It goes simply like this - As the spam volumes keep on climbing and climbing and ever-decreasing volume of email is actually legitimate, "huge investment in SMTP infrastructure" becomes slowly more of a liability than asset.
You already need heavy-duty spam filtering SOMEWHERE to be able to use business email. I just realized some of my colleagues "just hit delete" on something like 50 emails per day because they lack the know-how to make simple thunderbird/outlook filter to weed out mails marked as SPAM by the mail server.
Not only that, the spam-poofing methods become more and more intricate. Botnets make it practically impossible to recognize valid sender. Image based spam makes it extremely difficult to recognize content as spam without nuking all legitimate family photo emails.
If you start arrogant diatribe about why people shouldn't buy from spammers, I'm personally going to come over your house and beat you up with a nice ripe carp. Real customers havent been for ages people buying 4" more length-baking powder pills but rather the guys who think they're going to get rich quick and forking over $500 or whatever on a starter spammer pack. Or renting botnet posting capability. Or buying email address lists. And so on and so forth.
So yes, my solution to spamming is that sheer volume of spam and the difficulty of fighting it is making email as a media increasingly worthless and when supporting it becomes clearly more of a liability it becomes more and more attractive to apply incompatible measures of doing business. Such as, well, calling people.
Graylisting and other such measures also become more viable. Sure it'll delay and possibly lose legitimate email but the signal would be liable to be lost in the noise anyways. I can easily see "sales"-email links becoming the only email addresses accepting email from anyone with some people weeding crap from content on the backside. Personal corporate accounts probably become more and more biased towards graylisting email from unknown senders.
To sum it up, no I do not have a method to cure email. I think the problem will solve itself by making the host die of the infection which will also kill the parasites.
In 1903, man flew in a heavier than air craft for the first time. In 1969, man landed on the moon. Therefore, in 2001, man will have moon bases and be able to send a manned mission to Jupiter.
Sorry, it didn't work out like that.
Why not?
Because we haven't invented any new rocket fuels since the 60s, and conventional rocket fuels suck. All that Jetsons/Star Trek stuff was based on the theory that we would keep ramping up the curve at the same speed, but in reality, we hit a plateau and leveled off.
Actually, not true.
We DID invent new rocket fuels. It's just politically impossible to field any kind of nuclear impulsion engine or even it's less radical other nuclear engines. You want heavy lifting capability to orbit and solar system in 10 years?
Just throw some billions in nuclear drive applied research, but be vary of greenpeace hitmen.
- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, better system won. VHS was 'better' because the quality dropped with each copy.
Puh-leeze.
VHS is the better product. Why?
Because you could record an entire movie on a single tape right from the beginning. Most people do not view system where you have to change tapes mid-taping as "better".
Re:Wrong marketing did them in, clock *does* matte
on
Is AMD Dead Yet?
·
· Score: 1
Uh-huh. "for some application" that does "something video-y"?
That's a credible testimonial if I've ever seen one in/.
There's the issue of speed too. If you made a plane that could corner like a swallow when it's doing 1000km/h, you'd have to scrape the pilot from inside the cockpit class assuming the rest of the plane was made of magic material that wouldn't tear apart by the G-forces. So there's momentum and then we have inertia. Unless you have magic inertia damper most sci-fi warplanes seem to have you're not going to be able to change direction just like that..
Then again, a plane doing 7-8 gees can evade a missile (depending on your timing and if your deity of choice is feeling beneficial) a missile that can pull 25 gees because the latter is so much faster and actually has larger turn radius. And a small relatively slow sports plane can turn on a comparative dime compared to either.
Surprisingly that 25g missile is much much smaller and lighter than the plane as well.
Nah. For example there are no ways to do proper 3-dimensional cores yet. I should find out but I think you cannot put transistors on top of each other with the current manufacturing technologies.
And a surprisingly big area of that chip space is in fact cache ram. "Empty" area on the left is 4MB cache. Nobody asked to standardize on a 4-register design for petes sake. Yes, I know, modern 64bit processors more or less emulate the x86 assembler and do the things completely differently internally. But I daresay the PPC 64-register architechture would do fine with an order of magnitude less cache ram.
You're really limited by heat and frequency and actually making things smaller helps on both. But still, note how the trend has gone away from megahurz wars to number of cores. I'd hazard that in the long run that's actually a good thing and should make CPU usage more energy efficient etc because you have most of the cores idling when not needed.. Now if we just get the damn games written to be multicore-friendly!
One way or another this is going to involve making pretty harsh changes to either your metabolism or instincts. Latter we can hack already if you don't mind the schizophrenia from amphetamines.
