These guys have built a really clean implementation of a peer-driven (as opposed to true P2P) spam filter. You install their MS Outlook extension on your desktop machine, and it filters incoming messages against a list of spam signatures reported by other Cloudmark users. You then have the opportunity to report any spam that makes it through the filter, which in turn reduces the probability that other users will be subjected to that particular spam message.
They are running an open beta test at the moment. I've only used it for a few days, but it seems like a definite win. It's been flagging around 75% of the spam I've received since I installed the beta, with zero false positives so far.
Not affiliated with Cloudmark, just a (so far) satisfied user...
You won't need any external DSP resources, but the term "software-defined radio" is still a gross misnomer because you still need an RF front end to do anything really interesting.
At a minimum, this would consist of a mixer and 1st local-oscillator synthesizer, preferably with an RF preamp in front of it all depending on what frequencies you want to cover and what kind of antenna and feedline you're running.
The mixer and RF preamp can be off-the-shelf parts from Mini-Circuits or eBay.
The synthesizer is less convenient. I'm finishing an article on a "turnkey" octave-range VHF/UHF/microwave synthesizer design (http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html that anyone with a decent soldering iron should be able to put together, but it's still not a trivial project.
A lot of software-defined radio efforts are targeted at relatively narrow bands like the 2.4 GHz ISM band, where a bandpass filter can theoretically be used to take advantage of ADC aliasing via undersampling. With a scheme like this, you can dispense with the mixer and synthesizer. I'm not optimistic about these kinds of ideas, though... to achieve competitive performance, every dollar you save on the mixer and 1st LO synthesizer will have to be spent on a super-high-quality ADC configuration. It seems like the sensitivity would be pretty crappy, not to mention the fact that plenty of interfering sources near other aliased frequencies would be likely to survive the trip through the front-end filter. (I will admit that I don't have any direct experience with this topology, though.... there are probably quite a few advantages that I'm glossing over.)
At any rate, though, by keeping the traditional front-end mixer and oscillator while letting software handle the IF processing, you can use an ordinary sound card in a direct-conversion scheme (see this month's QEX to demodulate just about anything in the entire spectrum -- FM, NBFM, AM, SSB, FSK, QAM, you name it. To me, that seems a lot more interesting than the "Antenna at the ADC" schemes that a lot of people are hyping.
Yeah, in our case, the competition always centered around whose calculator could do 69! the fastest. (69 being the largest number whose factorial is less than the calculator's numeric limit of 10^100).
I don't remember who won, but the slowest calculator took several seconds to run the benchmark. Needless to say the cheerleaders were not impressed.
except maybe the random number generator (I can live with any mental bias when making up a number).
Not me. I wouldn't be able to order a pizza without my EC-4017's RAN# key.
0.000-0.199: Pizza Hut 0.200-0.399: Papa John's 0.400-0.599: Domino's 0.600-0.799: Pagliacci 0.800-0.999: Pizza Time
Fifteen years or so ago, I gave my father this very EC-4017 for Christmas. He died in '98, but it was only last month that I discovered the calculator, brand new and untouched in its original box from Radio Shack, in a neglected bureau drawer at home. The OEM lithium battery hadn't even leaked.
One of the most annoying things about Dad was his steadfast refusal to actually use anything you gave him as a present. At this point, though, having reached the same conclusion that all calculators today suck complete and total ass, I'm very grateful for that little character quirk of his. Like the original poster, I'd probably have paid a couple hundred bucks for this calculator on eBay... if one could be found there, which it can't.
It's interesting that this gift went to a particular university's law school rather than to a grassroots organization such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I wonder if it could be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the EFF after their attorneys' recent losses in cases like Universal Studios versus 2600 Magazine?
It's true that the EFF hasn't been batting 1.000 lately, but I've never even heard of the "Center for the Study of the Public Domain." Their web site talks only about "...hiring new faculty, creating new courses, setting up Internet Journals and creating new Fellowship Programs." Anyone know what cases they've actually participated in, if any? And for which side?
