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Hurricanes Affecting Spammers?
Ant writes "According to BusinessWeek Online's article, Lots of folks think the hurricane hits in Florida, the Sunshine (and Spam!) State have taken slowed the volume of spam." I've not noticed any decrease.
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They know who many of these guys are, and where they live/work. Why are they still in business sending spam? If the Gummint doesn't want to do anything about them maybe some kind locals will break their legs for us in exchange for Hurricane donations...
They're spamming from inside the hurricane proof Dome Home?
From the blurb:
I've not noticed any decrease.
From the article:
But daily results posted by MessageLabs, Earthlink (ELNK), and Symantec (SYMC) showed little correlation.
And neither has anyone else. It was only a single institution that claimed their weekly spam traffic was down 100 million messages. The article mentions that two top 10 spammers remained in the top 10 even during the storms. They even (hopefully) jokingly claim it was a heroic effort.
"Lots of folks think the hurricane hits in Florida, the Sunshine (and Spam!) State have taken slowed the volume of spam."
Lots of folks think there are black helicopters poisoning the citizens of our country too, but that doesn't make it the slightest bit true.
According to my Spam Stats (Coral Link) the level of spam going through my server is relatively steady.
If they think hurricanes in Florida did a decent job of taking out some spammers, they should wait 'til the next 6.0M+ earthquake hits Silicon Valley...
-Rob
Marriage doesn't have to suck!
Well the solution to spam seems to be to wipe out Florida.
No, silly, spam is situated in California... The porn sites people sign up for are situated in Florida... Porn spam is down, overall spam is not.
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
and for the first time in months, no spam! Havent cleared it in days. Theres usually 100+ pieces in there, and now none! Not that this is evidence or anything, but interesting nonetheless...
"Something's wrong with you...and I hope we never do meet again." - Deftones When Girls Telephone Boys
Working in the internet marketing industry (not spam) I can tell you that Boca Raton in particular has a reputation for being host to some extra-shady operations.
Are several major natural disasters all it takes to quell a couple weeks worth of spam? Experts at anti-spam advocacy groups doubt it. "[Spammers] tend to exist all over the place. Florida represents such a small quantity of the total worldwide, I can't imagine it would have a major impact." says Michael Osterman of Osterman Research Group, which looks at spam trends.
'Nuff said.....
-thewldisntenuff
My MythTV HowTo
So by that analogy, we are saying that most spammers live in Florida? eh... Jeanne's on the way, we'll keep kicking florida's ass with tropical weather, and eventually Mickey and all of the spammers will be washed out to sea.
At least I'm still get personal emails from high ranking democrats, why just today John Kerry himself sent me one.
Just as Microsoft learned when they had a DDoS against their DNSs and subsequently went to Akamai, the spammers will learn from this. After all, email is their livelyhood.
Trolling is a art,
If it's true, then let's not waste another moment -- blast a trench and cut the whole state off from the country while we have the chance! It'll solve a bunch of other problems in November too....
I've actually noticed an increase. They're getting spam through SpamAssassin, now.
Your ad here.
Diebold has to make some money off of all those voting machines they are installing in Florida during the off season!!
...the hurricane has increased the number of articles and reports about hurricanes. There is a direct relationship. I haven't run any analyses on it yet, but my hunch is that we can find a statistically significant result.
But seriously, why write this puff piece? Take a look at this quote form the article: "The bottom line: Nature's wrath on spammers makes for an eye-grabbing fable. But more likely, neither rain, nor snow, nor slashing winds will keep unsolicited e-mail from its appointed rounds." Sheesh!
How to Download YouTube Videos
I admin several email servers for an ISP - there has been no decrease in spam.
The old sayings still hold true in the digital age.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Just because you happened to receive less spam this month than you did last month, and at the same time, hurricanes happen to be slamming Florida, does not necessarily mean hurricanes are slowing spammers down. Nor does it mean that all--or even most--spammers are located in Florida.
Sometimes luck is just luck. There is such a thing as coincidence, in spite of what the religious nuts may try to tell you.
Apparently, Nigeria wasn't hit by any tornadoes since I'm still receiving several Nigerian letter scams emails daily. Sometimes I wish I'd get some sort of other spam, but no -- it's always Nigerian letter scams.
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
There's much joking about God getting back at Florida for the elections four years ago. But you know what? Now I'm thinking it's more spammers.
This sig no verb.
During Hurricane Frances, I was playing City of Heroes with a Super Group. One of our members lives down in Miami, and he was able to play through just about all of it.
He was worried that he'd get disconnected at some point, but we played for like 6 hrs straight on a Task Force that day, and I saw him online a couple of times throughout the hurricane days.
I guess he was lucky. I was surprised he was able to be online all of that time down there. We knew he was based in Miami since before the hurricanes, so it wasn't like he was trying to get attention.
Personally, I'm glad to be living on the upper-East coast. Our weather is mild, we have no earthquakes, mudslides, or raging fires to worry about (though my state is in the top 5 for largest forest coverage).
It would take A LOT for me to want to move down to Florida (though Spring Breaks are tempting).
I live in Indiana, but the company I develop for (and where they keep are mail server) is in Pensacola. There is apparently no power (or no server? who knows?) down there today, so I have received ZERO spams.
