It was unsolicited, it was bulk, it was email. UBE. Spam.
The mail including the headers was valid
Spam isn't about invalid headers. It's about unsolicited bulk email. UBE. Spam.
and Niel decides after recieving one unsolicited message that it's spam.
Yes. Because it was unsolicited, bulk and email. UBE. Spam.
Bullshit, if I send this guy an email by mistake am I spamming him?
If your message is easily identified as being a bulk message, thus being an unsolicited bulk email or UBE or spam: Yes. If it wasn't bulk, it wasn't spam and you'd be entirely safe.
Just sending large numbers of the same email out IS NOT spam.
Yes, bulk mail to people who solicited it is ok.
But sending out the same large numbers of the same email to people who haven't asked for it makes it unsolicited bulk email = UBE = Spam.
I use Microsoft's Word Viewer to view and print the documents coming in, but refuse to use a full-blown Word installation to create them. So far, no problems, although you do do get some funny looks from clients when you tell them that (and why) you don't use Word on your office PC.
the firm commissioned a Frankfurt musician-songwriter to write a perky ditty for the annual consultants' conference in 1999
Oh boy. Oooooh boy.
Welcome to the subculture of corporate event jingles.
The musician friend I mentioned in the parent post, he actually does these kinds of songs, too. My a cappella group performs songs like these during corporate gigs. For those who've never been to such a corporate event - they are usually planned by an in-house committee or by an external event company. To lighten up the atmosphere, they often have live music for the session breaks or for the evenings. We used to do a lot of those (although that business is slow right now, too...)
Event jingles, made for just one occasion, with a catchy tune and forgettable lyrics, after that instantly forgotten. Many companies want a song like that for their corporate gigs, be it an event for customers or one internal event for employees only.
I find it strange and usually unintionally funny, sometimes even dark humour (there once was an event jingle for an in-house gig with lyrics similar to "we like to work for this company, it's really great here" when only days before said company had fired a few thousand of its work force...)
These event jingles are not meant to be distributed later, although there are some PHBs out there who think it's a really really great idea to have the event jingle distributed to the company's employees on CD after the event.
Actually, there are some pretty good event jingles, but usually, there are of the same quality as this KPMG song.
It's actually very well-paid work, both for the composer as for the musicians performing them. And it requires lots and lots of meetings with PHBs who want to make sure that the "vision" and "spirit" of their company is shown in the right angle.
My musician friend usually puts a fake name on the event jingle arrangements he hands out, so that these sins from the past won't haunt him in the future in case he ever will really become that famous pop star.
It goes -- sing along, now -- "KPMG/We're strong as can be/A dream of power and energy/We go for the goal/Together we hold/On to our vision of global strategy..."
To me, it sounds more like a lame telephone loop that companies use to torture people on hold. (A friend of mine composes non-lethal telephone songs. Contact me if your company needs better phone loop music.)
So, does anybody know where this song originated?
Is this just a telephone "hold the line" theme or are KPMG employees required to sing a long to this piece every morning?
The European Space Agency (Esa) is studying science fiction for ideas and technologies that could be used in future missions.
A panel of readers is currently combing sci-fi novels and short stories published in the early decades of the last century to see if technology has caught up with ideas that were futuristic when first put into print.
Any good ideas turned up in the search will be assessed by scientists to see if they can help the agency in its ongoing mission to explore space.
Knowledgeable fans of science fiction are also being encouraged to send in suggestions to help Esa spot sources of good ideas.
(Follow link above for rest of article, interesting.)
IIRC, pressurized, needle-free vaccination devices have been designed after watching McCoy doing medical treatment on Trek. After a short web search, one of them appears to be the Gene Gun described here.
You ask for novels, yet your example is taken from a TV series. So, which do you prefer? And which medium do you believe is more influental?
Secondly, I believe that your choice of Star Trek's communicator isn't actually a good example.
I wasn't born then, but I guess that Walkie Talkies and CB radio or their equivalent existed back then, so it doesn't require much effort to imagine a much smaller version of such a device.
It'd be much more interesting to find out about devices or procedures that can be traced back to SciFi that were not just foreshadowing advanced versions of an existing technology.
(I'll answer your question about SciFi devices in real life in another post, since I want to look for some sources to back up these claims...:-)
Btw, being a SF-nut, one interesting thing I noticed about SciFi movies: You can always tell their production era by looking at hairstyles and makeup. Hardly any SF movie has the guts to do something completely out-of-fashion when it comes to the looks of actresses and actors.
