Apparently all of the user groups that got to try out the EV1 are begging to keep their cars and offered to maintain them all themselves.
It seems GM and Ford pulled out largely so that they could focus on the fuel cell race that is going on right now. GM swears they will be first out, and Ford of course swears that they will win. Last I heard, GM is in the lead.
I didn't go to the link yet, but please oh please oh please say that you don't have to know the person that keeps track of what you look at.
If that is the case - that some total stranger has to browse through what you have been looking at - then I am TOTALLY signing up and then I'm just going to constantly look at the most disgusting and wrong things.
I will keep in contact with them and act as if I really want to "get better" and that I sure wish I could stop. And then immediately go and start looking at donkey porn again. Occsaionally I will try to lie to them or deny looking at the stuff, and then break down and admit that I did.
Oh wow - if this is with total strangers, then this will frickin ROCK!!!!
It has already been shown that not all of that number leaves space for life, and certainly life as we know it. There are certain conditions that must be met, and those conditions are far rarer than your 1eN value.
Which then begs the question of life that we don't comprehend or lives in an environment unlike ours, thereby bringing back your full 1eN... At that point, then you are assuming that no laws at all apply to life - which means you can then assume anything at all.
Which simply means that you are fantisizing. Which in itself is fine, and further evidenced by your mention of God.
But along with that - leave me out of your fantasy world where there are no rules, and I will stay seated here in reality and logic and be just fine with that.
IMO, just the "itelligence" issue alone is enough to make the SETI effort questionable at best - not to mention the stats side of things. What is intelligent to us is limited to the breadth of our experience and environment - we treat communication with very high regard... but perhaps that isn't a true definition of intelligence - it just serves our purposes well. "Intelligent" is just a term related to our outlook - it just replaces a certain construct that we are looking for - but to match that construct doesn't necessarily fufill the true definition of that word.
I would think that one could postulate on other life forms out there with pretty close to near certainty. But in order to think of other life forms that would communicate in a way that we would know about adds so much more complexity that I personally think SETI is a total waste (in terms of its end goal - in terms of getting people together and also in terms of a well known distributed system, it serves its own purpose).
Were there bacteria and/or viruses out there, I'd not be surprised at all. Where there some sort of creature out there that is animal-like? Even that doesn't surprise me as much, but I still find that much less likely.
But is there something else out there that commincates via radio waves? I really don't know - but looking at the numbers, I'd bet a lot against it. It is a wonderful thing to think that we aren't alone - whether in terms of a God or in terms of others in space - but there are so many parameters at work that I certainly don't count on it.
And for those that think of things such as the greys - that is beyond retarded. To think that something will look anything like earth - let alone us is pretty narrow minded to say the least. And that doesn't even approach those that think the Earth was seeded by aliens landing here and we are the offspring of that...
In the end, it saddens me - I tend to put too much faith and trust in people that have strong scientific outlooks. But those same people then frequently end up failing my idealistic view that they are somehow immune to the logical curiosities of religion or search for alien communication - two things that I group in the same. (although interestingly the absolute discovery of one would negate the other by their current definitions)
And this thread seems to be full of the people here on slashdot that are of the "I don't agree with you, therefore you are a troll" mentality, so I don't suspect this post will last long.
I just installed a new Netgear router that has a security logging feature. It is filling up in a big way with SMB requests and UDP cals.
It is currently set to ignore anything on any port that is trying to come in - and it also apparently looks for things like DOS attacks and it is listing a lot of stuff.
I just set it up yesterday, so I don't know how much of this I would have seen prior since I never logged the attempted contections before.
Microsoft has always been one of the Fortune top rated copmanies to work for. Up there with Adobe, WalMart, Wegmans, and Pfizer.
(granted they did have an issue with being sued by the part time people because those people apparently felt that the contract that they agreed to and signed... was unfair - not sure what ever came of that - perhaps with the downturn in the economy those people realized that they were lucky for their jobs and shut the hell up)
I have 10 friends that I went to college with that interviewed with Microsoft, and now 5 of them work there (they all got offers, 3 of them didn't want to move, one of them opted for grad school, and the last thought he had a chance at Apple or something... he didn't last I heard).