Just then the floating disembodied head of Colonel Sanders started yelling Everything You Know Is Wrong!-Weird Al
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
"You are like a hurricane, there's no spam in your eyes."
A spokesperson for Hormel Foods reports that there has been no decrease in spam either ... however, there has been an increased interest in Spam Gifts and also in the Spam Museum.
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
Thats where I keep all my stuff!!!!
I suppose it would be too much to ask for all floridians EXCEPT spammers to evacuate the state, and THEN have the worst hurricane in recorded history drop them all in the atlantic. :(
God promised you that he would never flood your ass out to sea and drown you. He never promised that he wouldn't send a category 4 hurricane after those who steal others' bandwidth. Be warned cyber sinners the end is fucking nigh!!!
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
Hurricanes are living proof that God hates spammers and wants us to be happy.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, write technology blogs.
The solution to spammers is simple, kill them. After enough of them go, the rest will soon be stirring in fear. Make spamming a capital offense. Then give all their earthly possessions to the good sysadmins of the world.
That my penis was finally big enough... They do stop sending you penis enlargement emails once it is big enough right??
Sometimes I wish I'd get some sort of other spam
Yet another problem easily solved by a single usenet post from your email account.... And this one does not even need a reply from anyone.
If insurance companies have noticed that the cost of their spam filtering in their IT department is affected by Florida, then they should divert the costs of the filtering to premium rises in Florida alone, rather than dumping it across the board. Maybe then something would be done about it, when Florida insurance holders would notice raised premiums when they deal with their insurance to cover hurricane damage. And maybe it would actually affect their voting.
I would see this as no different from any of the other excuses that insurance companies use to raise premiums, like what kind of car you drive or the crime rate of where you live. Any company that has expenditures to cover spam filtering in their IT departments should charge florida a little extra.
...dear god, think of the possibilities. A robot with the ability to play a trumpet constantly...endlessly. The annoyance will be legendary. avv
"Extrudited"? Is that where they squeeze you through a small hole and then send you back home? pw
Lots of folks think the hurricane hits in Florida, the Sunshine (and Spam!) State have taken slowed the volume of spam.
I'll admit I have a headache and my thinking is kind of fuzzy right now...but what the heck is that trying to say?
He should launch Operation Unsubscribe
... but what have you got against embedded punctuation? How the hell is anyone supposed to read your post?
Sean mxq
Whoops, I mean the Centrino chip. ra
It seems to me that most (if not all) spaming and advertising done on the Internet is simply polluting the lines of communication. Like any pollution, it reduces the stuff you want, by increasing the ratio of stuff you don't want, thereby making the whole environment unusable.
Is it possible that this view can be used in any legal way to go after Internet polluters?
roc
...overburned? - the CDs or the coffee? xg
Wisdom takes time to build.
How old was Strom Thurmond when he died?
jd
Ford and GM don't have to innovate because the prices of Japanese cars are artifically high in the U.S. due to taxes on imports designed to "level the playing field."
We don't need to have all these tariffs on products imported from countries that have the same standard of living that we do. The Japanese work hard, yes, but they are paid first world salaries so if the prices of their automobiles is low, it is because they are damn good at building cars and if they want to work a little harder than us to do it, more power to them.
On the other hand cars imported from Mexico (like the VW I drive) are produced at the expense of some Mexican making 70 cents an hour. We can't have free trade in this scenerio or we'll all be living in cardboard lean-tos just like our counterparts south of the border. ah
I'm thinking this means there will henceforth be a lucrative niche market in providing redundant mail servers to spam marketers.
M
Most of the silos on the 'net have been older Atlas silos. Very, very few of the Titan I silos ever got into public hands AND have no apparent water seepage into any parts of the building (Typically, the actual missle bays would fill up with water because of location- they'd sump pump it out, but with them being abandoned...).
If it's for real, it's something somewhat special. The last one that went up was some 2-3 years ago in Colorado. lqu
Actually, MS use UNIX servers for Hotmail
Ummm... no. You have no idea what you're talking about. If you had said "used" (as in past tense), then you'd at least be close. Still wrong, but close. They used one of the BSD's until people called them on it. Hell, for all we know, they still are and just changed the headers that the server hands out to look like a MS box like the other post in this thread shows.
Anyway, you're wrong on all accounts.
kys
the typhoons in China rather than the hurricanes in Florida.
Most of these spammers are con artist going back to the mid 80s boiler room stock market scams. If someone just did a background check for outstanding warrants, I would bet there is a good chance of finding them. That could give cause to go in an arrest them since we know where they are.
I sometimes ponder if anyone has thought about taking the Spamhaus top ten list and making it into a hit list.
It would stand to reason that the 80/20 rule could apply. Kill the top 20% of the spammers and we could eliminate 80% of the spam.
Oh, excuse we, did I just say that out loud?
.
"Your having a bad day when the voices in your head put you on hold"
Answer: Never.
Here's a clue about how to avoid lawsuits: don't break the law.
