Slashdot Mirror
Slashback: Munich, Harlan, Alacrity
Please don't link "here": case in point. Kent Brewster writes "As previously mentioned here(1), here(2), and here(3), national treasure Harlan Ellison has been fighting a drawn-out battle with AOL over alt.binaries.e-book. Looks like a settlement has been reached; details (such as they are) are on AOL."
Papa Legba adds a link to an informative page on the suit's progress, with lots of informative links.
The basement dwellers burrow deeper. kevin_conaway writes "Accoring to this article on Tech Target, the DNS outage at Akamai was caused by a massive DDOS attack on Akamai's servers. Akamai Technologies Inc. said a 'sophisticated, large-scale distributed denial of service attack' on its domain name service bogged down several of its clients' Web sites yesterday morning, and that it's investigating the incident with federal authorities."
Time to quit your Winin' marmoset writes "As a followup to this story, Dave Winer has posted information about transitioning weblogs.com sites. Rogers Cadenhead and Steve Kirks pitched in to help. The plan includes a 90-day free evaluation period, during which the affected users will be able to make local copies of their data, sign up for paid hosting, or move to another hosting solution."
Pay up, Pal. ack154 writes "Following up from a previous slashdot story, PayPal may have reached a preliminary settlement in the class action lawsuit brought against them in 2002. The lawsuit was regarding the freezing of suspected fraud accounts and communication of limits on accounts. Limited details are available right now, but the eBay announcement states that anyone who signed up for a PayPal account between Oct 1999 and Jan 2004 may be eligible."
Forkenbrock points to this USAToday today article which says that "Ebay's Paypal will pay a total of 9.25 million dollars to its users (businesses and individuals)."
What about Java vs. T++? Stefan de Bruijn was one of several readers who reacted to the benchmarks cited in the Slashdot post titled 'Java faster than C++'.
He writes "I took the liberty to re-write a major piece of the C++ part of the benchmark. Furthermore, the Intel compiler has been tested as well. The Java code was assumed 'correct.'
The results are quite different than the former posting. Here, C++ appears to be a winner for the vast majority of programs; where Java scored better with (recursive) algorithms and the use of file IO (where it must be remarked that the C++ code uses iostreams)." joekaylor writes "I did a similar study 6-months ago to the study sited recently here on Slashdot, and I did it with java jdk 1.4.x. Java performance has been underestimated for QUITE some time. It's not the best tool every time, but it is not considered often enough and for the wrong reasons."
And an anonymous reader writes "This article by USC graphics researchers surveys a number of good (mostly numeric) benchmarks and then explains the theory of why maybe java should be faster than C++. It also raises the (unanswered) question of why geeks (ostensibly intelligent and scientifically-minded people) continue to believe some ideas (for example, 'garbage collection is slow') despite strong evidence to the contrary that has been available for many years."
Well, it's sort of like a gigabyte. helloanand writes "So, a day after yahoo relaunched their email service with 100 MB space, hotmail also expanded their offering to 25 MB. Just logged into my hotmail account and saw the space bumped up. The thing that I noticed is that MSN/Hotmail didn't make a big splash about it. Its actually a good thing for the users. Gmail started this trend by coming up with 1 GB (yes! gigabyte) worth of space. Then yahoo joined the party with their own 100 MB version and now the latest to join in bill gates & co (aka MSN Hotmail). Lets see what other changes does Gmail stimulate to the email service. Also the thing to note is that Google's gmail is being closely observed by the established players like MSN and Yahoo."
Each city represents a star system; players alternate by country. Wudbaer writes "The Munich city council has finally OK'ed the multi-step 30 Million Euro project to migrate the Munich city council to Linux, as heise news reports (German text). The planned high-profile migration of the administration of one of the largest cities in Germany has already created a lot of interest both in pro and anti-OSS camps, and was rumored to have run into substantial problems at the beginning of the year which might have endangered the council's final OK for the project. But now apparently the road is open for the project. Go Tux !"