(I can remember one of the guys wore Tevas, a shirt he had painted in that had holes in it, and ragged cut offs to his Microsoft interview, while some others debated on suits or not - he wanted to make sure that they were only going by his brain... he got the offer... and turned it down to go to grad school)
The guys that work there love it. And in the tech world (I guess only outside of slashdot), seeing that you worked at Microsft actually has some tech cred to it - I know of 3 guys that I went to school with that went on to start their own companies and the MS name on their cv helped get their funding.
I know a guy that works in their computer game department, and I know a guy that works in their XBox game department (I think it is slightly funny that they are even different departments). They each think it is the coolest job on the planet, and I'm not sure I blame them.
I find it really amusing that "everyone" here thinks MS is so evil, when in reality, they are one of the best companies to work for - and perhaps are even doing some things right - as much as it hurts the people here to think.
It is human nature to strive to be at the top, and to some extent, to resent those that sit at the top. Were Apple or Linux to rise up and dethrone the current MS position, the same people here would start griping about the exact same issues that MS is going through because they are side effects of beinga successful company.
and in true slashdot mentality, I'm sure this will get modded troll
I have said on here before, I love gadgets. They have to pass two tests and then I find them drool-worthy. 1) they have to be shiny. 2) they have to be smaller than my penis.
While that phone looks vaguely cool, I feel like such an old fogey for thinking "what the fuck would I need all those features for in my phone?"
I currently have the Nokia 8890 and love it - when the newest replacements for those come out (They are sturdier) in the states or in Bermuda, then I will gladly buy one of them and hold it close, whispering sweet nothings to it. But otherwise - there are a ton of new phones coming out that I just have clue at all why the hell I'd want one. It might as well come with a very small dishwasher and chopsticks - I'd never use those either.
Re:wonder if it will catch fire?
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Server In A Fly
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Yes! Thank you - that is it.
He was a very odd fellow. Used to put hooks through his back and hang himself for days over the water or other various things, not eating the whole time.
In the movie The Cell, there were a bunch of references to modern art - Stelarc was one of them. As well as... fuck - my art major was well spent since I can't recall any of these names - although I can tell you all about the artists. I want to say Joseph Beuys, but I'm not sure he is the correct reference.
wonder if it will catch fire?
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Server In A Fly
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I suppose LEDs don't really get hot.
when I was in college I can remember Mark Taylor bringing in a artist that was hooking himself up to electrodes and a web server and you could control him movements via a webpage. So you would click on a link on a page, and could make his right arm contract, or his left leg, whatever. Then he went live and he got lots of clicks and as a result was spastically moving about (he was suspended - perhaps by hooks in his back since that was another art thing he had done in the past). They let us try out the electrodes and they were uncofortable in that it feels like an intense muscle cramp since it fires all the muscle fibers instead of a smooth contraction like we normal have. I don't recall the guy's name, but it had an S in it, I think at the start. and he was not 'merican:) Slygart or something like that. damn art people are weird.
so you fall into the range of people that do get that much - therefore you think everyone gets that much?
I don't understand why you don't disallow mail to a non-existant user.
on my server, I saw my spam really ramp up (I saw it as a problem when I started getting 500 spams a day while I was out of the country one week), and so I looked at the names it was sending to.
it was like you said - someone was scanning for valid emails. So I just set it so that any mail that wasn't to one of the valid usernames on the domains, just gets redirected to/dev/null.
again - you are not the usual user - you have a domain registered, my grandmother on the other hand doesn't get that volume of spam since she has a regular email address and owns no domains (that I know of - that grandma....)
Out of the few hundred people I know online, I don't know anyone else that gets 100 spam a day. Does that mean there aren't any others? no. does that mean all 30K users an ISP has gets that much? hell no. I would venture a number closer to 5 a day would be the average amount per user. I get way more because of owning multiple domain names, having been on the net for some time, and being pretty "wreckless" with giving it out on the net (posting to newsgroups, web pages, web forums, and signing up for things).
I know people that get 3 a day and get really pissed about that. That always amuses me.
But I would have to say what amuses me more is how strongly you feel about spam. I could most certainly see someone that angry about live hand grenades coming to you in the physical mail... wow - think of all of the accidents that would happen then. But I just don't see it with the spam.