<bart xb
I thought that the usual rule was that you could not be extradited for an act that was not classified as a crime in your country of residence. This causes the IRS grief when someone moves to a country where tax evasion is not a crime. lx
They might have chosen the name Sedna because the object is in the Kuiper Belt. If I recall correctly, the naming convention for Kuiper Belt Objects is that of creation deities. Sedna is the most important deity to the Inuit and plays a vital role in one creation tale, what with her parents chopping off her fingers and those fingers turning into various aquatic animals. tr
I've sure noticed a decrease in the spam I've been getting over the past few days: About a fivefold decrease, down from about 20 per day to about four. I wondered why, but it didn't occur to me that it might be the hurricane(s). Since I only get 20 spams per day anyway, it might just be one particular spammer who was knocked out.
> I've not noticed any decrease.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why our so-called "editors" are Masters of Deception.
They get paid---that is to say, this is their job---to post stories that others send them, then add their own, grammar-impaired comments.
Simply priceless.
1. Buy missile complex for $300K or less.
2. Get $500K in donations to fix up your own private property (a scam in and of itself).
3. Sell on eBay for $3.95 million.
4. Profit.
sh
Shell scripts should be short and easy to write. I have seen plenty of them fail due to some resource or another being temporarily down. At first people are neat and then send an email to notify the admin. When this then results in a ton of emails everytime some dodo knocks out the DNS they turn it off and forget about it.
Every scripting language has their own special little niche. BASH for simple things, perl for heavy text manipulation, PHP for creating HTML output. This scripting language is pretty much like BASH but takes failure as given. The example shows clearly how it works. Instead of ending up with PERL like scripts to catch all the possible errors you add two lines and you got a wonderfull small script, wich is what shell scripts should be, that is none the less capable of recovering from an error. This script will simply retry when someone knocks out the DNS again.
This new language will not catch your errors. It will catch other peoples errors. Sure a really good programmer can do this himself. A really good programmer can also create his own libraries. Most find of us in admin jobs find it easier to use somebody elses code rather then constantly reinvent the wheel. sqi
Actually, I haven't seen much spam in my gmail account and I posted to usenet multiple times during the summer.
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
I think the best answer the 'If nobody would by this stuff...' argument was:
Spam works on the level of 1 in 10,000. The general population contains a far higher rate of mental illness, senility, and retardation.
You'll never cure spam by 'education' of any sort. There are some people who are just too crazy or too stupid to learn. pne
Date: Thu, 16 SEP 2004 15:44:20 -0800 (PST)
From: ezeani madu
To: ezeanimadu@yahoo.com
Subject: ASSISTANCE NEEDED
From: Madu Nominees Carbez.
1120 Louisiana Blvd
Louisana-America.
Dear Sir,
I do not mean to embarras you by this proposal, but to confide to you a very sensitive issue, of a very pathetic situation, and also to seek your utmost assistance for the issue I am about to explain to you.
My name is Ezeani Madu Carbez, and I am the principle consultant of the above mentioned law firm here in Louisana-America.
You see!, one of my clients, and ofcourse my most
valued client by name Jonnez Hommer just called my presence to confide a very sensitive situation to me. My client happeneds to be the chief security officer {CSO} of clearing house 'Diamond Dispatch'.
My client, Jonnez is presently being kept away from the clearing house by IVAN 15 inches of rain and surges of up to 16 feet, 150mph winds and IVAN.
A first class information has revealed that there is a shipment of diamonds washed away in a armoured car into the nearby lake before It could be deposited with the clearing house here in in Louisana-America before it was washed awaty.
According to him, the shipment contains the DIAMOND sum of US$35,000,000 [Thirty Five Million Dollars American] which the clearning house does not know about yet, as the content was declared as family jewelries and security documents.
My client needs finanical assistence in the recovery of the 35,000,000 [Thirty Five Million Dollars American], please send me details of your bank account for funds to be collected and for the 35,000,000 [Forty Five Million Dollars American] to be deposited through the assistencies to disperse the money from teh sales of the DIAMONDS.
My client has also resolved to reward you hansomely with 5% of the total amount on the sucessful conclussion of the DIAMOND recovery.
I shall also be 100% available to provide you with all the necessary assistance and guidelines you may require on the course of this assistence.
I have just entrusted the details of this shipment and the fate of this helpless diamonds into your conscience for safe keeping. I also hope to have offerred you a great opportunity to make yourself some good money, I believe I have.
Should the above opertaion appeal to you therefore,I hereby urge you to mail me your response immediately for further details and immediate commencement of this receovery.
You will also be doing us a lot of good to guide
this information with immense confidentiality, should this receovery not appeal to you.
Hoping to hear from you soon on this issue.
Regards,
Ezeani Madu Cardez. {ESQ}
The one quote from the Business Week regarding the wrath of God smiting Florida came from a post on NANAE, where the poster was blasted with one negative comment after another.
To take the position that God should somehow clear Florida by sending hurricanes is absurd. Literally millions of people with no connections to spam were affected.
Four people died in Blountstown, an 8 year old girl in Milton, and several others in Panama City Beach, and so far, no connection between the deceased and spamming.