For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.
They don't sign you up for spam lists. Try creating your Hotmail account name with a random-sounding combination of several letters that don't spell any valid English words or proper names and numbers that don't look like a year in the 20th century. As long as the address is kept private, it won't be spammed.
"aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years. "rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.
My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
Re:Is Quake Still Played?
on
Tenebrae Quake
·
· Score: 2
With the right nods, Quake 1 still offers the best deathmatch experience, bar none.
Give me infinite weapons and a well-tuned grappling hook any day over per-pixel shading.:)
Other bidders have no idea what to aim for, because do not know what my maximum is.
(sigh) They don't have to know what to aim for. They will still cost you, the early and eventually-successful bidder, more money just by trying.
What you're forgetting is that on eBay, it's the second-highest bidder that determines how much the winner pays. The less time the second-highest bidder has to reconsider his maximum bid, the better off the highest bidder is.
Placing your maximum bid early in an auction practically guarantees that you will pay more than you would have if you had placed the same maximum proxy bid in the last few seconds of the auction. Whether you like it or not, that's how the game is played.
But, with proxy bidding, other people cannot know what I'm willing to pay until they bid above my maximum. Once they've done that it doesn't matter anyway.
You're missing the point. By bidding early, you give the other bidders something to aim for.
Few people have a perfectly fixed idea of what a given item is worth. If I bid $10 for a CD and one or more people come along later and outbid me, it may have the effect of persuading me that the CD is "worth" more than $10, and that I should raise my maximum bid. Conversely, if I'm the high bidder, I really don't want to give the other bidders time to stew about being outbid. There's no upside at all to that.
This kind of thinking is what turns auctions into "competitions," often in defiance of common sense. It's just human nature, nothing more and nothing less.
Seeing the auction process as a competition is stupid. The seller is the only "winner."
Very true. That's why eBay has several million auctions running at any given time. Sellers (like myself) LOVE people who follow your advice and bid early.
It's obvious that video games play a minor part in the decadence of society.
It must drive people like yourself nuts when someone points out the steady decline in juvenile crime that started around the time Nolan Bushnell first booted up Pong on a wire-wrap breadboard.
But keep trying... maybe someday the statistics will swing your way, and you'll have something to prove with your anecdotes and speculation.
The USPS's lifeblood is unsolicited commercial advertising mail.
That's certainly true, but they damned sure don't deliver it for free, do they? Imagine what would happen to a bulk mailer who misappropriated USPS resources to bury millions of people in junk mail without paying a dime of postage.
If there were a way to make spammers pay for the resources they use, the volume of unsolicited commercial email would drop by at least 95% overnight.
Because then I have to futz around running my own email server, or paying my ISP-du-jour to host one for me. I don't want to be in the email business.
The other main reason I've kept my UUNet account is that they're probably second only to AOL (and maybe Earthlink) in worldwide dialup availability. Very handy when travelling.
Before the whole WorldCom shitstorm went down, I would have violently argued against the idea of treating email as a centrally-administered national resource.
Now, it looks like my pop.net email address -- for which I've been paying $20/month for the last several years on the grounds that I didn't think UUNet would ever go away -- might well become worthless before long.
I'm pissed and disillusioned at the same time. It really does appear that any sufficiently-large corporation is indistinguishable from an incompetent government. Perhaps there actually would be some value in a USPS-administered email option in the marketplace. One address, guaranteed for life, immune to the slings and arrows of corporate greed and idiocy, where spammers would have to answer to Federal postal inspectors.
Honestly, I'd probably sign up. Email may turn out to be one of those things the private sector just doesn't handle very well.
If I remember right, some of the first commercial RAID boards ("Dell Drive Array") used the i960.
Can't think of anything else, though. The i860 and i960 were supposed to take over the planet at one point, but it never seemed to happen.
