Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters.
That's because junk snail mail is almost self-regulating; unlike spam, there's a cost barrier that prevents the average person from being bombarded with hundreds of pieces of junk mail each day. How many pieces of junk snail mail do you get each day, on average? 6? 8? 10? That's nothing compared to the hundreds of spam messages that flow into my email inbox each day. It's so much that I am losing legitimate messages in the torrent of junk on a regular basis, even with filtering attempts.
Junk snail mail is not threatening to destroy the mail system the way that spam is threatening to destroy email.
Far from it, you should be thankful for that junk snail mail, because it's funding the postal system that allows you to get the legitimate mail. Conversely, spam doesn't contribute to the cost of our email system, but uses up tremendous resources instead.
Valve bailed out on the Mac port of the original Half-life mere days before the port was done. Why? Because they made a decision that they were going to issue NUMEROUS updates and bug fixes, and they knew that the Mac version would always lag behind the Windows version, meaning that Mac players would not be able to play against Windows players most of the time. That was the official line.
I think the real reason Valve didn't release the Mac version was the cost of the patches, since Valve didn't charge for any of them. Will there be enough Mac or Linux sales to cover not only the initial development costs for each platform, but also the ongoing free patches and upgrades? Probably not.
Actually, I think that not having wireless on the iPod is an advantage over this Intel server.
If I put all of my personal files on a wireless hard drive I carried around with me, I would always be worried about people around me trying to hack in. Can you imagine going into the mall a few years from now, when everyone is carrying one of these? It would be a hacker's dream to wander the mall, seeing what info he can pick up!
Or, can you imagine a worm in that same mall, jumping from person to person as they pass each other?
No thanks, just give me the security of the wire. I might support wireless if there was a hard switch on the unit that physically disconnected the wireless hardware, making it impossible to be turned on via software.
...or they could just buy Apple and stick the Windows logo on OS X. They've copied almost everything from OS X, anyway, they may as well just buy the durn thing and get it over with.
A blacklist based on gateways sounds like it's just as limited as current blacklists based on IP ranges. If someone using a BellSouth DSL line does a spam blast, and the BellSouth.net gateway is added to the blacklist, then it represents tens of thousands of people who just got added to the list erroneously.
No doubt Marshall Brain is a smart guy; butg it surprised me that he described the details of Rowling and the first Harry Potter book, but completely failed to connect the dots.
Rowling was a welfare mom! She took up writing out of desperation, because she needed to have a source of income to provide a better life for her kids. She did NOT do it because she felt some "artistic urge" to create something, she did it because of the immense economic pressure on her family!
Fast foward 50 to 100 years to the "robotic society"; Rowling would NOT have created Harry Potter, because she is now living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, courtesy of the government. Is she going to hunker down in front of a computer to crank out an 800-page tome, or is she going to spend her days playing around on the local beach with her kids? Get real, Brain!
Didn't we learn this lesson in the last century? Socialism doesn't work, even if the robots are doing all of the work, because it removes almost all of the motivation for accomplishment.
The big lie I always hear about Applescript is that: "Applescript doesn't need lots of documentation, it's self-documenting, english-like, and always current"
Sadly, this is very true. Apple has really fallen down on the job of documenting AppleScript, and it's always been underutilized because of it.
When AppleScript first came out, everyone could understand the potential of the feature, but few people really knew how to use it. Apple's AppleScript Product Manager, Sal Sagohian (or however it's spelled), isn't a programmer, but a layout designer who was devoted himself to becoming proficient in it so that he could automate QuarkXPress... after hammering on AS for a year or two, he was impressing both Quark and Apple with the power of AS everytime he went to the trade shows. At Apple, AS was "yet another cool technology" that was about to fall by the wayside; Apple can promote simple technologies that do great things, but they don't know how to champion complex technologies, and so a lot of great stuff at Apple has just faded away. Someone at Apple saw that that was about to happen with AS, and hired Sal to champion it, which he has. I think he's done a great job of keeping the technology alive, but Apple still hasn't evangelized the masses of Mac users about it.