* Cheap TV Phone (nevermind, I don't look so hot in the morning)
Uh already here? I already got one. Never used video calls thought.
* Appliances that Accept Voice Commands
See above. Also another feature I've never used.
* Cybernetic Implants
See above. Depends on what you mean by cybernetic exactly, thought. Sure you can't have minigun but instead you can have crappy eyesight or acceptable hearing with implants.
* Non-Lethal Weaponry for Cops
Are you for real, bro?
* Reliable Tires (or that fail gradually) - Tires are still based on air-filled balloon technology, making them problematic.
You need money to run a business. And quite different skill set from doing basic research to keep a startup viable. And even so most startups go kaput. And I'm not even going into the bit of getting a drug approved by FDA. Even if you got VC backing to go thru with it they'd be just probably fattening you up for eventual xmas.
So as a startup biotech CEO you have options of selling now or holding out for a better deal later before you run out of money and have your patents snatched up for bargain.
And a very short counter to this particular one: Because any startup biotech companies are snatched by big pharma the second the new molecule they've been working on seems to be viable. Big pharma on the other hand got started by cheerfully ripping off their competition back in the day when IP protection was just a pipe dream.
Ah, now you're showing a bit of bias. The majority of people claiming that HD-DVD isn't done yet seem to have something against Blu-ray. I suspect much of what they say is wishful thinking rather than reasoned analysis.
Just a bit of enlightened self-interest.
If you do not live in region-1, format with strong region coding is always a bit minus for the format. It's not just that you have to pay more to get less but you often get nothing, there are tons of titles not available in R2.
That's the catch. Decent upscaling DVD player isn't necessarily any cheaper at all.
And if you put off purchasing BD player for a year or two you probably get a BETTER player for spending less money for the HD + BD players together than if you got BD today...Assuming the DRM-laden region-coding crap is prevailing in the long view (2-3 years, not 1 week sales)
Do not have a HD-player. They're ridiculously expensive in europe and the selection of high definition material in rental shops is pathetic. In fact we got 1st HD/BD disks available for rent around Xmas 2007.
I'll go HD when my local video store starts getting most of the new releases as HD/BD and I can pick up a region-free player for less than 300 euros.
I do have up-scaling DVD player that cost quite a bit more than amis pay for those Toshiba HD-DVD players.
putting the device into some state where it grabs the PCI bus and never releases it (effectively causing the PC to hang).
Actually, PCI bus spec gives max times that the controller should enforce. On pure HW logic level, that is. Whether or not the OS/Drivers barf on such situation is a different story. But the bus itself should not be "grabbed" by a device that's not actually broken.
Yeah, I know, there's spec and there's your friendly chinese knock-off FPGA IP core..
Oh, I just assumed you want to have some kind of display where you can see your options. Not strictly necessary of course. But apparently some of those elections have bazillion items in popular vote, so you might have to allow for going forward/backward in a list of selections.
Of course, when you decide to go down with an ATM style display you're already 2/3rd of the way to crazy overcomplicated machine.
Still, if you drive a LCD display that accepts text input the program doesn't have to be complicated at all. Something that can be, ahem, audited.
And same goes for the feature list. I haven't been arsed to check but do they have the new filesystem there once more? Someone has been working on the new Windows filesystem for about 14 years now (since chicago). Must be really rewarding to have it axed time after time.
While I don't give a hoot about how americans do the physical act of voting, as an electrical engineer I'm appalled about using something like Windows CE to implement a god-darn voting system!
If the voting system is more complicated than a basic 4-function calculator, you're doing something waaaaaaay wrong. Maybe you should just licence the system Brazil uses? Or India? That's where your hi-tech comes from theses days anyhow.
Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.
Fair enough. But again you're omitting some key facts, are you not?
To start on the water reservoir business, you have to put about a billion USD on the table and that's if you're building the damn thing in China dozen years ago!? The chinese plant has storage capacity of around 9300MWh (13000MWh gravity potential at 70% efficiency). That takes 8 million cubic meters of water pumped 600 meters up. Or about 200m by 40m by 1km pool. Whoa nelly. Let's say one modern nuke plant is at around 1000MW so that engineering monster can store about nine hours worth of power output from the plant. Going to have to build quite a few pools to survive between September and April.
Let's look at that energy storage cost figure next, shall we? one billion cost, 9300MWh storage cap. Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.
The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.
Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.
No, I just think people who preach numbers as gospel without checking them are idiots.
