discussions, entertainment reviews, etc, etc. Different people here probably have different favorite topics, but signing up for Slashdot puts them in a position to comment about all the topics. Diverse sites attract more readers, and give them more opportunities to post. Super-narrow sites like Smokedot, while an nice example of free software encouraging free speech, aren't good for building user bases.
(None of this is to say that niche services on the web are bad. I like niche services. I have a bunch of niche pages on my web server (like pages devoted to specific, out-of-print roleplaying games), but not discussion sites, because I know those subjects are going to generate the requisite repeat traffic. I settle for the occasional "Hey, I like your page" e-mail, and get on with my life.)
I could probably draw some sort of parallel with Usenet: Some really narrow-focused newsgroups succeed, some of them never get off the ground. But I've rambled on too long already.
The only thing it was ever going to be useful for to the general public was so they didn't have to *gasp* type in a URL printed on a product.
Sure, scanning the barcode is dumb if there's an URL on the package. What I found intriguing was the fact that could scan all sorts of CDs and books I bought before everything had an URL on it, and find a website. Barcode scanners are backwards-compatible with my entire CD collection. I think that was the only really clever part of the whole CueCat concept.
Still, the concept was more "interesting" than "useful", it's not enough to drive a sucessful business, and DC blew the implementation anyway. DC's implosion is no great loss.
No network. It's a syndicated show.
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Andromeda
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· Score: 2
The show's production company has a local listings page. Good for U.S. channels only.
"Let me know what you think it could be used for."
Write some software that ignores the "official" audios cues but trackes key phrases like "Hi, Bob." and "Make it so!". Voilà -- Now you've got computerized score-keeping for drinking games. If computer-assisted drunkeness isn't a killer app for the American market, I don't know what is.
The NY Times story on the Playboy suit explains it nicely, but the summary is: She really had been a Playboy playmate, so it was legal for her to say so on her web site. (Imagine if she lost. People could get sued for posting résumés that contained copyrighted words.)
I've never looked at xenu.net, but I suspect the Playboy v. Terri Welles case is at least partially relevant: If Playboy can't prevent ex-playmates from saying they were Playboy, Scientology shouldn't be able to prevent ex-Scientologists from saying they were in the Church of Scientology, and so forth.
The real problem here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA encourages the yanking of web sites based on accusations, not legal findings of fact. The Act's authors put far too much faith in corporations' ability to act responsibly.
Word at the Open Directory Project is that the "new" AltaVista has been popping in and out of existence all day. Presumably, this represents a failed attempt to test the new site without showing it to the public.
(According to CNET, there was a beta version of the new AltaVista at beta.altavista.com, but it was taken down when CNET phoned AV about it. Obviously, whatever AV's doing to hide the new page from the public now isn't working quite right.)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't search for "xenu.net Scientology", search for "site:xenu.net Scientology". You have to include the "site" keyword. The notice is at the bottom of the results page.
I don't think many people are going to see these DMCA notifications, because I don't think that many people search this way. If they know a given site has information on a topic, most of them go straight to the site, don't they?
Seriously, they took example.com live a while back. http://example.com/ resolves to a page saying "These domain names are reserved for use in documentation and are not available for registration."
I don't think they've got any mail server set up, though, so it's still safe to use them for fake mail addresses. I think.
Write a perl script using an automatic comment generator to post comments to all your favoirte weblogs and blogs (Not as hard to generate seemingly relavant comments as you think!)
Here's a recent post at Webmasterworld.com that accuses certain bots of spamming old-style guestbooks with ads.
Of course, I doubt it really helps the spammer that much, since I doubt Google gives much weight to guestbooks. On the other hand, guestbooks are easy targets, since I don't think most of them are actually being read by human beings.
It's no great mystery. That's Google's link analysis at work. Google associated the words "email" and "attachment" with http://www.userfriendly.org/cartoons/archives/99ju l/19990724.html because other pages linked to it using those words.
For example, this page at whump.com linked to the strip using "how to handle those attachments" as the text of the link. There are presumably other pages with links that contribute to the effect.
Goggle itself admits this is the cached version of that User Friendly page. I actually see this a lot when looking at the cached versions of sites I've found through Google.
I don't know ICANN policy on this, but I would hope that no country code will ever be withdrawn.
.zr after Zaire changed its name to "Democratic Republic of Congo".
.cs (Czechoslovakia), .dd (East Germany), and .su (Soviet Union) were officially wiped off the face of the Earth after their associated nations were disolved, although some .su domains are reported to still resolve.
You're about 10 years late on that one. The IANA, (who has the authority for these things until ICANN takes it away) already has deleted several "obsolete" ccTLDs from its official list. Here's last year's announcement about the deletion of
Similarly,
Or rather, the original registrant of sucks.com, Zbig Tyrlik, tried it back around 1994. (I believe he was also the original registrant of "suck.com", selling it to the Automatic Media gang when he realized there's no money in subdomains.) He did get alt.fan.zbig-tyrlik newsgroup out of the deal, though.
