Multi-part MIME, baby. You should just set your email client to view the plain text version and ignore the HTML version.
Generally HTML-only email is spam-ish, though unfortunately, some websites generate it for their automated account systems and the like, because it's easier to generate than multi-part MIME. So you can't nuke HTML email indiscriminately. Just make sure your spam-filtering program assigns it a sufficiently negative score.
I was under the impression ICANN essentially told Verisign this was not in compliance with their contract, and that it was unacceptable. When do we hear what the consequences are of continued, flagrant, and intentional violation of the public trust of.com and.net?
Please, ICANN, you've always sucked before, but maybe there's hope for you yet. Enforce the terms of the contract with Verisign with extreme prejudice and terminate these scumballs.
Don't give that figure too much creedence. Most likely those 16% are people who had only vaguely thought about it, and have now vaguely discounted it. I can't imagine that many organizations have done a true about face over this.
But it does make it harder to go take a risk and stick out your neck to recommend Linux when other execs in your company are reading confusing stories in the media about how everybody using Linux is getting sued. Doesn't make it sound very appealing, I admit. Some serious PR effort is needed here - no, good PR isn't that expensive, it just requires a dedicated voice in the middle of the spectrum (not RMS and the hippy brigade at the FSF, please God - look at the wretched quotes from them in that Forbes article the other day) to start pumping out press releases, and filing counter suits to generate some hype and create "reportable" events to generate favorable stories.
It requires a lawyer and a few big mouths and a lot of time and effort. It would be nice if somebody like IBM would dump some money on some organization to do this job.
Justification - most people don't like, want or use their web browser for email. Mixing the two up confuses people and dissuades them from using it. The slowness of Mozilla/Netscape made people try it and ditch it very fast, even though the rendering engine, Gecko, is quite fast and accurate.
People want web browsing to be smooth, and seamless, without popups and other annoyances or interruptions, and have their sites "just work" with their browser. People want a browser to browse the web, and that's it. People don't want 80000000 complicated configuration options - they want some isolation from complexity (but complexity should be available for the more sophisticated users, just hidden away a bit). Users want a browser that is aesthetically pleasant by default and doesn't look like some weird ugly ultra-futuristic thing - users DON'T want to have to use skins or themes or download or install stuff to make something look normal, and blend in with their computer.
These basic user responses and demands are the standard under which Mozilla Firebird is better than Mozilla. It doesn't mean it's a better browser for everybody's needs, it just means it's a better browser for most people's needs.
It doesn't help that the FSF is such a batch of loonies, but the writer of this piece is spewing pure venom here. Jeez, you'd think these evil people that he describes (flagrantly no less) as a bunch of arm-in-arm hippies were hurting him in some way. Or hurting somebody.
The whole spiel about the enforcer bit is somewhat strange - companies that use GPLed products and make money off of them often give money to the FSF. Sure, they may do it in part because they know the FSF will help keep the playing field level for them with respect to their competitors, but so what? That's only fair. They can't force their competitors to NOT release GPL software or to take stuff off the market, since it's GPLed.
Again, the point is proved that RMS and the FSF should not be allowed to represent the FOSS community in any sort of public forum. These guys get on the phone with a reporter and they are so eager to spread their philosophy that they say foolish things that get taken out of context about Microsoft and Oracle, and generally don't understand how to package sound bites properly. I think there needs to be some sort of "Chinese wall" between evangelism and enforcement - like they shouldn't both be done under the heading of the FSF.
I, for one, welcome our new OpenOffice.Org masters. Now if they could just get rid of the "dot org" in their name so it wasn't a mouthful of marbles, maybe we could actually pitch this product to our friends.
Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. I've dealt with many lawyers whose mastery of English is far below this standard, and for whom a letter of this quality would be entirely out of reach. Sure, lawyers usually have a few stock phrases at their disposal, but very, very few of them can craft a decent legal argument about technically sophisticated topics such as applicability of copyright law to old sound card ROMs.
I think the best takeaway here is that you should always retain a lawyer and get them to edit and send the letter on your behalf, and let them be the asshole. I still think it's generally preferable to come up with your own argument in a case like this, and find a lawyer who'll work with you and realize that your domain knowledge is far superior to their own, and that their understanding of specific laws (though perhaps not the general gestalt of the law) is nothing that a guy bright enough to emulate an MT-32 ROM can't pick up in a day or two.
But the point still stands: on an aggregate basis, the bandwidth costs are still a heck of a lot smaller than the human capital costs, they are just incurred at a different point. The ISP doesn't see the thousands of users and the thousands of hours of wasted time directly, they just see thousands of megs of wasted bandwidth. So sure, to an ISP owner, it looks like the major cost is wasted bandwidth (and as you point out, in some cases it's the ISPs upstream bandwidth they have to pass along to their customers, in other cases, bandwidth their customers are paying for).