You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless. What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average. In california you may have nice positive feedback since you need more AC the more sun you get, but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter. Even if it's technically daytime, it's usually overcast. In summer sun may be up 20 hours / day but didn't we just have a discussion on the practicality of large scale energy storage?
I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?
Even if you want to use solar for everything, most pricing I've seen for bulk energy storage is about 4c/kWh to the consumer. With solar this cheap, that's affordable.
On what exactly? Hot air?
We do not have very good ways of storing energy. Battery technology sucks balls, especially on industrial grade. Sure, you could use the energy to make methanol for example and burn that later but that's not terribly efficient process. Growin plants and all that. Hydrogen has a nasty habit of evaporating through solid steel. Flyweels are right out for GWh class storage as well.
Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general? Are we shipping pressurized hydrogen on megatankers now?
You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar panel exposed to sunlight 24/7 in hard vacuum. Then you go and compare the cost directly with coal that's guaranteed power when you need it at a known, stable efficiency. That's cute. Or intellectually dishonest. One of the two.
VBA+Excel is surprisingly good for EE - You have to deal with bills-of-materials that can have hundreds of items that have to be carried over to a component database one way or other. The traditional method is to go over the bloody list by hand that takes all day and is unsurprisingly error-prone.
With VBA simple item-code comparison macro can literally do work that'd take you day or two in five seconds and has inventory level back-referencing to boot.
Yes, I know many houses have monster oracle/whatever database apps that do similar job, only developed for tons of euros by consultants and are total pain to use.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I do have a solution to spam.
It goes simply like this - As the spam volumes keep on climbing and climbing and ever-decreasing volume of email is actually legitimate, "huge investment in SMTP infrastructure" becomes slowly more of a liability than asset.
You already need heavy-duty spam filtering SOMEWHERE to be able to use business email. I just realized some of my colleagues "just hit delete" on something like 50 emails per day because they lack the know-how to make simple thunderbird/outlook filter to weed out mails marked as SPAM by the mail server.
Not only that, the spam-poofing methods become more and more intricate. Botnets make it practically impossible to recognize valid sender. Image based spam makes it extremely difficult to recognize content as spam without nuking all legitimate family photo emails.
If you start arrogant diatribe about why people shouldn't buy from spammers, I'm personally going to come over your house and beat you up with a nice ripe carp. Real customers havent been for ages people buying 4" more length-baking powder pills but rather the guys who think they're going to get rich quick and forking over $500 or whatever on a starter spammer pack. Or renting botnet posting capability. Or buying email address lists. And so on and so forth.
So yes, my solution to spamming is that sheer volume of spam and the difficulty of fighting it is making email as a media increasingly worthless and when supporting it becomes clearly more of a liability it becomes more and more attractive to apply incompatible measures of doing business. Such as, well, calling people.
Graylisting and other such measures also become more viable. Sure it'll delay and possibly lose legitimate email but the signal would be liable to be lost in the noise anyways. I can easily see "sales"-email links becoming the only email addresses accepting email from anyone with some people weeding crap from content on the backside. Personal corporate accounts probably become more and more biased towards graylisting email from unknown senders.
To sum it up, no I do not have a method to cure email. I think the problem will solve itself by making the host die of the infection which will also kill the parasites.
In 1903, man flew in a heavier than air craft for the first time. In 1969, man landed on the moon. Therefore, in 2001, man will have moon bases and be able to send a manned mission to Jupiter.
Sorry, it didn't work out like that.
Why not?
Because we haven't invented any new rocket fuels since the 60s, and conventional rocket fuels suck. All that Jetsons/Star Trek stuff was based on the theory that we would keep ramping up the curve at the same speed, but in reality, we hit a plateau and leveled off.
Actually, not true.
We DID invent new rocket fuels. It's just politically impossible to field any kind of nuclear impulsion engine or even it's less radical other nuclear engines. You want heavy lifting capability to orbit and solar system in 10 years?
Just throw some billions in nuclear drive applied research, but be vary of greenpeace hitmen.
Then again, materials science and modeling etc has advanced so radically since 60s that relatively trivial amounts of money can actually get you a chain of space stations
At least on the porn star bit it should be easy enough to find references on..
- VHS vs. BetaMax: Cheaper, better system won. VHS was 'better' because the quality dropped with each copy.
Puh-leeze.
VHS is the better product. Why?
Because you could record an entire movie on a single tape right from the beginning. Most people do not view system where you have to change tapes mid-taping as "better".
Uh-huh. "for some application" that does "something video-y"?
/.