I'm not a spammer - but I sure as hell don't hate them and have yet to see an explanation that has made me say "oh, I see your point, those guys really do deserve to be killed" For the most part, I think more along the lines of "wow, I hope those guys are making money for this, b/c it seems like it is a waste of time and annoying"
My ISP is technically AT&T (recently bought out by Comcast here in Boston). They don't have to deal with a single spam that I have ever had delivered to my account. I have a server through pair.com and get all mail delivered there, and check all mail via ssh there. The server that I do all that on is an Athlon 1G with half a gig of ram. But last I looked, there weren't 30K users on that machine.
I suppose all that goes to show that I'm not the typical user in many ways - so perhaps that is why I just don't see what the big deal is with spam. I find it all amusing. esp people like you that I hope don't have firearms and free time.
Intersting. So you can at least account for the ones that have expressly stated it.
From your perspective, I see that must be extremely frustrating since that is lost revenue at first glance.
From my perspective, I make my money on end users. I don't own an ISP, but I write software for people that are on the net. One would think that I would want as many users as possible to be out there, so that my product could reach as many as possible, and make me fabulously wealthy.
But in reality - I am really *very* happy to know that there is something driving these people off of the net. If I have someone that is new to the net wanting to buy a product or service of mine (to be fair, I write things for a very specific market), it is more than likely that I will have to spend a lot of time hand-holding this person - which means I'm losing money on that person. They are paying X dollars for my product/service - and I'm spending time on them. I have N other users that also pay X dollars, and I never have to talk with them at all - therefore, they are better customers to me.
If all of the ones that are scared off by spam leave - those are the same ones that are going to be contacting me with issues that are beyond the scope of my service/product and want hand holding... so without them, my revenue and more importantly my profit - goes up.
but to say - I do see that the issue exists for the isp, and that is unpleasant and undesirable for you. but I would still argue that spam frustrated user leaving is actually saving you money in the end - freeing up your bandwidth and hardware for another potential user to come in, pay the same amount, and require less attention from you - thereby costing you less.
let them leave - this place is getting crowded anyway;)
not all of the "price" based systems involve money directly. some of the "fees" are processor time and such.
but in the end, it all boils down to money - money is time, time is money. but time is money in your own currency:) an american dollar and a pengo (wherever the hell that is) are not equal - but a time unit equates to a fixed amount of your own currency that takes that into account.
and when you say "would cost a penny, just time"
- that also is interesting in that time is money - in terms of time is a non-renewable resource. they could have been using that time to do xyz things that would generate money, or xyz time spending money (moving money to someone else). so that was money tied up in that "free" endeavor... meaning it wasn't truly free.
the idea should be renamed - call it "cost based" and it makes more sense.
To be fair, I'm not sure that is what drives spam revenue.
It is true that television and print ads are driven by the desire to sell the product that they advertise.
But I think spam has evolved to the point where it is not about what is being "sold" and instead about creating the address base.
If you look at a large percentage of the ads, there is no real way to buy what they are referring to. If you click on the links, they bring you to a page that then lets them confirm the address that they sent to (yours - and by clicking on that link, they know that you exist and it is a live address). Can you actually buy anything on that page? Not usually - usually it is a way to unsubscribe, or it is a series of ads for other things, or it pops up a ton of other crap - eventually leading to porn.
The point of spam might have initially started as an attempt to get people to buy crap - like an annoying informercial or a qvc that keeps coming back at you.
But the money making part of it now is to generate a larger list of users with more real users in it and then sell that list to other spammers. As well as generate revenue from popups and click thrus.
If you genuinely look at over 90% of the spam you get, you will see that were you to want to buy whatever it is that they are talking about - there isn't a way to get to it - you will be diverted many times along the way. There are obvious exceptions to the rule - Netflix, porn, and geroge foreman grills come to mind.
I am down to about 100 spams a day now and I go through them frequently to try and think of more ways to get rid of them (I use the most recent spamassassin), and have come to notice this trend on my own.
Regular web advertising failed because nobody was buying the product - banner ads and the like never really caught on - but they remain out there - people trying to get your attention.
Whereas spam has grown the entire time - because they have found a different way to make money - not selling you the product, but by selling your address.