If your community standards do not allow kids to see works of art that a teacher thinks is appropriate, you should change the community standards, not the work of art.
IMHO, a trojan is computer code that is doing things behind the user's back.
A cookie is just state information, nothing more, nothing less.
If a user has lots of Cookies and AdAware tells him that these are "spyware components", it is misleading, feeding paranoia and fear.
See the original statement of the user who said he had "200 files" that he called "trojans".
AdAware is right about detecting and removing Cookies of well-known user-tracking ad-sites. But it should be a bit more exact when explaining the risks to avoid paranoid users.
The first time I ran it it found over 200 (!) files on my computer. Needless to say, the computer not only was a lot faster once I deleted all these trojans, but more stable as well.
AdAware calls Cookies "spyware", which is a little bit overly paranoid. Cookies are used for data mining, AdAware is right about identifying and removing them, but they are not "trojans".
It's often said that the old arcade games of the early 1980's were some of the best ever created because they had so little to work with -- and therefore they were forced to focus on gameplay over glitz.
Kind of.
I just installed Mame and tried a few of the games I remember from the past. For some of those titles that I used to think fondly of, I was shocked how boring and repetitive their gameplay actually was.
Why should the GPL be a problem?
on
Behind the Scenes
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I don't quite understand why the GPL should be a problem, as mentioned in the Salon article.
It doesn't forbid writing and selling proprietary software, as long as said software isn't based on GPL'd source fragments.
And in-house tools are an example of software that isn't meant to be published or sold to the public. So when writing such tools, they can use GPL'd source and mangle it in whatever form they want, since the result doesn't leave the company and isn't sold or distributed, they don't have to publish source.
That's simply not true. Due to M$ hold on the desktop, most new programming students will learn how to program on a windows platform.
Being a former computer science student, I can assure that there wasn't a single line of Windows-specific programming done in my years at University. We mostly learned on Unix platforms (Solaris) and got ourselves free ports of the tools for Windows if we wanted to write for Windows.
Then again, learning platform-agnostic development is the way to go for any "programming student" (as you called them).
I'm in Germany, so I never had the chance to pick one up. If anyone out there has a CueCat that he wants to give away, please contact me. (sockpuppet@hanno.de)
You have to remember that just because you don't see an actor on a screen somewhere doesn't mean they are out of work.
That's not what I meant with my original question. So, yeah, I'm talking about screen acting. Some of the TOS actors literally had no other screen acting job except the TOS movies - despite being fine actors. The TNG actors are hardly seen in bigger roles on screen these days. I find that sad, in a way.
You're a well-known, established actor; but I guess you won't take this as an insult if I don't call you a superstar. So you're not yet in the position to choose all your projects and be granted every wish you have about a script.
So, I always wondered how actors choose their scripts - what is your job like when you're not acting?
What kind of scripts do you get offered? What silly (or not silly) scripts did you turn down? Can you talk about roles or projects that you were chosen for and then it didn't work out?
Do scripts ever get proofread? / Trek careers
on
Ask Wil Wheaton Anything
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Most popcorn movies these days have big holes in their script, be it plot-wise or technology-wise.
While it sometimes works to abandon logic or science (Armageddon comes to mind), this trend seems to backfire more and more often (Godzilla comes to mind, a movie that even Roger Ebert dissed for its science goofs).
How come that the way technology or science is depicted on screen (computers, technology, sci-fi) hardly ever gets proofread in Hollywood scripts? You seem to be a tech-nerd - do you ever correct something in a script? (If you know a script-writer who needs a proofreader, give him my e-mail address:-)
2nd question: Do you think that having been a member of the Trek franchise was good or bad for your career? I'm a big trek fan, yet it often amuses me how Trek actors can consider themselves superstars in the Trek world, but nobodies outside.
I often feel sorry for the dead-end careers that it meant for Nichelle Nichols or DeForest Kelley. I often wonder when I will finally see the TNG actors in bigger roles. (Don't tell me that Brent Spiner's recent work was a stellar career. Why doesn't he get better roles? Or Marina Sirtis? Or almost any other Trek actor?)
Re:What is with all this palm crap?
on
Pocket PC 2002
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· Score: 2
You have a scientific calculator that can also do some PDA stuff. The Palm is a PDA that could also run a scientific calculator software. I've seen the TI once. It's a great calculator, but not a good PDA. I own the Palm. It's a great PDA, but not a good calculator - the built-in software lacks and the third party software isn't worth the price for me.