If Mr. Helm wanted to write a piece regarding spam and Florida, he should of posted all the comments flaming the moron that had written the original post.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
i wouldnt exactly say transmeta chips are blazing.. my friend had a 600mhz tm5600 based laptop that had been marketed as 'gigapro' without any sort of actual note of the clock speed and the performance was not really near that of a comparable 600mhz cpu from amd or intel.. he endedup selling it for the price he bought it for and got an A64 emachines with a radeon m9600.. bit better for games;) pk
The solution to the spam problem is simple yet elegant - gambling.
:)
jkw
Every time you send an email you place a small wager on the line that the recipient wants to read your message. Something like 1 cent. If the recipient doesn't mind your message then they don't redeem your offer and it doesn't cost you a thing. However, if you're sending spam then the recipient cashes it in (or perhaps it is used to cover overhead costs of this system).
If you send a legitimate email and somebody decides to be a jerk and cash it in then you're only out 1 penny. However, if you just sent 2 million of those unwanted emails you're screwed.
This is better than the "small price" schemes because it doesn't cost anything. Well, unless you're A) a spammer or B) sending email to dickheads.
This wouldn't replace SMTP, it would just be a layer on top. If you sent an email and you participated in this system then a third party would sign your messages and you'd be get a special verifiable header that the recipient could then treat as "likely ham".
Anybody have a better idea? I didn't think so.
If only more people actually did this! If even 10% of the people who complained about M$ actually did something about it, the software world would be a very different place. It's amazing the number of people who feel that they are a special case, that they have a particular special reason for not switching to something else. (Yes, in some cases those reasons are genuine, but I suspect laziness plays a large part in many.)
I try to act on principle. I've only ever owned two pieces of M$ software, for example: one was the Psion Series 3 version of AutoRoute (which doesn't really count as it was written by a separate company that got bought out shortly before release; M$ dropped it soon after), and the Mac OS X version of IE (pre-installed; I keep it as a last-resort browser and use it every few months). It's not hard, really -- it's a pain when people keep sending me Word documents, but there are various workarounds even if people won't take the hint -- and I don't feel I'm making any great sacrifices. I just don't put following the crowd as my top priority.
So, to all you people who use M$ software and complain about it: don't complain, STOP USING IT!
zgj
Every country sets its own agenda. The US wants to be the untouchable goliath of military power. If the US wanted to be the world leader in non-military research and development, they could be.
Very, very true. But, it just wouldn't be The American Way if we didn't have the ability to police the world. However, if you pay close attention to the history of how the US became involved in various wars,[read: WWI, WWII] you'll see we re-acted to outside influences. Had those not come along, the US may never have invested so heavily in a war machine. (Just my $0.02.) ob
The problem is that, for the most part, really epic stories are simply not endemic to the musical theatre art form. How many have there been? And, of those, how many have truly been successful? Even theatre epics, like Show Boat or Les Miserables are still pretty small in scope when compared to something The Lord of the Rings because they focus pretty pointedly on people, whereas LOTR is about big events, big stakes, and even larger plot points.
Shrinking the story down to where it would it would on the musical stage, and still leave room for the things every play needs (exposition, characterization, and, probably most importantly, songs) would be almost impossible under the best circumstances, and most of the people involved simply aren't of the proven calibre necessary to pull all this off. Sure, A.R. Rahman had some kind of a success with Bombay Dreams, but what in Matthew Warchus's resume suggests he's even remotely qualified to handle something on this scale? He's talented, yes, but not with material of this size. His solution to staging one of Broadway's most traditionally opulent musicals--Follies--on Broadway in 2001 was to strip away everything that made it so oversized and, in its original production, so thrilling. If you do that with The Lord of the Rings, what's left?
So, while I wish them the best of luck, they're really facing a difficult struggle, and I'm not sure they will be able to pull it off. Under most circumstances, I would suggest that they rework the idea as an opera, or perhaps a series of operas, but of course, Richard Wagner already did that with Der Ring des Nibeluengen, and the less comparison The Lord of the Rings has with that, the better, I think. It will be unavoidable in any case, but critics (and audiences) will have their knives sharpened going into this, and it will have to be even that much better to win them over. I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy the challenges facing the creators of this musical. zhd
It might seem petty, but the reality is that there is a huge number of people that use hotmail on a regular basis.. this kind of downage affects a lot of people.
What is interesting is how:
- Microsoft responds, their press releases etc.
- Possible reasons for failure
- What others can learn from these kind of failures, to prevent them happening.
- That such a large system that must deal with a massive number of requests has completely gone down instead of the service degrading due to servers failing, etc..
Lighten up a bit, i'm honestly suprised it would go down for a significant amount of time.
pd
Hei, Dillon
It seems that you are working in some
inovative features.
I hope that in the way, you fill some patents
about your work (even if you don't agree with
software patents), because we are going to
need it in the upcoming patent fight against
Microsoft. of
MPlayer plays back more video types than Windows Media Player, and also is more fault-tolerant, uses less resources, is easier to use, and is more stable.... and is more illegal, as it uses pirated software that they don't have permission to redistribute to do so. tsd
Here in Florida the people are a bit paralyzed in fear right now... Every two or three weeks, there is a new storm headed our way. One of the biggest changes to weather reporting recently is "doppler indicated tornado cell activity", as the meteorologists call it. Basically they find pockets of cyclonic air on their doppler radar, and they issue a full blown tornado warning for it, whether it really is a tornado or not. It gets a little grating on the nerves to have 5-10 tornado warnings per day when a hurricane is nearby. But, when it's not raining, hot, humid or generally miserable, Florida can be nice. :^)
As for the spammers, I thought they were all in China (we outsourced spam too, right?).