That's a credible testimonial if I've ever seen one in
There's the issue of speed too. If you made a plane that could corner like a swallow when it's doing 1000km/h, you'd have to scrape the pilot from inside the cockpit class assuming the rest of the plane was made of magic material that wouldn't tear apart by the G-forces. So there's momentum and then we have inertia. Unless you have magic inertia damper most sci-fi warplanes seem to have you're not going to be able to change direction just like that..
Then again, a plane doing 7-8 gees can evade a missile (depending on your timing and if your deity of choice is feeling beneficial) a missile that can pull 25 gees because the latter is so much faster and actually has larger turn radius. And a small relatively slow sports plane can turn on a comparative dime compared to either.
Surprisingly that 25g missile is much much smaller and lighter than the plane as well.
Nah. For example there are no ways to do proper 3-dimensional cores yet. I should find out but I think you cannot put transistors on top of each other with the current manufacturing technologies.
And a surprisingly big area of that chip space is in fact cache ram. "Empty" area on the left is 4MB cache. Nobody asked to standardize on a 4-register design for petes sake. Yes, I know, modern 64bit processors more or less emulate the x86 assembler and do the things completely differently internally. But I daresay the PPC 64-register architechture would do fine with an order of magnitude less cache ram.
You're really limited by heat and frequency and actually making things smaller helps on both. But still, note how the trend has gone away from megahurz wars to number of cores. I'd hazard that in the long run that's actually a good thing and should make CPU usage more energy efficient etc because you have most of the cores idling when not needed.. Now if we just get the damn games written to be multicore-friendly!
If you're blind or deaf, having some kind of crappy vision or OK hearing is a huge improvement..
* Cheap Nuclear Power
At the very least you can reuse nuclear fuel..
* Safe, Effective Diet Pill
One way or another this is going to involve making pretty harsh changes to either your metabolism or instincts. Latter we can hack already if you don't mind the schizophrenia from amphetamines.
* Cheap TV Phone (nevermind, I don't look so hot in the morning)
Uh already here? I already got one. Never used video calls thought.
* Appliances that Accept Voice Commands
See above. Also another feature I've never used.
* Cybernetic Implants
See above. Depends on what you mean by cybernetic exactly, thought. Sure you can't have minigun but instead you can have crappy eyesight or acceptable hearing with implants.
* Non-Lethal Weaponry for Cops
Are you for real, bro?
* Reliable Tires (or that fail gradually) - Tires are still based on air-filled balloon technology, making them problematic.
Run flat tires?
You need money to run a business. And quite different skill set from doing basic research to keep a startup viable. And even so most startups go kaput. And I'm not even going into the bit of getting a drug approved by FDA. Even if you got VC backing to go thru with it they'd be just probably fattening you up for eventual xmas.
So as a startup biotech CEO you have options of selling now or holding out for a better deal later before you run out of money and have your patents snatched up for bargain.
Good old Let's see you do better argument!
And a very short counter to this particular one: Because any startup biotech companies are snatched by big pharma the second the new molecule they've been working on seems to be viable. Big pharma on the other hand got started by cheerfully ripping off their competition back in the day when IP protection was just a pipe dream.
Ah, now you're showing a bit of bias. The majority of people claiming that HD-DVD isn't done yet seem to have something against Blu-ray. I suspect much of what they say is wishful thinking rather than reasoned analysis.
Just a bit of enlightened self-interest.
If you do not live in region-1, format with strong region coding is always a bit minus for the format. It's not just that you have to pay more to get less but you often get nothing, there are tons of titles not available in R2.
That's the catch. Decent upscaling DVD player isn't necessarily any cheaper at all.
..Assuming the DRM-laden region-coding crap is prevailing in the long view (2-3 years, not 1 week sales)
And if you put off purchasing BD player for a year or two you probably get a BETTER player for spending less money for the HD + BD players together than if you got BD today.
Yeah yeah. I hope at least it was good for you too.
Ha.
Do not have a HD-player. They're ridiculously expensive in europe and the selection of high definition material in rental shops is pathetic. In fact we got 1st HD/BD disks available for rent around Xmas 2007.
I'll go HD when my local video store starts getting most of the new releases as HD/BD and I can pick up a region-free player for less than 300 euros.
I do have up-scaling DVD player that cost quite a bit more than amis pay for those Toshiba HD-DVD players.
With BD you have to ditch the "cheap" bit of the equation.
You get upscaling DVD player for $33?
I guess it's really "good".
Except that by buying HD-DVD player you get cheap upscaling DVD player that can play HD discs as a bonus.