Jean Claude: I pity them, Phillippe. Phillippe:Mei oui, Jean Claude, mei oui.... Won't you join me in my irrrrrrrrritating little song? Jean Claude: It would be an honor!
It's not a bug, it's a feature
on
Flaming Cellphones
·
· Score: 4, Funny
Apparently, whoever she was talking to hit the "ignite cellphone" button...
At least if virus writers are involved in the spam business, it gives a trail for investigators to follow. Wanna know who wrote the virus? Just go after every business that paid for an e-marketing campaign, and force them to tell you where to find this dirtbag.
Anyone who's writing viruses with the attempt to build a revenue stream is just plain dumb. It's about as dumb as putting your name and address on an illegal chain letter and sending it out to 10,000 strangers.
One has to wonder what impact spammers have on viral activity. Here, we have a virus that scans your hard drive for any emails it can find... meanwhile, spammers are collecting email addresses on their hard drives by the tens of thousands, and may be causing viruses like SoBig to spread much more quickly.
...and then hunting down the Darwin and OS X development teams at Apple and terminating them "Arnie-style" before they document anything more about the OS.
Alternatively, you could just nuke Apple's Cupertino campus.
It's conceivable, sure, but you're a lot more likely to get turned down for a job for a lack of education than too much education.
Along those lines, I've noticed that when a particular job market is oversaturated (as IT currently is), then of course, salary levels drop, and employers will hire the most amount of education that they can get for their money. Instead of Bachelor's degrees soaking up all of the entry-level positions, it's the people with the Master's degrees who are knocking the B.S's out of the way, and Doctorates start taking the mid-level positions. The B.S.'s are scrambling just to FIND jobs.
Is it possible to have too much education? Only if your education is so specialized that it severely limits the number of available employers.
Also, somebody else hit the nail on the head. A doctorate won't do you a lot of good if you don't have the requisite people skills for the salary level.
Most famously, the question is not, "Where will I be if I get this education?"; the question is, "Where will I be if I DON'T get this education?" Yeah, in this job market, a doctorate may not look like it's worth the effort, but it's probably a helluva lot better than not having one.
I'm surprised that no one has set up a company to anonymize P2P... I know there are companies that anonymize web surfing in general, but it seems like someone could write an app that would anonymize all TCP/IP traffic going out from your computer.
IANAL, but I would imagine that it would be best if it was written by a company NOT involved in the P2P industry. That way, the company is simply offering generic anonymous internet and can't be slapped with charges like Napster of being designed solely for the intent of transferring copywrited material.
If the company is continuously shuffling IP addresses among its various members, and not keeping records that can be subpoenaed in court, then the RIAA is once again unable to attack individuals.
The only downside would be the huge volume of traffic going through the anonymizing site, making it a fairly expensive service that casual P2P users would probably never subscribe to.
Everyone has different goals for their careers, though. Your goal is to build cool stuff; mine is to eventually build my own business. If I could walk out today and duplicate my current income by freelancing, I would absolutely do it.
But I take issue with the article's author that there is enough freelance tech support for everyone. A lot of programmers are going to naturally fall back on that as their jobs move overseas, and it will quickly become saturated.
Beware of anyone promising a "one size fits all" fix for this downturn...
Slashdot Mirror
is that, in 2001, Michael Dell told BusinessWeek that Apple should liquidate all of thir assets and close down shop.
Like most of the big name Wintel companies, they love to take their cheap shots at Apple while shamelessly plundering Apple's ideas.
Roughly 90% of my snail mail box is junk mail. Yet I don't see any politicians jumping on bills like these that would outlaw sending bulk or individual "commercial" letters.
That's because junk snail mail is almost self-regulating; unlike spam, there's a cost barrier that prevents the average person from being bombarded with hundreds of pieces of junk mail each day. How many pieces of junk snail mail do you get each day, on average? 6? 8? 10? That's nothing compared to the hundreds of spam messages that flow into my email inbox each day. It's so much that I am losing legitimate messages in the torrent of junk on a regular basis, even with filtering attempts.