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
I must agree. I barely saw any SPAM last week. However, I think that may have to do with my losing power for 128 straight hours.
And I'm not sure why anyone would post that this isn't fair, if you can't see MS is once leveraging it's desktop monopoly to control yet another market, you are blind or at least obtuse. Do we really want another Netscape on our hands, it's taken 5 years for the likes of Mozilla, FireFox and Safari to revive browser innovation while IE 6 has remained a stagnant, insecure and non-compliant piece of junk. Killing competition in browsers hurt the web, although it will be years before the useless business analyst get around to acknowledging this. We don't want the same thing to happen in media players/codecs, instant messaging or a raft of other technologies. Time to stop MS now. And vote with your damn wallets, if you don't like what MS does then switch to Mac OS X or GNAA/Linux and put your money where your mouth is! ch
I used to work for Sun Electric (now Snap-On), designing engine and emission diagnostic analyzers.
The "secret" diagnostic codes are published. The Chilton's repair guides for cars list the error codes for each car and manufacturer. Also, the factory service manuals for those cars have the codes and their meanings listed.
I love Cadillacs, though, because you can press "OFF" and "WARMER" on the Climate Control panel and it will list the codes on the display there! Then you can do the repairs at home yourself!
You can also go buy a $500.00 Snap-on ALDL analyzer (Assembly Line Diagnostic Link) and it will list the codes too. The newer vehicles call this OBD-2 (Onboard Diagnostics, V2).
Finally, there is some software out there (Payware, IIRC) that will list the codes on a PC or laptop, but you need to build an RS-232 to ALDL level converter for it (or buy the software with the appropriate dongle).
zso
Please stop stalking me, bro.
I have been interested in Astronomy since I was about six years old. Just over forty years. I have heard what you suggest before -- but only in the last few years. And I don't understand it any more this time than I did on the earlier occasions.
Frankly, I strongly suspect it is a false factoid, like that the internet was built to survive a Nuclear War. I strongly suspect it is a bullshit meme that keep being repeated because it sounds cool, but is completely false.
Pray explain what you mean when you say the other 138 moons would float off ?
I am trying to do the "thought experiment" of silently, quietly erasing the principals of those moons, mass and all. I am finding this difficult to do. I don't believe there is any way this could occur, in our Universe.
So, instead I imagined doing something to accelerate a moon, any moon, to the escape velocity of its principal. What happens then? Well, the object accelerated to just beyond a planet's escape velocity will assume an orbit very similar to that of the Planet it just escaped from. Sometime in the last couple of years ago there was a flap about a small object that seemed to have been temporarily captured in the Earth-Moon system. But it turned out to be NASA space debris. It appeared to be the discarded upper stage of an Apollo moon shot. ze
I've got a theory, that it's a Nazgul, A dancing Nazgul. No, something isn't right there.
(Frodo)
I've got a theory, that Bilbo is dreamin' And we're all stuck inside his wacky Broadway nightmare.
(Aragorn)
I've got a theory we should work this out.
(The Fellowship except Gandalf)
It's getting eerie, what's this cheery singing all about?
(Gimli)
It could be Elves, some evil Elves. Which is ridiculous 'cause Elves they were persecuted wicked good and loved Middle Earth and fairie power and I'll be over here.
(Merry)
I've got a theory, it could be lunchtime...
[crickets chirping] cpy
http://more.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyN ews/asteroid0107.html
m
. ht ml
t ml
ifz
http://personals.galaxyinternet.net/tunga/I7.ht
http://home.att.net/~thehessians/asteroidstrike
http://www.sandia.gov/media/comethit.htm
http://www1.tpgi.com.au/users/tps-seti/crater.h
The 1989 Loma Prieta quake had a magnitude of 6.9 and affected the entire San Francisco area. The InterNet and computers did not go down, except in the few places that lost power.
Resources DO become unavailable in most systems. It simply doesn't pay to ensure everything is duplicated, and set up infrastructures that makes it transparent to the end user - there are almost always cheaper ways of meeting your business goals by looking at what level of fault tolerance you actually need.
For most people hours, sometimes even days, of outages can be tolerable for many of their systems, and minutes mostly not noticeable if the tools can handle it. The cost difference in providing a system where unavailabilities are treated as a normal, acceptable condition within some parameters, and one where failures are made transparent to the user can be astronomical.
To this date, I have NEVER seen a computer system that would come close to the transparency you are suggesting, simply beause for most "normal" uses it doesn't make economic sense. euh
I know it is one of their big selling points but I have yet to have used a Transmeta device that actually had a longer run time than my huge Latitude C series with second battery. Why? Because for some reason manufacturers seem to have a fetish for the 2.5 - 3 hour benchmark. Once they reach it, they concentrate on size instead. Surely I can't be the only one who would be happy with a smallish (12-13") notebook with long battery life. I certainly find that more interesting than devices that are so tiny as to be unusable yet have comparable run time to normal laptops. sgb
is there anything like cakewalk available for linux? rf
Not being a beer drinker I am not surprised, the bubbles are probably trying to drown themselves rather than taste that foul brew... vrt
they would start development on their second OS right now. I don't live in Europe, but from what I read and hear on IRC, I get the feeling that M$ is not going to win any appeals, and eventually will be forced to sell their cut down OS. It would save them time and money. Why drag it out in court, when you're probably going to lose anyway? hx
It comes standard with a wlan chip, AND a wired nic!