Re:Optical Mice use LEDs, *NOT* Lasers.
on
LEDs for the Blind
·
· Score: 2
Well, like the filament of the rectifier tube in my 1939 Stewart-Warner radio, it hurts my eyes to stare into it, and it's red, but it's definitely not a laser.
The interesting thing about people that get that rich is: they don't want to go to the moon or mars.
I've thought a lot about that question ("Why doesn't Bill Gates do something really cool for humanity, like fund a private Mars program? Man, if I were Bill, I'd be spending my summers on Olympus Mons already.")
At this point, I think I understand the answer. Bill never wanted to build a moonbase or go to Mars, any more than he wanted to become the President of the United States or a Bond-esque archvillain. He wanted to become the richest dude on Earth by running the world's biggest software company. That's it. That's all he ever wanted, and he obviously wanted it more than anything else, because that's what he got.
Paradoxically, if Gates had ambitions in other directions such as funding a private space program, he'd likely never have achieved a position in life that would allow him to do those sorts of things. He'd have retired to go play with rockets after making his first few hundred million, a la John Carmack. This is why the only people who could take space exploration private won't.
Which sucks, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it is.
The idea is to avoid a repeat of the Rambus debacle vis-a-vis the JEDEC consortium. Anyone who takes part in a standards process is ethically and legally obligated to reveal any patents that may affect the availability of the specification being developed. Rambus didn't -- they waited until their IP had been integrated into a critical industry standard, then had their lawyers spring a surprise party on everybody.
This is actually relatively old news, and it isn't necessarily a showstopper. MS has historically been the victim rather than the instigator of legal action with respect to stupid patents.
Re:Why you don't always go to the Supreme Court
on
2600 Drops DeCSS Appeal
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The justices will get worse, not better for this type of case if they are appointed by Bush. Conservative president = conservative judicial nominees.
Not necessarily. A conservative judicial nominee is more likely to be a strict constructionist, one who interprets the Constitution without an (overt) activist agenda. Such a jurist would be more likely to take a dim view of Hollywood's lawmaking-by-payola activities.
A Democratic judicial nomination would be more likely to be made at the behest of the sort of Hollywood interest groups that more or less constantly brown-nose Democratic lawmakers. Remember that the DMCA happened on Clinton's watch.
Ham radio is more than just "talking"
on
Field Day 2002
·
· Score: 2
... or at least, it was supposed to be.
Take a look at eBay's components and test equipment sections sometime. For the price of a decent HF station, you can outfit your shack with better equipment than NASA had when it launched the Voyager probes. If you can't think of something interesting to do with all that stuff, it's time to turn in your license and take up birdwatching.:)
The Amateur Radio Service's underlying charter emphasizes the advancement of the radio arts and sciences, and for a long time, that was what hams did. Things slowed down for awhile when Heathkit went away and the Japanese started commoditizing the radio business, but those things happened a long time ago. The truth is, you can do more fun stuff with ham radio now than at any time in the past.
If your logic were correct then a dual-CPU system with a VGA card would run Quake3 as fast as a single-CPU system with a GeForce3.
You're closer to the truth than you think. It pretty much would run just as fast; it's just that the rendering quality wouldn't be competitive. Yet.
The GPU's specialization has more to do with vectorized math and optimized memory access than anything else. Those are both engineering topics that Intel and AMD take very seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
These guys have built a really clean implementation of a peer-driven (as opposed to true P2P) spam filter. You install their MS Outlook extension on your desktop machine, and it filters incoming messages against a list of spam signatures reported by other Cloudmark users. You then have the opportunity to report any spam that makes it through the filter, which in turn reduces the probability that other users will be subjected to that particular spam message.
They are running an open beta test at the moment. I've only used it for a few days, but it seems like a definite win. It's been flagging around 75% of the spam I've received since I installed the beta, with zero false positives so far.
