I just stumbled across this little gem. I don't see a name for the product. What it essentially does is create files with the names of common movies and songs that contain nothing more than zeros. Stick these files on a web page or FTP server and wait for the *AA sue-bots to crawl your site and send a C&D letter. The *AA of choice would be making a legal threat illegally. So if you're really bored of have the $$ to spare you could sue for barratry. Who has the patience for that though? This would fill their sue-bot output with a bunch of BS, similar to filling a spammer's spam-bot with a bunch of bogus email addresses. It's a novel idea...

Note: I would have selected the journal Topic "Football." Oddly enough it wasn't an option... ;-)

I have a gripe, and it's a big one. This particular gripe is with the college football ranking system and bowl selection system. In short I believe the current system is a scam. Tell me this, how can the number one college football team in the nation, USC, not play in the national championship? How can the number 3 team, OU (O Who?), play in their place? Now don't get me wrong. I'm not a USCOU fan either. I'm a K-State fan. That's right. I have a Wildcat tattooed on my ass, and I like it. I'm a fan of the team that was ranked 15th last week, K-State. I'm a fan of the team that played the team that was ranked number 1 last week, OU. I'm a fan of the team that beat the living hell out of the number 1 team in the nation, at least they were last week. That's right. #15 K-State whipped the living shit out of #1 OU 35-7. Oh hell yeah! Who's your daddy?! If your a O Who fan, you probably don't know. ;-P Let me just say one more thing before I get back on topic. Bob Stoops REALLY looked like he needed a dip REALLY badly at the end of the 3rd quarter. If you don't know what I mean by that then this will be utterly lost on you.

Last week's #1, OU, was completely and utterly trounched by #15, K-State. It wasn't like OU wasn't there to play. They scored on their fourth play. OU just couldn't K-State's running or passing game. OU's offense couldn't handle K-State's power house of a defense. OU was simply bested by the better team, the team that went to Arrowhead to win. That ass-whoopin' dropped OU to number 3 and raised K-State to #8. Why is it that OU is still playing in the Sugar Bowl, this year's championship game, then? I'll tell you why. It's because some computer in up-state New York thought they should be. USC whipped Oregon State Saturday by 24 points. This win ensured USC the number 1 spot in the nation. However no one ever expected a BCS computer to decide that since OU played 1 more game than USC that OU was the better team. Opps! Bend over USC. Now you know how we K-Staters feel. The BCS jackasses have been screwing us for years. Strength of schedule my ass. How many times have we had the number 1 defense in the nation? This year we have the nation's leading rusher. The BCS always treats us like their midwest bitch.

USC was voted number one in the nation by the ESPN/USA Today coaches' poll AND the Associated Press' media poll. You remember what coaches are don't you, BCS people? They are the people who really know what teams are the best in the nation. Try not to forget that.

USC is the number one team in the nation. The Rose Bowl is this year's true National Championship game, once again. The BCS is now truly a joke. Now everyone realizes this. We K-Staters have been saying this for years, as has others. Now the nation knows it too. How exactly can a supposed number 1 team be number 1 and yet not even win their conference? Strike that, how can they be number 1 if they thoroughly got their asses kicked in their coference game? Bye bye BCS. The BCS ranking is a joke. The best should be decided by playoffs. That's the only fair why to play the game. You'll be gone very soon BCS, and we couldn't be happier.

I was sitting on my throne browsing through the latest MacMall catalog the other day when I came across the Microsoft product section (about 1.5 pages). I was reading the blurb on Virtual PC 6.1. I decided then and there that I must write down what I've been saying for months about Microsoft's Mac product line future. This is my prediction...

The whole reason Microsoft bought Virtual PC and Connectix is really quite simple. Microsoft is going to pull the plug on all their Apple development for all of their products except for Virtual PC. "Why?" you might ask? Consider this, Microsoft is having to develop their office and home use applications twice, once for x86 and once for PPC. They are duplicating development efforts for:

• Office X
• • Word X
  • Excel X
  • PowerPoint X
  • Entourage X
• MSN
• MSN Messenger
• Windows Media Player
• Remote Desktop Client

Note that Internet Explorer is not listed since it is no longer being developed by Microsoft for Macs. (yippeeee!!!!!)

That's a lot of redundant development, especially for a platform that's not even their own!