Here, found a old Usenet article mentioning Zbig's folly. Didn't find anything by Zbig himself. If I recall correctly, he did most of his advertising in the oh.* and cle.* netnews hiearchies. That was probably part of his sales problem right there....
Just to be pedantic: ICANN makes all new gTLDs "block" a special set of reserved names that can't be registered by normal joes off the street. Of course, they include "icann" in the list, thus protecting us from the potential horrors of "icann.museum".
.pro agreement. It's the same list they stick all the new gTLDs with.
For example, here's the reserved domain list from the
Included in the list, by the way, are all the other ICANN gTLDs, so there will never be a "gov.sucks", even it there is a ".sucks" domain.
.int (which was created fairly casually, according to this story) is still smaller than .museum, and .int has a 13-year head start.
.mil seems to be pretty small, too.
If they can make a completely disposable instant camera along the lines of the disposable 35MM, they might have a sustainable niche.
It's the Polaroid PopShots (their biCapitalization, not mine). It's been around for over a year now, and retails for about $20 USD (which is only 5-10 bucks cheaper than the basic Polaroid OneStep that most people are familiar with). I don't know how well it's selling.
This is symptomatic of Polaroid problem, really. There are half-dozen posts in this thread proposing a "miracle product" to get Polaroid back on track. The problem is, Polaroid already makes most of those products. They make digital cameras. They make photo-printers. They make high-end cameras with good lenses. Etc, etc. They even produce (in a joint venture with Olympus) a hybrid camera that stores pictures digitally and prints them on Polaroid film. It's a cool concept that nobody (even here on a gadget-happy site like Slashdot) seems to know about. Their R&D department isn't the problem.
Polaroid makes the stuff, they just can't seem to market it worth a damn. They're either going after the wrong market niche, or just not advertising at all. They only people who knew Polaroid was making new cameras were kids (the iZone is Polaroid's biggest seller now) and people who work in camera stores (that's my excuse).
Two factors affect phone battery life that I haven't seen mentioned here yet, so I'll inject them here. (I used to have a job selling Sprint and AT&T cell phones, so I learned more of this than normal people want to know.)
1) Part of it is just the age of your phone. Newer phones have more efficient power saving systems. No great surprise there.
2) Many newer phones (and virtually all the cheap ones that some phone companies give to new customers) only use digital cell networks. Phones using all-digital networks need less power than analog cell phones. Given the same amount of stored energy in a battery, the digital phone often lasts twice as long as the analog one.
It sounds like zulux has a dual-mode phone (as do I). When a dual-mode phone loses its connection to the digital cell towers (which are still rather rare outside cities), it switches to analog (and drains its battery faster). If it can't get a good signal at all, it then switches to power-save mode. Dual-mode phones thus have wider coverage areas than all digital phones, at the cost of a shorter battery life outside urban areas.
(Incidentally, many dual-mode phones allow the user to deactivate mode switching, so it's all or nothing. This is useful in those freak zones where you're too close to an analog tower, and the phones switches modes when it doesn't need to.)
Summing up my rambling:
1) Analog phones (which are fairly rare nowadays) buried in the WTC rubble are almost certainly out of juice. Two or three days is about it for analog phones.
2) Digital and dual-mode phones might still have juice, depending on the obvious variables like battery capacity, power-saving technology, and whether the phones are wasting juice trying to connect to the analog network.
3) It's always a good idea to keep your phone batteries fully charged, and it's OK to splurge and buy the extra long-life batteries, if that's an option for your phone.
This has been a public service annoucement from your friendly neighborhood ex-phone salesman.
The junior high school I attended in Michigan actually had fire escape slide -- a large metal tube that ran (at a 45-degree angle) from the second floor to the ground outside. It was attached to a building built in 1911, but both ends had been sealed off by the time I attended junior high in the 1980s. It's probably not a practical system for a 110-storey building, though.
If I recall correctly, the exit for the slide wasn't that far from the school's abandoned fallout shelter. There's a joke in there somewhere, but I don't get it.
Where do get that? An earlier report (from May, when they didn't explicitly call it a Y2K error) says:
(That's the third paragraph from the end of the May 30 article.)
Stops raising the damn prices of CDs!!!! They have been slowly yet steadily raising the price, ugh! It now costs the same to download a CD as it used to buy one, grrrr.
Are you sure that's all MP3.com's fault? According to their Help section for musicians, the artists are setting prices on their own CDs. MP3.com just sets the limits on the minimum/maximum price (currently $3.99 and $30.00, respectively) for the downloaded CDs, then adds $3.99 to determine the price of the physical CD.