Marcus links to this announcement on the city government's web page, and suggests that you put it through Google.
securitas writes "Hot on the heels of Munich's decision to go with Linux, the City of Bergen, Norway will replace its Unix and Windows core infrastructure with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. The second part of the implementation will migrate the city's educational network - with 100 schools and 32,000 users - from 100 Windows application servers to 20 Linux IBM eServer BladeCenters. Bergen is Norway's second-largest city. ZDNet UK's Michael Parsons discusses the choice in an interview with Bergen CTO Ole Bjoern Tuftedal."
Making less of a mess. HishamMuhammad writes "The GoboLinux story featured recently on /. got the project some publicity, but again a number of misconceptions showed up, from people who think we are "just another user-friendly distro", because of our verbose pathnames like /System/Settings. Here is an article I wrote in order to explain the principles behind the design of GoboLinux (also in PDF), which tells our side of the story."
My Hotmail account still only has 2MB of storage - and every time I leave it alone for more than two days, it fills up with spam. I checked the site pretty carefully for any expansion offers, but it looks like either the poster lied or was one of a select few to get an offer that's unavailable (for free).
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I just checked and Hotmail is still showing 2 MB for me. This link still shows a fee of $29.95 a year for 25 MB.
I always thought it ludicrous to pay MSN for more space for one simple reason : the only cause of me exceeding my space limit was all of the spam that I got from having a Hotmail account, and Microsoft is still the only company (that I know of) that counts your junk mail folder against your quota. Why should I give them money to house more crap when it's their insecure system that's the cause of all of my spam?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
My yahoo e-mail went to the 100mb limit the other day, but, in addition for the last few months neither the bulk mail (spam) or the trash folder have counted against the limit
Ive only used blogger for about 3 weeks and even I got an invite. Thats the way to go...
Try Spymac.com which allows anyone to signup for a free 1 gig account
aventuremail.com also is in beta, but allows 2 gig online storage
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Me too. Completely took me by surprise -- I logged in Monday morning and BAM, everything's different. (No warning! How did Yahoo! manage to do this without tipping off Slashdot??) New look, 2GB storage, no graphical ads, more filters, more address blocks, disposable addresses, trainable spam filter, and so on and so on. Ever since Yahoo! bought Rocketmail and turned it into Yahoo! Mail, I've had to have a .sig explaining that the following lines were an ad and not from me. Well, I've finally taken it off. No more in-mail ads!!
Thank you, Google!
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
There is more to Gmail than just the space, though. There is also the amazing, sleak interface (that runs almost like a client app) and wonderful Google searching of your messages. Plus, it is so damn fast.
That said, I just got five more invitiations today and all my friends already have Gmail. If anyone wants an invite (preferably Hotmail users), then shoot me an e-mail at adpowers@gmail.com. I'll save a spot for Arlen, other than that, it is first come first serve.
I simply don't see how anyone who has actually used GMail could honestly think it has any competition at all.
And I don't mean from Yahoo!, Hotmail, or the latest 2GB provider. I mean any mail client period. Web-based or otherwise.
Yes the 1GB storage capacity is awesome, but it's just icing on the cake to an amazing interface. GMail is a pleasure to use.
It's not just faster than any other web-based mail client. It's faster than any other website period. Assuming a decent amount of bandwidth, it's faster than most locally running GUI clients, except for possibly KMail or mutt.
The interface is revolutionary. It makes hot new clients like Thunderbird look backward. Expect to see GUI client knockoffs as soon it gets out of beta.
GMail kicks ass, pure and simple. It will be a very, very difficult for anyone else to catch up. The only thing Yahoo! and Hotmail have going for them right now is existing userbase and name recognition. But Google has that too and I bet that can transfer a lot of that over to GMail if they try hard enough.
He knows, much to the chagrin of many people, that his antics keep his books on the shelves where less - colorful - authors disappear from print.
But the sad fact is that I don't believe any of his novels are currently in print, and of his 30+ short story collections, I think only 3 or 4 are readily available.