It's a question of what you need. You obviously need scientific stuff more than the average user. Despite my interest in astronomy, I don't do quantum calculations and cosmological stuff on a daily basis.
What I do on a daily basis is using the calendar, the address book and (I admit it) the games and the online software. And a PDA does have an excellent user interface for each of these applications.
The battery life of PalmOS based PDAs is also measured in hours.
Since you turn on / turn off a PDA so often and usually keep it in "sleep" mode most of the time -- a Palm PDA is never actually "off", it just "sleeps" to keep its data in RAm -- these hours of actual battery time are perceived as days and weeks by the user.
If you run a really addictive game on a Palm PDA, you'll realize how fast you can drain the batteries there, too.
But that's exactly the problem of the next generation of PDAs. MP3 players, pocket games or small video application require you to have the machine running for a pretty long time, unlike the "old school" Palm PDA that you take out of your pocket, turn on, read or write some data, put it back to sleep and back in your pocket.
So in a way, the Palm's limited uses turns out to be one of its biggest advantages in preserving battery power.
Re:It is the Palm killer. Here's why:
on
Pocket PC 2002
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· Score: 2
Palm forces you to buy a developer kit
There is a free developer kit based on the GNU toolkit chain. If you're on Debian: "apt-get install prc-tools" and you're ready to write your first application.
The prc-tools are also available for Windows.
You are not forced to buy Palm's developer kit. Actually, Palm is very supportive of third party developers and has been handing out all the information needed to them.
but you can use standard Microsoft tools to develop for Windows CE
Last time I heard, the Microsoft Developer Tools weren't free, either. In fact, Visual Studio is pretty expensive (while I admit that it's worth the price). I don't know if there is a free trimmed-down version for WinCE development, but still:
Slashdot Mirror
...but that's not Spam
Of course it is.
It was unsolicited, it was bulk, it was email. UBE. Spam.
The mail including the headers was valid
Spam isn't about invalid headers. It's about unsolicited bulk email. UBE. Spam.
and Niel decides after recieving one unsolicited message that it's spam.
Yes. Because it was unsolicited, bulk and email. UBE. Spam.
Bullshit, if I send this guy an email by mistake am I spamming him?
If your message is easily identified as being a bulk message, thus being an unsolicited bulk email or UBE or spam: Yes. If it wasn't bulk, it wasn't spam and you'd be entirely safe.
Just sending large numbers of the same email out IS NOT spam.
Yes, bulk mail to people who solicited it is ok.
But sending out the same large numbers of the same email to people who haven't asked for it makes it unsolicited bulk email = UBE = Spam.
Do you get the point now?
I use Microsoft's Word Viewer to view and print the documents coming in, but refuse to use a full-blown Word installation to create them. So far, no problems, although you do do get some funny looks from clients when you tell them that (and why) you don't use Word on your office PC.
the firm commissioned a Frankfurt musician-songwriter to write a perky ditty for the annual consultants' conference in 1999
Oh boy. Oooooh boy.
Welcome to the subculture of corporate event jingles.
The musician friend I mentioned in the parent post, he actually does these kinds of songs, too. My a cappella group performs songs like these during corporate gigs. For those who've never been to such a corporate event - they are usually planned by an in-house committee or by an external event company. To lighten up the atmosphere, they often have live music for the session breaks or for the evenings. We used to do a lot of those (although that business is slow right now, too...)
Event jingles, made for just one occasion, with a catchy tune and forgettable lyrics, after that instantly forgotten. Many companies want a song like that for their corporate gigs, be it an event for customers or one internal event for employees only.
I find it strange and usually unintionally funny, sometimes even dark humour (there once was an event jingle for an in-house gig with lyrics similar to "we like to work for this company, it's really great here" when only days before said company had fired a few thousand of its work force...)
These event jingles are not meant to be distributed later, although there are some PHBs out there who think it's a really really great idea to have the event jingle distributed to the company's employees on CD after the event.
Actually, there are some pretty good event jingles, but usually, there are of the same quality as this KPMG song.
It's actually very well-paid work, both for the composer as for the musicians performing them. And it requires lots and lots of meetings with PHBs who want to make sure that the "vision" and "spirit" of their company is shown in the right angle.
My musician friend usually puts a fake name on the event jingle arrangements he hands out, so that these sins from the past won't haunt him in the future in case he ever will really become that famous pop star.