Maybe too many artists bought into the hype they can get rich off the Internet? Or (more likely), they raised their CD prices to compensate for not being in the "Pay for Play" system?
Musicians don't always make sensible business choices when it comes to pricing CDs. (After all, if they knew everything about selling music, they'd probably run a record company.) For example, I've found one singer who charges $6.99 and $10.98 for the netCD and DAM versions of her CD, when the real thing only costs $6.49 through her label's web site. I like her music, but I have to wonder what she's thinking there....
We don't have enough good old-fashioned Mad Scienists in America anymore. If we don't do something to increase the ranks of Mad Scientists soon, we're going to fall behind Europe in the Mad Science Race.
Fortunately, I have no doubt that Dr. Richard Steiner will make a fine example of an American Mad Scientist. According to his biography, he's devoted the last seven years of his professional life to replacing a hunk of metal with a hunk of metal surrounded by a two-story high machine! Even the project's name is brilliant in its silliness. Imagine meeting this guy at a party:
You: So, what do you, Richard?
Richard: I'm building the ELECTRONIC KILOGRAM! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Igor, fetch me a drink!
Mark my words: In ten years, he'll be swinging from a balcony on the side of the Electronic Kilogram screaming "At the Academy, they called me mad! Mad? I'll show them!", as superstitious anti-Metric villagers storm the lab.
I, for one, feel better about America knowing we have men like Richard Steiner and his colleagues on the job. After all, even cold fusion and Raelian clones pale in comparison to the might of the ELECTRONIC KILOGRAM! BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!
The primary difference here is that Kodak is placing their service within a product that the consumer must already have chosen. i.e. The user has already chosen to use Kodak to take photos, and presumably to edit them too.
Yep, that very important to Kodak because they've built their business on brand loyalty and repeat business. Kodak cameras are generally underpriced compared to Canon/Nikon/Olypmus/Pentax/etc, but they make it up in the long run because:
1) People with Kodak camera buy Kodak film. (Really, I worked in a camera store. Their customers are like sheep.)
2) Photo labs buy photo printers, paper, and chemicals from Kodak.
Up to this point, it should be noted that Fuji has the exact same business plan: Sell cheap cameras, make the real money on film and processing. Kodak goes one better with:
3) Miscellaneous crap. How sheeplike are some Kodak customers? They buy Kodak photo magazines. Seriously, it's nothing but a 30-page advertorial for Kodak cameras and film, and people money for it. Kodak liked the results so much, they went into the tripod business. Kodak users buy Kodak crap. Any crap.
Online photo services are going to be the replacement for items 1 and 2 if/when digital cameras take over the photo world. Kodak doesn't want to give that up, and suprisingly, consumers don't either. When I worked in a camera store, most people buying Kodak digital cameras didn't do much comparison shopping -- they went in planning to give themselves to Kodak, because they had a good history with Kodak. Kodak people want to be Kodak people all the way. It's the kind of loyalty rarely seen outside of certain operating system loyalists.
Microsoft isn't just shafting Kodak, it's shafting every company that sells cameras or photos and the consumers who (like dopplex says) have already made the choice to be Kodak people.
I agree that Kodak makes some awful software, so I wonder whose fault this really is. I've got a DC-265 and under Win98 it was a pain to use
The DC-265 is old, for a digital camera. Most manufacturers have better software now, and definitely easier to use than the old Kodak software.
In fact, (and what ZDNET glosses over) several manufacturers are moving towards "no-click" photo transfers. The EasyShare cameras mentioned in the article use a docking cradle. Users pop the camera in the cradle, hit a button on the camera, and the pictures are transferred without the user having to go into software. (The cradle recharges the camera battery while it's at it.) I've worked in camera stores, and I know there are people who need things that simple, and that Kodak is going to advertise these features heavily.
Som, That's the other reason Kodak is so angry. Microsoft has sabotaged Kodak's entire advertising strategy.
Are they upset simply because Microsoft beat them to the punch with the same business model?
Microsoft didn't beat anybody to the punch on ordering prints online. All four of the companies that make cameras and prints (Agfa, Fuji, Kodak, and Konica) have had online photo services for a while, and have been integrating those services into the software included with cameras. Other digital camera manufacturers have been signing deals with middleman providers like Ofoto or Snapfish. Every company in the digital camera business knew that easy online ordering of prints was important to "average" consumers.
Microsoft saw somebody else suceeding online, and tried to take all the business for themselves.
Two "stupid password system" stories: one work, one school
The work story:
I used to work for a retail company where who used the same root password for the POS (cash register) LAN in every store. Not only was it easy to dictionary-attack (a single five letter word), they published it in the employee newsletter whenever Daylight Savings Time switched, so employees in the store could reset the system clock.