Not affiliated with Cloudmark, just a (so far) satisfied user...
You won't need any external DSP resources, but the term "software-defined radio" is still a gross misnomer because you still need an RF front end to do anything really interesting.
At a minimum, this would consist of a mixer and 1st local-oscillator synthesizer, preferably with an RF preamp in front of it all depending on what frequencies you want to cover and what kind of antenna and feedline you're running.
The mixer and RF preamp can be off-the-shelf parts from Mini-Circuits or eBay.
The synthesizer is less convenient. I'm finishing an article on a "turnkey" octave-range VHF/UHF/microwave synthesizer design (http://www.qsl.net/ke5fx/synth.html that anyone with a decent soldering iron should be able to put together, but it's still not a trivial project.
A lot of software-defined radio efforts are targeted at relatively narrow bands like the 2.4 GHz ISM band, where a bandpass filter can theoretically be used to take advantage of ADC aliasing via undersampling. With a scheme like this, you can dispense with the mixer and synthesizer. I'm not optimistic about these kinds of ideas, though... to achieve competitive performance, every dollar you save on the mixer and 1st LO synthesizer will have to be spent on a super-high-quality ADC configuration. It seems like the sensitivity would be pretty crappy, not to mention the fact that plenty of interfering sources near other aliased frequencies would be likely to survive the trip through the front-end filter. (I will admit that I don't have any direct experience with this topology, though.... there are probably quite a few advantages that I'm glossing over.)
At any rate, though, by keeping the traditional front-end mixer and oscillator while letting software handle the IF processing, you can use an ordinary sound card in a direct-conversion scheme (see this month's QEX to demodulate just about anything in the entire spectrum -- FM, NBFM, AM, SSB, FSK, QAM, you name it. To me, that seems a lot more interesting than the "Antenna at the ADC" schemes that a lot of people are hyping.
Yeah, in our case, the competition always centered around whose calculator could do 69! the fastest. (69 being the largest number whose factorial is less than the calculator's numeric limit of 10^100).
I don't remember who won, but the slowest calculator took several seconds to run the benchmark. Needless to say the cheerleaders were not impressed.
except maybe the random number generator (I can live with any mental bias when making up a number).
Not me. I wouldn't be able to order a pizza without my EC-4017's RAN# key.
0.000-0.199: Pizza Hut
0.200-0.399: Papa John's
0.400-0.599: Domino's
0.600-0.799: Pagliacci
0.800-0.999: Pizza Time
Fifteen years or so ago, I gave my father this very EC-4017 for Christmas. He died in '98, but it was only last month that I discovered the calculator, brand new and untouched in its original box from Radio Shack, in a neglected bureau drawer at home. The OEM lithium battery hadn't even leaked.
One of the most annoying things about Dad was his steadfast refusal to actually use anything you gave him as a present. At this point, though, having reached the same conclusion that all calculators today suck complete and total ass, I'm very grateful for that little character quirk of his. Like the original poster, I'd probably have paid a couple hundred bucks for this calculator on eBay... if one could be found there, which it can't.
It's interesting that this gift went to a particular university's law school rather than to a grassroots organization such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I wonder if it could be interpreted as a vote of no confidence in the EFF after their attorneys' recent losses in cases like Universal Studios versus 2600 Magazine?
It's true that the EFF hasn't been batting 1.000 lately, but I've never even heard of the "Center for the Study of the Public Domain." Their web site talks only about "...hiring new faculty, creating new courses, setting up Internet Journals and creating new Fellowship Programs." Anyone know what cases they've actually participated in, if any? And for which side?
WTF? If you're typing faster than your word processor can accept text input, it's time to upgrade that 1981-vintage copy of AppleWriter ][.
For kicks, create a hotmail account, in your preferences don't set it to sign up to any mailing lists...Wait a week and login, it will be flooded with spam (much of which the 'bulk/spam email detector' missed) even if your userid is something random and unguessable.