As an ISP I can tell you they're giving up on the internet, to them the cost/benefit is just not worthwhile. That's not a good trend.
This statement seems odd to me - how can you determine that they are leaving the net for good because of spam, or if they are just leaving your service because they found a better/cheaper service to use instead?
I used to get over 500 spams a day, and now am down to avg about 100 spams a day. I filter them all out and I really don't see what the big deal is at all.
That said, I only pay for my own hardware and not for all the hardware at an ISP (at least not directly - I am aware that in the end I pay some part of it). So I can understand that it is hard for me to bear the same hatered that others do - but I really just don't get why the spammers are so hated.
They are annoying as hell, but I just don't get the hatred.
I didn't read the article at all (that would go against what slashdot stands for right?) - but I think they should: 1) charge money to take it back (they already do) 2) build up a network of clustered Macs to make a big supercomputer 3) charge users for time running apps on this cluster (the applications that run on supercomputers would be pretty limited, but also means limited to the groups that are willing to pay $$$)
That would mean that they have to ship in the computers, so that would take a chunk (if not all) that that $30 fee. Then would have to build a network to cluster then - likely gigabit if not fiber - does Dolphin do Mac networking? I don't know of a Mosix/OpenMosix for the PowerPC world, so it would have to be a Beowulf style.
They would make money off of the collection and the use of the system, but would have to spend in order to supply power, AC, and keeping track of the network.
This is something that would have a range of usefulness (profitablity) and then would eventually hit a point where it no longer scaled correctly and they would spend too much to maintain it. To avoid that, they could cycle computerrs in and out of the network. As they get faster computers being turned in, they can swap out the crappier systems that are part of the cluster.
blah blah blah - anyways - just something that popped into mind when I saw that they were getting machines for free, and getting money on top of that (like I said, not sure how much of that money goes towards shipping).
Once they use them in the cluster, then they could actually recycle them like they say.
Not to mention all of the stuff that they could strip off of the drives that are coming in.
I of course can't be bothered to go and look at the actual site - but it seems that if you have enough historical data (which certainly does exist), and you have a good current data feed - then it should be fairly easy to do something like this with neural nets.
It won't be 100% accurate, but it is certainly more accurate than many other methods.
On the other hand, if they just have it calling "rand() % 365" and then say there will be an earthquake that day... less reliable.
The original Sega was so fragile since any slight amount of dust on a cartridge would make it unplayable (until you blew on it and hit on top of the unit)... I never had a console until much more recently, but I can recall seeing friends get frustrated with it.
Then in high school one of my friends decided that his Sega should be upgraded to... whatever it was that he was upgrading it to. He either couldn't find anyone that would buy it, or was just too lazy/apathetic to look (this was pre '95, so pre EBay and popular net time).
He and his brother took turns smashing on the console and its cartridges with a hammer, dunking it in a sink full of dishwater, microwaving it, and even (once the plastic had been suffficiently deteriorated so that the innards were exposed) - using needle nosed pliers to yank off random parts of the board. They would do some act to it, like some oven time, and then wait for it to recover from that (cool off or dry off) and then would try playing games on it. Then repeat. It was really amazing how long that thing would still play games.
From what I recall, the games stood up to a lot of physical abuse, but once you started taking the pliers to them, it was obviously going to not take long. The console itself on the other hand was amazing - it was like magic how much you could take out of that thing and it would still work. I think what finally killed it was a severed wire that got data or power - we figured it would die far before that.
I'm also surprised that nobody was hurt during these experiments. (this was the same friend that had a really old, really large TV that had a capacitor underneath it that would charge up, and then if you didn't discharge it periodically, it would arc out and hit things in teh room - which made it interesting to watch in that room. my friend that owned it seemed to think it totally normal to have to take a screwdriver and reach under the TV, waving it around until there was a loud *POP* sound of it discharging and the fait smell of something bad having just happened.)
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently all of the user groups that got to try out the EV1 are begging to keep their cars and offered to maintain them all themselves.
It seems GM and Ford pulled out largely so that they could focus on the fuel cell race that is going on right now. GM swears they will be first out, and Ford of course swears that they will win.
Last I heard, GM is in the lead.