Nonetheless, that cost, on the whole, is still far lower than the wasted effort, aggregated across those thousands of customers, each of whom may waste 15-20 minutes a day sorting through spam.
The bandwidth cost is negligible. The real cost is time and effort wasted wading through spam trying to find your real mail. I know, I can see you're from Australia, and you guys pay through the arsehole for bandwidth, but here in the rest of the world, we just don't want our time wasted - that's the real cost burden being placed on the recipient.
Every scheme I've seen to make the sending process "cost" something seems to correspondingly decrease the usefulness and convenience of email (though I do like the idea of using some sort of computational "postage" to make a separate class of "postage-paid" first-class-style emails to help distinguish personal communications from everything else). But mandating the tacking-on of ADV: substantially reduces my cost as a spam recipient in wading through all the gunk out there, training and configuring filters, and so on.
Agreed. We all probably can concur that large scale, unsolicited spamming is bad and the people who do it and try to conceal their identities, and cause damage and waste lots of time should be punished. But clearly 471 years for what is fundamentally one or a couple of offenses that are being made into some ungodly number of separate crimes is way out of wack with any normal concept of justice.
No matter how profitable spam might be, it seems to me like 5 or 6 months in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison should be plenty to "rehabilitate" even the most recalcitrant offender.
See my other comment in this thread. I realize this is possible, but it does reduce productivity, and it does cost more money to develop software this way. Which is fine for classified government projects, but doesn't fly in most parts of the business world. Specifically, most projects are done on a tight budget as it is, and more importantly, are done with insanely short development timelines.
If you go out and drop on an existing development team that they will have to give up the net access they've become so used to for looking up API documentation, posting questions to message boards, email around the office or with others outside the office (or for after working-hours conversations about work related topics), or make them go through extraordinary steps to get to the same information, productivity will drop substantially.
My experience here comes from managing teams ranging from 2 to 20 people in size working on projects with budgets ranging from tens of thousands to several million dollars, just FYI - and specifically, remembering back to several occasions where our internet access went down unexpectedly for a day or two, and seeing productivity drop massively as people floundered around trying to get work done.
Hey, I never claimed to have any magical inside information - I just read the CNN article, which was pretty frigging vague. In any case, the point still stands that the grandparent post's suggestion that software developers should do without email/internet access and write code in a sterile cleanroom environment seems somewhat misguided.
Obviously there are top secret, high sensitivity government projects that justify extreme level of secrecy and protection for the code involved (and the massive expense and effort that goes along with it), but I don't know of any normal software development shop that would do a basic cost/benefit on this and determine that isolation is the solution to the problem.
As best as I can tell, somebody either emailed themselves a few source code files or something similar, and that's how they got compromised. There's no accounting for users being lax with system security - I just don't see how you can completely prevent stuff like this in a software development shop.
Do you propose making software developers do their work without access to the internet? From my experience the loss in productivity would be substantial. Or maybe make them run into a "clean room" whenever they want to look something up or send an email. Jeez, sounds a bit extreme to me.
Good security practices and user training are key, especially if you are working on high value software that you really, really don't want anybody to see the inner workings of.
I'm assuming the only reason the lifting of some portion of source code would lead to a delay is if it contained their copy protection code. Otherwise, so what if somebody obtained 1/3rd of the source code? What would they do with that, other than perhaps guide them a bit in disassembling the finished executable, assuming they could figure out what was what. If their copy protection system was sufficiently robust, they should be able to get around a compromise of that with a few changes - it shouldn't require months. But then again, if you assume even a moderate number of changes need to be made, the re-testing and repeat QA work required could take a fair amount of time.
Still, it sounds more like this is a convenient excuse for late delivery to me. I'm sure this guys email really was compromised, and hey, it sounds good to the uninitiated - "our code was 'stolen', we have to go rewrite a lot of it, we'll be delayed by a few months".
You can file a provisional patent app for 75 bucks and a real patent app for 300. IP lawyers are pretty much useless from my experience, so there's no point - they will just want you to write all the claims anyway, since you're the one who understands the invention, the prior art, etc., and they generally don't. Failing that, you can always just pay an IP lawyer for a 2-3 hour review of your patent app that you write and you prepare - they might be useful to help formulate a stronger set of claims or reorganize the claims a bit. $10k is the "hey Mr. Lawyer, please help me file a patent application" price.
First of all, fuck them for trying to force such idiocy down our throats. Second of all, fuck them since most of them don't even offer such a service. Third of all, fuck them for charging 60 bucks for letting me use a basic feature of the Internet.