Keep in mind, each local network is storing 30 days worth of sales receipts, including customer's names, credit card numbers, and expiration dates. An employee with the password could have dumped the whole mess to a floppy. Fortunately for that company, most retail employees aren't that clever.
(The primary terminal on each LAN had a password-protected "manager menu" that was used for payroll and staffing functions. With those, you could add or subtract hours on people's timecards, give individual passwords to employees, or even delete other employee's payroll records. Every manager in the company was assigned the same password, and there was no userid.)
The college story:
My alma mater didn't use individual userids for most "paperwork" accounts, like the system the registration department used to adjust student's schedules, or the one librarians used to look up people's library fines. The department userids for those accounts were all exactly three letters long (and based on the department name, like REG), and the passwords were all exactly four letters long (usually English words like "book").
All of these systems were available by dial-up. As you can imagine, the students who figured this system out had a much easier life than the rest of us, because they always got the classes they wanted, and they never had overdue library books.
The broader the subject matter, the less compelling the appeal to a broader base of people. The narrower the subject matter, the stronger the potential appeal to a smaller base of people.
It's a nice idea, and one you hear a lot online, but look at all the Slash sites out there now. (Or even at one list of them.) Most of the really narrow ones don't have any commentary, just the owner-posted stories.
Smokedot. Jazz-Sax.com. Go Hogs. All very narrowcast with no serious comment traffic. (Gohogs is a college sports site. Come on, we know sports fans like to argue. Why aren't they posting?) Plastic is currently one of the busiest Slash sites outside of Slashdot. Sucess is so much more than site focus. It's attracting users (Slashdot had word-of-mouth back in the Web's word-of-mouth days. Plastic had advertising on its partner sites). It's picking stories that inspire the users to post (and getting enough of them). It's keeping the server up from day to day (a lot of the small narrowcast sites on the Slashcode.com keep falling down). And probably most importantly, it's striking the balance between broad and narrow.
Slashdot is actually pretty broad when compared to the less-sucessful sites: tech discussions, political discussions, entertainment reviews, etc, etc. Different people here probably have different favorite topics, but signing up for Slashdot puts them in a position to comment about all the topics. Diverse sites attract more readers, and give them more opportunities to post. Super-narrow sites like Smokedot, while an nice example of free software encouraging free speech, aren't good for building user bases.
(None of this is to say that niche services on the web are bad. I like niche services. I have a bunch of niche pages on my web server (like pages devoted to specific, out-of-print roleplaying games), but not discussion sites, because I know those subjects are going to generate the requisite repeat traffic. I settle for the occasional "Hey, I like your page" e-mail, and get on with my life.)
I could probably draw some sort of parallel with Usenet: Some really narrow-focused newsgroups succeed, some of them never get off the ground. But I've rambled on too long already.
The only thing it was ever going to be useful for to the general public was so they didn't have to *gasp* type in a URL printed on a product.
Sure, scanning the barcode is dumb if there's an URL on the package. What I found intriguing was the fact that could scan all sorts of CDs and books I bought before everything had an URL on it, and find a website. Barcode scanners are backwards-compatible with my entire CD collection. I think that was the only really clever part of the whole CueCat concept.
Still, the concept was more "interesting" than "useful", it's not enough to drive a sucessful business, and DC blew the implementation anyway. DC's implosion is no great loss.
The show's production company has a local listings page. Good for U.S. channels only.
Now, really: You can't expect Digital Convergence to ignore experts like those, can you?
"Let me know what you think it could be used for."
Write some software that ignores the "official" audios cues but trackes key phrases like "Hi, Bob." and "Make it so!". Voilà -- Now you've got computerized score-keeping for drinking games. If computer-assisted drunkeness isn't a killer app for the American market, I don't know what is.
The NY Times story on the Playboy suit explains it nicely, but the summary is: She really had been a Playboy playmate, so it was legal for her to say so on her web site. (Imagine if she lost. People could get sued for posting résumés that contained copyrighted words.)
I've never looked at xenu.net, but I suspect the Playboy v. Terri Welles case is at least partially relevant: If Playboy can't prevent ex-playmates from saying they were Playboy, Scientology shouldn't be able to prevent ex-Scientologists from saying they were in the Church of Scientology, and so forth.
The real problem here is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA encourages the yanking of web sites based on accusations, not legal findings of fact. The Act's authors put far too much faith in corporations' ability to act responsibly.
Word at the Open Directory Project is that the "new" AltaVista has been popping in and out of existence all day. Presumably, this represents a failed attempt to test the new site without showing it to the public.
(According to CNET, there was a beta version of the new AltaVista at beta.altavista.com, but it was taken down when CNET phoned AV about it. Obviously, whatever AV's doing to hide the new page from the public now isn't working quite right.)