I didn't go to the link yet, but please oh please oh please say that you don't have to know the person that keeps track of what you look at.
If that is the case - that some total stranger has to browse through what you have been looking at - then I am TOTALLY signing up and then I'm just going to constantly look at the most disgusting and wrong things.
I will keep in contact with them and act as if I really want to "get better" and that I sure wish I could stop.
And then immediately go and start looking at donkey porn again.
Occsaionally I will try to lie to them or deny looking at the stuff, and then break down and admit that I did.
Oh wow - if this is with total strangers, then this will frickin ROCK!!!!
It has already been shown that not all of that number leaves space for life, and certainly life as we know it. There are certain conditions that must be met, and those conditions are far rarer than your 1eN value.
Which then begs the question of life that we don't comprehend or lives in an environment unlike ours, thereby bringing back your full 1eN...
At that point, then you are assuming that no laws at all apply to life - which means you can then assume anything at all.
Which simply means that you are fantisizing.
Which in itself is fine, and further evidenced by your mention of God.
But along with that - leave me out of your fantasy world where there are no rules, and I will stay seated here in reality and logic and be just fine with that.
IMO, just the "itelligence" issue alone is enough to make the SETI effort questionable at best - not to mention the stats side of things.
What is intelligent to us is limited to the breadth of our experience and environment - we treat communication with very high regard... but perhaps that isn't a true definition of intelligence - it just serves our purposes well.
"Intelligent" is just a term related to our outlook - it just replaces a certain construct that we are looking for - but to match that construct doesn't necessarily fufill the true definition of that word.
I would think that one could postulate on other life forms out there with pretty close to near certainty.
But in order to think of other life forms that would communicate in a way that we would know about adds so much more complexity that I personally think SETI is a total waste (in terms of its end goal - in terms of getting people together and also in terms of a well known distributed system, it serves its own purpose).
Were there bacteria and/or viruses out there, I'd not be surprised at all.
Where there some sort of creature out there that is animal-like? Even that doesn't surprise me as much, but I still find that much less likely.
But is there something else out there that commincates via radio waves? I really don't know - but looking at the numbers, I'd bet a lot against it.
It is a wonderful thing to think that we aren't alone - whether in terms of a God or in terms of others in space - but there are so many parameters at work that I certainly don't count on it.
And for those that think of things such as the greys - that is beyond retarded. To think that something will look anything like earth - let alone us is pretty narrow minded to say the least.
And that doesn't even approach those that think the Earth was seeded by aliens landing here and we are the offspring of that...
In the end, it saddens me - I tend to put too much faith and trust in people that have strong scientific outlooks.
But those same people then frequently end up failing my idealistic view that they are somehow immune to the logical curiosities of religion or search for alien communication - two things that I group in the same.
(although interestingly the absolute discovery of one would negate the other by their current definitions)
And this thread seems to be full of the people here on slashdot that are of the "I don't agree with you, therefore you are a troll" mentality, so I don't suspect this post will last long.
I just installed a new Netgear router that has a security logging feature. It is filling up in a big way with SMB requests and UDP cals.
It is currently set to ignore anything on any port that is trying to come in - and it also apparently looks for things like DOS attacks and it is listing a lot of stuff.
I just set it up yesterday, so I don't know how much of this I would have seen prior since I never logged the attempted contections before.
Microsoft has always been one of the Fortune top rated copmanies to work for. Up there with Adobe, WalMart, Wegmans, and Pfizer.
(granted they did have an issue with being sued by the part time people because those people apparently felt that the contract that they agreed to and signed... was unfair - not sure what ever came of that - perhaps with the downturn in the economy those people realized that they were lucky for their jobs and shut the hell up)
I have 10 friends that I went to college with that interviewed with Microsoft, and now 5 of them work there (they all got offers, 3 of them didn't want to move, one of them opted for grad school, and the last thought he had a chance at Apple or something... he didn't last I heard). (I can remember one of the guys wore Tevas, a shirt he had painted in that had holes in it, and ragged cut offs to his Microsoft interview, while some others debated on suits or not - he wanted to make sure that they were only going by his brain... he got the offer... and turned it down to go to grad school)
The guys that work there love it. And in the tech world (I guess only outside of slashdot), seeing that you worked at Microsft actually has some tech cred to it - I know of 3 guys that I went to school with that went on to start their own companies and the MS name on their cv helped get their funding.