I'm very impressed by this little bugger!
If its got a DVD drive, I'm sold. Its still a little pricey for my taste buds, but I'm definately impressed! kbr
Finally a solution to SPAM:
More hurricanes!
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Cheaper version of Windows? I think it will be funny if MS sells the new version for the same price and just tells them the player was a freebie. ci
unfortunately, this is nothing new.
CBS gfd
The amount of garbage I've seen in email, snail mail, and cable TV has started to turn a mental red flag on: Beware of anything that comes from a Florida address.
It's not just spam. I've seen bogus sweepstakes from Clearwater, but most importantly, a vast majority of those "minimum investment required" "business opportunities" (the usual fodder of late-night cable TV ads) all come from south Florida...note all the addresses of the defendants in this comprehensive list.
The state, to me, seems to produce a disproportionate amount of schemes, spam, and crap. If I were a legitimate businessperson in southern Florida, I'd be really pissed because of all the negative associations.
Which of course begs the question--what is it about Florida that attracts such low life businesses? Mob connections, ineffective leadership, bad judicial processes?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
EOM
I did. Endlessly is good. The network overhead is negligible.
Check once every 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,whatever,mins *all the time anyway* whether it fails or succeeds and you *absolutely don't* want to have to explicitly tell 1000 machines to start again.
You simply generalise the update process, get rid of the special cases. In the case of patches, you know you're going to have to distribute them out to clients at some point anyway so have all the clients check once a day, every day. If the distribution server is down for a couple of days it's pretty much irrelevant.
My error detection code is trivial the network traffic is negligible unless the job's actually being done and I still haven't been given a good case for ftsh. I have a good case for a better randomising algorithm within a shell and a decent distributed cron (which is simple BTW), but not for a specifically fault tolerant shell.
You've got to stop thinking of these things as individual systems. The network is the machine.
tx
Perhaps the bendy straw people should sue. uv
God got so ticked at getting so much spam that he decided to smite Austin, MN with a great flood. Then Noah tapped him on the should and said that SPAM != spam.
Seriously though - the had like a foot of rain up there on Tuesday night. Nothing like a hurricane, but it still causes problems.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I'm a gear head. I know lots of geeks who are gear heads. I, however, have never encountered a problem due to inability to access 'calibration codes'.
I know that you can hook your laptop up to your OBDI/II based vehicle. What can ya do?
-monitor telemetry in real time
-read error codes stored in computer [terse format]
-reprogram the computer[really the data on which decisions are made, not the heuristics themselves]*
*You can't change stuff on earlier computers! Must be that we don't have the 'calibration code' to make a PROM into an EEPROM?!
Seriously though! What you need to 'know' to fix a car is:
Interface specification
Table of error/condition codes and triggering parameters.
Wiring diagrams, mechanical diagrams, parts lists, etc.
how modern cars work
From what I understand, the Interfaces are standardized [think ISO,IEEE, not RFC]. The error codes, and at least short descriptions, are available. The diagrams, etc. are available via repair manuals/KB Systems. I know that at least some manufacturers publish/authorize official such products. As for knowledge, can't legislate that:)
What information is being withheld that makes non-dealer repair impossible?
And what are 'calibration codes'? gprslated to be released until the last quarter this year. 2005 "sounds bad", but it's only a few months. tow
Hei, Dillon
It seems that you are working in some
inovative features.
I hope that in the way, you fill some patents
about your work (even if you don't agree with
software patents), because we are going to
need it in the upcoming patent fight against
Microsoft. er
Not good for MS. A lot of people have been waiting on Yukon. Yukon is finally going to deliver online restoration, database mirroring with automatic failover, and support for mirrored backup sets.
Disappointing. SQL Server had really come a long way, too. Maybe 2005 won't be too late. ld
So for now just speculate and pretend MS will have to abide by the sanctions. By the time the ruling does take place users will be familiar enough (if they are not already) with WMP that it would be hard for anything to take its place. If a user has purchased any addins for WMP it is unlikely for them to prefer another player. Personally I think this is more of a burden for the users because they will have to find the newest WMP to download then its 4-5 patches.
osI often think that if you could get one car executive to take a 'chance'...and try the old idea behind the original GTO's and later other muscle cars...throw a monster engine into a decent body of a car...keep the interior minimalist...with real perfomance, and keep the price reasonable. I gotta think these things would sell like hotcakes...
Oh well...as long as we're dreaming here...I'd also like a pony... is
"According to BusinessWeek Online's article, Lots of folks think the hurricane hits in Florida, the Sunshine (and Spam!) State have taken slowed the volume of spam."
... explain it!