They don't sign you up for spam lists. Try creating your Hotmail account name with a random-sounding combination of several letters that don't spell any valid English words or proper names and numbers that don't look like a year in the 20th century. As long as the address is kept private, it won't be spammed.
"aimfiz69105" at hotmail.com has received zero spams in the past couple of years.
"rezrov" at hotmail.com has received about 300 spams since it was created last week.
My guess is that the problem is that Hotmail and other mail providers are apparently stupid enough to accept incoming mail with 300,000,000 recipients in the header. I can't think of any other reason why "rezrov" would get buried in spam almost instantly while "aimfiz69105" never gets any.
With the right nods, Quake 1 still offers the best deathmatch experience, bar none.
:)
Give me infinite weapons and a well-tuned grappling hook any day over per-pixel shading.
Other bidders have no idea what to aim for, because do not know what my maximum is.
(sigh) They don't have to know what to aim for. They will still cost you, the early and eventually-successful bidder, more money just by trying.
What you're forgetting is that on eBay, it's the second-highest bidder that determines how much the winner pays. The less time the second-highest bidder has to reconsider his maximum bid, the better off the highest bidder is.
Placing your maximum bid early in an auction practically guarantees that you will pay more than you would have if you had placed the same maximum proxy bid in the last few seconds of the auction. Whether you like it or not, that's how the game is played.
But, with proxy bidding, other people cannot know what I'm willing to pay until they bid above my maximum. Once they've done that it doesn't matter anyway.
You're missing the point. By bidding early, you give the other bidders something to aim for.
Few people have a perfectly fixed idea of what a given item is worth. If I bid $10 for a CD and one or more people come along later and outbid me, it may have the effect of persuading me that the CD is "worth" more than $10, and that I should raise my maximum bid. Conversely, if I'm the high bidder, I really don't want to give the other bidders time to stew about being outbid. There's no upside at all to that.
This kind of thinking is what turns auctions into "competitions," often in defiance of common sense. It's just human nature, nothing more and nothing less.
Seeing the auction process as a competition is stupid. The seller is the only "winner."
Very true. That's why eBay has several million auctions running at any given time. Sellers (like myself) LOVE people who follow your advice and bid early.
Why not just bid what you are willing to pay? You know how proxy bidding works, don't you?
Because other people tend to base what they are willing to pay on what you are willing to pay.
Placing a competitive bid early in an auction is just plain stupid.
It's obvious that video games play a minor part in the decadence of society.
It must drive people like yourself nuts when someone points out the steady decline in juvenile crime that started around the time Nolan Bushnell first booted up Pong on a wire-wrap breadboard.
But keep trying... maybe someday the statistics will swing your way, and you'll have something to prove with your anecdotes and speculation.
The USPS's lifeblood is unsolicited commercial advertising mail.
That's certainly true, but they damned sure don't deliver it for free, do they? Imagine what would happen to a bulk mailer who misappropriated USPS resources to bury millions of people in junk mail without paying a dime of postage.
If there were a way to make spammers pay for the resources they use, the volume of unsolicited commercial email would drop by at least 95% overnight.
Because then I have to futz around running my own email server, or paying my ISP-du-jour to host one for me. I don't want to be in the email business.
The other main reason I've kept my UUNet account is that they're probably second only to AOL (and maybe Earthlink) in worldwide dialup availability. Very handy when travelling.
Before the whole WorldCom shitstorm went down, I would have violently argued against the idea of treating email as a centrally-administered national resource.
Now, it looks like my pop.net email address -- for which I've been paying $20/month for the last several years on the grounds that I didn't think UUNet would ever go away -- might well become worthless before long.
I'm pissed and disillusioned at the same time. It really does appear that any sufficiently-large corporation is indistinguishable from an incompetent government. Perhaps there actually would be some value in a USPS-administered email option in the marketplace. One address, guaranteed for life, immune to the slings and arrows of corporate greed and idiocy, where spammers would have to answer to Federal postal inspectors.