Junk snail mail is not threatening to destroy the mail system the way that spam is threatening to destroy email.
Far from it, you should be thankful for that junk snail mail, because it's funding the postal system that allows you to get the legitimate mail. Conversely, spam doesn't contribute to the cost of our email system, but uses up tremendous resources instead.
Valve bailed out on the Mac port of the original Half-life mere days before the port was done. Why? Because they made a decision that they were going to issue NUMEROUS updates and bug fixes, and they knew that the Mac version would always lag behind the Windows version, meaning that Mac players would not be able to play against Windows players most of the time. That was the official line.
I think the real reason Valve didn't release the Mac version was the cost of the patches, since Valve didn't charge for any of them. Will there be enough Mac or Linux sales to cover not only the initial development costs for each platform, but also the ongoing free patches and upgrades? Probably not.
Actually, I think that not having wireless on the iPod is an advantage over this Intel server.
If I put all of my personal files on a wireless hard drive I carried around with me, I would always be worried about people around me trying to hack in. Can you imagine going into the mall a few years from now, when everyone is carrying one of these? It would be a hacker's dream to wander the mall, seeing what info he can pick up!
Or, can you imagine a worm in that same mall, jumping from person to person as they pass each other?
No thanks, just give me the security of the wire. I might support wireless if there was a hard switch on the unit that physically disconnected the wireless hardware, making it impossible to be turned on via software.
I don't think you want to be jumping a convertable car off a ramp into the water.
From the eBay page:
Now my loss is your gain because you can get this used song on the cheap.
Yeah, rite! It's up to $9,700 now! Is this an exercise in copyrights or stupidity?
...or they could just buy Apple and stick the Windows logo on OS X. They've copied almost everything from OS X, anyway, they may as well just buy the durn thing and get it over with.
A blacklist based on gateways sounds like it's just as limited as current blacklists based on IP ranges. If someone using a BellSouth DSL line does a spam blast, and the BellSouth.net gateway is added to the blacklist, then it represents tens of thousands of people who just got added to the list erroneously.
I didn't make that up about JK Rowling; she has said in interviews that the reason she wrote the first Harry Potter was out of economic desperation.
No doubt Marshall Brain is a smart guy; butg it surprised me that he described the details of Rowling and the first Harry Potter book, but completely failed to connect the dots.
Rowling was a welfare mom! She took up writing out of desperation, because she needed to have a source of income to provide a better life for her kids. She did NOT do it because she felt some "artistic urge" to create something, she did it because of the immense economic pressure on her family!
Fast foward 50 to 100 years to the "robotic society"; Rowling would NOT have created Harry Potter, because she is now living a comfortable middle-class lifestyle, courtesy of the government. Is she going to hunker down in front of a computer to crank out an 800-page tome, or is she going to spend her days playing around on the local beach with her kids? Get real, Brain!
Didn't we learn this lesson in the last century? Socialism doesn't work, even if the robots are doing all of the work, because it removes almost all of the motivation for accomplishment.
The big lie I always hear about Applescript is that: "Applescript doesn't need lots of documentation, it's self-documenting, english-like, and always current"
Sadly, this is very true. Apple has really fallen down on the job of documenting AppleScript, and it's always been underutilized because of it.
When AppleScript first came out, everyone could understand the potential of the feature, but few people really knew how to use it. Apple's AppleScript Product Manager, Sal Sagohian (or however it's spelled), isn't a programmer, but a layout designer who was devoted himself to becoming proficient in it so that he could automate QuarkXPress... after hammering on AS for a year or two, he was impressing both Quark and Apple with the power of AS everytime he went to the trade shows. At Apple, AS was "yet another cool technology" that was about to fall by the wayside; Apple can promote simple technologies that do great things, but they don't know how to champion complex technologies, and so a lot of great stuff at Apple has just faded away. Someone at Apple saw that that was about to happen with AS, and hired Sal to champion it, which he has. I think he's done a great job of keeping the technology alive, but Apple still hasn't evangelized the masses of Mac users about it.