How can Microsoft lower their development overhead and still either a) sell products to Mac users or b) convince users to switch to Windows? To me the answer is very obvious. Microsoft is developing a common codebase for which to run their existing applications off of. They can save money by porting Windows to a Mac environment, just like in Virtual PC. They no longer have to code everything twice. A x86 version of Office 2010 will run just fine under Virtual PC on a Mac. That is how they lower their costs. Now they only have one application to develop: Virtual PC. That completes their first goal. They get revenue from more sales and have to do very little work to make it happen. How do they eventually get this userbase to switch to x86 Windows though? It's simple really: They pull a bait and switch and drive their mac customers to Windows. They could do this by introducing instability into Virtual PC that leaks over into OS X. They blame the crashing on Apple and lure some users away to x86-ville. They get everyone switched to Office via VPC but introduce a bug with the release of a new Office. The new Office won't run on VPC. Again they blame Apple. Microsoft then drags it's feet on "patching" VPC so that the new Office can run on it (funny, I thought this was a Windows environment...) all the while blaming Apple for bad coding and not sharing APIs. In the process they lure more users away. They do this every time a new Office comes out that uses a different file format. The Office via VPC users are continually stuck using a dated version that can't open documents from a new version of Office on x86. Frustration leads to migration; bye bye more users. Eventually Microsoft is just going to leave the Mac arena but not until after making a big public todo over how bad OS X is and how Apple leveraged its position wouldn't share APIs as well as intentionally making Microsoft products run poorly on OS X. This will of course be a load of hooey but the smear campaign will work to some degree. More people will switch to x86 just to get Office back.

Think it won't happen? I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you. It seems to make perfect sense. The loss of Microsoft applications on Macs is a good thing to me--a damned good thing. Internet Explorer on OS X was a joke. It was HORRIBLE. IE literally locked me out of a PacketShaper 4545 once. That put a stupid look on my face, all because some genious programmer at Microsoft decided that IE should modify all pre-configured text fields on a form before form submissions, even if the field hadn't had its text altered. Genious. The worst thing about Microsoft products leaving the Mac arena is that this will give anti-Mac IT folks a chance to say no more Macs on the network. No more Office on Mac means that the Mac users won't be able to share files easily with the PC users. Anti-Mac IT folks will have a foothold to keep Macs off the network from then on.

I sure hope OpenOffice becomes usable on all platforms in the very near future. If it becomes adpoted soon enough, we might not really care what Microsoft does...

This of course is my opinion; I could be wrong.

I have bought tens of thousands of dollars worth of goods on the 'Net over the years. I mean that literally. If you include the auctions I've won then that number would easily double. I've been extremely fortunate to have a very limited number of bad online transactions. I've also been lucky enough to not have an problems (that I know of) with identity theft. I credit my good fortune to picking merchants that I've either heard good things about or got the warm and fuzzies after visiting their site or doing research on them. Still, I've had my problems. I now always double check new merchants with a review site called ResellerRatings.com. I get to hear from other consumers on their experiences (good or bad) with that merchant. It has saved my ass numerous times. I've found that the cheapest place is usually not the best place to make your purchase. Paying a few bucks extra to buy from NewEgg or GoogleGear is worth it. The service before and after the sale is worth it alone. You might end up paying $1-15 more for something but it's worth it IMHO. One time when I didn't check resellerratings.com is one time I definitely got burnt. I priced ultra/160 73GB hard drives a year or so ago. One vendor had a significantly lower price and had a pretty good site. That merchant was Computer Giants. I recommended to my employer that we buy that hard drive through CG. Big mistake. The drive was faulty from the start and went KIA within a day or so of being powered up. Needless to say CG was less than helpful with a RMA. They wanted us to pay for the return shipping AND for CG to test the drive to determine if it was in fact faulty AT THEIR LEISURE. The drive was destined for a server and a project that depended on it. Paying more money for a DOA drive was certainly not reasonable. We were a state agency for Pete's sake and they sold us a faulty product. In the end Maxtor's excellent support bailed us out. They replaced the drive with a brand new one that worked flawlessly. That was one of only a few times I didn't research an online merchant before doing business with them. Before sinking your hard-earned cash into a ubber-special deal from a merchant you've never heard of before, I highly recommend you do a few minutes worth of research into their past. It could save you a lot of potential grief.

A U.S. court in Oklahoma has blocked the national "Do Not Call" list one week before it was to go into effect. The Direct Marketing Association sued to block the list shortly after Congress approved it in January, saying it would violate free-speech laws and discriminate against an industry that provides millions of jobs. It's at least a temporary victory for telephone spammers.

Submitted to /. 20030823

Hot on the heels of the demise of Osirusoft.com, news is spreading of the demise of the Monkeys.com and of the (at least) temporary demise of OpenRBL. Monkeys.com is known for providing the Unsecured Proxies List, UPL which was highly effective at combating open proxy spam. The wave of DDoS attacks against DNS Blocklist servers is gaining speed. Who's the next target: SpamCop, NJABL, MAPS or ORDB? What does it take to get the FBI involved in tracking down the sources of the DDoS attacks with possible ties to the recent viruses that create a distributed network of open proxies?

Want to know what my biggest /. gripe is? The story submission process. I've submitted perhaps a dozen stories to /. in my time. One has been accepted. It wasn't even that good. Most of the ones I wrote were Ask Slashdot questions and were world's better than some of the stupid stuff that gets asked on Ask /.. Yet, they were rejected. What's wrong with rejections? Nothing. I'm sure the /. folks see all sorts of submissions and get sick of dumb stories quickly. They probably also had grammatically incorrect stories or stories lacking enough technical content and links as well. Rejects are good if there is a good reason.