Was the lower volume in spam reported by people living in Florida? That would
I think the EU is going in the wrong direction, saying MS has to unbundle Media Player is the stupidest thing I have heard of. If thats the case all OS's should unbundle Media Players, Mac's, GNAA/Linux, whatever. Why play favorites, aren't they trying to make things equal. Maybe they should unbundle notepad and calculator as well, their are 3rd party applications out there. Hell I don't even use the newest media player, I use media player classic. But I have to say its nice to have common apps installed as soon as the OS is installed, so you don't have to go searching and downloading all this stuff. What if you don't have access to the internet what are you going to do then? Their is a reason MS bundles these, to make it easy for users. by removing any applications they just make it really really hard for consumers. Yes they should have an option to uninstall anything you don't want. *sarcasim* --> But I say why stop with MS and Media Player, I say NO OS's should bundle any Apps, No quicktime on Mac's, no Notepad in Windows, no OS's can't have any application pre-installed if their is a 3rd party version out there. *end sarcasim* What the hell is wrong with people, this won't hurt MS at all, only hurts us and fellow consumers. bzk
Florida IS spam, so of course it decreased.
You should at least boot if from a Compact Flash card
silent, no heat, droppable (kinda)
I've got no references for GNAA/Linux but FreeBSD has a sectionin the Handbook and bunch of scripts for the binaries you want. Well that's for non-X, my next stage of my project is trying to get my EPIA working in SVGA mode or, if I get a big enough CF card (I think a 256Mb should work and they are about $50 on ebay). I'm trying for an in car system. I already got it playing mp3s from the CD Rom 35 seconds from power.
of
I trust these stats better.
h
http://www.spamcop.net/spamgraph.shtml?spammont
What's going on here? Is this some kind of nexus for comments from alternate universes? I have no idea what the hell half the people here are talking about. It certainly ain't hurricanes!
If you look closely on EBay, 19 people have voted him up. 19 people are satisfied with his previous auction, which leads to this conclution: The person selling it may not be faking it, but how the hell did he get it in the first place? rz
I don't know what it's like in the US, but here in the UK, the cost of new PCs is making PC "repairs" uneconomic if the repairer wants to charge rates similar to those of plumbers and the like (to put some numbers on that, a typical rate for a plumber is 60GBP per hour, and a new PC costs from 300GBP, with monitor and preloaded copy of whatever the latest flavour of Windows is; how much work do you reckon can do in under 5 hours?)
Of course, this does discount the stupid and the penny-wise-pound-foolish, whom are probably the best cash cows out there for any business.
-- vj
considering California is the sunshine state.
if(( !Mod == Troll ) || ( !Mod == OffTopic ))
{
printf( NULL, 'Go To HELL!');
}
else
Karma++
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Seriously though, this sounds fine for integrating electronics into fabrics, but the "artificial nerve" idea conjures images on Christopher Reeve leaping up and tap dancing. This invention doesn't sound like it has any therapeutic uses that a normal wire doesn't. Perhaps users of vagus nerve stimulators or other devices requiring in vivo wiring could be a little more physically vigorous without worrying about things pulling or breaking... but I have my doubts about even that. sp
You can't directly compare this to the DMCA because when you're talking about music, movies, and software, you're talking about 1's and 0's that can be copied over and over. They're talking about codes to ensure fairness in repairing automobiles so the dealers don't steal all the business. The reason congress is stepping in is because no one is going to put their 2004 Explorer on kazaa and share it. They're not talking about opening up all the software. This isn't about open source at all, it's about knowing what is wrong with the care based on the error code the computer spits out. qh
Can it make tea too? zvt
But will it keep all those GNAA posts out of slashdot? ;)
tiv
Yes, there were school closures "up here" in Minnesota as well.
Meh, too lazy to log in so I'll post as an AC.
Only once have I ever seen my daily volume of spam drop nearly to zero. On September 11th, 2001, I got spam in the morning when I got up for my 8 AM class, and during the rest of the day...nothing. Not a single piece. I was getting at least 20 pieces of spam a day at that point (I'm probably triple that now), and I'm quite certain that my experience wasn't the norm, but it further reinforced the feelings of unease I had all day.
Even the spammers stopped because they were probably busy watching CNN, too.
as a california resident, let me just say you are crazy with all those blizzards!
theres ICE on the ROAD in the middle of the day! it's unnatural!
FROZEN WATER FALLING FROM THE SKY! THE END OF THE WORLD IS HERE!
I've been pretty impressed with gmail thus far. Honestly, I haven't done much to research their spam filtering, but it seems effective. I specifically used one of my invitations to create a spam box which I went about submitting to various web sites & posting to usenet about a month / half ago - mainly out of curiosity to see how long it would take to fill with spam. I've yet to get the first bit of spam. In fact, I've had absolutely no spam in any of my gmail accounts.
Check my journal for gmail invites!
Date, RBL rejects:
Sep 6 19190
Sep 7 19202
Sep 8 20092
Sep 9 23417
Sep 10 23229
Sep 11 17529
Sep 12 19330
Sep 13 27464
Sep 14 24520
Sep 15 20670
Hey spam decreased on Sept 11 - that's surely evidence that the spammers were taking a moment of pause to honor our nation's "sacrifice".
Maybe the reduction in spam is causing hurricanes...