I really had high hopes for Borealis publishing's Edgeworks series, but they only managed to get 4 volumes out. I'd love to see Memos from Purgatory and Web of the City published in one volume with an updated introduction to the two...
This sig intentionally left justified.
I found out along with everyone else a couple days ago that Yahoo had upgraded their mail services, but the post doesn't mention the upgrade they made to those of us paying for services through them.
::poof::, all the spam starts bouncing. I think you can make as many as you'd like, one for each site where you feel it's necessary. That is way cool. (I know you can do this with your own private server as well, but that would cost a lot more and be less accessable).
.mac) that do this, but with a 2 GB space I could even keep multiple versions of the backup. As it is they have a 10 MB message size limit.
About a year ago I upgraded my Yahoo account to 25MB of storage for something like $20 a year. It was worth it to me because that was the email address I had used for years, and i wanted to be able to access every important message I had gotten in a few years from anywhere (I'm in the military). Yahoo had bumped up my inbox size a couple times before (I think new users got 4 MB but mine had gone up to 8 by that time). But I was running out of room and wanted to keep my messages.
So anyway, I logged on a couple days ago, and my mailbox had been upgraded to 2 GB. Damn.
It also turned out that they had implemented almost every feature I had wanted, and a few that I didn't know I wanted. I almost never get a spam mail, partly through discipline and partly through Yahoo's pretty decent spam filtering. The one feature I really wanted was the ability to search through all my mail. They put this in, and along with a few other features (like filtering rules and better spam protection), put in a feature which i had never actually wanted before, but that was only because I had never thought of it.
I think it's called something like "Address Guard", and it's a lot like what American Express is doing with its credit cards for online purchases. They realized that you can never stop ALL the spam, so they made it so you can make throwaway email addresses that link to your actual address. You give out your throwaway, and if you start getting spammed at it you can just delete it, and
The enormous mailbox limit has given rise to a new feature request. Now i wish they had a remote disk function, where I could back up part of my hard drive on their servers. A 200 MB PGP disk could hold just about all my sensitive files (including scans of all my military records) and make them accessable from anywhere. I know there are services (like
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
It's sheer software fanaticism coupled with greed that has stagnated Hotmail. I can consider Hotmail's user load for about half a second. Then I remember Hotmail's history and know that Microsoft has taken a cool thing and run it into the ground.
Microsoft has wasted tons of money and time converting Hotmail over to their own OS. The effort failed more than once and they had to increase the number of machines just to keep up with stagnant or declining demand. Their own consultants use the Hotmail example of Unix virtues. Is it any wonder that the only improvements have been cosmetic and trivial?
The list of improvements is slim. Microsoft has added some spam filtering, "folders". They have also improved the attachment dialogs so that it's easier to fill your 2500KB. You also get more adds. Singles adds my wife finds cheesy and offensive.
The service has been unusable for a couple of years. My wife seems happy with it, but she's also happy with clear channel and other advert heavy broadcasts. Watching her try to get things done with it is sort of like watching someone try to eat well buttered, American rice with chopsticks. It's impossible for her and family members to exchange files over 2K despite cable modems at both ends.
Oh well.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
One thing I've always come to expect with Windows is that when I install some software, if I go with the default install it will go into C:/Program Files and there I will find almost all the programs installed on my computer. Linux, up until Gobo, has been harder to predict in this sense.
/usr/bin or /usr/local/bin, unless they're a core system program in which case they go in /bin. Administrative programs go in the equivalent .../sbin directories. Library files go in the equivalent .../lib directories. Application data goes into a /usr/share/ directory, if it has been written to modern standard, or possibly /usr/lib/ if it is older. For programs that might need to be started at boot time, a script goes into /etc/rc.d/init.d to do it.
Are you taking the piss, or what? When you install programs on Linux, they go under
This is nearly as simple as the Windows equivalent, and has the advantage that programs are by default installed on the path. (Yes, some of us wish Windows would have a more sensible system for this)