Register.com is the worst ever. They have no security practices or policy to speak of, and have been known to just hand a domain over to somebody who claims they are the rightful owner if it seems right to them. Yes, I shit you not.
Use domainmonger.com for important domains. I've been using them for several years now, they will always get on the phone and resolve problems if need be, and their support and reliability are fabulous. They will never bend over and hand a domain over without a full ICANN dispute process. It's 17 bucks, and you can get cheaper if it's not business-critical - ev1servers.net is nice for el-cheapo 5 dollar domain name registration. Both are OpenSRS registrars.
Depends. If you've got a good enough spec to work from, and you're a fast worker, then you'll make more by negotiating fixed rate. If the client doesn't know exactly what they want, you want to do an hourly rate since there will invariably be a lot of change requests. Your fixed rate contract should still stipulate that any featurization beyond the initial spec costs extra. Yes, I've learned this the very hard, no-lubrication provided way with large ($300k+) multi-person contracts I've negotiated.
Why didn't the original Sys V licenses say that they were irrevocable? If I were IBM, and I were licensing something I was going to build a large portion of my business around, you damned well better believe the license agreement would say in 20 different places how fucking irrevocable my license was.
And there's nothing wrong with a candidate with vision. I'm a bit disappointed in Professor Melnick's quote in that article. I spent enough time studying physics at Harvard to know never to spout off about what we know will never be impossible.
We know that faster-than-light travel is contrary to our current best effort at producing a consistent body of laws to describe nature, but those laws are based on observations accurate within certain parameters and realms. But we certainly can't say what's really dictated by some magical immutable laws of physics.
Arguably true, but we're back to square one, relying on a centralized arbiter of authority to issue and manage use of the info namespace. Who gets to use info:palm? What if another legitimate trademark holder on "palm" in a different field wants info:palm? Don't richer metadata schemes that are not strictly hierarchical, for example something based on RDF or the "semantic web" achieve the same results with fewer issues and opportunities for confusion, more opportunities for distributed trust, and a lesser requirement for a centralized registration repository?
We need a common, useful and powerful language for describing metadata, not another broken, inflexible system like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Generally HTML-only email is spam-ish, though unfortunately, some websites generate it for their automated account systems and the like, because it's easier to generate than multi-part MIME. So you can't nuke HTML email indiscriminately. Just make sure your spam-filtering program assigns it a sufficiently negative score.
Please, ICANN, you've always sucked before, but maybe there's hope for you yet. Enforce the terms of the contract with Verisign with extreme prejudice and terminate these scumballs.
Credence, Creedence - hey what's the difference? :) I'll chalk this one up to lack of sleep.
But it does make it harder to go take a risk and stick out your neck to recommend Linux when other execs in your company are reading confusing stories in the media about how everybody using Linux is getting sued. Doesn't make it sound very appealing, I admit. Some serious PR effort is needed here - no, good PR isn't that expensive, it just requires a dedicated voice in the middle of the spectrum (not RMS and the hippy brigade at the FSF, please God - look at the wretched quotes from them in that Forbes article the other day) to start pumping out press releases, and filing counter suits to generate some hype and create "reportable" events to generate favorable stories.
It requires a lawyer and a few big mouths and a lot of time and effort. It would be nice if somebody like IBM would dump some money on some organization to do this job.
People want web browsing to be smooth, and seamless, without popups and other annoyances or interruptions, and have their sites "just work" with their browser. People want a browser to browse the web, and that's it. People don't want 80000000 complicated configuration options - they want some isolation from complexity (but complexity should be available for the more sophisticated users, just hidden away a bit). Users want a browser that is aesthetically pleasant by default and doesn't look like some weird ugly ultra-futuristic thing - users DON'T want to have to use skins or themes or download or install stuff to make something look normal, and blend in with their computer.
These basic user responses and demands are the standard under which Mozilla Firebird is better than Mozilla. It doesn't mean it's a better browser for everybody's needs, it just means it's a better browser for most people's needs.
Sorry, I just couldn't help it.
The whole spiel about the enforcer bit is somewhat strange - companies that use GPLed products and make money off of them often give money to the FSF. Sure, they may do it in part because they know the FSF will help keep the playing field level for them with respect to their competitors, but so what? That's only fair. They can't force their competitors to NOT release GPL software or to take stuff off the market, since it's GPLed.
Again, the point is proved that RMS and the FSF should not be allowed to represent the FOSS community in any sort of public forum. These guys get on the phone with a reporter and they are so eager to spread their philosophy that they say foolish things that get taken out of context about Microsoft and Oracle, and generally don't understand how to package sound bites properly. I think there needs to be some sort of "Chinese wall" between evangelism and enforcement - like they shouldn't both be done under the heading of the FSF.