Not much bravery required. It's not like the player stops working if some studio stops supporting it.
putting the device into some state where it grabs the PCI bus and never releases it (effectively causing the PC to hang).
..
Actually, PCI bus spec gives max times that the controller should enforce. On pure HW logic level, that is. Whether or not the OS/Drivers barf on such situation is a different story. But the bus itself should not be "grabbed" by a device that's not actually broken.
Yeah, I know, there's spec and there's your friendly chinese knock-off FPGA IP core
Oh, I just assumed you want to have some kind of display where you can see your options. Not strictly necessary of course. But apparently some of those elections have bazillion items in popular vote, so you might have to allow for going forward/backward in a list of selections.
Of course, when you decide to go down with an ATM style display you're already 2/3rd of the way to crazy overcomplicated machine.
Still, if you drive a LCD display that accepts text input the program doesn't have to be complicated at all. Something that can be, ahem, audited.
Two words:
Yeah. Right.
And same goes for the feature list. I haven't been arsed to check but do they have the new filesystem there once more? Someone has been working on the new Windows filesystem for about 14 years now (since chicago). Must be really rewarding to have it axed time after time.
While I don't give a hoot about how americans do the physical act of voting, as an electrical engineer I'm appalled about using something like Windows CE to implement a god-darn voting system!
If the voting system is more complicated than a basic 4-function calculator, you're doing something waaaaaaay wrong. Maybe you should just licence the system Brazil uses? Or India? That's where your hi-tech comes from theses days anyhow.
Compressed air and/or pumped water storage. The prices I've seen listed are about 4c/kWh.
Fair enough. But again you're omitting some key facts, are you not?
To start on the water reservoir business, you have to put about a billion USD on the table and that's if you're building the damn thing in China dozen years ago!? The chinese plant has storage capacity of around 9300MWh (13000MWh gravity potential at 70% efficiency). That takes 8 million cubic meters of water pumped 600 meters up. Or about 200m by 40m by 1km pool. Whoa nelly. Let's say one modern nuke plant is at around 1000MW so that engineering monster can store about nine hours worth of power output from the plant. Going to have to build quite a few pools to survive between September and April.
Let's look at that energy storage cost figure next, shall we? one billion cost, 9300MWh storage cap. Divide 1e9 with 9.3e6 and you have 107,5USD / kWh. Oops.
The price per watt is *NOT* the price of the power output. It's the price of a cell producing a "standard watt". You then plug this in to how much insolation you get in a given region, factor in all of the other capital costs, and then amortize them (and maintenance) over the life of the system.
Really, you must think people are utter idiots if they can't figure out that you need to do that.
No, I just think people who preach numbers as gospel without checking them are idiots.
You admitted it yourself the $1/W figure is completely meaningless. What matters is what's the average cost for kWh in any given region in average. In california you may have nice positive feedback since you need more AC the more sun you get, but over here we need more heating when we get f- all sunlight for months during winter. Even if it's technically daytime, it's usually overcast. In summer sun may be up 20 hours / day but didn't we just have a discussion on the practicality of large scale energy storage?
I'm sure your amortization calculations factor in a modest profit for capital for the projected 50 year service life and add to the cost of the energy accordingly?
Even if you want to use solar for everything, most pricing I've seen for bulk energy storage is about 4c/kWh to the consumer. With solar this cheap, that's affordable.
On what exactly? Hot air?
We do not have very good ways of storing energy. Battery technology sucks balls, especially on industrial grade. Sure, you could use the energy to make methanol for example and burn that later but that's not terribly efficient process. Growin plants and all that. Hydrogen has a nasty habit of evaporating through solid steel. Flyweels are right out for GWh class storage as well.
Have you factored in the costs of powering regions which do not get much sunlight during winter months and/or do not have sunny weather in general? Are we shipping pressurized hydrogen on megatankers now?
You take a $/W number that everyone knows is unrealistic unless you've got orbital solar panel exposed to sunlight 24/7 in hard vacuum. Then you go and compare the cost directly with coal that's guaranteed power when you need it at a known, stable efficiency. That's cute. Or intellectually dishonest. One of the two.
VBA+Excel is surprisingly good for EE - You have to deal with bills-of-materials that can have hundreds of items that have to be carried over to a component database one way or other. The traditional method is to go over the bloody list by hand that takes all day and is unsurprisingly error-prone.
With VBA simple item-code comparison macro can literally do work that'd take you day or two in five seconds and has inventory level back-referencing to boot.
Yes, I know many houses have monster oracle/whatever database apps that do similar job, only developed for tons of euros by consultants and are total pain to use.