Your mail may go through a third-party server (which every single mail does that does not get sent to a local recipient - when I send out an e-mail it first goes to my ISP's server for starters), they are not responsible for storage/retention of your mails. I assume in your case Symantec basically acts as a relay for your network, storing mails only long enough to check for viruses/spam/other filtering and delivering it to your own mail server (from your mail I understand that you are still running your own local mail server).
If you think that this is comparable with using Gmail, you don't know what you are talking about.
Gmail stores your mails for you: no need to run your own mail server and store/retain your own mails. Granted you can (using POP/IMAP or so), the whole idea behind using Gmail is that you don't have to. If Gmail were to suddenly crash and burn, most of the people using it would lose all their mails. This includes many (mostly small) companies that do not wish to run their own servers - I do but that's mainly because it's my hobby.
Secondly, Gmail stores your e-mails and can be subpoenaed by the US government (to me a foreign government) to reveal those mails, and as I understand under laws like the patriot act do not even have to inform you that your mails have been disclosed. There you have a major privacy issue. The government may be able to wiretap Symantec or your ISP to listen in to your mails, they can never get your old mails from Symantec simply because they are not stored there but only filtered.
And thirdly, like all webmail providers (think Sarah Palin) there is the risk of other people hacking into your account. Either by brute force, bugs in the system allowing one logged in user to see mails of other users (something like that has been reported on this site before) or by guessing the correct answers to your "security" questions to get to your password. Having to log in to your own server is harder.
For me Gmail is a no-go for anything sensitive - actually even for personal mail - simply because it's storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy, especially privacy of non-nationals. Not that I think the government under which I live is that great, at least when it comes to privacy they still do have the upper hand.
IE is going down steadily, FF is virtually stable in market share, looking at the overall trend.
That means that the FF vs IE ratio is going up. And it seems that people are switching still from IE to FF. The overall trend of FF+IE going down could be either because of competition on the desktop, or by the increase of devices that do not support FF or IE (such as the iPhone and iPad).
I think its about time we reccomended the right tool for the right job, as opposed to just avoiding it outright.
I totally agree with that. IE6 for those legacy internal corporate applications that don't work with anything else. The latest Firefox for all other web-related work.
That means it still can do stuff that only a few years ago we called "high end". It is just not top-of-the-line. And what many geeks and nerds tend to forget is that >90% of any market is in the lower end.
My previous server was 6, 7 years old when it became my server. It did the job nicely until the hardware broke down. The current server is not serving up files any faster (the 100 Mbit LAN is the limiting factor), it is not serving the web pages or sending/receiving e-mail faster (again the network is the limiting factor), backups took a little longer but that no-one is waiting for so that doesn't matter.
My old server probably used less power overall, so it was better for my power bill even tough it's performance per watt certainly was worse.
I honestly hope that this kind of low-power tech becomes more mainstream, and is not just used in the handhelds and so. If only to give an alternative in the desktop/laptop market to the Intel/AMD processors. But well until Windows runs on ARM that will not happen.
I bet those millions of servers handling an office of five people can happily do with half the horsepower and 10% of the power use.
And I'm not just thinking of my own business.... with a 1.8 MHz or so Intel based computer idling most of the time handling the e-mail and files of my staff and me.
While probably no-one cares whether or not I visit/., that doesn't mean I like to tell just everybody that I am a regular reader/poster. If they ask me I will tell, but not need to tell them beforehand. And that's what we're talking about here.
That depends on whether they're really "transcoding". Most Flash these days is H264 anyway, so it might just be doing something to bypass Flash and give the device access to the video stream.
Sounds very reasonable, and also immediately explains why it "doesn't support all video" as the summary indicates.
I can not be bothered to go that far. Too much work. An incoming smtp takes maybe a couple hundred bytes over my 2 Mbit line, takes a couple thousand cycles of my 2 GHz or so processor, and adds a line in my log file. The effort I would have to put in to blacklist some IP (I'm surprised you get that many spamn from so few IPs in the first place) is simply not worth it.
Besides as I'm doing international business I don't want to black list a complete country.
It apparently was a proof of concept only; limited (for whatever reason) to a single ISP. No reason why he shouldn't be able to scale up the operation to millions of infected computers.