I, for one, welcome our new OpenOffice.Org masters. Now if they could just get rid of the "dot org" in their name so it wasn't a mouthful of marbles, maybe we could actually pitch this product to our friends.
I think the best takeaway here is that you should always retain a lawyer and get them to edit and send the letter on your behalf, and let them be the asshole. I still think it's generally preferable to come up with your own argument in a case like this, and find a lawyer who'll work with you and realize that your domain knowledge is far superior to their own, and that their understanding of specific laws (though perhaps not the general gestalt of the law) is nothing that a guy bright enough to emulate an MT-32 ROM can't pick up in a day or two.
Nonetheless, that cost, on the whole, is still far lower than the wasted effort, aggregated across those thousands of customers, each of whom may waste 15-20 minutes a day sorting through spam.
Every scheme I've seen to make the sending process "cost" something seems to correspondingly decrease the usefulness and convenience of email (though I do like the idea of using some sort of computational "postage" to make a separate class of "postage-paid" first-class-style emails to help distinguish personal communications from everything else). But mandating the tacking-on of ADV: substantially reduces my cost as a spam recipient in wading through all the gunk out there, training and configuring filters, and so on.
No matter how profitable spam might be, it seems to me like 5 or 6 months in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison should be plenty to "rehabilitate" even the most recalcitrant offender.
If you go out and drop on an existing development team that they will have to give up the net access they've become so used to for looking up API documentation, posting questions to message boards, email around the office or with others outside the office (or for after working-hours conversations about work related topics), or make them go through extraordinary steps to get to the same information, productivity will drop substantially.
My experience here comes from managing teams ranging from 2 to 20 people in size working on projects with budgets ranging from tens of thousands to several million dollars, just FYI - and specifically, remembering back to several occasions where our internet access went down unexpectedly for a day or two, and seeing productivity drop massively as people floundered around trying to get work done.
Obviously there are top secret, high sensitivity government projects that justify extreme level of secrecy and protection for the code involved (and the massive expense and effort that goes along with it), but I don't know of any normal software development shop that would do a basic cost/benefit on this and determine that isolation is the solution to the problem.
Sorry, that's what CNN reported. Don't blame me if the CNN writers are talking out of their asses.
Do you propose making software developers do their work without access to the internet? From my experience the loss in productivity would be substantial. Or maybe make them run into a "clean room" whenever they want to look something up or send an email. Jeez, sounds a bit extreme to me.
Good security practices and user training are key, especially if you are working on high value software that you really, really don't want anybody to see the inner workings of.
Still, it sounds more like this is a convenient excuse for late delivery to me. I'm sure this guys email really was compromised, and hey, it sounds good to the uninitiated - "our code was 'stolen', we have to go rewrite a lot of it, we'll be delayed by a few months".
You can file a provisional patent app for 75 bucks and a real patent app for 300. IP lawyers are pretty much useless from my experience, so there's no point - they will just want you to write all the claims anyway, since you're the one who understands the invention, the prior art, etc., and they generally don't. Failing that, you can always just pay an IP lawyer for a 2-3 hour review of your patent app that you write and you prepare - they might be useful to help formulate a stronger set of claims or reorganize the claims a bit. $10k is the "hey Mr. Lawyer, please help me file a patent application" price.
Did I mention, fuck them?
Use domainmonger.com for important domains. I've been using them for several years now, they will always get on the phone and resolve problems if need be, and their support and reliability are fabulous. They will never bend over and hand a domain over without a full ICANN dispute process. It's 17 bucks, and you can get cheaper if it's not business-critical - ev1servers.net is nice for el-cheapo 5 dollar domain name registration. Both are OpenSRS registrars.
And they could include a goatse.cx link too, just for illustrative purposes. Now THAT would be a deterrent!
Depends. If you've got a good enough spec to work from, and you're a fast worker, then you'll make more by negotiating fixed rate. If the client doesn't know exactly what they want, you want to do an hourly rate since there will invariably be a lot of change requests. Your fixed rate contract should still stipulate that any featurization beyond the initial spec costs extra. Yes, I've learned this the very hard, no-lubrication provided way with large ($300k+) multi-person contracts I've negotiated.
Why didn't the original Sys V licenses say that they were irrevocable? If I were IBM, and I were licensing something I was going to build a large portion of my business around, you damned well better believe the license agreement would say in 20 different places how fucking irrevocable my license was.
We know that faster-than-light travel is contrary to our current best effort at producing a consistent body of laws to describe nature, but those laws are based on observations accurate within certain parameters and realms. But we certainly can't say what's really dictated by some magical immutable laws of physics.
We need a common, useful and powerful language for describing metadata, not another broken, inflexible system like this.