Jean Claude: I pity them, Phillippe.
Phillippe: Mei oui, Jean Claude, mei oui.... Won't you join me in my irrrrrrrrritating little song?
Jean Claude: It would be an honor!
Apparently, whoever she was talking to hit the "ignite cellphone" button...
At least if virus writers are involved in the spam business, it gives a trail for investigators to follow. Wanna know who wrote the virus? Just go after every business that paid for an e-marketing campaign, and force them to tell you where to find this dirtbag.
Anyone who's writing viruses with the attempt to build a revenue stream is just plain dumb. It's about as dumb as putting your name and address on an illegal chain letter and sending it out to 10,000 strangers.
One has to wonder what impact spammers have on viral activity. Here, we have a virus that scans your hard drive for any emails it can find... meanwhile, spammers are collecting email addresses on their hard drives by the tens of thousands, and may be causing viruses like SoBig to spread much more quickly.
Another reason to hate spammers, I suppose....
I'm doin' it for my mom.
Not to be outdone, Kazaa is out to prove that they have bigger balls by declaring "Gigli" a first-class movie.
is that, after all that blustering and defiant language, Earthstation 5 is now unreachable.
Kudos, Slashdot, for doing what the MPAA could not.
"Oh! Never mind...."
...and then hunting down the Darwin and OS X development teams at Apple and terminating them "Arnie-style" before they document anything more about the OS.
Alternatively, you could just nuke Apple's Cupertino campus.
It would be a very short book. The first (and only) page would read, "Use Thunderbird instead."
It's conceivable, sure, but you're a lot more likely to get turned down for a job for a lack of education than too much education.
Along those lines, I've noticed that when a particular job market is oversaturated (as IT currently is), then of course, salary levels drop, and employers will hire the most amount of education that they can get for their money. Instead of Bachelor's degrees soaking up all of the entry-level positions, it's the people with the Master's degrees who are knocking the B.S's out of the way, and Doctorates start taking the mid-level positions. The B.S.'s are scrambling just to FIND jobs.
Is it possible to have too much education? Only if your education is so specialized that it severely limits the number of available employers.
Also, somebody else hit the nail on the head. A doctorate won't do you a lot of good if you don't have the requisite people skills for the salary level.
Most famously, the question is not, "Where will I be if I get this education?"; the question is, "Where will I be if I DON'T get this education?" Yeah, in this job market, a doctorate may not look like it's worth the effort, but it's probably a helluva lot better than not having one.
I'm surprised that no one has set up a company to anonymize P2P... I know there are companies that anonymize web surfing in general, but it seems like someone could write an app that would anonymize all TCP/IP traffic going out from your computer.
IANAL, but I would imagine that it would be best if it was written by a company NOT involved in the P2P industry. That way, the company is simply offering generic anonymous internet and can't be slapped with charges like Napster of being designed solely for the intent of transferring copywrited material.
If the company is continuously shuffling IP addresses among its various members, and not keeping records that can be subpoenaed in court, then the RIAA is once again unable to attack individuals.
The only downside would be the huge volume of traffic going through the anonymizing site, making it a fairly expensive service that casual P2P users would probably never subscribe to.
...and it comes in a discreet, plain-brown wrapper that clearly says, "NOT PENIS CREME" on the side.
Everyone has different goals for their careers, though. Your goal is to build cool stuff; mine is to eventually build my own business. If I could walk out today and duplicate my current income by freelancing, I would absolutely do it.
But I take issue with the article's author that there is enough freelance tech support for everyone. A lot of programmers are going to naturally fall back on that as their jobs move overseas, and it will quickly become saturated.
Beware of anyone promising a "one size fits all" fix for this downturn...