This is where the problem comes in. No reason is given for story submission rejects. Why? Probably because there isn't an easy way to do this in SlashCode. Imagine this.

Joe writes a story, previews it a couple times while adding content, then submits the story. A /. editor, lets call him Leroy, reads Joe's story. The story was obviously not proof-read because it's full of grammatical errors and mis-spelled words. The good news is Joe has a good story topic. It doesn't have enough technical content though. Joe forgot to include links to the company involved or an offsite news story. Bad Joe. No cookie for him.

Now, under the existing story submission process Leroy would simply reject the story. I propose that SlashCode have a way for Leroy to provide feedback to Joe on his story. Now I'm sure the /. editors read and reject^H^H^H^H^H^Hconsider hundreds if not thousands of stories each day. Whatever the feedback method is, it can't consume much more of their time if any. I propose the inclusion of a couple menus on the editor's page that lists the most common reasons for rejecting a message. The menus could contains reasons such as

Grammatical errors

Mis-spelled words

Bad links

Rambles

Lacks technical depth

Duplicate story

Incorrect Topic/Section

Topic not meant for Slashdot

Or any other common reasons for rejecting a story. Each menu selection in the first menu of reasons could then change the menu items in a second menu of suggestions.

Proof read

Double Check Links

Make more concise

Find technical content

For example "Grammatical errors" or "Mis-spelled words" could give the option of "Proof read" by default (and "go back to elementary school" as a second option). "Bad links" could give the option of "Double Check Links" by default and "Find a mirror" as a secondary option.

Using these menus would be very simple, almost effortless. There could even be a text field for Leroy to make notes in if they desire. Perhaps the story is good and just needs a couple small changes before Leroy would accept it. Leroy could express this in his own words in the text box if they wish. Now when Joe goes to check his messages, he sees that his story has been rejected. He checks the notes on it and see why. Whoops. It looks like he forgot to proof read his story. Whoops again, he forgot to include the links to the technical specs on that new gizmo. Since this new fangled system lets him edit the story he submitted for X days (new feature please), he brings it up, revises it complete with typo-fixes and new technical data and links. Now Joe resubmits it. Well since an editor, Leroy, has already worked with this story once before, it is auto-assigned to Leroy. Leroy then checks in on his submitted stories. Hmm, looks like Joe revised his story. "Why, this is exactly what I was looking for!, he exclaims . He sees that all the neccessary changes have been made and the story is good enough to accept. Joe checks his messages later and sees that his story was accepted. Joe is happy. Happy is Joe.

Now isn't that a much nicer way to accept and reject stories? Tell me, how many of you folks out there hated math teachers that never gave you the opportunity to correct math homework, even if it was only for half credit? I know I sure did. Did the quality of your work improve because of it? I imagine it did. I submit that the quality of user-submitted stories would increase if such a process were implemented and given a chance.

In all honesty it wouldn't take any more time away from Leroy to use the menus. By setting your default appropriately, one or two menu selections and a click is all Leroy would have to do after reading the submission. That's not too hard or time consuming, is it? Joe is happy because he received actual feedback instead of a big fat rejected on his submission. I'd compare the existing method to having a bank stamp a big fat rejected on your home loan app with no explanation. With my method they would at the very least give you a couple reasons why the loan app wasn't ready for the big time. "Your credit doesn't meet our minimum requirements", "You don't have enough collateral for a loan of this size". Ideally you'd get a couple simple suggestions to go with the reasons, such as "apply for a secured credit card and use it for 6 months to build more credit", "eliminate higher interest debits first, then come back", or "consider using your retirement or motorcycle as collateral". I'd much rather have constructive input than a big fat rejected, wouldn't you?

These menus could be incredibly easy to implement. If I was a half-way decent programmer, I'd submit the source to SlashCode myself. Unfortunately I'm not a programmer by trade. I do think it would be very easy to do though. The menus would be javascript driven. I've done much of that before on my statistic sites and it's not too hard. The story archival for correction feature wouldn't be too hard either I wouldn't manage. Just hold on to the story text a little longer and allow the user to edit a copy of it, then resubmit it back to the assigned editor. That can't be that hard either. This simple addition would greatly improve my impression of story submission process. If I were using SlashCode on my own server (I'm considering it), I as the editor would want to be able to tell my users why I rejected their submission. Otherwise I'm sure they'd call me on the phone to ask why. SlashCode isn't always used in places where the editors and users don't know each other personally and aren't separated by thousands of miles.

That's about all I have to say on this. I have posted two articles to slashcode.com about it in the past and both were received with favortism towards implementation.

"Submission rejection feedback"

"Story Submission Suggestion"

I think it would be a worth while thing to implement. Of course I could always be wrong. I welcome input from other current and potential SlashCode gurus and admins.

A journal have I!