Less and less spam is getting through my filters. I'm not getting the really clever messages that slip through as much.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What slow down on spam? In fact in the ever since Saturday I had the nearly the double the amount of spam at our email server. Amount from each catagory (porn, drugs, software, etc.) seems to be in same percentage.
Quoting a certain Cameron flick, a spammer ...
"It can't be reasoned with, it can't be bargained with... it doesn't feel pity or remorse or fear... and it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I wrote about this over on my spam blog today.
While this is a reasonable idea on the surface, the reality is that spammers aren't necessarily spamming from their own computers. So if they aren't spamming from them, it doesn't matter if their power is out due to a hurricane.
Florida houses the people that are responsible for the most spam, but that is a legal thing (especially Boca Raton which has the most favorable bankruptcy laws for spammers - they get to keep physical assets such as their Porsches) - it doesn't necessarily mean that they send the spam themselves.
The spam is cheaper to send from elsewhere (cheaper largely in the legal sense of avoiding "local" prosecution) such as servers overseas (Brazil, Korea, and Russia - used to be China until they recently cracked down on it), or from zombied machines.
I have noticed no drop in spam, and I can't logically think why there would be one (although on the news they said there were millions without power - so perhaps that means there are zombied PCs taken offline that aren't spamming).
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
... then again, I don't get spam, so it's impossible to decrease the amount of what I DO get.
Back then, if you used the Internet, it was all a text-based interface. You'd log in to other machines by telnet. File transfers were by FTP. IRC was established in 1988 but not well known until the 1990's. (I ported IRC to HP/UX, sent the patches to the author, and didn't touch it again for over a decade because it looked addictive.) HTTP (the protocol of the web) wasn't invented until 1990.
I was a Computer Science student at California State University, Chico at the time. I think it was a great time to be studying Computer Science and networking.
By 1989, the Internet was already an international network spanning the US and all its Cold War allies (western Europe, Japan, Australia, etc.), with hundreds of thousands of users. The vast majority of users at the time were at large corporations, educational institutions and government/military sites. Direct access from residences was not yet common, though there were already some at the time. A lot of e-mail at the time was still transported in batch mode via UUCP over 1200-2400 baud phone modems, using the Internet only as a backbone along a multi-hop e-mail forwarding path.
The Internet has always had some decentralization by design - it was designed by the US military to be decentralized so that there was no center of the network for an enemy to attack. Even after it went into civilian use, that was enough for it to "stay up" through the 1989 quake even though some sites went down.
In 1989, San Francisco wasn't the center of the Internet or the quake - San Jose/Silicon Valley was. The World Series at Candlestick Park, the Bay Bridge collapse and the I-880 Cypress Freeway collapse that most of you saw on TV were all 80-100 miles from the epicenter, which was in the mountains spanning a 35-mile segment of the San Andreas fault between San Jose, Santa Cruz and Watsonville.
However, many phone switches in the region crashed when SF's phone switches went off-line. Most of the phone outages were just due to too many people picking up their phones to make phone calls at the same time after the quake, which happens after every quake.
Even so, many direct-connected Internet sites took as long as a few days to get back online. So as far as disasters go, it was comparable to Florida's hurricanes.
Anyway, so that's a bit of the history. It was a well-documented quake so there's a lot of history to look up if you want to. Some of our younger readers were too young to be aware of it at the time, or not even born yet. The 15th anniversary of the quake will be next month on October 17. Those of us who were in or near the area still remember where we were at 5:04PM, or shortly thereafter when we first heard about it. I was just far enough away in Chico that I didn't feel it. (My parents lived in San Jose at the time and I had been here for both of the 5.1/5.8 pre-shocks, so I was very interested.) But others in Chico either felt it (in tall buildings), saw chandeliers sway or saw swimming pools start sloshing. Many in the US learned about it quickly because of the World Series (baseball) - it was San Francisco vs Oakland and the game was just about to begin. Live news coverage had just begun and all the satellite uplinks were already reserved and live when the quake hit so the media couldn't have been more prepared to cover a major quake. So you'll find a lot of info about it out there.
"Hurricane (insert name) pounds Florida"
"New Microsoft patch to fix security flaw"
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
I think you mean -
"...even AFTER you are dead."
Read all about it at billjonessucks.com
Who f*cking cares?
Have you ever seen the size of their cockroaches?
From the above link:
last I heard teh river had creasted and that the spam museum was safe.
I am sorry but not trying to post anything that maybe regarded as flame bait but I could care the F*** less if i got less spam due to the hurricane. I am sorry I would rather deal with 50 more of those tid bits of joy a day being filtered out and deleted by my filters rather than see the destruction that has been caused the past couple months.
To rejoice or even bring this up as something great due to the fact you got one less viagra email calling your wang small is sick and repulsive...
I really do hope that everything is ok up in Austin. I was in Ankeny during the "floods of 93" and know how much that kind of thing sucks.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
I'm a network admin for a small ISP in NW Ohio, and as a general rule, we outright block between 45k, and 52k letters a day, just from real time blacklists. The past week has shown us blocking over 60k a day, which almost never happens, but its been consistently high for a week now. So, I have to disagree, spam levels have not dropped off because of Ivan, or any of his less bolshevik friends.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.