I know a guy that works in their computer game department, and I know a guy that works in their XBox game department (I think it is slightly funny that they are even different departments). They each think it is the coolest job on the planet, and I'm not sure I blame them.
I find it really amusing that "everyone" here thinks MS is so evil, when in reality, they are one of the best companies to work for - and perhaps are even doing some things right - as much as it hurts the people here to think.
It is human nature to strive to be at the top, and to some extent, to resent those that sit at the top. Were Apple or Linux to rise up and dethrone the current MS position, the same people here would start griping about the exact same issues that MS is going through because they are side effects of beinga successful company.
and in true slashdot mentality, I'm sure this will get modded troll
I never thought they's last.
actually those that state "It doesn't work" have been huffing gas.
the ones that are on glue would say that "It's too fast"
I'm content to just mainline sherbert.
then you'd be on to something
But what is wrong with Amazon's system of ranking books and writing comments about them - they have a lot of info that is searchable?
Hell, they own IMDB too.
Damien Hirst.
that is the artist I was thinking of with the severed horses/cattle.
I have said on here before, I love gadgets. They have to pass two tests and then I find them drool-worthy.
1) they have to be shiny.
2) they have to be smaller than my penis.
While that phone looks vaguely cool, I feel like such an old fogey for thinking "what the fuck would I need all those features for in my phone?"
I currently have the Nokia 8890 and love it - when the newest replacements for those come out (They are sturdier) in the states or in Bermuda, then I will gladly buy one of them and hold it close, whispering sweet nothings to it.
But otherwise - there are a ton of new phones coming out that I just have clue at all why the hell I'd want one.
It might as well come with a very small dishwasher and chopsticks - I'd never use those either.
Yes!
Thank you - that is it.
He was a very odd fellow. Used to put hooks through his back and hang himself for days over the water or other various things, not eating the whole time.
In the movie The Cell, there were a bunch of references to modern art - Stelarc was one of them. As well as... fuck - my art major was well spent since I can't recall any of these names - although I can tell you all about the artists. I want to say Joseph Beuys, but I'm not sure he is the correct reference.
I suppose LEDs don't really get hot.
:)
when I was in college I can remember Mark Taylor bringing in a artist that was hooking himself up to electrodes and a web server and you could control him movements via a webpage.
So you would click on a link on a page, and could make his right arm contract, or his left leg, whatever.
Then he went live and he got lots of clicks and as a result was spastically moving about (he was suspended - perhaps by hooks in his back since that was another art thing he had done in the past).
They let us try out the electrodes and they were uncofortable in that it feels like an intense muscle cramp since it fires all the muscle fibers instead of a smooth contraction like we normal have.
I don't recall the guy's name, but it had an S in it, I think at the start. and he was not 'merican
Slygart or something like that.
damn art people are weird.
so you fall into the range of people that do get that much - therefore you think everyone gets that much?
/dev/null.
I don't understand why you don't disallow mail to a non-existant user.
on my server, I saw my spam really ramp up (I saw it as a problem when I started getting 500 spams a day while I was out of the country one week), and so I looked at the names it was sending to.
it was like you said - someone was scanning for valid emails.
So I just set it so that any mail that wasn't to one of the valid usernames on the domains, just gets redirected to
again - you are not the usual user - you have a domain registered, my grandmother on the other hand doesn't get that volume of spam since she has a regular email address and owns no domains (that I know of - that grandma....)
Out of the few hundred people I know online, I don't know anyone else that gets 100 spam a day.
Does that mean there aren't any others? no.
does that mean all 30K users an ISP has gets that much? hell no.
I would venture a number closer to 5 a day would be the average amount per user.
I get way more because of owning multiple domain names, having been on the net for some time, and being pretty "wreckless" with giving it out on the net (posting to newsgroups, web pages, web forums, and signing up for things).
I know people that get 3 a day and get really pissed about that. That always amuses me.
But I would have to say what amuses me more is how strongly you feel about spam.
I could most certainly see someone that angry about live hand grenades coming to you in the physical mail... wow - think of all of the accidents that would happen then.