Try greylisting. Anyone using a proper mailer will come through, >90% of spam (my experience) is stopped that way. And actually only mails from new, as yet unknown senders get delayed; friends or business associates you get mail from regularly get through without delay. And what comes through is mostly Nigerian scams, interestingly. Apparently they use proper mailers.
To me this has proven the best anti-spam measure so far. And by the time the spammers catch up it also means their cost of sending has gone up a lot as it is not "fire and forget" any more but real resources need to be allocated. So far they don't.
And of course the actual thinking that has gone into it from both the builder(s) and the programmer(s) to make it actually be able to work. That also doesn't come from Lego.
The "only" magic that comes out of the Lego factory is of course in the form of accurate actuators, step motors, position sensors, and whatnot built into that hardware.
Of course any company wishing to do business in mainland has to conform to mainland laws. That is not just for HK companies. It accounts for all companies, and it is why Google redirected its censored google.com.cn search engine to uncensored google.com.hk.
And of course it works always like that. If a company wants to do business in Germany they have to follow German law. If they want to do business in the US, they have to follow US law.
And HK is independent enough for companies operating in HK to fall only under HK law and not under mainland law. It is just that TOM Online wants to do business in mainland, and then their mainland business falls under mainland laws. And that has nothing to do with the fact that the parent happens to be in HK. Also there is no pressure from mainland on companies not operating in mainland to reform and conform to their laws - of course they sometimes do try to pressure the HK government to change the laws, but that's another matter.
Like another poster also pointed out: Hong Kong is not China. It is politically part of China, but for all practical reasons it acts as a different country (and you as not being involved in the world political stage should simply consider it as such, much closer to the everyday reality):
Separate currency, the Hong Kong dollar, linked at 7.8 to the US dollar and fully convertible (can't say that of the yuan).
Borders with China. I am Hong Kong resident, and still need to buy a visa to enter China.
Hong Kong is a free port for import and export of goods and services. China is pretty thoroughly locked down, import duties of goods to China are huge. Really.
Hong Kong has an open, accountable judiciary, with a strong respect for the rule of law. The exact opposite of the other side of the border.
Hong Kong has press freedom, and not just official.
Hong Kong people have the right to demonstrate, and do so. In 2003, half a million people took to the streets - or about 7% of the total population. It sent shock waves throughout the country, all the way to Beijing. Something like that would never be allowed in China.
And last but not least Hong Kong has the permission from Beijing's overlords to move towards full democracy.
And when we're at it, let's just add it's called Netvigator.
I'm one of their customers - it's the only option available in my location (the fun of living in a village, maybe some 500m away from the nearest high-rise - and with that I mean some 40-odd floors tall stuff). Connection is pretty OK though. I have 6 Mbit nominal down (640k up or so, that sucks) for under USD 30 per month, and quite often getting >800 kB/s download speeds.
This yp thing I ran into recently as well. Quite irritating, though it did give me the correct url instead of the mistyped one.
But I can not believe it is just for the iPad. OK it may sell well but overall it must be more of the iPad having a problem not being able to play video from Facebook than the other way around.
There will be more reasons behind it. The iPhone would be more reasonable already (many more sold). Or maybe Facebook themselves want to get rid of Flash but don't want to say it directly?
All and all it's a great excuse. The iPad is high in the minds of many people, so it's easy to ride the wave and to "blame the iPad" in order to dump Flash.
People that demand IE6/7 support nowadays ire likely to lag a bit when it comes to patching. Especially as they themselves run those obsolete browsers (which is obviously the case here), indicating they don't seem to care much about security.
A commercial shipping container is allowed to hold about 28 ton of cargo. The container itself weighs about 4 ton. That's 32 ton. No problem for a normal container trailer. I can imagine that four cruise missiles can stay within that weight.
Furthermore railroads may be more vulnerable than roads, other than the bridges they still need very well aimed bombs to really destroy. Roads are easily repaired, a couple hours of work and you can pass again. Not at 120 km/hr maybe but that's not needed.
Slashdot Mirror
Your mail may go through a third-party server (which every single mail does that does not get sent to a local recipient - when I send out an e-mail it first goes to my ISP's server for starters), they are not responsible for storage/retention of your mails. I assume in your case Symantec basically acts as a relay for your network, storing mails only long enough to check for viruses/spam/other filtering and delivering it to your own mail server (from your mail I understand that you are still running your own local mail server).