Honestly, I'd probably sign up. Email may turn out to be one of those things the private sector just doesn't handle very well.
No kidding. This thread is full of "+5 Informative" posts that read like bad science fiction.
Just a simple case of ionospheric skip. Nothing more to see (or hear), folks, move along.
If I remember right, some of the first commercial RAID boards ("Dell Drive Array") used the i960.
Can't think of anything else, though. The i860 and i960 were supposed to take over the planet at one point, but it never seemed to happen.
Well, like the filament of the rectifier tube in my 1939 Stewart-Warner radio, it hurts my eyes to stare into it, and it's red, but it's definitely not a laser.
WTF? Time to stop overclocking your 5Y3.
The interesting thing about people that get that rich is: they don't want to go to the moon or mars.
I've thought a lot about that question ("Why doesn't Bill Gates do something really cool for humanity, like fund a private Mars program? Man, if I were Bill, I'd be spending my summers on Olympus Mons already.")
At this point, I think I understand the answer. Bill never wanted to build a moonbase or go to Mars, any more than he wanted to become the President of the United States or a Bond-esque archvillain. He wanted to become the richest dude on Earth by running the world's biggest software company. That's it. That's all he ever wanted, and he obviously wanted it more than anything else, because that's what he got.
Paradoxically, if Gates had ambitions in other directions such as funding a private space program, he'd likely never have achieved a position in life that would allow him to do those sorts of things. He'd have retired to go play with rockets after making his first few hundred million, a la John Carmack. This is why the only people who could take space exploration private won't.
Which sucks, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it is.
The idea is to avoid a repeat of the Rambus debacle vis-a-vis the JEDEC consortium. Anyone who takes part in a standards process is ethically and legally obligated to reveal any patents that may affect the availability of the specification being developed. Rambus didn't -- they waited until their IP had been integrated into a critical industry standard, then had their lawyers spring a surprise party on everybody.
This is actually relatively old news, and it isn't necessarily a showstopper. MS has historically been the victim rather than the instigator of legal action with respect to stupid patents.
The justices will get worse, not better for this type of case if they are appointed by Bush. Conservative president = conservative judicial nominees.
Not necessarily. A conservative judicial nominee is more likely to be a strict constructionist, one who interprets the Constitution without an (overt) activist agenda. Such a jurist would be more likely to take a dim view of Hollywood's lawmaking-by-payola activities.
A Democratic judicial nomination would be more likely to be made at the behest of the sort of Hollywood interest groups that more or less constantly brown-nose Democratic lawmakers. Remember that the DMCA happened on Clinton's watch.
They just want to make sure you paid for it.
Which is otherwise known as "confusing YOUR problem with MY problem."
Go away, Ms. Rosen.
Who could forget the wonders of Kramer's Krumbling Krud?
... or at least, it was supposed to be.
:)
Take a look at eBay's components and test equipment sections sometime. For the price of a decent HF station, you can outfit your shack with better equipment than NASA had when it launched the Voyager probes. If you can't think of something interesting to do with all that stuff, it's time to turn in your license and take up birdwatching.
The Amateur Radio Service's underlying charter emphasizes the advancement of the radio arts and sciences, and for a long time, that was what hams did. Things slowed down for awhile when Heathkit went away and the Japanese started commoditizing the radio business, but those things happened a long time ago. The truth is, you can do more fun stuff with ham radio now than at any time in the past.
If your logic were correct then a dual-CPU system with a VGA card would run Quake3 as fast as a single-CPU system with a GeForce3.
You're closer to the truth than you think. It pretty much would run just as fast; it's just that the rendering quality wouldn't be competitive. Yet.
The GPU's specialization has more to do with vectorized math and optimized memory access than anything else. Those are both engineering topics that Intel and AMD take very seriously.