But I just don't see it with the spam.
I'm not a spammer - but I sure as hell don't hate them and have yet to see an explanation that has made me say "oh, I see your point, those guys really do deserve to be killed"
For the most part, I think more along the lines of "wow, I hope those guys are making money for this, b/c it seems like it is a waste of time and annoying"
My ISP is technically AT&T (recently bought out by Comcast here in Boston).
They don't have to deal with a single spam that I have ever had delivered to my account.
I have a server through pair.com and get all mail delivered there, and check all mail via ssh there.
The server that I do all that on is an Athlon 1G with half a gig of ram.
But last I looked, there weren't 30K users on that machine.
I suppose all that goes to show that I'm not the typical user in many ways - so perhaps that is why I just don't see what the big deal is with spam.
I find it all amusing. esp people like you that I hope don't have firearms and free time.
Intersting. So you can at least account for the ones that have expressly stated it.
;)
From your perspective, I see that must be extremely frustrating since that is lost revenue at first glance.
From my perspective, I make my money on end users. I don't own an ISP, but I write software for people that are on the net.
One would think that I would want as many users as possible to be out there, so that my product could reach as many as possible, and make me fabulously wealthy.
But in reality - I am really *very* happy to know that there is something driving these people off of the net.
If I have someone that is new to the net wanting to buy a product or service of mine (to be fair, I write things for a very specific market), it is more than likely that I will have to spend a lot of time hand-holding this person - which means I'm losing money on that person. They are paying X dollars for my product/service - and I'm spending time on them. I have N other users that also pay X dollars, and I never have to talk with them at all - therefore, they are better customers to me.
If all of the ones that are scared off by spam leave - those are the same ones that are going to be contacting me with issues that are beyond the scope of my service/product and want hand holding...
so without them, my revenue and more importantly my profit - goes up.
but to say - I do see that the issue exists for the isp, and that is unpleasant and undesirable for you.
but I would still argue that spam frustrated user leaving is actually saving you money in the end - freeing up your bandwidth and hardware for another potential user to come in, pay the same amount, and require less attention from you - thereby costing you less.
let them leave - this place is getting crowded anyway
not all of the "price" based systems involve money directly. some of the "fees" are processor time and such.
:)
but in the end, it all boils down to money - money is time, time is money. but time is money in your own currency
an american dollar and a pengo (wherever the hell that is) are not equal - but a time unit equates to a fixed amount of your own currency that takes that into account.
and when you say "would cost a penny, just time"
- that also is interesting in that time is money - in terms of time is a non-renewable resource. they could have been using that time to do xyz things that would generate money, or xyz time spending money (moving money to someone else).
so that was money tied up in that "free" endeavor... meaning it wasn't truly free.
the idea should be renamed - call it "cost based" and it makes more sense.
To be fair, I'm not sure that is what drives spam revenue.
It is true that television and print ads are driven by the desire to sell the product that they advertise.
But I think spam has evolved to the point where it is not about what is being "sold" and instead about creating the address base.
If you look at a large percentage of the ads, there is no real way to buy what they are referring to. If you click on the links, they bring you to a page that then lets them confirm the address that they sent to (yours - and by clicking on that link, they know that you exist and it is a live address). Can you actually buy anything on that page? Not usually - usually it is a way to unsubscribe, or it is a series of ads for other things, or it pops up a ton of other crap - eventually leading to porn.
The point of spam might have initially started as an attempt to get people to buy crap - like an annoying informercial or a qvc that keeps coming back at you.
But the money making part of it now is to generate a larger list of users with more real users in it and then sell that list to other spammers. As well as generate revenue from popups and click thrus.
If you genuinely look at over 90% of the spam you get, you will see that were you to want to buy whatever it is that they are talking about - there isn't a way to get to it - you will be diverted many times along the way.
There are obvious exceptions to the rule - Netflix, porn, and geroge foreman grills come to mind.
I am down to about 100 spams a day now and I go through them frequently to try and think of more ways to get rid of them (I use the most recent spamassassin), and have come to notice this trend on my own.
Regular web advertising failed because nobody was buying the product - banner ads and the like never really caught on - but they remain out there - people trying to get your attention.