If you think that this is comparable with using Gmail, you don't know what you are talking about.
Gmail stores your mails for you: no need to run your own mail server and store/retain your own mails. Granted you can (using POP/IMAP or so), the whole idea behind using Gmail is that you don't have to. If Gmail were to suddenly crash and burn, most of the people using it would lose all their mails. This includes many (mostly small) companies that do not wish to run their own servers - I do but that's mainly because it's my hobby.
Secondly, Gmail stores your e-mails and can be subpoenaed by the US government (to me a foreign government) to reveal those mails, and as I understand under laws like the patriot act do not even have to inform you that your mails have been disclosed. There you have a major privacy issue. The government may be able to wiretap Symantec or your ISP to listen in to your mails, they can never get your old mails from Symantec simply because they are not stored there but only filtered.
And thirdly, like all webmail providers (think Sarah Palin) there is the risk of other people hacking into your account. Either by brute force, bugs in the system allowing one logged in user to see mails of other users (something like that has been reported on this site before) or by guessing the correct answers to your "security" questions to get to your password. Having to log in to your own server is harder.
For me Gmail is a no-go for anything sensitive - actually even for personal mail - simply because it's storing your mails on servers in a country which government has a total lack of respect for privacy, especially privacy of non-nationals. Not that I think the government under which I live is that great, at least when it comes to privacy they still do have the upper hand.
IE is going down steadily, FF is virtually stable in market share, looking at the overall trend.
That means that the FF vs IE ratio is going up. And it seems that people are switching still from IE to FF. The overall trend of FF+IE going down could be either because of competition on the desktop, or by the increase of devices that do not support FF or IE (such as the iPhone and iPad).
I think its about time we reccomended the right tool for the right job, as opposed to just avoiding it outright.
I totally agree with that. IE6 for those legacy internal corporate applications that don't work with anything else. The latest Firefox for all other web-related work.
That means it still can do stuff that only a few years ago we called "high end". It is just not top-of-the-line. And what many geeks and nerds tend to forget is that >90% of any market is in the lower end.
Far from all servers are used in data centres.
Far from all servers have a typical >50% load on their processor.
There certainly is a huge market out there for small, lower-end servers for which your average Intel based box is simply huge overkill.
Why Windows? I thought we were talking about servers here.
Exactly.
My previous server was 6, 7 years old when it became my server. It did the job nicely until the hardware broke down. The current server is not serving up files any faster (the 100 Mbit LAN is the limiting factor), it is not serving the web pages or sending/receiving e-mail faster (again the network is the limiting factor), backups took a little longer but that no-one is waiting for so that doesn't matter.
My old server probably used less power overall, so it was better for my power bill even tough it's performance per watt certainly was worse.
I honestly hope that this kind of low-power tech becomes more mainstream, and is not just used in the handhelds and so. If only to give an alternative in the desktop/laptop market to the Intel/AMD processors. But well until Windows runs on ARM that will not happen.
And how about small businesses?
I bet those millions of servers handling an office of five people can happily do with half the horsepower and 10% of the power use.
And I'm not just thinking of my own business.... with a 1.8 MHz or so Intel based computer idling most of the time handling the e-mail and files of my staff and me.
While probably no-one cares whether or not I visit /., that doesn't mean I like to tell just everybody that I am a regular reader/poster. If they ask me I will tell, but not need to tell them beforehand. And that's what we're talking about here.
That depends on whether they're really "transcoding". Most Flash these days is H264 anyway, so it might just be doing something to bypass Flash and give the device access to the video stream.
Sounds very reasonable, and also immediately explains why it "doesn't support all video" as the summary indicates.
I can not be bothered to go that far. Too much work. An incoming smtp takes maybe a couple hundred bytes over my 2 Mbit line, takes a couple thousand cycles of my 2 GHz or so processor, and adds a line in my log file. The effort I would have to put in to blacklist some IP (I'm surprised you get that many spamn from so few IPs in the first place) is simply not worth it.
Besides as I'm doing international business I don't want to black list a complete country.
Supernova?
And to make it even easier, I recall articles on /. that there are ready-to-use "diy" trojan kits on the market to make it even easier.
It apparently was a proof of concept only; limited (for whatever reason) to a single ISP. No reason why he shouldn't be able to scale up the operation to millions of infected computers.