Read the fine article.
It goes -- sing along, now -- "KPMG/We're strong as can be/A dream of power and energy/We go for the goal/Together we hold/On to our vision of global strategy..."
To me, it sounds more like a lame telephone loop that companies use to torture people on hold. (A friend of mine composes non-lethal telephone songs. Contact me if your company needs better phone loop music.)
So, does anybody know where this song originated?
Is this just a telephone "hold the line" theme or are KPMG employees required to sing a long to this piece every morning?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Windows allows you to rename an open file.
You are wrong.
If [...] then it looks like WE HAVE A WINNAR
Bla.
Has anybody actually seen it and compared it to existing solutions?
Until then, both the article and the company's website are a little too light on details for me.
A snippet from a BBC News article, May 11 2000:
Science fiction powers space research
The European Space Agency (Esa) is studying science fiction for ideas and technologies that could be used in future missions.
A panel of readers is currently combing sci-fi novels and short stories published in the early decades of the last century to see if technology has caught up with ideas that were futuristic when first put into print.
Any good ideas turned up in the search will be assessed by scientists to see if they can help the agency in its ongoing mission to explore space.
Knowledgeable fans of science fiction are also being encouraged to send in suggestions to help Esa spot sources of good ideas.
(Follow link above for rest of article, interesting.)
To all these claims: These are things I heard someplace. I did not research any of these, so don't take these as fact.
It is claimed that the 1929 movie "Woman in the Moon" invented the launch count-down.
Star Trek PADD and today's PDAs. (I believe that the Newton actually has been designed with the show's device in mind.
IIRC, pressurized, needle-free vaccination devices have been designed after watching McCoy doing medical treatment on Trek. After a short web search, one of them appears to be the Gene Gun described here.
You ask for novels, yet your example is taken from a TV series. So, which do you prefer? And which medium do you believe is more influental?
:-)
Secondly, I believe that your choice of Star Trek's communicator isn't actually a good example.
I wasn't born then, but I guess that Walkie Talkies and CB radio or their equivalent existed back then, so it doesn't require much effort to imagine a much smaller version of such a device.
It'd be much more interesting to find out about devices or procedures that can be traced back to SciFi that were not just foreshadowing advanced versions of an existing technology.
(I'll answer your question about SciFi devices in real life in another post, since I want to look for some sources to back up these claims...
Btw, being a SF-nut, one interesting thing I noticed about SciFi movies: You can always tell their production era by looking at hairstyles and makeup. Hardly any SF movie has the guts to do something completely out-of-fashion when it comes to the looks of actresses and actors.
If your community standards do not allow kids to see works of art that a teacher thinks is appropriate, you should change the community standards, not the work of art.
Btw, I'm not an everything must be free zealot.
Yes, it depends on how to define a trojan.
IMHO, a trojan is computer code that is doing things behind the user's back.
A cookie is just state information, nothing more, nothing less.
If a user has lots of Cookies and AdAware tells him that these are "spyware components", it is misleading, feeding paranoia and fear.
See the original statement of the user who said he had "200 files" that he called "trojans".
AdAware is right about detecting and removing Cookies of well-known user-tracking ad-sites. But it should be a bit more exact when explaining the risks to avoid paranoid users.
The first time I ran it it found over 200 (!) files on my computer. Needless to say, the computer not only was a lot faster once I deleted all these trojans, but more stable as well.
AdAware calls Cookies "spyware", which is a little bit overly paranoid. Cookies are used for data mining, AdAware is right about identifying and removing them, but they are not "trojans".
It's often said that the old arcade games of the early 1980's were some of the best ever created because they had so little to work with -- and therefore they were forced to focus on gameplay over glitz.
Kind of.
I just installed Mame and tried a few of the games I remember from the past. For some of those titles that I used to think fondly of, I was shocked how boring and repetitive their gameplay actually was.
I don't quite understand why the GPL should be a problem, as mentioned in the Salon article.
It doesn't forbid writing and selling proprietary software, as long as said software isn't based on GPL'd source fragments.
And in-house tools are an example of software that isn't meant to be published or sold to the public. So when writing such tools, they can use GPL'd source and mangle it in whatever form they want, since the result doesn't leave the company and isn't sold or distributed, they don't have to publish source.
Or did I get something wrong here?
That's simply not true. Due to M$ hold on the desktop, most new programming students will learn how to program on a windows platform.