Whereas spam has grown the entire time - because they have found a different way to make money - not selling you the product, but by selling your address.
As an ISP I can tell you they're giving up on the internet, to them the cost/benefit is just not worthwhile. That's not a good trend.
This statement seems odd to me - how can you determine that they are leaving the net for good because of spam, or if they are just leaving your service because they found a better/cheaper service to use instead?
I used to get over 500 spams a day, and now am down to avg about 100 spams a day. I filter them all out and I really don't see what the big deal is at all.
That said, I only pay for my own hardware and not for all the hardware at an ISP (at least not directly - I am aware that in the end I pay some part of it). So I can understand that it is hard for me to bear the same hatered that others do - but I really just don't get why the spammers are so hated.
They are annoying as hell, but I just don't get the hatred.
I didn't read the article at all (that would go against what slashdot stands for right?) - but I think they should:
1) charge money to take it back (they already do)
2) build up a network of clustered Macs to make a big supercomputer
3) charge users for time running apps on this cluster (the applications that run on supercomputers would be pretty limited, but also means limited to the groups that are willing to pay $$$)
That would mean that they have to ship in the computers, so that would take a chunk (if not all) that that $30 fee.
Then would have to build a network to cluster then - likely gigabit if not fiber - does Dolphin do Mac networking?
I don't know of a Mosix/OpenMosix for the PowerPC world, so it would have to be a Beowulf style.
They would make money off of the collection and the use of the system, but would have to spend in order to supply power, AC, and keeping track of the network.
This is something that would have a range of usefulness (profitablity) and then would eventually hit a point where it no longer scaled correctly and they would spend too much to maintain it.
To avoid that, they could cycle computerrs in and out of the network. As they get faster computers being turned in, they can swap out the crappier systems that are part of the cluster.
blah blah blah - anyways - just something that popped into mind when I saw that they were getting machines for free, and getting money on top of that (like I said, not sure how much of that money goes towards shipping).
Once they use them in the cluster, then they could actually recycle them like they say.
Not to mention all of the stuff that they could strip off of the drives that are coming in.
I of course can't be bothered to go and look at the actual site - but it seems that if you have enough historical data (which certainly does exist), and you have a good current data feed - then it should be fairly easy to do something like this with neural nets.
It won't be 100% accurate, but it is certainly more accurate than many other methods.
On the other hand, if they just have it calling "rand() % 365" and then say there will be an earthquake that day... less reliable.
up at the top it should be "original Nintendo" - the Sega was the one that was a tank.
I'm retarded.
The original Sega was so fragile since any slight amount of dust on a cartridge would make it unplayable (until you blew on it and hit on top of the unit)... I never had a console until much more recently, but I can recall seeing friends get frustrated with it.
Then in high school one of my friends decided that his Sega should be upgraded to... whatever it was that he was upgrading it to. He either couldn't find anyone that would buy it, or was just too lazy/apathetic to look (this was pre '95, so pre EBay and popular net time).
He and his brother took turns smashing on the console and its cartridges with a hammer, dunking it in a sink full of dishwater, microwaving it, and even (once the plastic had been suffficiently deteriorated so that the innards were exposed) - using needle nosed pliers to yank off random parts of the board.
They would do some act to it, like some oven time, and then wait for it to recover from that (cool off or dry off) and then would try playing games on it. Then repeat.
It was really amazing how long that thing would still play games.
From what I recall, the games stood up to a lot of physical abuse, but once you started taking the pliers to them, it was obviously going to not take long.
The console itself on the other hand was amazing - it was like magic how much you could take out of that thing and it would still work.
I think what finally killed it was a severed wire that got data or power - we figured it would die far before that.
I'm also surprised that nobody was hurt during these experiments.
(this was the same friend that had a really old, really large TV that had a capacitor underneath it that would charge up, and then if you didn't discharge it periodically, it would arc out and hit things in teh room - which made it interesting to watch in that room. my friend that owned it seemed to think it totally normal to have to take a screwdriver and reach under the TV, waving it around until there was a loud *POP* sound of it discharging and the fait smell of something bad having just happened.)
That this sort of things leads to people cutting out my eyes.
If that doesn't trigger the Freudian gaze, then what does?