Try greylisting. Anyone using a proper mailer will come through, >90% of spam (my experience) is stopped that way. And actually only mails from new, as yet unknown senders get delayed; friends or business associates you get mail from regularly get through without delay. And what comes through is mostly Nigerian scams, interestingly. Apparently they use proper mailers.
To me this has proven the best anti-spam measure so far. And by the time the spammers catch up it also means their cost of sending has gone up a lot as it is not "fire and forget" any more but real resources need to be allocated. So far they don't.
And of course the actual thinking that has gone into it from both the builder(s) and the programmer(s) to make it actually be able to work. That also doesn't come from Lego.
The "only" magic that comes out of the Lego factory is of course in the form of accurate actuators, step motors, position sensors, and whatnot built into that hardware.
This "small" piece of Microsoft's business is far larger than 99.9% of the technology companies out there
Which makes total sense as MS themselves is larger than some 99.9% of tech companies out there.
Of course any company wishing to do business in mainland has to conform to mainland laws. That is not just for HK companies. It accounts for all companies, and it is why Google redirected its censored google.com.cn search engine to uncensored google.com.hk.
And of course it works always like that. If a company wants to do business in Germany they have to follow German law. If they want to do business in the US, they have to follow US law.
And HK is independent enough for companies operating in HK to fall only under HK law and not under mainland law. It is just that TOM Online wants to do business in mainland, and then their mainland business falls under mainland laws. And that has nothing to do with the fact that the parent happens to be in HK. Also there is no pressure from mainland on companies not operating in mainland to reform and conform to their laws - of course they sometimes do try to pressure the HK government to change the laws, but that's another matter.
Like another poster also pointed out: Hong Kong is not China. It is politically part of China, but for all practical reasons it acts as a different country (and you as not being involved in the world political stage should simply consider it as such, much closer to the everyday reality):
Separate currency, the Hong Kong dollar, linked at 7.8 to the US dollar and fully convertible (can't say that of the yuan).
Borders with China. I am Hong Kong resident, and still need to buy a visa to enter China.
Hong Kong is a free port for import and export of goods and services. China is pretty thoroughly locked down, import duties of goods to China are huge. Really.
Hong Kong has an open, accountable judiciary, with a strong respect for the rule of law. The exact opposite of the other side of the border.
Hong Kong has press freedom, and not just official.
Hong Kong people have the right to demonstrate, and do so. In 2003, half a million people took to the streets - or about 7% of the total population. It sent shock waves throughout the country, all the way to Beijing. Something like that would never be allowed in China.
And last but not least Hong Kong has the permission from Beijing's overlords to move towards full democracy.
And when we're at it, let's just add it's called Netvigator.
I'm one of their customers - it's the only option available in my location (the fun of living in a village, maybe some 500m away from the nearest high-rise - and with that I mean some 40-odd floors tall stuff). Connection is pretty OK though. I have 6 Mbit nominal down (640k up or so, that sucks) for under USD 30 per month, and quite often getting >800 kB/s download speeds.
This yp thing I ran into recently as well. Quite irritating, though it did give me the correct url instead of the mistyped one.
But I can not believe it is just for the iPad. OK it may sell well but overall it must be more of the iPad having a problem not being able to play video from Facebook than the other way around.
There will be more reasons behind it. The iPhone would be more reasonable already (many more sold). Or maybe Facebook themselves want to get rid of Flash but don't want to say it directly?
All and all it's a great excuse. The iPad is high in the minds of many people, so it's easy to ride the wave and to "blame the iPad" in order to dump Flash.
People that demand IE6/7 support nowadays ire likely to lag a bit when it comes to patching. Especially as they themselves run those obsolete browsers (which is obviously the case here), indicating they don't seem to care much about security.
From seeing them on TV, it seems that a Patriot missile battery is not that big. Shouldn't be too hard to adopt to such a packing.
A commercial shipping container is allowed to hold about 28 ton of cargo. The container itself weighs about 4 ton. That's 32 ton. No problem for a normal container trailer. I can imagine that four cruise missiles can stay within that weight.
Furthermore railroads may be more vulnerable than roads, other than the bridges they still need very well aimed bombs to really destroy. Roads are easily repaired, a couple hours of work and you can pass again. Not at 120 km/hr maybe but that's not needed.
All of them.
Start asking questions when done.