Being a former computer science student, I can assure that there wasn't a single line of Windows-specific programming done in my years at University. We mostly learned on Unix platforms (Solaris) and got ourselves free ports of the tools for Windows if we wanted to write for Windows.
Then again, learning platform-agnostic development is the way to go for any "programming student" (as you called them).
Troll? How can the parent be modded "troll"?
If you really want a job as a technical editor, try proofreading you own posts
English is not my first language. Thank you for understanding.
I'm in Germany, so I never had the chance to pick one up. If anyone out there has a CueCat that he wants to give away, please contact me. (sockpuppet@hanno.de)
:-)
Yeah, I'm cheap.
You have to remember that just because you don't see an actor on a screen somewhere doesn't mean they are out of work.
That's not what I meant with my original question. So, yeah, I'm talking about screen acting. Some of the TOS actors literally had no other screen acting job except the TOS movies - despite being fine actors. The TNG actors are hardly seen in bigger roles on screen these days. I find that sad, in a way.
You're a well-known, established actor; but I guess you won't take this as an insult if I don't call you a superstar. So you're not yet in the position to choose all your projects and be granted every wish you have about a script.
So, I always wondered how actors choose their scripts - what is your job like when you're not acting?
What kind of scripts do you get offered? What silly (or not silly) scripts did you turn down? Can you talk about roles or projects that you were chosen for and then it didn't work out?
Most popcorn movies these days have big holes in their script, be it plot-wise or technology-wise.
:-)
While it sometimes works to abandon logic or science (Armageddon comes to mind), this trend seems to backfire more and more often (Godzilla comes to mind, a movie that even Roger Ebert dissed for its science goofs).
How come that the way technology or science is depicted on screen (computers, technology, sci-fi) hardly ever gets proofread in Hollywood scripts? You seem to be a tech-nerd - do you ever correct something in a script? (If you know a script-writer who needs a proofreader, give him my e-mail address
2nd question: Do you think that having been a member of the Trek franchise was good or bad for your career? I'm a big trek fan, yet it often amuses me how Trek actors can consider themselves superstars in the Trek world, but nobodies outside.
I often feel sorry for the dead-end careers that it meant for Nichelle Nichols or DeForest Kelley. I often wonder when I will finally see the TNG actors in bigger roles. (Don't tell me that Brent Spiner's recent work was a stellar career. Why doesn't he get better roles? Or Marina Sirtis? Or almost any other Trek actor?)
You have a scientific calculator that can also do some PDA stuff. The Palm is a PDA that could also run a scientific calculator software. I've seen the TI once. It's a great calculator, but not a good PDA. I own the Palm. It's a great PDA, but not a good calculator - the built-in software lacks and the third party software isn't worth the price for me.
It's a question of what you need. You obviously need scientific stuff more than the average user. Despite my interest in astronomy, I don't do quantum calculations and cosmological stuff on a daily basis.
What I do on a daily basis is using the calendar, the address book and (I admit it) the games and the online software. And a PDA does have an excellent user interface for each of these applications.
The Palm has its uses.
The battery life of PalmOS based PDAs is also measured in hours.
Since you turn on / turn off a PDA so often and usually keep it in "sleep" mode most of the time -- a Palm PDA is never actually "off", it just "sleeps" to keep its data in RAm -- these hours of actual battery time are perceived as days and weeks by the user.
If you run a really addictive game on a Palm PDA, you'll realize how fast you can drain the batteries there, too.
But that's exactly the problem of the next generation of PDAs. MP3 players, pocket games or small video application require you to have the machine running for a pretty long time, unlike the "old school" Palm PDA that you take out of your pocket, turn on, read or write some data, put it back to sleep and back in your pocket.
So in a way, the Palm's limited uses turns out to be one of its biggest advantages in preserving battery power.
Palm forces you to buy a developer kit
There is a free developer kit based on the GNU toolkit chain. If you're on Debian: "apt-get install prc-tools" and you're ready to write your first application.
The prc-tools are also available for Windows.
You are not forced to buy Palm's developer kit. Actually, Palm is very supportive of third party developers and has been handing out all the information needed to them.
but you can use standard Microsoft tools to develop for Windows CE
Last time I heard, the Microsoft Developer Tools weren't free, either. In fact, Visual Studio is pretty expensive (while I admit that it's worth the price). I don't know if there is a free trimmed-down version for WinCE development, but still:
What the heck are you talking about?